Learning to “be” in a new century: reflections on a curriculum in transition

Rosemary Hipkins

Abstract

Future-focused theoretical thinking about education exhibits an ontological turn, with attendant advocacy for more attention to be paid to the nature of knowledge and to students’ identity development. This article explores the second of these recommendations and makes the case that students’ “selves” should be an important curriculum focus if they are to participate positively in the knowledge age. Developing a sense of wellbeing that allows students to contribute to a diverse and rapidly changing society requires a more holistic view of self that is developed through learning experiences that are both practical and academic, and also model personal responsibility within the provision of appropriate social support. Using New Zealand’s Health and Physical Education learning area as an example, the article explores the potential for authentic inquiry to meet the demanding challenges of making students’ “being” at least as much a curriculum focus as their “knowing”.

Introduction

School education cannot help but be caught up in the rapidly changing social conditions called the “knowledge age” (Gilbert, 2005). This era has brought changes in thinking about both the nature of knowledge and the nature of a “self”, with accompanying debate about the meaning and place of “participating and contributing” as an aspect of the school curriculum. While changes in thinking about knowledge and about identity are closely intertwined, this paper takes the second of them—the meaning of self—as the change explored. When the social world is changing rapidly, a sense of self and of location becomes a critical anchor when considering how best to respond to that change. For this reason the self is a central concept when teaching any subject that bears on wellbeing.

The Health and Physical Well-being learning area,¹ with its three subjects of health, physical education, and home economics, provides an interesting example of some directions in which the school curriculum at large might evolve to meet the learning needs of the knowledge age. The national curriculum for this learning area was mandated second to last of the current seven curriculum documents (Ministry of Education, 1999). It takes a constructivist approach to learning and is underpinned by several “big ideas” with an interesting mix of theoretical orientations. These include the concepts of social determinants of health and health promotion, together with critical action or action competence, and an interpretation of the Māori concept of wellbeing as hauora.² These ideas are explored in more detail in the second half of this paper.

More recently, a review of New Zealand’s entire curriculum has led to a Curriculum Marautanga Project (CMP), still under way. Part of this project is exploring the introduction of five key competencies into the next version of the national curriculum. These are based on the OECD DeSeCo research concerning the outcomes of learning necessary to lead to a successful life in a well-functioning society (see, for example, Rychen & Salganik, 2003).

The five key competencies for New Zealand’s national curriculum,³ as these were named at the time of writing,⁴ are: relating to others; managing self; participating and contributing; pursuing knowledge; and using languages, symbols, and texts. The nature of “participating and contributing” in relation to the proposed key competencies has been a particular focus of the discussion in the Curriculum Project (Rutherford, 2004)⁵ and it has currently replaced “participating and contributing”, which was the earlier title for this competency (Ministry of Education, 2005). Participating and contributing is seen as an important aspect of the provision of continuity from early childhood into school-level education (Carr & Peters, 2005), as a central component of the successful transfer of learning (Carr, 2004; Rychen & Salganik, 2003) and as an important factor in the motivation to learn (Willms, 2003). This article discusses an “ontological turn”⁶ that provides a helpful dimension to this debate, and perhaps can convince some sceptics that there are good reasons for this focus on “participating and contributing” in the knowledge era.

Strand A of Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum—Personal Health and Physical Development—focuses strongly on the self. While this focus is implied in the first three aims, it comes directly into view in Achievement Aim 4, “Personal identity and self worth”:

Analyse attitudes and values and take actions that contribute to their personal identity and self-worth. (In this document, ‘personal identity and self-worth’ includes the ideas of self-concept, self-confidence, and self-esteem).

(Ministry of Education, 1999, p. 8)

The achievement objectives for this aim provide guidance for exploring the diversity of ways of being an authentic self in relation to a range of contexts, including place (both local and national), culture, extended family (whänau), various groups of people, and lifestyle choices. This accords well with the post-structural idea that each of us is an “intersection” of many identity categories that include “race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, wellness, etc.” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 480). This article suggests that the Health and Physical Well-being learning area is appropriately future-focused when it provides learning opportunities, contexts, and strategies to explore the self in relation to these category intersections as they play out in a rapidly changing, complex world.

