The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies

A Festschrift in Honor of William F. Pinar

Mary Aswell Doll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317214199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this volume scholars from around the world consider the influential work of William F. Pinar from a variety of "conversations" his ideas have generated. The major focus is on the What, Why, and How of the word "reconceptualization, " which involves engaging critically and ethically as public intellectuals with gender, class, and race issues theorized in a variety of disciplines. The book introduces Pinar's seminal argument for curriculum to return to its root in the word currere (the running of the course of study) and its key concepts: autobiography as alternative to the denial of subjectivity in traditional curriculum studies, study, and place. Issues addressed include the ethics of study both of self and of the discipline of curriculum studies, the politics of presence, the curricular importance of entering the public sphere, the openness to complicating simple solutions, and the ethical dealing with alterity (the state of being other or different; otherness).

1 “Holding Tight against the Tide”

The Problem of Instrumentalism

Tero Autio

I met William Pinar about twenty years ago in the Curriculum and/or Didaktik Conference in Oslo, Norway, and since then, we have been close colleagues and friends. Within fifteen minutes of coffee table discussion, despite our different geographical, cultural and educational differences, we recognized our kindred spirit about how we think and could think about curriculum issues. Since then, I have benefited from Bill’s unparalleled erudition always in process by incessant study, from his unbreakable flow of ideas and his intra- and interpersonal intelligence, his unwavering support and friendship, his tactful and diplomatic skills, always spiced by his uniquely brilliant sense of humor. I would like to honor my great friend Bill “my way” by introducing some of my historical and theoretical ideas how I have understood Bill’s unique and constantly transforming contributions to curriculum theory.

We are living in times that have lost any intellectual or political sense of education in terms of “complicated conversation” as it was conceived in classical antiquity. The general political atmosphere in most of the Western world is suffering a kind of euphoria after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The euphoria reached the measures where the social and cultural evolution of liberal market democracy was declared the winner in the competition for the best available blueprint for democratic societies and an argument for a globalized world as a unitary wholeness tied together by market forces as a basis for politics, morals and education alike. The elevation of market forces as the guiding beacon for all social action, politics and education was prophetically expressed by one of the main architects of neoliberalism, the former UK Prime Minister in her speech at the end of 1970s when she radically redefined capitalism and its undergirding, initially Christian, ethics (see Max Weber) by a secularized, non-Biblical, de-spiritualized, primitively pragmatic concept of ethics and morals.

Capitalism encourages important virtues, like discipline, industriousness, prudence, reliability, conscientiousness, and a tendency to save in order to invest in the future. [Capitalism is replacing biblical values because] it is not material goods but all the great virtues exhibited by individuals working together that constitute what we call the market place.

(Autio, 2006, pp. 152–153, italics added for emphasis)

It seems now that a revolutionary political turn is eating its own offspring; capitalism herself is seemingly in deep crisis in its assumed task to organize a democratic society and the wellbeing of people. The worst victims of the neoliberal reformed, post-Soviet capitalism in the West are mainly youth and disadvantaged people. Further, it is increasingly recognized that Western economy, politics and education are mutually complicit in the crisis: neoliberalism is destroying the basic elements of democracy in the name of market liberalism, with its conscious indifference to economic and social inequality and growing poverty. The education acronym GERM, Global Education Reform Movement, seems indeed to be the virus that is killing education (Sahlberg, 2011). Neoliberal democracy is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms; neoliberalism means a dismissal of democracy with a pervasive and excessively instrumental and calculative rationality, where the political vision is profitability and cost–benefit effectiveness without any further consideration of social and economic conditions for sustainable living.

The implications and consequences of these quite recent world political phenomena have been thoroughgoing and radical for the world of education. My conviction is that we cannot, as educationists, really understand what is our current state of education without taking into account the dynamics of the world political picture with its present loss of political alternatives and utopias. The entrenched Culture of Method (Autio, 2006) in education (in mainstream research as well as a core of teacher education curricula and as a core image of neoliberal conception of teaching) is structurally, institutionally and intellectually screening off the bigger historical, theoretical and political panoramas as vital elements of educational erudition, wisdom and understanding. Theoretically, the educationalization of the Cold War in the United States also marked a decisive shift “from psychology to philosophy, from a popular interpretation of pragmatism to cognitive psychology that was at its outset in the late 1950s—cognition theory being the most important academic reference of PISA today, as the stakeholders admit themselves” (Tröhler, 2013, p. 201).

