Disordering the coalition government's ‘new’ approach to curriculum design and knowledge: the matter of the discipline

ABSTRACT

In recent times knowledge has come in for a hard time as a form of scholarship, as an educational aim and as a matter of public enterprise (Barnett, 2009). As a result, knowledge has been downplayed in education (schools and universities) and society. This article considers how engagement with disciplinarity might be a productive process of re-engaging geography education with the idea of knowledge and its role in education within the current National Curriculum Review in England, where it seems knowledge is to be reinstated as the core principle of the school curriculum. Even a cursory examination of the debate about geography as a subject in the National Curriculum would suggest the need for greater awareness about knowledge. Disciplinarity is approached by drawing attention to an increasingly influential school of thought, social realism, as well as the notion of a new disciplinarity in higher education, both of which see disciplinary knowledge as a social phenomenon. To understand education we need to understand knowledge. This is not to emphasise that knowledge is the only consideration, but rather to begin to reclaim this crucial but often absent dimension of education. Doing so, it is argued, will offer geography education a more productive discussion of a knowledge or subject-based school curriculum and its purpose, content and means of justification.

Pupils are not disciplinary, the world neither, what about the knowledge? (Audigier, 2006, p. 39).

Alongside calls to abandon disciplines, a more measured reconsideration of disciplinarity is gathering pace that highlights its continuing relevance (Christie and Maton, 2011, p. 1).