Learnification and the outcomes‐focused curriculum: The case of secondary school English in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

The last 30 years have witnessed a global ‘curricular turn’, with curricula increasingly moving from specifying particular content to specifying broad, skill‐based ‘learning objectives’. This paper explores the implications of this curricular turn through a critical assessment of the current state of secondary school English in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is achieved through a critical discourse analysis of key curricular and assessment documents and a series of semi‐structured interviews with English teachers. Biesta's concept of ‘learnification’, which captures how contemporary schooling can focus on learning in a way which can obscure important questions of what students are learning and why, is used as a lens through which to analyse this data. The paper argues that secondary school English in New Zealand is highly ‘learnified’, that is, both official documents and teachers are concerned above all else with ensuring ‘learning’ is happening and ‘learning objectives’ are being met, rather than with bigger questions of purpose. This problematically decreases the opportunity for what Biesta calls a ‘pedagogy of interruption’: the opportunity for curricular encounters to challenge and extend students’ horizons.

Disrupting Aotearoa New Zealand’s Curricular Consensus: From ‘World-Leading’ Curriculum to Curriculum Refresh 2007–2021

“…The move to 'historical amnesia' is furthered in the 'back end' on the NZC, which does not mandate any understanding of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand (Sheehan, 2010). This lack of specific content is carried through to many other subject areas, as the preference is for open-ended, broad-based achievement objectives which mostly specify skills, or things students should be able to do, rather than things they should know (Hughson, 2021). As well as working to maintain this ahistorical 'bicultural' imaginary, this outcome-focused curricular structure also works to incorporate other discourses.…”