In the United States, there has been a long battle throughout the twentieth century between educational progressivism and educational instrumentalism. But we need to understand the long and strong European roots in American thinking to make the developments more intelligible. John Dewey (1859–1952) was a classic advocate of progressivism in education; Dewey was Hegelian just like Karl Marx (1818–1883) before him. They both were monumental thinkers yet critical about German Idealism that together with the cultural, artistic and literary circles of the time created an influential intellectual German late-Enlightenment movement called Deutsche Bewegung (German Movement) around 1770–1830 (Klafki, 1991). The ideal aim of this philosophical and aesthetic movement was explicitly educational in a broad sense: to create a democratic civic society by Bildung, by education, where the educated public would guarantee the enlightened aspirations of democracy. Democracy and education would be inseparably intertwined in that intellectual, political, aesthetic and education movement. Only against that noble and most worthwhile initiative can we understand the shame, guilt and frustration among Germans as to what the totalitarian Nazi regime brought about while brutally crushing the democratic cause and showing how delicate and vulnerable a thing democracy is in practice. The prominent German social theorist Jürgen Habermas has remarked that the German national identity has been “irreversibly tainted since the Holocaust” (Autio, 2009, p. 18). Still, maybe no other nation has made so conscious an effort to cope with her tragic past as Germany in rebuilding democracy after fascism. But it seems that education and curriculum theorizing have been hit much harder in the aftermath of fascism. It seems to be the task of others to reactivate the political and ethical Bildung that echoed original Western ideals initially articulated in Athens by Plato and Aristotle and in Jerusalem by the teachings of Jesus and his disciples of Christianity—but also Oriental wisdom traditions—now living a renaissance in China (see Pinar, 2013).

The European Enlightenment owes an irreplaceable intellectual debt to Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) as an instigator of Modern Education as a political project (see Tröhler, 2013). Legacies of the Enlightenment have remained to live and be reactivated in other demographic and intellectual locales: in John Dewey’s democratic and progressive contributions to American education in modern times and in William Pinar’s insightful and close readings of postmodern times. Bill’s intellectually appealing contributions include the turn to reconceptualize and internationalize the field of curriculum studies against psychological instrumentalism and its later economic embodiment in neoliberal globalization. I see Bill’s long-perspective contributions particularly in the Deweyan spirit of “Democracy and Education” as a defense of the democratic cause “against the tide that threatens everything.” In Bill’s approaches, the reader can discover refined sensitivities that challenge the notions of liberal democracy cherished in the Western world based on universalism, pragmatism and positivism. Bill has honed his political sense and ethical sensitivity in his series of Curriculum Studies: Intellectual Histories and Present Circumstances in Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, United States and most recently in China. In these exchanges with different countries, Bill reconceptualizes the “learning theories” of the psychologized curriculum and its political equivalent: the abstract subject of liberalist political theory as a powerful resource for colonization. These abstractions work as rhetorical political devices only and do not actualize the dynamics between psyche and society. In political terms, Bill’s introduction of postmodern approaches into the field of curriculum theory complicates the unitary subject advocated by liberal democracy and the likewise unitary, unspecified humanist subject of North European Bildung/Didaktik discourse.

I view Bill’s zooming in for the concrete intricacies and diversity of the real subject—one instance of his more general methodology of the “primacy of the particular” and “working from within”—as providing vital resources for updating education and democracy beyond its Western/Northern biases and suggesting articulations for subjugated and subaltern knowledges and practices as well. The inclusion of the silenced voices and colonized minds on the agenda of curriculum theory and studies revitalizes the significance of education for democracy; ideally and theoretically, democracy is the site for the actualization of every human potential.

