In a paper on curriculum design, the Israeli academic, Anna Sfard, proposed two metaphors for learning, ‘learning as acquisition’ and ‘learning as participation’ and warned against the dangers of pursuing one at the cost of the other. Given the current heavy emphasis on knowledge acquisition – the coherent curriculum and the accumulative mastery of key concepts; Ofsted’s simplistic model of cognition and the role of long-term memory; Science of Learning’s preoccupation with blocking, spacing, interleaving and recall practice – we might view Sfard’s 1998 article as startlingly prophetic.
Most educators would express concern at the suggestion that the point of knowing more is to pass more tests yet there are indications that, despite Ofsted’s attempts to redress the pernicious effects of the high-stakes testing regime of recent past, there is a danger that the ‘threshold concept’ will become the new SAT target if knowledge acquisition continues to dominate curriculum development, as it currently does. The question remains largely unanswered in CPD circles – what is it that we expect children to do more of as a result of knowing more? The answer surely cannot be more tests, even if these are dressed up as retrieval tasks.
It has long been a central tenet of social constructivist theory that learning permits a certain kind of development that would not be possible without the systematic instruction that Vygotsky proposed as vital to the development of mature forms of thinking. So we can welcome Ofsted’s subject reviews when, as in the case of Geography, for example, the intention is made clear for children to acquire knowledge in order to ‘think like geographers’. The review explores the role of disciplinary knowledge – the conventions by which knowledge in any subject is created, contested, revised and validated – in developing children’s ‘sense of social and environmental agency’. Clearly, then, Ofsted expects the impact of curriculum to include some sort of behavioural change as well as an increase in the amount of knowledge gained.
The idea of values as abstract notions that represent the juncture of ideas and beliefs with behaviour and action leads to the possibility for subject values that point towards the kind of behaviour and action that is expected to follow from an acquisition of the ideas and beliefs inherent in the knowledge. By bringing together clear statements of the knowledge children are expected to learn with the desired personal change, curriculum planning can begin to address the challenge of impact in terms of what it is children are expected to do as a result of knowing more. For example, target behaviours for Geography might relate to our desire for children to interact directly with the world outside the classroom, to develop deep connections to particular places and to begin to act in ecologically-informed ways with the natural world. Relevant subject values for these impact statements might be Adventure, Spirit of Place and Responsibility (an idea of what these behaviours might look like is included in the Geography section of this site).
Refusing to allow curriculum planning to end at the year group chart that sets out the precise knowledge to be acquired opens the space for attention to the possible indicators of personal change as a result of that knowledge. Intentions for the development of a child’s social and environmental agency in the wider world through acquisition of specialist knowledge addresses the twin challenges that any principled curriculum should aim to address: the epistemological (KNOWING) and the ontological (BEING). In reading comprehension we talk about cohesion and coherence: how cohesion is achieved within the text – what is the stuff that binds it together as meaningful; and how does the text cohere with our understanding of the wider world? With this in mind, we might revise our understanding of the Coherent Curriculum as one which is cohesive internally – all the bits add up to a meaningful whole – but also coherent in its intentions externally – developing children as informed agents in their present and future worlds.
Ofsted (2021) Research review series: geography https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-review-series-geography/research-review-series-geography#disciplinary-knowledge
Sfard, A. (1998). On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4–13.
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