Cultures of Curriculum

Pamela Bolotin Joseph, Pamela Bolotin Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136869402
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Using "cultures of curriculum" as a lens, this clear, compelling text reveals and critically examines the belief systems and classroom practices of curricular orientations in contemporary American society. It is designed to foster awareness, examination, and deliberation about the curricula planned for and carried out in classrooms and schools; to inspire conversations about theory and practice as well as political, social, and moral issues; and to expand critical consciousness about approaches to curriculum and practice. Readers are encouraged to give serious attention to the issues this book raises for them, and to join with their colleagues, students, and communities in considering how to create curricula with purpose and congruent practices and to reculture classrooms and schools. A framework of inquiry is presented to facilitate such reflection and to accomplish these goals.

Cultures of Curriculum, Second Edition:

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• Introduces the field of curriculum studies by describing theories and questions pertinent to curriculum inquiry

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• Describes the process of curriculum leadership drawing from historical and contemporary research on curriculum change and transformation

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• Presents the concept of cultures of curriculum as a way of thinking of curriculum as cultural text encompassing histories, norms, beliefs, values, roles, and environments.

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• Connects theory to practice by describing curricular orientations as depicted in practice, providing educators with approaches to instruction, planning, and assessment for creating intentional practices in classrooms and schools

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• Uses a heuristic that helps educators to understand curricular orientations, examine curriculum in classrooms and schools, and reflect upon their own beliefs and practices

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• Integrates moral and political discourse into discussions of curriculum orientations so that educators can recognize, question, and challenge aims and actions by examining dominant paradigms and both their direct and unforeseeable influences upon schooling

Changes in the second edition:

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• Four new chapters –

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  • "Narrowing the Curriculum" (current trends of standardization and high-stakes testing)

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  • "Educating Through Occupations (Deweyan progressive and career/technical education)

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  • "Sustaining Indigenous Traditions" (Native American/indigenous education)

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  • "Envisioning Peace" (peace, global, human rights, environmental education)

  
  
  

• Updates and pertinent scholarship in all chapters reflecting recent events and discourses

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• Curricular cultures all are examples of progressive alternatives to traditional education

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• New two-part structure: Curriculum Studies and Curricular Cultures

Part I
Curriculum Studies

Chapter 1
Conceptualizing Curriculum

Pamela Bolotin Joseph

A theory that works is altogether a miracle: it idealizes our varying observations of the world in a form so stripped down as to be kept easily in mind, permitting us to see the grubby particulars as exemplars of a general case.

Jerome Bruner, 1996, The Culture of Education, pp. 88–89

To apprehend their dynamic roles as curriculum workers, educators must abandon the conviction that curriculum is an object—explicit, proscribed, and given. Regrettably, this way of characterizing curriculum can lead teachers to think of themselves as technicians whose realm only includes lesson plans, curriculum guides, outcomes, and tests but excludes their own artistry and their students’ curiosity from curriculum development and enactment. As well, when educators focus on discrete parts of curriculum and do not see the big picture, they may view themselves as employees controlled by educational systems and not as empowered professionals. Or, they may continue to skate on the surface by not seeing the complex sociocultural, political, and ethical layers of meaning in curriculum and pedagogy. Even educators engaged in major curricular reform oftentimes may not deeply understand the significance of their efforts if they work to change structures but do not consider ultimate aims for students and society.

For curriculum to be understood as process for transforming educational aims and practices, it must be conceptualized as an undertaking that encompasses inquiry and introspection. Therefore, the concept of curriculum should include in-depth examination of practices, interactions, values and visions as well as “an inward journey” (see Slattery, 1995, p. 56) of personal reflection. It is “the purpose of curriculum…to engage the imagination” (Doll, 2000, p. xi) so that we can reflect on our beliefs and actions and to engage in a vigorous discourse about moral and social visions for education.

How can educators develop such a perspective so that they understand curriculum as a reflective endeavor as well as a dynamic personal and social process? We believe that that engagement in curriculum theory (curriculum studies) facilitates this transformation because this rich and deep field of scholarship and inquiry offers language and patterns of thought which allow for the naming, questioning, and critique of dominant perspectives and the imagining of alternatives to conventional curriculum. Such knowledge of curriculum helps practitioners to interrogate the purposes of schooling and their own roles by “investigating everyday phenomena, problematizing and questioning the commonplace” (Joseph, 2007, p. 283). In that way, they can become “critically conscious of what is involved in the complex business of teaching and learning” and to “break with fixed, customary modes of seeing” to “remove the blinders of complacency” (Greene, 1973, pp. 8–11).

The study of curriculum is closely connected to qualitative research which seeks meaning rather than control or an ultimate version of truth.

…the general field of curriculum, the field interested in the relationships among school subjects as well as issues within the individual school subjects themselves and with the relationships between the curriculum and the world, that field is no longer preoccupied with development…the field today is preoccupied with understanding…it is necessary to understand the contemporary field as discourse, as text, and most simply but profoundly as words and ideas. (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995, pp. 6, 7)

Thus we learn to inquire into the embedded metaphors, assumptions, and visions within curriculum and to comprehensively critique our assumptions, goals, and practices. Also, we can examine and reflect on the norms and values that have direct and unforeseeable influences upon schooling. Accordingly, the study of curriculum becomes a catalyst for moral and political deliberation within “complicated curricular conversations” (see Henderson, 2001) and the desire for curriculum transformation. Certainly, one of the most important ethical obligations of curriculum inquiry is to ask such critical questions as what is our vision of the educated person? How do our curricular decisions affect children? And, how do we create schools as humane environments that nurture the potentials of all students? Curriculum as understanding leads us to become more aware of possibilities for education.

