Michael Young on the question of knowledge in the curriculum

One book that has proven to have a formative influence on me as I begin my MRes is Michael Young's book Bringing Knowledge Back In (2008). Young is a notable sociologist of education who, at the beginning of the 1970's wrote a book titled Knowledge and Control (1971) in which he helped to usher in an approach to the sociology of education that linked the kinds of knowledge then enshrined in school curricula with vested power interests - an approach that has, of course, proved to be very popular. In this more recent book, Young charts how his position has altered significantly. Though he hasn't turned his back on the idea that knowledge is to a large extent socially and historically constructed, he now understands that the extreme social relativist views that have emerged since the 1970's have caused academics to avoid facing difficult questions about knowledge and truth. This, as I understand it, has in turn undermined, rather than advanced, the sociology of education's critical and emancipatory potential. As Young himself writes:

"the 'new' sociology of education that began... with a radical commitment to truthfulness, undermined its own project by its rejection of any idea of truth itself." (Young, 2008: 199)

Furthermore, Young now believes that it is the distinctly social character of knowledge that enables it to have a claim to truth and objectivity, and to give us a basis for choosing particular educational and curriculum principles over others. The fact that cultural objects are not analysable in the same way as natural objects does not mean that those working in the cultural sciences shouldn't pursue the maximum amount of objectification possible. He pursues a lengthy analysis of the works of Durkheim, Vygotsky, Cassirer, Basil Bernstein and others in order to substantiate this claim. I won't go into this level of detail here. The book, being as it is a collection of previously published essays, is a little on the repetitive side and I suspect that most readers will want to be selective in which chapters they turn to, as I was. However I do want to focus a little on the distinction Young makes between vertical and horizontal knowledge structures and on the idea of grammaticality, which can be found in the final chapter of the book.

Vertical, hierarchical knowledge structures are those which develop through integration into ever more unitary, more general sets of propositions and towards more general explanations and laws. Something like Physics would probably best represent this type of knowledge. Horizontal knowledge structures on the other hand are those which are plural rather than unitary and which contain parallel and largely incommensurable languages. The social sciences, in their current form, are more likely to be in this vein. Verticality and horizontality have to do with theory's internal development. Moving on to grammaticality, this term is to do with a knowledge structure's dealings with the external, empirical world; that is, its ability to identify 'empirical correlates'. High grammaticality therefore refers to a theory with a high level of worldly corroboration. Together, the criteria of verticality and grammaticality "determine the capacity a particular knowledge structure has to progress." (Ibid: 210)

For me, the interesting question then arises as to where geography fits into this framework. I suggest that here we have a discipline that is verticality challenging. We have a whole host of parallel languages, stemming from that original bifurcation of physical and human geography and then into further sub-disciplines such as economic, population, and various forms of cultural geography such as humanist, critical, feminist etc. My experience at university has been that these lines of enquiry tend to follow their own disciplinary paths, with few attempts made at dialogue and integration, though there may well be geography departments where a more integrative approach is taken. This is a far cry from the early holistic origins of geography (see Bonett, 2008) and reflects ever increasing specialisation in academia.

As for grammaticality, I think geography is particularly strong in this respect. Particularly in fieldwork, but even in the classroom, geography is a subject that reminds us that there is a world out there, beyond human imaginings and constructions. A world of human and non-human others that calls for our understanding and care. In this sense, geography is a corrective to a curriculum that has perhaps become too focused on the self, a topic I have broached in previous posts and which I will no doubt engage with again. One of the values of a geography education is precisely that it brings our attention to this world outside of ourselves and, if it does its job right, provides us with the resources and conceptual understanding to find our place within it.

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is geography? London: Sage.
Young, M.F.D. (2008) Bringing knowledge back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. London: Routledge.
Young, M.F.D. (1971) Knowledge and control: new directions for the sociology of education. London: Collier-Macmillan.

