After the knowledge turn? Politics and pedagogy

This special issue of the Curriculum Journal brings together a number of scholars who have contributed to the development of a perspective that has come to be known as social realism (c.f. Barrett & Rata, 2014; Barrett, Hoadley, & Morgan, 2017; Maton & Moore, 2010). Social realism developed initially out of a concern shared among a group of sociologists of education about the general neglect of knowledge in educational research. They attributed this neglect to a widespread and longstanding impulse to reduce knowledge to social relations of power and the often incommensurate standpoints of different groups of knowers. As a result, the organizing principles of knowledge, its production and change constituted a significant ‘blind spot’ for the field (Moore & Muller, 1999; Young, 2000; Moore & Maton, 2001). Following on from Basil Bernstein’s efforts to theorize knowledge and knowledge-producing fields, social realism endeavoured to bring these matters to the front and centre of the sociology of education.

From the early 2000s there were a number of significant publications focused on the structuring of knowledge, including ‘Bringing Knowledge Back In’ (Young, 2007a), ‘For Knowledge’ (Moore, 2000), Reclaiming Knowledge (Muller 2000), and ‘Founding the Sociology of Knowledge’ (Moore & Maton, 2001). Conversations and on-going work amongst these scholars and others led to the First International Social Realism Symposium held at Homerton College in Cambridge in 2008. It brought together a broad grouping of researchers engaging in work around knowledge and education. Second (2013) and Third (2015) International Social Realism Symposia were held at Cambridge and have continued on as the Cambridge Symposia on Knowledge in Education, the new title intended to be more inclusive and to reflect a broadening focus on matters of curriculum, pedagogy and policy by researchers across a variety of backgrounds. A number of the articles in this Special Edition came out of the Fourth Cambridge Symposium on Knowledge in Education held in 2017 (the Fifth will be held in July 2019).

Theoretically, the body of work that has developed in the previous 20 odd years by scholars in this loose grouping has sought to connect Bernstein to philosophies including critical realism (Moore, 2013; Wheelahan, 2010) and critical rationalism (Maton, 2014). It has also engaged with the foundational work of theorists such as Durkheim, Cassirir, Popper and Vygotsky, to name but a few. More recently the work has begun to generate its own conceptual language, most prominently perhaps in the coining of the distinction between ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘knowledge of the powerful’ (Young, 2007b). This distinction, and particularly the idea of powerful knowledge, saw social realist ideas enter the arenas of policy making (Beck, 2013) and of pedagogy (Young & Lambert, 2014).

‘Powerful knowledge’ is specialised knowledge attained through formal education, and it is powerful because of its ‘generality, coherence and explanatory power, and above all, its capacity to extend horizons’ (Muller & Young, this issue). ‘Knowledge of the powerful’ is focused on the use or origins, and the interests of those originators or users of this powerful knowledge (Muller & Young, this issue). The distinction captures the impetus behind the social realist intention: understanding the constitution of more powerful forms of knowledge and how these relate to curriculum knowledge; and establishing the means to broaden access to powerful knowledge (and not simply critique or dismiss it as being the preserve of the elite). The distinction has generated a series of critiques and re-articulations over the last 10 years culminating (for the moment at least) in the piece in this issue by Muller and Young where the authors work to place powerful knowledge on a ‘firmer footing’ conceptually.

The concepts of powerful knowledge/knowledge of the powerful have been important in marking out a different kind of politics of knowledge; from one rooted in the time of the new sociology of education in Britain in the 1970s where knowledge was regarded as representing the interests of those with power (knowledge of the powerful), to one focused on the positive, generative ‘powers’ of specialised knowledge and what it bestows on its acquirer (powerful knowledge). The debates that currently are playing out in relation to issues of decolonizing the curriculum circle around this distinction in the consideration of power and knowledge. But what powerful knowledge has also established is a kind of ‘curriculum ideal’ for many engaging in, or critiquing, a ‘knowledge turn’.

A curriculum ideal

‘Social realists’ are not of apiece (as the contributions to this Special Issue suggest), nor do they have a monopoly on privileging knowledge in considerations of curriculum. What is distinctive about their take then? There are a number of ways of answering this question, but one is that in a normative sense, they hold, either implicitly or explicitly, a kind of curriculum ideal. This ideal speaks to both politics and power, and to pedagogy, the sub-title of this Special Issue. The ideal is captured in one account by Young and Muller’s ‘3 Futures’ (Young & Muller, 2010). In this account the authors distinguish between three curriculum models they term ‘Future 1’, ‘Future 2’, and ‘Future 3’. The first is a ‘traditional’ model that treats knowledge and disciplinary boundaries as fixed, given and asocial. Its concern is with the conservation of national identity in the curriculum, drawing on canonical texts. It is characterized as ‘undersocialised’ by foregrounding the knowledge to be reproduced across generations and backgrounding the contemporary generation and their particular context.

