The (Re)Organisation of Knowledge and Assessment for a Learning Society: The constraints on interdisciplinarity

Initiatives of curriculum reform currently underway in higher education in South Africa attempt to move undergraduate curricula towards more structured and integrated degree programmes so as to enable greater control over the quality of "graduateness", especially the development of generic, flexible and transferable skills associated with the idea of a learning society. This paper uses a case study of a one-semester university course, designed to support the development of a "critical citizen", to illustrate the challenges involved in the restructuring of curriculum towards more interdisciplinary forms. The work of educational sociologist Basil Bernstein, particularly his terms "classification" and "framing" and his model of the pedagogic device, is used to provide a theoretical frame for this case study. Comments from the course designers are used to show how the process of trying to derive generic competencies common to a range of humanities disciplines runs the risk of omitting the necessary disciplinary basis for the achievement of such competencies. Further, the challenges of drawing academic staff from many disciplines into consensus for the purposes of appropriate assessment practices are explored, and the evidence suggests that powerful structural factors exist which may frustrate the easy achievement of such consensus. In conclusion, it seems that the achievement of interdisciplinary or generic forms of curriculum may be more challenging at intellectual and social levels than policy-makers give credit for.