What Is Curriculum Theory?

William F. Pinar

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317232735
• Auflage: 3
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Education Curricula

This primer for prospective and practicing teachers asks students to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, reflect on their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to educate, and to become educated in the present moment in the places we inhabit.

Not only the implementation of objectives to be assessed by standardized tests, curriculum is communication among older and younger generations, informed by academic knowledge, and characterized by educational experience. Pinar's concept of currere –the Latin infinitive of curriculum–is invoked to provide an autobiographical method for self-study, enabling both individuals and groups to understand teaching as passionate participation in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum.

New to the Third Edition:

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• A new allegory-of-the-present: the Harlem Renaissance

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• New section on technology

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• New section on the future of curriculum

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• Expanded section on Freedom Schools

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• Educators depicted as truth-tellers in this "post-truth" era of "fake news"

Provocative, compelling, and controversial, What Is Curriculum Theory? remains indispensable for scholars and students of curriculum studies, teacher education, educational policy, and the foundations of education.

Part I

The Problem that Is the Present

Chapter 1

Curriculum Theory

Maligning the Profession

“Great teachers,” Ripley informs us, set “big goals” for their students and, she adds, they constantly check on how they’re doing.¹ This instructional strategy is stunning in its simplicity: “I do, we do, you do.”² What Ripley is describing is autocracy not pedagogy, a military drill not intellectual engagement. “Knowledge matters,” Ripley reports, “but not in every case.”³ I suppose she means knowledge about education, as she is quick to point out that a master’s degree in education is unrelated to “classroom effectiveness,” by which she means tests scores, not erudition or intellectual engagement. One wonders what the research shows on the relation between MDivs (masters of divinity degrees, conferred by theology schools⁴) and the moral improvement of parishioners? What does the research tell us about the relation between MBA degrees and economic growth? Most economists and financial advisors did not foresee the 2008 financial crisis coming, despite economists’ insistence that economics is a scientific discipline, capable, by definition, of prediction. Does Ripley report that fact? Does Ripley report on the relation between medical school courses and those tens of thousands of deaths caused by medical mistakes each year?⁵

Consider the case of Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a Harvard economist. Fryer likens billion-dollar research investments of pharmaceutical companies to devise new drugs to the comparative modesty of budgets allocated to scientifically testing educational theories. Never mind the difference in investment: are “theories” and “drugs” analogous? As Zimmerman notes, there are simply “too many different actors and variables to render reproducible and generalizable knowledge” in education.⁶ Add to that fact the methodological incommensurability between the two domains—science and education—as the latter is inevitably informed by ethics, politics, and culture. The Harvard economist is not discouraged, however. Hernández reports that Fryer resigned his part-time post as chief equality officer of the New York City public schools in order to lead a $44 million effort called the Educational Innovation Laboratory.⁷ The “Lab” will “team” economists and “marketers” determined to “turn around … struggling schools,” specifically in New York, Washington, and Chicago. Given the failure of the “science” of economics to predict the calamitous 2008 financial collapse, might Fryer’s efforts be better focused on improving his own “struggling” field?

Economics not only failed to predict the 2008 financial collapse, its sophisticated practitioners have acknowledged that the field has also failed to learn what makes for economic growth. (Yet educational researchers are still singled out for failing to know “what works” for “learning.”) A free-market economist from the University of Chicago admitted: “there aren’t too many policies that we can say with certainty … affect growth.” A group of distinguished economists (including Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz) signed a joint statement—the Barcelona Development Agenda—that announced: “There is no single set of policies that can be guaranteed to ignite sustained growth.” The “dean” of economic growth research, Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, allowed: “In real life it is very hard to move the permanent growth rate; and when it happens … the source can be a bit mysterious even after the fact.”⁸ The problem, Easterly explains, is not that economists have no explanation of what causes economic growth, it is that “we have too many.”⁹ Over 145 separate factors have been associated with economic growth, but efforts to make a meaningful pattern of them have failed. Only retrospective, and nationally specific, analyses seem to yield any understanding of which policies might have had “positive effects” on economic growth.¹⁰ Cannot we say the same about schooling? Substitute “learning” for “prosperity” in the following sentence and you see my point. “Perhaps,” Easterly allows, “prosperity [learning] is not after all designed from above; perhaps it emerges from below, from the independent actions of many individuals who figure out their own paths.”¹¹ Indeed. “In the face of worsening teacher shortage,” De Avila and Hobbs reported that several U.S. states reduced requirements for credentials, making it “much easier to teach in public-school classrooms.”¹² Since 2005 all 50 states and Washington, D.C. have reported teacher shortages; during the 2009–2015 period enrollment in teacher preparation programs plunged 42 percent.¹³

“Untimely” Concepts

For those prospective and practicing teachers for whom teacher education has been primarily an introduction to the instructional fields—the teaching of reading or mathematics or science—curriculum theory may come as something of a shock, if only due to its emphasis on “what” one teaches, rather than on “how.” Of course, how one teaches remains a major preoccupation of curriculum theorists, but not in terms of devising a “technology” of “what works,” not as a form of social engineering designed to produce predictable effects (i.e., “learning”), too often quantified as scores on standardized exams. The late-19th-century African-American feminist and public school teacher Anna Julia Cooper (whom I’ve quoted already in endnotes) was clear on this point:

We have been so ridden with tests and measurements, so leashed and spurred for percentages and retardations that the machinery has run away with the mass production and quite a way back bumped off the driver. I wonder that a robot has not been invented to make the assignments, give the objective tests, mark the scores and chloroform all teachers who dared bring original thought to the specific problems and needs of their pupils.¹⁴

Standardized test scores are, finally, just numbers; what remains from education is the cultivation of “original thought” while attentive to oneself and others. Standardized tests undermine originality, creativity, and independence of mind.¹⁵

