Debate and critique in curriculum studies: new directions?

At the recent European Conference for Education Research in Hamburg (3–6 September), a double symposium took place, primarily focussing on the place of powerful knowledge in the curriculum. The symposium was hosted by EERA Network 3 Curriculum Innovation and chaired by Jim Hordern, one of the contributors to the recent special issue of this journal (issue 30[2]), ‘After the knowledge turn? Politics and pedagogy’. While the symposium was first proposed in relation to the papers in the special issue, its scope was more ambitious, also involving new and highly prominent contributors such as Gert Biesta and Zongyi Deng, who had not published in the original special issue. The sessions were packed to the rafters, with people being turned away at the door, which is indicative of the high levels of interest currently generated in the curriculum field, and which bodes well for the future of curriculum studies.

Zongyi Deng, drawing upon a recently published paper on the state of the field (Deng, 2018), offered a powerful critique of current trajectories in curriculum studies. Deng was especially critical of North American reconceptualism, drawing analytical tools from Schwab’s (1969) seminal critique (through a medical framework) of the field as “moribund”, a term the latter used to denote the ‘symptoms’ of the field as he saw it in late 1960s North America. In Deng’s view, the current state of play manifests many of the six ‘flights’ or ‘symptoms’ identified by Schwab at that time, particularly: a flight of the field, as curriculum scholars have become marginalised by policymakers, and as research on curriculum practice has increasingly become undertaken by specialists in other fields such as assessment; a flight upwards, as curriculum scholars increasingly engage with ‘exotic’ and ‘fashionable’ discourses such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and so forth’ (Deng, 2018, p.697); and a flight to the sides, as scholars have explicitly distanced themselves from the worlds of practice found in schools and other educational institutions.

Deng offered three sets of solutions to this situation: 1] curriculum theory should be focussed on advancing the field, and should thus be a ‘normative undertaking which needs to be animated and informed by a vision of what education should be’ (Deng, 2018, p.701, emph. in original); 2] curriculum theory must be concerned with, and have a strong relationship with educational practice, ‘and the inner work of schooling that are defined by specific curriculum content or material, specific students, and specific teachers within a specific instructional context’ (Deng, 2018, p.702, emph. in original); and 3] there should be critical, creative and eclectic use of theory, as different theories offer different perspectives on the field, and ‘combin[ing] various theories [.] form[s] a more appropriate” whole” for application to issues and problems concerning practice and the inner work of schooling’ (Deng, 2018, p.705). We note here that Deng’s work will soon become more prominent in the UK, as he will shortly take up a Chair in Curriculum and Pedagogy at UCL/IoE.

Of course, Deng’s ideas are subject to critique and contestation themselves, and we offer them here to enable lively debate on curricular issues, thus further exemplifying and perhaps expanding what we have called a renaissance for the field. As we have stated in previous editorials, we believe that curriculum should be at the heart of educational practice, and in order that this might happen more readily, we need the sorts of nuanced debate that is exemplified by the above discussion. We are encouraged that this debate is strongly emerging via forums such as the EERA Curriculum Development Network and events such as the recent European Conference on Curriculum Studies (Maynooth, Ireland, June 2019), which featured keynotes from scholars as diverse as Elizabeth Rata and Patrick Slattery. The high attendance at these fora suggests that the debate goes beyond a small and narrow clique of curriculum scholars, and that curriculum is once more high on the academic agenda.

The papers in this issue offer further promise that the curricular debate is alive and well. Moreover, we see in these papers evidence that Deng’s concerns are being addressed. Several of the papers are focussed on the improvement of practice through interventions that are clearly framed as curricular issues. Many offer the use of theory – Vygotsky, Bernstein, Dewey, inter alia – to provide insights into familiar curricular problematics, whether these be operating at the micro-level of classroom practice (e.g. feedback to improve learning) or the macro-level of national discourses (e.g. the rationale for framing a subject with broader, macro-level educational curricular practices). Taken as a whole, the papers offer an eclectic view of curriculum as a multi-layered set of social practices, comprising different components – assessment, pedagogy, specification et cetera – that form the educational experiences of students in schools and other settings. The first four articles relate to activities and interventions that facilitate or promote learning. The fifth article is about teacher/school decision making in relation to historical content. The sixth paper provides a position piece on the origins, role, trajectory and importance of a subject, technology. The final paper looks at the complex relationship between the global and the local in relation to competences, namely those concerned with critical thinking. The papers contain a number of common themes, inter-relating theory and practice. These include student and teacher agency in curriculum making, the need to recognise the different practices that comprise curriculum thus avoiding reductionism to content, and the need to consider how students and teachers are supported in achieving agency, recognising that, as Smith in this volume notes, citing Berlin (1961), ‘agency requires a positive conception of freedom as ‘freedom to’ rather than simply ‘freedom from’.

