Constructing ‘powerful’ curriculum theory

ABSTRACT

This article addresses how ‘powerful’ curriculum theory might be constructed from the perspective of the German Didaktik tradition—highly compatible with Schwab’s the Practical. To start with, I scrutinize Joseph Schwab’s model of curriculum planning and Wolfgang Klafki’s model of lesson preparation and examine two theories of content that underpin the two models. Invoking the German Didaktik tradition, I next explicate a distinctive form of theorizing that yields powerful curriculum/Didaktik theory. I argue that Didaktik, together with the Practical, provides a viable way of constructing powerful curriculum theory—exemplified by a theory of knowledge and a theory of content—in the current context. I conclude by drawing implications for our understanding of the powers of professional educational knowledge and for tackling the current crisis in educational theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Powerful educational knowledge
• curriculum theory
• bildung-centred Didaktik
• pädagogik
• the Practical
• schwab

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express sincere gratitude to Ian Westbury for his useful comments on an earlier version of this article, and is very grateful for the meaningful comments of three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Didaktik and curriculum can be considered as ‘parallel areas of the same subdiscipline’ (Kansanen, 1999, p. 25) and they address a very similar set of issues (teaching and learning goals, content selection and organization, teaching methods, teaching and learning media, etc.) (Westbury, 2000). However, Didaktik is laregely lacking in Anglo-Americam countries.

2. Pädagogik refers to a distinct discipline of education relating to the work and practice of schooling—widely accepted in European countries as an important educational discipline for teacher education (Biesta, 2011).

3. The resemblance of the ‘practical’ way of theorizing with the Didaktik’s can be explained in terms of the legacy of German scholarly tradition prevalent at the University of Chicago where Schwab developed his curriculum thinking, including the Practical (see Deng, 2020; Reid, 1980).

4. For this, readers are refereed to McKeon (1937, 1949)).

5. The prevalence of this kind of thinking has to do with the legacy of the German philosophical tradition at the University of Chicago (see Reid, 1980).

6. Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik arose from criticism of Herbartian Pädagogik and a revisiting of the original thinking of Herbart and Kant (Hamilton, 1999; Hopmann & Riquarts, 2000). Pädagogik is positioned within the realm of human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) rather than natural science (Naturwissenschaften), with grounding from the thinking of European Enlightenment.

7. This is an exception. At the University of Chicago Schwab and many of his colleagues tended to believe that Education was a field in its own right (cf. Levine, 2006; Schwab, 2013).

8. The pursuit of human capital entails a narrowing of the purpose of education (Biesta, 2009; D. F. Labaree, 2014). The promotion of measurable outcomes and evidence-based practices is at risk of destroying the essence of practice as a deliberative educational endeavour (Biseta, 2007; S. Hopmann, 2007). The endorsement of the kind of theory centred on ‘what works’ and ‘effectiveness’ ignores questions about ‘what is educationally desirable’ and restricts ‘the opportunities for educational practitioners to make such judgments in a way that is sensitive to and relevant for their own contextualized settings’ (Biesta, 2007, p. 20; also see S. Hopmann, 2007).

9. Both Bildung and the Chicago conception of liberal education find their root in the ancient Greek ideal of liberal education (paideia)—the well-rounded formation of the self through culture.

10. In a similar vein, Lambert (2014) argues that without such cultivation, students ‘are deprived and restricted in their personal and intellectual growth into fully capable adults’ (p. 13).

11. Maton’s (2014) notion of waving and weaving refers to the process of navigating and integrating various knowledge forms.

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Notes on contributors

Zongyi Deng

Zongyi Deng is Professor of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He is also an executive editor of the Journal of Curriculum Studies (JCS) and has held faculty positions at Nanyang Technological University and the University of Hong Kong. His interest areas include curriculum content or subject matter, curriculum theory, didactics (Didaktik), curriculum policy and reform, and comparative and international education. His publications appear in JCS, Curriculum Inquiry, Comparative Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Teachers and Teaching, Cambridge Journal of Education, Science Education and other international journals. His latest book is Knowledge, content, curriculum theory and Didaktik: Beyond social realism (Routledge).