Curriculum in an age of complexity

With the rise of the knowledge age, one paradoxical response to the drive for sameness and common ways of being has been a new valuing of diversity and difference. In part, we must learn to value diversity because many new technologies have shrunk the world so that we live in much more diverse communities than may have been the case even in the recent past. In part, it is because both knowledge and social conditions are changing so fast that everyone needs to know how to keep learning new things. The impetus for diversity also relates to a hunger for a constant supply of new ideas and knowledge—diversity potentially provides new ways of thinking and so is an important source of creativity (Gilbert, 2005). To these challenges Barnett (2004) adds yet another—the rise of what he calls “supercomplexity”. This concept raises the impossibility of finding a consensus on knowledge debates, even hypothetically. Rather, Barnett says, we need to learn to live in an uncertain world in which the more we come to know, the more profoundly we also recognise our ignorance. In this view, there will always be “epistemological gaps” (p. 251) that no amount of new learning can anticipate or satisfactorily fill.

If the supercomplexity argument is accepted, schooling practices from the 19th and 20th centuries, still prevalent today, do not stand up well in the face of this formidable challenge. Such practices include the grouping of students in large common categories that emphasise similarities while glossing over or ignoring each person’s unique individuality. In school we have taught a common curriculum to all students, expecting them to adapt to the demands of learning knowledge that someone else has selected as being sufficiently valuable to be stored up by everyone who can do so. Quite intentionally, the chosen “academic” knowledge has been expected to be too hard for some students, who have not been allowed to think of themselves as “knowers” and who have been expected to be the compliant workers of the industrial age (Apple, 2004; Gilbert, 2005; Renwick, 1986). This practice is in tension with advocacy for lifelong learning (Hipkins, 2005). It is more aligned to a traditional view of a “knowledge apprenticeship” (Gilbert, 2005) than to situated views of the scaffolded construction of knowledge in context that underpin initiatives such as the introduction of key competencies (Carr, 2004). And, as we shall see, it is completely at odds with the views of supercomplexity theorists such as Barnett.

One response to the impetus for change sketched here is to advocate for a curriculum focus on “process” or “skills” in the belief that these, at least, will be transferable. But this is naïve. As Gilbert (2005) points out, some of the “old knowledge” that we have traditionally taught is still very important for students to know. Indeed, the DeSeCo key competencies approach expects learning to be demonstrated through the appropriate use of knowledge, skills, and motivations in real contexts (Rychen & Salganik, 2003). In this view, “transfer” of learning is thought of as an adaptation of current knowledge and skills to a new situation. This requires the demonstration of a complex performance (Delandshere & Petrosky, 1998) in which all aspects (knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values) are integral (Hipkins, Boyd & Joyce, in press).

Many of the objectives of Strand A⁷ in Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum specify “old” knowledge that provides important foundations for developing new ways of knowing and thinking. But, unlike other learning areas, this curriculum document is not burdened with over-stuffed content that needs to be sorted, prioritised, and reduced. Rather, the most challenging issue related to the knowledge content of this learning area is that some people continue to see the three subjects as “not academic” and therefore as being of more marginal value in the overall school curriculum. In the knowledge age, habitual either/or binary thinking is being replaced with both/and thinking. This type of rethinking would suggest that school subjects need to be both academic and more applied—for all students. Recent research carried out by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research has demonstrated how home economics, for example, is in the process of becoming more academic, while retaining strongly practical components. Its popularity with students and teachers attests to their valuing of this type of combination (Hipkins, 2004; Hipkins, Conner & Neill, in press).

In an earlier paper, Gilbert (2001) noted a likelihood that changes to views of knowledge could undermine the status in the school curriculum of subjects such as science, which have always been important to the academic sorting process, unless approaches to teaching these subjects changed. There is already something of this influence at work in the learning area chosen for this case study. For example, medicalised ways of thinking about health and scientific ways of thinking about food choices have been superseded in these subjects. Both the mandated curriculum and its supporting materials describe teaching and learning approaches that explore a more holistic range of factors involved in making healthy decisions, and that focus more on wellness than on illness (see, for example, Ministry of Education, 1999, 2002).

