The Death of Curriculum Studies and Its Ghosts

Abstract

This article analyzes the rhetoric of “death” and “haunting” in curriculum studies by closely reading Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman's Understanding Curriculum (2002). Drawing on the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I argue in the first section of the article that the rhetoric of death appears at moments when the pressures of globalization upset the disciplinary assumptions of the field. In the second section, I argue that Understanding Curriculum is formally a “work of mourning” by reading the book along with Derrida's writing on inheritance. The final section of the article takes up the problem of inheritance again, but turns to Friedrich Nietzsche's writings on history and a scene from Luke's Gospel to formulate a conception of the field, usually obscured by the rhetoric of death and haunting, as driven by love.

Notes

¹Indeed, this text was the only curriculum theory assigned in my core curriculum seminar (as non-required reading, no less). The attention I give it here is, then, a sign of an absolute debt: without it, I may never encountered the field I have come to love so much.

²It would seem to beg the question that if a chapter needs to be devoted to how various curricula are developed and used in actual K–12 schools, how can one speak of this practice as dying in 1969? It will, therefore, be necessary to deal with the specificity of the effects of the pronouncements of death in Part II of the article.

³This is what is meant by the term “biopolitics,” coined by Foucault and elaborated by Donna Haraway, Giogrio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Cary Wolfe, and Nicole Shukin, among others.

⁴Pinar's (2004) first section of What is Curriculum Theory? is titled “The Nightmare That is the Present.”

⁵In an earlier essay appearing in Malewski's (2010) Curriculum Studies Handbook, I took issue with Pinar's use of ghostly rhetoric. In the intervening years, I have come to a new appreciation for haunting as a productive and necessary part of critical, political action (even if, as I argue, we also have to turn away and forget the ghosts). In particular, studies of haunting as an embodied form of interpersonal or social memory (one that is place-based and material) surrounding genocide, slavery, and colonialism (O’Riley, 2007; Parham, 2009; Schwab, 2010; Young, 2006) and Spivak's (2003) evocations of haunting as index of a peculiar non-linear temporality of classroom encounters have changed my mind. Parham (2009, p. 3) is interested in how haunting “makes it possible to testify to the effects of unwitnessed events or to understand themselves as subject to social and historical forces otherwise unnamed in a larger scene.” Haunting names how history as social trauma affects us in ways that escape the severely limited (humanist) forms of consciousness forced on us in schools.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathan Snaza

Nathan Snaza teaches modern literature, educational foundations, and contemporary theory at the University of Richmond. He is co-editor, with John Weaver, of Posthumanism and Educational Research (Routledge, 2014), and his essays have appeared in journals such as Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Educational Researcher, Angelaki, Symploké, and Journal for Critical Animal Studies. He is working on two books, one on the pedagogy of extreme metal, and another articulating a posthumanist and new materialist theory of literacy practices.