A pedagogy of conceptual progression and the case for academic knowledge
Abstract
The potential for academic knowledge to ‘interrupt’ inter‐generational reproduction in education is located in the structural contradictions that shape knowledge and democracy. Since the late 1990s research in the sociology of education, which theorises curriculum knowledge using the ideas of Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein, suggests that academic knowledge, far from being the domain of conservative forces, contains the means by which the working‐class and marginalised groups may overcome class determinism. The paper argues for a pedagogy of conceptual progression to assist students across the ‘interruption’ or ‘discursive gap’ into academic knowledge. Such a pedagogy need not be confined to its central purpose—that of teaching abstract ideas drawn from their disciplinary systems of meaning and classified for teaching as academic subjects. It can also be the means to mediate the relationship between the context‐dependent knowledge of students’ experience and the context‐independent knowledge of the academic subject. This pedagogy might be the way to maintain the motivational intention of constructivism and ‘relevance’ approaches that emphasise students’ experience. However, it would use experience to illustrate the abstract ideas acquired in academic subjects, not serve as the source of knowledge itself, nor the knowledge focus.
Number of times cited: 9
- Graham McPhail, Curriculum integration in the senior secondary school: a case study in a national assessment context, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 50, 1, (56), (2018).
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- Elizabeth Rata, Knowledge and teaching, British Educational Research Journal, 43, 5, (1003-1017), (2017).
- Graham J. McPhail, Powerful knowledge: insights from music's case, The Curriculum Journal, 28, 4, (524), (2017).
- Graham J. McPhail, Does Knowledge Matter? Disciplinary Identities and Students’ Readiness for University, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 52, 1, (57), (2017).
- Parlo Singh, Pedagogic governance: theorising with/after Bernstein, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38, 2, (144), (2017).
- Graham McPhail and Elizabeth Rata, Comparing Curriculum Types: ‘Powerful Knowledge’ and ‘21st Century Learning’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 51, 1, (53), (2016).
- Graham J. McPhail, From aspirations to practice: curriculum challenges for a new ‘twenty-first-century’ secondary school, The Curriculum Journal, 27, 4, (518), (2016).
- Elizabeth Rata and Anita Taylor, Knowledge Equivalence Discourse in New Zealand Secondary School Science, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 50, 2, (223), (2015).
