Improving Teaching and Learning In the Core Curriculum

Kate Ashcroft, Professor Kate Ashcroft, John Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138420830
• eBook ISBN: 9781135709464
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focusing on the core subjects of Mathematics, English and Science, the book addresses the political agenda in which the core curriculum takes place, and provides practical information and guidance on teaching the three subjects. The book briefly traces the history of these core subjects, examines what is meant by 'curriculum knowledge', takes apart the classroom and educational issues before offering advice on handling curriculum change and tackling new approaches to teaching. It helps teachers develop their skills through enquiry tasks, case studies, questions and suggested further reading.

Chapter 1

Common sense and scientific sense

John Lee

Kenneth Baker was one the earliest users of the term ‘core’ in the context of the National Curriculum. However, the term ‘basic subjects’ or ‘the basics’ had already been in common parlance at this time. In recent years we have seen a swing back to the term basics to cover literacy and numeracy, but Kenneth Baker’s core curriculum included science, and the recent emphasis by this government on ICT arguably makes it part of the core. It is not irrelevant to worry about what terms we use. When we talk about basic subjects we are saying that these are subjects that incorporate the skills and knowledge essential for success in school and later life. The idea of a core leads us to consider a body of knowledge and skills that will be shared by all pupils and in some way be at the centre of the school curriculum. We might argue that use of the term ‘basic’ leads us to see primary education not as a distinct but necessary stage in the pupils’ school life, but as the elementary building blocks on which future schooling depends. In this second sense primary education becomes a preparation for the much more significant secondary stage. This sort of idea is encapsulated in the notion of elementary and secondary education, the terms used in England and Wales until 1944. In short, the arguments that led to identification of English, mathematics and science as core subjects are subtle and varied.

The idea that there is an essential core curriculum now seems like common sense but is it? We need to remind ourselves that a different core curriculum could be constructed. It all depends on what we decide is significant and important. Not so long ago very different ideas of what the core of the primary curriculum should be was current. In 1963 Sybil Marshall in An Experiment in Education described her work in a small rural school. Her focus is not subjects but the way children learn and how they represent things.

‘Those who regret the wholesale instruction methods of their own schooldays, no doubt regret the lack of the bedside manner of the modern physician. They would be better employed spending their time thanking God that there is less and less need for either.

(Marshall, 1963)

Enquiry task 1
How can science be justified as a core subject if the arguments for English and mathematics are that these subjects provide the skills needed For learning all other subjects!
Make a list of the things taught in your school and identify them in the following manner.
Subject/area of knowledge	Essential for everyday life	Necessary for a decent job/life style	Essential for higher level learning

Enquiry task 1 How can science be justified as a core subject if the arguments for English and mathematics are that these subjects provide the skills needed for learning all other subjects? Make a list of the things taught in your school and identify them in the following manner; Subject/area of knowledge Essential for everyday life Necessary for a decent job/life style Essential for higher level learning

As you can see, Sybil Marshall had little time for whole class teaching. Nor did she think subjects needed to be taught separately. She argued that the best learning comes from the children and that children learn best through the expressive arts. In fact she went beyond this and was totally dismissive of fixed subjects and fixed timetables.

‘No one has the right to shut the delight of English Literature up in a forty minute box, anyway, and to know that Hymn Practice has willy-nilly, to last forty minutes because the timetable says so is enough to make any child consign any and every hymn writer to perdition.

(Marshall, op. cit.)

This diversion to the recent past should remind us that both the idea of a core, and the core subjects themselves are constructed by people, not fixed and given. This is usually referred to as the social construction of knowledge.

How is a core subject constructed?

If you look at the National Curriculum documents for English, mathematics and science you will see that what counts as knowledge of these subjects is laid out in the programmes of study. It is easy to forget that this document was fought over by a variety of groups of people, each group with its own interests. In other words, the core subjects of the National Curriculum were fought over, and subjected to revision in the wake of the Dearing Report.

