Three curriculum concerns and a strategy

Rosemary Hipkins

In this post I briefly outline three areas of curriculum that are currently concerning me. My examples are from science education because that’s where my expertise lies, but the concerns are likely to be relevant to other learning areas, with a change of details. All three concerns relate to aspects of knowledge—that thing that we tend to take for granted as the foundation of the curriculum. I then suggest a strategy that might contribute to advancing curriculum design while also helping address these three areas of concern.

A new curriculum, based on old knowledge

I’m worried about the narrowness in the Year 12 and 13 Biology curricula. The biological sciences have recently exploded with new knowledge yet there is very little in these new curriculum specifications that I could not have taught when I began teaching in the early 1970s. Some detail has been updated, but this is mostly highly technical updating (e.g. biochemical detail of how gene expression works). The narrow focus and traditional compartmentalisation of topics reinforce linear cause-and-effect narratives that are a hall mark of classical 20^th century science. Meanwhile science itself has been evolving rapidly and often dramatically. Why would we want to teach only the dry bones when young people would surely be more engaged by the plethora of fascinating and challenging topics just waiting to be explored? The Gut Bugs programme from the Liggins Institute in Auckland is just one example.

Equipping learners to navigate disinformation

Conceptual understandings are not the only thing that has changed rapidly during this century. So have the social conditions we all experience, compliments of social media. Disinformation abounds! My recent book explores how and why young people might need different sorts of encounters with knowledge to develop the capabilities they will need to more safely navigate the wilds of social media and AI. While the new curriculum specifies a lot of detailed content to learn, I don’t think it does enough to help learners develop an understanding of the grounds on which knowledge claims rest. No-one wants to encourage young people to question everything to the extent that they think one knowledge claim is as good as any other (i.e. relativist thinking) but on the other hand we can’t afford to continue with established patterns of uncritical acceptance either. Science educators engage with this dilemma in two ways. One is to argue for making the people aspects of science more visible: for example, the use of peer review and other argumentation processes that put new ideas to the test before they are made public. Understanding the nature and role of these established science practices can foster a sense of what to look for when deciding whether trust in a knowledge claim is warranted. The other way that science educators engage the risk of relativism is to advocate strongly for helping young people learn about how new knowledge is generated and validated but also that the world ‘pushes back’ when we get our theories wrong. Both these ways of mitigating the risk of relativist thinking rely on a strong Nature of Science (NOS) component in the science curriculum, but this type of focus is largely absent in the new drafts, at all levels, not just at level 5.

Walking back the bicultural elements in the curriculum

In the recent past, considerable effort was invested in designing a more bicultural curriculum. One example was the idea of ‘mana ōrite’ in the NCEA change package, which was defined as ‘equal status for mātauranga Māori’. Another example was the original Te Mātaiaho framework for the refreshed curriculum. Arguably, there was not enough clarity about what these efforts were intended to achieve, and for whose benefit. Understanding the potential contribution of mātauranga Māori to the learning of all our young people requires new ways of thinking about where different knowledges come from, and what makes them fit for purpose in some contexts, but not necessarily others.

Introducing the idea of knowledge systems

All three of these concerns are complex. As I see it, a key problem is that we don’t often focus on the phenomenon of knowledge per se. How do we know what we know? Where does knowledge come from? On what grounds is some knowledge considered more trustworthy than other knowledge? Who is able to say what knowledge is trustworthy? Why do people have different views about how the world should be understood? Who gets to arbitrate when people disagree about the answers to these questions? These are matters of a branch of philosophy called epistemology. There’s a lot to learn in this area, but teachers are overloaded. We need a practical strategy that can be comparatively readily understood and applied. That’s where I think the idea of knowledge systems could help.

Here’s how the on-line Sociology Dictionary describes knowledge systems:

Knowledge Systems are structured ways of creating, sharing, and validating knowledge within a society. These systems encompass cultural beliefs, scientific understanding, educational practices, and local wisdom, forming the foundation through which societies interpret the world.

Familiar Eurocentric disciplines are knowledge systems (the sciences, history, other social sciences, the arts, literary studies and so on). Each discipline has its own concepts, practices, values. and conventions. The NZC curriculum learning areas included some references to these (e.g. nature of science; historical thinking; critical literacy). Some aspects of practices and conventions are hinted at in the Capabilities definitions for new Level 5 subjects, but only in a way that seems to take for granted that these features will be obvious. However, when you are immersed in a specific knowledge system it can be invisible to you. What we know and think and do just ‘is’. This is especially true when we think about our first language as a knowledge system. It’s not until you learn another language that you begin to be aware that there are quite different ways of organising what we know, and how we know.

What’s missing from the revised curriculum, and could help address the concerns I have outlined, is any sense that Eurocentric disciplines are not the only types of knowledge systems that have legitimacy and value. Indigenous people tend to think very differently about how the world ‘is’ and this is reflected in the way their knowledge systems are organised. Mātauranga Māori is one example but there are many others. As just one example of an important difference, traditional science thinking positions humans outside the natural world, looking in ‘objectively’. By contrast, indigenous people tend to see humans as immersed within the natural world, in dynamic relationships to all the other things in that world. Understanding this difference is important if we aspire to have all our young people learn to live more sustainably on our planet.

Local knowledge systems have some features of the formal disciplines and some features of indigenous knowledge systems. As the name suggests they evolve over time amongst people who have deep and sustained local knowledge of a specific area. Place-based learning has a focus on sharing the practical wisdom that is a hallmark of such systems.

All three types of knowledge systems are important. In our increasingly diverse classrooms, young people will already be juggling some combination of them. The interplay between them has the potential to draw attention to knowledge, as knowledge. Awareness of the limitations of our own knowing is called ‘epistemic humility’. Building the associated capabilities is increasingly seen as an important goal for education. But this doesn’t mean slipping into relativist ‘anything goes’ uncritical acceptance of knowledge claims. Rather it involves the complete opposite— being vigilant, thinking critically about where knowledge claims are coming from, and why they might (or might not) be trusted. (Epistemic vigilance is another helpful concept.) Building awareness of different knowledge systems, and how they can contribute to the richness of what young people learn about the world, and about themselves, can help build epistemic awareness. In turn, such awareness lays an important foundation for ongoing epistemic vigilance and epistemic humility.