Engendering Curriculum History

Petra Hendry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136881589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can curriculum history be re-envisioned from a feminist, poststructuralist perspective? Engendering Curriculum History disrupts dominant notions of history as linear, as inevitable progress, and as embedded in the individual. This conversation requires a history that seeks re-memberance not representation, reflexivity not linearity, and responsibility not truth. Rejecting a compensatory approach to rewriting history, which leaves dominant historical categories and periodization intact, Hendry examines how the narrative structures of curriculum histories are implicated in the construction of gendered subjects. Five central chapters take up a particular discourse (wisdom, the body, colonization, progressivism and pragmatism) to excavate the subject identities made possible across time and space. Curriculum history is understood as an emergent, not a finished, process – as an unending dialogue that creates spaces for conversation in which multiple, conflicting, paradoxical and contradictory interpretations can be generated as a means to stimulate more questions, not grand narratives.

1

Engendering Curriculum History

That history produces subjects rather than subjects producing history might seem a poststructural “fact.”¹ Yet, how the discourses of curriculum history collude in producing normative assumptions of gendered, raced, and sexed subjects remains relatively unproblematized. The primary focus of this chapter is to examine the ways in which the discursive practices of curriculum history make particular subject identities thinkable. However, to interrogate the “subject” of history at the same time that the death toll of “history” and the “subject” has been rung is a seemingly contradictory position. It is this site of disease, doing history while simultaneously being suspicious of it, which I embrace. What does it mean to do history if there is no longer a subject? What are the implications of history being in flux at the very moment that the histories of those traditionally marginalized are being articulated? As a woman curriculum theorist I ask, “Can I give up history before I even have one?” When history has functioned as a primary form of oppression, “Do I even want one?” What does it mean to do curriculum history at this particular juncture?

Rather than abandon history as a “relic of humanist thought” (Scott, 1989: 35), I seek a feminist poststructuralist reading of curriculum history that attempts to disrupt the search for origins and to decenter the unitary heroic subject, either male or female. I also want to challenge the myth of progress by conceiving of history as the confluence of processes so interconnected that it cannot be reduced to a unitary storyline (grand narrative). Rejecting a compensatory approach to re/writing history, which leaves dominant historical categories and periodization intact, I examine how the narrative structures of curriculum histories are implicated in the construction of gendered subjects. To problematize the notion of the subject, without giving up the political work of “recovering” women’s history, is the feminist poststructuralist challenge, which I take up. I maintain that we must become comfortable with a more complex, less tidy, nonlinear understanding of the history of curriculum theory, which disrupts the very categories that make “history” intelligible.²

History as Memory Work

History as celebrated by memory is deciphering of the invisible, a geography of the supernatural … It brings about an evocation of the past …

(Jean-Pierre Vernant, 1983)

History is the memory of things said and done.

(Carl L. Becker, 1935)

History has always provided me with a way to reshape the future through reimagining the past. As a young girl it was history, rather than literature, science, or art, that provided me with a way to understand who I was and more importantly who I was not. History held extraordinary power. As a young girl this was a profound insight. Having learned my history lessons well, I knew I was to be seen, not heard. This silencing was not the result of explicit sanctions. There was no need to cut my tongue out, to gag me, or to banish me from public places. Unlike the women in history books, this was not necessary. Astonishingly enough, I had already learned to silence myself—bite my tongue, hold my peace. This repression is the history that has no voice. My knowledge that women’s experiencing of the world is invisible is a painful reminder that history, and in this case specifically curriculum history, is predicated on subjugation and erasure.