The first paper in the issue, by Ruth Dann, focuses on feedback, as a relational rather than technical concept. In her paper, Dann offers a theoretical argument drawing upon Vygotsky (ZPD/dialogue), Holland and colleagues (Figured Worlds/context, drawing on Bourdieu) and Bakhtin (language/meaning). She contends that, to date, classroom feedback has been under-theorised. The paper offers a challenge to over-simplified technicist notions of feedback as a mechanism to raise attainment in terms of predefined criteria, as part of a washback effect from high stakes testing. Instead, Dann argues that feedback is a context specific and situated process, requiring ‘mediated dynamic interaction’. This requires attention to the ‘role of others, language, activity and identity’ – and the active role of students in feedback, engendering ways of them seeing ‘themselves as future learners’. Ultimately, in Dann’s view, feedback requires fundamental changes in the relations between teachers and students, requiring a shift in the balance of power; she states that ‘feedback is typically conveyed as something given to another, for a purpose which will bring about change’. The locus of power – ‘to shape, time, control and focus it’ – tends to currently lie with teachers, and this paper argues for a more powerful role for the recipients of feedback, that is students.

The second paper, by Matthew Dunn, also focuses on micro-level classroom interactions, in this case the teaching of threshold concepts, which he explores in the context of the transition from GCSE to A level Biology, using the Threshold Concept Framework. The paper outlines the notion that a curriculum area comprises fundamental or key or core concepts: threshold concepts are a particular subset of these, functioning as a ‘portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something’. This involves ‘transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded and troublesome’ changes to discourse and subjectivity – what the author describes as ‘an ontological and epistemological shift in the learner’s view of the world and potentially their own identity’. The paper offers empirical evidence that threshold concepts are integrative, involving the linking of concepts from different domains of the subject (e.g. understanding the movement of sugars much more clearly once one has a secure grasp of cell structure and membrane function). Dunn suggests that mastery of threshold concepts facilitates a shift in identity and belonging within the subject, via the acquisition of a new specialist common language.

The third paper by Charlotte Stephenson and Tina Isaacs continues the theme of micro-level classroom interaction, focussed on an initiative known as the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ), a programme which sits alongside A Levels in some English schools. Qualitative research with teachers and students explores the effect of EPQ on self-regulated learning in the context of a recent shift in post-16 learning, primarily driven by an attainment agenda, where there are clear tensions between top-down attainment-driven teaching and student engagement as active and autonomous learners. The research explores how EPQ impacted on study at A level, how it prepared students for university study, and how it shaped students’ attitudes and self-perception. The EPQ approach was found to build student agency despite a culture of ‘spoon-feeding’. According to Stephenson and Isaacs, ‘teachers reported seeing transformations in their students, reporting increases in self-confidence, self-esteem and resilience as a result of the EPQ process’. This in turn was seen to lead to better engagement and academic performance.

The fourth paper offers a combined focus on classroom practice and meso-level support for that practice. This paper on English language teaching, by Darío Banegas, reports on an action research project with over 900 students of English in Argentina. As with previous papers in the issue, there is a theme of student autonomy and active engagement in the curriculum, again exposing the tension between top-down policy and the local contexts within which curriculum enactment and learning occur. The paper also focuses on the effects exerted on teachers, through their engagement with the programme. According to Banegas, and in line with a social practice view of curriculum, ‘with teachers’ engagement, a curriculum ceases to be a product and becomes an in-context decision-making process which responds to the environment’. An interesting finding was that so few teachers were actually familiar with the official curriculum – this is an ongoing issue that has contributed in other contexts to the predominance of superficial first order over more nuanced second order understandings of curriculum policy intentions (e.g. see Priestley & Minty, 2013, in relation to Scotland). The paper points to the value of processes such as Action Research, which actively engage teachers with the curriculum and indeed render the curriculum a process for participants – this value lies, to paraphrase Stenhouse (1975), in that in such instances there is both teacher development and curriculum development. ‘This study suggests that engaging teachers and learners in curriculum transformation improved not only language learner motivation but also teacher motivation, and contributed to teachers’ agency and professional development’.

