Key Concepts in Curriculum Studies

Perspectives on the Fundamentals

Judy Wearing, Marcea Ingersoll, Christopher DeLuca, Benjamin Bolden, Holly Ogden, Theodore Michael Christou, Judy Wearing, Marcea Ingersoll, Christopher DeLuca, Benjamin Bolden, Holly Ogden, Theodore Michael Christou

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351167062
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Pedagogía
• Thema: Currículos educativos

Offering an accessible entry into curriculum theory, this book defines and contextualizes key concepts for novice and experienced students. Leading scholars in curriculum studies provide short anchor texts that introduce, define, and situate contemporary curriculum theory constructs. Each anchor text is followed by two concise, creative keyword responses that demonstrate varied perspectives and connections, allowing readers to reflect on and engage with the personal relevance of these fundamental concepts.

Useful to instructors and scholars alike, this book explains keyword writing as a teaching and learning strategy and invites readers to enter the complicated conversations of contemporary curriculum theory through their own creative, personal responses. Featuring wide-ranging, nuanced, and varied commentary on major relevant themes, as well as discussion questions for students, this book is an essential text for doctoral and masters-level courses in curriculum studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Marcea Ingersoll, Benjamin Bolden, Judy Wearing, Christopher DeLuca, Holly Ogden, and Theodore Michael Christou

From the earliest times, cities were built around centre points. In the Egyptian village of el-Lahun, the temple of the Senusret’s pyramid marked the middle, with worker dwellings and buildings of state falling under its shadows. Similarly, Angkor Wat and its sister cities followed a central plan, expanding outwards from a state-built temple. Many Mesoamerican cities had similar layouts. Classical cities—Greek, Roman, and Phoenician—maintained a centre point, even as their metropolises grew. Despite the efficiency of grid plans with adjoining right-angled streets, urban planners throughout the millennia have maintained the importance of the city centre. Square blocks were often built around keystone monuments, cathedrals, and state palaces: the piazza remained the heart of many cities.

Haussmann’s modernization of Paris introduced dramatic boulevards, each pointing toward a central monument, that have since become iconic of the Parisian style. The Arc de Triomphe, radiating with 12 avenues, is a central hub, hearkening to a ship’s wheel. Haussmann also favoured green spaces, and over a 17 year period, added 2,000 hectares of parks to Paris. The gardens were sites for recreation, relaxation, and play. They were open to all, as a gesture towards Parisian unity, freedom, and citizenship. Park pathways wound toward centrally-positioned fountains, ponds, or theatres, creating deliberate points of connection for citizens and visitors.

Curriculum theory is, essentially, the study of constructs related to teaching and learning. Constructs such as those explored in the chapters of this text are key concepts in curriculum theory. Serving as centre points for curriculum theorizing, constructs name the abstract, interpretable, and socially-invented dimensions of teaching and learning. Curriculum theory reinterprets constructs to reimage and reconfigure, to redesign the architecture of education, building systems of understanding that converge on new meanings. Like Haussmann, curriculum theorists revise and modernize these conceptual centre points. Curricular constructs have “a tremendous force, becoming the conceptual centre-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built, promising to resolve many fundamental problems at once” (Bresler, 2004, p. 3).

In this text, we conceptualize curriculum as a constellation of perspectives surrounding theoretical centre points, where the meeting places, the multiple paths that lead there, and those who travel the pathways constitute the whole. Understanding curriculum involves analyzing the conceptual aspects of teaching and learning from different vantage points, by making personal connections and understanding them in relation to the experiences of others. We all bring unique perspectives to the study of curriculum, and we can communicate our similarities and differences of understanding by sharing the experiential pathways that lead us to its central meeting places.

Traditions of Curriculum

This text is part of the rich tradition of study that constitutes curriculum—teaching and learning—as a field of scholarship. Curriculum studies emerged as a scholarly enterprise during the early years of public schooling in the United States, predominantly as a mechanism for ensuring efficiency. In the developmental era of the early 1900s, teaching, learning, and resources in public schools were organized according to the newly developed scientific management and organizational principles of the factory sector. When education philosopher John Dewey put forward, and championed, a progressive, learner-centred approach to student experience of schooling, he provided a counterpoint to those who saw schooling as mere application of technical interventions.

