‘Powerful knowledge’ curriculum theories and the case of physics

Introduction

Much of the thinking and writing about school curriculum takes place either at the big picture level (policy frameworks, curriculum theory) or alternatively within bounded specific communities (subject professional associations, school communities). The purpose of this paper is to focus on both in relation to questions about ‘powerful knowledge’ and the school curriculum.

The starting point for this discussion and the arguments it wants to examine further are associated with the case for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ (Young, 2008) and for a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’ (Young & Muller, 2013; Young, 2014) and for the particular value of knowledge that has been built by systematic human enquiry over time (Moore & Muller, 1999). Those arguments are advanced as having implications for the shape and content of school subjects and are opposed to grounding curriculum thinking primarily in terms of student interests, or unconstrained social demands (work skills, safety, values and the like), or skills conceived as content-free process. Our specific focus in relation to these arguments is physics, drawing on an empirical research project that has interviewed university physicists and school physics teachers in Australia about how they understand the field of physics today, and their more specific views on what is needed or valuable in curriculum.

Working with a focus both on the broad curriculum arguments and the case of the physics curriculum helps to bring in to clearer view some questions that underpin, tacitly at least, both the theories and some contemporary reforms, such as the attempt to build a new national curriculum framework in Australia. Can school subjects be logically derived from the discipline to which they relate? Given that disciplines are social in origin and changing and expanding over time, what, for the purpose of education is the discipline? Are questions about student engagement only questions about pedagogy and not curriculum? Should a focus on bringing knowledge back in (Young, 2008) mean that the role of school in forming identities and values is avoidable as a significant feature of what the curriculum does?

Bringing knowledge back in: the curriculum case about disciplinarity and powerful knowledge

In the past decade, there has been a renewed discussion in many parts of the world about the scope, purpose and specific content of the school curriculum (e.g. Biesta, 2014; Hamilton, 1999; Priestley & Biesta, 2013; Yates & Grumet, 2011; Yates, Collins & O'Connor, 2011; Young, 2008, 2013). In this paper, we want to take up the line of argument variously tagged ‘social realism’, or ‘bringing knowledge back in’, or ‘powerful knowledge’ that would seem to have particular relevance to the case for science, and more particularly physics, in the school curriculum.

The line of argument we want to consider here began with an article by Moore and Muller (1999) entitled ‘The discourse of voice and the problem of knowledge and identity in the sociology of education’ and it has been developed and refined further in many subsequent writings by these writers (e.g. Moore 2012; Muller, 2000, 2006, 2009) and others, most notably Michael Young (in particular, 2008, 2013, 2014; Young & Muller, 2010, 2013; Young & Lambert 2013). It has also been the subject of much discussion and critique (e.g. Beck, 2013; Biesta, 2014; Green, 2010; Morgan, 2014; Zipin, 2013). We begin by outlining three linked but relatively distinct elements of the case being made.

The first line of argument is an argument about knowledge rather than curriculum, but it also underpins the curriculum case (Moore & Muller, 1999; Moore, 2012; Young & Muller, 2010, 2013). The argument here is made within and directed to sociology of education. It argues that although knowledge is social in origin (developed through human interests and activities) that does not mean that all knowledge is equally subjective or socially relativist or of equal worth. Rather a distinction is made here between ‘knowledge of the powerful’ and ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young & Muller, 2013, p. 233). That the worth of knowledge is simply relative to who possesses it, ‘knowledge of the powerful’, for example, is argued to be overly relativist, over-politicised and mistaken. ‘Powerful knowledge’ as a characteristic of the knowledge itself derives from its form of development and testing over time that take it beyond the social relativism inherent in its origins. It has a defined focus and methodologies, and is particularly seen in the disciplines. Disciplines bring specialised structured ways of investigating or understanding the world, and a self-correcting quality that are ‘truth seeking’ (in their inherent form as distinct from how individuals may use them) and as such are nearer to truth, more reliable, more powerful. Knowledge is not powerful simply because of who possesses it but because its ‘truth-seeking’ form allows a progress and perspective that is beyond the immediate human interest or social origins (Young, 2013). So, Young argues, although there is overlap between ‘knowledge of the powerful’ and ‘powerful knowledge’, education sociologists in the late 20^th century wrongly collapsed the latter entirely into the former. Science and physics would seem in these arguments to implicitly be paradigmatic examples of ‘powerful knowledge’ (for this paper we leave aside issues about how well this characterisation works for the humanities and creative arts, although those questions are also part of our larger project which is studying history alongside physics)¹.

