Certainty abandoned and some implications for curriculum research

Nature of curriculum

A first point is about the nature of curriculum. Dominant perceptions tend to ignore the fact that the concept of curriculum may be variously understood, depending on a person’s perspectives and form of thinking. One perspective sees the world and the people who occupy it as in the final stage of development: it is assumed that today is the accumulation of all its yesterdays – we have reached the endgame. This perspective is informed by a particular way of thinking that sees this moment as working towards closure. According to Berlin (2012) (in his essay ‘The hedgehog and the fox’), this is a view held by hedgehogs, who focus on one big idea only. A different perspective sees the world and its inhabitants as in a stage of constant development, a summary of all that has gone before and that forms the beginning of the next moment: this is a view held by foxes, who are nimble on their feet and understand that every question, every situation, requires a different response. From this perspective, experience is seen as a continual process of unfolding, a process of new beginnings in working with knowledge and in the writing of life texts (Said, 1997). It is also rooted in the idea of uncertainty, explored by philosophers such as Berlin. Yet this view does not fit with the dominant one-directional perspectives of policymakers that aim for certainty, nor does it feature to any extent in the literatures of contemporary or historical approaches to education or curriculum, or to philosophy itself. Consequently, dominant assumptions (not all) throughout the literatures of curriculum research and development are that others know what you will learn before you learn it, and that they can specify both what you will learn and how you will learn it. These assumptions, in my view, amount to a monumental mistake, in spite of their permeating the organization and experience of formal education; this idea also informs the thinking behind this article.

Sowell (1987) speaks about these two world perspectives as contributing to two visions of reality: a closed vision and an open vision. When the two visions enter into an understanding of curriculum, they produce two dominant models. The first is understood as a closed field containing a number of objects in the form of concrete objectives, manufactured certainty and the delivery of imagined outcomes; the second is an open vision that sees possibilities in everything – Goethe’s (1957) vision of the original leaf that has the potential to unfold into a flower; the raindrop that becomes a flood; the acorn that becomes an oak (Bertoft, 1996). This vision lies at the heart of a number of theories and theoretical frameworks, including complexity theory, emergence and Bohm’s (1985) view of unfolding meaning in an unfolding universe. It may also be seen in Chomsky’s views, especially in Knowledge of Language (Chomsky, 1986), about the generative transformational nature of language, a view that may be brought to an understanding of any aspect of reality. A significant feature is that all these approaches celebrate the idea of uncertainty: the aim is not to achieve finality but to celebrate emergence into, and engagement with, an unknowable future.

Aims of curriculum

The second point is to consider how the aims and purposes of dominant education systems are currently theorized and organized as curriculum. The orthodox view, espoused by many policymakers (such as those responsible for implementing the 2013 National Curriculum in England) and traditionalist academics (such as those advocating a renewed emphasis on powerful knowledge), is that curriculum is a body of those knowledges that people ought to know to function well as socially aware human beings, and that will enable them to achieve their goals and realize their values. This body of knowledge is compiled, organized and delivered by people operating at differently perceived levels of epistemic competence: policymakers include politicians and highly knowledgeable theorists, who hand the knowledge down to reasonably knowledgeable people such as teachers, who deliver it to utterly non-knowledgeable students, who are then required to internalize it. The aim, then, is to persuade the students to accept this knowledge as quickly and easily as possible, and to apply it to their everyday practices.

This view is insulting to practising teachers and their students on two counts. First, the system represents an abiding commitment to epistemic injustice: a term, coined by Miranda Fricker (2007), which stems from a view that some persons are incapable of acquiring or producing knowledge simply because of their heritage or cultural–social–historical positioning. People are too often positioned according to categorizations of gender, social status or race: see, for example, Gould’s stories in The Mismeasure of Man (1992) about the horrendous injustices perpetrated on some very bright people by others who hold this view. Second, this autocratic approach to curriculum policy and its implied practices places it not too far from the days of Bobbitt (1918), who maintained that the curriculum should be seen as the delivery of specific knowledges, by identified knowers, with the aim of turning out citizens who would act together for what he saw as the common good. Nor is it too far away from the efficiency theories of Frederick Taylor, the great promoter of what Callahan (1962) called ‘the cult of efficiency’. Further, Taylor held that the practice of curriculum should also be policed to ensure that the correct content and form were being delivered. This view is thoroughly critiqued today by more thoughtful researchers, such as Au (2012) and Apple (1993). Nevertheless, the aim still remains in many places, including the UK, of ensuring the achievement by students and teachers of policymakers’ pre-specified objectives: the focus is still on the end point of achieving, rather than the ongoing experiences of participating (see also Gibson, 1993).

