Making geography visible as an object of study in the secondary school curriculum

Abstract

This article considers disciplinary-based knowledge and its recontextualisation and acquisition in the secondary school curriculum. It starts from the premise that teaching disciplinary knowledge is important. The focus is the subject of geography and the increasingly influential realist school of thought in the sociology of education and the endeavour to ‘bring knowledge back’ into education. Social realist theorists emphasise the importance of the explanatory power of specialist or disciplinary knowledge. Basil Bernstein's ideas of hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures are being developed in order to bring into view the epistemological principles that underpin the recontextualisation of such knowledge within the school curriculum that can support meaningful learning. The generative capacity of Bernstein's typology is illustrated by the work of Maton who places knower structures and legitimation codes alongside Bernstein's knowledge structures. The article outlines this ‘structure of knowledge’ approach before discussing the nature of geographical knowledge. Consideration is then given to how these ideas about the structuring of knowledge might influence thinking about the geography curriculum and pedagogy. In recognising the significance of the social realist approach to knowledge and the link between discipline and curriculum, the article ends with some thoughts about the limitations of social realism as an overarching theory of knowledge for educational purposes. These revolve around the nature of epistemic communities and specifically: the extent to which social realism recognises the socio-epistemic relation between educational and disciplinary contexts; the under-theorisation of the field of knowledge production itself; and the fact that social realist theorists tend to ignore a key aspect of the epistemic relation of knowledge – what knowledge is about. Engagement with such issues is necessary to support a model of education centred on the student, the teacher and knowledge and concerned with knowledge orientation as well as knowledge acquisition.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• educational knowledge
• geography education
• social realism

Notes

1. Such wording is not common in geography education. Recontextualisation refers to the transfer of knowledge and in particular to the work of Basil Bernstein. His theoretical ideas have seldom been used in geography education. Bernstein was interested in how a society circulates its various forms of knowledge. His account recognised a set of distributive rules, each of which is associated with a specific field of activity: a field of production where ‘new’ knowledge is produced and positioned; a field of recontextualisation where discourses from the field of production are selected, appropriated and repositioned to become ‘educational’ knowledge; and a field of reproduction where pedagogic transmission and acquisition take place (with differential results). For Bernstein, recontextualisation involves the interplay between two sub-fields: the official recontextualising field (ORF) and the pedagogic recontextualising field (PRF). The ORF consists of specialised departments and sub-agencies of the state and local educational authorities. The PRF consists of university departments of education and their research as well as specialised educational media and teachers. Acquisition is commonly associated with the idea of education as the transmission of knowledge and a passive model of learning, which has rightly been heavily criticised by educationalists. The use of the word by social realist scholars and in this article has a different meaning; it explicitly presupposes the active involvement of the learner in the process of acquiring knowledge.

2. Social realism is building on developments in related academic fields, especially the sociology and philosophy of science. Realist theories of knowledge have largely taken shape through the debates that developed in response to Kuhn's (1970) account of the development of science, Popper's (1972) earlier critique of positivism and the work of Bhaskar (1975, 1978) and the development of critical realism. More recently social realist theorists have used the work of Alexander (1995), Cassirer (1996, 2000), Collins (1998), Shapin (1994), Ward (1996, 1997) and Williams (2002). The work is extensive now. See, for example, Maton (2000, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c); Maton and Moore (2010); Maton and Muller (2007); Moore (2000, 2004, 2007a, 2007b); Moore and Maton (2001); Moore and Young (2001, 2010); Muller (2000, 2009); Young (2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2010); Young and Muller (2007, 2008, 2010). Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a development in the study of knowledge and education that is being used to analyse a growing range of social and cultural practices across increasingly different institutional and national contexts. The Legitimation Code Theory website is a selection of journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings and presentations using Legitimation Code Theory as a central framework for research since 2007. See: http://www.karlmaton.com/

3. Young (2008b, 2009) distinguishes between ‘knowledge of the powerful’ and ‘powerful knowledge’. ‘Knowledge of the powerful’ refers to what Young once termed ‘high-status’ knowledge and Bourdieu (1986) would describe as the ‘cultural capital’ of the dominant or ruling classes. Many sociological critiques of school knowledge have focused on the dominant relations between knowledge and power and the inequalities that have been embodied historically in the disciplinary and subject basis of school curricula. The concern has been with the legitimation of knowledge (who legitimises what counts as knowledge) and who has access to it. However, the fact that some knowledge is ‘knowledge of the powerful’, Young argues, tells us nothing about the knowledge itself. The term ‘powerful knowledge’ refers to what the knowledge can do: move young people, intellectually at least, beyond their local and particular circumstances. Sociological critiques of school knowledge have neglected the extent to which the knowledge from which the disadvantaged are disproportionately excluded – disciplinary knowledge – is not just the knowledge of the powerful, which it has been for too long, but it is also, in an important sense, ‘knowledge itself’, that is ‘powerful knowledge’ that is valued in particular ways within society. It should be emphasised that this is an argument for a return to a conservative view of education and the purposes of schools. The traditional elite curriculum was grounded in absolutist views of disciplinary knowledge and the idea of the intrinsic value of certain bodies of knowledge that denied the historicity and sociality of knowledge, by which we are left with a false objectivity based on the givenness of knowledge.

4. Over the last decade, in post-observation discussion with trainee teachers and their more experienced teacher mentors about teaching and learning in geography, my experience has been that geographical knowledge has rarely, if ever, figured in such discussion. It has been marginalised by the exigencies of everyday practice and the imperatives of policy. It raises the question: how can engagement with disciplinary knowledge be enabled in schools and teacher education?

5. The issue of how different types of knowledge structures develop cumulative knowledge takes us back to what has been seen as a recurrent problem of the social sciences/humanities: an appropriate conceptual framework for establishing the objectivity of knowledge and knowledge growth in order to ‘close the gap’ between the empiricist paradigm of science and the humanistic-hermeneutical paradigm of the social sciences.