A 21st century turn to ontology

Barnett (2004) takes the knowledge argument forward another step. In his view, both knowledge and skills, while obviously necessary, become secondary to a kind of “knowing-in-and-with-uncertainty” (p. 251). Developing the attributes for such knowing, he says, is “primarily an ontological task” (p. 252). In this view, the challenge for both curriculum and pedagogy is to support the education of learners who have “an investment in their own selves that enables them to go forth in a challenging world” (p. 252). Barnett relates this to having a language of self—an “energy, authenticity and will” (p. 254) to put learning into action in the world. This turn to ontology—a philosophical focus on being as opposed to knowing—is interesting and timely. It has recently been noted by researchers from the sociology of science (Latour, 1999; Law & Urry, 2002) and anthropology (St. Pierre, 1997), and in education has elsewhere been linked to sociocultural perspectives on learning (Packer & Goicoechea, 2000).

Sociocultural theorists take the view that the individual is constructed in a web of relationships with other people, the natural world, and with the technological artefacts of our built world. It is the sum of these relationships that in complex and shifting ways determines who and what individuals can be and do at any given time. Each of us can experience varying ways of being a self at differing points of intersections in these webs of connection. This sort of self-awareness is particularly evident in one of the Curriculum in Action resources, called Making Connections (Ministry of Education, 2002):

When students are in touch with their community and culture and are confident about their own identity, they can develop the resilience to keep reaching out and making connections to other people and to new ideas, even when this is challenging. (p. 6)

Some researchers have argued that the real work of school is the “production of persons” (Packer & Goicoechea, 2000). While children’s education begins from birth, the early years are primarily a time of participatory learning while immersed in the real contexts of life and in the language that will shape the world for the child. When children first go to school they have to learn a new social position: how to be a “student”. One change is that they need to learn to relate to adults in a more impersonal way than they do within their families, although of course they can still go home at the end of the day and be a child again. Children also need to learn new ways of naming things in the world—more abstract ways than they may have used in their early childhood years.

Most children quickly learn to construct a school identity for themselves. But some resist, because there are also real ontological costs. When only some ways of knowing are sanctioned and rewarded, some of these are costs to students’ identities. Packer and Goicoechea (2000) say that part of the cost of becoming a self (in the school sense) is learning to live in a world where binary distinctions are real. The self we develop as we learn to “do school” is a person who thinks and learns in a micro-world where the binary categories of mind/body, reason/emotion, thought/action become lived realities. This world operates as if the mind was a separate thing from the body, and as if reason really could be separated from emotion, and so on (Sfard, 1998). To move past the false certainties built on binary thinking is to take a step towards Barnett’s world of supercomplexity. In a both/and world there is no one right way to be or to know (and hence, clearly, no single curriculum for all).

Lemke (2002) also challenges traditional ways in which schools produce learners and points out that “learning only has value if it lasts long enough to be put to use” (p. 36). He says we know very little about changes in behaviour that accumulate over years, rather than minutes or hours, and challenges the idea that the learning “self” can become a meaningful participant in societal activities simply by emulating them. In fact, he says, many types of school learning are a “bridge to nowhere” (p. 37), because they are too different from activities that take place in the world outside school.⁸ Lemke strongly critiques the school practice of teaching content when what we should be doing is actively supporting students to become the people they aspire to be—to develop identities that will last well beyond school. “Identities are not phenomena of the moment or the hour. What matters to the formation of an identity is activity that is reinforced over the long haul, and fairly frequently” (p. 41). Lemke says such activities need to: integrate school and outside-of-school experiences; build character; help students understand how our communications media and technological artefacts shape our cultural views; and explicitly teach students how to read, talk, and write in the various multimedia modes of communication relevant to specific disciplines. These ideas accord with the intention of the key competencies and align particularly strongly with the “making meaning” competency.

