ABSTRACT
Disciplinarity has a grip on much of the discourse on curriculum policy and instructional practice. Schools are mandated to teach academic disciplines such as mathematics, chemistry, geography, history, and economics to the future generations. Teachers are supposed to work with and transform the content of the academic discipline for classroom teaching. Lurking beneath the surface of this discourse is a fundamental conceptual distinction that has not received sufficient attention from policymakers, researchers, and educators – the distinction between school subjects and academic disciplines (Stengel, 1997). Yet this distinction is crucial for a proper understanding of curriculum development and pedagogical practice. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the differences between school subjects
and academic disciplines, and in so doing, to argue for the centrality of school subjects in curriculum development and pedagogical practice. By a school subject, I refer to an area of learning within the school curriculum that constitutes an institutionally defined field of knowledge and practice for teaching and learning. By an academic discipline, I refer to a field or branch of learning affiliated with an academic department within a university, formulated for the advancement of research and scholarship and the professional training of researchers, academics, and specialists. School subjects can be traditional academic subjects such as mathematics, history, and geography that could have direct affiliations with their parent academic disciplines. They can also be unconventional ones such as tourism and hospitality that have no or minimal connections with academic disciplines. This chapter begins by looking at different conceptions of the central aim of
schooling embedded in various curricular ideologies and discourses. It next analyzes and unpacks the differences and relationships between school subjects and academic
disciplines. This is followed by a discussion of the formation of a school subject with reference to the curriculum-making processes involved, and then an analysis of the formation of liberal studies as a new school subject in the current context of curriculum reform in Hong Kong. The chapter ends by addressing what is involved in knowing the content of a school subject for teaching.