Future 2 is conceived as an ostensibly progressive response to the conservatism of Future 1. It is an ‘over-socialized’ curriculum model that views disciplinary boundaries as artificial and arbitrary, and knowledge as socially constructed. In its progressive sense, the Future 2 model seeks to account for students’ interests and experiences, and their self-realization. Its more instrumental incarnation views knowledge as preparing them for future employment; competence or outcomes-based approaches with the promise of economic participation.

Young and Muller offer a social realist alternative to Future 1 and Future 2. Their Future 3 recognises that specialist knowledge is important and thus school subjects are crucial, but that what counts as ‘powerful knowledge’ must change over time as ‘specialist knowledge grows apace’ (Young & Muller, 2010b, p. 21), and disciplines ‘morph and adapt’ (Young & Muller, 2010b, p. 20) as new problems emerge both within disciplinary communities and society at large. Future 3 is a curriculum based on instruction in epistemically structured concepts and their relationships with one another in a manner that differs from students’ everyday experiences. And it is a curriculum that works towards the promotion of equal epistemological access to powerful knowledge. In doing so, powerful knowledge is understood as an educational good to which all should have access. This view stands in contrast to those who have advocated a non- or anti-academic curriculum in order to ‘give voice’ to marginalized learners. When such curricula have been implemented in practice, the educational consequences have often been deleterious, not least for students themselves.

In recent trends in curriculum policy, there are at least three different challenges to this Future 3 curriculum ideal, which is yet to find empirical instantiation. One is the on-going shift towards Future 2 competencies and outcomes-based curriculum frameworks. In developing countries these have a particular appeal in that they are often coupled with learner-centred reforms. These curriculum frameworks represent a break with traditional forms and hold out the promise of an emancipatory ideal for learners on the one hand, with distinct and definite sets of skills that can be accumulated for a guaranteed participation in the economy on the other. Future 2 is purveyed as a progressive emancipatory social project disguising more neoliberal intentions (Allais, 2014). A second trend is towards neo-conservative knowledge-based approaches, such as recent UK curriculum reforms, that treat curriculum as a given body of knowledge that is objective and a-historic. This is the Future 1 curriculum deriving its epistemic authority from inherited tradition and the affirmation of a supposed unified national culture.

A third trend arguably lies somewhere between a competency approach and a knowledge-based one – that of standards-based curriculum reforms. Although often retaining an emphasis on subjects, and specifying content, standards-based reforms have placed a similar emphasis on measureable skills and content in relation to their direct usefulness to Future 2 curricula. Rather than students being exposed to knowledge rich curriculum that teaches ‘how to infer meaning from a specific proposition in the context of the wider relationship between propositions [which] is a central element of knowledge acquisition’ (Hordern et al., this volume), the emphasis falls to lock-step teaching of isolated contents and propositions and an emphasis on testing.

The articles collected in this Special Issue reflect on a number of these issues and concerns – both reflecting the ideal as well as critiquing it and seeking greater conceptual definition to it. One critical issue concerns the fact that within curriculum there are always political actors involved, and this necessarily impacts on any attempt to think about future curricula. The first paper by Morgan, Hordern and Hoadley considers the relationship between politics and the re-contextualization of curricular knowledge, using Young and Muller’s heuristic Futures 1, 2 and 3 scenarios of education. They argue that political interests have led to a situation where important conceptual differences between knowledge as described by Young and Muller in their Future 1 and Future 3 scenarios are unacknowledged: as is the fact that the Future 3 scenario arises from a critique, rather than a rejection, of Future 2.

The paper is a reminder of the intimate connection between politics and knowledge in considerations of curriculum, and points to questions of knowledge and an emancipatory political orientation. These are important questions for these authors, especially in a context when politics - of the left and the right, in America and Europe - are unmoored from established post-war meanings and invidious forms of nationalism are on the rise. The article identifies schisms within the broad social realist church and points out that there are politics in the knowledge turn. They suggest considering the political orientations behind certain curriculum positions and promote critical engagement with different futures (for example Future 2) rather than flat opposition or full embracing.

The knowledge turn and social context

Foreshadowing some of the issues raised in this Special Edition’s final article by Muller and Young, Carol Bertram’s contribution engages with the question of ‘What is powerful knowledge in school history?’ Through an analysis of secondary school history curriculum documents from South Africa and Rwanda, Bertram concludes that a conception of powerful knowledge in school history must be understood as including not just substantive (knowledge of what happened when and where and of the concepts that can support students’ understanding here) and procedural (an understanding of how disciplinary knowledge is generated in history) knowledge, but also the needs of society (Biesta’s notion of ‘socialisation’) and the individual (Biesta’s notion of ‘subjectification’). In short, both disciplinary structure and social aims and context are likely to influence any history curriculum; the latter have been under-accounted for in most social realist analyses.

