Content selection in advanced courses

ABSTRACT

Advanced high-school courses, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses in the United States, present a content selection conundrum of major proportions. Judicious content selection is necessary if students are to learn subject matter meaningfully, but the sheer breadth of tested material in these courses promotes nearly the opposite: “test-prep” teaching and mere “coverage” of the curriculum. This paper contributes elements of a theory of content selection that is aimed at meaningful learning (Bransford) and centered on the ideas of agency and constraint (Giddens), curricular structure (Bruner and Schwab), and knowledge and power in curriculum practice (Young). We also present the practical tool we used to select content for emphasis in a high-school government and politics course – an “advanced” course where selecting anything for emphasis is perceived as costly.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum development
• curriculum studies
• student and teacher experiences
• educational practices
• educational theory
• school/educational reform

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the journal's editors and reviewers for their perceptive suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Advanced Placement (AP) is the main brand of advanced high school coursework in the United States. AP is similar functionally to the “A-Level” in the United Kingdom, Singapore, and elsewhere, influencing students’ college admissions while operationally defining “advanced” study in pre-collegiate education. AP courses and exams in the USA are developed collaboratively by disciplinary scholars and teachers working with the College Board, an association that develops and markets AP and its tests. AP courses are considered by numerous observers (but not all, e.g., Sadler, Sonnert, Tai, & Klopfenstein, 2010) to be among the best in the American high school. Indeed, they are touted by some as “the gold standard” of the American high school curriculum (e.g., Mathews, 2009, p. 8).

2. This is Ann Brown's (1992, p. 143) approach to scaling an innovation. It signals our understanding that educational interventions rarely survive the translation from research to practice, and that research models for studying interventions often focus on alignment and fidelity rather than mediation, adaptation, and respect for teachers as knowledgeable agents who make local decisions.

3. See Baker (2014) and Spring (2006).

4. The literature on content selection includes these landmarks: Apple (1979), Bernstein (1971), Dewey (1902), Eisner (2002), Fenton (1967), Hunt and Metcalf (1968), Oliver (1957), Schwab (1964), Taba (1945), and Tyler (1949). See also critiques of the role of academic disciplines in the formation of school subjects in Cherryholmes (1988, chapter 7), Deng and Luke (2008), Thornton and Barton (2010), and Whitty (2010).

5. One key way they overlap is captured in Shulman's (1987) influential hybrid, “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK). This category is useful because it identifies the distinctive bodies of knowledge for teaching. It represents the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction. (p. 8) Cochran, DeRuiter, and King (1993) define PCK as “the transformation of subject matter for teaching” (p. 264). See also Bernstein (1990).

6. For example, see the conflicts that have moved through U.S. courts over teaching evolution (Kitzmiller v. Dover, 2005), literature (Mozert v. Tennessee, 1987), and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms (Newdow v. Rio Linda, 2010).

7. See Labaree's (2012) fine account.

8. We accept the conventional understanding of concepts as small ideas. They are smaller than generalizations, which comprise concepts, and theories, which comprise generalizations. They have, on Young's analysis (2008, 2013), both objectivity (they are objects of study and discursive manipulation in the world) and history (they are contingent and dwell, as constructs, in modes of social organization).

9. See Mitchell's (2003) analysis.

10. British political scholar Elizabeth Frazer, writing before Bernard Crick's group was finished, was one of the first to see that “whereas U.S. school children are told important things about the system of government under which they live, U.K. children for the most part have been told nothing at all” (2002, p. 34).

11. This description of the course draws from Parker et al. (2013).

12. This is a rapidly shifting landscape. See Schneider (2011) and Sadler et al. (2010).

13. Here we rely on Young's “social realist” position on the objectivity of knowledge (2008, 2013), which includes its origin in social organization as well as its materiality as an object of analysis, understanding, and appropriation. In this way, knowledge is similar to other social institutions, e.g., the family and the economy. It is both “constructed” and materially “out there.”

14. Resources, recall, are understood as in structuration theory (Giddens, 1984). Agents use resources, which exist objectively in the environment, but agents created them in the first place, using other resources. Parker (2011, p. 413) comments Using this framework, we can zero in on the ways change agents work in, with, and around powerful social forces, and we are encouraged to avoid both structural determinism and romantic individualism…. Resources are constructed, yes, but they are under construction, too. Recursively, they are received, constructed, remodeled, and given back.

15. It should be clear by now that we do not essentialize or reify a discipline's structure (nor, for that matter, did Bruner or Schwab). Rather, “structure” is a category that signals the project to identify a course's generative core and to construct a meaningful relationship between center and periphery. It is, like other structures, a social formation that is contingent on relations occurring in and around the activity that produced it. Bruner's and Schwab's work was useful to us not only because it aimed to find priorities and relationships among curricular elements, but also because it did not dismiss the academic disciplines as merely knowledge of the powerful. Bruner and Schwab were able, therefore, to consider disciplinary communities and their outputs as available inputs – resources – for curriculum decision making.

16. Note on these texts: the Federalist Papers were 85 essays written just after the constitutional convention of 1787 by proponents of the new constitution, explaining its principles and rationale. These two celebrated papers, numbers 10 on political parties and 51 on checks and balances, were written by James Madison who later became the fourth President of the United States. Meanwhile, the course textbook varied from one school system to another, but was one of a handful that major publishers develop for this course.

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful for generous support from the George Lucas Educational Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Walter C. Parker

Walter C. Parker is Professor of Social Studies Education and (by courtesy) Political Science at the University of Washington, Seattle. He studies social studies education, particularly civic education, in the USA and other liberal democracies.

Jane C. Lo

Jane C. Lo is a doctoral candidate in Social Studies Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. She studies the political engagement of youth, social studies curriculum development, and project-based learning.