A second line of argument more specifically relates this position on knowledge to arguments about the curriculum. Here Young has been the most prominent discussant (especially Young, 2008, 2013, 2014; Young & Muller, 2010, 2013) and the case takes up not only the different value of different ways of seeing knowledge, but engages with the traditional sociological concern with inequality and difference. Concerns about inequality had generated the earlier move by sociologists to see knowledge primarily in terms of the social interests it served (e.g. in the earlier highly influential volume edited by Young (1971)). For sociologists concerned about inequality, the issue had been that there was a problem in talking about this kind of knowledge as more valuable when it effectively reinforced the disadvantage of students who were already disadvantaged. For example, research on school subjects and social inequalities in Australia (Teese, 2000; Teese & Polesel, 2003) had suggested that although the high-status subjects such as physics and high-level mathematics may be intellectually powerful as well as socially and instrumentally advantageous, the abstracted detachment required for them produced disengagement by those from poorer backgrounds and reproduced the socially differentiated patterns of success and failure (similarly, Bourdieu, 1977; Whitty, 2010; similar arguments related to gender – Rolin, 2001; Walkerdine, 1988).

Young emphasises here that what is significant about such knowledge is that it is specialised knowledge in how it has been produced and differentiated from everyday experiences students bring to school (Young, 2013, p. 108).

The third line of argument that is part of the ‘knowledge-based curriculum’ argument concerns the more specific relationship between the perspective on knowledge outlined above, and what is needed to enact a curriculum at school or teacher level (e.g. Young & Lambert, 2014). How do school subjects relate to disciplinary knowledge? What are schools doing in relation to knowledge compared with the ‘knowledge creation’ activities of universities and researchers? Here the arguments by Young and Lambert acknowledge that other elements will need to come into play in relation to school subjects compared with disciplines, but the issues are largely seen as pedagogical, as separate from the understandings about the discipline or knowledge field itself. In writing about this, Young takes up Bernstein's (2000) concept of school subjects as ‘recontextualising’ the ‘knowledge creation’ field. According to Bernstein (2000), when discourse is relocated from the field of knowledge production to the field of recontextualisation the knowledge structures that are implicit to those fields are relocated from the field of knowledge production to the field of recontextualisation. In Bernstein's argument, this translation is often indirect, carrying some but not all of the structure with it and is the space in which ideology comes into play. Here the curriculum developer has the opportunity to include their ideals around the purpose of education and notions of the ideal learner and graduate. Young's references to recontextualisation however do not make reference to either ideology or purpose as independent and inherent issues of this stage. Rather the thrust of his concern is to see this as primarily a stage of transmitting the knowledge effectively, and that this necessarily takes some account of learners and the context of the particular school.

In the case summarised above then, four different elements of the qualities of ‘powerful knowledge’ potentially come into play (Moore, 2004; Young, 2009; Young & Muller, 2013): (1) access to more reliable facts or truths; (2) access to higher level conceptual perspectives of the specialist field; (3) being able to see the specialist, structured form of a knowledge that differs from everyday experience; and (4) working with objective rather than learner-centred or social-interests-centred orientations to curriculum. All are linked in the arguments above, but what we will see in the case of physics is that this ‘social realist’ argument in fact elides some important questions about what is powerful in that discipline for the purpose of curriculum. Is it what it has uncovered (more reliable truths about the world) or is it about being given access to the structured field of knowledge by which these have been established? What does it mean to do the latter, if, as in the case of physics, the sophisticated mathematics that now underpins the knowledge creation end of the discipline is not graspable at school level?

