Centre for Higher Education Development

Sociologists of education rooted in social realism have for more than a decade argued that knowledge matters in education, there are different kinds of knowledge, not all forms of knowledge are equal and that these differentiations have significant implications for curriculum. While this argument has made an important contribution to both theoretical and policy debate, the implications for curriculum have not been sufficiently addressed. In other words, a theory of differentiated knowledge has not translated into an adequate theory of differentiated curriculum. Drawing on Basil Bernstein’s work on knowledge differentiation and Karl Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory, this paper offers an empirically derived emerging framework for conceptualizing differentiated higher education curricula with a particular interest in occupationally and pro- fessionally oriented curricula. The framework illuminates the principles underlying curriculum differentiation, thus enabling a richer conversation about epistemological access and progression.
Keywords: curriculum; higher education; knowledge; differentiation; Basil Bernstein; Legitimation Code Theory

The Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s Design Foundation Course (DFC) has as its purpose to give talented but underprepared students epistemological access to the general field of design as well as to a range of specific design disciplines. In order to design curricula that enable epistemological access we argue that educators need to make explicit what makes their knowledge practices special. Drawing on research into levels of design expertise as well as Legitimation Code Theory, this paper offers a theoretical and analytical framework that accounts for progression in levels of expertise, forms of knowledge and the cultivation of a designer gaze. The analysis of the DFC curriculum briefs reveals that design expertise develops through the engagement between increasingly more context-dependent design problems and increasingly complex design concepts. The paper concludes by drawing on the design case for a set of principles which can inform the progression of knowledge in vocational curricula more generally.