What are we Teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum

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Praise for What are we Teaching?

Richard Bustin has written an excellent book about one of the things which matters most – what teachers should actually teach. He makes a strong case for powerful knowledge, in both theory and practice, and does something which is unfortunately rare: he looks at each school subject, or groups of subjects, and asks what knowledge matters most. A terrific book.

Professor Barnaby Lenon CBE, Dean, Faculty of Education, University of Buckingham

What are we Teaching? offers school leaders and teachers a profound opportunity to reflect on the crucial role of subject specialist teachers and their contributions to a subject-based curriculum. Drawing upon research with educators across various subjects, the book captures the authentic voices of teachers in art, design and technology, drama, English, history, mathematics, modern foreign languages, music, physical education, religious education, and science. Alongside the teachers’ insights, explorations of knowledge within these subject areas illuminate the potential for each subject to contribute distinctively to young people’s education.

Dr Grace Healy, Education Director (Secondary), David Ross Education Trust

Richard Bustin’s book is a much-needed addition to the academic discussion on the meaning and role of subjects in school education. Much has previously been written about the concept of powerful knowledge and its potential to highlight the importance of specialised knowledge in education: scholars in several discipline-based subject groups – for example, in geography and history – have studied it, but most of this work has been done in the context of these individual subjects. In this book, Richard looks at different subjects and gives voice to teachers themselves. In the theoretical part of the book, he makes a clear introduction to the concepts of powerful knowledge and the capability approach to help teachers explore what kind of contribution their subjects can have for their students. Even though the book is mainly targeted at readers in the UK, it also works well for the international audience interested in the role of subject-based education. I highly recommend this book to all teachers, teacher educators and student teachers.

Sirpa Tani, Professor of Geography and Environmental Education, University of Helsinki, Finland

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This is a remarkable book and the timing of it is impeccable. The 2024 Labour Government is strongly committed to social justice and is looking to restore the promise of education. This book should inform that work. It is well informed, showing up some of the snake oil solutions of recent years, and through its conceptual framing provides a way to avoid the familiar swing of the educational pendulum. And Richard Bustin makes no bones about it: we need to trust teachers and support them properly in the ‘knowledge work’ which I fervently believe underpins great teaching at all levels.

It is not a ‘practical’ handbook, but it is written mainly for teachers and the voices of teachers are loud. The book advocates for the rich and enriching intellectual component of teaching, summed up in the idea of curriculum making. Over half the book explores how over 200 teachers of various subjects (across three schools) respond to the simple yet radical idea that what we teach young people should empower them. Obviously, the book in no sense offers a final word. But it does open up this question and provides productive ways to work with it.

David Lambert, Emeritus Professor of Geography Education, UCL Institute of Education, and co-author of Race, Racism and the Geography Curriculum

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Foreword by Mary Myatt

The development of the curriculum is an ongoing professional endeavour, a never-ending story. What are we Teaching? is an important contribution to the professional conversations about what counts as a thoughtful curriculum, worthy of all the young people we teach.

Creating a curriculum is a source of endless fascination. It is crucial work; it is what schools ‘do’ and the debates about what is worth teaching and why are important. For these reasons, Richard Bustin’s question – ‘How can the nature of powerful knowledge in different school subjects be characterised?’ – provides us with a fresh lens to consider the value and impact of curriculum development. What are we Teaching? offers some original research to help address that question. It is both robust and accessible in equal measure, quite a feat!

The inclusion and critique of narratives about the curriculum from across different, and sometimes opposing, positions is illuminating. As a result, Richard has provided us with an opportunity to scope the landscape and to consider alternative points of view. This is helpful for the reader as it sets out the background into which the fresh perspectives can be inserted. As Christine Counsell has argued, background knowledge is essential for pupils when learning new material: similarly, providing the reader with an overview is helpful for us as professionals, if we are to get to grips with the sometimes contested, yet fascinating, landscape of curricular models.

Drawing on wide-ranging research, including that of David Lambert and Michael Young, Richard argues that it is essential to honour the rigour of the individual subject domains, whilst at the same time foregrounding the subjects’ potential for human development. In the analysis and critique of the Future curriculum scenarios, What are we Teaching? helps our own insights grow on two counts: we are reminded of the ways in which ‘powerful knowledge’ might be framed and we are also invited to distil meaning from each the elements that are likely to make most difference in teaching the individual subjects.

