David Lambert
This brief memorandum provides a succinct summary of Future 3. It draws from a longer open access article published mainly for a German audience of geography educators: https://zgd-journal.de/index.php/zgd/issue/view/167 which provides more detail and importantly citations and references – these ideas do not just rise without trace. The International Geographical Union Commission for Geographical Education (IGU-CGE) is holding a panel discission to explore international perspectives on Future Three scenarios (August 25th 2024) which will focus on key emergent questions such as,
1. What changes in teacher education and professional development are needed for teachers to enact a progressive knowledge-rich geography curriculum?
2. How might these changes be implemented in the context of national policy for schools and the geography curriculum?
3. How might these changes be sustained so that they are transformative?
Hard Times, published 170 years ago, was Dickens’ satirical destruction of education based upon ‘nothing but facts’. It remains an eloquent revelation of capitalism’s power to reduce humanity to numbers and definitions. In educational terms this meant reducing learning to fact and reifying a pseudo-scientific ‘reasoning’ process that purported to be value-free, objective, and devoid of feeling, emotion, and intuition. Today, when many schools proclaim their curriculum as knowledge-led and/or knowledge rich, to what extent have we learned some of the lessons provoked by the narrow and harmful processes of education depicted in Hard Times? If there remains a shadow of Thomas Gradgrind then it is not for want of repeated attempts to move on from ‘nothing but facts.’ For instance, over 50 years ago Postman and Weingartner famously called for anew education‘to help all students develop built-in, shockproof crap detectors.’ The old education, they argued, was predicated on absolute, fixed and unchanging ‘truths’ and did not encourage critique. It was dominated by certainties, often binary rights and wrongs and did not encourage ambiguity.
The new education emphasised learning more than teaching, focussing teachers’ attention not on teachable knowledge but on the learner. Gert Biesta has called this the ‘learnification’ of education, and while this may produce competent, socially skilful, and highly flexible human capital, it risks turning out young people who are in some ways significantly untaught. The ‘swing’ between old and new education, between traditionalist and progressive educational thought, between modernisers and conservatives, continues. With a potentially epochal election having now taken place we should ponder this carefully.
It is possible to imagine a third option, which is exactly what Michael Young and Johan Muller attempted to do in their 2010 paper on three future curriculum scenarios. These are caricatures, but they contain enough veracity to facilitate meaningful and productive debate about the curriculum:
Future 1 (F1) is a curriculum consisting of ‘given’ knowledge that is seemingly uncontested. The teacher delivers these authorised contents. It is a traditional curriculum of one-way transmission.
Future 2 (F2) is a response to the deficiencies of a transmission model of the curriculum Subject boundaries are relaxed or even dissolved. Content becomes increasingly arbitrary, and instead generic and transferrable skills are brought to the forefront.
Future 3 (F3) restores the responsibilities of teachers for ensuring pupils have access to knowledge (they are more than ‘facilitators of learning’). But unlike F1, knowledge is contested, dynamic and subject to argument. Students are encouraged to discern the reliability or dependability of knowledge claims. This is a curriculum of engagement with knowledge itself.
F3 curriculum scenarios address the inadequacies of both F1 and F2. Thus, under F3 it is accepted that all knowledge is socially constructed – it is produced by groups of human beings – but this does not mean that all knowledge has equal claim to truth, rendering selections of what to teach arbitrary. F3 recognises the virtuous educational intent that can be present in both the ‘traditional’ F1 and the ‘progressive’ F2 scenarios. Thus, in F3 scenarios specialist disciplinary knowledge (sometimes referred to as ‘powerful knowledge’) is a curriculum principle, but the focus of attention is on how this knowledge is made (and by whom), how it gains (or loses) its warrant, and how it changes over time. Curriculum knowledge is not the same as the knowledge it draws on. In short, F3 thinking resolutely rejects the ‘old education’ but imagines the ‘new education’ focussed on teachers’ work and the quality of the enacted curriculum.
F3 curricula:
- ask ‘who are we teaching?’ This is to acknowledge and respect students’ lived experiences, aspirations, and drives as learners;
- are mindful of the prime reason that schooling is compulsory – that there is important knowledge that students can acquire at school that is beyond their everyday experience, and that acquiring it is necessarily a voluntary action on the part of the learner;
- recognise that there are different ways of ‘knowing’ the world. For example, although we learn much through our everyday experience, this is very different from learning to see the world as an object of study and it is this difference that pupils can pose the greatest difficulties for some students;
- provide opportunities and encourages students to think about how we know what we claim to know;
- seek to show the ‘power’ of different ways of seeing and thinking associated with different subjects.
F3 thinking encourages a shift from the technical competence and efficiency of teachers to implement and deliver content, towards the kind of dialogue and conversation with and among students that demonstrates their engagement and encourages the search for new knowledge. Claims for curricula based on ‘powerful knowledge’ are easy to assert. However, if through their implementation such curricula achieve little more than short-term memorisation, then much of the emancipatory potential of knowledge-rich teaching is lost. This point is arguably of greatest significance for students of minoritised and/or socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
A yet more ambitious claim is that a F3 curriculum might even begin to address how school curricula – and teaching itself – can face up to epochal challenges such as the rise of post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, the yet to be understood educational implications of artificial intelligence and the environmental and political crises that the climate emergency points to.
Reference
Lambert, D., Béneker, T. and Bladh, G. (2024) Teaching Quality in Geography: what are we trying to achieve? Zeitschrift für Geographiedidaktik, 51, 3, 156-159. DOI: 10.60511/51187