Curriculum Studies Handbook - The Next Moment

Erik Malewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135857653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What comes after the reconceptualization of curriculum studies? What is the contribution of the next wave of curriculum scholars? Comprehensive and on the cutting edge, this Handbook speaks to these questions and extends the conversation on present and future directions in curriculum studies through the work of twenty-four newer scholars who explore, each in their own unique ways, the present moment in curriculum studies. To contextualize the work of this up-and-coming generation, each chapter is paired with a shorter response by a well-known scholar in the field, provoking an intra-/inter-generational exchange that illuminates both historical trajectories and upcoming moments. From theorizing at the crossroads of feminist thought and post-colonialism to new perspectives that include critical race, currere, queer southern studies, Black feminist cultural analysis, post-structural policy studies, spiritual ecology, and East-West international philosophies, present and future directions in the U.S. American field are revealed.

1 Introduction
Proliferating Curriculum

Erik Malewski

For Lyotard, the aim of philosophy is not to resolve differends but rather to detect (a cognitive task) and bear witness to them (an ethical obligation) this is precisely what the millennial generation of curriculum works may do. (Sears & Marshall, 2000, p. 210)

An interpretation does what it says. It may pretend to simply state, show, and inform, but it actually produces. It is already performative in a way…. The political vigilance that this calls for on our part obviously consists in organizing a critical examination of all the mechanisms that hold out the appearance of saying the event when they are in fact making it, interpreting and producing it. (Derrida, quoted in Mitchell & Davison, 2007, p. 229)

Our Inheritance and the Conditions of Possibility

Huebner, in his 1976 essay, “The Moribund Curriculum Field: Its Wake and Our Work” made an incisive, if less frequently referenced intervention into the debates over the state of the curriculum field. He asserted, about what was termed the field’s dying status,

The curriculum field no longer serves to unify us. The dispersing forces are too great, the attraction of new associations and the possibilities of new households too compelling. The people need our diverse capabilities; but if our own energies continue to be applied to holding ourselves together, we will not have the energies left to serve them. If the diverse interests and collectivities that have been gathering over the past seventy years are cleared away, we might be able to see the original conception of curriculum and to do and describe our work more effectively. (p. 155)

He then went on to claim, “our problem is to explore the nature of the course of study—the content—and to eliminate the interests which do not bear directly upon this content” (p. 156).

Of course, the assumptions that underwrite this take on the status of curriculum studies—and others like it—have in the past and continue in the present to incite debate. There might be reasons to contest the empirical investments in some of Huebner’s work, for example. Or, one might dispute the notion that unification is a necessary precondition for effectively examining courses of study. One might even contest his notion that an original conception of curriculum exists and therefore might be discovered by clearing away other seemingly nonrelevant interests. One might also challenge Huebner’s emphasis on synthesis and transcendence over multiplicity and difference. Attributable to the effect postdiscourses have had on the field, there is much in this statement that contemporary curriculum scholars might find problematic. Yet—to be certain—to a curriculum scholar who emphasizes evolving spirituality, self-definition, and the critical examination of language and discourse—and asserted in no uncertain terms that relying upon developmental and instrumental concepts would not get either the field or schooling where it needed to go—Huebner’s scholarship might function as a comforting text for the present day field. His body of work attests to the belief that curriculum’s objects and concepts should not—indeed cannot—function to separate technique from politics, artistry, and temporality, to name only a few domains within the curriculum field to which he made a contribution. Huebner’s call to examine democratic ideology, media representations, and issues of power and access might seem prophetic as we look back at the first signs of reconceptualization, an indicator of a field that was yet to come.