Photo is by Flickr user ChrisM70 and is made available under a Creative Commons license

The question concerning technology and geographical education

In the post Heidegger and Technology we saw how, for Heidegger, it wasn't particular items of technology, nor even technology in and of itself that had led us to the nihilistic modern era but rather the essence that lies behind technology, that metaphysics of Enframing that wills to order everything and challenges things forth, including ultimately humans themselves, as resources to be exploited. Heidegger saw the work of art, such as the work of Van Gogh or of the poet Hölderlin for instance, to occasion a different, more authentic kind of world disclosure that allows things to shine forth and show themselves, free from the calculative and reductive tendencies of modern, technological, thinking. So, what consequences might all this have for our ideas about education? Is education also implicated in the technological mode of revealing and if so is there the possibility of an alternative?

From the emphasis put on examinations and 'teaching to the test' through to justifications of education that accentuate efficiency and 'economic competitiveness', it appears that there may be various reasons for thinking that education might indeed be under the insidious grip of Enframing. Fitzsimons (2002) writes that education itself has been reconceptualised as a key 'technology' for the projects of economic development and globalisation. In this vision, all the components of the educational enterprise, including students, teachers and knowledge are all seen as resources to be utilised as efficiently as possible. In addition, Dwyer et al (1988) have argued that 'schools are exemplars of inauthentic existence, and we can see it in many of their practices, such as the emphasis on rote memorization and unreflective praise of contemporary norms'.

So, if schools are indeed fully caught up in and actively perpetuate the technological mode of revealing things, is there any possibility at all for a more poietic mode of attunement to take place in the classroom? In an article that is as yet unpublished, James Magrini (2010) puts forward the case that there are windows of opportunity, particularly in the arts and humanities, to create 'small worlds apart from the oppressive effect of Enframing', in which students and teachers can engage aesthetically with the world and listen and respond to the 'call of Being'. These small but potent windows of opportunity put students in touch with 'contextual ways of knowing' in which they have the potential to see, hear, feel and 'attend to more facets of the experienced world'. This puts me very much in mind of the sort of 'Living Geography' initiatives that the Geographical Association have been advocating.

In a similar vein, Michael Bonnett (2002) has considered what 'education as a form of the poetic' might look like. In this vision we are invited to see education as essentially 'an ever-evolving triadic interplay between teacher, learner, and that which calls to be learned'. Unlike the highly controlled and instrumental way of thinking that defines the era of Enframing, poetic thinking does not conform to an externally imposed framework but rather involves a 'genuine listening to what calls to be thought in the evolving situation'. Such thinking is context-relative and expresses 'a receptive-responsive openness to things'. In a poetic mode of education, the teacher must 'let the pupil learn rather than impose learning upon her'. Importantly, this is not a wholly passive process. This kind of thinking is demanding and rigorous in its nature, for, as mentioned, it requires the learner to listen for what calls to be thought.

Bonnett rounds off with this wonderful passage which incisively captures what genuine thinking means for Heidegger, and what a poetic form of education would mean for learners, and is well worth quoting at length:

"For Heidegger, genuine thinking is not the assimilation of a series of gobbets of prespecified information and ideas, nor the acquisition and application of free-floating 'thinking skills,' but an exciting and demanding journey into the unknown. It is deeply rooted, being drawn forward by the pull of that which is somehow incipient in our awareness but has yet to reveal itself, and the fundamental achievement of education lies in learners coming to feel for themselves the call of what is there to be thought in this unthought: the harmonies, the conflicts, and the mysteries." (2002: 242)

This is an especially interesting quote because it connects with the ongoing debate about knowledge, pedagogy and the geography curriculum that my own research will be contributing towards. It would seem that the recent predominance of generic and transferable 'thinking skills' and other pedagogical devices have caused us to forget the real purpose of schooling, which is to give young people access to the ever evolving store of powerful and important knowledge (such as geographical knowledge) which can enable them to understand themselves and the world. As this quote points out however, this is best approached not as a matter of assimilating a series of predetermined facts, but rather as a continuing journey, made by both teacher and student, into what is, at least to them, as yet unknown.

