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Abstract
Building upon past studies of curriculum textbooks in the US, this paper presents an analytical framework that classifies curriculum texts according to their representation of reconceptualized curriculum scholarship. It uses four indicators of the representation of curriculum scholarship in the analyses of eight curriculum texts published in the USA in the 1990s: the author’s stated intentions; the organization of the table of contents; the treatment of the forms of reconceptualism; and the ratio of curriculum and non‐curriculum journal citations. The analysis finds that reconceptualized curriculum scholarship has been at least mentioned, if not extensively treated, in most texts since the mid‐1980s, and that this approach is most comprehensively treated in books published in the 1990s.
Notes
1. These cited descriptions, discussions, dissections, and debates include references to some 30 years’ worth of primary documents that constitute their bases.
2. In a later paper, Rogan (Citation1991) also explored the extent to which the research found its way into the content structures of the curriculum field as this was portrayed by textbook authors. He concluded that the texts paid ‘scant attention to the research studies reported in curriculum journals’: ‘research conducted on curricular matters and reported in curriculum journals is not systematically being incorporated into the accumulated knowledge in the field as portrayed in the standard texts’ (p. 57). Furthermore, he contended that ‘other’ journals—Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, Teachers College Record, National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin, Educational Researcher, and the Harvard Educational Review, many of which ‘do not portray themselves as research journals, but rather as forums for the exchange of ideas and practices’—were more frequently cited than, for example, such research journals as Curriculum Inquiry (p. 59).
3. We found some 20 texts that seemed to be written for use in an introductory curriculum course in the US. We did not consider texts that consisted of collections of articles (e.g. Parkay and Hass Citation2000). We excluded texts that focused on a single aspect of curriculum, such as alignment or evaluation. We also excluded texts with a single edition (except for Pinar et al. Citation1995), in part because multiple editions suggest wide use, and in part because we wanted to explore shifts from an earlier edition to a later edition (see note 12).
4. We note in addition that, whereas the traditional scholarship represents curriculum as a phenomenon of schooling, the reconceptualized scholarship is concerned with curriculum as a more pervasive social and cultural phenomenon (Marshall et al. Citation2000).
5. i.e. Curriculum Review, Curriculum Theory Network, Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Curriculum Perspectives, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Curriculum Journal, and Phenomenology + Pedagogy.
6. Although we focused on citations from journals and not from books and other sources in relation to this fourth indicator, we considered citations from books and other sources when we made a final judgement on the overall extent to which a text represents reconceptualized scholarship. Except for Eisner (Citation2002) and Ornstein and Hunkins (Citation1998), our analysis indicated that the consideration of citations from books and other sources did not significantly change the degree of representation based on citations from journals.
7. The ratio of 1:3 indicates that a text represents reconceptualized scholarship in 75% of its presentation, the ratio of 1:1 in 50% of its presentation, and the ratio of 1:0.33 in 25%, etc.
8. Because three other indicators are considered together with this ratio, we recognize the limitation of the ratio alone in pinpointing the degree of scholarship representation, and refrain from locating texts on the diagonal continuum solely based on these ratios. Our commitment to using all four indicators led in some cases to some adjustments in placement locations based on the ratio alone, and to the retention of the ratio‐based placement in others.
9. The 3rd edition of Eisner’s text has appeared under two imprints in different years (Citation1994, Citation2002). The pagination is identical.
10. While Curriculum includes most of those categories of understanding curriculum as texts explicated in Pinar et al. (Citation1995)—such as political, gender, phenomenological, post‐structural, post‐modern and aesthetic curriculum theorizing—they do not deal with race, theological, and international curriculum theorizing as extensively Pinar et al. do. However, with respect to curriculum as international text, they assert that they have written their book from an international perspective, although the book is focused on the historical, social, and political contexts for US schooling. They do, however, include ‘references and citations … to practical and theoretical work in curriculum undertaken not only in the US but also in Australia, the UK, Canada, and—to a lesser extent—several other nations’ (p. ix).
11. ‘Behavioural approach’, ‘Managerial approach’, ‘The systems approach’, ‘Academic approach’, and ‘Humanistic approach’, in addition to the ‘Reconceptualists’.
12. We used our analytical process to ascertain whether later editions of our synoptic texts might have ‘moved’ on the reconceptualized curriculum scholarship representation scale from their earlier editions. No text moved ‘upward’ by even one sub‐category of the diagonal scale.