Curriculum theory, which aims to analyse and shape the future of education, has not yet adequately addressed the significant societal changes of the late 20th century. Instead, scholars of the field have largely been concerned with implementing education policy, training teachers, and developing educational content. Read More
As a result, the content of school subjects, such as history, geography, languages, maths and science, has been overlooked. Although they are often taken for granted as distinct and immutable entities that hold little relevance in our everyday lives, these disciplines are social constructs that intersect with patterns of social relations and structures.
Professor Brian Hudson at the University of Sussex and his collaborators at Karlstad University in Sweden wish to see a transformation in how school subjects are taught. In a recent paper, they explain that when students can relate academic knowledge to their own experiences, they can more easily engage with educational material, resulting in effective learning.
To encourage a shift towards this type of educational approach, Professor Hudson and his colleagues developed a new research framework that can assess the quality of educational practices. To develop their framework, the team drew upon five educational concepts.
The first concept is Powerful Knowledge, which refers to specialised knowledge that is different from everyday experience and can bestow power on those who hold it. Second, they include Epistemic Quality, meaning the quality of knowledge imparted, which is impacted by content, student-teacher relationships and how students can make use of the knowledge. The third involves Transformation Processes, in which academic knowledge is transformed for specific purposes.
The fourth concept within the framework is Learning Games, which can be used to represent the interactions between students and teachers. Finally, the researchers consider Epistemic Ascent, which describes a learner’s development from novice to expert.
To put these ideas in context, consider a classroom learning environment composed of three key elements: academic content, student, and teacher. Learning within this environment can be facilitated by learning games which connect the content to students’ everyday experiences. During learning games of high epistemic quality, academic knowledge meets students’ experiential knowledge and is transformed, recontextualised and given meaning. This learning leads to epistemic ascent as students obtain knowledge that is transformed into powerful knowledge, which will be useful in their future lives.
The researchers used their new framework to analyse existing studies of school subjects. For example, one study found that social science lessons on law and order enforced strict boundaries between the knowledge being taught and the students’ experiential knowledge. This made it difficult for students to relate to the material. This type of educational approach does not enable adequate transformation of knowledge.
Armed with this framework, policy-makers and educators can make more reliable, relevant and impactful changes to educational policy, teacher education and curricula.
