1. Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge and Teachers as “Curriculum Makers”
Professor David Lambert
University College London
Institute of Education

2. My aims and purposes Argue for a progressive knowledge-led curriculum
Distinguish the features of the ‘three futures’ heuristic
Focus special significance to an aspect of teachers’ work called ‘curriculum making’

3. Who are the children we teach?

4. What role does education play …

5. … in preparing children for ‘this day and age’?

6. How does what you teach …

7. … make a distinctive contribution …

8. … to the educated person?

9. And enable them to face the future with confidence and capability

10. Acknowledging some contemporary challenges
The digital age
Information at your fingertips
24/7 news
Computing power: e.g. geospatial technologies
Global threats
Asymmetric warfare and ‘terror’
Climate change
Unregulated capitalism
Enormous inequalities
Culture shifts
Three minutes (concentration span)
Selfies and celebrity (‘famous for 15 minutes’)
Social media tyranny

11. 2. Acknowledging some contemporary ‘solutions’
Global competitiveness
The ‘global race’
Metrics
System reform (and ‘innovation’)
‘Learnification’
Skills and transversal competences
‘Building learning power’ (learning to learn)
Dimensions, themes, issues … (not subjects)
Creativity
Personalisation

12. Your Text Here For example, Ken Robinson:

13. In whose interests is the ‘learnification’ of education?
Our ‘Fordist’ models of mass education are not preparing
young people adequately.
Let us agree with Ken Robinson on that!
Let us also agree that the students we meet demand respect for they
are born with “extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence,
feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness.”
But maybe respecting students requires more from us
than simply acknowledging their human potential

14. Being sceptical of ‘Learning’ (that is, learning as an end rather than a means to an end)
Where ‘learning’ is regarded as:
A good thing in itself - and assumed to be value free in this sense.
An essentially scientific or technical process –thus, with correct technique, learning can be ‘accelerated’, as if this were a desirable end in itself.
Paramount. Teaching is subservient to, and led by, the learning. We become embarrassed by teaching, and rather talk about ‘facilitating’ learning.

15. Learning as an ‘end’ rather than a ‘means to an end’
Where ‘learning’ is regarded as:
A good thing in itself - and assumed to be value free in this sense.
(It is not. Learning can be trivial, dangerous or wrong)
An essentially scientific or technical process – thus, with correct technique, learning can be ‘accelerated’, as if this were a desirable end in itself.
(But understanding aspects of science, history or art can be counter-intuitive, and can require sustained, painstaking effort)
Paramount. Teaching is subservient to, and led by, the learning. We become embarrassed by teaching, and rather talk about ‘facilitating’ learning.
(A profession that abrogates responsibility in this way may be one that has lost confidence in itself)

16. “Calling time on exam-factory education”
“… we always need to guard
against the soft bigotry of
low expectations: the worrying
trend of play and expression
being adequate for working-class
pupils, while leaving the tough
stuff, the physics and the history,
for their better off peers.”
Guardian
Tristram Hunt MP

17. (Schools are part of the “Vibrant City”)
The neo-liberal orthodoxy has “dulled our ability to think for, or beyond, ourselves”
[Wadley 2008]
(Schools are part of the “Vibrant City”)

18. (Can classrooms provide a “Garden of Peace”?)
Young people have a “PEDAGOGIC RIGHT” to acquire the
knowledge and the means to:
Think theoretically (in the abstract)
Discern ‘better’ knowledge/arguments
Make good generalisations
(Can classrooms provide a “Garden of Peace”?)

19. “Bringing Knowledge Back In”
Main arguments
Schools are special places (they are not ‘everyday places’)
Clear conceptual distinction between curriculum and pedagogy
The curriculum inducts young people into ‘powerful knowledge’
(Michael Young 2008)

20. Powerful knowledge and the school curriculum
“… She understood so little of the material world –
how water boiled, why a walnut fell from a tree –
that she had had to take almost everything on trust”
Sebastian Faulks’ 2012 novel A Possible Life.
Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat”
Van Gogh c 1885

21. Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge (PDK)
PDK refers to the knowledge children and young people are unlikely to acquire at home or in their workplace
PDK is knowledge they will need if they are to become active citizens and workers in the complex modern world, sometimes called a ‘knowledge society’

22. Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge [PDK]
PDK is usually:
evidence based
abstract and theoretical (conceptual)
part of a system of thought
dynamic, evolving, changing – but reliable
testable and open to challenge
sometimes counter-intuitive
exists outside the direct experience of the teacher and the learner
Discipline based (in domains that are not arbitrary or transient)
PDK enables people (and societies) to ‘think the unthinkable’ and the ‘yet-to-be-thought’ (after Bernstein 2000)

23. Back to a fundamental question What is [your subject] for?
My subject is geography
It is a pedagogic right for all young people to have access to geographical knowledge, and to encounter the world as an object of disciplined thought.
This expresses the for young people to engage with:
The world beyond their experience
Concepts and theories (‘systematicity’)
Disciplined thought (‘thinking geographically’)

24. Curriculum Futures
F1 subject delivery – of knowledge for its own sake; traditional subjects: under-socialised knowledge
F2 skills and ‘learning to learn’ – knowledge is constructed: over-socialised knowledge; subject divisions are artificial. Themes. Experiential.
F3 subjects are not given (as in F1), but not arbitrary (as in F2) – knowledge development led by ‘... The epistemic rules of specialist communities’ to provide ways to understand the world and take pupils beyond their everyday experience.
(Young and Muller 2010; Young and Lambert 2014)

25. Towards the Future 3 Curriculum
Knowledge-led curriculum
(incorporating ‘skills’ and ‘competence’)
Based on ‘powerful (disciplinary) knowledge’
(‘epistemic ascent’)
Progressive – motivated by social justice
(‘pedagogic rights’)
Distinguishes curriculum from pedagogy
(the what and the how)
Pedagogic selections need to be fit for purpose
(the what comes before the how)

26. Some key ‘curriculum’ questions
and challenges
Is the distinction between the ‘everyday’ and ‘disciplinary’ knowledge clear-cut across subjects?
Who ‘owns’ powerful knowledge (PDK)?
Can the state legislate: ie can PDK be codified into national standards?
What are the roles/responsibilities of teachers in bringing an F3 curriculum into fruition?

27. discipline of geography Curriculum Making in Geography
In the context of the
discipline of geography
Does this take the learner beyond what they already know ?
Which learning activity ?
Student Experiences
School Geography
Teacher Choices
Underpinned by Key Concepts
Thinking Geographically
Curriculum Making in Geography