As we work with teachers, adult educators, administrators, community activists, and curriculum specialists, our paramount purpose is realized when these educators expand their consciousness of their ways of viewing and understanding curriculum as well as their own roles as curriculum workers. Theories, frameworks, and images are the means for us to explore curricular meaning and to imagine how we can change curriculum content and classroom and school structures. This chapter portrays the powerful approaches to conceptualizing curriculum in the past and in contemporary times drawn from the field of curriculum theory that have contributed to our construct of cultures of curriculum.

Multiple Curricula

Perhaps no other discussion of curriculum has grounded our idea of curricular cultures as meaningfully as Elliot Eisner’s (1985) conception of “three curricula that all schools teach.” Eisner’s heuristic allows us to examine curriculum that is:

• Explicit (obviously stated)

• Implicit (not official, often referred to as “hidden”)

• Null (non-existing—the curriculum that schools do not teach)

The explicit curriculum is manifest in publicly stated goals of education, e.g., teaching students American history or health. Explicit curriculum can be found in the school’s presentation of itself to the public, in official curriculum guides, and in academic or behavioral outcomes in courses and lessons.

The implicit curriculum is the learning and interaction that occurs that is not explicitly announced in school programs. Implicit curriculum may be intentionally taught, e.g., a teacher, fearful of confrontation from the very conservative community in which she works, continually tries to teach critical thinking but never announces these goals to parents or students. Implicit curriculum also may be inadvertent, e.g., we may not have realized how our classrooms or schools teach competition as a social value.

The null curriculum deals with what is systematically excluded, neglected, or not considered. Thus, we find null curriculum if we teach history as “the true story” but do not present the perspective of peoples from non-dominant cultures—or we choose as “the greatest literature” only works written by European males. (A caveat to the concept of null curriculum is that not all excluded curricula fall into this category; educators always make choices but what they do not choose is not necessarily null curriculum, e.g., selecting one textbook over another because of preference for an author’s writing style.) The concept of null curriculum is compelling—as a reminder of the choices we made or did not even think about—as we examine our own practice as curriculum workers.

Larry Cuban (1993) also proposes a framework of multiple curricula for curriculum investigation. He suggests that we view curricula in four categories:

• Official curriculum can be found in curriculum guides and conforms with state-mandated assessment.

• Taught curriculum is what individual teachers focus upon and choose to emphasize—often the choices represent teachers’ knowledge, beliefs about how subjects should be taught, assumptions about their students’ needs, and interests in certain subjects.

• Learned curriculum encompasses all that students learn; learned curriculum may be what teachers planned or have not intended, e.g., modeling teachers’ behaviors or what students learn from other students.

• Tested curriculum means the assessments—whether derived from the teacher, the school district, state, or national testing organizations—that represent only part of what is taught or learned.

As does Eisner (1985), Cuban (1993) warns us not to be captivated by curriculum that is symbolic (how the school or state represents itself) but not necessarily indicative of what takes place in classrooms. Cuban explains that we need to consider these multiple versions of curricula if we really care about educational reform; changes in official and tested curricula may be meaningless unless we attend to the taught and learned curricula. The multiple curricula approach to curriculum inquiry reminds us that whenever we speak of curriculum, we must ask, “which curriculum?” We cannot engage in curriculum deliberation without reflecting upon curriculum as many-sided meanings and experiences.

Curriculum as Text

When we understand curriculum as having diverse meanings, we develop lenses to “see” curriculum as multiple layers of phenomena. We might also imagine curriculum as a multitude of discourses. William Pinar, William Reynolds, Patrick Slattery, and Peter Taubman (1995), writing extensively about the historical and contemporary field of curriculum, teach us how to “hear” various curricular voices or to recognize different “languages.”

To understand the contemporary field it is necessary to understand the curriculum field as discourse, as text, and most simply but profoundly, as words and ideas. By discourse we mean a particular discursive practice, or a form of articulation that follows certain rules and which constructs the very object it studies. Any discipline or field of study can be treated as discourse and analyzed as such. To do so requires studying the language of the field. Yes, the curriculum field is about what happens in schools, but in being about schools it employs and is comprised by the language which both reflects and determines what “being about schools” means. (Pinar et al., p. 7)

Conceiving curriculum as text or discourse compels us to listen to and make sense of the words, phrases, and patterns of language that characterize curriculum and to be aware of how this language itself shapes curriculum. We are encouraged to consider not only the ways that people talk about curriculum, but to seek understanding of inherent themes and structures.

These scholars (Pinar et al., 1995) depict curriculum as various discourses or texts:

• Historical

• Political

• Racial

• Gender

• Phenomenological

• Poststructuralist, Deconstructed, Postmodern

• Autobiographical/Biographical

• Aesthetic

• Theological

• Institutionalized

• International

Each discourse has its own premises and foci; each creates a particular reality of phenomena. For instance, aesthetic text represents curriculum as art and artistic experience; it features the teacher (curriculum worker) as artist, the appreciation of curriculum as connoisseurship, and the curriculum as a creative process, e.g., as tempo, dance, or theater. Curriculum as institutionalized text concerns the structure of schools, c...

Table of contents

• STUDIES IN CURRICULUM
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Curriculum Studies
• Part II Curricular Cultures
• About the Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index