In the next paper, the focus shifts from classroom interaction to the issue of curriculum coherence. This article, by Joe Smith, addresses the question of what constitutes the core elements of a subject, in this case History. The paper reports on research in Scotland, where the government has ‘taken an extreme position on this debate by specifying no mandatory historical content in its social studies curriculum’. The paper explores how History teachers conceptualise their subject and define what constitutes significant knowledge in the context of localised curriculum making. In Smith’s words:

without access to theoretical debates about the nature of historical knowledge, schools fall back on instrumental justifications for content selection within the curriculum. The result in many cases is an extremely narrow and fragmented syllabus in which pupil preference, teacher interests and the logistics of timetabling guide content selection.

Smith criticises the effect of perverse incentives on teachers thinking, a lack of attention to the purposes of History within education, and inter-subject rivalry, all of which encourage instrumentalism rather than disciplinary thinking in the teaching of History. He concludes with a suggestion ‘that the formulation of coherent school level history curricula is dependent on the fostering of agency among a theoretically-informed teaching profession’.

The sixth paper in this collection, by Matt McLain, Dawne Irving-Bell, David Wooff and David Morrison-Love, is a position piece, drawing upon pragmatist thought on education, on the place of design and technology in the National Curriculum in England, and its development over time as a school subject. The article explores ‘the classification and framing of knowledge in education and the nature of technology within society’, presenting ‘a cultural historical perspective on technology, and technology education, positioning it as a fundamentally human activity’. This discussion takes place in the current context of curriculum narrowing in England - the squeezing out of ‘less important’ subjects under the revised national curriculum, with its emphasis on knowledge-rich provision and attainment in a narrow range of core subjects. This downgrading of technology as a subject is perceived to be in part due to its weak classification (in Bernstein’s terms) in relation to more strongly classified subjects such as mathematics. According to the authors, ‘to view design and technology solely as a STEM or a vocational subject, denies the potentially powerful cultural contribution it makes to education and society’. They suggest that ‘our challenge is to espouse and enact inclusive curricula that equip children and young people to live and thrive in an increasingly technological world’.

The final paper in this issue, by Armend Tahirsylaj and Ninni Wahlström, takes us into different territory. Their article explores, in the contexts of two macro-level national curricula, the inter-relationships between discourses in transnational and national policies. In the context of the EU’s 2016 ‘A New Skills Agenda for Europe’, which set out curricular priorities in terms of employability and economic competiveness, ‘the article problematises the complexity of developing twenty-first century skills, such as critical thinking, by addressing the role transnational and national policy contexts play in realising critical thinking in Sweden and Kosovo’. The article ‘explore[s] the recontextualisation of the transnational concept of “critical thinking” in two different national curricula, through analysis of core curriculum documents relating to the mother tongue curriculum’. The authors conclude that ‘Sweden emerges as a divergent case and Kosovo as a convergent case with regard to transnational policy flow’. Sweden is only implicitly influenced by transnational policy discourses around competencies, referring to them as abilities, and emphasising a balance of different types of knowledge. Kosovo, conversely, has a more explicit focus on competencies, being more overtly influenced by transnational policy discourses, reflecting the influence of UNESCO. This illustrates, perhaps, the longstanding tradition of national curriculum specification in Sweden, as compared with the newly emergent national curriculum in Kosovo.

The issue concludes with a review of a book, ‘Learning to teach in England and the United States: The evolution of policy and practice’, authored by Maria Teresa Tatto, Katharine Burn, Ian Menter, Trevor Mutton and Ian Thompson. The review by Karen Peel, points to ‘a significant increase of regulatory policy and accountability measures in initial teacher education through the introduction of professional standards, compliancy regulations, compulsory skills testing to qualify as a teacher and standardised assessments for students’. It highlights the book’s strong critique of practice-based routes to teacher training, and its strong message that universities and schools need to [re]connect for teacher education. Peel draws attention to the authors’ questioning of current assumptions that learning to teach is primarily about acquiring technical skills.

Mark Priestley
[email protected] Stavroula Philippou
[email protected]