Journeys of Expansion and Synopsis: Tensions in Books That Shaped Curriculum Inquiry, 1968–Present

Abstract

In honor of the 40th volume of Curriculum Inquiry, I begin by claiming that pursuit of questions about what is worthwhile, why, and for whose benefit is a (perhaps the) central consideration of curriculum inquiry. Drawing autobiographically from my experience as an educator during the past 40 years, I sketch reflections on curriculum books published during that time span. I situate my comments within both the historical backdrop that preceded the beginning of Curriculum Inquiry and the emergence of new curricular languages or paradigms during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I suggest that two orientations of curriculum books have provided a lively tension in curriculum literature—one expansive and the other synoptic—while cautiously wondering if both may have evolved from different dimensions of John Dewey’s work. I speculate about the place of expansion and synopsis in several categories of curriculum literature: historical and philosophical; policy, professional, and popular; aesthetic and artistic; practical and narrative; critical; inner and contextual; and indigenous and global. Finally, I reconsider expansive and synoptic tendencies in light of compendia, heuristics, and venues that portray evolving curriculum understandings without losing the purport of myriad expansions of the literature.

Notes

Notes

1 To wonder, I think, is enough to do. Forty years is daunting to speculate, and impossible to define or even clarify. Instead, I am content and invigorated to have opportunity to share my ponderings. I share my sense of wonder and speculation with the hope and intent of growing together with other scholars in the field, rather than engaging in barbed eristic with them.

2 Others who have obviously lived different paths within the curricular realm would have different stories and protagonists; they would derive different categories of thought and literature, and would offer additional perspectives on current and future developments. I would relish reading stories of others about their experiences in the curriculum field.

3 The term landmark texts has been suggested in conversation with Ming Fang He, and is a term that suggests for me books and articles that have moved curriculum studies in new directions. Such texts could include innovative synoptic treatments as well as expansive works that add to the complexity of work in the field and derive from many sources, including indigenous and subaltern ones, some of which are yet to be discovered. I am grateful to Ming Fang for this term and for numerous suggestions regarding this essay.

4 I tried to develop a statement of categories of landmark texts in the interest of enhancing the disciplinarity to advance curriculum studies. The working document is called Possibilities, Recommendations, and Suggestions for the AAACS Project to Advance Curriculum Studies Through Disciplinarity—on the AAACS Web site of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 2009. I hope that its refinement and revision will be helpful to other curriculum scholars under the new committee that is continuing the work.

5 Articles by Craig Kridel, Tom Thomas, and William Schubert in the Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (Kridel, 2010, in press) illustrate collectives at historically prominent centers of curriculum studies.

6 The emergence of the terms traditionalist, conceptual empiricist, and reconceptualist is clearly set forth in work of William Pinar (1975, 1978), and the continued development of this intellectual strain of curriculum theory is chronicled in Pinar et al. (1995), as are the conferences, especially in Chapter 4 of that work.

7 The early contributions of the AERA SIG on Creation and Utilization of Curriculum Knowledge, now called the AERA SIG on Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies, are interpreted by Short, Willis, and Schubert (1985), indicating a major effect of this SIG and Bergamo conferences on the transformation of the Curriculum Studies Division (Division B) of AERA from an emphasis and title that focused on objectives to one that focused on the larger intellectual sphere of curriculum studies. By 1983 the title of Division B had changed to the present one: Curriculum Studies.

8 J. J. Schwab’s talk at the April 31, 1975 AERA meeting in Washington, DC, was entitled Curriculum theory: The practical and the educational.

9 The session title was Curriculum inquiry: Three perspectives on realization of integrative concepts of critical consciousness, April 22, 1976, in San Francisco, with presenters F. P. Hunkins, M. van Manen, and W. H. Schubert, and discussants G. Willis and D. R. Chipley.

10 Louis J. Rubin was well known for intellectual “talk show”–style sessions at AERA, wherein he would challenge such frequent participants as Ralph Tyler, Harry Broudy, Jack Getzels, Maxine Greene, and others with provocative questions that encouraged them to respond impromptu. Having been a student in Rubin’s classes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I recalled a similar pedagogical technique used by him with students and at AERA attended his conversational sessions whenever possible. Rubin often added that he deemed the informal conversations at AERA to be the most thought-provoking events there, and he wanted to instantiate them in the form of sessions, which he did for over 20 years.

11 Because these were all symposia that I organized and chaired and not single authored, I am referencing them here rather than in the reference list. The 1977 session in New York with M. Johnson, M. Eash, D. Walker, M. Apple, and W. Pinar was on April 8 and titled Priorities in curriculum scholarship: Toward separatism or synergy. The 1980 session in Boston with M. van Manen, R. Tyler, M. Grumet, and P. Jackson was on April 7, and titled Curriculum knowledge and student perspectives: Exploring the relationship, while the other with M. Greene, E. Eisner, M. Apple, and M. Fantini was on April 8, and titled The expanding domain of curriculum inquiry: Assessment and recommendations. The three sessions at the 1981 AERA in Los Angeles were Neglected but necessary sources of curriculum knowledge, with H. S. Broudy, R. Stake, R. W. Tyler, and P. H. Taylor (with W. A. Reid delivering his paper and commenting), on April 15; Ralph W. Tyler in retrospect: Contributions to the curriculum field, with L. J. Cronbach, G. MacKenzie, R. W. Tyler, and K. Strickland as co-chair, on April 15; Reflections and recommendations on the creation and utilization of curriculum knowledge, involving G. Beauchamp, J. Goodlad, E. C. Short, B. O. Smith, and R. W. Tyler, on April 16.

