Curriculum matters: educational tools for troubled times

ABSTRACT

It is our contention that we are in a crisis of curriculum that can be seen from calls to defund public education to the reduction of children to scores on annual assessments. We also point to a crisis in studies of curriculum that the critical tools necessary to consider and critique curricular practices have been intentionally removed from schools of education. Our argument begins with a discussion of the potential significance for curriculum studies that focuses on questions of history and voice, and of resonances. In the light of such resonances and the ecologies where educational understandings reside, the second section of our paper examines the possibilities and challenges for curricular tools, as applicable in everyday interactions as they are in the more structured educational ecologies of schooling. We then apply such contextualized understandings to a formal curriculum espoused by an elite U.S. university in order to better articulate both what curriculum studies can do and why curriculum remains such a significant aspect of our understanding. Our work ends with a brief concluding section that suggests what else the curriculum might do and the kinds of things we are concerned are increasingly overlooked, from historical knowledge to contemporary cultural expressions.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum Theorizing
• critical sociocultural theories
• schooling
• embodied curriculum
• formal curriculum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Walter (e.g, Gershon, 2017b), has collapsed these often falsely separated actions into a single phrase he calls beingknowingdoing for, as he argues, to be is to know is to do, one is not possible without the others and all are ongoing actions.

2. In keeping with the language of curriculum theorizing in North America since the reconceptualization of the field in the early/mid-1970s, we understand formal curriculum to mean the knowledges students are meant to learn in schools and processes of schooling. For more on curricular constructions, see Gershon, 2017a.

3. We do not mean to imply that Walter somehow did not either read critical scholars, critical scholars of colour, women, or queer scholars (for example). Instead, our point is that these works that we have understood to be central to our field—and works we read and utilized well before more recent critiques about the whiteness of Curriculum Studies—did not hold the foundational place that figures such as Cooper, Locke, and Woodson now rightly do. Though outside the scope of our work here, it is ironic to us that teacher education remains radically white in foundation even as more recent calls and actions towards a less Anglo, straight and male curriculum finally move forward. For example, Anna Julia Cooper is absent in many elementary teacher education programs that list (almost) solely dead white male as the most important figures in educational history and insist that psychological theories of development are the sole lens through which education is ‘correctly’ theorized.

4. For example, an educational gap requires measurement against those understood to be at the top, reinscribing educational winners and losers. Such framing also strongly implies that those on top belong there and that those not on the top can’t exceed those enshrined as of paramount significance. In schools as in US society in general, racist systems construct everyday racisms as normal (e.g., Rist, 1973; Love, 2019).

5. The Fordham Institute and its Foundation and E.D. Hirsch and his Core Knowledge Foundation couple pro-education rhetoric with anti-public school policies. Firmly aligned with the social efficiency group, they strongly believe that the key to education is knowledge that can be measured and the continual measurement of that knowledge is the focus of schooling.

6. Jeffery Roth’s (1996) review of Steiner’s 1994 book, Rethinking Democratic Education: The Politics of Reform, is an early case in point that speaks to our concerns with Steiner’s conceptualizations of education and curriculum. In short, Roth concludes that Steiner’s claims to democratic curriculum-making are universalist in application with little attention to systems or sociocultural contexts, call for the measurement of ends-means knowledges, and are epistemological rather than ethical in orientation. Steiner’s is a Neo-Kantian approach as opposed to, for example, Landon Beyer’s curricular constructions that Roth characterizes as Neo-Pragmatist. However, what is perhaps Roth’s most significant point for our argument is that Steiner understands his positionality as oppositional to the ‘efficiency school’ of neoconservative measurement-as-education scholars. What is ironic about this framing is that Steiner ultimately calls for changes in thinking about democratic education that are as ends-means-oriented and measurable as the neocon’s he critiques. It is an explicitly neoliberal orientation, measurement towards prescribed ends that Roth notes are often as acritical as they double down on universalities that utilize the comprehensiveness of its democratic framing. They appear to do so largely to avoid talk about the ethical claims embedded within those supposed universalities (see, for example, Au & Ferrere, 2015). Practically, Roth’s article is another example of how curriculum scholars and scholarship, in this case the late Landon Beyer, can be used as critical tools to critique educational claims to justice.

7. As with a previous note about teacher education, although this comment could become a study unto itself, it is important to note just how embedded questions of labor and teacher accountability to neoliberalisms has become over the last three decades. Not only does the IEP stake its claim on the deprofessionalization and infantilization of teachers as we detail in this section, they also do so less explicitly as they do in this instance. Note that the bargain IEP proposes is that they have already done the work of creating an instrument that teachers can use to measure their growth and understanding. This a removal of both authority and access in exchange for lightening previously unnecessary labor and numerical legitimization, an understanding that is prevalent in most elementary school formal curriculum packages (see Gershon, 2017a).

8. The Mont Pelerin Society formed in 1947 as an intellectual organization inspired by the work of F.A. Hayek and included business leaders, economists, philosophers, historians and other intellectuals (see MacLean, 2017).

9. This is an accompanying retrogressive construction of notions of cartography and mapping as cataloguing ‘the real’ rather than a necessarily construction of the ‘throwntogetherness’ of things (Massey, 2005) (see also, for example, McKittrick, 2006; Mogel & Bhagat, 2010).

10. We are two white-presenting men whose positionalities and histories complicate the privileges we receive (e.g., gender and race). It is our contention that the burden of such arguments about how fields continue systemic forms of oppression is labor we knowingly take on as we believe it is unjust for often-disenfranchised peoples to not only receive deficit-oriented biases but also have the added labor of educating white people (for further discussion on questions of whiteness and the academy, see Jupp et al, 2016; Matais, 2016). This can be seen in our respective scholarship, work that seeks to interrupt ongoing oppressions and disenfranchisement and the use of our available privilege as leverage towards justice. To these ends, we also understand that our role is often forms of reflexive criticality, listening to disenfranchised communities and peoples about how to leverage our available wiggle room of privilege in ways that uplift, from pressing to create space to stepping back, out of the way.