ENQUIRY TASK 2

Compare the way that the content of mathematics, science and English are set out in the original curriculum documents and the 1995 revision.

You can see from this that in the case of mathematics and science in particular the way that the content is organised has been radically changed.

Why do you think this has come about?

In what sense are primary mathematics and science different now from 1998?

Each of the core subjects exists not just as core subjects of the school curriculum but also as subjects of study in universities and colleges. If we look at each in turn we can see how they have been constructed, more important we can show how they are often the sites of fierce disputes. It is easy to think that the content of these subjects and how they should be studied is a matter of common agreement but this is not the case.

English provides the clearest example of how subjects are fought over by various interest groups. Often people refer to the past, when it is claimed the content of English was well established. Students of English studied the classics of English literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Wordsworth and Dickens, for instance. Of course this ignores the fact that English is really quite a new university subject. It came into the universities only at the end of the nineteenth century, and in Oxford was considered to be rather too easy so all students were made to study Anglo-Saxon. If we look at the course in English on offer in universities and colleges today we can see a bewildering variety of content. Students may study a traditional course organised on chronological lines, Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, or study contemporary popular literature including Batman comics. It is little wonder that there is such a fierce dispute about the content of National Curriculum English when those who study the subject at higher levels are unable to agree on its nature. A good example of the way in which there is no easy agreement about English can be culled from school. I can remember tremendous staffroom battles over whether it was proper to allow children to read comics. Generally it was felt they were acceptable at playtime but not during class time, although for many children they were the one thing they read with enthusiasm and enjoyment. You might like to consider why Enid Blyton has been the subject of constant criticism from some teachers and librarians, not just on the grounds of sexism, but on the grounds that it is not real literature.

While it might appear that mathematics is more securely fixed, that there is a common agreement about its content and methods, this is not the case. Consider this story, a true one. A publican of my acquaintance employs students as parttime bar staff. He finds them pleasant and quick to learn but he says they cannot add and subtract in their head. What do you teach them now in school, he asks? Surely a student at a university should be able to add the price of a few drinks quickly and accurately and give the correct change? My acquaintance holds a view about the essential nature of mathematics that is not uncommon. However mathematics is not simply about arithmetic, it is about much more than this. In fact mathematicians study a wide variety of things many of which have little direct relevance to everyday life. Producing a proof of Fermat’s last theorem will not help us to add the price of a round of drinks or give the correct change but it is clearly mathematics. Recently we have been told that pupils in England are not as successful in mathematics as pupils in the Pacific Rim countries. The press and politicians have argued that it is the neglect of particular aspects of mathematics that has caused this. What is happening is that mathematics is being constructed as knowledge and skills with numbers. Successful child mathematicians are not those who can solve mathematical problems but manipulate numbers to solve problems set by the commercial world. What we can see is that mathematics is being constructed as a much more restricted subject by the National Numeracy Strategy which will be discussed in detail in a later chapter.

Science is usually thought of as objective and neutral. In the public eye and in the eye of the child, scientists are seen as cold ratiocinators. Our students often ask school children to describe a scientist and their views are surprisingly like those that appear in popular fiction. A white-coated unemotional male working with mysterious apparatus. How can science be socially constructed? Surely it deals with the laws of nature and proceeds in a fixed manner? Really nothing could be further from the truth. One way to define scientific knowledge is to describe it as the result of what scientists do. In the past, for instance, there was one subject—chemistry—now we have organic and inorganic chemistry, colour chemistry, the chemistry of living things, biochemistry and so on.

