Curriculum knowledge and justice: content, competency and concept

This study is interested in understanding the configurations of knowledge underpinning three examples of curriculum policy texts in the specific case of the school subject of geography. The three policy texts are the 1991 Geography National Curriculum (GNC), the 'Opening minds' curriculum and the GNC 2007. I start with the proposal that each selected text promotes a particular type of knowledge, namely: content, competency and concept. I argue that deconstructive reading of three policy texts reveals what are assumed to be legitimate knowledge discourses as well as what is overlooked in each tidy curriculum scheme. I engage the help of the poststructuralist thinker Jacques Derrida in this deconstructive undertaking. The study demonstrates how the 1991 'content' curriculum privileges a western European view of the world; how the 1999 'competency' curriculum overlooks the politics and ethics of knowledge by focusing on an economistic, outcomes-driven technical view of knowledge; and how the 'concept' curriculum offers opportunities for deconstructive reading while at the same time indicating an unproblematical commitment to conflated and assumedly neutral approaches to knowledge. Opening up curriculum texts to deconstructive reading shows language as insecure and reveals spaces for the incoming of more just ways of thinking about the world.