Richard shows us that the ways in which school subjects come to be framed and articulated are not the same for all disciplines. Whilst science and mathematics might bear a close relationship to the ‘parent’ academic field, this is less clear cut in some of the arts and humanities. iiIn presenting us with the alternative arguments, the terrain becomes very interesting. The elements that are currently thought to be most fruitful in terms of being worthy of inclusion in the curriculum are contested, quite rightly, over time. This is seen in the debates about the merits of texts selected in English, and the emerging calls for a wider range of diverse voices to be included in history and geography, for example.

What brings this book to life and what will make it so helpful for colleagues grappling with these important themes in schools, is that the work is informed by Richard’s own research, both for his doctorate and for the purposes of this book. This is a remarkable bridge between the academic and the practical, ‘work in progress’ nature of curriculum debates in schools. What are we Teaching? considers the contested notion of powerful knowledge across the full range of school subjects and comes to some surprising conclusions. The book involves the voices of teachers from the three case study schools who spent time and energy exploring these ideas for themselves.

I was particularly struck by the inclusion of Amartya Sen’s work as a way of framing the subjects as providing the space for developing capabilities. While Sen’s work has, for the most part, been influential in geography curriculum development, it has the potential to inform discussions and insights in other subjects as well. The capabilities lens helps to take us beyond the examination specifications, important as these are, to the bigger capacity that each subject has for developing the human alongside the intellectual and academic capabilities of young people.

This book is a highly stimulating, thought-provoking, yet accessible read. Richard carries his scholarship lightly. He is ultimately practical in the way in which he takes us through the landscape, makes his arguments and poses questions for discussion and reflection at the end of each chapter. To articulate what powerful knowledge might be, in its most expansive sense, across each of the subjects is a truly remarkable piece of work. As such it will be immensely helpful to colleagues refining and upgrading their curriculum.

Mary Myatt, education advisor, writer, speaker and author

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Acknowledgements

This book is over a decade in the making and, as such, I wish to thank a number of people whose thoughts and advice have helped me to shape the arguments you are about to read.

First is Professor David Lambert. David supervised my doctoral research whilst I was a part-time student at the UCL Institute of Education (and working as a full-time teacher). David’s work on powerful knowledge and GeoCapabilities, as well as much of his collaborative work with others, is referenced throughout this book, and he invited me to take part in the GeoCapabilities 2 project. For this, and for his continued support since the completion of my doctoral research, I will always be very grateful. Thank you.

Secondly, I would like to thank the teachers whose words are featured in the second part of this book. They took part in the workshops as part of continuing professional development provision, knowing that I might use their responses somehow. They are anonymised, in line with research ethics, but they know who they are, and their contributions add a sense of realism to the ideas in the book.

I have had the pleasure of sharing many of these ideas with trainee and experienced teachers throughout the world and want to thank them for their engagement in discussions which have helped to shape my thinking. My own students in the schools where I have taught have helped to keep all these ideas grounded, and so they deserve my thanks too.

I also want to thank a small number of friends and colleagues who offered comments on earlier draft chapters: Dr Laura Barritt, Melody Bridges, Dr Cosette Crisan and Dr Arjan Reesink. I am honoured that Mary Myatt agreed to write the foreword to this book and want to thank her for her endorsement.

Finally, I want to thank my family – Sarah, Lizzie and Evie – for ensuring that I always had something more important to do than writing!

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Contents

Title Page

Foreword by Mary Myatt

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Have we lost our way?

We seem to have lost our way

Choose your team: the traditionalists vs the progressives

Don’t change the subject!

For discussion

Part I: Theory

Introduction to Part I

Wider reading

Conclusions

Chapter 1: We’ve ‘had enough of experts’

Why has this happened?

What is the impact for teachers in schools?

The need for expert teachers

Student expertise

The growing inaccessibility of science

Conclusions: have we really had enough of experts?

For discussion

Chapter 2: Why are we doing this?

Knowledge and truth

What’s it all about anyway?

Knowledge in the classroom: some starting points

Disciplined thinking in classrooms

What about skills and values?

Types of classroom knowledge

Conclusions

For discussion

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Chapter 3: Whatever happened to powerful knowledge?

So, what is powerful knowledge?

Back to the future

Powerful pedagogies

Powerful knowledge: the story of school geography

Powerful knowledge: where did it all go wrong?

