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conducted for this project due to their focus on relatively small amounts of text within this
same textbook, rather than across multiple textbooks and eras so that the meta-discourses can
be considered. Emerging curriculum approaches such as ethical inquiry which seeks to
engage students in “....fostering the skills of rational ethical justification...[through] ...a
dialogue-based, ethical inquiry approach for teaching....Society & Environment curriculum
area” (Collins & Knight, 2006, p. 2) is also not used due to its emergence only in more recent
times, and its placement still on the fringe of the majority of curriculum content taught in
schools, used more as part of pilot research than an integral part of the curriculum, at this
point in time. Instead a categorisation of three approaches to curriculum: traditional approach,
progressivist approach and entitlement approach are used in the conclusion chapter to
categorise the overarching dominant discourses present in school History curriculum across
each of the three eras. The following table of approaches, encapsulated by Gilbert, draws first
on Cope and Kalantzis (1990) who describe traditional and progressivist curriculum
approaches, and moves to suggest a third approach, which Gilbert calls the entitlement
approach. Here, each of the approaches and their relationship to various aspects of the school
curriculum are described. Combined, the three approaches provide a framework to categorise
the discourses that emerge from the analysis (see Table 2.1 for details). A point that needs to
be made is that the approaches described here, whilst not exhaustive, do offer a clear way to
categorise the dominant discourses presented in History curriculum throughout the selected
eras. Furthermore, these approaches are explicitly curriculum, rather than pedagogical
approaches. For an overview of pedagogical approaches that are generally aligned with the
curriculum approaches listed in the table below, consult Kemmis, Cole, and Suggett (1983);
and for an overview of more complex approaches to curriculum within textbooks categorized
into distinct orientations, consult Pinar et al. (2002).
Table 2.1
Three Approaches to the Social Science Curriculum.
Curriculum dimension Traditional approach Progressivist approach Entitlement approach
Major substantive curriculum as presented curriculum as open curriculum as discursive
emphasis
social content
62
process
Criteria for selection prescribed curriculum curriculum relevant to
contemporary issues
empowerment
curriculum of expanding
significance and
alternative futures
Source of social values universalistic curriculum relativist curriculum culturally immanent
curriculum
Epistemological a curriculum of fixed inquiry process
critical reconstruction of
emphasis
social truths
curriculum
knowledge for just,
democratic and
sustainable futures
Note: This table taken from Gilbert (2003, pp. 6-7).