Curriculum Making in Post-16 Education

The Social Conditions of Studentship

Martin Bloomer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134810420
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

It is widely agreed that the post-16 curriculum in England and Wales is inadequate, mainly due to the successive reforms of various governments.
YTS was a reaction to problems of youth unemployment, CPVE and BTEC embraced a 'broad' concept of vocationalism, and even with the introduction of NVQ and GNVQ the A-level retains its gold-standard in the eyes of many. The post-16 curriculum that has emerged is hardly coherent. So how can teachers translate an externally imposed curriculum into a meaningful learning experience for students?
Drawing on solid research in post-16 education, this book makes explicit the nature of flaws in policy, and provides an account of how teachers and students construct their roles. It puts forward the case for a radical reappraisal and identifies appropriate aims and organising principles for a post-16 curriculum for the future.
Martin Bloomer is currently Dean of the Faculty of Education at Exeter University.

1
INTRODUCTION

Developments in British post-16 education in the mid- to late 1990s have been dominated by a New Right agenda and its search for the teacher- and studentproof curriculum, for political accountability and for uniformity of ‘outcome’. This book, drawing from the findings of recent research, highlights inadequacies in that thinking and proposes a very different approach to curriculum reform. It celebrates agency, professionalism and diversity in educational practice and acknowledges the essential contributions of teachers and students to the making of knowledge, learning opportunities and curricula.

THE PROBLEM AND THE APPROACH

My attention, throughout this book, is tightly focused upon students’ and teachers’ experiences of learning and teaching. It might seem strange that I should want to draw attention to students and teachers following the widespread reforms of curricula and administrative arrangements for post-16 education in the late 1980s and 1990s. After all, one could reasonably expect that their experiences had already received exhaustive examination and evaluation prior to and during this period of reform. The deplorable fact is that they have not; students’ and teachers’ experiences have been largely ignored in the processes of policy making.

Of course, I do not deny that some notions of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ have figured in the much publicised reforms of recent years. But I do question what notions these are, how informed they are, and what value they hold for any critical evaluation of post-16 education or for the development of policy. In the chapters that follow, I shall examine the concepts of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ which have informed recent policy making and illustrate the ways in which these have served to promote and sustain an impoverished concept of education. I shall argue that the structurally deterministic theories in which such concepts are firmly located, and which treat students and teachers as objects in some grand technocratic design, are not only blinded to key purposes of education but devalue educative processes themselves.

But my aim is not merely to heap criticism upon the faithful slaves of determinism. Rather, it is to try to learn from recent experiences, to come to know learning and teaching more thoroughly and to point to opportunities for their enhancement. I attempt this in the belief that, one day, post-16 education will be revisited by people of greater vision than the reformers of the 1980s and 1990s. To assist my analysis, I shall draw heavily from research evidence collected for the Teaching and Learning in 16–19 Education’ research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, referred to below as the ‘Leverhulme Study’. This evidence adds considerable weight to the claim that curriculum making does not begin and end with policy makers. It indicates how teachers act critically, in varied ways, upon the curriculum prescriptions presented to them as they create opportunities for their students; and how students act upon those opportunities as they each carve out their own personal learning careers. Students and teachers ‘make’ rather than ‘take’ their roles and the making of the curriculum is their essential business. I have, therefore, chosen the term ‘studentship’ to describe the active and critical engagement of students in these processes but I fear I must draw the line at using ‘teachership’ in my accounts of what teachers do.

In the following chapters, I shall draw from many particular cases of students and teachers. In the course of illuminating studentship and teaching I shall try to make explicit some of the techniques and strategies that individuals have used in the course of their learning and teaching. While I hope that readers might find something here which prompts reflections on their own practices, it is not my intention that the exemplar cases I use should be treated as models. Neither teaching nor learning are acts of technicianship, acquired through modelling technical skills, through the uncritical adoption of rules or procedures or through the rehearsal of prescribed roles. Both are achieved and continually refined through the critical examination of one’s own and others’ practices, a claim that I shall return to in due course.

Throughout this book, I shall use the Leverhulme Study to illustrate certain flaws in contemporary policy, planning and theorising. But my use of empirical evidence is by no means confined to illustrating and verifying. Its greater usefulness, as far as I am concerned here, is in the generation of an explanatory theory of studentship and of learning and teaching in post-16 education.

If my work is to assist readers in their own evaluations of practice, whether as teachers or researchers or even as learners, it is important that I make the processes of my own theorising quite explicit. I have, therefore, presented my own interpretive accounts alongside the research data at various stages throughout the book and have attempted to weigh these against evidence and theory from other sources. My theoretical standpoint in this work is that of interpretivism and my principal aim the generation of theory from research data. Much of the data that I have used for this purpose are qualitative: students’ and teachers’ accounts of their work and observers’ accounts of life in post-16 classrooms. But the analytical categories and concepts by which the data have been ordered are not borne simply from my own preconceptions; nor are they unduly governed by pre-existent theories of teaching and learning. They have been elicited from the data by means of comparative analysis, my handling of which I hope to make clear in later chapters. It is my intention, therefore, that the reader will have full access to the interpretive processes that I have employed and, hence, be able to view my work as critically as they might their own.

THE LEVERHULME STUDY

A rationale for the study

The Leverhulme Study was conceived at a time of central government commitment to the expansion of participation in post-16 education. It was also a period of growing interest in more broadly based post-16 curricula and in proposals for addressing the so-called ‘academic—vocational divide’. There were also major developments in 14–16 education and the higher education system was in a state of some considerable flux. It was even anticipated that the significance of research in this field would grow as the Single European Market became more firmly established and the prospect of a ‘harmonisation’ of curriculum planning in the 16–19 sector in Europe became an ever closer reality.

The research was designed to examine relationships between curriculum planning and students’ experiences of learning. If, as my previous research had suggested, these relationships were fundamentally weak, there would follow very clear and strong implications for reforms of post-16 education, particularly those concerning relationships between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ tracks and those concerning the ‘broad-based sixth’ (see DES et al., 1988a, 1991; Finegold et al., 1990; Richardson et al., 1995). The research was also designed to identify factors having a significant bearing upon students’ learning and to explain the processes underlying their relationship with learning. Of course, the explanatory theory to be generated would be only a partial theory given the infinite number of factors likely to have some bearing upon learning. However, it was to be a theory firmly grounded in evidence of students’ experiences of learning and, for that reason at least, would provide an essential contribution to debates and decisions affecting post-16 education. Without such a contribution, the course of post-16 education would be as likely to be steered by folk-lore and New Right dogma as by anything else.

Studies of classroom life in post-16 education are vastly under-represented in the research literature and, certainly, have had little impact upon curriculum planning and development. There are many reasons for this: not least among them is the long-standing preoccupation of university departments of education with teacher education and research in the compulsory sector and their consequent lack of involvement in the affairs of further education. Thus, the explosion of interest in ethnographic studies in the 1970s was confined largely to secondary and, to a lesser extent, primary education. The post-16 sector was not well served in the process, with only a few works (e.g. Willis, 1977) having any recognised relevance.

Bereft of a significant history of classroom research, planners in the post-16 sector at both national and local levels rarely draw upon empirical evidence of students’ experiences. Instead, knowledge of the student experience is largely taken for granted, informed more by inferences from the stated purposes of grand curriculum designs than by systematic study of practice. What is planned to happen is widely assumed to determine what happens in practice (Bloomer and Morgan, 1993). Not surprisingly, in the absence of hard knowledge of students’ experiences, much of the literature which serves the sector is marked by the uncritical use of descriptors such as ‘BTEC’, ‘GNVQ’, ‘A-level’, ‘academic’, ‘vocational’, ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ in accounts of students and learning. Such usage serves to reify ‘types’ of course, group, student or activity; it deflects attention from the purposes and experiences of individual students and, by accentuating the significance of normative knowledge of student experience, casts the student into the role of passive recipient rather than active participant.