In the next decades, the field of curriculum studies expanded this discussion of what should be taught in schools, emphasizing experiential and social considerations, and became more theoretical in scope. The first documented conference devoted to curriculum theory was held in Chicago in 1947, and several scholarly journals followed. The inception of these journals traces the development of a scholarly field that has moved ideologically outward from its origins, eventually becoming more international: the Journal of Curriculum Studies (United Kingdom, 1968), Curriculum Theory Network (Canada, 1968) which became Curriculum Inquiry (1976), JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (United States, 1979), Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction (United States, 1998), Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (2003), Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (United States, 2004), the establishment of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies in 2001 and its associated journal Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (Canada, 2004), Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (United States, 2005), and the establishment of a European Association of Curriculum Studies (2013). Students new to the field of curriculum can also find a comprehensive range of publications that provide encyclopedic insight (Kridel, 2010) into the major texts (Schubert, Lopez-Schubert, Thomas, & Carroll, 2002) that have shaped it as a field of study (Flinders & Thornton, 2012; Pinar, 2011), inquiry (Goodlad, 1979), and theory (Pinar, 2004). Other texts incorporate more international perspectives (Marsh, 2009; Pinar, 2013).

One of the challenges of curriculum has always been to define the field. At various points in its history, curriculum theory has been declared moribund, in crisis, irrelevant, and exclusionary (Pinar, 2007; Schiro, 2013). It can feel diffuse and intangible—perpetually shifting with each flex of new educational movements. It can seem bifurcated—divided between camps of practice in schools and theory in universities. It can seem caught between the more practice-oriented realms of curriculum development, implementation, and assessment, and the less tangible social, political, theoretical, cultural, and philosophical realms. Klein (1992) captures this divide, stating that “curriculum theory is rarely considered a possible source of knowledge by the practitioner” (p. 191). But we reject this false dichotomy. As practitioner-scholars, theory is embedded in our practice. And, in the chapters that follow, readers will find theory embedded and explored in the practice and pedagogy of keyword writing from community members. Their personal theoretical responses challenge this divide. The following chapters highlight theory and practice as already coexisting.

We offer a dynamic curricular mapping of theoretical movement that is also method—curriculum as noun and verb. The process of writing personal experience into the history of a named construct is explored as curriculum in action: of theory, inquiry, pedagogy, and practice. We present curriculum as constructs that are enduring, but dynamic in the sense that they are differently revealed by the personal responses that can be written into them. We invoke Schubert’s (2003) approach to teaching curriculum theory, which he traces back to John Dewey’s (1916/1997) emphasis on a dynamic connection between learners’ interests, disciplinary knowledge, and personal experience. Our text is in keeping with the traditions of curriculum theorists who see the field as scholarly inquiry into educational experience, in all of its complex dimensions. Curriculum is more than knowledge and content that is accumulated; it is also learning as it is lived, and knowledge as it is explored.

Our approach illuminates the thinking of other curriculum scholars who note the importance of differentiating between knowledge and knowing (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 1999). We see this text as a way to recognize and experience a “coming to know,” acknowledging curriculum as a journey that includes perpetual movement—a constant state of coming to know—whether you are writing about curriculum as a high school student, or a seasoned curriculum scholar. As we journey, we are constantly coming to know where we have been, where we are, and looking in anticipation toward the journey to come. We are in relation to others and see ourselves in relation to our surroundings, and to our place on the curricular journey. The concepts we present here are enduring landmarks on the dynamic curricular map, and the voices are contemporary.

Key Curriculum Constructs

Essentially, curriculum theory addresses questions of what is (or should be) taught and learned, by whom, and when. With this text we offer key concepts, or constructs, in curriculum theory as central places for the curious to meet and negotiate meaning. The collected constructs in this text address many of the questions, areas for consideration, and realms of complexity that have been tackled by curriculum theorists. These constructs are vast, interpretable, and infused within nearly every aspect of human activity. They are simple, yet slippery (Aoki, 1996). Curriculum theory has a long history of using multiple forms of inquiry (see Short, 1991) and different kinds of language (see Huebner, 1999). The constructs identified in this text serve as useful entry points, because curriculum scholars have mapped and returned to them consistently and repeatedly.

