‘The shadows of “boundary” remain’: curriculum coherence and the spectre of practice

ABSTRACT

This paper will re-visit the origins and early use in South African curriculum writing of the concept of ‘coherence’; it will go on to show how Suellen Shay and her colleagues fleshed out the concept and created an instrument for its empirical analysis; it will then step back and examine the contribution and some problems that were brought to light; examine briefly how Shay’s later work continued to wrestle with the notion of ‘practice’, particularly in light of curricula that were judged to display conceptual coherence; and will suggest one possible solution in the seminal paper by Bernstein (2000). Finally, the paper will reflect on two implicit definitions of ‘curriculum’, a ‘strict’ one and an ‘extended’ one and suggest why they should be distinguished.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum coherence
• knowledge forms
• curriculum structure
• curriculum knowledge
• Bernstein

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jeanne Gamble, Nicky Wolmarans and Michelle Meyer of AfricanSunMedia for permission to publish figures reproduced in the paper. He also thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for comments helpful in revising the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This became ‘contextual coherence’ soon after, the two terms denoting the same thing.

2 For a history of the SANTED project and the policy environment in which it was conducted see Oosthuizen 2014.