Joseph Schwab, curriculum, curriculum studies and educational reform

Abstract

The ‘Practical 1’ paper combines Schwab’s abiding concern, for the nature and quality of educational experience with another abiding concern, for how we think about what we do. The Practical 1 is the first of a set of four ‘practical’ essays. These in turn are the product of his thinking about college education and his ideas on the principles of scientific inquiry applied to education in the Practical 1. What Schwab said about education was considered provocative at its time. What Schwab was doing has continuing value. He would, no doubt, say different things in the current educational environment but what he was doing as he said them would remain close to the original.

Keywords:

• Joseph Schwab
• educational reform
• principles of inquiry
• curriculum inquiry

Acknowledgements

This paper first appeared in the form of a public lecture, in May of 2011, while I was a visiting scholar in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I want to thank Zongyi Deng who arranged the seminar and I want to thank him and his colleagues for helpful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. I also wish to thank Ian Westbury and Shijing Xu who provided comment on early drafts.

Notes

1. I have not strictly followed the editor’s mandate to reflect on the ‘Practical 1’ paper. I studied with Schwab because of his work in science education and wrote a dissertation on the principles of plant ecology and their relevance to an inquiry-oriented curriculum. For this reason Schwab’s writings are tinged, for me, with a science hue and I find it difficult to restrict my observations to the single paper focus of this special issue. As a result, my manuscript ‘leaks’.

2. My purpose in this paper is to re-think Schwab’s work for curriculum studies and educational reform. This is a different purpose than inquiry into the uses to which Schwab has been put. For this purpose interested readers should consult Cheryl Craig at the University of Houston. She has used Schwab in her own studies of school reform (e.g. Craig 2003); and she has traced Schwab’s ideas in the works of others (e.g. Craig 2009). With Miriam Ben-Peretz at the University of Haifa she is currently working on a study of the impact of Schwab’s work.

3. The first three ‘practical’ papers are represented in Westbury and Wilkof (1978). Schwab wrote in a broad range of outlets. The Westbury and Wilkof book pulls these writings together. Westbury was a junior colleague of Schwab at the University of Chicago and had first-hand biographer’s access to Schwab during the book’s preparation. For anyone interested in Schwab’s ideas and/or more generally in the potential for intelligent curriculum reform the Westbury and Wilkof book is the place to start.

4. I am not saying Schwab was an Aristotelian, one of the easy criticisms of Schwab sometimes offered by curriculum reconceptualist theorists who remain offended by what they think of as Schwab’s structure-of-the-disciplines writings. I am saying that Aristotle, among others, especially Dewey, is an essential resource in understanding what Schwab was doing.

5. This distinction is mostly treated in prosaically practical ways in the education literature. I recall one writer expressing irritation at a discussion of what he took to be the obvious when the distinction between theory and practice was raised.

6. An influential writing in this regard is Understanding Curriculum (Pinar et al. 1995). The term ’understanding’-oriented reader imagination to the Aristotelian theoretic and to a wave of traditionally theoretic reconceptualist curriculum literature. For illustration, see the section ‘What happened to curriculum studies’ in this paper.

7. I have disagreed with others on this point though I think there is less to separate us than might at first appear. They, I think, are pointing to what Dewey said while I am focused on what he was doing. Dewey wrote directly on inquiry (Dewey 1910, 1938a) and said much that fits McKeon’s problematic. But Dewey’s writing was dialectic. Dialectic is what he was doing. In order to read a Dewey text, particularly in his middle and later years, it is necessary to see what he says at different points in the text and to reconstruct his argument from multiple points. Think of the well known Experience and Education (Dewey 1938b).

8. McKeon’s framework is a reminder that Schwab’s particular writings were only one of several that might have been advanced as principles and methods for curriculum. This is a rather personal note since the literature research has not been properly done but I believe that the particular form of the ‘practical’ series reflected Schwab’s idea of what was needed for the times. At other times and places, under different circumstances, the deliberative dialectic mode of relating theory and practice might, for Schwab, take a back seat to other modes of relationship.

9. One of the other resources for Schwab, which I will not discuss here, was the notion of the Aristotelian topics, the source of modern notions of the dialectic, which Schwab variously called ‘desiderata’ and ‘commonplaces’ in their application to curriculum. The point of the commonplaces is that in fields that could be otherwise, such as curriculum studies and educational studies, opinion on what is important shifts from group to group, from time to time, and from place to place. Thus, any account of education or of curriculum is bound by persons (social groups), time, and place. Curriculum is not universal. The same I believe, is true for Schwab’s Practical papers. The Practical is a particular way of thinking about the principles and methods of curriculum for the times in which Schwab found himself. Other versions of the ‘practical’ series remain to be written.

10. Several years ago in an address at Capital Normal University (Beijing) Xu and I said if Schwab thought the field had taken flight in 1970 he would now think it had been shot off into space in a rocket (Connelly and Xu 2009).

11. I need to say that though the trend in the US has been towards national curriculum and national educational policies this has not been the case in Canada. As Westbury (2008) points out the development and use of state and state-based curriculum policy is relatively common throughout the world.

12. As an aside, and for anyone interested, we (Connelly and Connelly 2010) believe that the curriculum policies of the Ontario Provincial Government exhibit a reasonable balance between what we call inward-to-schools-looking and outward-to-society-looking issues.

13. Even the theorists recognize this. One says ‘our influence has decreased over the past 30 years … because of a certain devaluation of curriculum professors generally’ (Pinar 1999: 14); another says ‘interesting concepts have blossomed at a theoretical level … but these have had little or no effect on mainstream, school-based curriculum development (Doll and Gough 2003: 53).

14. The word ‘consultant’ neither reflects the character of the part of the field Jackson is describing nor the words and arguments in his own account. Jackson was on to something but by misreading the Practical, he validated those who saw the Practical as a version of McKeon’s ‘operationalism’.

15. See also my essay on the topic of teacher education (Connelly 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

F. Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly is a professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). He was a long-time editor of Curriculum Inquiry and has written on science education, curriculum studies, teacher education, multiculturalism and narrative inquiry. He was the director of the Canada Project, Second International Science Study, IEA, and the director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education/OISE/UT doctoral programme. He has written policy papers for the Science Teachers Association of Ontario, the Ontario Teachers Federation, the Ontario Ministry of Education, the Government of Egypt, Queensland Australia, UNICEF, the World Bank, and The League of Arab States. Currently, he is an education judge for the annual PROSE book awards, Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division and Association of American Publishers and, with Shijing Xu, is a co-director of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada seven year China-Canada cross-cultural Partnership study of education. This year he was awarded Honorary Professor status at South West University