Conclusions

For discussion

Chapter 4: Towards a capability approach to curriculum making

What is the capability approach?

Back to school: the capability approach to curriculum thinking

But what about knowledge?

Back to the story of school geography: GeoCapabilities

Back to the classroom: the making of a Future 3 curriculum

Conclusions

For discussion

Part II: Theory into Practice

Introduction to Part II

Teacher voice

Limitations of the research and how the data are used

Conclusions

Chapter 5: What might make mathematics a powerful knowledge?

Mathematics knowledge

School mathematical knowledge

What makes mathematics a powerful knowledge for young people?

Teacher voice

Conclusions: towards mathematics capabilities

For discussion

Chapter 6: What might make English literature and language a powerful knowledge?

English in the curriculum

Knowledge in English

English literature as a corrupt curriculum

English as a powerful knowledge

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Teacher voice

Conclusions: towards English capabilities

For discussion

Chapter 7: What might make science a powerful knowledge?

Science as procedural knowledge

Science as substantive knowledge

Science knowledge in schools

Science as a powerful knowledge

Teacher voice

Conclusions: towards science capabilities

For discussion

Chapter 8: What might make the humanities a powerful knowledge?

Humanities in the curriculum

Humanities knowledge(s)

Humanities as a corrupt curriculum

Humanities as powerful knowledges

Teacher voice

Conclusions: towards humanities capabilities

For discussion

Chapter 9: What might make the creative arts a powerful knowledge?

Creative art knowledge in schools

Creative arts as procedural knowledge

Creative arts as substantive knowledge

Creative arts as powerful knowledge

Teacher voice

Conclusions: towards creative arts capabilities

For discussion

Chapter 10: What might make languages a powerful knowledge?

Language education in schools

Knowledge in language education

Languages as a powerful knowledge

Teacher voice

Conclusions: towards languages capabilities

For discussion

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Chapter 11: What might make physical education a powerful knowledge?

Physical education in schools

PE as a procedural knowledge

PE as a substantive knowledge

PE as a powerful knowledge

Teacher voice

Conclusions: towards PE capabilities

For discussion

Conclusions: towards a whole-school capabilities curriculum

Back to empowering knowledge of subjects?

What might educational capabilities look like?

How do we get there?

Final conclusions

For discussion

References

Copyright

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Introduction

Have we lost our way?

According to Māori oral tradition, the goddess Hine Hukatere spent her days walking New Zealand’s Southern Alps. One day she decided to visit the beach where she met and fell in love with the great warrior, Wawe. She invited Wawe back to her mountain home but as they hiked together, he could not keep up and he stumbled. An avalanche struck, and he disappeared forever. Hine Hukatere was distraught and began crying. She cried so much that Ranginui, the Sky Father, took pity on her and turned her tears into rivers of ice.

This story was told to me by a mountain guide as I stood gazing at the awesome glacial landscape that spread before me. I was on a geography field trip with my fellow undergraduates, and we were there to study the landscapes formed by ice in this spectacular mountain range in New Zealand. We were looking at Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere: the frozen tears of Hine Hukatere. The names Franz Joseph Glacier and Fox Glacier as the two main glaciers in this part of the Southern Alps are more commonly known, came later when Europeans first set eyes on the landscape. Having told us this epic, tragic story, our guide rather dismissively proclaimed that we were there to study the causation of the glacier as we now know it. What followed was a rather more familiar story of snowfall, accumulation, glacier flow, erosional processes and the various scientific rigmarole of glacier function.

What struck me most was that the two stories of glacier formation were explained almost as if they were in conflict with each other and we had to choose which one we believed. We had to decide whether the glacier was formed by the frozen tears of a grief-stricken goddess or from the scientific processes of ice accumulation and flow. It was made clear to me on the day which one I needed to engage with, certainly as far as any 2essays were concerned. Yet, to me, pitching them against each other as claims to truth was misguided. Science, by which here (and in this book) I mean the methodological process of seeking reproducible truths, clearly was going to favour one story of glacier formation. Given that glaciers are found all over the world, the same set of processes can be observed, and the rigorous study of them furthers scientific understanding. But the Māori version of events is a different form of truth. It binds the mountains and the glaciers to the people who live there. The environment becomes inextricably linked to their being, through art, stories, music and culture. As such, the people have an in-built responsibility towards, and stewardship of, the environment; the mountains are not something ‘othered’, to be studied objectively, but are part of their very selves. It tells us more about the Māori people, their culture and their sustainable relationship with their landscape than any scientific mission could. The question is not which knowledge is better, but in what ways the knowledge(s) can help us to understand the world.