12 In response to what many consider the introductory essay on existentialism in education by Ralph Harper (1955), Ulich (1955) responded by calling for education to center on “great events and mysteries of life: birth, death, love, tradition, society and the crowd, success and failure, salvation, and anxiety” (p. 255).

13 Jean Anyon, Michael Apple, Peter Applebaum, William Ayers, Bernadette Baker, Landon Beyer, Deborah Britzman, Richard Butt, Mary Aswell Doll, William Doll, Susan Edgerton, Michelle Fine, David Flinders, Bernardo Gallegos, Noreen Garman, Geneva Gay, Henry Giroux, Jesse Goodman, Ivor Goodson, Beverly Gordon, Noel Gough, Carl Grant, Peter Grimmett, Madeleine Grumet, Ming Fang He, James Henderson, Annette Henry, David Jardine, Stephen Kemmis, Kathleen Kesson, Joe Kincheloe, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Patti Lather, Nancy Lesko, Allan Luke, Dan Marshall, Cameron McCarthy, Linda McNeil, Janet Miller, Petra Munro, Marla Morris, Hugh Munby, Pedro Noguera, Reba Page, Charles Payne, William Pinar, Tom Popkewitz, Danielle Raymond, William Reynolds, Patrick Roberts, Tom Russell, James Sears, Steven Selden, Patrick Slattery, Christine Sleeter, John Smyth, Shirley Steinberg, William Stanley, Angela Valenzuela, Max van Manen, William Watkins, John Weaver, Tony Whitson, John Willinsky, Geoff Whitty, George Willis, and Michael F. D. Young.

14 The 18 authors who included autobiographical renditions are Michael Apple, Miriam Ben-Peretz, Louise Berman, Michael Connelly, Bill Doll, Elliot Eisner, John Elliott, Ivor Goodson, Maurice Holt, Frances Klein, Herbert Kliebard, William Pinar, William Reid, William Schubert, Edmund Short, Malcolm Skilbeck, Laurel Tanner, and Michael Young. Some of these listed influences that included mainly other curriculum scholars or chose not to provide a list; thus, they are not included in illustration of philosophical influences. Clearly, their other work indicates paramount influence by philosophers and other social theorists.

15 The arrogance of U.S. self-importance in many spheres leads too often to lack of credibility given to insights from other cultures. It also leads to forceful imposition of U.S. perspectives on others, including curricular frameworks. A reprehensible part of the illustration resides in the alleged leadership of curriculum studies by the U.S. scholars, and the concomitant ignorance on behalf of too many U.S. scholars, including myself, and policy makers of curriculum in other nations throughout the world. We need to ask more assiduously: When scholars from the United States are taken as beacons of curriculum insight, is it more of a function of the United States as a globalizing power wielder, or is it due to a thoughtful appreciation of insights in frameworks advanced?

16 Elliot Eisner, Maxine Greene, Lou Rubin, Harry Broudy, Madeleine Grumet, Bob Donmoyer, Wells Foshay, Jim Henderson, Ann Lynn Lopez Schubert, Wanda May, Gail McCutcheon, Ken Kantor, Jose Rosario, Sue Stinson, Landon Beyer, Bill Ayers, Michael Apple, Francine Shuchat Shaw, Beau Vallance, Janet Miller, Bill Pinar, Nelson Haggerson, Delese Wear, Richard Butt, Noreen Garman, Max van Manen, Joel Taxel, Noel Gough, Alex Molnar, George Willis, and myself.

17 In a book series with Backalong Books and the Centre for Arts-Informed Research, Knowles, Cole, L. Neilsen, and others have produced several volumes that deal with diverse aspects of the arts in inquiry: theses and dissertations, visual inquiry, theorizing, writing, and more.

18 By curriculum curriculum, I refer to one’s curriculum for studying curriculum.

19 American Educational Studies Association, a scholarly group that focuses on social, philosophical, historical, political, and cultural bases of education.

20 Such work was facilitated by the steadfast efforts of Ann Lopez-Schubert (1952–2006) between 2001 and 2006, who relentlessly tapped many book, journal, and Internet sources for worldwide alternative reports and perspectives to understand deleterious effects globalization that stemmed from corporate, nationalistic, and militaristic greed.

21 The original title of this section was something like “Indigenous, (De-, Post-, Neo-) Colonized, Ecological, Third World Feminist, Transcultural, and Globalization Literatures.” Even if the list were continued for a few more lines, it would not capture the vitality of inquiry experienced in the field today.

22 Though just one example, I wonder about the educational community’s realization of this perspective when I reflect on AERA’s recent rejection of a proposed SIG on Critical Interspecies Education. Was it rejected because it allegedly was deemed to overlap with the interests of other SIGs on ecology or environmental matters, or was it partially because the proposed topic was deemed silly by those ensconced in dominating epistemologies, presumably assuming that acceptance would diminish the conventional rigor that is believed to spawn credibility?

23 Additionally, as Dennis Thiessen has reminded me, an explosion of handbooks and encyclopedias over the past 2 decades has occurred in numerous academic fields, education being prominent among them. Handbooks in such areas of education as social foundations, leadership or administration, policy studies, educational change, teaching and teachers, diverse research traditions, and the several subject areas often contain one or more chapters on curriculum, curriculum studies, curriculum inquiry, or curriculum theory. Even when they do not use such labels, they have considerable content and citation overlap with the general area of curriculum studies.

24 Indeed, this is the kind of faith that I suggest is necessary for educators generally and curriculum scholars in particular as they work on any project that has controversial dimensions. They should seek to learn from one another and engage in the kind of genuine dialogue that they often advocate for others.

25 In fact, I would like very much to work on such an article.

26 I feel privileged to have played a small part in this venture.

27 I recommend Schultz (2008) as an example of showing how stories of teaching can be directly situated within curriculum literature to inform innovative educational practice and policy.