Some subjects appear to be awash with books on how to teach them and writing on what constitutes a ‘good’ curriculum in terms of that subject. Wise subject leaders who are engaged in curriculum design would of course do well to read such material to help aid their thinking, as would senior leaders who are responsible for quality assurance.
But what if little or nothing appears to have been written about the teaching of or curriculum thinking in relation to a particular subject? Where does a subject leader go for inspiration? How do they know if their curriculum is any ‘good’ or how it could be improved? How might senior leaders attempt to quality assure that curriculum?
The answer is that the curriculum thinking must be done from scratch. Before any work can be started the parties involved need first to educate themselves in the underlying principles and concepts of curriculum theory. These generic principles then need to be tentatively applied to the subject. There is no other way. If it doesn’t exist, and you need it, you need to create it!
Once created, this thinking can then be shared with others in the field to be validated, developed and challenged. This is how the field will develop over time.
Few tools exist to support the novice curriculum theorist though. The terminology can be hard going and the examples given often are insufficient to develop understanding, frequently because none of them relate to the subject the novice is familiar with! In the same way as a student struggles to generalise when presented with a single example, the novice curriculum theorist can also struggle if the examples given to illustrate theoretical terms are sparse or unfamiliar.
Much of the writing and thinking I have encountered in relation to curriculum theory relates to History for example, but it took me over a year to make any sense whatsoever of the idea of ‘second-order concepts’ as I could not understand the History context, and I had found no other examples! I just didn’t get it, and as such I wasn’t able to generalise and apply in a new subject context.
So, I’m on a mission to uncover and invent approaches that can support subject specialists to better understand and be able to apply generic curriculum theory to their own subject curriculum thinking. This is obviously fraught from the outset, as all subjects are of course distinct and it would be false to think that every generic concept could be applied to every subject. But if you’ve got nothing to go on, you need to start by trying things on to see if they fit. I have found this beneficial in developing my own thinking thus far.
It’s absolutely not about trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It is entirely about trying to expand and stretch ones own thinking to develop new and useful understanding that can support successful curriculum design.
Visual Tools
Visuals can be helpful for liberating thinking from the limitations of words. They can also help to develop understanding of conceptual boundaries and provide a medium through which to discuss examples, non-examples and change.
Ruth Ashbee (2021) does an excellent job of explaining Basil Bernstein’s ‘fields’ of production, recontextualisation and reproduction in her exceptionally helpful book, ‘Curriculum - Theory, Culture and the Subject Specialisms’.
‘The field of production, where new knowledge is made’ (universities, industry, expert/professional practice etc)
‘The field of recontextualisation, where knowledge from the field of production is selected, processed, and prepared, ready for teaching’ (DfE, publishers, textbook authors, awarding bodies etc)
‘The field of reproduction, where students are taught selected knowledge as their foundation in the disciplines’ (schools, homeschooling, colleges etc)
Ashbee explains,
“Awareness of the nature and extent of the recontextualisation from the field of production to field of reproduction is key for effective curriculum discussions. Such awareness helps to guard against mistaken thinking in curriculum work manifesting as either under-recontextualisation (the thinking is too close to the discipline to make sense or be appropriate for schoolchildren) or over-recontextualisation (too much of the knowledge or nature of the discipline is lost).”
So, should you wish to engage in attempts to apply some of the theory from Bernstein and Ashbee to your subject, you might wish to consider some thinking about what I have called ‘subject symmetry’.
This is a visual tool, the field of production is represented with one circle and the field of reproduction is represented with another.
Do we want to achieve symmetry? Will there be an exact match between the discipline and the school subject? Well, no, as Ashbee rightly notes, under-recontextualisation is undesirable. You are not going to have your science students carrying out medical procedures or operations in the classroom! Even your Year 13 mathematicians will not scratch the surface of some topics or reach anywhere near the depths possible in the entire domain of mathematics.
But it is clear that little recognisable relationship between the field of production and reproduction could be sign a curriculum that would benefit from further development.
Using a ‘subject symmetry’ approach can help to promote useful discussion as to the type and degree of recontextualisation that is currently evident. This can help thinkers to explore the relationship in terms of breadth and depth. What is possible, desirable and undesirable can be conceived.
Christine Counsell (2018) explains, “each school subject stands in a slightly different temporal relationship to its real-world cognate of scholarly and professional knowledge production”. And it is not just the differences between the fields of production and reproduction that Counsell is alluding to here, but her emphasis is more on how the degree of difference (or symmetry) will vary between the subjects. It could be that using subject symmetry visuals might help colleagues from different disciplines to conceive in new ways how various different subjects (other than their own) might be similar or different to their fields of production, and then move on to consider why and what is most desirable.
The concept and visuals of symmetry (or absence of it) can help us to think about breadth and depth of the current curriculum offering and to help gain a richer understanding of the school subject.
Discussions and thinking can occur around the extent to which the current curriculum might be broadened to take more from the field of production, and how it might be deepened to cover content in a more complex or more authentic manner.
Analogy
A second approach that could be useful is removing the theoretical curriculum concept away from school subjects altogether and inserting a different (and maybe more familiar) context to help promote understanding.
I like to think about restaurants when thinking about Bernstein, recontextualisation and subject symmetry. This analogy translates easily and usefully in my own mind - the field of production is the original home cooking and historic traditions of a cuisine found in the country of origin. Imagine for example the traditional food and customs of Japanese cuisine.
No UK restaurant experience (the field of reproduction) is likely to exactly replicate the experience of traditional dining in a Japanese household for a myriad of reasons. This may not even be desirable. Yet in trying to design or determine the quality of a such a restaurant, research about and reference to the traditional cuisine is useful. It would clearly be beneficial to have visited Japan, but consulting some Japanese nationals would also be useful, as would visiting other Japanese restaurants and reading Japanese cookbooks. If looking to improve a Japanese restaurant, you would obviously need to visit it and try the food to start with, and it would certainly seem valid to compare the existing offering to the traditional cuisine when seeking aspects that could be improved.
What if you considered Italian restaurants. They cannot perfectly replicate an authentic evening supper prepared for decades in the households of rural Tuscany or traditional street food from the bustle of Naples. But what knowledge, actions, meetings, visits, and reading would be required to compare, assess and/or improve the offerings of Pizza Hut, Bella Italia, ASK, or Eataly, etc?
It now becomes fairly evident what the curriculum designer or quality assurer must think about to ensure quality. The importance of subject knowledge (a subject ‘native’ and subject ‘nationals’), the importance of curriculum conversations both within schools and across them (visiting, tasting), the importance of subject reading (the ‘cookbooks’).
Share!
So, I shall continue to try to create and share the visuals, analogies and examples that I use to help me make sense of abstract curriculum theory and apply it to subjects I teach and lead. And I hope to inspire you to do the same too. By increasing the tools and conceptions of theoretical concepts, and increasing the number of examples available, we can work to improve understanding of theory across the profession and support those with the greatest need to generate new thinking.
References
Ashbee, R. (2021) ‘Curriculum - Theory, Culture and the Subject Specialisms’.
Counsell, C. (2018) ‘Taking Curriculum Seriously’ in Impact https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/taking-curriculum-seriously/
Note
Of course it is not necessarily easy to define the domain itself. Of course showing this as a single and sold black circle indicates it is known and complete and the boundary is known. This might not of course be the case - it is more likely to be some cloudy ghostly character who is hard to define and constantly changing. But hey, this is a representation model to support thinking, it is a tool, a model, it is not necessarily a true picture of reality. Nothing is perfect!
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