A Sociological Approach of the Art Curriculum in Greek Primary Education: The Subject’s Social Status in the Intented and Implemented Curriculum

Abstract

This study approaches the contemporary Art curriculum of the Greek Primary Education that was established in 2003 as implementation of the decisions of the European Union's leaders in Lisbon (2000). These decisions induced the Greek educational policy reforming the compulsory education's curricula. We consider Art Primary School curriculum as socially organized knowledge and Basil Bernstein's sociological theory on pedagogic code and curriculum is utilized. We tried to answer the following questions: How Art knowledge is stratified in the cases of current Greek Primary Education Curriculum and school practice and why? And, which are the relationships between the content of the Art and other subjects of the Primary Education Curriculum? Therefore the purpose of this paper is to investigate the intentented and the implemented Art curriculum of the Greek Primary Education. The former declares the Art official school knowledge discourse and the latter expresses the recontextualization of this discourse in the micro-level of the real school practice.