Discourse, pedagogy and the National Curriculum: change and continuity in Primary schools

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
One of a number of studies of the impact of the National Curriculum on professional and educational practice, the CICADA project, funded by ESRC, focused on pupil‐teacher discourse in primary classrooms, setting it in the wider contexts of (i) a national survey of teachers and (ii) classroom data from before the legislation which heralded the reforms in question. While the survey data confirmed the findings of other studies‐‐namely, a scenario of considerable change in curriculum planning, management, assessment and record‐keeping‐‐the computerized analysis of the discourse data (using the categories of discourse, syntax, pedagogy, curriculum, participants and lexis) showed this taking place against a backdrop of relative continuity at the deeper levels of pedagogy. Here, independently of the reforms, teacher‐pupil discourse tended towards two clear‐cut and widely differing clusters. The first involved the teacher in much more formative feedback, directing and commanding than the second, which in turn entailed higher levels of explaining, exploring, questioning and eliciting. Though the study is small‐scale and exploratory, it appears to offer a useful counterpoint to those studies which, grounded more in teacher perceptions, see the National Curriculum as having induced more fundamental pedagogic change. Indeed, the project's comparative study of day‐to‐day teaching dilemmas over the 6‐year period showed pedagogy as such being supplanted as a core teaching dilemma by curriculum planning and assessment. The CICADA discourse clusters stand in an instructive relationship to earlier studies of primary pedagogy, not offering a firm typology of teacher styles or strategies yet providing a commentary on issues like ‘facilitation’ and ‘intervention’ as well as, more generally, on our developing understanding of the role of interaction in classroom learning.

This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit: