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This paper traces the sociological roots of the 'knowledge turn' and a concept centrally identified with it, 'powerful knowledge', beginning with the work of Basil Bernstein which was subsequently elaborated in a wide range of contexts-of-use in the broad field of curriculum studies. The paper distinguishes different reasons educators have for engaging with curriculum which the paper classifies into 'curriculum of' and 'curriculum for'. It goes on to discuss the particular pathos of specialised knowledge, and suggests ways of dealing with it; and concludes by suggesting paths going forward for bringing curriculum theory and subject didactics into productive dialogue

This paper will re-visit the origins and early use in South African curriculum writing of the concept of 'coherence'; it will go on to show how Suellen Shay and her colleagues fleshed out the concept and created an instrument for its empirical analysis; it will then step back and examine the contribution and some problems that were brought to light; examine briefly how Shay's later work continued to wrestle with the notion of 'practice', particularly in light of curricula that were judged to display conceptual coherence; and will suggest one possible solution in the seminal paper by Bernstein (2000). Finally, the paper will reflect on two implicit definitions of 'curriculum', a 'strict' one and an 'extended' one and suggest why they should be distinguished.

We set out to address the question--what does it mean for educational knowledge to be 'powerful'? We compare the Anglo tradition of curriculum studies with the "Didaktik" tradition through the lens of an analysis of curriculum structure in postgraduate courses in South African universities rooted in either the Anglo or "Didaktik" tradition. This analysis of curriculum structure affords a view of each tradition that we argue is 'powerful', but in different ways. While "Didaktik" provides a humanities-based curriculum coherence in teacher education, curriculum studies offers social scientific possibilities for empirical inquiry. We make the argument that a strategic entente cordiale, or pedagogic compact, would strengthen the professional position of teachers and education academics in the respective countries. This is particularly so in the context of threats posed by instrumental trends driven by educational sciences underpinning TIMSS, Pisa and the like.

This paper first re-visits the origins of the concept powerful knowledge and goes on to assess its mixed fortunes as of 2022. It assesses Basil Bernstein’s early interest in knowledge in the curriculum by examining his retrieval of Durkheim’s discussion of the Trivium and Quadrivium, going on to examine how the sciences and the Humanities each specialize knowledge but in different ways. It then discusses the recursive form of theorizing of pedagogy developed by Bernstein in his pedagogic device, distinguishing this form from that to be found in recent discussions of Didaktik and powerful knowledge, drawing out their complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends the authors' earlier work (Young & Muller 2013) exploring the concept of 'powerful knowledge'. It first examines some of the origins of the concept and goes on to a brief consideration of how sociology, political theory and economics have traditionally represented 'power' and 'knowledge'. Two key senses of power are identified and two difficulties are next identified: how to retain both senses of power in a satisfactory account of 'powerful knowledge; and how to provide a satisfactory account of the 'power' of knowledge in the humanities. By identifying three meanings of 'powerful knowledge', and making an argument for their interrelationship, the article aims to put the concept on a firmer footing and point to its potential implications for curriculum theory.

The emerging interdependent world order poses new challenges for States and citizens alike. For States, interdependence has meant a new concern with integration, whilst for citizens and authorities alike, greater mobility has raised new concerns about recognition of competences, qualifications, quality and transparency. The introduction of learning outcomes is one of the principal instruments to achieve this in higher education. This article analyses how the implementation of higher education learning outcomes (HELOs) can be seen as ambiguous governance and management tools, manifested as parts of international policy development and policy trends. These ambiguous tools intertwine with different disciplinary and stakeholder networks. The desire to implement HELOs in a more or less uniform way across as diverse contexts (countries, disciplines, institutions) as possible has led to a design strategy that favours generic definitions of learning outcomes. In the implementation process, these generic HELOs are experienced as ambiguous, meaning that they are characterised by an openness to different interpretations. This opens up a space of discretionary and interpretational latitude, either because HELOs are assimilated to traditional path dependencies, or because they allow institutional agents (such as institutional leaders and others) the space to introduce change. The ambiguity of HELOs simultaneously provides the flexibility for contextually-diverse implementation, ensures less comparability than initially envisaged, and opens up the possibility for change, although change is contingent on structures and processes that are external to the policy process itself. HELOs are thus a paradigm case of the centrality of context in policy implementation studies.

