ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up Michael Young’s ‘three scenarios’ heuristic originally advanced with Johan Muller. I argue that the ‘Future 3’ curriculum is a highly productive framework to enable specialist teachers to retrieve a greater sense of their professional worth. However, there is no ‘royal road’ to ‘recontextualisation’ from the discipline to school subjects. Using geography as the focus, I argue that the Future 3 curriculum is possible only through the conscious efforts of teachers enacting the curriculum.
The arguments deployed inevitably take us into a re-examination of powerful knowledge and Margaret Roberts’ (2014) observation that whatever knowledge is selected and justified in the curriculum "it is only potentially powerful". Thus, although we may accept curriculum and pedagogy as conceptually distinct as Young urges us to do, in practice, curricular, pedagogic and indeed more ‘learner-centred’ perspectives are required to merge, particularly in a subject like geography which seeks to incorporate inductive, phenomenological approaches to understanding how human beings makes sense of place and space. Ever mindful of the dangers of outcomes-led curriculum assumptions which may undermine the knowledge-led curriculum, the chapter explores the significance of ‘curriculum making’, devised to articulate and support teachers as ‘curriculum leaders’.
