ABSTRACT
The Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) was a very different curriculum to both Curriculum 2005 (C2005) and the National Curriculum Statement (NCS). Teachers were now confronted with very strong stipulation of content and closely specified sequencing and pacing requirements of subjects. This chapter explores the nature of the knowledge (not just its boundedness) in order to discern why individualization was surface, pacing extremely slow and the transmission of evaluative criteria still weakly framed. The Schools Performing Against Demographic Expectations (or SPADE) project was set up around the time of the implementation of CAPS to explore the relationship between particular aspects of schooling and educational attainment in a sample of 14 schools in poor communities. The pedagogy of the 14 teachers was coded in terms of classification and framing for mathematics and reading. Group guided reading is a particular methodology that is specified in the CAPS to occur daily in classrooms.
