English curriculum often treats books as essentially some mutually exclusive learning. The packets of academic knowledge applied to one book are not always applied to future books. Take for instance knowledge of Freud’s conception of mind; Id, Ego and Super Ego. This knowledge is often applied to Lord Of The Flies as a way of understanding the characterisation of Ralph, Jack and Piggy. But this discrete packet of knowledge is rarely revisited and applied to future texts.
We should not think that this is because Golding was writing much more about psychology of man than other authors, or that somehow Freud had Lord Of The Flies in mind when composing his theory. That curriculum limits the application of this discrete knowledge to only a single text is an example of a curriculum that is failing to revisit prior learning. Academic Literature studies can mostly be applied across texts – the disciplinary learning is text agnostic and having this knowledge is how we access texts. The curriculum of Discipline Of English has been written with this in mind, that knowledge is transferable across texts, and independent of any single text.
There are of course hundreds, maybe thousands of discrete packets of knowledge that comprise the whole of academic Literature, and no department could ever deliver all or most of this content. Instead, departments must reduce the discipline down to a range of terms that are applicable to the texts studied, and use those terms repeatedly to learn how to unlock texts through them. Discipline Of English has worked from a wide range of primary sources to create a range of suitable learning objectives, or discrete packets of knowledge. Once this is digested by the student, there is no book they could not put to use their learned terms, facts, concepts and procedures.
The list of discrete knowledge becomes the unit / module map. It is the list of knowledge to be studied and applied by the student. This map is important for teachers to see the ‘whole’ of the department and the undertaking, to rank order and prioritise knowledge. Few departments have such a list, but ours is ready to be viewed. Head to the curriculum area and browse the intent within our curriculum.