In Bill’s thinking, “The Recurring Question of the Subject” is vitally linked to politics in terms of unstable and contested dynamics of “subjective transformation and social reconstruction.” In that sense, Bill is rearticulating in the postmodern and international context both the Bildung/Didaktik tradition as well as Dewey’s modernist and pragmatist coordinates for education and democracy. The index of Bill Pinar’s own intellectual insistence for perpetual transformation is his perceptive observation of the exhaustion of critical theory and such poststructural concepts as discourse, identity and power. Each of these curriculum conceptions, he writes,

are no longer conceptual innovations or provocations precisely due to their taken-for-grantedness … these concepts circulate as accepted truths—even the poststructuralist truth that there in no truth!—and have thus become abstractions split-off from the concrete complexity of the historical moment. Split-off, they do not link us to the present and can no longer provide passages to the future. In their triumph they become markers of our defeat: our expulsion from the public sphere.

(Pinar, 2013, p. 7)

The topology of Bill’s curriculum theorizing in terms of horizontality and verticality is an effort to overcome the tendency toward totalization that the triad—power, discourse and identity—imply. Similarly, the preceding concepts of Reproduction and Resistance of Critical Theory “assume a cognitive and political superior standpoint of the academic intelligentsia in order to be able to renounce all the deviations from the grand narrative of emancipation” (Autio, 2006, p. 146). In this view, critical theory appears as another ideology of objective knowledge and science in its abstract foundational compulsion for the Archimedean standpoint detached from the particular material and epistemic circumstances.

The methodological topology that combines the present, horizontality, with the intellectual history of the past, verticality, is one of the keys to overcome the presentist understanding what we experience now and what the methodologies of mainstream empirical social sciences support in their preference of survey over theory. For Bill, writing is method, the working of “from within,” recognizing the significance of the past, the meaning of the present and the expectation of a future as “complicated conversation.”

Bill’s most recent strategy in his efforts to understand educational experience in the interconnected world and beyond standardizing economic globalization is the internationalization of curriculum studies. The internationalization of curriculum studies orchestrated has meant opening space for a different vocabulary of educational experiences in Brazil, China, Mexico, South Africa and United States. Internationalization can provide scholars with a critical and intellectual distance from their own local cultures and from those standardizing processes of globalization that national cultures and individuals have to meet. The lessons of internationalization that the critical distance such conversation entails enables understanding of one’s own situation and the situations of one’s colleagues. Particularly, from a Euro-American point, the history of domination and colonizing—now often in the form of globalization—and their educational and curriculum vehicles—standardization, accountability and privatization—are legacies of instrumentalism, anti-intellectualism and hidden colonial embodiments of the Euro-American logocentric subject.

The knowledge–power mindset as the core curriculum of the nation making is embodied in present Anglophone accountability, standardization and privatization movements in education with very few exceptions of that global rule. Despite their claimed “psychological” profile—against the morally and intellectually scandalous void of the concept of the subject and consciousness—externalized and reified notions of human psyche in behavioral-cognitive theories as kinds of a-psychological psychologies have been complicit in the corporatization of education in present official education policies. The collapse of the USSR with the disappearance of any competing big political visions strengthened the instrumental and method-driven, “evidence-based” orientation in politics and education and its research. The most glaring example from the United States is efforts at the federal level to legislate “correct” scientific method (Lather, 2013, p. 38). The economic and managerial stress on education, in the name of globalization, draws on political demands for uniformity, toward colonization and standardization of all spheres of human action instead of heterogeneity, difference and diversity as drivers of democracy.

The curriculum of nation making has arguably reached the point where economic thought is coterminous with rationality and the concept of neoliberal democracy is an oxymoron (Couldry, 2012). Accordingly, the nation state is a unit of measurement in international competitions in the economy and instrumental education rather than the site of democracy and democratic education. Yet, the shift from the nation state to the “market state” as an aspired global model of society, education and curriculum as one of its vehicles, may nevertheless be not erasing nationalism. It is argued that “there is every reason to assume that nationalism, at least in the near future, will endure, despite all the attempts by politicians and scholars to herald the start of a post-national period. The multipolarity of nations is too deeply embedded in Western political culture to be removed from it within a few decades. And this is the situation we have to deal with, whether we like it or not” (Hirschi, 2013, p. 220).

