International Research

Social Cohesion Perspective

The social cohesion perspective highlights the curriculum process being embedded in the specificity of institutional arrangements, structural relationships, and symbolic representations forming a totality in individual societies. A review by Stephen Heyneman and Sania Todoric-Bebic revealed that different regions, however, may have various issues related to structural approaches to social cohesion. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the structural approaches to social cohesion highlight equality of opportunity, universal primary education as well as administration, organization, and school governance toward the goal of democracy, and teachers' role in political socialization. In Asia, there are variations in such approaches: Malaysia has adopted schooling for national identity; India, Indonesia, and Malaysia have highlighted the role of moral education in enhancing social cohesion. Textbooks and examinations are used as vehicles for social cohesion in China and for the promotion of homogeneity in Japan.

Sociostructural Perspective

For the sociostructural perspective, the reproduction of social inequality and cultural capital through school education and its curricula has been discussed by a number of scholars, including Basil Bernstein, Michael Apple, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michael Young. Bernstein, in the 1970s, introduced the concepts of strong and weak classification and framing of curricula. Classification relates to the construction and maintenance of boundaries and the hierarchy of curriculum or subject content while framing refers to the relative extent of control by the teacher and pupils over the selection and transmission of knowledge. Bernstein proposed the collection code curriculum (strong classification and strong framing) and the integrated code curriculum (weak classification and weak framing). For the collection code curriculum, he quoted the English upper secondary and Advanced level (post-16) courses that tended to be specialized, concentrated on a small number of related subjects [Page 498]while the U.S. counterpart tended to be less specialized and structured by courses defined as knowledge units, and continental European curricula structured by subjects. He noted that there was a trend in many countries to move toward an integrated code curriculum, characterized by an enquiry-based approach to topics and themes, multiple modes of assessment, and a wide choice of subjects and courses for pupils and teachers working in interdependent teams. In addition, counteracting the possible deterministic and hegemonic nature of cultural reproduction theories, Bernstein, in The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (1990), argued that there could be two recontextualizing fields: the official recontextualizing field focusing on the what of pedagogic discourse and the pedagogic recontex-tualizing field highlighting the how of pedagogic discourse. These two fields could provide the potentials for various stakeholders such as government officials, consultants, school practitioners, publishers, and university experts to change and negotiate the discourses for curriculum planning, curriculum change, and knowledge transmission.

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