Forms of knowledge and curriculum coherence

Abstract

This paper examines what is entailed by taking a socio‐epistemic or ‘knowledge‐based’ approach to considerations of curriculum and qualifications. The paper begins by examining the roots of diciplinary difference in the medieval universities and their treatment in contemporary scholarly work; discusses implications for curriculum and qualification differentiation; and shows how social, disciplinary and qualification organisation are aligned in the specialisation of consciousness.

Keywords:

• disciplines
• Trivium
• Quadrivium
• curriculum differentiation
• occupations
• qualification routes

Notes

1. Paper presented to the ESRC Seminar Series – Seminar 2: Epistemology and the Curriculum, June 26–27, 2008, in University of Bath, England.

2. A part of this paper was first written for an unpublished report to the SANTED Project, CEPD.

3. The terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ were not Biglan’s own. They had been used first by Bertrand Russell in 1929, and in the sociology of science, by Storer (1967) and Price (1970) before Biglan.

4. Expressed epistemologically, this means that although an observation can be given two interpretations, the difference between these can always be resolved by reference to a ‘touchstone’, thus forestalling the kind of incommensurability so often found in the ‘soft’ disciplines (Mackenzie 1998, 34–35).

5. Some of these features apply to the Humanities, but many do not. The knowledge structures of the Humanities do not display Bernstein’s ‘verticality’, for example; only the natural and social sciences do.

6. It should be borne in mind that professional fields have many occupational niches at different levels of the division of labour; medicine trains surgeons and nurses, and much in between.

7. How the globally dispersed contemporary disciplinary communities actually ‘work’ as communities has only recently been posed as a puzzle worth examining (Muller 2008a).

8. For purposes of this section, ‘disciplines’ refer to disciplines and disciplinary regions, as distinguished from curricula.

9. ‘Pedagogic discourse can never be identified with any of the discourse it has recontextualised’ (Bernstein 2000, 47).

10. This binary is admittedly rather crude, because it again partly omits the Humanities (see Mackenzie 1998, fn. 18: 46). Posner and Strike (1976) distinguish five major curriculum design drivers: concept related; world related; learning related; enquiry related; and utilisation related. For present purposes, our equivalent of their concept‐ and utilisation‐related distinctions suffice.