Curriculum Dilemmas

This post is based on a Q and A webinar which I did with Niall Alcock for the We Are In Beta Secondary Curriculum Thinkers Community in April 2021. I have put some more information about this community at the end (with the option of a free trial). This was the second of two webinars. A blog post based on the first can be found here. The text below is not an exact transcript of what I said, but is written up from my notes. It was aimed primarily at my fellow senior curriculum leaders, but I would imagine subject leaders might get something from it too. This post is long for a blog, because the webinar lasted an hour or so, but I have listed the dilemmas I included as links at the beginning, so you can skip to the section you are most interested in.

Contents

1. What do we mean by curriculum dilemmas and why is it important to talk about them?
2. Knowledge versus skills
3. Substantive knowledge versus disciplinary knowledge
4. Teaching the canon versus representing diversity
5. Making the curriculum coherent
6. Cultural literacy versus powerful knowledge
7. Breadth versus depth
8. Navigating the dilemmas

What do we mean by curriculum dilemmas and why is it important to talk about them?

When I first started to read about curriculum theory, it felt as if the way to develop a better curriculum would simply reveal itself to me as I learned more. In reality, however, I discovered an endless spiral of debate, which became more challenging with my growing knowledge, rather than less. This is because planning a curriculum is a complex problem, which people interpret in different ways and which can never be fully solved. In this scenario it is easy to succumb to indecision or, alternatively, to resort to dogmatism and dismiss those who disagree as stupid or ill-intentioned. We see far too much of the latter on Twitter.

I think it is important to engage with the debate, being willing to adopt firm positions, but to apply the principle of charity to those who differ. To assist with this goal I attempt below to summarise important arguments about six common areas of disagreement, hoping to generate light rather than heat. I cannot promise the answers, but with any luck I can at least identify fruitful questions. I must stress that I do not claim to have reached a final position on these issues, and sometimes it feels like I change my mind on a weekly basis.

School leaders need to know about these dilemmas because they cannot be avoided in curriculum planning. Since leaders must inevitably make bets, I would much prefer them to be conscious bets, based on a grasp of the debate, as opposed to stumbling in the dark, with an increased risk of contradictory decisions. Knowledge, albeit incomplete, is better than ignorance.

Knowledge versus skills

This is one dilemma which I believe is a false one. Knowledge and skills are not in opposition to one another, but go hand in hand. I am not even convinced that there is clear blue water between them.

First it is worth tackling the myth that a knowledge-rich curriculum is somehow anti-skill. As far as I am concerned, this could not be further from the truth. Of course we want students to develop skills. In fact I think that we should map them out meticulously and pay very careful attention to how we teach them, rather than leaving it to chance. I would argue that the best way to do so is through a knowledge-rich curriculum, as Jon Hutchinson explained far better than I could in a classic blog post from a few years ago.

In my experience, skills are frequently mentioned but rarely defined clearly in schools, and it would help to be more precise about what we mean by them. I would identify at least three different shades of meaning in common usage in schools.

The first type of skill is a specific procedure, with a commonly accepted technique and aim, such as carrying out a rugby tackle in PE, using pencil shading in Art to portray light and darkness, or cooking a particular recipe in Food Tech. These skills often involve carrying out physical actions and I would tend to refer to them as procedural knowledge. They are best taught explicitly and, as Michael Fordham explains here, when you teach them you have to do so using declarative knowledge.

The second type of skill I would identify is commonly labelled as transferable, although I think that is a somewhat misleading term, because cognitive scientists question the extent to which they transfer (Willingham, 2009). They tend to be subject-specific rather than cross-curricular, and even the subject may be too generic a field.

A commonly used example is critical thinking, within which we might include the ability to question claims, test them against evidence, compare them against alternative arguments, and come to an informed conclusion. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want students to learn how to do this. I certainly do. The question is how.

If I want students to do this in a history essay I need to teach them a lot of detail about the topic to enable them to do it effectively. I can’t just isolate the skill and teach that. When they move to another topic they might well retain some of the techniques and be able to transfer them, but they will still need to build deep knowledge of the new topic. If they forget the content, the ability to perform the skill in that context disappears too.

