One of the biggest challenges for
education in the 21st century is that our ideas about curriculum are currently
underpinned by at least two quite
different epistemologies, or models of what counts as knowledge. The first
view is the “traditional” idea of knowledge as content, concepts and skills selected from the disciplines to form
the “subjects” or “learning areas” of the school curriculum. From this point of
view, the learner’s job is to absorb and assimilate that knowledge into their
mind and demonstrate how well they have done this through various means of
assessment. It is assumed that this knowledge will be stored up for later use
during the learner’s life.
The second conception of knowledge is
associated with the Knowledge Age/“21st century” literature. In this view,
knowledge is seen as something that does
things, as being more energy-like than matter-like, more like a verb than a
noun. Knowledge, in the Knowledge Age, involves creating and using new
knowledge to solve problems and find solutions to challenges as they arise on a
“just-in-time” basis. These ideas about knowledge have emerged in the world
outside education—driven in large part by economic, social and political
changes, often facilitated by new technologies.
The Knowledge Age literature argues that
reproducing existing knowledge can no longer be education’s core goal, because (a)
it is no longer possible to determine exactly which knowledge people will need to
store up in order to use it in their lives after school, and (b) the “storing
up for future use” model of knowledge is no longer useful or sufficient for
thinking about how knowledge is developed and used in the 21st century. Instead,
the focus needs to be on equipping people to do things with knowledge, to use knowledge in inventive ways, in
new contexts and combinations. An individual’s stock of knowledge is important
as a foundation for their personal cognitive development: however, for it to be
useful as a foundation for their participation in social and economic life, the
individual must be able to connect and collaborate with other individuals
holding complementary knowledge and ideas.
What this means for the school curriculum
is a shift in what is “foregrounded”. Instead of simply assuming these
capacities will be developed through engagement with disciplinary knowledge
(the traditional view), there is a shift to focusing on the development of everyone’s capabilities to work with knowledge. From this point of
view, disciplinary knowledge should be seen, not as an end in itself, but as a context within which students’ learning
capacity can be developed. While the use of the term “learning areas” in The
New Zealand Curriculum[1] (NZC) document signals this,
it is clear that this has not changed underlying thinking for many educators.
It seems clear that the work of building a 21st century education system must
involve supporting educators—and the public—to understand the paradigm shift in
the meaning of such apparently common-sense terms as “knowledge” and
“learning”, and how this might change the way curriculum is interpreted into
learning and teaching experiences.
R Bolstad & J Gilbert (2012, p. 4) Report to Ministry of Education, "Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching — a New Zealand perspective"
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