In their contribution, Yael Shalem and Stephanie Allais critically examine competing claims about the relationship between knowledge, curriculum and social justice. Some educational researchers emphasize that social justice is best promoted through a curriculum underpinned by the epistemically structured, generalizable, ‘powerful’ knowledge of the disciplines. Others claim that social justice is best promoted when students are made critically aware of the socially situated nature of knowledge claims and of the justifications offered for them. Shalem and Allais argue that most of those engaged in debates about knowledge, curriculum and social justice are currently drawn to one or the other of these poles. Such polarity is problematic as it renders a sense of consensus and progress quite difficult, if not impossible.

In exploring whether the debate might be more resolvable – or at least less dichotomized – in practice than it appears to be in principle, Shalem and Allais consider the relationship between knowledge production and curriculum making across three disciplines – economics, education, and history – as they transverse in different ways the polarity that characterizes the debate. Whereas economics is demonstrated to have shifted towards the first pole and education towards the second, history does not align directly with one or the other. This is because both a set of knowledge criteria that strive to guarantee some degree of objectivity, and a recognition of diverse social perspectives, play a role in the production of knowledge and the construction of curriculum in the field. Thus, while the debate over the relationship between knowledge, curriculum and social justice might not be resolvable in principle, the case of history provides one example of how a discipline based in generating objective knowledge need not be dismissive of the social context and standpoint from which this knowledge has been produced. Indeed, the recognition of social context and the transparency it affords might ultimately serve to strengthen the discipline and sharpen the debate.

Knowledge, subjects and pedagogy: at the micro level

Rata, McPhail and Barrett open up what they regard as some of the possibilities for thinking through pedagogy within a social realist frame, in their terms, looking towards an ‘engaging realist pedagogy’. A more theorized understanding of pedagogy, where characterizations are proactive rather than reactive, opens up possibilities for explicitly teaching teachers and student teachers pedagogic forms that take account of conceptual progression and support epistemic ascent. The paper is suggestive of a need for more research of the type pioneered by Ana Morais and her colleagues at the University of Lisbon – experimental studies of pedagogic modalities designed specifically to benefit certain social groups in particular subjects.

An important tenet of social realist approaches to knowledge is that there is a Durkheimian differentiation between forms of knowledge used in everyday personal life, and the formal public knowledge of education. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert’s paper considers how experience may also be differentiated. Drawing on Kantian aesthetics, she argues that there is a difference between direct personal experience/response, and experience which is mediated through an aesthetic, interpretative engagement with the text. An aesthetic approach to literature needs both the text to be central, and an approach to reading which cannot be reduced to either direct personal response, or to analysis of literary or linguistic techniques. Through charting major cultural and policy shifts, and using empirical examples from GCSE examination questions, she illustrates how the re-contextualization of literature suggests that the official understanding of literature has come to marginalize the text and encourage aesthetically reductive pedagogic approaches. The final, more philosophical, section of her paper considers the broader contribution aesthetics can make to questions of understanding in relation to powerful knowledge.

Finally, Muller and Young’s contribution re-visits their earlier account of powerful knowledge in light of certain criticisms, the most significant of which suggests that their argument pays too little heed to social and political forces in which knowledge arguments are concretized in policy and practice. The Bernsteinian recontextualisation of academic theory into social practice inevitably entails some changes, possibly distortions, in the ideas; for a greater range of interested actors are involved. Their paper suggests that the changes need not necessarily be intellectually corrosive: much seems to depend on how both power and knowledge are conceptualised and to what extent powerful knowledge remains true to its ‘sociological justification’ or becomes a tool for those in positions of power.

Their article considers how Marx and the major sociologists who worked in his wake, Durkheim, Manheim, Weber, Parsons, Lukes and Castells, have conceptualized power. Central to different views is Spinoza’s distinction between ‘power to’ (potentia) and ‘power over’ (potestas): does power always involve domination by some form of force or coercion? Where Lukes sees the two as different, Castells blurs the distinction in that any power to do anything necessarily involves exerting power over someone. But, they argue that the potential of powerful knowledge has a transformative power in a socio-epistemic sense: properly understood, it is conducive to helping pupils’ thought enter discursive contexts where they can make new connections, gain new insights, and generate new ideas.

Important conceptual clearing is achieved in Muller and Young’s paper. They close with an opening: how can powerful knowledge best articulate with the lived world of meanings of all learners, making it accessible without excluding, boring or alienating them. It is this question of epistemological access (Morrow, 1989) that is implicit in most of the papers in this collection, and one that continues to animate the work in the broad social realist group.

Ursula Hoadley
University of Cape Town, South Africa
[email protected]

Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert
Independent scholar

Brian Barrett
State University of New York College at Cortland

John Morgan
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.