Discourse, genre and curriculum

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the central metaphors of curriculum as ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ that are adopted as the organizing metaphors for William Pinar’s 2006 book Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. Using the works of Michel Foucault, the paper explores relationships between discourse and curriculum as procedures of exclusion. Moving on to genre as a literary form, the paper analyses the pedagogical form of the essay and the rise of the article as one of the most pervasive forms that underlie academic culture. In our postdigital age, however, both the article and journal have significantly changed. This paper shows that a historicizing of the curriculum, understood as an approach to curriculum studies, is a process of denaturalization of commonly accepted assumptions about the curriculum. Therefore, problematizing the concepts of ‘discourse’, ‘genre’, and ‘text’ enables us to understand the historical and constructed notion of the curriculum and to examine its contemporary postdigital forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• discourse
• genre
• text
• article
• postdigital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor in Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (US). He has held posts at the University of Waikato (NZ), the University of Glasgow and the University of Auckland, where he had a Personal Chair. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Educational Philosophy and Theory, The Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Brill), Open Review of Educational Research (T&F) and Knowledge Cultures (Addleton). He has written some ninety books, including Wittgenstein's Education: ‘A picture held us captive’ (2018) and Post-Truth and Fake News (2018).

Petar Jandrić is Professor and Director of BSc (Informatics) programat the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Croatia. His previous academic affiliations include Croatian Academic and Research Network, National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh, Glasgow School of Art, and the University of East London. Petar's research interests are situated at the post-disciplinary intersections between technologies, pedagogies and the society, and research methodologies of his choice are inter-, trans-, and anti-disciplinarity. His latest books are Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (2017) and The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto (2018). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Postdigital Science and Education. Personal website: http://petarjandric.com/.

ORCID

Michael A. Peters http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975

Petar Jandrić http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6464-4142