One does not have to look too hard to find examples of where curriculum selection was designed to indoctrinate. The most obvious cases are the totalitarian states of the twentieth century where children in, say, 1930s Germany or the USSR were taught curricula that were designed to advance a specific view of the human past. […]
Can a curriculum ever be balanced? Read More »
As I set out in my last post, substantive knowledge concerns knowledge of the past, and in history curriculum theory can generally be seen as the counterpart of disciplinary knowledge, which involves knowledge of the discipline. Over the last few decades, however, substantive knowledge has generally played second-fiddle to disciplinary knowledge in models of progression,
What sorts of substantive knowledge are needed to get better at history? Read More »
In my previous post I focused on ability statements (which take the form “pupils can x”) and argued that it is problematical to incorporate these into progression models where the ability statement is left at a general level. A statement such as “pupils can construct causal arguments” is not a meaningful addition to a progression
Types of knowledge in a history curriculum Read More »
Progression models are frequently constructed from ‘ability’ statements. Put simply, if you have an ability, it means you can do something. It is therefore quite common to see progression models in history education containing statements about “pupils can construct causal arguments” or “pupils can critique interpretations of the past”. The rationale behind this is
The problem with general ability statements in history education Read More »
What does it mean to get better at history? One of the problems we have in answering this question is that history is an incredibly diverse discipline: there are thousands of possible things that one might legitimately study at school. In one school pupils might be learning 18th-century French history, but in the next town
The curriculum as progression model Read More »