What can schools do?
In the computer age, the globalised world, the world of new cross-disciplinary knowledges, what types of knowledge matter in schools?
by Professor Lyn Yates
Schools and the people who work in education in these changing times are facing considerable challenges. Curriculum research and discussion in this context needs to be complex and multifaceted, not just about measurement.
Knowledge, social identities and the changing world
Civics and citizenship education, is now an official Australian national curriculum priority area, together with literacy, mathematics and science, and ahead ofall other areas. Why are civics, citizenship and social values now important, when they didn’t seem to be for most of the past four or five decades? And how do you actually create good citizens?
The University of Melbourne has just established a new multi-million dollar institute, Bio21, and put together in it people from different disciplines across the bio-sciences, with the idea that new forms of collaboration and knowledge-building need to get under way. This need for new cross-disciplinary work and collaborations has also been much discussed by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the academies. What does all that mean in terms of how we divide up the school curriculum and how we think about pathways of building knowledge today?
Or consider these developments. In 2001, a national inquiry into the schooling of boys named this as an area where different things need to occur. In 2003–4, another national inquiry called for new approaches to vocational education in schools. The OECD developed the DeSeCo Project, a project set up to draw on international best-thinking about ‘key competencies for personal, social and economic well-being’ in the 21st century. The key foundations it identified were ‘interacting in socially heterogeneous groups; acting autonomously; and using tools interactively’.
What should young people learn? How can they learn? What do they learn?
All of these developments are, potentially, issues for curriculum. How well is schooling today dealing with the type of people young people are today? And how well is it preparing students for the more global world and changing forms of work that are the world of the future? And what type of activity is curriculum research?
Curriculum research is not just about controlled testing
Two important Commonwealth Government inquiries are currently underway which will directly impact on the work people like myself do. One is an inquiry into what quality research in universities looks like, and how it can be measured. The second is an inquiry into teacher education and whether that is sufficiently ‘evidence-based’ and producing competent classroom-ready teachers.
I’m worried about whether these inquiries are going to come up with too narrow a vision of what schools are about and what research and scholarship is about. People who think that the only issues for people who work in university education faculties are how to produce a good teacher in their first week on the job, or who think the only good research should look like a classic experiment or a randomised controlled trial, have got it wrong. We need a range of good research going on, research that is appropriate to the complexity of the issues. We need good quality thinking and lively conversations, inside and outside education faculties, about what we are trying to do in schools and other education institutions. We need to look at what is working and not working, but also where we are going.
Curriculum is about the ‘what’ of education
Curriculum questions look at the substance of what school does; they go beyond treating schooling as a black box that produces scores and outcomes patterns.
A focus on curriculum asks us to think about what is being set up to be taught and learned, what is actually being taught, what is actually being learned, why agendas are taken up or not taken up, who benefits and loses, whose voice is heard and whose is silenced, what future is being formed for individuals and what future is being set in train for Australia as a whole. Curriculum is concerned with effectiveness, but also with expansiveness and voices, and who gets a say.
Asking the impossible of schools
Curriculum questions are complex, but they are made more difficult by a public discourse that pretends that impossible things can be achieved. People are constantly discovering new (or old) social problems, and concluding that if only some simple ‘x’ was done in schools, we could solve that problem.
If you read government inquiries or listen to the media, you’d be truly impressed with what schools can supposedly do if only they got their act together. No adult would live in poverty, students and teachers would be on task 24/7, there would be no bad drivers, no drunk drivers, no crime, no sexism or racism or discrimination of any kind, everyone would eat healthy diets and be active and slim, every particular school would be better than all its competitors, and every student would complete Year 12 and get an ENTER score over 99 and go on to do medicine degrees. At the same time schools would also be producing a diverse range of enterprising young people who would fill the shortages in all the skilled trades (and in unskilled ones for that matter), and be entrepreneurs who would develop new inventions and turn around Australia’s balance of trade.
Schools are some of the most important social institutions we have, and they do have major effects on individuals and on the shape of the culture and country we live in. But we have impossible expectations about schools, and blame them for not fulfilling impossible and conflicting hopes. The fact that some people don’t do as well as others in schools isn’t (or isn’t just) a failing on the part of schools; it is part of what schools as a system are set up to do – to save universities and employers some of the burden of deciding for themselves who they will take on.
Schooling in a democracy is set up to do two main things: to convey the knowledge or develop the young generation in ways that the society considers important, and to do some of the preliminary sorting that decides who will get access to which courses and jobs and futures. It’s no wonder that these things continue to attract so much criticism.
Picking out what knowledge is important is no longer a simple matter of looking backwards; it is also about looking forwards, and talking about whose or which knowledge is to be valued. And the sorting is never satisfactory because we’d like everyone to get top marks and we swing back and forth between approaches like national standards and a common curriculum that put everyone on the same path and in the same competition, and approaches like the plan to revive technical colleges that decide early on who you’re going to be and set you off on that track.
Schooling can do terrific things – it can open your eyes to ideas and creative endeavours, make you think you are worth something, develop people who can competently and confidently go about their work and their lives as citizens, produce future citizens who treat others with respect. And it can do very negative things – convince you that you are worthless and don’t know anything, produce future citizens who don’t have good foundations for operating in the modern world or who don’t care if others get trampled as long as they are OK.
In recent times, the concerns about those who are being trampled on in the system, are being taken very seriously in the heart of the hard-headed economics camp of the OECD . ‘Social cohesion’ and how people of different religions and cultural backgrounds and gender treat each other, are now real issues.
Talk about ‘social capital’ and ‘resilience’ is suddenly important. Identities and values are on the map. It’s not much use as a nation upping your average maths performance score in the international league tables by .0001 per cent if people stop behaving civilly to each other.And the more researchers and expert committees look at changing patterns of work, at the need to be a so-called flexible, autonomous life-long learner, the more they start talking about identity issues, and that the important work of curriculum is not just about learning particular things, but coming to be a particular type of person, a person who can operate successfully in a changing world, who can work locally and internationally with others who are different.
Part of what a curriculum researcher does is to keep an eye on these big pictures and the research and visions that thread through them. I think of curriculum research as a kind of conversation, in which we are trying to feed in and examine different claims about what is happening now, and different visions of where we might go.
But these days, if you work in universities, you are not allowed to just read books and think and teach and write. To be taken seriously, it’s not good enough to have good ideas or to know a lot; you have to be seen to be winning research grants. This can lead to a lot of short-term projects with quick results rather than time to digest and work with ideas and findings. But there are important things that do require empirical research in the curriculum area.
The curriculum field is both a highly intellectual endeavour and a necessarily practical, political and pragmatic endeavour. The changing world is difficult and pressured, as well as exciting, for education and educators. I’d like to see more complex and powerful and interdisciplinary engagements and research on the big questions. But I’d also like room for attention to the small and local as well as the big; and for creative enquiry as well as measurement research.
Professor Lyn Yates (GDipEd, BA (Hons) 1971, MA 1976) is Foundation Chair of Curriculum in the Faculty of Education. This article is based on her inaugural professorial lecture delivered in June 2005 as part of the Dean of Education’s Lecture Series. A full version of her lecture is available at www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/about/news/events/lectures.shtml
For further Information about Professor Yates’ research projects or her ‘Contemporary Questions in Curriculum’ public seminar series, email l.yates@unimelb.edu.au.
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