Knowledge in New Zealand's secondary school chemistry curriculum

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the role of disciplinary knowledge in the chemistry curriculum at the senior secondary school level in New Zealand. Teachers in New Zealand work with a curriculum that gives them a high level of autonomy in curriculum design, and this study identifies how this flexible curriculum policy plays a role in the quality of the curriculum that is actually on offer for students. I begin from a social realist perspective, taking the role of the curriculum to be the identification and equitable distribution of ‘powerful’ disciplinary knowledge to all young people. The study involves the analysis of curriculum policy documents from New Zealand and overseas, before moving to interviews with five New Zealand chemistry teachers about their curriculum beliefs and practices. Qualitative data from a Ministry of Education survey about the ongoing changes to the national qualifications system is also employed to strengthen the findings. Bernstein’s (2000) concept of recontextualisation, Rata and McPhail’s (2016) curriculum organisers, and cognitive learning theories – beginning with Geary’s (2002) evolutionary educational psychology – are used to generate a model of a ‘powerful’, social realist chemistry curriculum. These concepts, along with Rata’s (2012) concept of localisation, are then used to critique New Zealand’s chemistry curriculum, and to analyse the curriculum practices of teachers. I find that a “localising ideology” recontextualising principle operates in the official curriculum, and that it looks increasingly dominant among teachers as well, at the expense of “universalising knowledge”. This is true even for teachers with pro-subject knowledge views. The result is that even where the discipline of chemistry is seen as a worthwhile basis for the curriculum, its position is tenuous, and the knowledge that is recontextualised is selected based on arbitrary considerations. I trace this phenomenon to the conflation of progressive political goals, such as social justice, with orthodox curricular “progressivism”. Finally, I argue that such a conflation in fact does a disservice to educational justice by firstly denying students the intellectual means to imagine circumstances different to their own, and secondly by depriving young citizens of the means to participate in a functional, liberal democratic society.