Against this background, the case of China is most interesting. We can argue that China, because of its hugely long and amazingly variegated phases of history is as much a nation state as it is a civilization state. Due to the weight of history, as exposed throughout in those very informative accounts in Curriculum Studies in China, democratization takes cultural forms, as Zhang Hua (Pinar, 2014) emphasizes. The reactivated legacy of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism through curriculum studies without the obsessive quest for certainty and ultimate foundations like the postmodern scholarship of Zhang Wenjun (Pinar, 2014) proves, will arguably reactivate also the European educational landscape. The violent Western colonization of education by accountability, standardization and privatization measures has been exhausting the project of the Enlightenment and its democratic drivers: liberty, equality and solidarity. Neoliberal democracy is an oxymoron indeed. The reactivated great Chinese wisdom traditions, in cultural-political tandem, are really invoked to address the cultural, political, ecological and economic crisis the current mode of capitalism camouflaged as democracy creates. The reform in China for quality education coded as creativity, innovation and academic freedom to teach seems to me at the same time very familiar and astonishing. In Finland, my country of origin, philosophy, arts, and teacher education are still closely intertwined against the authoritative efforts of scientism in terms of empirical (psychological and sociological) science. My bold claim is that Finland’s success in basic education is more dependent on the tradition of “pedagogic artistry” (Henderson, 2015) than its academization by misguided empiricist tradition. One of the main claims of Bildung/Didaktik maintains that the highest stage of self-awareness is reached through art. The Finnish national philosopher Johan Wilhelm Snellman (1806–1881) whose insistence on freedom, democracy and broad-based erudite personality against the shallow scientification of education in terms of educational psychology still matters in Finnish education and teacher education. On the scale like China, as a citizen of a minor country, I am used to think that education systems in superpowers are through their systemic interests unintentionally more inclined to wasting talents and human experience, standardizing and normalizing people than attuned to actualizing the potential of all people—the core idea of education and democracy since Antiquity.

Against these observations, the determined efforts in China for quality education against the Western mainstream as proclaimed by the official government agencies in China represent a real spark of hope—the contrasts with the West—as William Pinar (2014) notices—with the West’s dogged determination to destroy creativity, innovation and academic freedom—could not be sharper. In that sense, it is easy to join again with Bill Pinar’s concluding sentence in our China book project: “Reconstructing the past and recontextualizing concepts imported from abroad, supported by its distinctive and dynamic field of curriculum studies, China is recasting the character of curriculum” (Pinar, 2014, p. 241). I cannot resist the temptation to add in the same spirit and for the reasons I can intuit on the basis of our collaboration in the book project and my incurable love of big pictures: if...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 “Holding Tight against the Tide”: The Problem of Instrumentalism
• 2 Haunting Revelations: Teaching Amidst the Ruins of Race, Gender, and Violence
• 3 Of That Visionary Gleam: On “Sanity, Madness and the School”
• 4 The Homoerotic Turn and Currere
• 5 Crossing the Continental Divide: Pinar, Reconceptualization and Curriculum in Canada
• 6 Curriculum as the Place of Study
• 7 Excavating the Self: The Archaeologies of Pinar and Hillman
• 8 Reflection on a Poor Curriculum: With a Nod to Edgar Morin
• 9 Two Groundbreaking Ideas of William F. Pinar: Curriculum as Complicated Conversation and Study as the Site of Education
• 10 The Politics of Presence
• 11 William F. Pinar: Reflections on a Public Intellectual
• 12 Maple Jazz: An Artist’s Rendering of Currere
• 13 Generous Interrogations and Affirmations: Histories and Trajectories
• 14 Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity: William Pinar’s Complicated Conversation with Curriculum Studies
• 15 Becoming Inter-national: Autobiography, Curriculum, and Hyph-e-nated Subjectivities
• 16 Pinar’s Influence on the Consolidation of Portuguese Curriculum Studies
• 17 An Embodied Currere: Dance, Poetics, Place and Site-Specific Performance
• 18 Layers of Internationalization and Poststructuralism: William F. Pinar and Curriculum Studies in Brazil
• 19 William Pinar’s Contribution to Our Understanding of Sex, Gender and Curriculum
• 20 Complexities of the Complicated Conversation
• 21 The Autobiographical, the National, and the International: A Complicated Conversation
• 22 The Practice of Radical Love: Understanding Curriculum as Queer Theological Text
• 23 William F. Pinar’s Contributions to the World Curriculum Field
• 24 Working from Within, Together
• Contributors
• Index