There is a related question here about the extent to which technology might aid or hinder this journey. Does technology in education inherently conceal Being? That is, does it cause us to become less receptive and open to things, and more reliant on prespecified, highly structured frameworks that distance us ever more from the earth? In a rather interesting little interview on Radio 4 with author and TV presenter Christopher Somerville, he argues that in the age of the Sat Nav we have as a nation become more disorientated and geographically illiterate than ever before. The interview itself, spanning only four minutes, is short and Somerville's assertions are frankly shaky, but there are a few points made in it that can act as launch pads for further discussion.

In the interview, Somerville argues that people today are so dependent on their mobile phones and Sat Navs to orientate themselves that they fail to see the 'real' geography around them. It would be interesting to reflect a little more, from a Heideggerian perspective, on what constitutes this 'real' geography; is it the lakes, mountains and seas that lie behind the representations we see on our screens? If so, what precisely is it that makes these things so unique in their realness? Is it not possible that technology might actually help us to see, feel and hear more, thus enlivening our experience of the world? Could mobile phones and Sat Navs, creatively used, not enable us to become more, and not less, responsive to the landscape? These are all questions that are well worth exploring further, and I hope to do just that in a future article.

References

Bonnett, M. (2002) 'Education as a Form of the Poetic', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Dwyer, M., Prior, L. And Shargel, E. (1988) 'The educational implication of Heideggerian authenticity', Philosophy of Education, 44, 140-149.

Fitzsimons (2002) 'Enframing Education', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

James Marini (2010 - unpublished) 'Worlds Apart in the Curriculum: Heidegger, Technology, and the Poietic Attunement of Art' Submitted to the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. Draft available online.

Photo is by Flickr user Luca Rossini and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Bringing geography home

I am now gearing up to begin my MRes and subsequent PhD at the Institute of Education in London this October. Here is a taster of some of the things that I will be working on...

"The geographer Tim Cresswell informs us that prospective geography undergraduates often arrive at his university for interview expressing an interest in places and the differences between them. However, this interest is rarely about a deeply theorised notion of what place is as a concept. Cresswell argues that if students at school were to engage with thinking more deeply about place then it might not only ease their transition to university geography, but their experience of studying geography could be enlivened and their understanding of contemporary social and cultural issues enhanced. I find this an appealing argument. The ideas of place, home, identity and belonging are often evoked in the media, and are part of young people's everyday experience. It would seem therefore to be important for them to develop the capacity to think about these issues carefully and critically, in order to take them beyond the 'everyday'. This is a crucial part of what has been termed 'geo-capability'. However, more research is required in order to how to see precisely how this conceptual approach might work in practice. In response to this perceived gap, my research project will be focusing on these two key questions:

• How can we teach and learn geography in way that fosters a richer and more critical understanding of place, home and belonging by drawing upon both the resource that is the academic subject of geography and the experiences of young people?

• What would a geography curriculum built upon and led by such concepts look like and what benefits would this would bring about for learners, in terms of their 'geo-capability'?

My intention is to carry out research with young people and teachers from three Sheffield schools representing considerably varied catchment areas. They will be involved in a project about place, home and belonging. The young people will be asked to keep a multi-media diary documenting personal and shared geographies of their 'home' city of Sheffield over the period of one year. Although the group will have a high degree of autonomy over their project, it is anticipated that they will use an experiential fieldwork approach that may include creative writing, photography and the use of digital media such as online mapping and Twitter. I aim to find an approach that allows young people's voices to speak honestly and freely. My methodology will be chiefly qualitative and will include a large ethnographic component, as I will be accompanying the young people as they carry out fieldwork and compile their diaries, thus being at once researcher and participant. Other techniques that I may employ include interviewing and the analysis of media that students produce during the project.

It is important to recognise that this research will also contribute to broader debates about the role of geography in the school curriculum. It has become commonplace to hear arguments about the irrelevance of 'traditional' school subjects in the information age and their inability to provide young people with the skills they require for the 21st century. However, David Lambert and John Morgan argue that the 'curriculum wars' here alluded to are based on a superficial reading on the relationship between subject knowledge and the curriculum. I agree, and my research is located in opposition to both the idea of a subject discipline as a 'transmittable' body of knowledge but also to the 'debilitating anti-intellectualism' that occurs when subject content is supplanted by a sole focus on educational processes and skills-building. I wish to contribute to an emerging vision for geography education that integrates student experience, teacher knowledge and skills, and the subject resource that is geography. I believe that my research will help clarify important distinctions between everyday experience, pedagogy and the school curriculum as well as contribute to academic discourse on place, home and belonging.."

