Book Chapters

Shalem, Y., & Allais, S. (2025). Why “liberating” education studies from foundation disciplines cannot make it more coherent?

In Emerging Perspectives from Social Realism on Knowledge and Education (pp. 162-180). The main aim of this chapter is to discuss how the move away from “foundation disciplines” towards “education studies” obscures the disciplinary origins of the educational theories. This change in the curriculum of teacher education risks denying student teachers with access to the theoretical knowledge that underpins their practice. To analyse particular problems, every educational theory needs to develop an “epistemic spine”, which organises it as a vertical discourse consisting of ideas and concepts originated in disciplinary knowledge (Bernstein, 1999).

Without concerted and focused effort to foreground the histories and debates about the core concepts of the educational theories that student teachers encounter, their understanding of the parent and foundational concepts is likely to be superficial. To support our claim, we analyse three examples of three educational theories: The first two are taken from the Anglo-American tradition: “learner-centred pedagogy” and Shulman’s “pedagogical reasoning”. The third one is taken from the continental Europe tradition: Klafki’s “Bildung-centred Didaktik.”