Locality and the Curriculum: Towards a Positive Critique.

Abstract

The relationship between the social world outside school and the school curriculum has been interpreted by sociologists in terms of a hidden structure. They emphasise the way in which the curriculum contributes to the 'institutional sifting' carried out by the schooling process (see, e.g. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). This sifting process involves the allocation and distribution of curricula with assessment systems of differing significance (some have qualifications attached, others do not), and the differential susceptibility to the curriculum format between pupils of different social classes. In this way, the relationship between types of curricula and the reproduction of a particular social structure has become the focus. The manner in which this relationship is conceptualised suggests no particular reference to society or the locality in the form of curriculum content. Thus, the relation between society and the curriculum has been analysed in terms of its systemic effects, concerned, for example, with the interactions between pupils, teachers and the curriculum and the effects of this process on the future life chances, culture and class position of the pupils and the configuration of curriculum forms in particular social structures. There is, however, a different level of relation between the curriculum and the social world. It takes the form of the entry into the school curriculum of aspects of society as curriculum content. By this I do not mean the abstract forms of theories about the world found in sociology or civics text-books, but social practice or the phenomenological world itself. The social world that is most readily available is that which constitutes and surrounds the school, in other words, the social practice and physical environment of the immediate locality. Little attention has been given to the significance of the entry of aspects of the locality into the curriculum, i.e. its significance to the systemic relations between the curriculum and the social structure. This paper will be concerned with the different forms in which aspects of the locality, constituted by economic, political, social and cultural practice and the physical environment, have entered the curriculum. In many cases this has involved a restructuring of teachers' attitudes, school time, space and resources and has necessarily involved activities which are not confined to the classroom or, indeed, the school grounds. It would, however, be mistaken (in my view) to impute conceptual unity between the diverse ways in which aspects of the locality have entered curriculum practice; a typology, for example, may serve only to establish a vocabulary by which teachers can distinguish both the common ground and the differences between the various approaches to curriculum development, both in the Third World and in Western capitalist countries which claim or imply an explicit link with the locality. I shall refer to curriculum forms which are explicity concerned with aspects of the locality as