Photo is by Flickr user Kirk Siang and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Has the geography curriculum become self-obsessed?

In recent years we have seen a number of pedagogical interventions that claim to make learning more 'engaging' and 'relevant' to young people. From 'personalised learning' to the ubiquitous 'personal, learning and thinking skills' we have seen a noticeable drift of emphasis away from the teaching of subject knowledge to the development of these generic personal skills. As we enter a time of change, with a new Government in office promising a return to 'traditional' subjects, it is perhaps time to take stock and consider if the pedagogical adventure might not have indeed gone too far. In this piece I am going to take a look at the claim that education in general, and geography education in particular, has become preoccupied with the self and with making itself relevant to young people, all at the cost of emptying itself of substantive intellectual content.

In a book entitled The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes (2009) chart the escalation of therapeutic principles and techniques in all phases of the education system and in the workplace. Such an approach to education has become possible, they argue, because of a wider shift in popular culture towards a therapeutic ethos. According to Ecclestone and Hayes, 'populist therapeutic orthodoxies' reflect and reinforce the concept of 'a diminished self'. That is, a fragile and vulnerable self with a diminished sense of human potential. Therapeutic education invites children and adults to see themselves as inherently flawed and at risk, and to lower their educational and social aspirations accordingly, the upshot being that therapeutic techniques, paradoxically and despite claims to the contrary, actually create more unconfident and unhappy individuals. Overall the authors judge therapeutic education to be 'profoundly anti-educational' and an abandonment of 'the liberating project of education'.

I am not going to present here a fully fledged critique of the book but instead want to focus purely on the implications of what the authors categorise as 'therapeutic' approaches to teaching and learning on the structure and content of the school geography curriculum. I think there can be little doubt that we have seen a marked shift in recent years away from the teaching of subject disciplines and towards more generic pedagogical techniques such as 'learning to learn', 'personalised learning' and 'building learning power' (see Claxton, 2008). These approaches are usually defended as offering an 'engaging' and 'relevant' curriculum for all learners, including those who are 'turned off' by traditional academic subjects. They focus on providing children with the skills they need to think and learn for themselves, whilst content (that is, subject knowledge) tends to take a back seat role. In general, they also emphasise 'soft outcomes' of learning such as emotional literacy and well being, as opposed to the cognitive knowledge and skills that subject disciplines have customarily favoured.

The chief critique that Ecclestone and Hayes direct towards these methods of education is that they are increasingly 'turning young people's worlds inwards'. Pedagogic methods that encourage and even compel young people to disclose their innermost worries and anxieties are portrayed as innovative ways of engaging disaffected youth with schooling. Yet, their real effects are more insidious. According to the authors of this book, such pedagogic adventures are sidelining the cognitive and intellectual dimensions of learning for a preoccupation with one's own emotions and feelings and an obsession with one's own self. It is at this point that teachers of geography should really take note, for what is geography if not a sustained study of the world outside of our self and of the many places, processes and interconnections that comprise that world? If Ecclestone and Hayes are correct in their perception of an increasing self preoccupation within education, then this might seem to spell the end of geography as we know it. Extending this trend into the future, we might imagine the subject eventually being replaced by therapy sessions, such as group reflections on places that seem emotionally significant for example.

Recent developments in geography education would seem at first glance to support this hypothesis. To take just a few examples, a recent issue of the journal Primary Geographer had a focus on 'the geography of happiness' and carried articles on children's attachments to 'special places' and ways of 'incorporating happiness' into the geography curriculum. A recent edition of Teaching Geography, a journal aimed at secondary geography teachers, carried an article about students involved in a project called Young People's Geographies in which they were able to 'choose what they wanted to study' and another one all about young people's personal experiences of fieldwork, in which the focus of the fieldwork seemed to be not so much the objective, physical features of the landscape, but on how that landscape made them feel. These examples are no longer unusual and indeed they represent the general zeitgeist that underlies most cutting edge geography education in the UK as promoted by the Geographical Association. I suppose that Ecclestone and Hayes would consider these examples to be perfect illustrations of the dangerous 'inward turn' that education has taken.

