Ana Souza

Planning a competence-based curriculum: the case of four secondary schools in England

Despite the belief that schools tend to be resistant to change, it is possible to find secondary schools in the UK which are investing in the design of an innovative curriculum for their Year 7 (11-year-old students). This article focuses on four of these schools and discusses some of the challenges they face in planning and implementing their competence-based curricula (CBC). Such curricula tend to be based on the rationale that they better prepare all students for the constant changes of human knowledge and understanding. They develop transferable skills rather than subject-specific content, which are considered necessary requirements for learners as future productive members of society in the twenty-first century. Advocates of CBC argue that such curricula are more inclusive and emancipatory than traditional curricula, although this view is contested. Employing Bernsteins concepts of framing and classification of the curriculum, this article describes the challenges and constraints encountered by four schools which have endeavoured to develop a competence-based curriculum.

Researching the competence-based curriculum: preface to a case study of four urban secondary schools

This introductory article accompanies three further articles forming a case study research project undertaken to describe the experience of four urban secondary schools implementing a competence-based curriculum for students in their first year of secondary education. The nature of such competence-based curricula is discussed in the context of secondary schools before providing an outline of the context of each of the case study schools. A democratic and emancipatory view of education provides the rationale for the development of transferable competencies, and this is considered with respect to the challenges of engaging in a cross-disciplinary approach to the curriculum. These challenges are viewed through the lens of Bernsteins concepts of strong and weak framing and horizontal and vertical discourses. Each of the accompanying articles takes up a different aspect of education, focusing on curriculum planning, teaching and learning, and leadership and management respectively. Further challenges with regard to changes in the English curriculum are briefly reflected upon. Finally an outline of the case study methodology which was employed in the study is provided.

Leading and managing the competence-based curriculum: conscripts, volunteers and champions at work within the departmentalised environment of the secondary school

This article presents a sub-set of findings from a research project describing the experience of four case study schools which have implemented a competence-based curriculum (CBC) for students in their first year of secondary education. Secondary schools are highly departmentalised environments with organisational structures based primarily around subject departments and this can present a considerable challenge to such a multidisciplinary curriculum initiative. School leaders and teachers involved in the implementation and development of a CBC speak in terms of championing and legitimising the curriculum to their subject specialist colleagues. Teachers recruited to the competence-based approach were sometimes described as a mix of volunteers and conscripts and overcoming any initial scepticism toward the approach required the position and status of the curriculum initiative to be established within the departmentalised organisational structure of the secondary school, and required continuing advocacy for the competence-based approach.

Language and religious identities

The 21 century has seen the start of the systematic development of ‘language and religion’ as a subfield of sociolinguistics (Darquennes and Vandenbussche 2011). Studies in this subfield have pointed to two fundamental issues: firstly, the importance of language for the maintenance of religion and religious practices and, vice-versa, the importance of religious practices for the maintenance of language and, secondly, the role of language and religion as markers of identity (Mukherjee 2013). This chapter presents a general view of both these issues, with particular consideration of language and religious identities within the field of applied linguistics.

Language and faith encounters: bridging language–ethnicity and language–religion studies

There has been growing interest by British policy-makers in the importance of acknowledging the role of migrant childrens background in their educational progress. Therefore, this article draws on studies of language–ethnicity and of language–religion to understand the linguistic and the religious heritage of four groups of Brazilian migrants in London. The discussions describe data collected for two studies. The first study was conducted in a Brazilian complementary school and the second in three Brazilian faith settings. A new three-dimensional framework, the Religion–Ethnicity–Language (REL) Triangle, is explained and applied to the two sets of data. It is argued that the REL Triangle framework, which examines religion, ethnicity and language as intersecting aspects of identity, can help in the understanding of childrens linguistic and cultural experiences in out-of-school contexts, and thus, allow new links to be developed between mainstream schools and migrant communities.