Addressing the crisis in curriculum studies: curriculum integration that bridges issues of identity and knowledge

ABSTRACT

Many people from non-dominant backgrounds or believers from various religions want their children to acquire the best modern knowledge and to remain open to their home cultures and beliefs. However, this double aspiration poses complex challenges, and most scholars have either stressed the importance of addressing identity (and diversity) issues, or claimed that the key is to give everyone access to powerful knowledge. Beginning from curriculum studies’ alleged crisis and its relation to this dichotomy, this paper suggests that bridging concern for diverse identities and access to powerful knowledge implies devising curricula that allow for issues that are transversal to the disciplines without collapsing the boundaries between them. Since this has been generally difficult to develop, the paper reflects on the kind of curriculum integration that is needed, arriving at the idea of interstitial curriculum or connective tissue amid the disciplines. Subsequently, unique features of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBDP) are presented to exemplify these curricular interstices, and how they help to deal with the epistemological challenges posed by the initially mentioned double aspiration of many families at present.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum studies
• curriculum theory
• crisis
• knowledge
• identity
• epistemology
• curriculum integration
• interstitial curriculum
• International Baccalaureate
• IB

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Dennis Shirley for his mentorship, and for inviting me to co-teach Historical and Political Contexts of Curriculum with him during the Spring of 2016. I also want to thank the 2015–2016 cohort in the C&I Doctoral Program at Lynch who took the course with us; this paper refers to many of our discussions during the course. Finally, I would like to thank Jerry Finnegan and Jim Coughlin for their help proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juan Cristobal Garcia-Huidobro

Juan Cristobal Garcia-Huidobro is a Doctoral candidate in the Curriculum and Instruction Program at the Lynch School of Education. He is interested in curriculum theory and curriculum development. In particular, his research interests include how elementary and secondary schools' curricula address moral and spiritual issues. He has 8 years of teaching and counseling experience with youth in Chile, working in schools of the Red Educacional Ignaciana (Ignatian Educational Network). This experience includes working in Fe y Alegria, the largest Latin American educational network.