The formation of a school subject and the nature of curriculum content: an analysis of liberal studies in Hong Kong

Abstract

This essay explores the nature of the curriculum content of liberal studies—a core school subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong—with reference to the curriculum‐making processes entailed in the formation of that subject. The central thesis is that a school subject is introduced to schools and classrooms as a distinct representation of content embodied in curriculum materials, entailing a theory of content—a special way of selecting, organizing, and framing the content for social, cultural, educational, curricular, and pedagogical purposes. Knowing the content of a school subject thus entails knowing more than the content per se; it entails an understanding of the underlying theory of content, which is necessary for disclosing and realizing the educational potential embodied in the content.

Keywords:

• curriculum‐making
• curriculum content
• Hong Kong
• school subjects
• subject matter

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to Ian Westbury for his numerous critical and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. See, for example, Apple (1979), Anyon (1981), Bernstein (1971), Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), Oakes (1982, 1986), and Young (1971).

2. See, for example, Goodson (1988), Goodson and Marsh (1996), Goodson et al. (1998), and Popkewitz (1987).

3. See Ball et al. (2001), Kennedy (1998), Shulman (1986, 1987), and Wilson and Berne (1999).

4. See Grossman et al. (1989), Shulman (1986, 1987), and Wilson et al. (1987).

5. However, none of these initiatives were implemented successfully. See Morris and Chan (1997a, b) for an explanation.

6. Liberal studies was first introduced as an elective secondary school subject at the advanced supplementary level (ASL) (i.e. secondary 7).

7. In the current curriculum ASL liberal studies is offered as an elective school subject to ∼ 10% of senior secondary school students.

8. It should be noted that the term classroom is used in a broad sense, encompassing school‐based curriculum development activities as well. Also note that at the classroom level there is the achieved curriculum (the curriculum student actually acquired).

9. In general the document does not offer specific suggestions of instructional and assessment strategies for a particular module or theme. This leaves teachers a large degree of freedom in the selection of those strategies.

10. School‐based assessment and public examination will have 20 and 80% weightings, respectively, contributing to the attainment of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education. In addition to liberal studies, other examined subjects are Chinese, English, and mathematics.

11. This is the assumption made by the government. How it might work in reality is yet to be seen.

12. This assumption is problematic. To a large extent, how content is selected, arranged, and formulated in the Standards reflects what Roberts (2007) called the ‘focus‐on‐sciences‐and‐scientists’ approach—in which the disciplines and the practices of scientists are employed as the central frame of reference for defining and delineating the content of school science. Such an approach overlooks alternative kinds of human knowledge and ways of knowing that could be the potential sources of curriculum content for scientific literacy. It does very little to address learners who are culturally and linguistically diverse (Eisenhart et al. 1996). Furthermore, it is ‘based on an untenable, individualistic (neo‐liberal) ideology that does not account for the fundamental relationships between individual and society, knowledge and power, or science, economics, and politics’ (Roth and Barton 2004: 3).

13. Both ‘elemental’ and ‘fundamental’ are important concepts in the Didaktik tradition. The former concerns reducing curriculum content to its essential ingredients and the latter refers to an transformative experience that gives rise to a ‘growing’ or ‘becoming’ in a learner’s existence. See Krüger (2008) for a detailed and extended explication.

14. Shulman and associates were more concerned with how the potential embodied in disciplinary content can be transformed into pedagogical representations (Gudmundsdottir et al. 2000).

15. Teachers possess sets of beliefs and assumptions about curriculum content developed from their classroom practices and professional experiences, which constitute their existing theories of content (see Doyle 2008).

16. According to Shulman and associates, teachers need to have three kinds of subject‐matter knowledge: content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and curricular knowledge. Content knowledge includes knowledge of the substantive and syntactic structures of the academic discipline—terms borrowed from Schwab (1964). Pedagogical content knowledge and curricular knowledge enable the teacher to transform the content knowledge he or she possesses into ‘forms that are pedagogically powerful and yet adaptive to the variations in ability and background presented by students’ (Shulman 1987: 15).