Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge and Teachers as Curriculum Makers

Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge and Teachers as “Curriculum Makers” Professor David Lambert University College London Institute of Education

My aims and purposes • Argue for a progressive knowledge-led curriculum • Distinguish the features of the ‘three futures’ heuristic • Focus special significance to an aspect of teachers’ work called ‘curriculum making’ 2

Who are the children we teach? 3

What role does education play … 4

… in preparing children for ‘this day and age’? 5

How does what you teach … 6

… make a distinctive contribution … 7

… to the educated person? 8

And enable them to face the future with confidence and capability 9

1. Acknowledging some contemporary challenges • The digital age o Information at your fingertips o 24/7 news o Computing power: e. g. geospatial technologies • Global threats o Asymmetric warfare and ‘terror’ o Climate change o Unregulated capitalism o Enormous inequalities • Culture shifts o Three minutes (concentration span) o Selfies and celebrity (‘famous for 15 minutes’) o Social media tyranny 10

2. Acknowledging some contemporary ‘solutions’ • Global competitiveness • The ‘global race’ • Metrics • System reform (and ‘innovation’) • ‘Learnification’ • Skills and transversal competences • ‘Building learning power’ (learning to learn) • Dimensions, themes, issues … (not subjects) • Creativity • Personalisation 11

For example, Ken Robinson: Your Text Here http: //www. p 21. org/our-work/resources/for-educators/1007 12

In whose interests is the ‘learnification’ of education? Our ‘Fordist’ models of mass education are not preparing young people adequately. Let us agree with Ken Robinson on that! Let us also agree that the students we meet demand respect for they are born with “extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. ” But maybe respecting students requires more from us than simply acknowledging their human potential 13

Being sceptical of ‘Learning’ (that is, learning as an end rather than a means to an end) Where ‘learning’ is regarded as: • A good thing in itself - and assumed to be value free in this sense. • An essentially scientific or technical process –thus, with correct technique, learning can be ‘accelerated’, as if this were a desirable end in itself. • Paramount. Teaching is subservient to, and led by, the learning. We become embarrassed by teaching, and rather talk about ‘facilitating’ learning. 14

Learning as an ‘end’ rather than a ‘means to an end’ Where ‘learning’ is regarded as: • A good thing in itself - and assumed to be value free in this sense. (It is not. Learning can be trivial, dangerous or wrong) • An essentially scientific or technical process – thus, with correct technique, learning can be ‘accelerated’, as if this were a desirable end in itself. (But understanding aspects of science, history or art can be counterintuitive, and can require sustained, painstaking effort) • Paramount. Teaching is subservient to, and led by, the learning. We become embarrassed by teaching, and rather talk about ‘facilitating’ learning. (A profession that abrogates responsibility in this way may be one that has lost confidence in itself) 15

“Calling time on exam-factory education” Tristram Hunt MP “… we always need to guard against the soft bigotry of low expectations: the worrying trend of play and expression being adequate for working-class pupils, while leaving the tough stuff, the physics and the history, for their better off peers. ” Guardian 25. 4. 15 16

The neo-liberal orthodoxy has “dulled our ability to think for, or beyond, ourselves” [Wadley 2008] (Schools are part of the “Vibrant City”) 17

Young people have a “PEDAGOGIC RIGHT” to acquire the knowledge and the means to: • Think theoretically (in the abstract) • Discern ‘better’ knowledge/arguments • Make good generalisations (Can classrooms provide a “Garden of Peace”? ) 18

“Bringing Knowledge Back In” Main arguments • Schools are special places (they are not ‘everyday places’) • Clear conceptual distinction between curriculum and pedagogy • The curriculum inducts young people into ‘powerful knowledge’ (Michael Young 2008) 19

Powerful knowledge and the school curriculum “… She understood so little of the material world – how water boiled, why a walnut fell from a tree – that she had to take almost everything on trust” Sebastian Faulks’ 2012 novel A Possible Life. Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat” Van Gogh c 1885 20

Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge (PDK) PDK refers to the knowledge children and young people are unlikely to acquire at home or in their workplace PDK is knowledge they will need if they are to become active citizens and workers in the complex modern world, sometimes called a ‘knowledge society’ 21

Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge [PDK] PDK is usually: evidence based abstract and theoretical (conceptual) part of a system of thought dynamic, evolving, changing – but reliable testable and open to challenge sometimes counter-intuitive exists outside the direct experience of the teacher and the learner • Discipline based (in domains that are not arbitrary or transient) • • PDK enables people (and societies) to ‘think the unthinkable’ and the ‘yet-to-be-thought’ (after Bernstein 2000) 22

Back to a fundamental question What is [your subject] for? My subject is geography It is a pedagogic right for all young people to have access to geographical knowledge, and to encounter the world as an object of disciplined thought. This expresses the for young people to engage with: • The world beyond their experience • Concepts and theories (‘systematicity’) • Disciplined thought (‘thinking geographically’) 23

Curriculum Futures F 1 subject delivery – of knowledge for its own sake; traditional subjects: under-socialised knowledge F 2 skills and ‘learning to learn’ – knowledge is constructed: over-socialised knowledge; subject divisions are artificial. Themes. Experiential. F 3 subjects are not given (as in F 1), but not arbitrary (as in F 2) – knowledge development led by ‘. . . The epistemic rules of specialist communities’ to provide ways to understand the world and take pupils beyond their everyday experience. (Young and Muller 2010; Young and Lambert 2014) 24

Towards the Future 3 Curriculum • Knowledge-led curriculum (incorporating ‘skills’ and ‘competence’) • Based on ‘powerful (disciplinary) knowledge’ (‘epistemic ascent’) • Progressive – motivated by social justice (‘pedagogic rights’) • Distinguishes curriculum from pedagogy (the what and the how) • Pedagogic selections need to be fit for purpose (the what comes before the how) 25

Some key ‘curriculum’ questions and challenges • Is the distinction between the ‘everyday’ and ‘disciplinary’ knowledge clear-cut across subjects? • Who ‘owns’ powerful knowledge (PDK)? • Can the state legislate: ie can PDK be codified into national standards? • What are the roles/responsibilities of teachers in bringing an F 3 curriculum into fruition? 26

Does this take the learner beyond what they already know ? In the context of the discipline of geography Teacher Choices Underpinned by Key Concepts Which learning activity ? Student Experiences School Geography Thinking Geographically Curriculum Making in Geography 27

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