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

Abstract

AbstractThe 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.