Dysfunctional dichotomies? Deflating bipolar constructions of curriculum and pedagogy through case studies from music and history

Abstract

Recent public discussions of curriculum and pedagogy that have accompanied the English National Curriculum review have been structured around clichéd dichotomies that generate more heat than light and that, as Robin Alexander has argued, reduce complex educational debates to oppositional and incompatible slogans. This paper begins by exploring the ways in which these dichotomies have structured recent debates and goes on to critically explore arguments in two contemporary debates, in the fields of history education and music education, assessing how these debates have been framed and the extent to which the debates can be considered fruitful and progressive. In the first case, we seek to show, through a discussion of ‘knowledge’ and ‘skill’ in history, that bipolar thinking is both inadequate and dysfunctional in relation to the matters under discussion. A third term – disciplinary understanding – is advocated and explored. In the second case, we demonstrate that dichotomous thinking about formal and informal music education has generated a debate that has become more sophisticated as various authors have problematised and critiqued informal learning. Analysis of these debates suggests that dichotomous thinking is pernicious when dichotomies are used only as slogans, although dichotomies can be generative when they are used as starting points to open discussion, not to close it. The paper suggests that the difference between the debates might be explained by the varying degrees of political involvement in them.

Keywords:

• debate
• knowledge/skills
• formal/informal
• secondary schools

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Katharine Burn and the anonymous Curriculum Journal reviewers. Each provided a thorough, challenging and thought-provoking critique of an earlier version of the paper, for which we are very grateful.

Notes

1. ‘Skill/s’ figures 4 times in the document and ‘knowledge’ 12 times and a range of other terms, that go beyond the ‘skill’/‘knowledge’ binary, have an equivalent or greater incidence: ‘understanding’, for example, figures 28 times (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2007).

2. The 2013 document's ‘Aims’ section includes reference to ‘concepts’ and ‘methods’, however, as their subsumption under ‘Aims’ indicates, they now have a subordinate status: matters that merited three pages in 2007 (pp. 12–15) now merit seven lines (Department for Education, 2013, p. 1). The references to assessment in 2013 are minimal (representing one sentence of a five-page document) and internally incoherent: reference is made to the terminal assessment of ‘the matters, skills and processes specified in the programme of study’ yet no ‘skills’ are referred to eslewhere in the document and the only other occurrence of ‘process’ refers to the process of historical change itself – hardly something that students can be expected to master in a school subject (DfE, 2013, p. 1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Cain

Tim Cain is a professor in education at Edge Hill University, England, where he directs the research centre for schools, colleges and teacher education. He is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Music Education and British Journal of Music Education. His research interests include teacher research and knowledge mobilisation and his work in this area has appeared in Croatian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Slovene publications.

Arthur Chapman

Arthur Chapman is senior lecturer in history education in the Department of Curriculum Pedagogy and Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London. Arthur is an associate editor of Teaching History and The International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research and a member of the editorial boards of the International Review of History Education and The Curriculum Journal. His publishing and research supervision focus is history pedagogy and didactics with a particular focus on conceptual development in history and on the use of interactive technologies to support historical learning. He is a trustee of the British Curriculum Foundation.