Knowledge building across school and university: the research project

In an Australian Research Council funded project, Knowledge Building Across School and University ², carried out between 2011 and 2014, we aimed, using semi-structured interviews, policy analysis, university website analysis and the like, to understand more about how two disciplines (history and physics) are understood by those who work in them and what new conceptions of knowledge and education and education management are impinging on the knowledge agenda, in Australia today. We conducted 115 interviews across different kinds of institutions (elite and non-elite; school and university) with physics and history researchers and teachers at different career stages, using the interviews as a source of both direct and indirect evidence about knowledge today. We also interviewed representatives of professional associations and the chair of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) Science Curriculum framing committee as part of the project. Each interview lasted around an hour, and interviewees were sent transcripts and had opportunities to comment further if they wished. By ‘direct’ here we mean the kinds of responses interviewees gave to open-ended questions about how they saw their discipline, what, if anything had changed in it, what they thought was important in school subjects in this area. By ‘indirect’ we mean by attending to the body of interviews as a whole, and other evidence on the field, we make some interpretation of the scope and changing forms of physics today as well as the way the teachers are balancing concerns from within their understanding of the subject and more external pressures. In taking this approach we want to keep in play the sense of disciplines as social in origin, changing over time and comprising wider relationships and a body of knowledge that extends beyond the particular individuals working in it: via its history, journals, conferences, disciplinary associations (Abbott, 2001; Nerland, Jensen & Bekele, 2010; Nerland & Jensen, 2014). We wanted to see too how similarly or differently teachers in schools think about their subject compared with those teaching and researching in university, and the implications of such similarity or difference for the question of school curriculum.

In exploring how physicists and physics teachers see their discipline, and how they see what is important in their own teaching activities, we give particular attention to two elements of the argument about disciplines as ‘powerful knowledge’ that are related to the four different elements of the case and the questions we outlined earlier. First, that disciplinary knowledge is powerful because (or in that) it is different from everyday experience (‘commonsense knowledge’): it is disciplined, specialised, has rules and boundaries, and is oriented to more conceptual and generic forms of knowing. It is accepted in the case outlined above (especially Young, 2013; Young & Lambert, 2014) that good pedagogy may require a range of methods and examples, including everyday experiences, to link students into the curriculum, but Young, Muller and earlier Bernstein argue that unless students can be drawn into an orientation to the discipline and its structure and forms, rather than just using elements from the discipline to address issues drawn from the world of everyday knowledge, students will be sold short on the knowledge/intellectual development those disciplines make possible.

Second, the case for a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’ argues that taking the disciplines as an underpinning and locus for school curriculum impose constraints and directions in terms of coherence, selection, sequencing and pacing of school subjects (Muller, 2006; Young, 2013). Coherence, selection, sequencing and pacing are all issues in content selection which we discuss in the remainder of this paper.

So in what follows we want to discuss how those working in the physics discipline and subject areas talk about what the discipline or subject is, and what they bring into this conception that impinges on curriculum content selection issues for schools.

What is the discipline (or subject) and why does it matter?

Across both schools and universities, the people we interviewed (not surprisingly) strongly believed that their subject was important both as a field of important knowledge about the world, as an important form of disciplined inquiry or epistemological foundation for operating in the world, and also as a curriculum component that can achieve the broad social and vocational usefulness often referenced in public discussions about the twenty-first century. Almost without exception they agree with the broad argument made in the sociological curriculum literature discussed earlier, that greater depth and power is achieved by study within a discipline compared with attempting to directly teach ‘problem-solving’ or ‘communication’ and the like as instrumental techniques separate from substantive knowledge. This was a view shared by those who had in fact moved into different or more interdisciplinary areas.

Those trained in physics are proud of the history of physics and the innovations it has contributed to in everyday life, as well as the fact that it deals with the really big ‘nature of the universe’ questions. University physicists also report on ways the field is changing and expanding. A head of department for example tells us that once he would have understood every paper presented at his departmental seminars, but now it is so specialised that this is not possible – and similarly it is no longer possible to cover the whole of physics in the undergraduate curriculum as it once was. New collaborations are evolving, especially with Engineering, Biology and Medicine, and new fields or sub-disciplines have emerged especially biophysics and associations with physical chemistry. As well, as the work of Knorr-Cetina (1999) shows, and as many of the seminars held to explain the recent Higgs Boson discovery make clear, ‘scientific method’ in cutting edge physics is a very different beast from the school laboratory kind of experiment. Now many research groups are globally linked, with sometimes thousands of names on a paper, and the relation between equipment, equipment building, experimentation, theory, computer-processed big data, and empirical results is one that is multi-directional. It rarely leads to any simple experimental one-off proofs but requires ongoing dialogue and testing of theory, equipment, assumptions in every direction. For those we interviewed, this does not challenge the core of what physics is about: the ability to problem-solve, conceptualise and devise ways of testing at an abstracted and ‘fundamental’ level, but it does raise some questions about the form of the curriculum for school science and physics – about what is important or foundational, and about the development of the school subject.