It might be better to define science as methods and procedures connected to the creation of theories. When children really engage in science they do all of these things. I can illustrate this with an anecdote. A student was telling some Year 3 children the story of Noah’s Ark and she used some pictures to help her. In one of the pictures the ark was shown floating and because of the way the picture had been drawn the water appeared to be curved. The children argued that the earth could not be round because the water would fall off, but in the end accepted that it was on the evidence of pictures from outer space. In scientific terms, they treated that as adequate evidence. More problematic was how the water stayed fixed on a sphere and they came to the conclusion that somehow the earth sucked. What the children had done was generate a theory by analogy from the evidence they had. Such work does not fit easily a view that science is somehow fixed and immutable knowledge to be acquired.

ENQUIRY TASK 3

Compare children’s explanations of natural phenomena with the simplified explanations offered in children’s scientific textbooks.

For instance you might ask:

■ why do things fall to the ground when we drop them?

■ why don’t objects rise when they are dropped?

Compare their answers with simple textbook explanations.

Which are the most profound?

Common sense, science and knowledge

In the first part of this chapter we have shown that, rather than being fixed and immutable, the core subjects are socially constructed. However we do not mean that anything can be labelled as science or mathematics, only that the content of these subjects changes over time, and is somewhat dependent on the beliefs people hold. In this section we consider a model of what and how things can be learnt. In doing this we draw on some well known ideas.

There used to be an apocryphal character, the man on the Clapham omnibus, who was appealed to as a fount of ordinary wisdom and knowledge. What lies behind this is the idea that there is a common sense that cuts through jargon and academic specialism and reveals the world as it really is. It is a very attractive notion, but is deeply flawed. In fact common sense is often not sense at all. On many occasions common sense is just plain wrong or, worse, simply an expression of deeply held prejudicial views. Let us look at some examples to illustrate this.

In the case of English almost everybody has a view about the nature and purpose of grammar. At one point it was seriously suggested that teachers should spend time correcting children’s use of English in the playground as well as in the classroom. What underpinned this risible notion was and is the idea that grammar is a set of prescriptive rules that can be applied in all circumstances. These deeply held common-sense ideas about correctness, and any deviation from this borders on the ‘criminal’. In fact it is based on ignorance of language study and of the nature of grammar. In addition common sense usually mixes up aspects of pronunciation with grammar. We regularly hear that children’s language is slovenly, that for instance they use the double negative. Sentences such as ‘I didn’t do nothing’, are picked out as examples of this. Our man on the Clapham omnibus when asked to explain why this is incorrect will often say that two negatives make a positive and therefore what the child says is contradictory. The two negatives rule comes not from English grammar but from mathematics. In fact nobody is confused or believes that the child means to say she or he did something. In a similar manner the dropped ‘h’ is picked on as an aspect of slovenly speech, whereas the absence of ‘h’, the aspirant, is a feature of most English speech as is the use of the double negative. In these examples common sense may be damaging, in that judgments are being made about an individual’s speech: something at the core of their self-esteem. Michael Halliday, the distinguished professor of linguistics, reminds us that the phrase ‘I don’t like your vowels’ really means ‘I don’t like your values’. What Michael Halliday is pointing out here is that what appear to be linguistic, scientific judgments are not that at all. Most often they are judgments about an individual’s social status. This is particularly evident in common sense judgments of pronunciation, as in the case of ‘dropped “h”’ or the use of broad open vowels such that ‘soot’, ‘book’ and ‘cook’ all rhyme. George Bernard Shaw notes in his preface to the play Pygmalion that no Englishman can open his mouth without revealing his social class and origins.

So the confusion about the double negative and the dropped ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Series editors’ preface and introduction
• Chapter 1 Common sense and scientific sense
• Chapter 2 Developing a core curriculum
• Chapter 3 The National Literacy Strategy: context and consequences
• Chapter 4 Grammar, spoken and written, in the National Curriculum
• Chapter 5 Working with genres
• Chapter 6 Mathematics: aims and practices
• Chapter 7 New approaches: the National Numeracy Project, the ‘Numeracy Hour’ and the teaching of mathematics
• Chapter 8 Development of the science curriculum
• Chapter 9 The nature and purpose of primary science
• Notes on contributors
• Index