My colleagues in the Science Department will also want students to become critical thinkers, but they will mean something a bit different by it. You don’t think critically about scientific findings in quite the same way as you think critically about historical arguments. Science teachers will need to teach subject-specific critical thinking, in conjunction with factual knowledge of scientific topics, and the same applies in other subjects. What looks cross-curricular on the surface is often less so than it first appears, and what seems transferable actually depends on a great deal of domain-specific knowledge. One of David Didau’s blog posts goes into more detail, using the example of writing an essay on Romeo and Juliet, and is well worth reading.

I don’t think the final type of skill is really a skill at all, although it is often labelled as one. I am referring to broad character attributes or traits, such as resilience and open-mindedness. I would be more comfortable badging them as virtues rather than skills. I am in complete agreement that they are desirable and I very much want students to develop them, but I am not convinced it helps a great deal when we try to do so directly through the formal curriculum. I have worked in settings, for example, in which teachers have been expected to set learning objectives around things like open-mindedness (and I should be honest that in the past I was personally involved in establishing this expectation). I am not sure whether doing this makes anyone more open-minded, but I am confident that it tends to dilute the disciplinary nature of the subject.

So how can we cultivate these virtues? I certainly think a strong school culture is key and much of that goes well beyond the formal curriculum, but that is not the focus of this post. As far as the curriculum goes, I do think that being knowledgeable helps a great deal, but it is not a straightforward case of teaching X and students becoming more Y. Instead we have to be confident that if we teach subjects well, students will develop valuable attributes, but we cannot predict or control exactly what they will look like or where their knowledge will take them. Drawing on my own experience as a young person, becoming more knowledgeable certainly enabled me to be more open-minded, but I am pretty sure that if my teachers had told me every lesson that they were aiming to open my mind, it would have had the opposite effect!

Hopefully I have shown that thinking in terms of knowledge versus skills is lazy. Instead we need to be clear about which subject-specific skills should be developed by the curriculum, map them out intelligently and teach them as well as we can. This is definitely a ‘have your cake and eat it’ dilemma.

Substantive knowledge versus disciplinary knowledge

I introduced what is meant by these two terms last time, but to recap briefly, substantive knowledge covers the established facts and claims which become accepted as a result of academic study, such as the theory of evolution by natural selection in biology. Disciplinary knowledge addresses the process by which those things become established and how they can be challenged. To stick with science, we might include empirical experimentation and observation. The best short read I have come across on disciplinary knowledge is Counsell’s article Taking Curriculum Seriously (Counsell, 2018).

It is tempting to think that substantive and disciplinary knowledge should be balanced in the school curriculum for each subject, but I would sound a note of caution about balance, because a 50:50 split may not be a desirable aim (here or elsewhere). The best mix will vary significantly from subject to subject. In maths, for example, academic work takes place too far up the disciplinary ladder for students to access it meaningfully in schools, so they have to take much on trust in order to lay the groundwork for further study, and the curriculum tends to be dominated by substantive knowledge. Disciplinary knowledge also does not feature prominently in languages at school level.

My own subject of history is probably the one where discussion of disciplinary knowledge has been most prominent. That is because students can access major debates which take place amongst academic historians at a meaningful level and need to see that history is a process of enquiry, interpretation and argument if they are going to have any sort of authentic historical education at all. Indeed, substantive knowledge cannot really be studied in history without a disciplinary element, so it makes little sense to divorce the two in our thinking about curriculum.

My main recommendation, therefore, is to learn more and think deeply about what this issue looks like in each subject, but doing so is a real challenge for senior leaders. Books like What Should Schools Teach? (Standish and Sehgal Cuthbert, 2017) can offer good introductions to disciplinary knowledge outside of our own specialisms.

The danger of making bad decisions here is that we will not do justice to the subject. Insufficient disciplinary knowledge will mean that students get no sense of how a discipline develops and will fail to see that claims are often hotly contested. I would argue that this leaves them vulnerable to the abuse of academic disciplines by unscrupulous people who wish to use them for their own ends, as politicians and advertisers sometimes do. Insufficient substantive knowledge, on the other hand, will mean that the curriculum becomes devoid of content. Students may well know plenty about the scientific method, but without a good grasp of the findings of academic science, it won’t get them very far. If we want to induct students into academic disciplines, we need both in appropriate measures.

