‘Approaching the sacred’: directionality in the relation between curriculum and knowledge structure

Abstract

Increasing pressure on all levels of educational provision, whether academic or overtly vocational, to be to ‘relevant’ and ‘useful’ prompts consideration of the relation between curriculum and pedagogy in terms of the internal structure of knowledge forms. Following Durkheim’s distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ orders of meaning and drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein, this paper questions pedagogic presuppositions that directionality from sensory experience to abstraction posits the everyday life of the student as the foundation for the acquisition of complex, systematic knowledge. Two empirical examples are discussed: one focuses on the internal structure of craft knowledge, while the other focuses on the internal structure of mathematics as school subject. They converge in the finding that transmission of knowledge structure, whether in material or symbolic form, requires the transformation of empirical objects into theoretical objects before a connecting point can be found between the world of everyday experience and specialised knowledge forms. This is what constitutes a ‘relevant’ curriculum.

Keywords:

• Basil Bernstein
• craft
• curriculum
• knowledge structure
• pedagogy
• relevance

Notes

1. The general definition of framing is extended in his later work to refer to control over the selection, sequencing, pacing, criteria and the social base that makes the transmission possible (Bernstein 1996, 27; 2000, 12–13).

2. See Bernstein (1990, 211).

3. Sikoyo and Jacklin (2009) explore, for instance, the classification of primary school science in Uganda, while Johnson (2009) analyses classification in Life Sciences (Biology) curricula in secondary schools in South Africa.