Consequently, I begin with the premise that to conduct history in these poststructural times is to recover from the “epistemic violence” (Spivak, 1988), which has been history. Put more simply, “history is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (Jameson, 1981: 102). These limits are the consequence of the modernist obsession with objectivity and rationality that function to make “natural” the concepts of the subject as unitary; temporality as linear, continuous, and coherent; and progress as the inevitable consequence of history. By problematizing the very nature of knowledge as objective and corresponding to any reality, the deconstructionist turn has been central to problematizing modern forms of knowledge, like history, that seem natural but are in fact contingent on sociohistorical constructs of language and power (Baker, 2009a; Foucault, 1977; Polkinghorne, 1988; Young, 1990). This is not to suggest that there is no past. The past is real and there is evidence of it. However, evidence does not reveal the past, but instead it points to interpretations of the past. As Frank Ankersmit (1998) suggests:

Evidence is not a magnifying glass through which we can study the past, but bears more resemblance to the brushstrokes used by the painter to achieve a certain effect. Evidence does not send us back to the past, but gives rise to the question what an historian here and now can do with it. (p. 184)

Historians, as Hayden White (1978) maintains, do not “find” patterns of meaning in the past but “construct” meaning from and impose meanings on the mosaic of sources and evidences that are available from the past. As a curriculum theorist, my interest is in the narratives we have constructed in relation to who can be a knower and what can be known, and what this reveals about us as a culture, particularly in relation to gendered identity and subjectivities. I contend that the construction of history as linear, as inevitable progress, and as embedded in the individual is one possible telling—one which I maintain has functioned in complex ways.

According to Jane Flax (1990), modernist history’s “appearance of unity presupposes and requires a prior act of violence” (p. 33).³ The subject of the traditionalist history—unitary, male, heterosexual, White—is made possible through the deconstruction of its other.⁴ History’s appearance of unity, of coherence, of order is predicated not on any direct correspondence to a reality but on the suppression of contradictory stories, most often those of women, people of color, and the working class. History as we know it is not possible without this silencing. This suppression is the “epistemic violence” upon which the myth of a unified and fixed subject, which functions to “universalize” history and make it gender-less, is contingent (Smith, 1995). History as we know it limits contradiction, multiplicity, and difference. Remembering this suppression is the memory work that must be done.

“Righting” or “Writing” History

My disease in “doing history” is the result of the tension between the need to write/right the histories of “women,” “African-Americans,” and other marginalized groups into curriculum theorizing while simultaneously deconstructing those categories of history that have made possible the violence of erasure and subjugation. Rather than see these views as incommensurate, I will try to avoid the binary simplicity of either/or arguments. I maintain that one sickness of contemporary theorizing is to continue to seek unitary theories despite our acknowledgment that knowledge is multiple, contradictory, and always in flux. To envision both of these standpoints as compatible and, in fact, necessary, I will briefly review their theoretical histories.

To write women back into history has been a primary aim of feminist scholarship. However, “doing history” which adds the stories of women, Blacks, and marginalized others, does little to disrupt history as usual. Merely adding the names of women would be to ignore Joan Kelly’s (1984) salient reminder that “what we call compensatory history is not enough” (p. 2). Just to include women heroines would be to perpetuate the often silent and hidden operations of gender in shaping historical analysis. For example, although we include women—such as Margaret Haley or Ella Flagg Young or Ida B. Wells—in the story of progressivism, the very concept of periodization of the “progressive movement” as gendered and gendering remains unproblematized.⁵ In essence, the classic formation of narrative history as suggested by Susan Paddle (1995)—a unified subject and a plot predicated on the unfolding of a tale with implicit motifs of progression, development, and growth—remains the same. As a consequence, history retains the illusion of a seamless narrative written by an omniscient, invisible narrator. In other words, history remains grounded in an epistemology based on objectivity, and the very categories of history that have functioned to make women invisible remain intact.