Teaching the canon versus representing diversity

Subjects tend to have a traditional core, which we might refer to as the canon. We normally use it as a term for the obviously cultural and aesthetic subjects, like English literature, music and art, but I think we can apply it elsewhere too. In English obviously we might think of Shakespeare, Dickens and other well-known authors who are often dismissed as dead white men. In music we have the western classical tradition.

Outside of subjects like this we can still think of traditional topics of study, but they are not necessarily referred to as a canon. For example in history at Key Stage Three you would see Anglo-centric, mostly political history in hundreds, if not thousands, of schools, with slim pickings beyond that apart from maybe the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and some forays into the two world wars. Even in maths and science we could reasonably refer to a canon, since there is a great deal of uniformity from school to school in the curriculum in those subjects and widespread agreement about what an educated person ought to know.

The problem with the canon is that it is often very narrow, reflecting male, white, middle class cultural dominance and arguably perpetuating it. The controversy has well and truly entered the spotlight since the murder of George Floyd, with much of the opposition to the canon focussed on race and spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement. Calls to decolonise the curriculum and make anti-racism its goal have become very familiar, with the government feeling the need to enter the debate on the opposite side. Former Equalities Minster Kemi Badenoch made it very clear that she does not think the curriculum needs decolonisation in a parliamentary debate and the DfE has taken steps to prevent schools from using materials produced by the Black Lives Matter organisation.

Schools cannot sidestep this issue, but how can they navigate their way through what they might easily see as a minefield? In subjects like maths and science there is much more of a consensus about what should be taught, and this is enshrined in the National Curriculum and exam specifications. We might wish that more of it had been produced by people other than white men, but we cannot change the past. At the very least, however, we can highlight the contributions of those who do not fit the stereotype, whether that be medieval Muslim mathematicians or modern female physicists. Their stories can provide rich hinterland and might even help a tiny bit to make the future more equitable than the past.

Decisions are trickier in English literature, art, music and the like, where things are more hotly contested and where the National Curriculum is less prescriptive. I don’t think there are easy answers, but for me the concept of representation can shed light. We can ask who or what the curriculum should represent. Clearly it is not possible for it to reflect every aspect of every student’s identity, or even every community or group within the country, and I would worry that trying to incorporate this would quickly make things pretty tokenistic. It is reasonable, however, to ask whether, taken as a whole, the curriculum does a credible job of representing the diverse society we live in.

I do feel strongly that the curriculum should represent the academic disciplines to which the school subjects relate, because I think they offer the best route for students to gain access to a mature understanding of the world and their own existence as part of it. We need to avoid idolising the disciplines, however, because they are not always a model of inclusion themselves, and debates about decolonisation are often taking place fiercely within them too. I think it helps to avoid an overly narrow curriculum if we define the disciplines more broadly than merely as the profession based in universities, whether past or present.

In order to provide an example, I will return to English literature. Few people would dispute that Shakespeare should feature prominently in the curriculum because of his significance within the discipline and because there is widespread agreement that his work is great. I would argue that we would be letting our students down by excluding him. There is, however, plenty of scope for studying Shakespeare through a critical lens and I also think that an English curriculum which only featured dead white men would not adequately represent the discipline.

I can go into a little more depth about my own subject of history. If we ask ourselves what desirable representation might look like, I would suggest we can think about it on three levels. Firstly we can consider whether the curriculum represents the diversity of the past, secondly whether it represents the diversity of modern society and finally whether it does a good job of reflecting the academic discipline itself. The latter consideration might cause us to look at areas of study like gender, sexuality and so on, which feature strongly in academic history, including at undergraduate level, but we see them much less often in schools. There may be valid reason for this, but it is worth exploring.

