Phenomenology and curriculum implementation: discerning a living curriculum through the analysis of Ted Aoki’s situational praxis

Abstract

The argumentation in this paper is grounded in a critical and conceptual analysis of Ted Aoki’s phenomenology, wherein curriculum is read as phenomenological text. The problem explored emerges from Aoki’s critique of the Tyler rationale for curriculum design, implementation and evaluation as it is conceived and practised in contemporary standardized education, which is driven by the ideology of social efficiency. Aoki focuses on the way in which the scientific and technical modes of curriculum implementation preclude particular modes of Being-in-the-world because curriculum implementation, as a technical and instrumental process, reduces both educators and students to epistemological subjects, and beyond, objects of knowledge. By focusing on curriculum implementation as a form of ‘situational-praxis’ as opposed to ‘instrumental-action’, this paper concludes, it is possible to put educators and students in touch with the ontological aspects of their Being-in-the-world. Aoki’s practice of phenomenology reveals an understanding of an attuned mode of human transcendence in learning, which opens the possibility for an authentic educational experience where educators and students dwell in the midst of the curriculum’s unfolding as an ontological phenomenon.

Keywords:

• Ted Aoki
• phenomenology
• curriculum theory
• curriculum implementation
• philosophy

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Managing Editor Norm Friesen for his meticulous, dedicated and invaluable assistance in the editing process. I also thank the three referees who offered insightful and thought-provoking commentary on several versions of this essay. All of your suggestions have vastly improved the essay.

Notes

1. Aoki (2005) incorporates the term ‘implementation’ when introducing his reconceptualized understanding of educators and students involved in the ‘installation’ of the curriculum. Ornstein and Hunkins (2004) note that those in curriculum theorizing adopting a ‘nontechnical’ and ‘process-and-developmental’ view of curriculum implementation prefer the term enactment to implementation, ‘thinking that the term [implementation] suggests a technical rationality,’ whereas the term enactment ‘suggests a more fluid nontechnical approach to development and design’ (298–299). Despite what Heidegger (1998) tells us, and quite correctly, about the nature of language, I retain Aoki’s original choice of ‘implementation’ even when discussing his nontechnical fluid understanding of curriculum. However, I am well aware of the connotations that the term carries, and this is especially crucial to those interested in de-constructing (Taubman, 2009), or more appropriately, performing a Destruktion of the language of technical-empirical curriculum and its instrumental methods (Magrini, 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James M. Magrini

His research interests include philosophy and education-philosophy with a focus on phenomenology, ontology and philosophical hermeneutics. He has published many articles on Heidegger’s philosophy, and his latest book, Social Efficiency and Instrumentalism in Education: Critical Essays in Ontology, Phenomenology, and Philosophical Hermeneutics is published by Routledge Press and included in William F. Pinar’s Curriculum Studies Book Series. He was voted Outstanding Part-Time Liberal Arts Instructor at the College of DuPage (2012–2013).