What can schools do? Knowledge, social identities and the changing world.

Abstract

This is an inaugural lecture presented at the University of Melbourne when that university, an old and prestigious one, recently set up its first Chair of Curriculum in 2005. Lyn Yates argues in the lecture that curriculum is both a complex, challenging and highly intellectual endeavour and a necessarily practical, political and pragmatic endeavour. She discusses ways in which impossible expectations are set up for schools and for education scholars, and argues the need to attend to both the big picture issues about how the world is changing, and the more specific issues of the personal, and the need to manage the selective and competitive characteristics of schooling as a system, as well as questions about learning and knowledge and the development of individual students. In illustrating her themes, Yates draws on her three major recent research projects: the 12 to 18 Project (on gender, change and school inequalities); the Effects project (on new technology in schools); and the Changing Work, Changing Workers, Changing Selves project (on pedagogies of the new vocationalism).