The notion of “complicated conversation” is inherent in our construct selection process and the keyword response pedagogy we use to illuminate curriculum theory. In What is Curriculum Theory? William Pinar (2004) noted that complicated conversation is a “central concept in contemporary curriculum studies” (p. xiii). It is a connecting force for conjoining individuals and groups engaged in common yet complex educational pursuits. Considering this complexity, arriving at a select number of constructs involved a series of complicated conversations. We engaged in wide-ranging discussions about curriculum, bringing together our varied perspectives and lived experiences. We have each been teachers, graduate students, scholars, writers, and teacher educators—and these multiple and overlapping roles informed our deliberations. We also looked to leading scholars in the field (Christou, Coe, DeLuca, Gauthier, & Wearing, 2015) and reviewed the themes and subjects represented across glossaries, encyclopedias, popular textbooks, and landmark curriculum texts (e.g., Kridel, 2010; Malewski, 2009; Schubert et al., 2002; Slattery, 2012). Out of our conversations, 19 constructs emerged as key focal points for illuminating a seemingly indefinable field of inquiry:

• Aesthetics: Human experience is inherently aesthetic, and profoundly influenced by our aesthetic responses. From John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1932/2005) to curriculum as métissage (Hasebe-Ludt & Leggo, 2018), this is an enduring concept.
• Becoming: Curriculum theory explores who we come to be as learners across the lifespan. What does this potential for becoming mean for individuals and societies?
• Complexity: Postmodern curriculum theory resists simplification. Complexity theory, however, suggests systematic ways to interpret our existence and our relationships.
• Currere: Considering running the course as the etiological derivation of the term curriculum provokes personal and societal narratives of the intersections of past, present, and future.
• Discourse: Discourse is language in use in the world, its forms, its purposes, its contexts, and its connections. Not only is teaching and learning largely a linguistic exercise, but systems of education in society are discourses, too.
• Ecology: The interactions between living things and their environment is ecology—provoking questions of the human and nonhuman surroundings in teaching and learning. Ecology is also a metaphor for relationships among individuals, groups, and societies.
• Ethics: Education is an ethical pursuit, and ethics is not far from any discussion of teaching and learning and its political systems.
• Experience: Experience pervades curriculum theory, in its methods, its philosophy, and its foundational definitions, including the writings of thinkers like John Dewey and Max van Manen.
• Hermeneutics: Texts both represent and define human culture and ideas. To delve into the meaning(s) in and of texts is to delve into ourselves, and our often invisible influences.
• Imagination: Imagination is a vehicle for travelling beyond current realities. What are the curriculum voyages imagining can make possible?
• Indigeneity: In educational contexts across jurisdictions, increasing attention is focusing on Indigeneity, Indigenous education, and Indigenous knowledge.
• Narrative: Human experience can be viewed in its entirety through the lens of story—characters, plots, and setting and the changing relationships of these elements through time.
• Normativity: What is normal and who decides? These questions have enormous implications for the lives of individuals in and out of education settings.
• Place: Curriculum is rooted in place, in the land and in the culture that evolves from that land. Learning and teaching are not isolated phenomena; they happen in historical places and physical, living spaces.
• Poetics: Rhythm, rhyme, and emotive imagery contribute to our unique relationship with poetry. This unique relationship creates a mode of curriculum inquiry in its own right.
• Representation: Curriculum can be understood as the symbolic representation of what is valued and who is present in educational systems and society. Issues of “involvement, representation, and who should make curriculum decisions” (Goodlad, 1979, p. 362) persist.
• Social Justice: Political and cultural hierarchies evoke notions of power imbalance. For many, the work of curriculum study is to reveal and ameliorate these imbalances.
• Standards: Within the current accountability framework, curriculum, teaching, and learning are all driven by standards. Standards articulate performance expectations for students, and increasingly for teachers. “Standards” is the watchword of contemporary education, and a core principle driving the design of today’s learning environments.
• Temporality: Curriculum work plays an important role in the search for meaning and is inimitably linked to matters of time. Considering temporality challenges us to contextualize curriculum thinking, teaching, and learning across time and space.

This collection of curriculum constructs is not comprehensive, but rather represents our particular understandings of how contemporary curriculum theory intersects with life in and outside of our professional practice. The constructs are mirrors of the field as it has been perceived by curriculum scholars past and present. We introduce each construct with an anchor text written by a leading scholar in the field to provide a theoretical entry point for the concept and how it fits into the curricular landsca...