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  • What Is 'Really' Taught As The Content of School Subjects?Teaching School Subjects As An Alchemy
  • Thomas S. Popkewitz

There is general belief in current reforms that a teacher cannot teach a school subject unless she has adequate knowledge of the disciplinary field of that teaching. Coinciding with this belief is the emphasis in teacher education reforms and research on pedagogical knowledge teachers need for children to learn the content knowledge. The identification of "the best practices" and "the core" teaching knowledge to enact the curriculum exemplifies this belief. "Benchmarks" or standards are indicators of whether the teacher has mastered the core or best practices. The professional, highly skilled teacher is one who exhibits the benchmarks and classified as "effective" and "authentic" in classroom teaching.

The pedagogical knowledge to implement teaching of school subjects is the focus of teacher and teacher education reform. This assumption underwrites the McKinsey reports on educational assessments of national school systems. An international consulting agency that writes public service reports on education, McKinsey uses international assessments of student performances (PISA) in science and mathematics, for example, to outline models of school change that focus on teacher education and school system recruitment and professional training (Popkewitz, 2017). The models of change focus on the management of pedagogical practices to provide the "pathways" or "highways" for improving science, mathematics, and literary education. The highway metaphor directs attention to change as simply instrumental: "to get rid of potholes [and] make educators and employers part of the solution by providing 'signs' and concentrate on patch of pavement ahead" (Barton, Farrell, & Mourshed, 2013, p.54). Teacher education reform programs follow the same kind of assumptions but at the micro level of classroom interaction. The problem of good teaching is better implementation strategies for students to learn the curriculum. Teacher training is to enable teachers to "approximate" the professional practices of 'what teachers really need to know and be able to do" (Grossman, McDonald, Hammerness, & Ronfeldt (2008, p.247, italics added).

This article gives attention to the principles of change that organize contemporary teacher and teacher education reforms. It suggests that the models of change are built on a chimera or illusion. That illusion is that teaching is about learning science, mathematics, art, or music; and professional competence is finding the "core" pedagogical knowledge. The discussion argues historically that the school curricula for teaching school subjects have little to do with learning disciplinary practices, but rather are models of practices for making kinds of people. They embody cultural principles about who the child is and should be, and who is outside and does not "fit" into the spaces of normativity.

To explore the principles of the models of curriculum, the analogy is made with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemists who sought to turn base metals into [End Page 77] pure gold. As the medieval alchemy, the school subjects involve magical processes that transform physics and mathematics, for example, into the school curriculum. The alchemy of the school subjects is explored historically to ask how is it possible to think about curriculum reforms as we do and the limits of these models for school change. While it is often pleasing to think of schools as places for children "learning" and teaching as a "help profession", to think of the curriculum as an alchemy directions attention to a different historical quality of schools. Historically they are concerned with the making of kinds of people. Some of these kinds of people are today called the lifelong learner, the adolescent, and the disadvantaged child. Pedagogy (and pedagogical knowledge), the argument continues, links norms and values of collective belonging with the interior of the child in governing "the soul." The second section discusses how theories about the nature of society and collective belonging (the citizen) are brought in to order the curriculum to talk about science, arts, music and mathematics education. The theories in the curriculum and psychologies of the child generate principle about what is thought, talked about and "seen" as the practices of teaching. And embedded in the alchemy of teaching school subjects is the paradox of contemporary reforms. The designing of the curriculum to recognize differences and inclusion so "all children learn...

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