While it is less of an everyday concern with the circumstances of my new teaching role, I am still very interested in curriculum thinking. The emergence of AI in the form of ChatGPT and the quirky differences in pedagogical outlooks which I’m encountering outside of British state schools make me more convinced than ever that we need to teach a knowledge-rich, disciplinary-based curriculum. I was musing on this yesterday and tried to capture my thoughts; these words are very much a rough draft ‘work in progress’:
Studying a discipline such as Geography is about building a framework, or a set of mental models, through which we cannot only understand the world but see the world and engage with the world (knowledge and understanding with purpose; agency; capability). As such, a body of knowledge is no the end point, bit is is an essential component, maybe a corollary.
The justification for studying a discipline is because it allows you to think in a qualitatively different way to someone without that disciplinary education. (So a physicist offers different perspectives to a geographer, to a theologian.) Yet, it is essential to build knowledge in order to develop the framework – you cannot develop thinking in the absence of thinks to think about . Also, when so much of thought – and communicating thought – is language-based, the knowledge we acquire gives us a shared language so that we can share that disciplinary mindset with others.
Commonplace 