On the diversity of the past, the point is made very persuasively in David Olusoga’s Black and British (2017) that the history of Britain is deeply intertwined with the history of Africa and the Caribbean. A comprehensive understanding of the first must include black history and we are not doing that merely in order to mention some black people, but because we are representing the past more faithfully by doing so. For example, the Industrial Revolution should be not be understood merely as a narrative of pioneering entrepreneurs, technological developments and movement from the countryside to the towns, but the awful story of sugar and cotton must be at the heart of it too.

The key point is that a more representative curriculum can and should lead to more rigorous history. This case is made extremely well in a blog post by Claire Hollis. For me the Holy Grail is not to eliminate traditional areas of study, but to get to a point where students can see the canon for what it is, to have a grasp of how it came into existence, and to enter into informed discussion about whether it truly is the discipline at its greatest. There is an excellent article by Martin Robinson (2018) on this, which I would strongly recommend.

Making the curriculum coherent

Strictly speaking I don’t think this is really a dilemma at all, since there is no tension between two goals, but I have included it because I do think there is some confusion around the idea of coherence. It is a word which sounds good and people see it as a desirable attribute for a curriculum, without necessarily thinking through what they mean by it. Sometimes it implies that a curriculum should tell a particular narrative, such as the story of the nation. This overlaps with the previous section on the canon and I have seen it suggested that diversity in the curriculum risks making it incoherent. I don’t think this necessarily follows, and if we insist on a coherent curriculum in this sense, we risk it being very narrow. For example, we could design a music curriculum which focussed only on classical music and claim that it was coherent, but it would not represent music very comprehensively.

Instead, a coherent curriculum is one in which everything is planned logically so that all the components (including content, resources, activities, assessments etc) contribute effectively towards the curriculum intent and complement each other. In a coherent curriculum things are not there just because they were planned by the teacher who has been in the department for 25 years and nobody wants to upset them, or just because the students find them fun. There is an excellent short article on this by Mary Myatt (2018), drawing on the work of Tim Oates.

This issue highlights the importance of having a clear grasp of curriculum intent for each subject (by which I do not necessarily mean a beautifully written intent statement, but a shared understanding of curricular objectives), since without it we cannot really work towards coherence.

As a leader, coherence makes a very useful lens through which to appraise the components of a curriculum, since we can take any topic, resource or other element and ask about its function, considering how it contributes towards curricular goals. This might include how it builds on what came before and how it lays foundations for what comes later. In doing so it is important to remember that the impact of learning something is not just about what comes immediately afterwards in sequence, because the fruits of learning about an item of content might not be seen for a long time. Christine Counsell distinguishes very helpfully between ‘proximal and ultimate functions’ of content in a top blog post.

Senior leaders can also use the concept of coherence as a way of examining the curriculum as a whole in the school. It is a challenging topic of conversation for them to consider how each subject contributes to the overall intent.

Cultural literacy versus powerful knowledge

Last time I touched briefly on E.D. Hirsch and Michael Young as key curricular thinkers. I will not repeat everything I said at that point, but will consider how their views can pull in different directions, even though they both support the idea of a knowledge-rich curriculum. Hirsch’s signature idea is cultural literacy (1988), by which he means the ability to take part in the educated conversations of society. He argues that it is the job of schools to ensure that students develop this form of literacy, especially if they will not have access to it at home.

Young’s key idea is powerful knowledge (2014). He claims that this is the knowledge which comes from academic disciplines, making it possible for people to make sense of the world around them and offering secure grounds for explanations and predictions. Like Hirsch, he is very concerned for social justice. He sees powerful knowledge as distinct from the everyday knowledge which students are likely to gain outside the school gates.

There is a tension between Hirsch and Young because they seek their inspiration for the curriculum in different places. Hirsch finds it in literate culture and Young looks to academic disciplines. Hirsch’s content is more conservative, whereas Young’s would be more dynamic, since culture tends to lag behind academic disciplines in the integration of new material.

Hirsch is also much more concerned about substantive knowledge than disciplinary. For example, in RE he would doubtless be keen for students to learn about Christian beliefs about Jesus’ death and resurrection in religious studies. Young, on the other hand, is particularly interested in disciplinary knowledge, so I suspect he would argue that it is important for students to ask the sort of questions a theologian would ask about those same Christian beliefs.

