A pedagogy of conceptual progression and the case for academic knowledge

Abstract

The potential for academic knowledge to ‘interrupt’ inter-generational reproduction in education is located in the structural contradictions that shape knowledge and democracy. Since the late 1990s research in the sociology of education, which theorises curriculum knowledge using the ideas of Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein, suggests that academic knowledge, far from being the domain of conservative forces, contains the means by which the working-class and marginalised groups may overcome class determinism. The paper argues for a pedagogy of conceptual progression to assist students across the ‘interruption’ or ‘discursive gap’ into academic knowledge. Such a pedagogy need not be confined to its central purpose—that of teaching abstract ideas drawn from their disciplinary systems of meaning and classified for teaching as academic subjects. It can also be the means to mediate the relationship between the context-dependent knowledge of students’ experience and the context-independent knowledge of the academic subject. This pedagogy might be the way to maintain the motivational intention of constructivism and ‘relevance’ approaches that emphasise students’ experience. However, it would use experience to illustrate the abstract ideas acquired in academic subjects, not serve as the source of knowledge itself, nor the knowledge focus.