Neither school nor university physics teachers expect all students to achieve extensive expertise in physics – its elitism is part of its central identity. However they do want all students to (1) have some basic knowledge and induction into physics, (2) to learn and respect scientific method and reasoning and (3) to acquire respect (and preferably admiration) for the achievements of physics and the work of physicists and the contribution they make to the world.

In other words, in relation to the question of what is it that is important or powerful about learning physics, there is a tension (at least in terms of content selection or time allocation) between acquiring knowledge and tools that are useful in the world, and understanding and respecting what physics is doing and what role it has in the world. The two concerns are linked but not identical. There is also an additional problem we discuss later. Although both university and school physicists want students to see and respect physics in the world and to understand its power, they do not necessarily see this as ‘doing physics’ and are often uneasy about the space in the curriculum used for this purpose, seeing it as social studies of science rather than physics.

‘The discipline’, as interviewees see this (and in agreement in principle with what the curriculum theorists above have argued), is an organised approach that is achieving important breakthroughs in the world but also a human enterprise that has developed historically; it is both about learning to do or think about problems in a certain way but also to have a particular perspective on a wide scope of things happening in the world; it involves both technical specialisation and mastery but also motivation and creativity. This was described as thinking ‘like a physicist’. The Australian Science Curriculum Framework³ in its template captures some of these distinct lines of thinking we heard in response to our questions about ‘what is distinctive about physics?’ and ‘why is it valuable for students?’. It organises that curriculum framework in three strands comprising ‘science understanding’, ‘science as a human endeavour’ and ‘science enquiry skills’. But even so, each public release of the document has drawn some critical responses and a range of debates about the balance between these, and about which topics were to be chosen and which were left out.

In sum, there is not unanimity among those we interviewed about what to do about topics where the mathematics required to properly understand a concept is too difficult. Some believe that it is important to introduce the topic or concept either for motivation or because they believe that over time students need to return to a topic and each time grasp some more of it or grasp it more quickly.

Physics, ‘powerful knowledge’ and the curriculum

In many ways science is a school subject that is readily in line with (even the model for) Young et al.'s arguments about disciplines creating powerful conceptual advances by using boundaries, rules, non-everydayness. But if the majority of students are not going to go on to be university physicists (or even year 12 student physicists), and if school students will not achieve the sophisticated mathematics often referred to as being important to understanding contemporary physics, what is the ‘powerful knowledge’ they need to be given access to (and what does it mean to actually get access to it)? What the interviewees and also the Science Advisory committee for ACARA were trying to juggle was how to bring together giving students an initial experience of approaching the world as a physicist (i.e. an understanding that might give you some basic principles for understanding how motors work and keeping abreast of current scientific issues and debates in society), some recapitulation of the history of the field and its achievements, and a (motivating) sense of the big field and problems physics is involved in today. Their concern was not just that students should learn in some very basic ways to act like physicists (or do a very simple experiment), or that they should learn in clear systematic ways basic formulae, foundational knowledge and theories of physics, though both of these were important. They wanted students to learn to appreciate, or respect, or even better, became passionate about science and this way of doing things, in part through seeing and respecting what physics today has to offer.

In other words, while the case for a knowledge-based approach (in Young's ‘powerful knowledge’ argument sense) is in line with how physicists and physics teachers see the value of their subject, the conceptual tools they value include social values and appreciation as well as ‘reliable’ or ‘powerful’ knowledge and skills – and the discipline itself is not able to dictate the sequencing and selection that this entails (though it does entail some understanding and respect for the kinds of boundaries and hierarchies that are part of the subject processes, and particularly the mathematical ones).