For me there is a concern about truthfulness in a curriculum based on cultural literacy, which I have written about in a blog post mainly focussing on history. This is because national literate culture includes things like popular myths. For example, British people emphasise Britain’s importance in winning World War Two more strongly than people in other countries, and also more strongly than academic historians would be likely to argue. If we aim for cultural literacy in the curriculum, do we need to teach the myth, even if it does not stand up to scrutiny from historical scholarship? This is much less of a problem if we base our curricular philosophy on Young, because academic disciplines tend to be more concerned with accuracy than national culture, and they have mechanisms (albeit imperfect ones) to safeguard it.

I think the tensions can be resolved to some extent. I would start by making truthfulness in the curriculum a red line. If something is false we should not teach it. We can, however, aim for cultural literacy without making national culture an exhaustive source of curricular content. Hirsch does not say anything to stop us looking more widely, which opens the door to the more representative curriculum I refer to above.

Hirsch attempts to itemise national literate culture in a list, which is easy to criticise and caricature, but to my mind the saving grace is that he says very little about what precisely should learned about the things which he includes. This gives us some leeway to incorporate Young’s powerful knowledge, because we can look to academic disciplines to consider what questions should be asked about Hirsch’s content. In the blog post linked above I give examples of what this might look like when teaching Magna Carta in a history curriculum. We can also teach national myths by problematising the mythical element and asking how they came to be so commonly accepted. This way we are still teaching cultural literacy, but doing so against the grain in some sense.

Breadth versus depth

This final dilemma overlaps with a number of the other issues I have raised. Both breadth and depth appear to be desirable features of a curriculum, but each has its risks. The danger with breadth is that we end up with students who have knowledge a mile wide but only an inch thick, and that knowledge can be pretty superficial, as parodied so entertainingly about history in 1066 And All That (Sellar and Yeatman, 1998). On the other hand, depth can mean that students end up knowing a lot about particular aspects of a subject, but it sits in isolated silos with little to connect them. I remember an old History A Level unit on Tudor rebellions, which shone a spotlight on this aspect of the period 1485-1603. Students could learn about it and do well in their exam, yet remain completely in the dark about the tradition of medieval unrest which those rebellions drew on, such as the Peasants’ Revolt, and also about the Civil Wars, which broke out just 40 years after the death of Elizabeth I. There was no broader context.

Sadly it is not as simple as deciding whether breadth or depth is the better bet. This is definitely an issue where subject differences play a major role, especially when considering how what improvement looks like in the subject in question. Ruth Ashbee has done great work, drawing on the thinking of Basil Bernstein and Legitimation Code Theory in illuminating some of these issues, and I would strongly recommend having a read of various blog posts she has written, such as this one. She argues for a common language to talk about the curriculum, including how we describe progression in a subject. She calls it ascension, although my worry is that this implies something vertical, which does not work well for every subject.

I mention Ashbee’s work in a section about breadth and depth because it does not make much sense to talk about those concepts unless we have the sort of understanding of the architecture of the subject which she is calling for. Students might need to go deeper into a particular issue in order to build stronger foundations for the next level or they might need to learn about new aspects of the subject and explore the links between them. The former would be more likely to apply in a subject like physics, which we often characterise as hierarchical, because progress can be likened to climbing a ladder. You have to understand certain threshold concepts before you can build on them and learn new things higher up the ladder. On the other hand, the latter would be more likely to apply in a subject like sociology, because progress is more like building a collection. Just as you do not have to own one thing in a collection in order to own another, so the different parts of the subject do not build so directly on each other and, while they are related, there are fewer threshold concepts.

The point is that while it is right that we should think about breadth and depth in every subject, those things in themselves are not very helpful unless we have a clear idea of what they are there for. We need to ask in what ways the additional breadth or depth enables students to get better at geography or anything else. Like most of these issues, in order to address the dilemma we need to know more about the subjects which make up the curriculum.