In view of all the above issues, a checklist of characteristics for a curriculum that is responsive to the 21st century challenges of the knowledge era might include:

•&;&;&;&;an ontological focus on being/participating and contributing;

•&;&;&;&;an intention to develop learning dispositions and key competencies;

•&;&;&;&;a knowledge focus on developing new understandings that can be used in personally meaningful tasks, not just stored away;

•&;&;&;&;learning that provides opportunities to develop an increasingly sophisticated recognition of multiple knowledges, with the inherent uncertainties;

•&;&;&;&;learning that takes place in real contexts; and

•&;&;&;&;learners showing they have learned when they demonstrate the ability to adapt learning to new situations.

Barnett (2004) suggests that there is not one correct pedagogical approach to develop these attributes. Rather, a pedagogy for supercomplexity must “engage learners as persons, not merely as knowers” (p. 257). For this to happen, he says, educational processes that engage and disturb the learner should be paramount, and teachers must be prepared to take risks as learners themselves. How do the learning opportunities signalled in the Health and Physical Well-being learning area live up to this formidable challenge?

Working with social determinants of health

Liberal political philosophy, inherited from more certain times, holds that an individual can be held responsible for what happens to them, regardless of relevant external circumstances—as rehearsed, for example, in the “level playing field” argument.⁹ At the other extreme, with the rise of supercomplexity, it might be suggested that individuals are powerless in the face of overwhelming forces of change. A move to “both/and” thinking provides one way of rethinking these extremes, while learning to manage complexity and uncertainty. This is the ontological response. In this way of thinking we need students to take individual responsibility for their learning and we need society to support these efforts as best it can. It’s not a question of either/or, but a question of finding the best way to integrate and balance both.

Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum provides rich opportunities to develop understandings of ways in which both/and thinking might apply to wellbeing. Strand D of the curriculum document, which is particularly relevant here, specifies four broad aims to be developed at every curriculum level: societal attitudes and beliefs; community resources; rights, responsibilities, and laws; and people and the environment. The theoretical idea that “social determinants” impact on health and wellbeing forms the basis for critical inquiry in a range of contexts in all three subjects of this learning area. Such determinants can be personal (age, gender, genetics), lifestyle related (diet, exercise), economic (socioeconomic status), cultural (spiritual, values), environmental (access to clean air and water), political (housing policies), and social (access to transport, work conditions, social support, to name just three).¹⁰ Clearly, the list of examples could have been much longer. They suggest a rich range of inquiry contexts for older students, including these examples drawn from Making Meaning: Making a Difference (Ministry of Education, 2004):

Critically analyse the relationship between key determinants of health and the drinking patterns of an identified high-risk group in New Zealand society. (p. 36)

Critically analyse the interrelationships between people, industry, technology and legislation that affect the nutritional health of the population. (p. 97)

Critically analyse societal attitudes and practices that shape the physical activity patterns of a society. (p. 71)

Clearly, there is scope here for the sort of learning that will “engage” and “disturb” students’ political views (Barnett, 2004) and avert any overly simplistic attributions of blame. It is easy to see how Barnett’s warning, that teachers need to be prepared to take pedagogical risks, might also apply. To study such topics is not to engage in unproblematic certainties and settled knowledge claims. But Westheimer and Kahne (2004) add another layer to these challenges. They found that, depending on the teacher’s political orientation, citizenship education is likely to focus either on developing critical thinking, or on taking some sort of affirmative action, but not both. Potentially, the Health and Physical Well-being learning area meets this challenge if teachers integrate learning about social determinants of health with the ideas of action competence and health promotion. These are discussed next.

Taking action for healthy schools

Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum specifies “health promotion” as an underlying concept that supports the “framework for learning” in this learning area (p. 30). This is defined as “a process that helps to create supportive physical and emotional environments in classrooms, whole schools, communities and society” (p. 32). Health promotion initiatives can provide students with rich opportunities to develop their personal “action competence” as “personal skills that empower them to take action to improve their own well-being and that of their environments” (p. 32). The experience of building knowledge that leads to action and change, especially when this change is linked to the sorts of attitudes and values specified in Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum, is potentially very empowering for students. And this is precisely the type of activity that is specified in the learning area’s idea of a critical action cycle.

