Rethinking ‘subject content’ in RE
In thinking about the subject content of RE, I have recently been exploring a rich seam of general curriculum theory that comes from the German tradition of ‘Didaktik’. This might not seem immediately relevant to RE teachers, but, bear with me! I know RE teachers are interested in how we think about content: how should we go about selecting and arranging all the ‘stuff’ of RE?; should it be informed by disciplines and if so, which?; should it distinguish different forms of knowledge, and which forms should be prioritised? The German tradition has something vital to offer here.
Although the Bildung/Didaktik approach been influential in Anglo-American curriculum discussions to some extent (Deng 2020), there remains a gulf between the Continental and Anglo-American approaches to curriculum thinking (Westbury 2000). For the sake of brevity and focus, I will explore how curriculum knowledge is formed: how research or disciplinary knowledge is transformed, transposed, or converted into school subject matter. This directly applies to RE: as I talk to teachers and researchers of RE, the idea of ‘school RE’, a particular way of framing subject knowledge distinct from any academic subject or discipline, is appealing. I want to persuade you that an obscure German pedagogue, Wolfgang Klafki,[1] offers a curriculum framework that, particularly as we consider the impact of the ‘Worldviews approach’ (CoRE), RE teachers could usefully take up.
Elsewhere I point out that Daniel Tröhler makes a helpful distinction between academic /research knowledge and pedagogical knowledge (Lewin 2019; 2020). For Tröhler, the stuff we present in school classrooms is distinctively pedagogical: it is “stable, not provisional or contested; exceptions and contradictions are avoided; elements are presented in discrete parts or units; the presentation itself is often attractive or entertaining in some way. In summary, this involves “[s]election, condensation, composition, didactical structuring and streamlining for classroom instruction” (Tröhler 2008, 79)” (Lewin 2019, 54). What is striking to the scholar of RE is that Tröhler’s gloss of pedagogical knowledge precisely reflects what is supposed to be wrong with much RE today: it presents knowledge that is too stable; exceptions and contradictions are avoided; elements are presented in units. RE teachers should, it seems, abandon this category of pedagogical knowledge, at least in the sense of a simplified school subject.
Only they can’t. Nor should they.
I have reservations with calling this ‘pedagogical knowledge’ but this is by no means the only language for it. There are so many other ways of describing this distinction, but they all rely on the general idea that subject knowledge is different somehow from substantive knowledge. Let me run through some of those ways.
Basil Bernstein uses the term recontextualization to describe how disciplinary knowledge is changed for the classroom by “selection, simplification, condensation, and elaboration” (Bernstein 2000, 87). Indeed, a common term for this is knowledge transformation. Knowledge produced for research serves a different purpose to knowledge produced for pedagogy. Thus, research knowledge must be changed to fit pedagogical purposes. Yves Chevallard calls this kind of change, didactic transposition (transposition didactique): “the transformations an object or a body of knowledge undergoes from the moment it is produced, put into use, selected, and designed to be taught until it is actually taught in a given educational institution” (see Chevallard & Bosch, 2014, p 170). Niklas Gericke et. al. define pedagogical transformation as “an integrative process in which content knowledge is transformed into knowledge that is taught and learned through various transformation processes that take place outside and within the educational system” (Gericke, 432). There are many other ways of putting this, but few originating in the Anglo-American tradition and fewer still engaging with debates about the formation of RE curriculums.
It is not clear to me whether different forms of knowledge transformation, such as Bernstein’s recontextualization, Chevallard’s didactic transposition or Gericke’s transformations (Deng 2021) are examples of what I call pedagogical reduction (Lewin 2019), or whether pedagogical reduction is a subset of this knowledge transformation. I certainly understand the educational selection, simplification and representation of pedagogical reduction to be closely related to these transformation. Whatever language we use, the point really is to examine how school subject content is not simply ‘out there’, rather it is produced for a particular purpose in mind. What purpose does this school subject content serve? This is where Klafki comes in: he has provided an influential five-step set of questions that facilitate teachers’ thinking about how to unlock the educational potential of classroom content, that ties content production to educational purpose:
What wider or general sense or reality does this content exemplify and open up to the learner? What basic phenomenon or fundamental principle, what law, criterion, problem, method, technique, or attitude can be grasped by dealing with this content as an ‘example’?
