The changing nature of knowledge and implications for the curriculum

The changing nature of knowledge and implications for the curriculum

The curriculum has traditionally embodied knowledge that is not absolutely current. If a curriculum is locally determined it can be frequently refreshed, but by its very nature a national curriculum, such as the one introduced in England after the Education Reform Act of 1988, is established on a relatively long-term basis and diffi cult to change. One of the affordances of the Internet is that it makes current knowledge available to schools in a more fl uid, less packaged form. Knowledge is emergent and contestable, part of the on-going project of humankind to establish and codify what is known; but whereas in the past this process of knowledge creation was separated from knowledge consumption by academic reviewers and publishers, and quality control systems were in place to sort and select knowledge claims so that students and the general public were presented with a relatively orderly body of truths, now it is open to public scrutiny directly through the Internet or indirectly through the mediation of newspapers and broadcast radio and television (Lankshear 2003). Every teenager who logs on to MSN is offered an up-to-date news service as well as facilities for communicating with friends. Through the Internet, educational institutions have lost one of their traditional functions as the source of knowledge and the guardian of its quality. What has traditionally counted as knowledge – books, academic journals, research reports – is now available on the Internet alongside a huge quantity of other kinds of material, so that the overlaps between knowledge and information, evidence and hearsay, are blurring. Indeed, it is often said today that it matters little whether what is reported in the media about a politician or celebratory is true, because once it has widely circulated it enters the public’s imagination and becomes accepted as part of the story. Although this kind of gossip has always been part of human communities, its public nature on the Internet makes its impact different.

In addition to making the provisional and contestable nature of knowledge more visible, ICT has fundamentally changed the way it is represented, with ‘a shift from the verbal to the visual in textual production’ (Snyder 2001). Mutimedia representations are much more accessible to learners than linear verbal texts. The

Inside innovation 31 power of the image and its subtlety as a form of communication (Barthes 1983,

pp. 194–210) is often compelling and the greatly increased use of still and moving images is a shaping dynamic of changes in communication and knowledge transfer. What were previously discrete media – fi lm, radio, television, music production, can now be merged in the one-stop shop of the Internet. Snyder (ibid., pp. 51–3) calls this blurring of multimodal communication and representation ‘hybrid vigour’ and describes experimental hypermediacy – ‘Televised news programmes feature multiple video streams, split-screen displays, composites of graphics and text’ – which were novel in 2001 but are now commonplace.

These changes in the nature of knowledge have a number of implications for the curriculum and pedagogy. Andrews (2000) provides a striking example of how two emails he received enabled his children in England to track the travel time of migratory birds between New Hampshire and Ottawa, and how they were then able to use the Internet to answer a question in the second email on whether the idea that geese transported humming birds on their backs was true or a legend. It took them just 90 seconds to fi nd the answer. He argues that in the context of these new information and communication technologies the conceptualisation of learning in the National Curriculum – ‘fi nding things out, developing ideas and making things happen, exchanging and sharing information, and reviewing/modifying/evaluating work as it progresses’ – is ‘laudable, but somewhat static’. He argues for a more dynamic conceptualisation of learning with ‘four main characteristics: community, dialogue, transformation and framing’ (ibid., p. 5). The fi rst three of these suggest a more learner-led curriculum, akin to the project-based learning typical of Norwegian schools, or the shifts in curriculum in the Chilean Enlaces project towards more local knowledge related to children’s interests. The fourth refers to ‘the act of framing’ (original italics) by which the subject, the classroom and the school locate the process of knowledge acquisition and transfer. The wide range of multimedia resources available through the Internet, and the shifting status of traditional resources such as libraries, disturb learners’ and teachers’ established ways of framing knowledge and learning. Understandings of literacy have shifted, for example, as a result of the great increase in resources incorporating still and moving images.

McCormick and Scrimshaw (2001) extend this line of analysis by exploring how one of the impacts of ICT is to change the nature of teachers’ knowledge. They use a model developed by Banks et al. (1999) which distinguishes between subject knowledge, school knowledge and pedagogical knowledge and relates all three to the teacher’s personal constructs. ICT, they suggest, is likely to be either threatening or stimulating to the teacher’s personal identity and this will be a factor in the level of change they embrace when using ICT in teaching. Even at the lowest level of improving effi ciency with ICT, in which ‘ICT replaces some conventional resource, but the other elements in the situation remain largely unchanged’, they note that ‘there can be unexpected effects’, which is of course to be expected from a complexity theory perspective (McCormick and Scrimshaw 2001, p. 45); at the second level the Internet extends the reach of the classroom, drawing upon rich resources available on the Internet, such as the Sutton Hoo burial site; at the third level not just the knowledge content but the whole conception of the subject may be transformed,

32 Understanding innovation challenging teachers’ understandings of the nature of knowledge and demanding

considerable personal change as their relationship with students changes from knowledgeable authority to co-learner and adviser (ibid., pp. 48–9).