A re-examination of key curriculum debates and directions in South Africa
SOURCE: Oxford Research Encyclopedias
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2021
TITLE AUTHOR(S): C.A.Soudien, L.Chisholm
KEYWORDS: CURRICULUM, CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT, EDUCATION, SOUTH AFRICA
DEPARTMENT: Office of the CEO (ERM), Office of the CEO (OCEO), Office of the CEO (IL), Office of the CEO (BS), Office of the CEO (IA)
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 11923
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/15945
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/15945
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2021
TITLE AUTHOR(S): C.A.Soudien, L.Chisholm
KEYWORDS: CURRICULUM, CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT, EDUCATION, SOUTH AFRICA
DEPARTMENT: Office of the CEO (ERM), Office of the CEO (OCEO), Office of the CEO (IL), Office of the CEO (BS), Office of the CEO (IA)
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 11923
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/15945
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/15945
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
The key issue with which the South African debate around curriculum reform has been concerned, as has been the case in many countries around the world, is what should be at its core. There is agreement in this debate that the curriculum should deal with South Africa's apartheid legacy of exclusion and that it should prepare young people for the complexity of living in a new modern world order. There is little agreement, however, about what counts as valuable knowledge for meeting these purposes. In the process, as the new curriculum has been developed and revised, multiple schools of thought have emerged. Two, however, have taken clear form: social realism and social constructivism. The former took issue with what they described as post-modern relativism in the new curriculum. The target of their critique was the lost opportunity to affirm the importance of what they called "powerful knowledge". The new curriculum manifested a susceptibility, in its weak delineation of the boundaries of different disciplines, to the prominence of everyday knowledge. What children needed to learn was powerful knowledge that contained understandings of the deep grammars, restricted codes, and specialist areas of knowledge. In response, constructivists argued, through concepts such as "funds of knowledge" that South African children inhabited a world of multiple knowledges and that it was important that they were able to valorize the legitimacy of these knowledges, including indigenous forms, in their formal learning experiences. The debate is ongoing and reaches into the heart of policymaking in South Africa.-
Related Research Outputs:
- The recognition of prior learning power, pedagogy and possibility: conceptual and implementation guides
- South Africa
- Curriculum responsiveness in FET colleges
- The use of ICTs in the curriculum in Botswana, Namibia and Seychelles
- The use of ICTs in curricula in Botswana, Namibia and Seychelles
- Opportunities & challenges for teacher education curriculum in South Africa
- Introduction
- Curriculum restructuring in context: 1994-2007
- A distant reality: aligning the BEd curriculum at the North West University
- From bureaucratic compliance to creating new knowledge: comparative patterns of curriculum change
- Post-school private education and training providers in South Africa: What works!
- Capacity for (quality) instruction: a framework for understanding the use of resources to promote teaching and learning in schools
- Mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS in the curriculum
- Going public with scholarly collaboration: reflections on a collaborative self-study book process
- Introduction: why this book?
- Can we use young people's knowledge to develop teachers and HIV-related education?
- The politics of testing in South Africa
- South Africa
- Listening before telling: pairing indigenous knowledge with the school curriculum
- Curriculum, knowledge and the idea of South Africa