Knowledge across the curriculum

A theme that has received attention historically in curriculum studies is that of knowledge, and more recently, how knowledge should be enacted in classrooms and in national curricula. This journal included close attention to knowledge in its special issue on aims, knowledge and control (Wyse, Hayward, Higgins, & Livingston, 2014). Subsequent work has theorised a rapprochement between the ideas of powerful knowledge and a Deweyan pragmatist conception of knowledge as transaction (see introduction to Wyse, Hayward, & Pandya, 2016). All the papers in this issue of the curriculum journal relate to knowledge in the curriculum, although inevitably, in a general issue of this kind, some papers tackle the subject of knowledge more directly than others.

One of the limitations of some prominent recent theorisations of what has been called ‘powerful knowledge’ is the lack of empirical base. This has been a recurring theme in this journal (see, for example, the papers by Lambert, 2011; Priestley & Sinnema, 2014; Roberts, 2014; Young, 2014). Yates and Millar's paper reports an empirical study in Australia that explored the nature of powerful knowledge in the context of the subject of physics, both in schools and in universities. Perhaps, the most important finding of the work was that even in a subject that could be regarded as a relatively stable discipline, in relation to its foundational concerns, the knowledge selection required for teaching was much more complex than a linear relationship between knowledge generated in the academy and curriculum content selection in schools. This is a rather important finding in relation to the idea of knowledge as ‘the best that has been thought and said.’

Most people agree that a foundational concern of physics is mathematical thinking. And a characteristic shared between the two subjects is the need to pose and solve problems. In mathematics teaching, the need for problem solving and its frequent neglect in schools is a long standing issue. van Velzen's research investigated methods to evaluate sense making and global planning in the context of mathematical thinking problems for 11th-grade high school students. It was concluded that mathematical sense making ‘included elegant and complete, basic and attempted procedures.’ The issue of problem solving in mathematics raises the question of how knowledge is selected and applied by students during a problem-solving process, where they have to engage creative strategies that stretch the boundaries of their current knowledge and may require them to identify new knowledge to help them solve the mathematical problem.

Another tension with some conceptions of powerful knowledge arises from the phenomenon of cross-curricular and/or inter-disciplinary areas of learning. Creativity has grown in importance as an inter-disciplinary area in the curriculum in part driven by societal recognition of its value in a wide range of social arenas. Enikő Orsolya Bereczki's paper builds on the methods of research that has compared creativity across the national curricula of the European Union, by providing an in-depth analysis of creativity in Hungary's national curriculum. Problems identified in studies of national curricula in other countries, such as lack of clear definitions and inconsistent representation of creativity in subjects, were also found in Hungary.

A different cross-curricula topic is the focus of another paper in the issue. The idea of outdoor learning is common to both early years practice and to the subject of Physical Education (PE) in high schools/secondary schools. Atencio and Tan investigated conceptions of outdoor learning of Singaporean in-service PE teachers. The knowledge that the teachers drew upon ranged widely and included elements such as survival skills as well as more place-based viewpoints. It was concluded that, ‘critical conversations, integrating both epistemological and practical concerns, must occur in regard to prevailing pedagogical views that learning can emerge in both “uncomfortable” foreign environments as well as local contexts.’

While the subject names of the high school curriculum may appear obviously related to some academic disciplines, this is not so obvious for the early years curriculum. It is at this phase of education that theories of powerful knowledge are most severely tested. It was interesting to find clear connections between Yates and Millar's paper on physics and Elizabeth Wood and Helen Hedges’ paper that theorises curriculum in the early years. Having reviewed three ‘positions’ including the more traditional cognitive psychological developmental perspective, Wood and Hedges conclude that knowledge in the early years curriculum should be driven not just by disciplinary knowledge but also by how knowledge might be put to use by young children as a part of their interaction with peers and adults, echoing Dewey's transactional understanding and the importance of ‘psychologising’ the subject matter (Higgins, 2016).

The final paper in the issue is not directly about knowledge; however it is about a mechanism that strongly influences knowledge in the curriculum: assessment. International comparisons of countries are not just undertaken through comparison of their national curricula, as we saw in the paper by Bereczki, but also most prominently through international testing, usually of high school students (see Volume 27(1) of this journal for an example of comparing countries’ national curricula based on high performance in such tests). The performance of Scandinavian countries in the tests has attracted considerable attention so it is with interest that we read the paper by Therese N. Hopfenbeck and Marit Kjærnsli about students’ motivation for sitting the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. Contrary to some media reporting in Norway, that tried to suggest that young people were not interested in working hard in school, the authors found that the young people were motivated to do well in the PISA tests, although girls were more motivated than boys.