Powerful Knowledge in the Curriculum for Excellence

POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE IN THE CURRICULUM FOR EXCELLENCE

Rick Instrell

This is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the United Kingdom Literacy Association conference at the University of Chester on 15 July 2011.

Abstract

The Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is the current Scottish curricular initiative for 3-18 year-olds. Although most educationists agree with its progressive goals, its documents have been criticised as being vague, anti-intellectual and ignorant of subject disciplines.

This paper will argue that all curriculum designers would benefit from insights from educational linguistics, a hybrid field formed by fusing educational sociology and linguistics. The most potent ideas come by combining Basil Bernstein’s analysis of knowledge structures with ideas from linguistics. Linguistics is a vast discipline but three related fields are of particular relevance: systemic functional linguistics (SFL), critical discourse analysis (CDA) and multimodal social semiotics (MMSS). Each comes with a formidable battery of methodologies and jargon. Despite this their key concepts and applications can be translated into a teacher- and learner-friendly form (Instrell 2008, 2010).

The paper will apply educational linguistics ideas to the teaching of high-level intellectual processes such as abstraction and metacognition and then extend the ideas into an analysis of subject English.

Critics have labelled the CfE as anti-intellectual but few have actually suggested how to repair its obvious shortcomings. This paper is a constructive attempt to put academic disciplines and the pursuit of excellence back into the Scottish curriculum.

Context: Curriculum for Excellence
The ideas explored in this paper have been developed within the context of the Scottish Government’s curriculum development for 3-18 year-olds, grandly titled the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). It is claimed that the CfE focuses on learners’ needs by providing a coherent, more flexible

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