Recontextualising knowledge for lessons

This article builds on the descriptions of teachers’\ud journeys for knowledge previously presented\ud in this journal (Puttick, 2014) by asking what\ud teachers do with these sources of knowledge.\ud There is a substantial tradition of discussing the\ud transformation of (mainly disciplinary) knowledge\ud into school curricula, a process described by\ud Dewey as psychologising; by Bruner as conversion;\ud and by Schwab as translation (Deng, 2007).\ud Bernstein (2000) describes this movement as\ud recontextualisation. Building on his work, social\ud realism foregrounds the relationship between\ud academic disciplines and school subjects,\ud focusing on ‘the boundaries between schools and\ud professional and academic “knowledge producing\ud communities”’ (Young, 2009, p. 17). For the\ud teachers in my study of three secondary school\ud geography departments in England, the dominant\ud sources are Google, YouTube, exam specification\ud websites and textbooks, news websites, and\ud departmental virtual shared areas. This wide\ud range of ‘selections and arrangements ... creates\ud a quite different animal to the discipline’\ud (Muller, 2009, p. 215). There are different ways\ud of understanding the relationships between\ud school subjects and academic disciplines (cf.\ud Puttick, 2013, pp. 334–335), and concern has\ud been expressed about the relationship between\ud academic and school geography; there is a widely\ud held contention that they are disconnected,\ud separated by a chasm (Butt and Collins, 2013;\ud Goudie, 1993). However, concern about this\ud chasm is mainly based on evidence of formal\ud representations of school geography. The notion\ud of ‘disciplined judgement’ discussed below\ud offers one way of introducing students to the\ud ways in which powerful knowledge is produced,\ud judged, and developed. Therefore, understanding\ud more about recontextualising principles offers\ud an opportunity to develop the relationship\ud between school and academic geography through\ud teachers’ own practice