Implementing Cross-Curricular Themes (1994)

Keith Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138477100
• eBook ISBN: 9781351105385
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Published in 1994, this book was designed to help primary and secondary school teachers to develop, introduce, manage and monitor the cross-curricular themes of the National Curriculum. It provides realistic and manageable suggestions about the aims of cross-curricular work, curriculum building and management, appropriate teaching and learning styles, assessment, evaluation and record keeping.

Completed in the wake of the Government's full acceptance of the recommendations of the Dearing Report, Implementing Cross-Curricular Themes will help all those responsible for their school's delivery of this important dimension of the National Curriculum. The readership thus includes primary and secondary teachers and subject coordinators, heads and deputies and all involved in advising and training such staff.

Chapter One
The Aims of the Cross-Curricular Themes

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. (Marx)

Society has devolved upon schools in large part the responsibility to prepare its future citizens to cope with change — the abilities to stand upright when all around is changing. There is a need for students to be adaptable and flexible as never before. The school has a task to prepare students for life outside and beyond school.

In an era which is characterised by change the need for personal and social education is more pressing than ever. If students are to understand a changing society and are to become active members of it, then a passive, academic education has to be complemented by an active, enquiring education which is grounded in the issues of everyday life. Education should empower students and societies to shape their own and collective futures. Empowerment — the ability of individuals and groups to realise and enrich their own futures in a free and egalitarian society — sets its own agenda. This comprises a questioning of values, legitimacy and the politics of decision-making. It examines equality, privilege, advantage and disadvantage. The school curriculum is inescapably political. This is its excitement and its frustration! Decisions on its content are not arbitrary; they represent values, purposes and interests. Education is the process of rendering these transparent.

In this process it is not enough that students should possess a body of knowledge. They also need to know what to do with it and how it enables them to be active participants in society. Indeed a lesser known line from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach than that which prefaced this chapter begins: ‘Social life is essentially practical’.

The content and pedagogy of the cross-curricular themes, as part of every child’s entitlement to the national curriculum of England and Wales, constitute a major means by which individual and collective empowerment can be realised, as they concern raising students’ awareness of major contemporary issues. The importance of the cross-curricular themes in the school curriculum cannot be overstated. In some part this is recognized by the publication of the eight Curriculum Guidance documents by the National Curriculum Council in 1989 and 1990. This chapter outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the five Curriculum Guidance documents which set out the cross-curricular themes and indicates how the cross-curricular themes can serve individual and social empowerment.

The national curriculum meets change by providing a centrally prescribed, subject-based, uniform curriculum which is academic in character and which is legitimated by the force of statute. In this curriculum one can see that some types of knowledge are elevated to a higher status than others. At the top of the ladder come the core subjects of the national curriculum; next come the foundation subjects. At the bottom of the ladder come the cross-curricular themes, lacking the force of law to ensure that they find a place in the school curriculum. A subject-based, academic, curriculum which relies on the written word and is formally assessed does little to upset the societal status quo¹. It is ‘socially reproductive’ rather than ‘socially transformative’.

Even though there is formal equality of opportunity of access to an entitlement curriculum, writers from Bourdieu (1976) to Halsey (1992) demonstrate that providing equality of access to an academic curriculum is insufficient to produce equality of outcomes for students. By dint of their different class, gender, racial backgrounds and possession of ‘cultural capital’ students will take up an academic curriculum differentially. Those for whom school knowledge is an extension of the knowledge that they receive at home are advantaged over students for whom school knowledge represents an alien culture. One can question the motives of a government which elevates the socially reproductive elements of the national curriculum and lowers the status of its socially transformative elements.² Those areas which will challenge the societal status quo are accorded low status, those that will not, receive high status. Indeed, as if to avert challenge to the status quo, some contentious social issues are not mentioned in the national curriculum, for example media studies, peace education, women’s studies.

It is in the low-status cross-curricular themes that the potential to meet the demands of a changing society find their clearest expression. This can be evidenced in several ways. The content of the cross-curricular themes trades in ‘dangerous knowledge’ (Giroux, 1983), ie that knowledge which can challenge traditional values and assumptions. They are inextricably and unavoidably linked to the values and practices in the wider society. They have external referents which cannot be bounded within the school, as they explore community links. They examine political decision-making and infrastructures of society. Their subject matter is not confined to academicism but to politics and its ramifications in the society beyond school Their subject matter deals with sensitive issues — the politics of ecological and environmental decision-making and health care, employment and membership of a capitalist society, being a citizen of several communities. Go through the Curriculum Guidance documents for the cross-curricular themes and you will find that it is in these that the seeds of social change and an examination of the social fabric of everyday life are sown. Their impact can be unsettling and uncomfortable. Little wonder it is, perhaps, that they are relegated to a non-statutory, non-examined, low status area of the school curriculum by a government with a history of interventionist policies on the curriculum. Since the Education Reform Act of 1988 (DES, 1988a) the government in office has exerted considerable control of the objectives, content and assessment of the curriculum. Clearly the notion of a broad entitlement curriculum which every state school has a duty to provide might be more empowering that its predecessors. The question, however, is whether this is sufficient to guarantee full student empowerment in a changing world.

The national curriculum redefines student empowerment as the achievement of somebody else’s prescriptions. The curriculum is a ‘given’, its purposes, values and goals are not susceptible to debate, the teacher simply decides how best to teach it. The only area where prescription gives way to suggestion is in the cross-curricular themes by dint of their non-statutory status. It is in these that greater freedoms can occur.

However, let me not be merely negative about the national curriculum for it is concerned to foster understanding of curriculum content. It is not simply rote learning in the tradition of Gradgrind. The documents of the national curriculum are replete with terms such as ‘understand’, ‘identify’, ‘know that’, ‘describe’ etc.

