Reading Schwab’s the ‘Practical’ as an invitation to a curriculum enquiry

Abstract

In this retrospective essay reviewing the implications of Joseph Schwab’s essay, ‘The practical: A language for education’ (2013 [1970]), 40 + years after its first publication, I identify two ‘practicals’. The first is a comprehensive ‘Practical 1.1’ embracing ends, subject matter, problem source and methods. This ‘practical’ has radical implications for curriculum studies, and for educational theory and research more generally. However, these implications have not been recognized. On the other hand, Schwab’s deliberation-centred interpretation of the ‘practical’, the ‘Practical 1.2’, has been widely discussed but has not captured the field of curriculum studies because it fails to map onto the structures of most school systems.

Keywords:

• curriculum theory
• school improvement
• Schwab, Joseph
• theory of curriculum-making

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on ‘The Practical: An East–West Curriculum Dialogue’, College of Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China, 2009. I am grateful to Professor Yuzhen Xu for the invitation to participate in the Beijing dialogue and F. Michael Connelly of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Zongyi Deng of JCS for their advice as the conference paper was revised.

Notes

1. Many of Schwab’s essays are presented in Westbury and Wilkof (1978). For a background to ‘The practical: A language for curriculum’, see Schwab (1969) where he offers another, related account of the ‘practical’.

2. I would also add the historical work around the intellectual construction of the ‘field’ of education (Cruikshank 1998) and such related fields as the Protestant (Christian) ministry (see Browning 1983).

3. For accounts of Schwab’s life and work, see Levine (2006) and Shulman (1991).

4. He was largely responsible for the design of the natural sciences curriculum (Schwab 1978a, b), and played a major role in developing the capstone course, ‘Observation, Interpretation, Integration’ (OII) (Levine 2006): ‘[OII] came to reflect three rather different kinds of interest. The first concerned the diverse ways in which various philosophers had thought about the organization of the domains of knowledge. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Bacon, Kant, and Comte were the key figures in this lineup. Carefully selected excerpts from their works gave students direct entree into the ways in which they separated or joined theory and practice, reason and faith, percepts and concepts, nature and convention. The second kind of interest concerned the diverse ways in which philosophers and scientists thought about the methods of inquiry. The third concerned the operation of principles in diverse domains; the issues treated typically had to do with the role of different ways of construing such commonplaces as pleasure, justice, or causality’ (p. 101).

5. For an idealizing reconstruction and restatement of the platform of the Chicago College, see Schwab (1969). Carlgren (2011) introduces the less mysterious term ‘capabilities’ to capture the thrust of concepts like Chicago’s ‘faculties’ and ‘powers’.

6. There is also---and perhaps this is (3)---the school- and teacher-focused practice- and practitioner-centred interpretations of the text of the ‘Practical 1.2’ offered by, for example, Craig (2008), Ross (1993); see also Marom (2005). Another reading of the ‘practical’ sees it as a justification for what I am terming the ‘craft tradition’ within teacher education. In addition, the ‘practical’ endorses, by implication, a framework for school- or community-based educational governance as distinct from the dominant pattern of governance from Washington/Moscow (Wegener 1986).

7. For a discussion of the ‘climate’ within curriculum studies during the 1960s, see Short (2009).

8. The ‘Practical 1’ was written for and published by the Center for the Study of Instruction of the National Education Association. The essay came after a series of seminars hosted by the Center considering proposals by various scholars for a reinvigorated ‘curriculum theory’.

9. Of course this remains the question around (US) educational policy-making.

10. As noted above, one reading of the ‘Practical 1’ saw it as justification for what I am calling the ‘craft tradition’ within teacher education.

11. The term ‘crisis of principle’ is drawn from Schwab’s framework for teaching science (see Schwab 1978f). ‘Principle’ was a central term in OII, the Chicago capstone course. It means, broadly, ‘starting point’, but can also be understood as a Kuhnian ‘paradigm’.

12. Originally published in 1960.

13. In building the curriculum of teacher education and more advanced education in education in this way, the 19th-century founders of education as an academic discipline in the US had followed the framework of the curriculum for clergy developed in Berlin; see Browning (1983) where an argument for a new, ‘practical theology’ is outlined.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Westbury

Ian Westbury is a professor emeritus of curriculum & instruction in the College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1310 S. Sixth St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. He edited (with Neil J. Wilkof) Joseph Schwab’s Science, Curriculum and Liberal Education: Selected Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).