An enriched curriculum enhances the content we teach with depth and complexity. There can be demand that we march through the curriculum, so how do we create opportunities to pause and make linkages? Often we think of curriculum as a mountain to climb, each step we get progressively closer to the top. The route up is clear, with markers and signposts. Some students stall, dip in a crevasse, but they can step up again. They are moving on the same passage to the peak. While this metaphor is useful, it implies a straight line that culminates in graduation. How can they explore beyond the one mountain? How prescribed is the course?
I prefer to think of the curriculum as an ocean. There are a myriad of destinations a school can sail towards. We can explore in many directions, with departments setting out on different journeys. Along the way, there are opportunities to pause for deep dives. These foreign territories beneath the waves are just below us, hidden and beyond our everyday experience. We learn more about the ocean of knowledge when we don’t just stick to the shallow harbours or map coastlines, we probe the workings underneath the surface. Curriculum can allow us to investigate new worlds.
Micheal Young developed and popularised the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’, shaping the conversation on curriculum for the past decade. Powerful knowledge is a response to ‘knowledge of the powerful’, the concept that ‘elite’ knowledge that has been included in traditional formal educational curricula often reflects the interests, values, and perspectives of dominant groups in society—those with power and influence. Such knowledge has cultural capital and is viewed as the ‘official’ or ‘legitimate’ knowledge, often sidelining other perspectives. White, heteronormative, Western curriculum is given more legitimacy. Suppose we create a curriculum centred on knowledge of the powerful, in the hopes that all students have equal access to the ‘elite knowledge’ regardless of their background. In that case, we end up perpetuating inequities, neglecting or invalidating the experiences, histories and cultures of marginalised groups. As Young comments ‘The school, for all its tendencies to reproduce the inequalities of an unequal society, is the only institution we have that can, at least in principle, provide every student with access to knowledge.’ (Young, 2014, pp.13). As curriculum makers, we have the opportunity to equip our students with the knowledge to navigate the future.
One of my favourite articles on applying powerful knowledge is David Didau’s take, which interrogates common curriculum choices, he writes in the end that ‘A knowledge-rich curriculum is one which both confers cultural capital and provides the powerful conceptual equipment to think and ask questions.’
Diversify and Decolonise the Curriculum
In line with powerful knowledge, there is a massive movement to decolonise the curriculum, and explicitly build up narratives that place voices outside the dominant culture. This also means that the curriculum is developed by a diverse range of educators. In Lola Olufemi’s call to decolonise the curriculum at Cambridge University she wrote that
‘After three long years as a Cambridge English student, the thing that is most memorable about my degree and the thing that has caused me the most frustration is just how unbearably white the curriculum is. Myself and countless others have written at length about the ways in which a white curriculum is nothing more than the maintenance of structural and epistemological power. Decolonising the curriculum is a process– a process that requires thought and consideration. It means rethinking what we learn and how what we learn it; critically analysing whose voices are given priority in our education and for what reason. It is not an easy process and why should it be?’
Olufemi, 2017
Equity seeking groups deserve to see themselves represented in the curriculum, and students within a dominant culture should be exposed to knowledge outside their experience.
Diversifying curriculum means having a range of texts on reading lists, from writers of various cultures, genders, sexual orientations, and socio-economic backgrounds. Texts written by and about marginalised communities should be placed at the centre, not be treated as peripheral, or as an aside. Didau asks that ‘When thinking about the different subjects that form the curriculum, we should not only consider the cultural richness of the contexts we select to foreground, but also the underlying power of the underpinning contexts. It’s a useful exercise for subject teachers to work together to create lists of the most powerful knowledge in their domains and then to make plans for how best to teach it.’ There is a need in a global society for students of the dominant culture to understand a multiplicity of experiences. We do a disservice to students who feel rightfully underrepresented, and a disservice to those students who could grow their understanding of the world. We should be investigating the relationship between the location and identity of the writer, what they write and how they write about it. This means unmasking the colonial context and influence of many canonical works and literary theories. Engage with more perspectives of that work, not just taking sources from the West and establishing a Eurocentric view but listening to marginalised voices. Decolonisation also means acknowledging historical injustices. In my own experience in Canada, the curriculum explicitly valued Indigenous history (pre-colonial and colonial), art and oral traditions. History teachers have been especially active in decolonising and diversifying the curriculum ‘By examining primary documents, students can unearth historically marginalised voices that are not usually taught in mainstream curricula, such as those of LGBTIQ+ and minority ethnic groups. Archives that provide access to a wide variety of voices and cultures are critical to preventing history being told through a narrow lens and helping diverse student groups see themselves represented in the past’ (Cayley, 2021). We are preparing students for a globalised world where an inclusive curriculum makes their education more relevant.
There is also the important point that the dominant culture should not monopolise the creation of a curriculum. As Sonya Douglass Horsford rightfully asserts ‘To truly transform education, we must first deepen our understanding of the great battle that we are in. This begins with actually asking people of colour what they want and need and then listening to what they say. The voices, concerns, ideas, and vision for what students, parents, and educators of colour want and need is the evidentiary basis upon which any agenda for educational equity must be developed, if that is, in fact, what we truly seek to do.’ (Douglass Horsford, 2021)
It may seem contradictory to argue for a more diverse curriculum on one hand and then insist on depth on the other. It is not an argument of depth over breadth. Instead I would say that depth is an entry point for the many delightful tangents of breadth. Depth, degree of difficulty and diversity all bring a curriculum to life.
References
Cayley, S. (2021) ‘Five reasons why primary sources should be used for teaching’, Times Higher Education, 24 August. Retrieved from: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/five-reasons-why-primary-sources-should-be-used-teaching. Accessed April 18, 2023.
Didau, D. (2019) ‘Where we’re getting curriculum wrong Part 2: Powerful knowledge’ David Didau 12 December 2019 Retireved from: https://learningspy.co.uk/curriculum/why-we-need-powerful-knowledge/.
Douglass Horsford, S. (2021) ‘Whose Vision Will Guide Racial Equity in Schools?’ Education Week 17 March 2021 Retrived from: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-whose-vision-will-guide-racial-equity-in-schools/2021/03. Accessed: 1 January, 2024.
Olufemi, L. (2017) ‘Postcolonial writing is not an after thought; it is British literature’, Varsity, 21 June. Retrieved from: https://www.varsity.co.uk/comment/13261.
Young, M. (2014) ‘Knowledge, curriculum and the future school’ in M. Young, D. Lambert, C. Roberts & M. Roberts, Knowledge and the future school: curriculum and social justice London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp.9–40.