Status of curriculum

Higher education is deeply implicated in this view of curriculum and imbues it with respectability. Its policy recommendations draw on existing findings from those academics whose favourite epistemologies are those of technical rationality and whose forms of logic stem from a pursuit of end points, the fulfilment of articulated aims as outcomes, and the achievement of certainty: this is one of the most pernicious commitments of all. At the same time, little heed is paid to the everyday practical theories of teachers, nurses and other professionals in so-called ‘workplaces’ (as if Parliament and the university were not workplaces), who are deemed highly competent foxes in practical contexts, but not very much so in matters of theory generation.

This locates the enquiry squarely in the context of challenging what Dewey (1929) called ‘the quest for certainty’ and how this plays out in individual classrooms. Here, teachers are expected to ‘deliver’ a pre-specified curriculum, whose contents children and other learners are expected to accept unquestioningly and learn to reproduce. This was the experience of a young student of my acquaintance who reported that in a school art lesson he wanted to colour the leaves of a flower red, whereupon his teacher corrected him with: ‘No, leaves are green.’ She then took away all the non-green pens that were on the table: an example of the acquiescence of teachers who are dominated by a requirement to teach to the test, to stay at the level of telling what they know from the canon of existing knowledge, rather than communicating how learners can bring their own imagination and wonder to the action of creating knowledge and exploring it with others. Teachers are persuaded or frightened into abandoning their own love of enquiry in light of the fear of being revealed as an outsider or a threat; they comply, denying their own calling as educators, denying the idea of teaching as a rich values-based practice, and promoting instead a view of teaching as a technology. Rather than teach according to what students want to learn, and to what they wish to teach, teachers are required to abide by the given curriculum of official knowledges, and learners are required to learn and apply it (Apple, 1993): we are no further on from the days of colonization and the construction of empire. Back to the smooth ground of totalitarianism, but now, rather than do it to Julia, as the terrified Winston said in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2000), we do it to children.

This view/approach is what countless other practising teachers and I disagree with, across the sectors of mainstream and further education, and in some corners of higher education. It is also the concern of academic authors such as Nixon (2008) and Reiss and White (2013) who maintain that schools and other institutions of learning should cater for the expressed needs of their students as well as those of elitist policymakers. But this also would mean an abandonment of the dominant policy’s exclusive focus on achieving certainty, reinforced by dominant forms of research as produced by elitist-oriented researchers in higher education. It would mean, as well as embracing prescribed forms of technical knowledge, also embracing Polanyi’s (1958) knowledge of personal understanding, a reflective level where teachers and students can say: ‘I know what I am doing, and I can explain to you what I know, how I have come to know it, how I intend to use my knowledge and whose interests that knowledge might serve.’ Further, this more reflective approach shifts the ground towards the moral considerations of curriculum theory and practice, and away from only the more technical aspects.

From all these perspectives, traditionalist approaches to scholarship and curriculum research do not serve us well, focused as they are on providing answers and solutions, rather than on asking questions or engaging with dilemmas. They focus on instrumental forms of knowledge – ‘know that’ and ‘know how’, as set out by Ryle (1949). These are the views of Berlin’s hedgehogs: they do not accommodate views of personal knowledge (Polanyi, 1958), an understanding of what we need to know to find our way creatively and dialogically around a world full of others from different contexts and with different traditions. The aim is to achieve certainty and finality; the method is to make statements about causes and effects. And these approaches continue to be espoused, including dominant approaches to curriculum theory, even though their horizons are limited on several counts, including the fact that they adopt for curriculum studies what Collingwood (2013) calls ‘a scissors and paste’ approach. By this, he refers to historians who first ‘decide what we want to know about and then go in search of statements about it, oral or written, purporting to be made by actors in the events concerned’ (ibid.: 257). Rather, in Collingwood’s view, the study of history (and, in this article, the study and practice of curriculum) should be about asking the right questions. Instead of aiming for ‘a logic of propositions’ (that is, statements of fact), a search for truth should take the form of ‘a complex consisting of questions and answers’ (ibid.: 36–7). Polanyi (1983) thought similarly: in his The Tacit Dimension, he challenged a view of the implementation of centrally planned policy as leading to specific outcomes, claiming instead that freedom to think was a prerequisite of academic freedom and the right to plan futures imaginatively and according to the needs of persons.

This entire situation was well described by Donald Schön (1983: 42), in his metaphor of the topography of professional practice landscapes, where, he says:

There is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern.

The question then is: should teachers and other practitioners stay on the high ground, dealing with matters of theory, which are relatively unimportant for dealing with everyday matters of importance (but are not seen as theory-related), or should they choose to work in the swampy lowlands, where the main issues are to do with working with today’s problems and finding workable solutions.

