Does National Curriculum Fit for Working Class Children? A Gap in Math and Science Teaching

Abstract

This paper highlights the issue of imposing middle-class norms of schooling on working-class children and its consequence on low learning achievement and perpetuating socioeconomic differences in learning. A study was carried out to explore the teachers' role in contextualizing teaching in schools where students are from the working class. Math and science subjects teaching of a dozen of teachers were observed, and complemented with interview. Thus generated information was analysed in the background of the school setting, and the teachers' role as mediators between students' concrete experiences and disciplinary formal concepts of textbooks. The study suggested that teachers stressed the transmission of knowledge than mediating students' experience to formal learning; teachers' language use in the classroom is insufficient triggering students thinking and conceptualisation, meanwhile teacher preparation and development are not oriented to the contextualised and integrated teachings. Their teaching was not only problematic to achieving the national objective of education encouraging critical thinking, and developing problem-solving skills but also demanding middle-class habitus, aspirations, resourcefulness, performance, etc. in the working-class children.