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low socio-economic status (SES) schools in the Western Cape, South Africa. The paper shows that teachers and school managers have an ambivalent attitude to tests, wary of the reputational costs they can incur, but also curious about the differentiated picture test results can give them as they learn to "read" the underlying codes embedded in the results. The paper concludes that a focus on what tests make visible and a recognition of the pedagogic agency of teachers points to potential pedagogic benefits of systemic tests.

This paper begins from the assumption that "knowledge specialisation and differentiation" will continue to increase, and that these features of contemporary STEM knowledge will increasingly pose questions which science and engineering education must address. Two typical responses are outlined. The first response, the default position, has come to be known as "traditionalism," a minimal response that attempts to shore up a high-selectivity, low curriculum change elite template by means of repair services, which is where Academic Development in the universities began. The second response, a "progressive" one reacting to traditionalism, strove to put the learner and the act of learning in the spotlight, inadvertently thereby foregrounding skills and backgrounding the knowledge to be taught and learnt. The paper goes on to discuss de-differentiating features of this second response and argues that this will over time undermine the capacity of the university to deal effectively with rapidly evolving specialisation and differentiation. The paper concludes by considering a third way to address the issue.

The aim of this paper is to explore and clarify the idea of "powerful knowledge" as a sociological concept and as a curriculum principle. The paper seeks to clarify its conceptual basis and to make its meaning and the arguments it implies, less ambiguous and less open to misunderstanding. This will enable us to suggest some of the research and policy options that it opens up. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the origins of the contemporary usage of the concept in the sociology of education and its explains its roots in the often neglected sociology of knowledge of Emile Durkheim. We draw from Durkheim the idea that "powerful knowledge" is differentiated and specialised knowledge and trace this argument through the work of Vygotsky and, in more detail, of Basil Bernstein. Following Bernstein's analysis of the different forms that specialised knowledge can take, we consider the curriculum implications of the view that some forms, the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, are "intrinsically more powerful than others". We indicate the limits of this argument and in the final section suggest how the idea of powerful knowledge can be more broadly conceived to include the arts and humanities.

Several authors have suggested that the contract between the university and society formulated in the nineteenth century is breaking down, and a new relation between knowledge and society is being installed. This paper investigates what is at stake in this shift by re-visiting the roots of disciplinary knowledge, examining Durkheim's social theory of knowledge to display the evolution of basic and professional disciplines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two contemporary challenges to disciplinary knowledge are then examined and evaluated. The paper concludes that it is time to transcend the standoff between disciplinary knowledge and practice-based accounts of knowledge.

This paper enquires into the grounds for convergence of judgements in a situation of blind peer review, where reviewers are asked to assess the standing of scholars in a disciplinary field. The paper first considers traditional accounts of peer review and threats to its reliability and validity. Next it examines the grounds for disciplinary sociality and different forms of expertise that stratify the disciplinary field. The paper will report the results of an initial study of peer review judgements in the disciplines of Law, Psychology and Historical Studies. The paper will conclude by assessing the variable merits of micro- and macro-sociological explanations in accounting for the phenomenon of convergent disciplinary judgements. A case will be made for the explanatory power of social norms. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.)

This article draws on social realist approaches in the sociology of knowledge and in light of them constructs three scenarios for the future of education in the next decades. The primary focus of the article is on one of the most crucial questions facing educational policy makers--the relationship between school and everyday or common sense knowledge. The different possibilities for how the school/non-school knowledge boundaries might be approached are expressed in three scenarios--"boundaries treated as given", "a boundary-less world" and the idea of "boundary maintenance as a condition for boundary crossing". The curriculum implications of each are explored and the article makes the case for the third scenario. The factors likely to make one or other scenario dominate educational policy in the next 20-30 years are also considered.