Navigating the dilemmas

I hope that in the preceding sections I have shown that addressing these dilemmas is not simply a case of finding a middle way between extremes. It is much more complicated than that. Much of the answer, as I have highlighted again and again, depends on the subject. As senior leaders, there is no substitute for us learning more about the subjects which make up the curriculum and having detailed conversations about them with specialists, where we can really dig into these issues and get a handle on what teachers are trying to do. We should be very wary of overly prescriptive, generic frameworks for the planning or assessment of the curriculum, since they tend to distort and do damage. Our aim should not be conformity and compliance, but to do justice to the subjects and to our students in giving them full access to what subjects can offer.

All of these dilemmas can provide a useful lens to enable us to examine the curriculum. I would suggest that when we do so it might be more helpful for us to think of ourselves as surveyors rather than as architects. A surveyor looks closely and identifies things which might need attention, whereas an architect designs from scratch. I do not think that we can take any one of the concepts I have included and use it as a complete blueprint in order to build a curriculum, but we can use them to see where improvement might be needed. For example, as part of a review process we might reasonably ask whether a curriculum does justice to disciplinary knowledge in the subject or whether it is representative enough. We should be wary of anything which claims to be a comprehensive curricular recipe, however, because it promotes the illusion that there is some sort of ideal curriculum out there and also because in its focus on one feature it runs the risk of overlooking other elements which are equally important.

When we attempt to navigate these dilemmas we will inevitably make mistakes, and I have lost count of the number I have made. For example, in my first forays into senior curriculum leadership I focussed very strongly on substantive knowledge, asking subject leaders to itemise declarative and procedural knowledge. This was important, but in doing so I missed out disciplinary knowledge, because I had not read about it at that stage. We had to incorporate it later, by which time it came across as a bit of an afterthought. This sort of thing happens a lot. As we seek constantly to improve curriculum in my school, we keep realising that something we have done requires a bit of rethinking and, if necessary, unpicking, to take things to the next stage. No doubt in a year or two I will look back on the things I am doing now and feel much the same about them. Hopefully I will laugh at the mistakes I am making and see them as useful but flawed steps in trying to address a problem which cannot be solved, because the job is never done, but that certainly does not make it any less worthwhile.

References

• Counsell, C. (2018) ‘Taking Curriculum Seriously’ Impact 4 (London, Chartered College of Teaching)
• Hirsch, E.D. (1988) Cultural Literacy: What every American needs to know (New York, Vintage Books)
• Myatt, M. (2018) ‘Building Curriculum Coherence’ Impact 4 (London, Chartered College of Teaching)
• Olusoga, D. (2017) Black and British: A Forgotten History (London, Pan)
• Robinson, M. (2018) – ‘Curriculum: An offer of what the best might be’ in Impact 4 (London, Chartered College of Teaching)
• Sellar, W.C. and Yeatman, R.J. (1998) 1066 And All That (London, Methuen)
• Standish, A. and Sehgal Cuthbert, A. (ed.) (2017) What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, subjects and the pursuit of truth (London, UCL Institute of Education Press)
• Willingham, D. (2010) Why Don’t Students Like School? (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass)
• Young, M.; Lambert, D. et al (2014) Knowledge and the Future School: Curriculum and Social Justice (London: Bloomsbury Academic)

Image found here and labelled as available for noncommercial reuse.

A note about the Curriculum Thinkers Community

As I mentioned at the start, this post originated with a webinar for the We Are In Beta Secondary Curriculum Thinkers Community. This is an online network of senior and middle leaders from all over the country with an interest in curriculum. It provides a platform for expert leaders to deliver masterclasses in their fields, which I can enjoy listening to in the comfort of my own office or home. It also connects leaders from different geographical locations, enabling them to ask tricky questions about challenges they are experiencing in their jobs and to support each other with responses. I have been very impressed with the members’ generosity in sharing things they have developed. It has been great to get some of my colleagues involved too, through the highly successful Curriculum Thinking Weeks and through the networks which are coming into existence for each subject. I have been very glad that it amplifies their voices, develops useful contacts and gives them an entry point to the wider discourse around their subjects. If you would like access to all recordings and resources shared inside the community, get a free trial here.