Knowledge, Curriculum and Equity

Social Realist Perspectives

Brian Barrett, Ursula Hoadley, John Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351618823
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In 2008 the first in a series of symposia established a 'social realist' case for 'knowledge' as an alternative to the relativist tendencies of the constructivist, post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches dominant in the sociology of education. The second symposium focused on curriculum, and the development of a theoretical language grounded in social realism to talk about issues of knowledge and curriculum. Finally, the third symposium brought together researchers in a broad range of contexts to build on these ideas and arguments and, with a concerted empirical focus, bring these social realist ideas and arguments into conversation with data.

Knowledge, Curriculum and Equity: Social Realist Perspectives contains the work of the third symposium, where the strengths and gaps in the social realist approach are identified and where there is critical recognition of the need to incrementally extend the theories through empirical study. Fundamentally, the problem that social realism is seeking to address is about understanding the social conditions of knowledge production and exchange as well as its structuring in the curriculum and in pedagogy. The central concern is with the on-going social reproduction of inequality through schooling, and exploring whether and how foregrounding specialised knowledge and its access holds the possibility for interrupting it.

This book consists of 13 chapters by different authors working in Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. From very different vantage points the authors focus their theoretical and empirical sights on the assumptions about knowledge that underpin educational processes and the pursuit of more equitable schooling for all.

1

Introduction

Social realist perspectives on knowledge, curriculum and equity

John Morgan, Ursula Hoadley and Brian Barrett

The chapters that make up this book were presented at the Third International Social Realism Symposium held at the University of Cambridge between 29 June and 1 July 2015. This book aims in many respects to follow on from the volumes produced after the first and second symposia (Maton and Moore 2010, Barrett and Rata 2014). The first collection began to establish the social realist case for knowledge as an alternative to the relativist tendencies of constructivist, post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches in the sociology of education. By setting up a false dichotomy between positivist absolutism and the relativism they often endorsed as a response, these approaches served to sideline epistemological questions in educational research. The first volume thus sought to reclaim knowledge as an object of study. It consisted largely of conceptual pieces that combined to theorise a social realist understanding of knowledge and truth residing between the extreme positions of positivism and relativism. The social realist position recognises that knowledge is provisional, fallible and socially produced, but also claims that it has emergent properties and can be judged on its truthfulness and explanatory power, not just on who produces it or who is seen to benefit from it. In other words, the volume marked a shift in focus from whose knowledge to what knowledge, knowledge that is neither relative nor absolute. Social realism then placed knowledge centre stage in educational considerations, restoring to them ‘the very basis of education as a social field of practice’ (Maton and Moore 2010, p. 2).

Having established the epistemological contours of social realism, the second collection drew the theorising more directly in relation to curriculum. Many chapters in the second collection worked to develop a conceptualisation of ‘powerful knowledge’ – a term coined by Michael Young to describe systematic, specialised knowledge that facilitates the imagining of alternatives that extend beyond experience – and its place in curricula and classrooms. The focus on powerful knowledge enabled two things. First, it sharpened the distinction between who produced and had access to knowledge (knowledge of the powerful), and what specialised knowledge could do for those gaining access to it (powerful knowledge). Second, and relatedly, it helped to construct a social justice argument that concentrated not just on the formation of social identities through schooling, but also on epistemic access to specialised knowledge as the key educational process.

In this, the third volume, researchers in a broad range of contexts build on the ideas and arguments introduced in the first two volumes and, with a concerted empirical focus, bring these social realist ideas and arguments into conversation with data. In so doing, the work here identifies strengths and gaps in the social realist approach as well as a critical recognition of the need to incrementally extend the theories to tackle problems not only of knowledge as a structure, but also its relation to curriculum, its manifestation in policy and, critically, its realisation in pedagogy.

Having set out where this book is coming from, this introductory chapter seeks next to take stock of the current ‘state of the nation’ in social realist work in education. It starts with the subtitle – social realist perspectives – and attempts to place the development of ideas and research associated with social realism in a broad historical and geographical context. This is important, since it helps to make sense of the ways in which the three terms that form the main title of the book – knowledge, curriculum and equity – have become central concepts in the development of social realism.

Social realism

Social realism developed in response to other influential perspectives in the sociology of education. Although this history may be familiar to some readers (who will no doubt jump ahead), we start by providing an account of the origins of social realism since, we think, it helps to understand the trajectory that work in this area has taken to date and the various responses (not always welcoming) that social realism has provoked.

In English-speaking countries, the sociology of education emerged as a sub-field of its parent discipline. Sociology itself emerged as a response to the experiences of industrialisation and urbanisation that drove the shift from ‘traditional’ (i.e. agrarian) to ‘modern’ (i.e. industrial) economies and societies. An enduring concern was how, in conditions of rapid social change, social order could be maintained; this is a question that concerned Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. An important question centred on the role that ‘institutions’ such as schools played in reproducing social order.

