Michael E. Young

Bringing knowledge back in : From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education

Forward - Professor Hugh Lauder, University of Bath Introduction Part 1 - Theoretical Issues 1. Rescuing the Sociology of Education from the Extremes of Voice Discourse 2. Knowledge and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education 3. Durkheim, Vygotsky and the Curriculum of the Future 4. Structure and Activity in Durkheims and Vygotskys Theories of Knowledge 5. Curriculum Studies and the Problem of Knowledge Updating the Enlightenment? 6. Education, Knowledge and the Role of the State: The Nationalization of Educational Knowledge? 7. Rethinking the Relationship Between Sociology and Educational Policy Part 2 - Applied Studies 8. Contrasting Approaches to Qualifications and their Role in Educational Reform 9. Conceptualizing Vocational Knowledge 10. Professions, Professional Knowledge and the Question of Identity: An Analytical Framework 11. Academic/Vocational Divisions and the Problem of Knowledge in Post-Compulsory Education 12. Further Education and Training College Teachers in South Africa and the UK: A Knowledge-Based Profession of the Future? 13. Experience as Knowledge? Notes on the Recognition of Prior Learning 14. The Knowledge Question and the Future of South African Education Next Steps 15. Truth and Truthfulness in the Sociology of Educational Knowledge (With Johann Muller) Endword

From Constructivism to Realism in the Sociology of the Curriculum

What is educationally worthwhile knowledge, and what are (and what should be) the significant differences between curriculum or school knowledge and the every day, commonsense knowledge that people acquire at home, in the community and in the workplace? Until the 1970s, answers to these questions were either taken for granted by both sociologists of education2 and curriculum researchers as being part of existing educational systems or seen as issues to be left to philosophy. Education was seen as a good thing; the only big issues for sociology were distributional?in particular, the persistence, in all forms of selective education, of social class inequal ities (Jencks, 1975). Why was progress to upper secondary and higher education lim ited to the few, and how could these persistent inequalities, found in all systems of mass education, be explained and reduced or overcome? The what of education, the knowledge that students did or did not acquire, was not questioned, at least by sociologists.3 It was taken for granted that school and nonschool knowledge were different; they had always been so. Only rarely in the past, and invariably around religious issues, did the content of the knowledge that was included in the curricu lum become part of educational debates, let alone those involving the wider public.

Entropy detection by pigeons: response to mixed visual displays after same-different discrimination training.

Pigeons were trained to peck 2 different buttons in response to 16-icon Same versus Different arrays. In Same arrays, the icons were identical to one another, whereas in Different arrays, the icons were different from one another. In Experiment 1, pigeons discriminated Same from Different arrays and transferred their discriminative responding to arrays of novel icons. In Experiments 2-4, pigeons exhibited sensitivity to the degree of display variability when shown intermediate Mixture arrays. Entropy, an information theoretic measure, systematically described these results while outperforming rival accounts.

Apprenticeship as a conceptual basis for a social theory of learning

Abstract Many approaches to learning rely on behaviourist and individualist assumptions, are dependent on transmission pedagogies or are associated with cognitive science accounts of expertise. Drawing upon recent developments in activity theory that have resulted in learning new interpretations of the ‘zone of proximal development’ and the emergence of the idea of ‘learning as a form of social practice’, this paper proposes an entirely different perspective on learning. It argues that the idea of apprenticeship can be reconceptualised to provide the basis for a more inclusive social theory of learning. It explores how far new pedagogic criteria will have to be developed that might constitute the basis for such a theory of ‘reflexive learning’, and identifies the possible implications of this approach to learning for a number of current concerns in vocational education and training, for example, lifelong learning, collaborative/transformative learning and knowledge production.

