INTEGRATION AND COHESION

Integration and Cohesion

Integration and Cohesion

Social theories relating to community cohesion?

The social theories relating to community cohesion have long been used in the context of race relations throughout the English-speaking world, but it is only recently in the United States that community cohesion has been identified as a government policy with its own distinctive agenda. This academic discipline represents a study of the shared constructs that emerge out of the social interactions of individuals from different cultures who inhabit overlapping social and physical spaces. The shared constructs are the various practices, beliefs, social roles, norms, expressions, forms of organization, and conflicts (economic, political, legal, religious, expressive, and artistic) that exist in an array of ways and that promote internal cohesion within communities. The cohesion that exists within communities arises from two different stimuli: First, the historical experiences of communities, that are numerous and often times unpredictable, that impact a community's cohesion and, second, the physical and social environments that people live in. It is from these stimuli that individuals and communities derive their ability to connect with their neighbors and other communities. These could be explained further from various perspectives ranging from a community cohesion perspective (based on theory of societal system), a sociostructural perspective (based on class and status theories), a world system perspective (based on world-system theory), and administrative rationality (based on organization theory) (Cantle, 2001, pp.22).

Community cohesion perspective

The community cohesion perspective highlights the curriculum process being embedded in the specificity of institutional arrangements, structural relationships, and symbolic representations forming a totality in individual societies. A review by Stephen Heyneman and Sania Todoric-Bebic revealed that different regions, however, may have various issues related to structural approaches to community cohesion. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the structural approaches to community cohesion highlight equality of opportunity, universal primary education as well as administration, organization, and school governance toward the goal of democracy, and teacher's role in political socialization. In Asia, there are variations in such approaches: Malaysia has adopted schooling for national identity; India, Indonesia, and Malaysia have highlighted the role of moral education in enhancing social cohesion. Textbooks and examinations are used as vehicles for community cohesion in China and for the promotion of homogeneity in Japan (Cantle, 2001, pp.45).

Sociostructural Perspective

For the sociostructural perspective, the reproduction of social inequality and cultural capital through school education and its curricula has been discussed by a number of scholars, including Basil Bernstein, Michael Apple, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michael Young. Bernstein, in the 1970s, introduced the concepts of strong and weak classification and framing of curricula. Classification relates to the construction and maintenance of boundaries and the hierarchy of curriculum or subject content while framing refers to the relative extent of control by the teacher and pupils over the selection and transmission of knowledge. Bernstein proposed the collection code curriculum (strong classification and strong framing) and the integrated code curriculum (weak classification and weak framing). For the collection code curriculum, he quoted the English upper secondary and Advanced level (post-16) courses that tended to ...