Ironically, then, this compensatory view of history can contribute to reinforcing the notion of objectivity by claiming to make “better” history or at least a more rigorous, complete history. Susan Friedman (1995) reminds us that “this search to discover the ‘truth’ of women’s history that could shatter the ‘myths’ and ‘lies’ about women in the standard histories operates out of a positivist epistemology that assumes that the truth of history is objectively knowable” (p. 14). Consequently, this kind of compensatory or oppositional history has been deeply problematic for many feminists (Riley, 1989; Scott, 1987) because it constitutes “women” as an essentialized and fixed category. The diversity of women’s experiences is not only ignored, but what becomes obscured is that “woman” itself is a social construction, a product of discourse. Events or selves, in order to exist, must be encoded as story elements. What compensatory history makes invisible is that there is no identity outside of narrative. Narrative, as Paul Ricoeur (1976) reminds us, imposes on events of the past a form that in themselves they do not really have. Because events and selves are reconstructions, original purity of experience can never be achieved.⁶ For feminists concerned with writing women back into history, that is a profound theoretical as well as political concern.

History as Discourse or History as Anorexia?

To give up the concept of woman or even “women” because it is a fiction—a product of language or discourse—is potentially to delegitimize any concern for the “real” and “experience.” Gayle Greene (1993) refers to this lack of referential as a kind of “professional/pedagogical anorexia” in which endless deferral functions as a form of self-erasure, “an analogue to our obsession with thinness, a way of assuring ourselves and others that we’ll take up less space” (pp. 16–17). This “disappearing act” raises serious concerns regarding not only the ability to write women back into history but also about the ability to make any feminist knowledge claims.⁷ The invisibility and silencing of women proceeds as usual. Thus, the deconstructive turn potentially allows the subject to “stand free of its own history … and the depoliticization of knowledge can proceed more or less at will” (Said, 1989: 222). To be free of history is to sever the memory of inscription. Thus, despite my discomfort with a positivist epistemology, I am reluctant to give up the notion of “real women.” If we abandon a representational view of history, do we set ourselves up for erasure, do we in fact become complicit in the modernist dream of history as universal, objective, and, in essence, genderless?⁸

Of course, the binary of whether history is fact or fiction is part of the disease (Margolis, 1993). History is always a fiction (White, 1978), but this does not make it less real. How the story is told—why and at what point the fictions are conceived (Adams, 1990; Portelli, 1991), the discrepancies between what is told and what is experienced—are themselves theoretical constructs (Pagano, 1990). To recover from history is in part dependent on reconceptualizing and remembering the suppression, the contradiction, the pain, the fiction that is history.

History is not the representation of reality, it never has been. For the early Greeks, memory was not a means to situate events within a temporal framework but to understand the whole process of becoming. History, as a function of time, loses the poetic, the imaginative, and the power to evoke. History as an evocation of memory becomes our relationship to, and experiencing of, the identities made possible or impossible through historical narrative. In other words, history is the evocation of what makes invisibility possible. The Popular Memory Group suggests that memory is a dimension of political practice. As Gramsci has argued, a sense of history must be one element in a strong popular socialist culture (Popular Memory Group, 1992). History is the means by which a social group acquires the knowledge of the larger context of its collective struggles and becomes capable of a wider transformative role in society. This “recovery of history” is not intended to function as a corrective, to make history right, but as a process through which a group may “consciously adopt, reject or modify” history (p. 214).

To remember our experiencing of ourselves as objects is to “witness” or “testify” to the trauma of silencing, distortion, and invisibility. To testify, according to Shoshana Felman (1992), is to “vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth” (p. 5). This, according to Felman, is not a statement of fact but a speech act. Drawing on the autobiographical life accounts given by Holocaust survivors, Felman suggests that testifying

enabled them for the first time to believe that it is possible, indeed, against all odds and against their past experiences, to tell the story and be heard, to, in fact address the significance of their biography—to address, that is, the suffering, the truth, and the necessity of this impossible narration—to a hearing “you,” and a listening community. (p. 41)

To make “something lasting out of remembrance” is the task of both the poet and historiographer as Hannah Arendt reminds us (1954: 45).⁹ To remember, to conceive of history as memory work, is to confront the myths of what can and cannot have a history. How the narrative of curriculum history genders is the memory work that must be done.

