Recontextualising principles for the selection, sequencing and progression of history knowledge in four school curricula

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare four high school history curriculumdocuments with regard to how they select, sequence and make clear the progression ofhistory knowledge. Thereafter the aim is to establish if there are any recontextualisingprinciples that can be drawn from the comparison. The paper analyses secondary schoolcurriculum documents from South Africa, Canada (British Columbia), Singapore andKenya. A review of the history education literature indicates that the following concepts areproductive when analysing history curriculum documents: the purpose of school history, theknowledge structure of the discipline and the distinction between substantive andprocedural knowledge (or first and second order concepts) in history. These concepts thusinformed a content analysis of the curriculum documents. The findings show that a memoryhistory approach informs the Kenyan curriculum, while South Africa, Singapore and BritishColumbia take a disciplinary history approach. This informs the depth and breadth of thesubstantive knowledge that is selected, and highlights the first recontextualising principle,which is space. Curriculum designers make selections about the extent to which the historycontent is local, regional, national or international. The second principle is chronology,which is the key organising principle for the sequencing of content in all four curricula. Thethird principle relates to the conceptual progression of the substantive concepts, which isthe extent to which there is progression from generic concepts, to unique, contextualisedhistorical concepts to universal decontextualised historical concepts. The fourth principle isthe extent to which the curricula choose to develop procedural knowledge in the discipline.It is not clear how disciplinary procedural knowledge finds progression in these fourcurricula. Research has been done on progression in historical thinking in classrooms, butthis is not reflected in these curriculum documents, which do not map progression inprocedural knowledge clearly