Many years later, I became a secondary school geography teacher and had the privilege of teaching glaciation to my own students. I will often start the first lesson by telling the story of Hine Hukatere, usually accompanied by a Google Earth fly-through of the Southern Alps on the interactive whiteboard. I hope this captures the students’ imagination, gets them to engage with the landscape and begins to introduce the idea of how people treat the world around them. Given the headlines about retreating glaciers around the world as a result of climate change, understanding how people treat or mistreat the natural world is of contemporary relevance. Yet this is not how glaciation is approached in most textbooks. It is presented as a single story of scientific fact, devoid of human experience and interpretation. Students are required to learn the facts, draw the diagrams and sit the exam.

We seem to have lost our way

In the last few years, I have started to work more and more with trainee teachers. When I speak to groups towards the start of their training, they are still full of hope and big dreams. I ask them why they want to be teachers. They will often evoke ideas about wanting to make a difference, to challenge and change students’ ideas about the major issues of the day, such as inequality. When I visit in the summer term towards the end of their training year, I often get a different response. By then, they will 3usually have had stints working in schools every day and mixing with teachers in real staffrooms. The answer to the same question then is usually about getting students through their exams, with talk of ‘successful outcomes’, getting them good enough results to go to college or wherever they want to go next. Many seem to have lost the big picture, the big motivation that probably compelled them to be a teacher in the first place.

I remember meeting one trainee teacher who was planning a lesson on migration. Before he went into detail about what he was going to do in the lesson, I asked him why he was teaching it. I was hoping that I might get an answer about the significance of migration in shaping modern society, or something about the migration stories that were in the news at the time. He was slightly flustered by my question and then said, ‘Because that is the next lesson in the sequence.’ I pushed him further, to really think why a lesson on migration might be significant in some way for the students. He stared at me intently and then said in an impassioned voice, ‘Because it is really important the students know the difference between assessment objective 1 and assessment objective 2.’

He had become conditioned by exam speak and had not even finished his training year yet. Whilst this may well be the reality in many schools, a key contention in this book is that the over-tight grip of measurable exam results has stifled curriculum creativity in schools and diminished the student experience.

Choose your team: the traditionalists vs the progressives

When I first joined social media, displaying my job title of ‘teacher’, I was often asked if I was a traditionalist or a progressive. It was as if I had to choose my (online) team. The traditionalists were keen to maintain rigid subject boundaries and see children learn and recite facts; they would speak of educational ideals such as scholarship and rigour. The progressives, on the other hand, were much more interested in children’s holistic development, nurtured through a creative curriculum with lots of interdisciplinary learning, the breakdown of subject boundaries and broad values such as personalised learning.

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The problem for me is, at their extremes, both of these versions of education are found lacking. A focus purely on subjects for the sake of learning facts and taking exams never helps young people to develop the broader range of skills and competencies needed in the modern world. Yet remove the subjects completely – or dilute them so they simply become a means to another end – and something of real value is lost. As a geography teacher, the value of my subject is not in whether a young person can label all the world’s oceans or know the name of the largest waterfall in the world.¹ There is something much more fundamental about geographical knowledge – and its importance for young people in the modern world, which goes well beyond listing facts to pass an exam – and that is why I became a geography teacher. Whilst I see the need to sit exams, the idea of teaching to the test in silent classrooms is not why I went into the profession. I do not feel that I’m a traditionalist, but do value the role of my subject, so I also feel far away from the most progressive arguments. In that sense, I have never had a team to join.

Making a compelling argument against the role of a subject curriculum, Michael Reiss and John White (2013) argue for an ‘aims-based curriculum’, placing the needs of the child, rather than subjects, at the centre of a curriculum. For them,

school education should equip every child:

to lead a life that is personally flourishing

to help others to do so too. (Reiss and White, 2013: 4)

To achieve this, knowledge is reframed as ‘broad background understanding’ (Reiss and White, 2013: 9) and there is a focus on interdisciplinary thinking, a breaking down of subject barriers, moral education and citizenship.