Our webinar with Professors John Morgan and David Lambert took place in the context of the New Zealand curriculum refresh and discusses the changing perspectives on the place of knowledge in the curriculum. They describe the rewriting of a curriculum as a pivotal moment in education, as it involves one generation seeking to redefine what a nation needs to know. It can be a controversial process as it asks the question of what, and whose, knowledge is worth knowing, raising questions such as the role and status of global versus local knowledge.
The curriculum process also becomes problematic when the knowledge landscape becomes fraught and contested. While knowledge was once guarded in universities and books, now it is produced in many places and disseminated in many ways. Examples of some new forms of knowledge dissemination include AI, ‘fake news’, or even the debates over the safety of vaccinations during the Covid-19 pandemic. John and David discuss the two main ways in which the question of what to include in the curriculum has been addressed in the past, commonly referred to as ‘old’ and ‘new’ education.
Old education
Old education centered around a knowledge-heavy curriculum. It considered there to be absolute, fixed, and unchanging truths. It contained certainties and binary right and wrong. Students might read identifiable cause and effect explanations and be steered away from complexity. Knowledge was taken as given and the curriculum’s authority was accepted without question. In other words, the curriculum focused on hegemonic input.
New education
New education went in the other direction and focused largely on output, on the learner and how they use information, on their ability to problem solve and adapt. This system is accused of being careless with knowledge and as posing the risk of ‘learnification’, a term coined by Professor Gert Biesta to explain a focus on act of learning itself, rather than on what students are learning and why.
‘Future 3’
John and David suggest instead a third future, which can be seen as a synthesis of old and new education. They argue for a curriculum which takes knowledge seriously and considers the world as knowable, but which also is cognisant of other ways of being. In this scenario, knowledge would not be a given but rather something to be engaged with and questioned. Future 3 requires high quality and productive engagement by teachers and students with powerful disciplinary knowledge, which they could then relate to other, legitimate ways of knowing. It requires teachers to engage with knowledge questions such as:
- How do we know this?
- Who said this?
- What purpose does this serve?
- In whose interest is this?
In this way knowledge could be reintroduced to the curriculum but without the absolutes of the old education, while retaining the questioning role of the learner from the new education.
