A curricular lens on equity and inclusion: using Bernstein to articulate ‘supercomplexity’

This issue contains a diverse range of contributions to our understanding of the jigsaw of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. The thread running through them emphasises the importance of equity and inclusion, and the challenge to curriculum that these values pose.

Basil Bernstein (2000) understood curriculum as the ordering and regulating of what is considered worthwhile in a society's knowledge, which is then appropriated and recontextualised in an educational setting, so as to be reproduced by learners. His analysis highlighted some of the challenges, from a sociological perspective, of cultural equity and inclusion in education and provides us with a conceptual framework to relate some of the pieces of the educational jigsaw. This framework gives us a partial vocabulary to articulate the challenges of ‘supercomplexity’ that we have been focusing on in recent editorials (Hayward, Higgins, Livingston, & Wyse, 2017).

The first article in this issue, ‘Teaching for equity: insights from international evidence with implications for a teacher education curriculum’ (by Grudnoff, Haigh, Hill, Cochran-Smith, Ell and Ludlow), proposes a curriculum framework to inform an equity-centred teacher education curriculum, in order to address the persistent problem of inequitable educational outcomes between advantaged and disadvantaged students. In Bernstein's terms, this aims to help teachers make the educational code more accessible to disadvantaged pupils.

The regulatory function which codes maintain is the issue which Steck and Perry tackle in their article ‘Secondary school leader perceptions about the inclusion of queer materials in the school course curricula’. They argue that school leaders play a vital role in supporting or challenging school policies which facilitate or inhibit curricular inclusion of queer content in course materials and they identify an instructional pedagogy which promotes an equitable and inclusive educational process. This highlights the importance of key roles and individuals in schools in how some aspects of cultural codes (in this case, heteronormativity) are maintained or mitigated with schools.

In the third article, ‘Comparative analysis of Physics master degree curricula across national and institutional settings: manifestations of student-centred learning and implications for degree comparability’ by Sin, a different perspective on curriculum is presented by looking at students’ available choices with a specific curriculum, or their capability to exert control over the curriculum. She draws attention to the force of national pedagogic traditions (national discourse codes in Bernstein's terms) in shaping curricula and student expectations.

Ellili-Cherif and Hadba in their article entitled ‘Fidelity to and satisfaction with prescribed curriculum in an Arab educational context: ESL teachers’ perspective’ continue the thread with an analysis of the importance of the role of the teachers in the curriculum experienced by learners and the way that codes are mediated by the professionals responsible for curriculum delivery or enactment, similar to the stance we identified Steck and Perry had taken.

West, in ‘Validating curriculum development using text mining’ proposes a model for curriculum analysis using text mining to quantify patterns in curricula through the use of surface and deep cluster analysis. This approach aims to help educators validate the breadth and depth of a proposed curriculum in the emerging discipline of Data Science. In Bernstein's terms, this provides a framework to analyse the recontextualisation from the field of production (the emerging discipline of Data Science) into pedagogic discourse (the curriculum). This process and the tools and analysis outlined might also help us understand aspects of the ‘recontextualising rules’ involved in the translation. How does disciplinary knowledge become curriculum knowledge and how is it reshaped in the process?

In the penultimate article, ‘Negotiating the teaching of history in times of curriculum reform: the narrative accounts of four Australian primary teachers’, Reitano and Winter use narrative inquiry to show how temporality, sociality, and place play out in the lives of teachers of history. The authors highlight the challenges and opportunities for teachers’ professional knowledge in times of curriculum reform, again emphasising Bernstein's ‘field of recontextualisation’ where knowledge is selected and repositioned to become ‘educational’, which is particularly apparent in times or reform.

Yagnamurthy's article, ‘Continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE): policy and practice at the national level’, highlights some of the tensions between formative and summative assessment made apparent in the confusion produced in India between the formative approach ‘Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation’ and the summative aspects of their Examination Reforms in relation to the National Curriculum Framework. The tension between these two approaches produce a lack of clarity about assessment, or the ‘evaluative rules’, in Bernstein's terminology which had direct washback into the classroom and the curriculum experienced by learners.

As ever, the challenge remains in how to combine the knowledge offered by the individual articles in piecing the jigsaw together, so as to further our understanding of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Without an understanding of the parts and the whole, small changes to one piece of the puzzle will inevitably lead to unexpected changes in another, as we have seen to our cost in the repositioning of the evaluative rules of assessment through high-stakes tests and the washback on pedagogy and curriculum. As we argued in our previous editorial, this supercomplexity is a feature of the educational world we strive to improve.