Ursula Hoadley – författare

As South Africa transitioned from apartheid to democracy, changes in the political landscape, as well as educational agendas and discourse on both a national and international level, shaped successive waves of curriculum reform over a relatively short period of time. Using South Africa as a germane example of how curriculum and pedagogy can interact and affect educational outcomes, Pedagogy in Poverty explores the potential of curricula to improve education in developing and emerging economies worldwide, and, ultimately, to reduce inequality.　

Incorporating detailed, empirical accounts of life inside South African classrooms, this book is a much-needed contribution to international debate surrounding optimal curriculum and pedagogic forms for children in poor schools. Classroom-level responses to curriculum policy reforms reveal some implications of the shifts between a radical, progressive approach and traditional curriculum forms. Hoadley focuses on the crucial role of teachers as mediators between curriculum and pedagogy, and explores key issues related to teacher knowledge by examining the teaching of reading and numeracy at the foundational levels of schooling.　

Offering a data-rich historical sociology of curriculum and pedagogic change, this book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, sociology of education, curriculum studies, educational equality and school reform, and the policy and politics of education.

As South Africa transitioned from apartheid to democracy, changes in the political landscape, as well as educational agendas and discourse on both a national and international level, shaped successive waves of curriculum reform over a relatively short period of time. Using South Africa as a germane example of how curriculum and pedagogy can interact and affect educational outcomes, Pedagogy in Poverty explores the potential of curricula to improve education in developing and emerging economies worldwide, and, ultimately, to reduce inequality.　

Incorporating detailed, empirical accounts of life inside South African classrooms, this book is a much-needed contribution to international debate surrounding optimal curriculum and pedagogic forms for children in poor schools. Classroom-level responses to curriculum policy reforms reveal some implications of the shifts between a radical, progressive approach and traditional curriculum forms. Hoadley focuses on the crucial role of teachers as mediators between curriculum and pedagogy, and explores key issues related to teacher knowledge by examining the teaching of reading and numeracy at the foundational levels of schooling.　

Offering a data-rich historical sociology of curriculum and pedagogic change, this book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, sociology of education, curriculum studies, educational equality and school reform, and the policy and politics of education.

In 2008 the first in a series of symposia established a ‘social realist’ case for ‘knowledge’ as an alternative to the relativist tendencies of the constructivist, post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches dominant in the sociology of education. The second symposium focused on curriculum, and the development of a theoretical language grounded in social realism to talk about issues of knowledge and curriculum. Finally, the third symposium brought together researchers in a broad range of contexts to build on these ideas and arguments and, with a concerted empirical focus, bring these social realist ideas and arguments into conversation with data.

Knowledge, Curriculum and Equity: Social Realist Perspectives contains the work of the third symposium, where the strengths and gaps in the social realist approach are identified and where there is critical recognition of the need to incrementally extend the theories through empirical study. Fundamentally, the problem that social realism is seeking to address is about understanding the social conditions of knowledge production and exchange as well as its structuring in the curriculum and in pedagogy. The central concern is with the on-going social reproduction of inequality through schooling, and exploring whether and how foregrounding specialised knowledge and its access holds the possibility for interrupting it.

This book consists of 13 chapters by different authors working in Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. From very different vantage points the authors focus their theoretical and empirical sights on the assumptions about knowledge that underpin educational processes and the pursuit of more equitable schooling for all.