Curriculum genre theory

Frances Christie, Emeritus Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne, developed the theory of Curriculum Macrogenre and Curriculum Genre (1993, 1997, 2002) to investigate the different stages in the teaching of a topic in a subject and to map the development of a topic. Curriculum Genre Theory was developed to study the organisation and structure of learning in the classroom as well as how they are situated and related to the macro-design of the curriculum. The value in adopting Curriculum Genre Theory to study the progression of the lesson is espoused in Christie’s (2002: 2) argument that‘[ujnless we are willing to engage seriously with the discourse patterns particular to the institution of schooling, we fail genuinely to understand it’.

Frances Christie draws from Systemic Functional Theory, such as genre theory in the Systemic Functional tradition and aspects of sociological theories by Bernstein (1990, 2000), particularly his theoretical conceptions on the pedagogic discourse. Christie (2002: 3) views ‘classroom activity as structured experience and associated notion of classroom work as social practice’. Christie (2002: 3) proposes that'pedagogic discourse can be thought of creating curriculum genres and sometimes larger unities referred to as curriculum macrogenres’. These Curriculum Genres and Curriculum Macrogenres represent units of curriculum activity. The endeavour to map out these patterns of pedagogic discourse will show the unity, development, consistency, and change of the curriculum design in and over time. It will also enable comparisons across other lessons and subject disciplines.

Christie (2002: 96) observes that ‘curriculum activity that is expressed mainly in discrete curriculum genres carrying little sense of progression and development in learning is found in teaching and learning at all levels of schooling’. As such,she argues that unless there is evidence of significant change and development in understanding and in learning of a kind that marks an entry to new forms of‘uncommonsense knowledge’ (see Bernstein, 2000: 28—29), it is difficult to justify seeing the series of teaching episodes that emerges as more than a collection of discrete activities.

In light of this, Christie (2002) proposes the Curriculum Macrogenre model to exemplify the organisation of teaching and learning in different subjects, where the Curriculum Genres are not discrete but inter-related in various ways. Christie (2002: 25) explains that this

tells us not only about the manner in which pedagogic knowledge and relationships are constructed, but it allows us to make judgements about the relative success of the different models of pedagogy and of the pedagogic subject that appears to apply.

For the educational researcher, the value of the Curriculum Genre Theory is such that it can be ‘a principled basis for making selections of classroom text for analysis and interpretation’ (Christie, 2002: 22).

Despite only investigating the linguistic discourse in the classroom, Christie (2002: 3) acknowledges that language, however, must not be understood as some ‘discretely independent entity, but rather as part of complex sets of interconnecting forms of human semiosis’. In other words, the pedagogic discourses are multimodal and expressed simultaneously in time and space.

Lesson microgenres

Kay O’Halloran, Chair Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool, in her investigation of the Mathematics classroom (1996, 2004), extends Frances Christie’s Curriculum Genre Theory, to the level of a lesson unit and proposes the notion of ‘lesson microgenres’ in the Mathematics classroom. O’Halloran (1996: 59) draws from Lemke’s (1990) formulation of Activity Types and recasts them into ‘lesson microgenres’, each comprising specific types of discourses. Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001: 4) definition of discourse as ‘socially constructed knowledge of (some aspect of) reality’ is adopted in this book.

The lesson microgenres are realised multimodally — often with language, but also with other semiotic modes — expressed in time and space. O’Halloran (1996: 65) explains that ‘the unfolding of actual texts is displayed dynamically in clause time. In this way, the synoptic description of the microgenres for the analysis of lessons is used to dynamically represent the unfolding of an actual text.’

In this chapter, the examples of the lesson microgenres are based on a case study of the General Paper classroom in Singapore, where the data was collected. General Paper is a subject offered at the Singapore—Cambridge General Certificate of Education Advanced (GCE-A) Level Examinations and is often described as an advanced English Language subject, where students are to produce a composition and respond to comprehension questions in the examinations. The General Paper subject is offered by students preparing for the two-year GCE-A Level Examinations in a junior college. Based on the case study, we propose four main categories and 25 lesson microgenres in a typical General Paper lesson. They are Lesson Initiation, Lesson Diversion, Lesson Progress, and Lesson Closure.The list of lesson microgenres is represented in Table 2.1. The lesson microgenres express specific multimodal pedagogic meaning-making interactions and hence are labelled as

TABLE 2.1 Lesson microgenres in a General Paper lesson

‘discourses’. In the context of the General Paper lesson, the lesson niicrogenres for each stage of the lesson is presented, with a short description in Table 2.1.