Powerful knowledge and pedagogy in the Maltese secondary school economics classroom

Abstract

This thesis explores how economics education offers secondary school students access to ‘powerful knowledge’; knowledge which they might not have access to at home or in the communities in which they live. The ‘powerful pedagogy’ that enables this epistemic access is also researched. The study is undertaken in the context of repeated explanatory and predictive failures and anomalies of mainstream economics, the school of economic thought which dominates school economics. The notions of powerful knowledge, knowledge bases for teaching and threshold concepts assist in developing a framework conceptualising powerful knowledge and pedagogy in a Future 3 economics curriculum. A qualitative research approach underpinned by a critical realist framework draws upon teachers’ and students’ perspectives and lesson observations for a deeper understanding of the economics teaching and learning process. Supported by the findings, the thesis conceives powerful knowledge as the blending of two components or types. The first type is discipline based knowledge arising when students grasp the threshold concepts of scarcity, choice, opportunity cost, marginality, demand and supply analysis, and market structures. The second type of powerful knowledge derives from the first type and enables the students to understand better the economic world around them, equips them with new ways of thinking about the economic world, and enhances their criticality of thought in economic issues and their participation in economic debates. The findings indicate that powerful pedagogical practices that promoted the students’ engagement with disciplinary knowledge in economics consisted of emphasising the process of reasoning, connecting economics knowledge to real life, employing the teachers’ specialist knowledge to develop PCK representations, and adopting a variety of teaching strategies. The findings of this study call for the introduction of economics education in the Maltese State secondary schools (as is available to the students in the Independent and Church schools).