The Making Of The Curriculum

Collected Essays

Ivor F Goodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135720315
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The first edition of The Making of Curriculum was published in 1988 and reviewers hailed it as a seminal work in the field. In that work Goodson explored a number of aspects of the so-called traditional subjects and described the way they develop over time to a point where they can be promoted as 'academic' disciplines. He showed that the claim to be academic was in fact the result of a substantial political contest covering a century or more. The traditional subject was, in short, invented. The first edition of this book provided a series of challenging insights for those desiring to make sense of the current debate over schooling. In this new and extended second edition, Bill Pinar adds an illuminating introduction and Goodson brings his argument up-to-date with a discussion of the National Curriculum - 'a contemporary initiative in the making of curriculum.'

III
Essays and Exemplars

6

Teachers’ Life Histories and Studies of Curriculum and Schooling

I have argued elsewhere that whilst ‘the rhetoric and manoeuverings of educational politicians and subject associations may reveal a great deal about the framework of limits and possibilities within which teachers and pupils work in the classroom…neither the teacher nor the pupils are entirely passive recipients of the “espoused” curriculum’.¹ This chapter will take the view that curriculum history must therefore encompass the manner in which the curriculum is received and enacted and that the life history provides one method for examining this process. In the case of teachers, Woods (1980) has eloquently argued that for the teacher he studied, Tom:

A curriculum area is a vibrant, human process lived out in the rough and tumble, give and take, joys and despairs, plots and counter-plots of a teacher’s life. It is not simply a body of knowledge or set of skills, nor simply a result of group activity. Tom’s case shows that, to some extent at least, individuals can and do chart their own courses, and can engage with the curriculum at a deep personal level. For a full appreciation of this I have argued we need to take a whole life perspective.²

Origins of the Life History Method

The first life histories, in the form of autobiographies of American Indian chiefs, were collected by anthropologists at the beginning of the century. Since this date, they have been primarily undertaken by sociologists. Whilst in this chapter I am arguing they should be employed in studying schooling, in examining their fate we have to scrutinize their use to date by sociologists. For sociologists, the majorlandmark in the development of life history methods came several decades later with the publication of Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1927) mammoth study. In exploring the experience of Polish peasants migrating to the United States, Thomas and Znaniecki relied mainly on migrants’ autobiographical accounts, diaries and letters. For these authors life histories were the data par excellence of the social scientist:

In analyzing the experiences and attitudes of an individual, we always reach data and elementary facts which are exclusively limited to this individual’s personality, but can be treated as mere incidences of more or less general classes of data or facts, and can thus be used for the determination of laws of social becoming. Whether we draw our materials for sociological analysis from detailed life records of concrete individuals or from the observation of mass phenomena, the problems of sociological analysis are the same. But even when we are searching for abstract laws, life records as complete as possible constitute the perfect type of sociological material, and if social science has to use other materials at all, it is only because of the practical difficulty of obtaining at the moment a sufficient number of such records to cover the totality of sociological problems, and of the enormous amount of work demanded for an adequate analysis of all the personal materials necessary to characterize the life of a social group. If we are forced to use mass phenomena as material, or any kind of happenings taken without regard to the life histories of the individuals who participated, it is a defect not an advantage, of our present sociological method.³

Thomas and Znaniecki’s pioneering work established the life history as a bona fide research device. The prominent position of the life history was further consolidated by the flourishing tradition of sociological research stimulated at Chicago by Robert Park. In the range of studies of city life completed under Park, The Gang (Thrasher, 1928), The Gold Coast and The Slum (Zorbaugh, 1929), The Hobo (Anderson, 1923) and The Ghetto (Wirth, 1928), the life history method was strongly in evidence. Life history studies reached their peak in the 1930s with publications such as Clifford Shaw’s (1930) account of a ‘mugger’ in The Jack-Roller and Cornwall and Sutherland’s (1937) The Professional Thief.⁴ Becker’s (1970) comments on Shaw’s study underline one of the major strengths of the life history method:

By providing this kind of voice from a culture and situation that are ordinarily not known to intellectuals generally and to sociolo-gists in particular, The Jack Roller enables us to improve our theories at the most profound level: by putting ourselves in Stanley’s skin, we can feel and become aware of the deep biases about such people that ordinarily permeate our thinking and shape the kinds of problems we investigate. By truly entering into Stanley’s life, we can begin to see what we take for granted (and ought not to) in designing our research—what kinds of assumptions about delinquents, slums and Poles are embedded in the way we set the questions we study.