The political context for this is important. The period after the Second World War was dominated in countries such as the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand by a social democratic consensus, which held that increased access to schooling was an effective means of enhancing social mobility and providing equality of opportunity. This resulted in a broad acceptance of teachers’ right to maintain control over curricula and pedagogy, the tenets of educational ‘progressivism’, and a belief in the potential educability of all children. Sociology played an important part in this programme of social reform, and sociologists of education worked within the tradition of ‘political arithmetic’ and ‘status attainment’, which were concerned to collect data and assess how far governments were delivering on their goals of access and equality. As Basil Bernstein (1975) summarised:

The debates of the 1950s focused upon the organizational structures of the schools, the social origins of measured intelligence and its relation to attainment, within the wider issues of manpower requirements and social equality.

(p. 140)

It is worth noting that, when Bernstein wrote these words, sociology and the sociology of education lacked both status and organisational infrastructure. In Britain, for example, apart from the London School of Economics and the University of Leicester, there were few viable departments of sociology and only two major sociologists – Jean Floud and A. H. Halsey – engaged in research or systematic teaching in the sociology of education. They developed the subject within a structural-functionalist approach, which regarded education as one functioning part of the total society. Originally developed in the field of British anthropology through the work of researchers such as Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, structural-functionalism came to dominate the field of sociology for some time, especially after its adoption by Talcott Parsons in the United States. Parsons positioned the school as playing an instrumental role in the function of society by fostering consensus and socialising, sorting and selecting pupils for their adult roles on the basis of merit. According to Bernstein, the emphasis on functionalism ensured that the sociology of education at that time ‘bore the hallmarks of British applied sociology: atheoretical, pragmatic, descriptive, and policy-focused’ (1975, p. 141).

This applied focus was what afforded the sociology of education its ‘jurisdiction’ – its capacity to speak and make judgements about the processes of schooling. However, as the economic and socio-political conditions that allowed for educational expansion deteriorated, there arose a series of critiques of the ‘old’ sociology of education, which, it was argued, gave the impression of society as an ordered and functional system in which everybody unquestioningly played their assigned role. This represented an idealised view of society and education’s role in it that was increasingly unable to offer a realistic representation of how schools and classrooms actually worked. In the United States, it also focused on individual achievement and ability in large-scale status attainment studies. The technocratic personnel of the ‘old’ sociology were out of kilter with a youthful society where boundaries seemed to be breaking down.

It was in this context that the ‘new’ sociology of education was developed. In Britain, the 1964 Robbins Report identified the need for a major expansion of university education and stated the desirability of placing the training of teachers in university departments of education. In this period, new sociological perspectives – including Marxist, phenomenological, symbolic interactionist and ethnomethodological approaches – were gaining influence in the United States in response to the ‘individualist turn’ and the focus on quantifying individual achievement, mobility and, later, school effects. This series of ‘misfit sociologies’ (Pearson 1975) viewed humans as the creators of meanings; focused on micro- rather than macro-sociology; examined the assumptions underlying social order and sought to ‘problematize’ social categories; distrusted quantification; and was concerned to interpret rather than simply describe the social world. These developments coincided with a period of student and worker activism and as departments and course offerings (required for those pursuing teacher certification) in educational studies were rapidly proliferating, coalescing in university schools of education and teacher education programmes in accordance with the ‘professionalisation’ of teaching, thus expanding the ‘audience’ for the new sociology of education (see Menter 2016 for a discussion of how these ideas influenced teacher education).

It was in this context that there emerged a concern with social control or the ways in which schools were organised in a manner that served to reproduce social inequality. A good indicator of the difference between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ can be found in Michael Young’s review in the New Society of Marten Shipman’s The Sociology of the School (Shipman was an influential figure in the ‘old’ sociology of education):

[The book] will give students a one-sided and misleading idea of what sociologists are trying to do…. Shipman’s notion of sociology, alas all too common in the field, does lead one to ask the question whether such a book is worse than no book at all…. [I]t is one of the myths of conventional wisdom that organisations can be thought of as having goals, independently of the goals of the various groups and individuals of which they consist.

(Young 1968, p. 22)

The main criticism that Young made of Shipman’s approach was that it suggested that organisations themselves had objectives independent of those of the individuals and social groups who comprise them and who may have values, political viewpoints and aspirations of their own, whereas in reality, it was powerful groups who were able to impose their vision of the organisation on others. The task of the sociologist of education was to get inside the ‘black box’ of the school and classroom and understand the politics of knowledge. This, of course, was the position that was taken up in what has come to be regarded as the ‘founding’ text of the new sociology of education, Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (Young 1971). The new sociology of education suggested that it could not be assumed that schooling was, per se, a ‘good thing’. Indeed, the experience of educational reform was not suggesting this and, by the mid-1970s, it had become across the political spectrum de rigueur to talk of the ‘crisis’ in schooling. It is important to note the similarity of ideas between British and American writers at this time: Knowledge and Control provided a link to the writings of the ‘reconceptualist’ school of curriculum theory (e.g. Apple 1979, Pinar 2004; see Wexler [1987] for an account of these developments).