But there is a recently expanded body of more discerning work in the field, much of which is referred to elsewhere in this book. These works include ‘structural’ demographic studies of trends in participation rates, examination performances and such like (e.g. Audit Commission, 1991; Audit Commission and OFSTED, 1993; Smithers and Robinson, 1991, 1993); critical analyses of the principles underpinning current post-16 curricula, often with particular reference to ‘vocationalism’ (e.g. Holt, 1987; Spours and Young, 1988; Maclure, 1991a; Hyland, 1993a, 1994a); studies of curriculum innovation, design and management (such as the work of the Further Education Development Agency (FEDA, formerly FEU), often based on some form of ‘top-down’ or ‘centre-periphery’ model of evaluation); studies of specific key curriculum issues such as provision for students with special educational needs, multi-cultural education, assessment, information technology in the curriculum (where, again, the work of FEDA figures significantly); and ‘local’ evaluations of specific curriculum initiatives, particularly TVEI. However, important as these works are, few have taken serious account of students’ experiences of learning. Those that have been grounded in research into students’ experiences have, very often, focused on vocational courses and students’ transition into work (e.g. Sims, 1987; Stoney, 1987; MacDonald and Coffield, 1991; Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1993; the studies reported in Bates and Riseborough, 1993; and Hodkinson et al., 1996). Few have concentrated attention on ‘general’ (often referred to as ‘academic’) education or attempted to review the experiences of students across a range of courses or subjects.

Given the far reaching reforms to the 14–19 curriculum, recently completed, in hand or in prospect (e.g. National Curriculum, AS levels, Baccalauréats, NVQs, GNVQs, A-level reform, Diplomas, modular courses, reforms of assessment practices and the pervading influence of the ‘enterprise culture’ and the educational ‘market place’) it is especially important that serious attempts are made to comprehend students’ and teachers’ experiences of teaching and learning in order to describe and explain the real effects of educational planning/provision upon learning across a range of ‘general’ (‘academic’) and ‘vocational’ courses. The Leverhulme Study was planned with these considerations in mind.

Previous work

My earlier work in this field (e.g. Bloomer, 1991, 1992) revealed considerable variation in the pedagogic practices of teachers. This is no profound revelation in itself and is frequently acknowledged at the ‘common sense’ level as natural, inevitable and even justifiable. There is indeed a rhetoric, readily available at this level, which accounts for pedagogic variation in post-16 education in terms such as the ‘academic—vocational divide’, the ‘nature of the subject’, the characteristics of particular curriculum designs or the ‘qualities of the students concerned’. But such explanations (or rationalisations) are not confined purely to staff room discourse; they are reproduced in similar forms in ministerial pronouncements, publications by government-funded agencies, the media and the professional journals. As such, they have a significant bearing upon curriculum development and evaluation at both national and institutional levels.

From my earlier work, it was apparent to me that variation in pedagogic practices and in students’ experiences of learning is by no means solely attributable to curriculum design or even to the ‘nature of the subject’. I found far greater variation in classroom organisation, classroom discourse, students’ learning tasks, assessment practices and teachers’ pedagogic plans to exist within A-level courses and within vocational courses than between them. I found a similar range of practices in both, suggesting that the widespread use of the terms’, ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’, to denote ‘types’ of course was to some extent misplaced and that popular claims about the ‘academic— vocational divide’ warrant careful re-examination, at least in respect of their assumptions about pedagogy and students’ experiences of learning. As far as specific subjects were concerned, I found pedagogic practices to vary both between and within them. I found the practices of English teachers to vary to the greatest extent despite the fact that all of the teachers observed and interviewed were ‘following’ the same syllabus. A similar story can be told of mathematics and, certainly, of ‘vocational’ course tutors. It was also very apparent to me that such variation as existed between subjects was only weakly related to the crude yet widely held belief (grounded, perhaps, in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s which examined aspects of pedagogic practice in secondary schools in terms of subject paradigms, orientations or cultures— e.g. Bernstein, 1971; Barnes and Shemilt, 1974; Ball, 1981, 1982) that teachers of science, mathematics and foreign languages adopt more ‘teacher-centred’ practices while their colleagues in the arts, humanities and social sciences work in a more ‘student-centred’ fashion.

