Curriculum, text and forms of textuality

ABSTRACT

Building on Peters’ and Jandrić's previous work on curriculum as ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ (Peters, M. A., & Jandrić, P. (2018b). The curious relationships between discourse, genre and curriculum. Open Review of Educational Research, 5(1).), this article seeks to refresh and extend the central metaphor of ‘curriculum as text’ that is adopted as the organizing metaphor of William Pinar’s 2006 book Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. We undertake this analysis by referring to five theoretical notions: Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The garden of forking paths’ (1941), Roland Barthes’ structuralism (1977), Julia Kristeva's intertextuality (1966/1986), Ted Nelson's hypertextuality (1965), and Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's extratextuality (2004/1980). In conclusion, we show that the text is neither simply an artefact nor is it simply a sequence of uttered sounds. The text does not solely reside within the domain of the reader and cannot be considered as the exclusive domain of the author. Looking at relationships between text, textuality, curriculum, and technology, we show that the metaphor of ‘curriculum as text’ is inherently postdigital and that it requires development of a new postdigital language of inquiry and new postdigital forms of textual and non-textual expressions of that language in the years to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• text
• discourse
• postdigital
• structuralism
• intertextuality
• hypertextuality
• extratextuality
• Borges

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) programme at 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

Notes

1. Borges’ short stories ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘The Book of Sand’ are also experimental texts that play with similar ideas.

2. This section is taken from Peters (2013).