From Understanding to Creating Curriculum: The Case for the Co-Evolution of Re-Conceptualized Design With Re-Conceptualized Curriculum

Abstract

An essay review of

Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses

(Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. New York: Peter Lang, 1995/2003)

Notes

Notes

1 Mark Halvorson has an academic appointment at Trinity Western University and is a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University.

2 We need to clarify this statement. We are saying that Pinar et al. (1995/2003) did not grapple in Understanding Curriculum with the creating of curriculum using re-conceptualist ideas and principles. We are aware that Pinar himself has subsequently begun to consider the philosophy of curriculum development after the re-conceptualization (see Pinar, 2006b), that he (see Pinar, 2006a) has also attempted to show how this can be done using literary study, and that his latest work on cosmopolitanism (Pinar, 2009) describes the curriculum strategy of juxtaposition. For example, Pinar (2006a) takes Musil’s (1906) novel The Confessions of Young Torless (which deals with the rituals of sado-masochistic homosexual rape practised in the military school in which it is set) to show how literary study can become a form of research in investigating how the right-wing destruction of democracy in the United States has been used to marginalize legitimate citizens who are different and already disadvantaged. Pinar (2009) positions himself against three pressing problems of the profession: 1) the crime of collectivism that identity politics commits; 2) the devaluation of academic knowledge by the programmatic preoccupations of teacher education; and 3) the effacement of educational experience by standardized testing. He argues for the juxtaposition of the abstract and the concrete, the collective and the individual: history and biography, politics and art, public service and private passion to create a cosmopolitan curriculum that provides passages between the subjective and the social. In this intriguing, thought-provoking, and nuanced work, Pinar outlines a cosmopolitan curriculum focused on passionate lives in public service, providing one set of answers to how the field accepts and attends to the inextricably interwoven relations among intellectual rigour, scholarly erudition, and intense but variegated engagement with the world. Pinar’s (2006b) The Synoptic Text Today is the work that is most pertinent to the focus of this essay review. In it, he argues for a re-conceptualization of curriculum development to enable teachers to engage in complicated classroom conversations that grapple with issues plaguing the present. It is his attempt to re-frame curriculum development after the re-conceptualization as supporting “passionate intellectual classroom practice that engages our bb worldli-ness... [and] committed to understanding, through the school subjects, of teachers’ and students’ own ongoing self-formation within local cultures in an era of globalization” (p. xii). For Pinar, the purpose of re-conceptualizing curriculum development “is to strengthen the intellectual content of school curriculum while suggesting its subjective meaning and social significance” (p. 5, emphasis in original). To do this “requires a technical expertise in the subject and a pedagogical formulation of its possible import for the education of the public” (p. 5). In other words, Pinar’s aim is for public education to be reframed as the education of the public. His hope in bringing together this collection of essays is “to support the institutionalization of self-reflexive, historically-grounded, culturally-specific, intellectually vibrant academic field of curriculum studies in complicated conversation with each other... [in ways in which] they do not obscure processes of their institutionalization and intellectual formation, thereby betraying their political origins and subjective sources” (p. 178). We acknowledge the steps that Pinar and other re-conceptualist scholars like Miller (2005)—who uses the strategy of juxtaposition that Pinar writes about to invite inconsistencies and foreground the possibility that there will always be something that cannot and will not be interrogated—have taken in the direction we are suggesting. Nevertheless, this was not the case in 1995 when the first edition of Understanding Curriculum was released. Moreover, we maintain that our contribution in this essay review pushes the boundaries of thinking about post-re-conceptualist curriculum development in ways that are important and different, yet complementary, to the more recent contributions of Pinar (2006a, 2006b, 2009) and J. L. Miller (2005).

3 Baudrillard’s distinction between the mode of production and utility that organized modern societies and the mode of simulation that he believes is the organizing form of postmodern societies postulates a rupture between modern and postmodern societies as great as the divide between modern and pre-modern ones. In theorizing the epochal postmodern rupture with modernity, Baudrillard declares the “end of political economy” and of an era in which production was the organizing form of society. Following Marx, Baudrillard argues that this modern epoch was the era of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, in which workers were exploited by capital and provided a revolutionary force of upheaval. Baudrillard, however, declared the end of political economy and thus the end of the Marxist problematic and of modernity itself:

The end of labor. The end of production. The end of political economy. The end of the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitates the accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma of cumulative discourse. And at the same time, the end simultaneously of the exchange value/use value dialectic which is the only thing that makes accumulation and social production possible. The end of linear dimension of discourse. The end of the linear dimension of the commodity. The end of the classical era of the sign. The end of the era of production. (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 8)

The discourse of “the end” signifies Baudrillard’s announcing a postmodern break or rupture in history. We are suggesting that this is exactly what Pinar et al.’s Understanding Curriculum did in 1995, it created an epochal break between the era of curriculum development and the newly proposed focus on curriculum understanding. But we are also claiming that theirs was a first-stage rupture that did not lead to a necessary implosion of the boundaries between curriculum understanding and curriculum creating. Hence, we are proposing a second-stage rupture that brings together curriculum understanding and curriculum creating. This break would be between the era of re-conceptualist curriculum discourses and a third way of re-“designed” curriculum theorizing about school-based learning.

4 “Implosion” is a process in which objects are destroyed by collapsing in on themselves. The opposite of explosion, implosion concentrates matter and energy. An example of implosion is a submarine being crushed from the outside by the hydrostatic pressure of the surrounding water. Buildings being demolished are often imploded. The aim is to confine the materials to specific areas, usually to avoid harm to nearby structures. The technique involves the firing of precisely placed demolition charges in specific timed intervals that use gravity to cause the center of the building to fall vertically while simultaneously pulling the sides inward.

5 Our view of Wraga’s (1999a,b) criticism of Pinar, for instance, is that he understood Pinar and his re-conceptualist colleagues to be trapped in the system-world they had created with the result that they had neither concern for nor interest in school practice. That is, he thought that curriculum re-conceptualist scholars had established a linguistic system-world whereby they talked only to one another and neglected the life-world of practice. Pinar’s (2006a,b, 2009) subsequent grappling with how curriculum development would look after the re-conceptualization demonstrates that Wraga’s perspective was misplaced.

6 This section specifically uses ideas first articulated in Tony Fry’s (1999), A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing. We wish to acknowledge how important this book has been to our thinking.