The critical action cycle requires students to begin with the sort of thinking specified in the social determinants of health, but then to go on to deciding on a course of action they can take to address the issues raised. Further critical thinking in the follow-up allows consequences to be explored and, perhaps, a new critical action cycle to begin. Thus broad critical action cycles can help make the important connection between knowledge and the consequences of actions when learning in health, PE, or home economics. Taking critical action inevitably leads students to involvement in social issues. And social issues are also political at some level. It is not possible to consider critically where knowledge “comes from” without considering some aspects of societal and political power structures as well. Indeed, social justice is identified as an important value to be promoted through learning in PE, home economics, and health, along with care and concern for other people and the environment, and respect for the rights of others (Ministry of Education 1999, p. 34).

For pragmatists, the test of what is true is the consequences of putting knowledge into action (Biesta & Burbules, 2003). Values of social justice, with the accompanying attitudes specified in the curriculum document, direct attention to the consequences of actions and so could form a sound foundation for the development of a pragmatic disposition toward determining what is “true” in uncertain times. The conditions that could foster an ability to “be” in the face of supercomplexity are beginning to be laid down when students are empowered to act in this way. Thinking critically about prevailing social conditions was important to the first pragmatists (Menand, 2001) and it is interesting to note that John Dewey, one of the original American pragmatists, was also an early advocate of inquiry learning. Gilbert (2005) also comes to the conclusion that the use of authentic inquiry should be a key learning strategy if we are to begin successfully educating students for the knowledge society. What better context for such inquiry than something that directly impacts on students’ own wellbeing? The rich potential for inquiry is illustrated by these examples from the curriculum document (Ministry of Education, 1999):

Critically examining the social and cultural influences that shape the ways people learn about and express their sexuality, for example in relation to gender roles, the concept of body image, discrimination, equity, the media, culturally based values and beliefs, and the law. (p. 38)

Developing the skills to identify and discuss the social and cultural significance that sport has for individuals and for society, for example in relation to attitudes, values, specific practices and their effects, and media influences. (p. 45)

A tentative move towards cultural complexity

Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum introduces students to the Māori concept of hauora—a concept of wellbeing that “encompasses the physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual dimensions of health” (Ministry of Education, 1999, p. 31). Because mind and body are not separated as in the European tradition, this aspect of the Health and Physical Well being learning area provides an opportunity for teachers to help students explore the cultural assumptions that underpin binary thinking. Comparing the holistic view of the nature of well-being provided by the Māori concept of hauora with the more linear cause-and-effect scientific view of health can contribute to students’ development of understandings that “knowledge about knowledge” is itself a rich field of inquiry. In this way, the bicultural contexts of New Zealand’s schools potentially provide rich opportunities for exploring different cultural ways of thinking about self and, consequently, about what it might mean to be “well” in a rapidly changing world.

Learning for an unknown future

Barnett (2004) points out that there are certain dispositions that seem to equip some people better than others to cope when the unimaginable is happening to them. He lists these dispositions as carefulness, thoughtfulness, humility, criticality, receptiveness, resilience, courage, and stillness. We have already seen that learning in the area of Health and Physical Well-being explicitly supports the development of criticality and thoughtfulness, and it is not hard to see how the other dispositions could also be fostered, especially when learning through critical inquiry and action. Gilbert (2005) similarly suggests a move away from teaching knowledge that is certain and settled towards teaching that facilitates more explicitly meta-level learning—that is, learning how knowledge comes into being, how aspects such as “truth” and “quality” are determined in different disciplines, and so on. Both would agree that what is learnt needs to be transformative; that is, new insights change learners’ “being” in the world in personally meaningful ways. The famous American educator John Dewey also argued that learning should be a transformative experience, but years after his death people are still talking about how to make it so.