The school curriculum communicates what we choose to remember about our past, what we believe about the present, what we hope for the future. Because the curriculum is symbolic, its study requires situating curriculum historically, socially, and autobiographically. Curriculum theory is a field of scholarly inquiry within the broad academic field of education that endeavors to understand curriculum as educational experience. The curriculum occurs through conversation—silenced by racism, misogyny, economic inequality—within and across the school subjects and academic disciplines. Curriculum theory aspires to understand the educational significance of the curriculum for the individual, society, and history. These are reciprocally related.¹⁶ Akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of philosophy, curriculum theory is the creation of “untimely” concepts, “acting counter to our time, and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”¹⁷

Banished from the public sphere, curriculum theorists appreciate political powerlessness. (As the great Canadian political economist and communications theorist Harold Innis once acknowledged: “This is the most cruel pang that man can bear—to have much insight and power over nothing.”¹⁸) Even if education professors were acknowledged by the popular media as experts, the field forecloses such hubris. We understand that the canonical curriculum question—what knowledge is of most worth?—cannot be answered definitively; our aspiration is to forefront the question as an ongoing stimulus to study. That implies that one’s thinking, teaching, and writing are engaged in self-formation, reflection on the historical “self” one has been conditioned and perhaps required to be. One “works from within,” from one’s interiority, which is a specific configuration of the social and therefore a public as well as private project.

Private can imply isolation from historical forces and social movements. Such an implication would be mistaken: historical forces and social movements are both sources of interiority and provocations of theorizing and teaching. But a certain solitude—a “room of one’s own” in Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase—is a prerequisite for that “complicated conversation” with oneself without which one disappears onto the social surface, into the maelstrom of the often inhospitable public world. Without a private life, without an ongoing project of understanding, one’s intellectual “practice” can tend toward what is fashionable or profitable, what enables us to “get by.” A teacher who is not also a private person risks the unmediated expression of emotion projected onto the social surface, as interiority not self-reflexively grasped can disappear into, and be misrecognized as, “the world.” One’s relation with the world necessarily includes one’s relationship with one’s self, one’s self-reflexive preservation of one’s subjectivity. It is through subjectivity that one experiences history and society, and it is subjectivity through which history and society speak. It is subjectivity through which the natural world also sometimes speaks, as Wapner points out: “[O]‌ur thoughts, fantasies, and constructions are not self-originating but instead develop in relationship to the more-than-human world of which they participate. The nonhuman world works through us to the degree that we are the main agents of planetary change, but there is also something beyond us.”¹⁹ That “something” includes attunement to what exceeds the material world, to what many designate as God. Realizing that the world exceeds the self-evident means the “self” is not only a consumer, not only a citizen, but also a soul.

Too Little Intellect in Matters of Soul²⁰

Curriculum theory understands teacher education not as learning a new language for what teachers already do, although the language we employ to understand what we do structures as well as represents professional conduct. We understand the limitations of the language of “learning.”²¹ Barrow is blunt: “[T]‌here is very little of importance for educators that can be gained from the study of such things as learning theory, child development and personality.”²² Curriculum theorists appreciate the significance of employing ethical, religious, and aesthetic languages to depict and structure our professional lives as educators. We are suspicious of rhetorical bandwagons such as “big data” and “accountability.” Immediately we go to work to contextualize them historically, decode them politically, and situate them subjectively. In studying curriculum theory, then, teachers are not being asked to “do” something “new” in the classroom, although their conduct there may well be altered, perhaps even transformed, as a consequence of studying curriculum theory. How it will be altered or transformed one cannot predict, however.

We curriculum theorists do not regard our task as directing teachers to apply theory to practice, a form of professional subordination, in positions (as Southern Baptists once described wives’ relationships to their husbands) of “gracious submission.”²³ Rather, curriculum theorists regard our pedagogical challenge as the cultivation of independence of mind, self-reflexivity, and an interdisciplinary erudition. Teachers can then appreciate the complex and shifting relations between their own self-formation and the school subjects they teach, understood both as subject matter and as human subjects. It is this informed, often shifting expression of subjectivity attuned to the historical moment that enables one to ask and answer (over and over): what knowledge is of most worth?²⁴

Curriculum theorists are skeptical of “business thinking,” in which “curriculum producers offer something to curriculum consumers.”²⁵ The profession of teaching requires us to understand and participate as colleagues in the school, consulted in the governance of the day-to-day life of the institution and in the administration of academic matters such as curriculum content, teaching styles, and the assessment of students’ study. Participating in the governance of the school requires us to remain (or to become) self-aware of the multiple functions and potentials of the processes of education and of the institutions that formalize them. This means becoming articulate about and exercising influence over curriculum content, pedagogical practices, as well as the various means of assessing student study. How all this gets worked out is outside the purview of curriculum theory, but its scholarly understanding is not.²⁶

Curriculum theory is, in effect, a form of autobiographically and academically informed truth telling²⁷ that articulates the educational experience of teachers and students as lived. As such, curriculum theory speaks from actual individuals’ subjective experience of history and society, the inextricable interrelationships among which structure but do not determine educational experience. The role of language—first articulated by Huebner in the 1960s—in such “truth-telling” is key. “The danger,” Aoki warned, “is that we become the language we speak.”²⁸ If we employ, for instance, that economistic language in which teaching becomes not an occasion for creativity and questioning and, above all, the cultivation of interdisciplinary erudition and intellectual independence, but, rather, the “implementation” of others’ “objectives” aligned with “outcomes,” the process of education is eviscerated. Whatever language we employ—“evidenced-based” informed by “big data”—we “become” the language. In “becoming” the language of “implementation,” Aoki notes, “we might become forgetful of how instrument...