Curriculum Design in New Zealand Social Studies: Learning from the Past

Abstract

This thesis is sourced in a practical problem of curriculum design. As part of the current Ministry of Education Curriculum Project, the outcomes of New Zealand social studies are being “clarified and refined” through the development of an “essence statement” and revised curriculum structure. Given the fraught history of the social studies curriculum this work is of particular significance because it challenges those who remain committed to the subject to define and defend its relative importance in the national curriculum. Effective curriculum design, it is argued, can enhance the understanding, credibility and acceptance of the subject by expressing a clear and theoretically coherent view of its purpose and content. As such, it is both a resource for teacher learning about the subject and its requirements and a policy statement of student entitlement. It matters, therefore, what sense is made of it. This thesis examines and develops recommendations for enhancing the design of the New Zealand social studies curriculum through a three‐stage process. First, the sensemaking qualities of design are examined with reference to empirical work on curriculum policy implementation by Spillane and his colleagues (2000, 2002, 2004), and with reference to the role of language in cognition and to cognitive load theory. This analysis revealed that the interactions between design, individual cognition and situated cognition are critical to sense‐making about policy. A set of design criteria was generated from this analysis that emphasized the need for design to take close account of the existing schema of implementing agents and of the constraints of working memory. In the second phase of analysis, the design criteria were applied to the text of the four official expressions of New Zealand social studies curriculum policy since 1942. Using documentary analysis a set of design patterns was identified. The patterns revealed that the main sense‐making challenges for New Zealand social studies curricula have been the difficulty in signalling shifts in purpose and content, the lack of a theoretical structure that maximises internal coherence and alignment, and the complexities associated with the desire to maximise teacher autonomy. As a result of this analysis, the original design criteria were refined and presented as a set of design propositions to guide future curriculum development in social studies. The third stage of analysis develops and justifies a curriculum framework for social studies based on citizenship education. Citizenship education is defined, its importance within social studies is justified, and its inherent tensions are acknowledged. The suggested curriculum framework, which is aligned with the design propositions, is developed from theoretical work in the field of citizenship education and from international examples of citizenship education curriculum design. The thesis concludes that social studies curriculum design needs to pay much greater attention to the cognitive processes of implementing agents and to the need for an internally coherent structure based on a defensible and theoretically‐derived curriculum purpose.