From this statement Becker leads on to the assertion that Stanley’s story offers the possibility ‘to begin to ask questions about delinquency from the point of view of the delinquent’. So that it follows that:

If we take Stanley seriously, as his story must impel us to do, we might well raise a series of questions that have been relatively little studied—questions about the people who deal with delinquents, the tactics they use, their suppositions about the world, and the constraints and pressures they are subject to.⁵

Becker’s claim for the life history in this sense reiterates those made by contemporaries of the Chicago sociologists in the 1930s. Perhaps the best attempt to analyze the methodological base of the life history method was Dollard’s (1949) Criteria for the Life History. Fore-shadowing Becker, he argued that ‘detailed studies of the lives of individuals will reveal new perspectives on the culture as a whole which are not accessible when one remains on the formal cross sectional plane of observation’.⁶ A lot of Dol-lard’s arguments have a somewhat familiar ring, perhaps reflecting the influence of George Herbert Mead. He notes that ‘as soon as we take the post of observer on the cultural level the individual is lost in the crowd and our concepts never lead us back to him. After we have ‘gone cultural’ we experience the person as a fragment of a (derived) culture pattern, as a marionette dancing on the strings of (reified) culture forms’.⁷ In contrast to this, the Life Historian:

…can see his life history subject as a link in a chain of social transmission. There were links before him from which he acquired his present culture. Other links will follow him to which he will pass on the current of tradition. The life history attempts to describe a unit in that process: it is a study of one of the strands of a complicated collective life which has historical continuity.⁸

Dollard is especially good, though perhaps unfashionably polemical, in his discussion of the tension between what might be called the ‘cultural legacy’, the weight of collective tradition and expectation, and the individual’s unique history and capacity for interpretation and action. By focussing on this tension, Dollard argues the life history offers a way of exploring the relationship between the culture, the social structure and individual lives. Thus Dollard believed that in the best life history work ‘we must constantly keep in mind the situation both as defined by others and by the subject, such a history will not only define both versions but let us see clearly the pressure of the formal situation and the force of the inner private definition of the situation’. This resolution, or attempt to address a common tension, is seen as valuable because ‘whenever we encounter difference between our official or average or cultural expectation of action in a “situation” and the actual conduct of the person, this indicates the presence of a private interpretation’.⁹

After reaching its peak in the 1930s, the life history approach fell from grace and was largely abandoned by social scientists. This was firstly because the increasingly powerful advocacy of statistical methods gained a growing number of adherents among sociologists, but perhaps also because among ethnographically-inclined sociologists more emphasis came to be placed on situation rather than on biography as the basis for understanding human behaviour.

Since the 1930s, little attention has been paid by mainstream sociologists to life history methods. Only recently have there been signs of rehabilitation, significantly among deviancy sociologists: studies of a transsexual (Bogdan, 1974); a professional fence (Klockars, 1975); and, with a fine sense of history, once again a professional thief (Chambliss, 1972). Other marginal groups re-exploring life history methods are journalists-cum- sociologists, like Studs Terkel in the USA and Jeremy Seabrook and Ronald Blythe in the UK, and a growing band of so-called ‘oral historians’ (Thompson, 1978).¹⁰ Daniel Bertaux’s (1981) collection Biography and Society: the Life History Approach in the Social Sciences marks a significant step in the rehabilitation of the approach.¹¹

Among these scholars, albeit in marginal or fragmented groups, a debate is underway which promises a thoroughgoing reexamination of the potential of life history methods. But before we consider the contemporary appeal of the life history, it is important to discover why life history method was for so long eclipsed by the social survey and by participant observation. In this examination, the emphasis will be on distinguishing fundamental methodological stumbling blocks from the political and personal reasons for the decline of life history work.

Reasons for the Decline of the Life History

By 1966 Becker was able to summarize the fate of the life history method among American sociologists in this manner: ‘given the variety of scientific uses to which the life history may be put, one must wonder at the relative neglect into which it has fallen’. Becker notes that sociologists have never given up life histories altogether but neither have they made it one of their standard research tools. The general pattern was, and is, that ‘they know of life history studies’ and assign them for their students to read. But they do not ordinarily think of gathering life history documents or of making the technique part of their research approach’.¹²

The reasons for the decline of life history methods are partly specific to the Chicago department. From the late 1920s, life histories came under increasing fire as the debate within the department between the virtues of case study (and life histories) and statistical techniques intensified. Faris (1967) in his study of Chicago sociology records a landmark within this debate:

To test this issue, Stouffer had hundreds of students write autobiographies instructing them to include everything in their life experiences relating to alcohol usage and the prohibition law. Each of these autobiographies was read by a panel of persons presumed to be qualified in life history research, and for each subject the reader indicated on a scaled line the position of the subject’s attitude regarding prohibition. Interreader agreement was found to be satisfactory. Each of the same subjects had also filled out a questionnaire that formed a scale of the Thurstone type. The close agreement of the scale measurement of each subject’s attitude with the reader’s estimate of the life history indicated that, as far as the scale score was concerned, nothing was gained by the far more lengthy and laborious process of writing and judging a life history.¹³

Even within Chicago case study work the life history declined as against other ethnographic devices, notably participant observation. One element of the explanation of this lies perhaps in the orientations of Blumer and Hughes. These two sociologists pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface to the Second Edition
• An Introduction to the Second Edition
• I: The Search for Sources
• II: The Search for Methods
• III: Essays and Exemplars
• Bibliography