Myth 1: The Line History Draws

Like a fairy tale, the story of curriculum history in the United States produces and reproduces a narrative as soothing as a bedtime story—the lone scholar in the wilderness (colonial school master) is confronted by the threat of industrialization and urbanization. This struggle between the old and the new is the site for rebellion and transformation. The narrative is a familiar one—an age of innocence, crisis, and enlightenment. Embedded within this plot is a deeply gendered tale. It is the quintessential hero’s tale predicated on separation (lone schoolmaster), individuation (common school movement), and control (reforms—progressivism, technical rationalism, and professionalization, and conspicuously masculine discourses that focus on individuality and autonomy). It is a tale of repression and fear that has little to do with a “real” sequence of events and everything to do with how gender is produced through the narrative we call “history.”

Narrative authority in Western culture is, according to Charlotte Linde (1993), predicated on the ability of the narrator to create a sense of continuity (cause and effect), coherence (connection of past and present), and individuation (sense of separate self). These narrative conventions are not constraints on history; rather, they create the possibility of narration (Martin, 1986). Thus, locating how continuity, coherence, and individuation are inscribed in history as “real” provides ruptures and possibilities for interrogating how history is central to the production of subject identities. In the case of the tale of schooling, what identities/subjects are made possible or impossible when curriculum history presents itself as an apparently unified, linear story of the one-room school house, common school movement, and progressivism? And, how might we disrupt the tidiness of curriculum history to allow for the complexity of gender and history?

Curriculum history usually begins with the tale of the emergence of public schooling.¹⁰ Horace Mann and Henry Barnard are most often credited with this democratization of education.¹¹ To view this sequence of events—from the one room schoolhouse to the public common school—as a natural culmination of events or process of development is to make real what is the product of narrative. Made invisible is the reconstruction of gender necessitated by this shift of education from the private to the public realm. To construct education as public/male required reinscribing the home or schoolhouse as private/female. The emergence of the discourse of the “cult of domesticity” and its corollary, “teaching as women’s true profession,” suggested that women’s role as educators, as knowers, was to be indirect, it was to represent influence, not actual power, and it was to be exerted through others and for others. Not only was the task of educating understood as the domain of men, but knowledge itself was gendered as public, as male. Separation from the private (family/female) to identify with the common (public/male) realm provides the mark of male gendered identity. This gendered analysis was hinted at by Bernard Bailyn (1960) when he suggested that in early America “the most important agency in the transfer of culture was not formal institutions of instruction or public instruments of communication, but the family” (p. 15). While he credits the Puritans with the shifting of the locus of cultural transmission to public schools, it is Madeleine Grumet (1988) who maintains, that the common school movement “colluded in support of a program of centralized education that exploited the status and integrity of the family to strip it of its authority and deliver its children to the state” (p. 39). The traditional tale of the common school movement as part of the democratization of America takes on more complex meanings when also understood as a gendered narrative.

The redefinition of gender, and thus, education, was also a consequence of social changes resulting from America’s emergence as an industrial nation that required the repression of the individual (private) to the state (public). As Carl Kaestle (1983) suggests, the “pillars,” or common schools, were founded as a means to encourage Americans’ commitments to the public realm of “republican government, native Protestant culture, and capitalism” (p. x). While Kaestle maintains that the common schools functioned as a mode of social control in regard to class, to which there was resistance that is traditionally obscured in historical narratives, there is little attention to gender as critical to this revolutionary moment in which education is shifted from the private to the public. Central to the regulation of the individual, as Valerie Polakow (1993) has suggested, was the emergence of “pedagogy” and “pediatrics” as a means of fashioning identity. These arenas of social life, traditionally associated with the private realm and appropriated simultaneously with “democratizing” the nation suggest not historical progress or development but what Foucault has termed “episodes in a series of subjugations.”

The irony of this is that the construction of “pedagogy” as grounded in women’s natural nurturing capacities functioned in complex ways to both valo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Engendering Curriculum History
• 2. Imaging Curriculum
• 3. Embodying Curriculum
• 4. Decolonizing Curriculum
• 5. Unsettling Curriculum
• 6. Experiencing Curriculum
• 7. The Future of the Past
• Notes
• References
• Index