The new sociology of education became quickly embroiled in debates that were taking place concerning the work of neo-Marxists, inspired by the publication in English of Louis Althusser’s (1971) essay on Ideological State Apparatuses, which suggested that teachers were part of the repressive apparatus of the state (Hammersley 2016). There seemed little room for manoeuvre for ‘progressive’ educators. This was a time when the economic conditions that had sustained post-war educational expansion were changing, and teachers were increasingly being constructed as a problem requiring state control. Thus, by the time Young and Whitty put together their edited collection titled Society, State and Schooling in 1977, they were pessimistic about the potential for teachers to intervene to change the nature of knowledge on offer in classrooms and predicted an era of state definition of knowledge.

It is important to remind readers at this point that these debates about the new sociology of knowledge were conducted at the left or progressive end of the political spectrum. Indeed, they drew inspiration and made links with the cultural left and the new left, which meant in the United Kingdom that they were linked to other centres such as the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (at the University of Birmingham) and the Open University, which popularised many of the writings through its courses for teachers. The new sociology of education was linked to debates about teaching and schooling, and especially the small but vibrant alternative educational press, as indicated by an important but now little referenced edited collection Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge (Whitty and Young 1976). It had its main institutional base in the teacher-training colleges. This was a problematic location, especially in the context of, first, the fall in the school population from the mid-1970s and, second, the crisis in teacher training, which meant closures and redundancies, added to which was the ideological assault on sociology as a discipline. Consequently, the sociology of education once again took new directions from the 1980s. On the one hand, there was a move to locate sociology of education closer to the field of cultural studies, which was well suited to the preferred method of Pierre Bourdieu, whose book Distinction was published in English translation in 1984 and inspired ethnographies which allowed for a focus on the cultures of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. On the other hand, there was a move towards policy-sociology, with the result that the implications for teachers and curriculum developers of research within the policy-oriented sociology of education were less obvious.

These moves ensured that work within the sociology of education was strongly influenced by the theoretical developments within social theory and cultural studies, which looked to French and German cultural theory and operated in the space cleared by constructivist philosophies that focused on standpoint and positionality. Much of this work was difficult to translate and apply in school and classroom settings, with the result that curriculum studies took a turn itself, moving towards critical pedagogy. There are other important strands to this story, not least the growing trend within teaching towards the idea that knowledge is relative and school subjects are arbitrary. Still, Dreeben reminds us that although broad shifts can be discerned, there was a lack of an incremental development in the sociology of education, that bodies of research in the field were, and still are, characterised by their ‘discontinuous and in many ways non-cumulative contributions’ (1994, p. 7).

It was in this context that social realism emerged as a response to these developments.¹ An early articulation of this was Rob Moore’s (1996) paper ‘Back to the Future’, then Moore’s paper with Johan Muller on the ‘discourse of “voice” ’, which critiqued the tendency within sociology of education to reduce knowledge to experience and take truth claims as representing and expressing no more than the ‘standpoints’ and ‘interests of dominant social groups’ (Moore and Muller 1999, p. 189), Young’s ‘knowledge of the powerful’ as previously referenced. This prompted a response by Young (2000), who endorsed Moore and Muller’s efforts, but argued that their position suggested no necessary role for the sociology of knowledge, which he regarded as essential to any serious programme of educational research. In the series of arguments around knowledge that ensued (Moore’s [2000] paper ‘For Knowledge’, Muller’s [2000] book Reclaiming Knowledge, Young and Moore’s [2001] paper ‘Knowledge and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education: Towards a Reconceptualization’), a focus on knowledge within the sociology of education was asserted. Nevertheless, the terms are not settled, and it remains true that the discipline is still dominated by concerns with identity politics and a version of social justice that is based on ensuring that all students ‘recognise’ themselves and their lives in the curriculum. According to Moore (2004), the reason for this is perhaps not difficult to discern: the default settings of educational discourse associate progressivism with a loose epistemology, while arguments for knowledge have been appropriated by conservatives such as E. D. Hirsch’s core knowledge and those think tanks concerned to return to ‘basics’.

The intellectual trajectory detailed in previous sections suggests that social realist writers have engaged with and sought to intervene in debates within the wider educational field around knowledge, curriculum and equity (the three terms that form the subtitle of this volume). These terms are briefly introduced in the three sections that follow.

Knowledge

Early in his work, Basil Bernstein wrote of the sociology of education that it should seek ‘less an allegiance to an approach, and more a dedication to a problem’ (Bernstein 1977, p. 171). The problem that social realism is seeking to address has come into clearer focus through sustained conceptual and empirical work over the past two decades. Fundamentally, it is about understanding the social conditions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword: from ‘social realism’ to ‘knowledge in education’
• 1 Introduction: social realist perspectives on knowledge, curriculum and equity
• Section I Knowledge, curriculum and the social realist project
• Section II Knowledge and the structuring of the curriculum
• Section III Curriculum structure and its effects
• Section IV Pedagogy and the structuring of knowledge
• Index