Children´s access to experiences relevant to social studies

Analysing continuity and progression in the curriculum for the Lower Primary Levels and Early Childhood Education and Care

Abstract

Personal experiences are essential sources of subject knowledge in social studies for the primary years. When children enter school in Norway, 97 per cent of them have 2–5 years of experience from Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Consequently, the content of everyday life in the ECEC is significant for the pupils’ access to experi­ences. Policy-documents determine the scope of relevant experiences to be facilitated through the ECEC, and this article is guided by the following question: To what extent do the curricula facilitate progression between the learning area “Local Community and Society” in ECEC and social studies in lower primary school? To facilitate comparison between the ECEC curriculum (RP17) and the social studies curriculum (LK20) respectively, I have employed Dewey’s theory of progression as continuity of experi­ence. Operationalising the pragmatist notion of experience, I have developed a typology of progression in teaching consisting of four types: progression, continuity, interruption, and fragmentation. This theorisation of Dewey’s proto-concept progression, which has relevance to other topics and materials as well, is the first original contribution of this article. The comparative analysis across ECEC and initial education, is the second. The analysis is fruitful, and two main findings are described. Firstly, ambiguity between the curricula is found. Whereas the ECEC curriculum provides experiences relevant to all themes treated in social studies during the two initial school years, the social studies curriculum seems not to acknowledge and build on the experiences from the corre­sponding learning area. Secondly, the social studies curriculum for initial education does not emphasise the role of exploration, play and practical experiences which are assumed in the overriding core of the national curriculum. Consequently, the oper­ationalisation of these values is left to the local level.