However there remains a requirement that students will still receive a prespecified curriculum. The national curriculum signally understates the need for critique and interrogation of issues and of the legitimacy of values; indeed it regards as unquestionable its prescriptions for curricular knowledge. The agenda of the national curriculum remains unaltered.³

If we want to develop students’ adaptability and their ability to behave proactively in a changing world then simply receiving and understanding curricula has to be complemented by a critique of curricula and the issues and values implicit in them. A concern with empowerment — individual and collective — will require a critique of ideology and of whose and what interests are being served by curricula. The message here is the one from Marx which headed this chapter. Understanding has to be accompanied by critique in a climate of change.⁴

The contents of the cross-curricular themes are a potent means for the development of empowerment, for the topics that they cover contain knowledge that has the potential to challenge the status quo (outlined earlier). If teachers and students are to do justice to the politically and ideologically problematical areas of the cross-curricular themes it is unavoidable that they will have to engage questions of legitimacy. They will have to expose and debate the interests of those possessed of power — political, economic, gender-related etc. — as they are introduced in the cross-curricular themes.

Whilst the cross-curricular themes have potential for empowerment it is necessary to devote specific additional attention to issues of legitimacy, ideology critique, politics, power and decision-making if this potential is to be realized. Curriculum planners can turn to their own advantage the non-statutory nature of the cross-curricular themes by introducing these sensitive issues into the curriculum.

It is not only in decisions about curriculum content that empowerment lies. One could have a curriculum whose content was politically and ideologically explosive yet whose explosive potential was never realized in practice. Students could study ‘dangerous’ knowledge in a way which defuses critique and empowerment by engaging in understanding rather than critical exploration of issues. What is required is attention to pedagogy, for it is in human relationships, interactions and ways of addressing knowledge that the potential for empowerment in the cross-curricular themes can be released.

The Curriculum Guidance documents suggest that appropriate teaching and learning styles are premissed on active, experiential learning. They argue for links to the community outside the school to be made and that contacts with organizations and groups outside schools are necessary. Further, they suggest that collaborative, problem-solving approaches should be adopted. Whilst these are discussed more fully in chapter four they are mentioned here because they indicate that not only does the curriculum content of the cross-curricular themes address referents beyond the school but that the pedagogy also suggests the need for links to be drawn between the school and the community. Hence students will be involved in participatory forms of learning, learning about democracy and group membership by working democratically and in groups (cf Harwood, 1985).

Curriculum content and pedagogy will need to combine to interrogate the content of the cross-curricular themes in order to develop student empowerment. In particular the planning and implementation of the cross-curricular themes will have to enable students and teachers to expose and debate the values implicit in these themes as they are addressed in the Curriculum Guidance documents and to indicate how a less partial, partisan interpretation of the themes might be undertaken. This is the object of the remainder of this chapter, where each theme is examined for the values implicit in it. These are exposed, critically examined and then, for each theme, a further set of values is established which, it is suggested, enable empowerment to be developed. It is argued that for each document an alternative, more empowering interpretation can be developed. The discussion indicates how this can be realized.

A critique of the Curriculum Guidance documents

During 1989 and 1990 the NCC issued a series of eight Curriculum Guidance documents, principally to cover the cross-curriculum area of the national curriculum:

• A Framework for the Primary Curriculum (NCC, 1989a);
• A Curriculum for All (NCC, 1989b);
• The Whole Curriculum (NCC, 1990a);
• Education for Economic and Industrial Understanding (NCC, 1990b);
• Health Education (NCC, 1990c);
• Careers Education and Guidance (NCC, 1990d);
• Environmental Education (NCC, 1990e);
• Education for Citizenship (NCC, 1990f).

At first blush the five cross-curricular themes mentioned as the last five of these documents possess the empowering potential alluded to earlier for they concern life and decision making in a changing world. They concern knowledge of (a) the economic motors of society and their effects on the democratic process, (b) how political and economic decisions affect the quality of life — environmentally, personally and interpersonally, and (c) the powers which an understanding of citizenship can bring. However, as will be seen below, for a full realization of their empowering potential the cross-curricular themes will need to add critique to mere understanding. What follows is an analysis of the Curriculum Guidance documents which deliberately intends to show that, though they provide a valuable starting point for developing student empowerment in a changing world, a ‘different story’ can be told about each cross-curricular theme. A full and rounded experience of the cross-curricular themes will need to address not only the story as it appears in the Curriculum Guidance documents but alternative interpretations of issues delineated in them.⁵

Education for Economic and Industrial Understanding

There is a recognition by the NCC that this theme ‘involves controversial issues such as government economic policy and the impact of economic activity on the environment’ (NCC, 1990b, p. 4). However in the same paragraph the message is given unequivocally that young minds should be educated to enable pupils to be embryonic capitalists in a free market, materialist economy:

Education for economic and industrial understanding aims to help pupils make decisions such as how to organise their finances and how to spend their money … It prepares pupils for their future roles as producers, consumers and citizens in a democracy. Pupils need to understand enterprise and wealth creation and develop entrepreneurial skills (ibid., p. 4).

Indeed the tone of the NCC carries all the optimism of a wealthy populace whose only contribution to the economy is through work:

They will face choices about how they contribute to the economy through their work. They...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The Aims of the Cross-Curricular Themes
• 2 The Cross-Curricular Themes as Curriculum Statements
• 3 Approaches to Planning Cross-Curricular Themes
• 4 Delivering the Cross-Curricular Themes
• 5 Assessment and the Cross-Curricular Themes
• 6 Cross-Curricular Themes as Innovations
• 7 Teamwork and Leadership
• 8 Evaluation and the Cross-Curricular Themes
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index