A pedagogic compact: retrieving ‘powerful’ educational knowledge from Didaktik and curriculum studies

ABSTRACT

We set out to address the question—what does it mean for educational knowledge to be ‘powerful’? We compare the Anglo tradition of curriculum studies with the Didaktik tradition through the lens of an analysis of curriculum structure in postgraduate courses in South African universities rooted in either the Anglo or Didaktik tradition. This analysis of curriculum structure affords a view of each tradition that we argue is ‘powerful’, but in different ways. While Didaktik provides a humanities-based curriculum coherence in teacher education, curriculum studies offers social scientific possibilities for empirical inquiry. We make the argument that a strategic entente cordiale, or pedagogic compact, would strengthen the professional position of teachers and education academics in the respective countries. This is particularly so in the context of threats posed by instrumental trends driven by educational sciences underpinning TIMSS, Pisa and the like.

KEYWORDS:

• Didaktik
• curriculum studies
• educational knowledge
• curriculum structure
• social realism
• Bernstein
• Young

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the reviewers and to the associate editor for their helpful comments which helped us to sharpen the focus of this paper and our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Afrikaans is a Dutch creole, developed by the Dutch and German settlers with significant influence from the Malay community, originally slaves brought to the country.

2. ‘Weak’ in terms of conceptual development and cumulative empirical generalization, given its object of enquiry and the proliferation of different approaches.

3. These institutions were set up under Afrikaner custodianship under apartheid. Despite the fall of apartheid the imprint has yet to disappear.

4. … ‘an independent human science with its own terminology, its own point of departure, its own methods of investigation and verification based on the premises of educational (pedagogic) essences … ’ (Krüger, 2008, p. 216).

5. Nor do we wish to enter the debate of whether FP was a home-grown discipline bearing little relation to its European forebears, as argued by Suransky-Dekker (1998), or not. We will just comment that Langeveld was a more than occasional visitor to South Africa, contributed to the South African debate (Langeveld, 1960), and, together with Spranger and Karl and Charlotte Bühler, attended the festschrift launch for one of South Africa’s pedagogic luminaries, B.F. Nel. This suggests to us at least that the European didactitians did not simply disown their South African progeny (Krüger, 2008, fn.1, 248).

6. ‘Distasteful’ because they perceived an ideological affinity between the communitarian basis of CNE and apartheid (see Suransky-Dekker, 1998).

7. It was more like an informal college common room than a purposeful professional association, like the Afrikaner educationists had, another difference in socio-epistemic organization at the time.

8. A notable exception being one of the courses in one English institution which had a stronger knowledge focus and a more cumulative pedagogic structure.

9. ‘Regulative discourse’ owes an obvious debt to Durkheim’s ‘moral order’ (Durkheim, 1961/2002; see also Muller & Hoadley, 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johan Muller

Johan Muller is Senior Research Scholar and Professor Emeritus of Curriculum in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, email: [email protected]. His longstanding research focus has been on the sociology of knowledge, in particular on curriculum context and structure.

Ursula Hoadley

Ursula Hoadley is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, e-mail: [email protected]. Her research areas are curriculum, pedagogy and teachers work. She focuses in particular on primary schooling processes in contexts of poverty.