This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and progressive politics in the contemporary period. Limiting the curriculum to experiential knowledge limits access to a powerful class resource; that of conceptual knowledge required for critical reasoning and political agency. Knowledge that comes from experience limits the knower to that experience. The shift to localised knowledge fixes groups in the working class to a never ending present as schools that use a social constructivist approach to knowledge in the curriculum fail to provide the intellectual tools of conceptual thinking and its medium in advanced literacy that lead to an imagined, yet unknown, future.

The potential for academic knowledge to 'interrupt' inter-generational reproduction in education is located in the structural contradictions that shape knowledge and democracy. Since the late 1990s research in the sociology of education, which theorises curriculum knowledge using the ideas of Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein, suggests that academic knowledge, far from being the domain of conservative forces, contains the means by which the working-class and marginalised groups may overcome class determinism. The paper argues for a pedagogy of conceptual progression to assist students across the 'interruption' or 'discursive gap' into academic knowledge. Such a pedagogy need not be confined to its central purpose-that of teaching abstract ideas drawn from their disciplinary systems of meaning and classified for teaching as academic subjects. It can also be the means to mediate the relationship between the context-dependent knowledge of students' experience and the context-independent knowledge of the academic subject. This pedagogy might be the way to maintain the motivational intention of constructivism and 'relevance' approaches that emphasise students' experience. However, it would use experience to illustrate the abstract ideas acquired in academic subjects, not serve as the source of knowledge itself, nor the knowledge focus.

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This Research Report describes the trialling of the Curriculum Design Coherence (CDC) Model in the Knowledge‐Rich School Project in New Zealand. The Project’s findings suggest that a CDC Model curriculum development design programme may be of use more widely. The CDC Model achieves conceptual coherence and progression, firstly by using generalising subject concepts as the mechanism to create coherence; secondly by using connected content to materialise the subject concepts; and thirdly by employing the cohering subject concepts in competencies for real‐life application. It is argued that a curriculum designed according to a subject’s internal cohering mechanism gives rich depth and breadth to a national curriculum. It also assists students in acquiring deep understanding as their engagement with knowledge builds cognition. The sections in this report, ‘Introduction’, ‘The Knowledge‐Rich School Project’, ‘Knowledge Project Findings—Teachers’ Practice’, and ‘Knowledge Project Findings—the CDC Model’, provide accounts of the Project’s methods which have been used to create the findings. The collaborative design by researchers and teachers of ‘worked examples’ which apply the CDC Model was looked at first. Secondly, the ongoing refinement of the Model was investigated as the worked examples revealed its strengths and limitations, refinements which were fed back into the Model’s application. The sections ‘The Curriculum Design Coherence Model’, ‘Knowledge Types’, ‘Knowledge and Learning’, and ‘Knowledge and Language’ contain discussions of the realist (rational) theory of knowledge which informs the Model as well as explanations of how this knowledge theory justifies the Model’s design as a concept‐cohering tool. The CDC Model’s theoretical strength as a curriculum design tool makes it useful for professional programmes and teacher education. It avoids the limitations of both content‐list and skills‐based approaches for a concept‐cohering ‘rich’ approach to the curriculum.

A theoretical model called ‘Curriculum Design Coherence’ (CDC) is described and justified. The model's purpose is to assist teachers in the compulsory and higher education sectors to design courses that can accommodate the complex and interdependent relationship between concepts and content and between knowledge and skills. Its intended usefulness as a curriculum design tool may also contribute to teachers’ pedagogical decision‐making. The model was initially developed in a New Zealand university Engineering study and is now being trialled in a study in the compulsory schooling sector with the ‘Knowledge‐Rich School Project’. The CDC model integrates concepts, content and competencies in a coherent way, thereby avoiding several tendencies which have affected curriculum studies in recent decades. These are: a ‘skills’ versus ‘concepts’ bifurcation; an over‐emphasis on fragmented content without conceptual integration; and a similar over‐emphasis on pedagogy (the ‘how’) at the expense of what is taught. The first sections of the article discuss the theories used to justify the model's connections between the elements of concepts, content and competencies. The theories concern (1) knowledge types (disciplinary and socio‐cultural) and (2) knowledge forms (propositional/conceptual and procedural/competencies). The justification is followed by a description of the CDC model itself.

Biculturalism is New Zealand's experience of the shift from class to identity politics and multiculturalism that has characterized a number of liberal democracies since the 1970s. Originally a progressive project committed to incorporating Maori culture into the nation's symbolic identity, biculturalism became the vehicle for separatist ethnic politics and a fundamentalist 'blood and soil' ideology under the control of an emergent neotribal elite. This article traces the shifts in biculturalism and its damaging effects on the conditions required for democracy. It argues that national identity within a universalist concept of humanity, rather than a localized and essentialized ethnic identity, is more likely to ensure the maintenance of the nation-state within the global community.

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