Causation and Association

[Ilt may be that … reason, self-consciousness and self-control which seem to sever human intellect so sharply from that of all other animals are really but secondary re- sults of the tremendous increase in the number, delicacy and complexity of associations which the human animal can form. It may be that the evolution of intellect has no breaks, that its progress is continuous from its first appearance to its present condition in adult … human beings. If we could prove that what we call ideational life and reasoning were not new and unexplainable species of intellectual life but only the natural consequences of an increase in the number, delicacy, and complexity of associations of the general animal sort, we should have made out an evolution of mind comparable to the evolution of living forms. (p. 286)

Education, globalisation and the 'voice of knowledge'

This paper argues that underlying the links being made between the need for educational change in responding to the knowledge economy is an evacuation of the content of curricula and a misplaced emphasis on ‘genericism’ and experience. As an alternative the paper draws on ideas from Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein to make the case for the ‘differentiation of knowledge’ and in particular the differentiation between school and everyday knowledge as a principle for a future curriculum.

National Qualification Frameworks as a global phenomenon: A comparative perspective

The idea of qualifications defined in terms of outcomes that is discussed in the articles in this Special Issue has its origins in early developments in occupational psychology in the United States and the attempts to measure teacher competence that followed. However, the more recent development of the idea of a national qualifications framework owes much of its inspiration to the 16 Action Plan launched in 1984 in Scotland (see Raffe’s article in this issue) and the NVQ framework for vocational qualifications that was introduced across the whole of the UK in 1986 [1]. Although both English and Scottish developments were limited to vocational qualifications and shared a common outcomes-based definition of qualifications (Young, 2002), there were important differences between the two initiatives (Raffe, 1997) [2]. In his article in this issue David Raffe comments on the relatively limited influence of the 16 Action Plan on the provision of post-16 education in Scotland. At the same time, it was sufficiently widely accepted to be a significant basis for the succession of reforms that led to the launch of the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework in 2001 (see also Raffe in this issue). In stark contrast, the NVQ framework, launched with much fanfare, as a revolution in education and training acoss the UK in 1987, became the subject of increasingly sharp criticism (Raggatt & Williams, 2000) and has staggered to a position of ever increasing marginality [3]. Since the mid-1980s, national qualifications frameworks have been developed by a growing number of countries [4], which suggests that they are responses to global rather than just country-specific pressures (Young, 2002). However, apart from a number of country-specific analyses, there has been relatively little debate about qualification frameworks as a global phenomenon in either the policy or the research literature. There are a number of possible reasons for this. One is that at the level of rhetoric or broad goals, it is a development with which it is difficult to disagree— who could not want qualifications to be more linked to each other and to exhibit greater transparency? The introduction of an NQF has been seen by many involved, like a change of currency, as something almost inevitable. A second possible reason

Effects of number of items on the pigeon's discrimination of same from different visual displays.

The pigeons discrimination of visual displays comprising from 2 to 16 computer icons that were either the same as or different from one another was studied. Discrimination of Same from Different displays improved when the displays contained more icons, both after training with just 16-icon displays (Experiment 1) and after training with 2-, 4-, 8-, 12-, and 16-icon displays (Experiment 2). That improvement was specific to displays of different icons; accuracy to displays of same icons did not differ as a function of icon number. These results were well described by the degree of variability or entropy in multielement visual displays.

On the origin of personal causal theories

Detecting the causal relations among environmental events is an important facet of learning. Certain variables have been identified which influence both human causal attribution and animal learning: temporal priority, temporal and spatial contiguity, covariation and contingency, and prior experience. Recent research has continued to find distinct commonalities between the influence these variables have in the two domains, supporting a neo-Humean analysis of the origins of personal causal theories. The cues to causality determine which event relationships will be judged as causal; personal causal theories emerge as a result of these judgments and in turn affect future attributions. An examination of animal learning research motivates further extensions of the analogy. Researchers are encouraged to study real-time causal attributions, to study additional methodological analogies to conditioning paradigms, and to develop rich learning accounts of the acquisition of causal theories.

Alternative Educational Futures for a Knowledge Society

This article offers a critical analysis of recent trends in educational policy with particular reference to their assumptions about the knowledge society. It examines the implications of the analysis for the issue of elitism and the promotion of greater educational equality. The article concludes by offering an alternative approach to educational policy based on a social realist theory of knowledge.