I believe that the real picture is actually less dismal than these authors portray. On the whole, I actually support the 'turn' towards feelings and experience that the examples above display, on the grounds that they provide a much needed balance to earlier versions of geography curricula that have over-emphasised objective, detached and analytical ways of knowing the world. Subjective and emotional ways of knowing are equally valuable, and a good teacher knows how to integrate these disparate 'ways of knowing'. I do nevertheless recognise that there is an important message in Ecclestone and Hayes's claims. There is a profound difference between reflecting on one's emotions during an educational experience and more insidious attempts to engineer well-being and happiness. It is this latter scenario that geography teachers must avoid and be vigilant for. The critical role of geography education in broadening young people's horizons is another ground for vigilance. Engaging and relevant geography that begins with young people's everyday experience is one thing, but it would be indulgent and irresponsible, to say the least, to limit their learning to that everyday sphere. As Michael Oakeshott once said, the ultimate reward of education is precisely "emancipation from the mere 'fact of living', from the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth." (Oakeshott, 1998) Sure, let us take time to explore and acknowledge our emotions and feelings about a place, but let us not dwell there.

I think that there is a wider issue to be discussed here about the balance between self-knowledge and world-knowledge as outcomes of the educational endeavor. I truly believe that both are essential and, moreover, that they are certainly not mutually exclusive. Though my spiritual practice of yoga and my readings in this area, I am confident that striving to truly know oneself is a most worthy goal in a human life. However, I also happen to believe that such self knowledge cannot be sought in total isolation from knowledge of the world that exists outside oneself. In this way, I find it hard to accept that classic ideal of the ascetic soul, meditating in isolation, away from all worldly concerns. In the same way, in the field of education, I suspect that coming to an understanding of oneself goes hand in hand with an understanding of the wider world. In coming years I hope to devise a sound and positive argument that geography, partly due its holistic and integrative nature, plays a crucial part in advancing both of these sorts of understandings and in their integration. In brief, I want to argue that geography enables the learner to come to an understanding of themselves as an authentic, emplaced, knowing and feeling self in a world of human and non-human others with whom they are fundamentally and inevitably interrelated.

And a final point on the so-called 'geography of happiness' mentioned earlier. The nagging problem I have with this, and other similar instances of 'happiness education', can be expressed in the following query: should education aim to make us happy and is there not rather something inescapably difficult about this journey we call education? In this world in which we all find ourselves, it is almost certain that we will feel unhappiness, pain and suffering at some point and to some degree. To me, it seems counterproductive therefore to insist zealously on happiness and instead it seems that a better tactic (and here I borrow from Alain de Botton (1997) who himself borrows from Proust) is to learn how to 'suffer successfully'. To bear the capricious fortunes of a human life, and to realize and accept that, after all, we will not always be happy and that our being may not always be well.

References

Claxton, G. (2008) What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education. Oxford: Oneworld.

De Botton, A. (1997) How Proust Can Change Your Life. London: Picador.

Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.

Oakeshott, M (1998) [1971] ‘Education: The Engagement and its Frustration’ in Hirst and White (Eds.) Philosophy of Education: Major Themes in the Analytic Tradition, Volume I: Philosophy and Education. London and New York: Routledge.

Photo is by Flickr user blueiii and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Geography as holistic discipline

In a previous post concerning the need for continued justification of geography as a school subject I suggested that one possible route towards such a justification is to call attention to geography's holistic nature. What evidence do we have that geography has such a nature, and why might gaining a holistic understanding of humans and their environment be of any use to a young person growing up in this century? I didn't have the room to delve into this issue in that post, and I don’t believe it is one that can be dealt with hurriedly. However, I will begin my investigation with a look at the work of Alistair Bonnett (2008), who has written a very impressive introduction to geography, one that should be read by all with an interest in the subject.

Geography and educational aims

This post follows on from the previous one on Justifying geography.

