Disciplines, Outcomes and Purpose in Social Science Education

Abstract

The gap between school knowledge and academic knowledge has long been acknowledged. The division of the curriculum into separate academic subjects has sometimes been blamed for this problem. On this reading it would make sense to re-model the curriculum so that teaching is multidisciplinary. However, efforts to achieve this ideal have a poor record in England. In this paper we suggest that the answer to the problem is more likely to lie in the way that the curriculum is built from a careful analysis of the actual outcomes of learning. We briefly outline three projects that are based on this supposition, describing the theoretical underpinnings and the main features of the projects.

Keywords

• Threshold concepts
• learning study
• argument