The recontextualisation of knowledge : towards a social realist approach to curriculum and didactics

This article examines the relationship of curriculum and didactics through a social realist lens. Curriculum and didactics are viewed as linked and integrated by the common issue of educational content. The author argues that the selection of educational content and its organisation is a matter of recontextualising principles and that curriculum and didactics may be understood as interrelated stages of such recontextualisation. Educational policy and the organisation of pedagogic practice are considered as distinct although closely related practices of ‘curricularisation’ and ‘pedagogisation’. Neo-Bernsteinian social realism implies a sociological approach by which educational knowledge is recognised as something socially constructed, but irreducible to power struggles in policy arenas. More precisely, curriculum and didactics are not only matters of extrinsic standpoints. Recontextualising practices may also involve intrinsic features, that is, some kind of relatively generative logics that regulate curriculum design as well as pedagogic practice. In order to highlight certain implications for both curriculum and didactic theory, the author develops a typology that is analytically framed by principles of extrinsic relations to and intrinsic relations within curriculum or didactics