EDU007000 Archives

Bringing Powerful Knowledge into Classrooms

Powerful knowledge equips students with the capacity to engage with systematic, disciplinary thinking, to imagine futures that are not yet conceived and think what is yet to be thought. Bringing Powerful Knowledge into Classrooms explores how teachers develop such knowledge in classrooms by transforming disciplinary understandings through subject teaching that responds to the educational needs of society.

Drawing on Bernstein’s concept of recontextualisation and theories of teacher agency, the book examines how teachers navigate the boundaries between academic disciplines, school subjects and everyday knowledge. Through empirical case studies from England, Finland and Sweden, it illustrates how teachers’ decisions are shaped by national expectations, institutional frameworks and classroom dynamics. Combining Anglophone and Nordic traditions in subject teaching with curriculum theory and classroom research, the book offers a theoretically grounded yet practical account of how teachers recontextualise knowledge. It develops new insights into teacher agency and recontextualisation which are highly relevant to teacher education, curriculum design and educational policy. By focusing on real-life teaching across a range of subjects, the book deepens our understanding of how powerful knowledge is brought into classrooms and how teachers can be supported in this vital work.

What Should Schools Teach?

The design of school curriculums involves deep thought about the nature of knowledge and its value to learners and society. It is a serious responsibility that raises a number of questions. What is knowledge for? What knowledge is important for children to learn? How do we decide what knowledge matters in each school subject? And how far should the knowledge we teach in school be related to academic disciplinary knowledge? These and many other questions are taken up in What Should Schools Teach?

The blurring of distinctions between pedagogy and curriculum, and between experience and knowledge, has served up a confusing message for teachers about the part that each plays in the education of children. Schools teach through subjects, but there is little consensus about what constitutes a subject and what they are for. This book aims to dispel confusion through a robust rationale for what schools should teach that offers key understanding to teachers of the relationship between knowledge (what to teach) and their own pedagogy (how to teach), and how both need to be informed by values of intellectual freedom and autonomy.

This second edition includes new chapters on Chemistry, Drama, Music and Religious Education, and an updated chapter on Biology. A revised introduction reflects on emerging discourse around decolonizing the curriculum, and on the relationship between the knowledge that children encounter at school and in their homes.

Knowing History in Schools

The ‘knowledge turn’ in curriculum studies has drawn attention to the central role that knowledge of the disciplines plays in education, and to the need for new thinking about how we understand knowledge and knowledge-building.

Knowing History in Schools explores these issues in the context of teaching and learning history through a dialogue between the eminent sociologist of curriculum Michael Young, and leading figures in history education research and practice from a range of traditions and contexts. With a focus on Young’s ‘powerful knowledge’ theorisation of the curriculum, and on his more recent articulations of the ‘powers’ of knowledge, this dialogue explores the many complexities posed for history education by the challenge of building children’s historical knowledge and understanding. The book builds towards a clarification of how we can best conceptualise knowledge-building in history education. Crucially, it aims to help history education students, history teachers, teacher educators and history curriculum designers navigate the challenges that knowledge-building processes pose for learning history in schools.

History and the Climate Crisis

History education has a key contribution to make in developing a deeper understanding of the current environmental crisis, but its role is too often overlooked. When embedded in the school curriculum, environmental history adds crucial layers of knowledge to the learning from other subjects and can enable students to make their own informed contributions to one of the most pressing concerns of the 21st century.

History and the Climate Crisis makes the case for including an environmental focus in the secondary school history curriculum by locating its arguments within established historiographical and revisionist debates. It provides much-needed subject knowledge in an area that is new for most history teachers. The author considers the disciplinary and pedagogical challenges and demonstrates how including an environmental focus can strengthen students’ disciplinary knowledge. She also builds her argument through the use of many examples and offers practical strategies for use in classrooms, including developed enquiries suitable for the secondary history curriculum. The book focuses on environmental history within a strong subject bound curriculum and will be relevant to teachers, academics and policymakers in the UK and internationally.

Developing the Higher Education Curriculum

A complementary volume to Dilly Fung’s A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education (2017), this book explores ‘research-based education’ as applied in practice within the higher education sector. A collection of 15 chapters followed by illustrative vignettes, it showcases approaches to engaging students actively with research and enquiry across disciplines. It begins with one institution’s creative approach to research-based education – UCL’s Connected Curriculum, a conceptual framework for integrating research-based education into all taught programmes of study – and branches out to show how aspects of the framework can apply to practice across a variety of institutions in a range of national settings.

The 15 chapters are provided by a diverse range of authors who all explore research-based education in their own way. Some chapters are firmly based in a subject-discipline – including art history, biochemistry, education, engineering, fashion and design, healthcare, and veterinary sciences – while others reach across geopolitical regions, such as Australia, Canada, China, England, Scotland and South Africa. The final chapter offers 12 short vignettes of practice to highlight how engaging students with research and enquiry can enrich their learning experiences, preparing them not only for more advanced academic learning, but also for professional roles in complex, rapidly changing social contexts.

A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

Is it possible to bring university research and student education into a more connected, more symbiotic relationship? If so, can we develop programmes of study that enable faculty, students and ‘real world’ communities to connect in new ways? In this accessible book, Dilly Fung argues that it is not only possible but also potentially transformational to develop new forms of research-based education. Presenting the Connected Curriculum framework already adopted by UCL, she opens windows onto new initiatives related to, for example, research-based education, internationalisation, the global classroom, interdisciplinarity and public engagement.

A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is, however, not just about developing engaging programmes of study. Drawing on the field of philosophical hermeneutics, Fung argues how the Connected Curriculum framework can help to create spaces for critical dialogue about educational values, both within and across existing research groups, teaching departments and learning communities. Drawing on vignettes of practice from around the world, she argues that developing the synergies between research and education can empower faculty members and students from all backgrounds to contribute to the global common good.

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