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Social Realism (Education)
Social realism is an approach developed since the late 1990s to address the main question in curriculum theory: ‘how can teachers ensure that all students have access to knowledge’. This question is itself embedded in the fundamental issue of the sociology of education: why do young people from the working class, including marginalised groups within that class, fail at school? Driven by a deep commitment to social justice, seminal  writers Michael Young, Rob Moore, Johan Muller and John Beck argue that the answer lies in providing ‘powerful knowledge’ to all students. This ‘powerful knowledge’ is found in school subjects.

The importance of social realism is found in its commitment to the objective universal knowledge that is developed in the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences and made available to be taught as subjects at school and in tertiary institutions. This knowledge is continually ‘put on trial’ in the procedures of the various disciplines to ensure that it is the best provisional truth available. It is universal knowledge because it can be known by all people regardless of their diverse backgrounds and experiences. It is objective because, despite being developed by people who are located in their own social circumstances, the knowledge itself is separated from its creators. This occurs in the procedures and rules of the discipline which put knowledge ‘to the test’. The knowledge must stand or fall on its own merits – not on the basis of who created it or whose interests it may serve.

The purpose of schooling is to provide a discipline-based curriculum that gives all students the intellectual means to understand, critique, and change the world. It is a way of thinking that can only be developed over years of schooling. It means that schools should be different from the home and community. As Michael Young points out, it is the purpose of schooling to teach what cannot be taught at home. However, schools can be unfamiliar places to many students, particularly those from the working class and marginalised groups. So the issue for curriculum theorists who work from a social realist approach is to find ways to make school subjects accessible to all students without ‘dumbing down’ the curriculum. The most important approach is to separate the curriculum from pedagogy. The curriculum is what should be taught at school and for social realists this is the objective knowledge developed in the disciplines and made available in school subjects. The pedagogy is how that knowledge should be taught.

Traditional ways of teaching did not reach all students. Current pedagogical approaches based on constructivism, that is, all the methods that emphasis how to learn at the expense of what to learn do not provide powerful subject knowledge to students. In contrast curriculum theorists using a social realism approach are committed to studying how the powerful knowledge of school subjects can be taught in ways that reach all students. One of the most interesting developments is the ‘Future 3’ model developed by Michael Young and Johan Muller in their article: Young, M. F. D., & Muller, J. (2010). Three scenarios for the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge. European Journal of Education, 42(1), 11–17.

The usefulness of the social realist approach to understanding the type of knowledge that should be in the curriculum and the best pedagogy that will ensure that the knowledge is available to all students has been developed at two International Social Realism Symposia held at Cambridge University in 2008 and 2013. It is also available in these books and articles: