Session Information
23 SES 06A, The Changing Forms of Knowledge in Contemporary Curriculum Reconfigurations (part 2)
Symposium continued from 23 SES 5A Joint session with nw 13
Time:
2008-09-11
10:30-12:00
Room:
B1 116
Chair:
Lyn Yates
Contribution
I will begin with a brief schematic overview of the historical rifts in the knowledge landscape that have left enduring cleavages between the arts and the sciences, theoretical and practical knowledge. I will suggest that knowledge fields consequently differ in fundamental ways, and that these ways create specific possibilities and limits for curricular and pedagogical form. I will distinguish between knowledges that progress – that is, develop as abstract chains of condensed general knowledge) what Michael Young calls ‘powerful knowledge’), and knowledges that accumulate – that is, develop through segmental accretion. I propose that curricula differ crucially as to whether they differentiate between these two forms of knowledge, or whether they don’t.
Globalisation poses a paradoxical dual requirement to both the labour market and the curriculum: it needs both (relatively few) specialists – to drive innovation and the specialised professions; and (relatively many) generalists – to staff the burgeoning service sector. Curriculum policy consequently vacillates towards the specialising or the generic pole. A common compromise is to espouse a generic curriculum (a ‘curriculum for all’) but to embed within it tracks that allow for specialisation. In this way lip service can be paid to popular demands for equality and equity while servicing the more elite needs of a global economy and polity.
South Africa enters this fraught field of curricular contest and compromise in a particular way. Prior to 1994, we had a system that differentiated between academic and vocational along racial lines, producing a white elite and a mixed, largely black, mass of learners with strictly capped educational prospects. Consequently, on the advent of democracy in 1994, all forms of differentiation became politically suspect. The democratic hope was then, and remains now, a relatively pure aspiration for attainable equality and democracy through, inter alia, the education system, an aspiration as yet unleavened by the incremental disappointments and disillusionments of ‘normal’ capitalist democracy (although that is changing). The curricular policy makers charged with realising this hope were thus inclined to pursue a radical de-differentiated model of curriculum in the first round of curriculum policy formulation of the new order.
In this paper I will examine three particular instances of de-differentiated curriculum policy, and I will examine some consequences for knowledge and learning:
• the case of ‘Curriculum 2005’, a grades 1 to 12 national school curriculum;
• the case of the National Qualifications Framework;
• the case of the ‘new comprehensive universities’, formed by merging former universities with former technikons (technical college/university hybrids).
I will conclude by reflecting on the possibilities and limits of curricular differentiation and de-differentiation especially with regard to knowledge.
References
...
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.