These points are, sadly, matters of fact for today’s reality. However, it is time to adopt a more critical perspective, as is the commitment at the heart of action research: if a situation leaves something to be desired, other options are needed about how to change it. It is then apt to link Schön’s metaphor of the hard high ground and the swampy lowlands with one from Wittgenstein, who spoke about the smooth and rough ground of practices: while the smooth ground might be found on Schön’s high ground, the swampy lowlands represent something rougher. And for Wittgenstein (2009: 46), staying too long on the smooth surface of the high ground is threatening and makes one lose their purchase on reality:

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

But returning to the rough ground also brings challenges and decisions. The task now becomes to check one’s own commitments towards the current situation and decide whether, if any element is unsatisfactory, what to do about it. It is to highlight the need to follow Latour’s (2004) advice and turn matters of fact into matters of concern and ask, ‘How can an unsatisfactory situation be changed?’

But returning to the rough ground means wearing practical, theory-lined boots because it is littered with stories from experience (see Dunne, 1993). It is then the task of educators to listen to the voices of experience and learn about what curriculum means for others. Box 1 presents a story from experience to show how and why this should be the case.

Yet views about practice-based theory and person-centred curricula run on to a different kind of rough ground when they meet up with dominant views about what knowledge should be taught, how this might be done, and how the knowledge should be used. Donald Schön made this point, too, in 1995: he was referring to a ‘scholarship of enquiry’ or ‘the new scholarship’ found in Boyer (1990), which argued for a form of teaching that would encourage enquiry learning. A curriculum based on this view would involve:

• a ‘scholarship of integration’, the putting together of isolated facts across disciplines and putting them into a relevant context

• a ‘scholarship of application’, an understanding of how knowledge might be applied to relevant problems

• a ‘scholarship of teaching’, which begins with what the teacher knows, and means ‘not only transmitting knowledge but transforming and extending it as well’ (Schön, 1995: 27).

According to Schön (ibid.), abiding by these criteria would involve teachers doing ‘a form of action research, with norms of its own which will conflict with the norms of technical rationality’, a form of knowledge that focuses on instrumental aspects. And given that technical rationality is still widely acknowledged as the preferred form of knowledge of the modern research university, and therefore by default permeates received theories of curriculum, it conflicts with what is widely held as teachers’ practice-based knowledge. Schön said that this would lead to an epistemological battle, but it would be a: ‘battle of snails’, ‘proceeding so slowly that you have to look very carefully to see it going on. But it is happening nonetheless’ (ibid.: 32).

Yes, it is happening, with action research. It is usually held to have started in the 1940s, with the work of Kurt Lewin and others, working in the US (although it actually began much earlier than that with the work of scholars such as John Dewey in the US and Reg Revans in Wales); and then, in the UK, developed apace in the 1970s through the work of Lawrence Stenhouse and John Elliott. Their view was that teachers and students could research together in action how to improve what they were doing and use their knowledge for social benefit. The rationale for the work was throughout grounded in an enquiring approach, an attitude of not-knowing and wanting to find out. A key feature also was the idea of critique: if a situation was unsatisfactory, it could be changed. Both Stenhouse and Elliott encouraged teachers to find ways actively to use the power of critique for developing new ways of teaching to encourage learners to learn according to their own strengths. This in turn involved their teaching young people how to critique and to implement strategies for creating the kind of world in which they wished to live. The work was highly successful, and it had lasting implications for how curriculum might be theorized (Elliott, 1998) and for their ideas about teachers as researchers.

However, serious questions arise about the potential of action research for sustainable school and curriculum development. While the views of Stenhouse and Elliott about ‘teachers as researchers’ did prove highly influential at the time, and remain so to this day, it needs to be remembered that there is a big difference between content (‘the what’) and process (‘the how’). Although, at the time, action research was shown to be powerful as a process, especially for those in direct contact with learning contexts, it was never mainstreamed by policymakers as an equal partner, simply because dominant approaches maintained control over the content of curriculum and promoted it as a set of approved knowledges, which itself required a specific objectives-focused form of teaching. Further, the 1980s saw the establishment of a systematic policy of increasing control on schools and curriculum and form of research, by the then and later governments, including key members of the intelligentsia. And action research itself became a casualty in this drive: it is well documented how, since the 1980s, it was co-opted and mainstreamed in a form that suits dominant policy orientations (Herr and Anderson, 2005; McNiff, 2014). Thus, a nascent revolution in terms of establishing teachers’ freedom to consult with their learners about what they wished to learn for their own imagined futures was put down by officialdom; all things curriculum remained firmly under the control of officially legitimized knowers. Back to the sure smooth ground: back to the certainty of a closed form of thinking.