Knowledge and the
Geography Curriculum
A Social Realist Approach
Benjamin Major
The Knowledge Turn?
“The National Curriculum should set out
clearly the core knowledge and understanding
that all children should be expected to acquire
in the course of their schooling. It must
embody their cultural and scientific
inheritance, the best that our past and present
generations have to pass on to the next”
(Department for Education, 2010: 41)
The Ethical Turn
Alex Standish: “The conclusion drawn here is that
geography’s ethical turn with a focus on global perspectives
itself serves to directly undermine the moral case for
geography. It does this through its retreat from geography as
an objective body of knowledge and seeker of truth and its
replacement with personal geographies and truths. The
outcome is to deny students the geographical knowledge and
skills they need to make sense of the world around them.”
(Standish, 2009: 4)
A Balanced Curriculum
An Unbalanced Curriculum
“At the present time [1997], according to Marsden, the
curriculum is out of balance again. As a result of the
dominant debates and conflicts between the New Right and
the progressive educational movement, links with academic
geography had been neglected… In fact, because New
Labour’s priorities are not subject-based, the danger is that
the debates will gravitate even more strongly to this area,
leaving subject content out of the action.”
(Rawling, 2001: 143)
Powerful Knowledge
“Knowledge of the powerful is defined by who gets the
knowledge in a society… Powerful knowledge refers to what
the knowledge can do or what intellectual power it gives to
those who have access to it. Powerful knowledge provides
more reliable explanations and new ways of thinking about
the world and acquiring it can provide learners with a
language for engaging in political, moral, and other kinds of
debates.”
(Young, 2008: 14)
The Pedagogic Device
“Pedagogic discourse is constructed by a recontextualising
principle which selectively appropriates, relocates and
relates other discourses to constitute its own order.”
(Bernstein, 2000: 33)
Knowledge Structures
Horizontal knowledge structures: “a series of specialised
languages, each with its own specialised modes of
interrogation and specialised criteria… with noncomparable principles of description based on different,
often opposed, assumptions ” (Bernstein, 1996: 172-3)
Hierarchical knowledge structures: “an explicit,
coherent, systematically principled and hierarchical
organisation of knowledge, which develops through the
integration of knowledge at lower levels and across an
expanding range of phenomena.” (Bernstein, 1996: 172-3)
The Epistemic Device
The epistemic relation (ER) generates a knowledge
structure – the relation between a knowledge claim and its
object of study (this is a non-arbitrary, necessary relation
intrinsic to the knowledge itself).
The social relation (SR) generates a knower structure –
the relation between the knowledge claim and the subject
or knower (this is an arbitrary relation based on power
relations and contextual contingencies).
The Challenge
The challenge is to view curriculum knowledge both as
object and product (derived from a particular knowledge
structure and object of study), and as subjective practice
(the recontextualisation of disciplinary knowledge into a
curriculum, informed by social interests and relations).
Research Questions
How has the balance between the social, educational and
subject components of the geography curriculum shifted since
the arrival of the Geography National Curriculum and how will
the new curriculum review once more effect this balance?
What underlying causes and mechanisms have brought and
are bringing these changes about?
Research Questions
What changes have occurred in the ways that knowledge in
the geography curriculum has been classified and
legitimated?
What recontextualising rules are at work in geography
curriculum development? What internal, necessary
constraints and enablements are imposed on the curriculum
by the structure of the knowledge and its object of study?
What external, contingent factors relating to context and
social relations in the field also shape this curriculum?
Research Design
Initial use of Systematic Review for general overview and to
source key curriculum documentation
Interviews with those who have been directly involved with
shaping the national geography curriculum.
Analysis of these key documents and interviews using Critical
Discourse Analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis
“Critical Discourse Analysis starts from the perception of
discourse (language but also other forms of semiosis, such as
visual images) as an element of social practices, which
constitutes other elements as well as being shaped by them.
Social questions are therefore in part questions about
discourse – for instance, the question of power in social class,
gender and race relations is partly a question of discourse.”
(Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999: vii)
Critical Discourse Analysis
“CDA is particularly appropriate for critical policy analysis
because it allows a detailed investigation of the relationship
of language to other social processes, and of how language
works within power relations. CDA provides a framework for
a systematic analysis – researchers can go beyond speculation
and demonstrate how policy texts work.”
(Taylor, 2004: 436)
Significance of the Research
“… we would suggest that the specific pressures placed on
geographical education researchers in the UK have tended to
lead to “problem-solving” approaches to research. There is a
focus on providing knowledge “useful” to teachers in schools.
The prospects for a renewal of debate about the aims and
purposes of geographical education, based on an engagement
with a wider set of theoretical resources, seems remote.”
(Morgan and Firth, 2010: 90)
Any questions?
Benjamin Major
bmajor@ioe.ac.uk
http://ioe-ac.academia.edu/BenjaminMajor