This article has made the case that students’ “selves” should be a very important focus for their school learning if they are to participate in the knowledge age with a sense of wellbeing that allows them to contribute positively to a diverse and rapidly changing society. By moving to “both/and” thinking and towards a more holistic view of self and of wellbeing the ontological turn poses a challenge to traditional binary thought.

Learning needs to be both practical and academic, and demands both personal responsibility and appropriate social support. Authentic inquiry, especially when underpinned by challenging intellectual concepts such as social determinants of health while also backed by practical, critical action, can meet this demanding set of specifications. I find it interesting that this type of learning is already specified so consistently and clearly in New Zealand’s health and physical education curriculum, and in the supporting documents for its three subjects (health, physical education, and home economics). The theoretical thinking about an “ontological turn” in education has been published relatively recently. This curriculum area seems to have anticipated an important shift in thinking—one that potentially has profound consequences for the whole curriculum. As the key competencies to be introduced into the curriculum are discussed more widely, it may be that this curriculum area can again lead the way in demonstrating their integration. I will watch its ongoing development with great interest.

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this paper was funded by the Ministry of Education through the Curriculum Innovation Project. I am grateful for the perceptive comments from one reviewer, which helped me to fine tune important aspects of my argument.

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Notes

1&;&;&;&;The actual curriculum document is called Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum. The name change doubtless reflects debate about the emphasis to be placed on wellbeing and the change in the learning area title would have followed rather than preceded the curriculum title. In this article I will use the title of the overall learning area, because the curriculum “messages” I explore are bound up in the many supporting documents that have subsequently been produced by the Ministry of Education as well as in the actual curriculum document.

2&;&;&;&;Some Māori say the full complexity of the traditional meaning of hauora is, perhaps inevitably, lost in translation between the cultures (Garrick Cooper, personal conversation).

3&;&;&;&;There are currently seven “essential learning areas” in the overall curriculum. There will be eight in the new version to be released in draft form at the end of the current stage of the Curriculum Project. In the new national curriculum these learning areas will be called Learning Languages (it is part of English in the current version); English; Mathematics and Statistics (the inclusion of statistics in the title is new); Science; Technology; Social Sciences; The Arts; and Health and Physical Education.

4&;&;&;&;Discussion of contested aspects of the curriculum development process, such as the naming and definition of the competencies and nature of values in the curriculum, can be found in the open access area of the Ministry of Education’s curriculum online portal, www.cmp.ac.nz.

5&;&;&;&;This paper can be found in the Ministry of Education’s open access area of www.cmp.ac.nz. This website is regularly updated and so is likely to include other ideas and arguments that have unfolded since this article was written.

6&;&;&;&;“Ontology” and “epistemology” are philosophical terms that seem to me to be increasingly used in curriculum debates. I think of ontology as that collection of ideas, beliefs, and experiences that tacitly shapes our “being” in the world and what we do. By contrast, epistemology has a focus on “knowing” and so is about how we come to form our thinking about the world; again, more often tacitly than explicitly.

7&;&;&;&;There are four strands to the curriculum. Strand A is “Personal Health and Physical Development”. Strand B is “Movement Concepts and Motor Skills”. Strand C is “Relationships with Other People” and Strand D is “Healthy Communities and Environments”.

8&;&;&;&;In this article, as in previous writing, Lemke is especially critical of secondary school science teaching.

9&;&;&;&;For a critique of political ideas around a “fair go” see Saunders (2004).

10&;&;&;&;This development of the idea of social determinants is based on the work of the World Health Organisation, as published in R. Wilkinson and M. Marmot (Eds.) (1998).

The author

Rosemary Hipkins is a senior researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. She is interested in future-focused change in education and is a member of the Ministry of Education Reference Group for the Curriculum Marautanga Project currently under way. Rosemary is leading research into selected aspects of curriculum and assessment practice in secondary schools as the National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA) qualifications reforms are being critiqued and refined, and she has an interest in the effective use of ICT across all curriculum levels.

Email: rosemary.hipkins@nzcer.org.nz