Curriculum knowledge and justice: content, competency and concept

Abstract

This study is interested in understanding the configurations of knowledge underpinning three examples of curriculum policy texts in the specific case of the school subject of geography. The three policy texts are the 1991 Geography National Curriculum (GNC), the ‘Opening minds’ curriculum and the GNC 2007. I start with the proposal that each selected text promotes a particular type of knowledge, namely: content, competency and concept. I argue that deconstructive reading of three policy texts reveals what are assumed to be legitimate knowledge discourses as well as what is overlooked in each tidy curriculum scheme. I engage the help of the post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida in this deconstructive undertaking. The study demonstrates how the 1991 ‘content’ curriculum privileges a western European view of the world; how the 1999 ‘competency’ curriculum overlooks the politics and ethics of knowledge by focusing on an economistic, outcomes-driven technical view of knowledge; and how the ‘concept’ curriculum offers opportunities for deconstructive reading while at the same time indicating an unproblematical commitment to conflated and assumedly neutral approaches to knowledge. Opening up curriculum texts to deconstructive reading shows language as insecure and reveals spaces for the incoming of more just ways of thinking about the world.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• deconstruction
• geography
• justice
• knowledge
• policy

Notes

1. ‘Humanities’ subjects are commonly understood to comprise history, geography and religious education (RE) in secondary schools in England.

2. Key Stage 3 (KS3) refers to the curriculum usually earmarked for students aged 11–14 years in English state or government schools.

3. The ‘Opening minds’ curriculum is currently being used in over 200 schools. http://www.rsaopeningminds.org.uk/about-rsa-openingminds/.

4. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is a registered charity, founded in London in 1745.

5. The argument that some schools were not teaching enough locational knowledge was confirmed to some extent (see Storm 1987 and Rawling 1992, 299) but, as with many issues, the problem was more complex than it first appeared. In other words, it is not just a question of how much locational knowledge, but prior questions about what kind of locational knowledge.

6. Between 1969 and 1977 the Black Paper writers published a series of colloquial and polemic pamphlets appealing to popular common sense about education rather than deploying rigorous debate and analysis of evidence (CCCS 1981, 201). They argued for traditional academic standards (through testing and examination), respect for authority, discipline, ‘civilised values’ and conservative social morals (Salter and Tapper 1985, 176).

7. Including the teacher unions (ATL 2006), the House of Commons Select Committee (2008), National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA 2007), Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA 2005), National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER 2006).

8. The notion of performativity used here refers to the maximisation of output from a technical system as a mark of efficiency, in this case as applied to the transmission of knowledge by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1984). Ball sees educational performativity as, ‘a regime of accountability that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of control, attrition and change’ (2008, 49).