Abstract
Why have learner outcomes over the last 20 years increased so modestly, despite successive waves of far reaching curriculum reform? Could the curriculum model we have be the problem? In addressing this question, this chapter surveys curriculum reform models in developed and developing countries, explores their different logics, and applies the insights gained to recent curriculum reform in South Africa. The chapter concludes by arguing that curriculum reform on its own is not enough, and that the research community in South Africa has yet to discover what the most efficacious pedagogy for learners in impoverished schools would look like.
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- 1.
This section draws on Hoadley (2018).
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Loi d’orientation sur l’éducation.
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- 4.
In the vocational education literature, the term ‘competence’ takes a meaning opposite to the one ascribed to it here by Bernstein. There, it means an external skill or performance.
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A ‘communalising pedagogy’ is one where the teachers worked with the whole class as a homogeneous group, with little or no differentiation of tasks or differentiation of individual performances. In a communalising pedagogy, close scrutiny of what individual learners produce is not possible, and, consequently, the conditions for the successful production of the relevant pedagogic text are foreclosed.
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There is very little research at the FET classroom level. Prior to 1994, schools were hostile to the presence of researchers. After 1994, there was pressure to understand what was going on in classrooms, especially given anecdotal reporting of an on-going ‘breakdown in the culture of teaching and learning’. However, given the implementation of C2005, the raft of studies of classrooms at the time focused on the GET level and the effects of the implementation of the ‘new’ (mainly C2005 and NCS) curriculum (see Hoadley 2012).
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Muller, J., Hoadley, U. (2019). Curriculum Reform and Learner Performance: An Obstinate Paradox in the Quest for Equality. In: Spaull, N., Jansen, J. (eds) South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_6
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