“Reach out and touch knowledge” – Analysing curriculum in science with Legitimatio

I want to talk about curriculum and knowledge – – this is something I think about a lot! If we’re going to give our students the very best education, we can’t begin with pedagogy, or assessment, or exercise books- we have to begin with our subjects.

All  subjects have their own knowledge structures, they are made in different ways and they behave in different ways. It’s our responsibility to understand these things if we want to do the best for our students. But this is really hard to do! Knowledge is a thing but it’s not a concrete thing, you can’t point to it, it’s not made of atoms. And it’s so big as well, you know, no subject has anywhere near all of its knowledge held in the head of one person. And yet we have to understand it, or we will fail our duty as teachers.

*We might not include all of the great vocational subjects in our secondary curriculum, but this should be because they naturally fall later in a logical sequence, and not because they are inferior or less a part of human culture.** SG+ is down on the vertical axis, this is because the more gravity something has, the more it is pulled down – according to Maton!