Contemporary curriculum theorizing: crisis and resolution

ABSTRACT

Using the ‘medical’ framework (symptoms, diagnosis and prescription) in Schwab’s the Practical 1 article, I analyze the current state of contemporary curriculum theorizing as a result of the reconceptualist movement. I argue that curriculum theorizing is in serious crisis due to the loss of the original subject of curriculum studies – practice and the inner work of schooling as a complex institution. Furthermore, I contend that the crisis has to do with the task of theorizing being mistakenly viewed as the pursuit of ‘complicated’ curriculum understanding, together with an uncritical embrace of postmodernism and related discourses. Based on Schwab’s the Practical and informed by the German Didaktik tradition, I propose a way forward to overcome the crisis and to revive curriculum theorizing that matters in practice and in the world of schooling for the twenty-first century in terms of three propositions. First, curriculum studies is a distinctive field/discipline centrally concerned with practice for the advancement of education. Second, practice and the inner work of schooling provide the essential starting point and subject matter for theorizing. Third, curriculum theorizing requires the use of theories in an eclectic, critical and creative manner.

KEYWORDS:

• Reconceptualization
• curriculum theory
• Didaktik
• Schwab
• curriculum inquiry

Acknowledgements

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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Associated with the traditional field, the ‘institutional text’ has been least discussed, if not ignored completely (see Pinar, 2008).

2. While their scholarships have contributed to reconceptualizing the curriculum field, critical curriculum scholars tend not see themselves as ‘curriculum reconceptualists’. As Pinar et al. (1995) observed, Michael Apple would become one of the major figures in the movement to reconceptualize the field, although he disavowed any affiliation with the movement (p. 226).

3. Schwab was mainly responsible for the redesign of the natural sciences curriculum and played a major role in developing the capstone course, ‘Observation, Interpretation, Integration’ (OII) (see Levine, 2006; Westbury & Wilkof, 1978).

4. Curriculum subject matters and preoccupations are largely excluded from the topics of presentation in the Curriculum Studies Division (Division B) at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Consider the division’s call for its most recent annual meeting. The proposal categories are: Pasts and Emerging Futurities (The Theorizing Moments of Curriculum); Methodologies, Cosmologies, and Philosophies (The Shaping of Curriculum); Policies and Politics (The Webbings of Curriculum); Places and Praxis (The ‘Where-Abouts’ of Curriculum); and De/Colonization and Desire (The Wanting of Curriculum). Two years ago, a good quality academic paper (written by the author) addressing fundamental curriculum questions about knowledge and content got desk-rejection from Curriculum Inquiry, a recent postmodern-turned journal, on the grounds that the paper did not engage with posthumanism, postcolonialism and feminism.

5. The key figures of the postmodern vanguard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty, were or very close to Marxists during 1960s and 1970s. According to Hicks (2004), ‘postmodernism is a symptom of the far Left’s crisis of faith. Postmodernism is a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism’ (p. 181).

6. For instance, with respect to Doctrine 2, claims to knowledge, truth and metanarrative are not only about tyrannical powers. They are necessarily bound up with the use of ‘evidence, method, logic, or even the necessity for coherence’ and the reality which is ‘outside the text’ (Peterson, 2018, p. 314). As for Doctrine 3, in a democratic, well-functioning society, competence (ability or skill) – not (tyrannical) power – is a ‘prime determiner’ of the social status of an individual. Furthermore, ‘the most valid personality trait predictors of long-term success in Western countries are intelligence…and conscientiousness (p. 313).

7. As Westbury explained, ‘it became clear that Didaktik was, in a sense, “practical.” It came out the same Aristotelian and hermeneutic traditions as McKeon and Schwab, although Didaktik as a development of rhetoric has its own tradition’ (Ruzgar, 2018).

8. Other Didaktik schools are, for example, Berliner Didaktik, psychological Didaktik, experimental Didaktik, and dialectical Didaktik (Meyer, 2013; also see Arnold & Lindner-Müller, 2012).

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Zongyi Deng

Zongyi Deng is an associate professor at National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is also an executive editor of Journal of Curriculum Studies (JCS). His interest areas include curriculum content or subject matter, curriculum theory, didactics (Didaktik), Chinese education, and comparative and international education. His publications appear in JCS, Curriculum Inquiry, Comparative Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Cambridge Journal of Education, Science Education and other international journals.