The process is simultaneously trying to construct a curriculum framework, and fill a politically positive purpose for the government. But one danger of calling for public scrutiny (the mode adopted by the new national curriculum authority in Australia) is to produce too many demands for topic inclusion and overload.

Moreover, the topic selections are not neutral. They may (though this is not universally agreed) carry with them some implications for which groups will be prioritised/advantaged at school, who will be drawn to become physicists and who will be turned away from that. In our interviews teachers in one state, for example, mentioned a number of topics in the senior years that they saw as of particular interest to girls, for example, astronomy and medical physics, and their concerns about the effects of removing such topics from the proposed Australian curriculum.

So the findings from this research with physicists and physics teachers can be read both as support and elaboration of the kinds of arguments made by sociologists in favour of disciplinarity as having some distinct value as powerful knowledge, and also as cutting across some of the initial binaries set up in those arguments: in particular in too sharply separating pedagogical concerns from curriculum framework concerns, or in seeing the intellectual role of schools (‘powerful knowledge’) as if it has little to do with subjectivity and identity and social values.

In the interviews, both physicists and physics teachers conveyed their own sense that what is powerful is related to conveying in some way the discipline, not simply bits of useful knowledge or techniques produced by that discipline. For example, a female teacher spoke about wanting to make sure that students in junior (general) science not only learnt some basic aspects of physics, but learned to name those elements as physics, to begin to have a sense of what the field of physics was about. She and others we interviewed wanted students to learn to see physics as a field of inquiry, not just receive its ‘reliable content’. In this sense they were acknowledging the importance of students learning to enter ‘non-everyday’ knowledge and modes. But in so far as a discipline is an abstract concept encompassing a field of (evolving) knowledge and a range of human activity, learning the discipline cannot entirely be about some static abstract idea of what the field is – it is in part about what in particular students should learn and learn to value from the discipline. Here physicists were fairly much in agreement in wanting the physics community to be something that is valued, that is accorded respect! But they were not in such tight agreement about the different kinds of student interests within the field and how far these should shape the curriculum selection: about which topics should be included in the final year curriculum; about how much hands on experimentation compared with ability to write about this was important; about what level of mathematics compared with understanding of the social impact of the physics field should be part of the subject.

Overall then, we would suggest that this research offers some support to the case about the power of disciplinary knowledge as well as showing the limits of this argument and the relevance of questions about values, identity, equity in providing a curriculum foundation. Content selection is a distinctive curriculum issue, not simply one that can be derived authoritatively from the disciplines themselves (though it is related to and constrained by these) nor is this only about pedagogical concerns in relation to engagement. It is an issue because the scope of the disciplinary field is far greater than can be encompassed in the school subjects, and the trajectory of intellectual foundations and development, even in such a core science subject as physics is not simply ‘linear’. Content selection relates to engagement, and engagement matters in curriculum terms because it is needed for the intellectual ‘insiderness’ of learning the discipline and for inclusion within it, not just acquiring bits of fact or technique. It is important too because schools as institutions are important conveyors of social values, and content selection that emphasises some things and de-emphasises others directly impacts on this.

Even though physics as a disciplinary enterprise was shown here to be relatively stable in its foundational concerns and modes, and maintains a strong identity as a field and community, those we interviewed were also interested in the changes in the field – increasing specialisations, collaborations, merging boundaries, new possibilities as a result of new technology and new ways of handling data and calculation. So even in this rather stable subject area it is clear that subject frameworks need to be periodically refreshed, and that this task is not adequately addressable by an individual teacher or their school – it properly should involve a range of voices from those with different kinds of expertise. In a recent chapter, Lambert (2014) has made some useful proposals as to who should be involved and what should be differentially covered at a national framework level, and at a school or individual teacher level. Many teachers (at universities too) do not like changing what they have successfully been teaching in the past, but this does not mean that they are necessarily right in resisting change (or that they are necessarily wrong). Even less do politicians or appeals to public consensus via a curriculum authority website have a secure sense of what is powerful or what needs to be taken into account in framing curriculum content selection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant DP110102466: Knowledge building across school and university: policy strategies and effects.