Across much of the world there is now a standard secondary school curriculum based on a traditional array of subjects. This is the first work to tell the story of its invention, from the sixteenth century until the present day. The book concludes with a sketch of an alternative: a curriculum based on a well-argued set of fundamental aims.
Because school history often relies on reading and writing and has its own discipline-specific challenges, it is important to understand the language demands of this content area, the typical writing requirements, and the language expectations of historical discourse. History uses language is specialized ways, so it can be challenging for students to construct responses to historical events. It is only through a focus on these specialized ways of presenting and constructing historical content that students will see how language is used to construe particular contexts. This book provides the results of a qualitative study that investigated the language resources that 8th and 11th grade students drew on to write an exposition and considered the role of writing in school history. The study combined a functional linguistic analysis of student writing with educational considerations in the underresearched content area of history. Data set consisted of writing done by students who were English language learners and other culturally and linguistically diverse students from two school districts in California. The book is an investigation of expository school history writing and teachers’ expectations for this type of writing. School history writing refers to the kind of historical writing expected of students at the pre-college levels.
The ‘knowledge turn’ in curriculum studies has drawn attention to the central role that knowledge of the disciplines plays in education, and to the need for new thinking about how we understand knowledge and knowledge-building. Knowing History in Schools explores these issues in the context of teaching and learning history through a dialogue between the eminent sociologist of curriculum Michael Young, and leading figures in history education research and practice from a range of traditions and contexts. With a focus on Young’s ‘powerful knowledge’ theorisation of the curriculum, and on his more recent articulations of the ‘powers’ of knowledge, this dialogue explores the many complexities posed for history education by the challenge of building children’s historical knowledge and understanding. The book builds towards a clarification of how we can best conceptualise knowledge-building in history education. Crucially, it aims to help history education students, history teachers, teacher educators and history curriculum designers navigate the challenges that knowledge-building processes pose for learning history in schools.
Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school. The Once and Future School argues that to make sense of the current trials of secondary educational system and to maintain any sense of direction and vision for its future, we need a clear understanding of its path in the past and of its setting in a multi-national world. From their beginnings in colonial America to the present day, Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to hammer out and clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school.
The progressive raising of the school-leaving age has had momentous repercussions for our understanding of childhood and youth, for secondary education, and for social and educational inequality. This book assesses secondary education and the raising of the school-leaving age in the UK and places issues and debates in an international context.