The kinds of aims we should have for the living of a fulfilling human life are clearly highly debatable, as is the idea that we can provide any kind of objective list of aims in the first place. However, I am not delving into this particular issue here (see White, 2005 for more on this). In this post I am more concerned with examining how we might go about justifying geography in light of the kinds of aims which actually have been enshrined in the latest version of the KS3-4 National Curriculum (and I assume here that these have been decided upon after lengthy and painstaking deliberation). I must also add that at the time of writing a new government has just taken office that holds some very different conceptions of education from its predecessor, and so it could be that these aims are revised again in the not too distant future. Nevertheless, the aims as they stand are not overly contentious, and they provide a good starting platform from which to begin our justification for geography. I see this as an unavoidably slow and meticulous task that really requires empirical evidence to back it up. However, we can at least make some headway here.

Justifying geography

In the last post we saw that subjects cannot simply appeal to tradition to justify their place on the curriculum. Each subject has, instead, to continually justify its place by examining itself against the set of aims and principles that have been decided in advance as being core to a good education. By doing so, we will not have proved that initiation into the subjects is in fact the best method of education but we will at least have demonstrated that learning a particular subject contributes to our wider educational goals. This is perhaps the best we can hope for.

This process of justification may be easier for some subjects than for others. It is my view that when it comes to geography the justification seems, initially, relatively easy. Not only does it seem intuitively important to understand human and physical worlds and their interconnections, but in addition it is hard to image a time when such an understanding wouldn’t be important for a life worth living. Indeed, we might feasibly conceive of a scenario in which we needed no such understanding, for example, one in which we were all pre-programmed to behave, like robots, in a particular way according to an extrinsic plan. But even in this case, which after all is not too dissimilar to some theological worldviews that have held sway over the centuries, some minimal world knowledge might still seem desirable. Such knowledge might consist of some downloaded information that enabled us to orientate ourselves, perhaps a kind of personal Geographical Information System (GIS) wired into our heads for instance. The important point is that so long as life is considered not to be so controlled, and ourselves to be autonomous beings, some understanding of the physical and human world in which we live out our lives seems essential.

All geography is homesickness

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We could say of the study of geography, as the German Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis once said of philosophy, that it embodies a kind of homesickness; "the urge to be at home everywhere in the world". It was observations of an escalating divorce of humans from nature, our original home, which partly accounted for the emergence of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a recent study of the rise of the 'geographical imagination' in this period, Tang's (2008) intriguing thesis is that the origin of modern geography as it arose in the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter can partly be found in the Naturphilosophie and landscape aesthetics of the early German Romantics. This rich body of thought provided much inspiration for these early geographical luminaries but most pertinent for our theme is that in their search for a "deeper, pre-reflexive unity" the Romantics "contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the making of the modern geographical imagination that was predicated on the fundamental unity of man and nature." (Tang, 2008, pp.12) Although theories of the close interrelationship between man and the earth can of course be found much earlier than the nineteenth century, it is arguably only in this period that such theories moved substantially beyond a rigidly deterministic stance represented in a somewhat encyclopaedic fashion. With the emergence of geographical science, this interrelationship was now seen as altogether broader and more complex. Indeed, for the most optimistic it suddenly appeared possible to

The future of geography

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25 years ago, Ron Johnston made an appeal for the future of geography...

"Geographers have disengaged themselves from studying and promoting the uniqueness of place, and consequently have contributed to a general ignorance of the world as a complex mosaic. This disengagement must be corrected... and geographers must once again take the lead in portraying the complex variability of peoples and environments" (Johnston, 1985)

It seems to me that in academic geography we have seen this 'correction' occur to the extent that the positivist approach to geography seen in the 60's and 70's now seems to have withdrawn into the background. In the last quarter of a century we have seen Marxist, feminist and post-structural approaches, alongside a renewed interest in phenomenology, and many more. These may all have their differences but common to them all is the commitment to recognising the variability of place (even in those cases where place is seen to to be no more than a social construction) and to penetrating the 'real mechanisms', as Johnston put it, as opposed to that tendency that positivist approaches have to generalise and observe only the surface of things.  

But has school geography followed in the wake of this diversification of approaches?