School subjects, subject communities and curriculum change: the social construction of economics in the school curriculum

Abstract

The place of economics in the curriculum in England and Wales provides a lens through which we may view the ways in which the curriculum as a whole is fought over and remains shifting terrain. Conceived of as social movements, school subject communities are made up of competing factions giving rise to contest and conflict both within themselves and with other subjects. A social constructionist perspective, such as Goodson's, would suggest that the form and content of the curriculum are outcomes of such ongoing struggle, involving the interplay of power and control that reflect deep‐rooted traditions. Bernstein's notions of school subjects imply complex interplay of official and pedagogic agents in determining their fates as singulars, regions or generic entities. The rise and fall of economics lay substantially outside the control of its subject community and the social movements within it. At post‐16, a search for new content and pedagogies seemed to take little heed of its curricular market position. During the compulsory phase, the emergence of sub‐factions interested in vocational rather than economics education ensured its consignment to cross‐curricular theme status and relative oblivion in the post‐1988 National Curriculum.

Notes

1. TVEI was a scheme, symptomatically initially funded not through the Department of Education and Science (DES) but the Department of Employment, via the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), as the mid 1980s centrepiece of the New Right's ‘industrial trainers’ thrust to vocationalize the curriculum and invigorate training in educational contexts (Ball, 1990). Emerging ‘as a prototype for implementing educational policy and change’ (Gleeson, 1987, p. 1), it was the harbinger of a bidding culture for new school resources, categorically funded, the end of established, consultative forms of curricular development and change and the beginning of ‘a mode of operation’ that was ‘executive rather than legislative or advisory’ (Dale, 1985, p. 43). In introducing the manners of business into schools it did little more, in its own right, than to make teachers even cannier about outside change agents and learn to take the money and run (Fitz et al., 2005).