This study describes the results of a survey and a description of instructional technologies in place in the social sciences in South African Universities. Lecturers in the social sciences reported a well-established practice of information and communication technologies (ICTs) use for general purposes (although frequent use tended to be for email and searching the Internet). They had a high self-efficacy in terms of using ICTs both generally and for teaching and learning, and a high enthusiasm for the use of ICTs for teaching and learning. Half the lecturers had started using ICTs recently with the introduction of learning management systems (LMSs) whereas the other half had established practices that preceded the mainstreaming of LMSs across universities. Only about a quarter of the respondents felt able to develop and update ICTs themselves which indicates that support is a necessary part of teaching with technology. In terms of different types of use the focus was on putting content on the web and course administration. Use of ICTs for teaching of skills (whether information literacy, problem solving or critical thinking) was infrequent. There were different types of ICT use across the different sub-disciplines. Lecturers reported factors which constrained their use of ICTs for teaching and learning, such as inadequate technology, pedagogical issues (e.g. plagiarism), and students opting out of lectures when materials were available online. It is argued that user studies in are relevant to the future delivery of educational material, in terms of removing barriers to use and targeting training and supportive activities. (Contains 1 table and 8 figures.)

This paper examines what is entailed by taking a socio-epistemic or "knowledge-based" approach to considerations of curriculum and qualifications. The paper begins by examining the roots of disciplinary difference in the medieval universities and their treatment in contemporary scholarly work; discusses implications for curriculum and qualification differentiation; and shows how social, disciplinary and qualification organisation are aligned in the specialisation of consciousness. (Contains 4 tables, 1 figure, and 10 notes.)

Information and communication technologies hold much promise for use in education in developing countries. This study reports on an evaluation conducted on the introduction of computers in the delivery of the mathematics curriculum in one of the provinces of South Africa. Although the request was for an outcome evaluation very early in the implementation of the program, it was tailored in such a way as to fulfill a more formative role. Despite substantial variability in implementation, and in most cases with very weak exposure of the learners to the intervention, sufficient evidence emerged to indicate that this mode of curriculum delivery may be effective. Improvement in mathematics performance was related to a range of variables: some concerned classroom teaching practices, some referred to social differences between the learners, and some to the specific intervention. The strongest of these predictors in the sample was the strength of the intervention: the more time learners spent on using the software to study mathematics, the more improvement they showed from 1 year to the next in their performance in the subject. (Contains 10 tables.)

The aim of this article is to reflect on and explore questions of truth and objectivity in the sociology of educational knowledge. It begins by reviewing the problems raised by the social constructivist approaches to knowledge associated with the "new sociology of education" of the I970s. It suggests that they have significant parallels with the pragmatist ideas of James and Dewey that Durkheim analysed so perceptively in his lectures on pragmatism. The article then considers Basil Bernstein's development of Durkheim's ideas. We argue that despite his highly original conceptual advances Bernstein seems to accept, at least implicitly, that the natural sciences remain the only model for objective knowledge. This leads us to a discussion of Ernest Cassirer's idea of symbolic forms as a more adequate basis for the sociology of knowledge. In the conclusion, the article suggests how an approach to knowledge in educational studies that draws on Cassirer's idea of "symbolic objectivity" can come to terms with the tension between the concept of truth and a commitment to "being truthful" that was left unresolved, even unaddressed, by the "new" sociology of education of the I970s. (Contains 18 notes.)

This paper traces the sociological roots of the 'knowledge turn' and a concept centrally identified with it, 'powerful knowledge', beginning with the work of Basil Bernstein which was subsequently elaborated in a wide range of contexts-of-use in the broad field of curriculum studies. The paper distinguishes different reasons educators have for engaging with curriculum which the paper classifies into 'curriculum of' and 'curriculum for'. It goes on to discuss the particular pathos of specialised knowledge, and suggests ways of dealing with it; and concludes by suggesting paths going forward for bringing curriculum theory and subject didactics into productive dialogue [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo discute a questão do caráter da teoria de Bernstein. Ele baseia-se em um conjunto de conceitos-chave elaborados em alguns de seus artigos mais recentes, embora sugira ser possível discernir as origens dessas idéias em trabalhos muito mais antigos. Na primeira seção discute-se o diagnóstico de Bernstein, que compreende a sociologia da educação como uma estrutura do conhecimento horizontal com uma gramática fraca. Destaca-se um aparente paradoxo: se a sociologia da educação tem essa forma, como podemos explicar a própria teoria de Bernstein? O resto do texto emprega os próprios trabalhos de Bernstein como uma maneira de explorar as condições para o crescimento do conhecimento em sociologia como uma estrutura do conhecimento vertical com uma gramática forte.