What significance does the content in question, or the experience, knowledge, ability, or skill, to be acquired through this topic, already possess in the minds of the children in my class? What significance should it have from a pedagogical point of view?
What constitutes the topic’s significance for the children’s future?
How is the content structured (which has been placed in a specifically pedagogical perspective by questions 1, 2, and 3)?
What are the special cases, phenomena, situations, experiments, persons, elements of aesthetic experience, and so forth, in terms of which the structure of the content in question can become interesting, stimulating, approachable, conceivable, or vivid for children of the stage of development of this class? (Klafki 2000, pp. 151–157)
These questions can be ‘translated’ to RE. What wider or general sense of reality does this (religious) worldview open up to the learner? What principles does grasping this worldview exemplify? For instance, we might want to emphasise that not all worldviews are taken up consciously and reflected upon and so we might select a worldview that is unreflective as part of the subject matter (e.g. consumerism; discussed theoretically through Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern). This example also speaks to the second question, the world of the learner: what significance does the idea of an unconscious worldview have in the mind of the children already? This is relevant because it is an extension of the idea that everyone has “a way of understanding, experiencing and responding to the world” (CoRE) and that worldviews are not the preserve of organised institutions.
The more general point is that subject matter is derived from principles articulated through questions. This approach eschews any notion of reified subject content: the piles of stuff in textbooks, or the knowledge that is passed down from academic disciplines. Such disciplinary thinking often underestimates the transformations of subject knowledge described above. This is not to ignore the material of the curriculum (and its potential to disrupt the world of the learner), but to draw attention to the idea that selection and arrangement should be directed towards allowing students to grow in understanding of the world and themselves. As Zongyi Deng puts it “the fundamental task is not that of helping students acquire disciplinary knowledge, but that of using disciplinary knowledge as a tool or resource to create powerful, transformative experiences in the classroom that can lead to the cultivation of human powers” (Deng 2021, 1668). This, by the way, is what the German pedagogues mean by Bildung: the cultivation of human powers. This expression may sound a little odd, but it builds on a rich understanding of the world around us, and the capability to interpret our place within it. To me that sounds like what good RE should aim to do.
References
Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, research, critique. Rev. ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Chevallard, Y. & Bosch, M. (2014) Didactic transposition in mathematics education, in: S. Lerman (Ed.) Encyclopedia of mathematics education (Netherlands, Springer), 170–174.
Deng, Z. (2021) Powerful knowledge, transformations and Didaktik/curriculum thinking, British Educational Research Journal Vol. 47, No. 6, December 2021, pp. 1652–1674. DOI: 10.1002/berj.3748
Gericke, N., Hudson, B., Olin-Scheller, C. & Stolare, M. (2018) Powerful knowledge, transformations and the need for empirical studies across school subjects, London Review of Education,16 (3), 428–444
Klafki, W. (2000) ‘Didaktik analysis and the core of preparation of instruction’. In Westbury, I., Hopmann, S. and Riquarts, K. (eds) (2000) Teaching as a Reflective Practice. The German Didaktik tradition. London: Routledge, 139–60.
Lewin, D. (2019) Toward a theory of pedagogical reduction: Selection, simplification, and generalization in an age of critical education, Educational Theory 68:4-5, 495-512.
Lewin, D. (2020) Reduction without reductionism: Re-imagining religious studies and religious education, Implicit Religion 23:3, 193-217.
Tröhler, D. (2008) ‘The Knowledge of Science and the Knowledge of the Classroom: Using the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) to Examine Overlooked Connections,’ in Emidio Campi, Simone De Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (eds.) Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, Geneva, Switzerland: Librarie Droz.
Westbury, I. (2000) ‘Teaching as a reflective practice: What might Didaktik teach curriculum?’. In Westbury, I., Hopmann, S. and Riquarts, K. (eds) Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik tradition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 15–40.
Young, M. (2009) ‘What are schools for?’ In Lauder. H, Porter.J and Daniels.H(Ed) (2009) Critical Perspectives on education, London Routledge.
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[1] What a dreadfully Anglo-centric thing to say! In a German pedagogical context, Klafki (1927-2016) is hardly obscure being considered the father of didactics (Didaktik), but the fact is that he is seldom referenced and discussed within educational theory in the Anglophone world.
