Session Information
03 SES 04 B, Kindergarten and Primary Education Curriculum
Paper Session
Contribution
In 2004 a broad Educational Reform of the Greek-Cypriot public education was launched, culminating in the development of new curriculum texts for all sectors and subject-areas published in 2010 and evaluated in 2014. Drawing upon curriculum theory and history as well as sociological approaches to curricula, this study explores how distinct subject-areas were present in this process of the development and evaluation of official curricula and argues that disciplinary boundaries between subject-areas were a key rationality of “structuring” and “administering/managing” curriculum change. More particularly, using the Bernsteinian concept of (strong and weak) “classification” in the official and pedagogical recontextualisation fields, the argument is formed drawing upon four cases-contexts explored as interconnected: the first is the official primary education curricular texts and timetables that were published in 2010; the second is the process of the development of these official texts by subject-area committees with members of expertise in content, education, didactics or a combination of the above, including academics, teachers and MoEC technocrats; the third is the professional development process through which the MoEC reached teachers and pursued the implementation of these new curricula between 2010-2013; finally, the fourth case-context looks at the evaluation of these curricula by a central committee and anonymous reviewers in 2013-2014 as well as the responses of the first subject-area committees to this evaluation when it was published in 2014.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique, (2nd edition).Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Bernstein, B. (1999). Vertical and horizontal discourse: An essay. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2), 157-173. Kirk, D. & MacDonald, D. (2001). Teacher voice and ownership of curriculum change, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 33 (5), 551-567. Moore, R. & Maton, K. (2001). Founding the sociology of knowledge: Basil Bernstein, intellectual fields and the epistemic device. In Morais, A., Neves, I., Davies, B. & Daniels, H. (Eds), Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The contribution of Basil Bernstein to research. New York: Peter Lang.
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