But, just as the practices of teachers were not tied securely to courses, subjects or curricula, it was apparent that variations in students’ experiences of learning were not to be explained solely by reference to subject, courses or course groups. In a small study based on nineteen class meetings involving about 250 students, I found that students’ experiences of learning varied more noticeably within courses than they did between courses. Not only were students found to differ in the value that they accorded to different learning activities but, although exposed to the same experience as others in the same group, often gave quite different accounts of what they had learned. Some identified ‘factual’ knowledge as the significant content while others pointed more readily to the underlying principles that contributed to their understanding. This was apparent regardless of teacher or subject and it was quite clear that the teachers were, at most, only partly aware of the ‘mis-match’ between the learning that they had planned would take place and the quality of learning that had actually taken place among many of their students. The essential point here is that students’ perceptions, experiences and evaluations of learning were not simply the products of the curricula that had been designed for them; nor were they, for that matter, the fulfilment of plans of the teachers who had interpreted such designs. Other factors, such as students’ personal and career ambitions, their perceptions of knowledge, their evaluations of learning opportunities, their previous schools, social background and such like appeared to have combined to have a far more profound effect upon their learning than did the ‘grand curriculum designs’ which had generated the labels by which their learning experiences were commonly described.

The aims and outline methodology of the study

The initial aims of the Leverhulme Study were to examine ways in which teachers interpreted and acted upon externally prescribed curricula, to examine how students experienced the demands placed upon them, and to explain relationships between the two. Given my concern with the processes by which students and teachers achieved mutually satisfactor y (or unsatisfactory) working relationships, it was necessary to gain access to their perceptions and evaluations of curriculum aims, pedagogic plans and practices and to gain insight into students’ personal experiences of learning. It was through such insights that an understanding of processes was to be developed.

The first, brief, phase of the study focused on students’ first encounters with their tutors and peers and on their induction into post-16 courses at a tertiary college. Some ten classes, drawn from a range of A-level and BTEC National (some of which were shortly to be designated GNVQ) courses were observed and recorded on audio tape. Each tutor was interviewed before and after the observed session and, in each case, two students were interviewed afterwards. In addition, questionnaires seeking background information, students’ reasons for their choices of course, their expectations of course content, teaching, learning, assessment and classroom management, and their evaluations of their GCSE experiences, were completed by 816 new students during their induction week.

Information yielded from observations and interviews was used to inform the development of the observation and interview techniques employed in the second phase of the project. Data obtained from the questionnaires were analysed, reported (Bloomer and Morgan, 1993), utilised in a full comparative analysis, described below, and used as the basis from which a student questionnaire for use in phase two of the study was developed.

The second, major, phase of the study entailed ninety observations of A-level and BTEC/GNVQ class meetings across two tertiary colleges, a selective school sixth form and an independent school sixth form. The observations, by course and subject, are shown in Table 1.1. The subjects were selected on the grounds that they provided a reasonable representation of the range of different courses available at A-level and BTEC National/Advanced GNVQ and that they were likely to yield sufficient numbers of students for the study. The decision to confine the scope ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 THE CONTEXT OF EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE
• 3 KNOWLEDGE AND THE PRESCRIPTION OF LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES
• 4 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING IN PRACTICE
• 5 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING IN PRACTICE
• 6 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING IN PRACTICE
• 7 STUDENTSHIP AND LEARNING CAREERS
• 8 TOWARDS A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE POST-16 CURRICULUM
• 9 TOWARDS A CURRICULUM FOR THE FUTURE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY