A Journal About Education in Pacific Circle Countries
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Pacific- Asian Education A Journal about Education in Pacific Circle Countries Volume 22 Number 1 2010 Pacific-Asian Education The Journal of the Pacific Circle Consortium for Education Volume 22, Number 1, 2010 EDITOR Elizabeth Rata, School of Critical Studies in Education, Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Email: [email protected] EXECUTIVE EDITORS Airini, The University of Auckland, New Zealand Alexis Siteine, The University of Auckland, New Zealand CONSULTING EDITOR Michael Young, Institute of Education, University of London EDITORIAL BOARD Kerry Kennedy, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong Meesook Kim, Korean Educational Development Institute, South Korea Carol Mutch, Education Review Office, New Zealand Gerald Fry, University of Minnesota, USA Christine Halse, University of Western Sydney, Australia Gary McLean,Texas A & M University, USA Leesa Wheelahan, University of Melbourne, Australia Rob Strathdee, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Xiaoyu Chen, Peking University, P. R. China Saya Shiraishi, The University of Tokyo, Japan Richard Tinning, University of Queensland, Australia ISSN 1019-8725 © Pacific Circle Consortium for Education Publication design and layout: Halcyon Design Ltd, www.halcyondesign.co.nz Published by Pacific Circle Consortium for Education http://pacificcircleconsortium.org/PAEJournal.html Pacific-Asian Education Volume 22, Number 1, 2010 CONTENTS Editorial 5 Elizabeth Rata Articles Why educators must differentiate knowledge from experience 9 Michael Young The future of education in a knowledge society: The radical case for a subject-based curriculum 21 Michael Young Knowledge, belief, critical evaluation and education 33 Robert Nola Commercialising higher education: Lessons from Vietnam 45 Nguyen Thi Thuy Linh Promoting emotionally-vulnerable subjects: The educational implications of an ‘epistemology of the emotions’ 57 Kathryn Ecclestone Citizenship, identity and the social studies curriculum in Singapore 77 Theresa Tan and Rob Strathdee Environmental care in education outside the classroom 91 Chris North Book Reviews Knowledge, curriculum and qualifications for South African further education 103 Graham McPhail Why knowledge matters in the curriculum 107 Airini About the Authors 111 The Pacific Circle Consortium for Education 113 Members and officers of the Consortium 113 Notes for contributors and guidelines for submitting manuscripts 114 4 Journal of the Pacific Circle Consortium for Education Vol. 22, No. 1, December 2010, 5–7 Editorial Elizabeth Rata This is the first issue of Pacific-Asian Education published solely by the new editors based at the University of Auckland. As the journal of the Pacific Circle Consortium, Pacific-Asian Education has a distinguished tradition through its contribution to the region’s dynamic educational research culture. Its placement in Pacific and Asia does not mean, however, that the journal is not part of the innovations, trends, and debates that characterise educational research world-wide. Indeed, in our globalised world, it is essential that the journal look outward while at the same time maintaining a focus on Pacific and Asian concerns. This issue reflects that outward focus while remaining true to the aims of the Pacific Circle Consortium. Its purpose is to bring the debate currently shaking educational theories about knowledge and the curriculum into the journal’s purview. That we have been able to include two articles by Michael Young, the major social realist writer in the international debate, means that this issue of the journal is able to make a significant contribution to introducing the debate to Asia and the Pacific. His two articles have been developed from major addresses given at the University of Auckland in August 2010. These articles, combined with an article also developed from an address given by the philosopher of knowledge and science, Robert Nola at the same event, provide a philosophical dimension to the issue of knowledge and the curriculum. By comparing scientific realism and anti-realist positions, Nola enables the reader to approach the Young articles with the conceptual tools required for deep analysis. Both writers are interested in what knowledge is taught in schools. In discussing how beliefs can be based on culture, on evidence, or reason, Robert Nola lays out a framework for deciding how beliefs become knowledge. Michael Young’s two articles take up that point to argue that the knowledge taught in schools should be different from the beliefs of our daily experiences. This addresses directly the social realism versus social constructivism dispute at the heart of the knowledge and curriculum debates. Young’s concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ and his advocacy for separating curriculum and pedagogy are ideas that deserve full and thorough discussion by educators. In addition, his overview of the contribution of Durkheim, Vygotsky, and Bernstein to educational theory are useful reminders of the impressive body of educational thought upon which contemporary research builds. Kathryn Ecclestone’s original and challenging account of an epistemology of the emotions takes the social realist analysis into another area of educational research, that of the preoccupation with the emotions by social constructivists. Like the other contributors to this volume, her concern is with the question at the heart of the sociology of education throughout the world: Does the 6 Editorial – E Rata knowledge taught in schools contribute to greater social equality or does it contribute to the reproduction of inequality? While such philosophical considerations may at first seem a world away from Chris North’s concerns about environmental education in New Zealand, from Nguyen Thi Thuy Linh’s analysis of higher education in Vietnam, and from Theresa Tan and Rob Strathdee’s discussion of the social studies curriculum in Singapore, these three articles do in fact demonstrate the conceptual link between philosophy, educational theory, and research into the practice of education. Countries throughout the Pacific and Asian region are developing extensive education systems. What should be taught is pivotal to not only the nature of those systems but to the society as a whole. Drawing on Basil Bernstein’s theoretical insights, Nguyen Thi Thuy Linh uses her analysis of the credit system being introduced into Vietnamese higher education to open up the broader issue of what happens to knowledge when the boundaries between knowledge fields are increasingly blurred. The prospect of uncommitted and unmotivated students is one of a number of unintended outcomes discussed in the article. Theresa Tan and Rob Strathdee’s analysis of the gap between Singapore’s goal of creative, innovative and experimental education and the actual prescriptive and centralised educational system brings into focus the question that underpins all the contributions to this issue: What makes education transformative? While Tan and Strathdee focus specifically on the concept of citizenship, the implicit question about how citizenship is to conceptualised in a diverse society operating in a highly diverse world links this article to the question posed by Young: What should we teach in schools? Arguing that citizenship education is as much about preparing people to cope with the complex world of the global era as it is about learning to live in the local context, the writers argue that the social studies curriculum in Singapore needs to be broadened if it is to develop active citizenship at home and global awareness abroad. Chris North takes us to a different country - New Zealand - and a different school subject - environmental education. He shows that when knowledge is reduced to information and rule-bound behaviour it is neither translated into understanding nor into the practice that comes from really knowing why we behave as we do. Despite the very different approaches and subjects of their respective articles, North, Young, and Nola, like the other contributors to this issue, are talking to teachers. Their shared purpose is to get teachers thinking about what and how they teach. The two reviews, one by Graham McPhail and the second by Airini, introduce the reader to books that consider that question in specific countries. Leesa Wheelahan’s analysis of differential access to knowledge in higher education in Australia and the Young and Gamble edited volume about knowledge, curriculum, and qualifications in South Africa show the truly global nature of the curriculum debate. The reviews also raise the question at the heart of the sociology of knowledge. Can ‘cultural knowledge’, that is, the context-dependent knowledge of Bernstein’s horizontal discourses and the knowledge required for good pedagogical relations, also be epistemic or powerful knowledge? For Bernstein, Young, and other social realists, the inclusion of cultural knowledge in epistemic knowledge diminishes and dilutes its strong verticality, where, as Graham McPhail comments, content sequence and coverage are of paramount Journal of the Pacific Circle Consortium for Education 7 importance. That very inclusion of context-dependent knowledge is in fact what turns vertical knowledge into horizontal knowledge and weakens the curriculum. Airini shares this position saying that ‘knowledge in this sense’, that is, culturally or contextually bounded knowledge should be ‘communicated through pedagogic and organisational practices that emphasise the cultural assets of students rather