To read both with and against Huebner, then, might be contradictory and therefore an unreasonable thing to do. Why, someone might ask, read such work as profoundly central to the contemporary field and also as both limited and limiting? What is the purpose in starting off an introduction in such a way? Part of the argument I offer in this introduction is that in order to have complicated conversations about “next moments” in curriculum studies we must begin to illustrate how historical works, such as Huebner’s, give us the concepts and objects that enable dialogue while at the same time those objects and concepts give us the very horizon of intelligibility. To do otherwise, to simply read in concert as a way to honor the past or in dissent as a way to rebel against the work of a previous generation, one subscribes to a quite dangerous dogmatism; in either celebration or denigration there is the very refusal to work with difference. Derrida describes this denial as the inability to see the relationship between mechanical repeatability and irreplaceable singularity as neither a relation of homogeneity or externality (Derrida, 1978; see also Gasché, 1994; Wood & Bernasconi, 1988). That is, an inability to see a relation from past to present in which the elements of each are internal to one another and yet remain heterogeneous. That said, let me acknowledge Huebner’s contribution to curriculum studies and the conditions that made possible reconceptualization and, the focus of this text, explorations of post-reconceptualization. His work represents a lifetime commitment to developing political, theological, and phenomenological discourses within the curriculum field, focused not just on the academy, but also on the relationship between curriculum theory and school contexts, as well as the elements of the world that shape educational experiences. Also, it is important to acknowledge, as frequent references in the chapters included here attest, that these pages aimed at getting some sort of grasp on post-reconceptualization owe a great deal to William Pinar’s intellect, guidance, foresight, courage, and, above all, his example, much more than they might reveal, as the same should be said for those scholars associated with the reconceptualization movement, ones that make up the editorial board, response essay writers, and arguably select chapters of this collection.

Recognizing that, and that unlike Schwab who focused much of his career on scientific principles, Huebner was working on concepts and metaphors that became more central to a field indebted to the arts and humanities (see Pinar 1999, 2008), the first point that should be taken away from Huebner’s contributions to the field is that he made the case for understanding what might be termed postprogressive era politics of curriculum studies, framed not as merely a historical but also an epistemological moment. Content development and instructional strategies were no longer the primary questions curriculum scholars had to address with this changed state of affairs, this shift in outlooks in the field, questions of understanding subsumed greater urgency. The challenge before the field, therefore, was not to employ the “conceptual or empirical in the sense social scientists typically employ them” (Pinar, 1978) or “prescriptive evaluation instruments with an emphasis on curriculum as an object or a noun” (Slattery, 1997) but to focus upon “[t]he intellectual labor of understanding” whereby through “self-reflexive and dialogic labor one can contribute to the field’s intellectual advancement and to one’s own” (Pinar, 2007, p. xii). The most important element of this movement, its aim, would be the study of “the subjective experience of history and society, the inextricable relationships among which structural educational experience” (Pinar, 2004, p. 25).

Others besides Huebner are cited at the beginning of this introduction because he, the other contributors to this book, and I have been inspired by—one might say enamored with the study of educational experiences—although not from a dogmatic position but rather one inspired by a series of thinkers, ones that range from Heidegger and Foucault to hooks and Sedgwick. Also, it is not the aim here, by provoking the name of one of the less often referenced and yet central figures to reconceptualization, to imply that what follows, while an intellectual endeavor, signals a second reconceptualization, or, to be more specific, a contemporary redirection of the field with the qualities of the reconceptualization movement that occurred in the 1970s. Like Huebner, the concern of the contemporary field continues to involve a rejection (reconfiguration?) of traditional curriculum development in favor of the pursuit of politically inspired scholarship with the capacity to meet the promise of a democracy yet to come, one that engenders imagination, deliberation, and creativity. And also, it focuses upon curriculum-in-the-making, a continuous process of reflexivity, rather than what Schubert (1992) describes as “the necessity of producing theory, which carries a more brittle and dusty image of something finished and on a shelf” (p. 236). Unlike Huebner, the lines between development and understanding in the present day field are a lot less clear. Accordingly, this collection is an intervention in that it seeks to explicitly intervene within academic debates, while contemporary issues in education evidently influence the scholarship included here, and seeks to learn from and influence those issues. In the same vein, it is important to differentiate between interventionist academic work and activist work, a differentiation that became more clear after the breakdown at the 2006 Purdue conference (where the idea for this collection originated) over what scholarly efforts and intellectual practices were appropriate to the field.¹ This collection without a doubt represents a shift in knowledge production in the curriculum field but forgoes what has become an accepted belief in arenas such as cultural studies and critical pedagogy that interventionist scholarship is also activist, collapsing an important distinction between those who produce and circulate knowledge on a subject and those who often take great risks, sometimes involving their livelihood and, even more important, their lives.

Preferring a more modest conception, I begin this edited collection by invoking the name of Huebner and others, such as Pinar, to acknowledge a certain inheritance, a field passing through the hands of generations where each generation is indebted to the forbearers whose efforts to some extent set the conditions for their contributions. To state it simply, this collection would not be possible without the work of innumerable scholars both within and outside curriculum studies. But this begs the question, with the varied scholarship that makes up the history of the field, why choose this particular essay of Huebner’s? “The Moribund Curriculum: Its Wake and Our Work” is a relevant essay, or accomplice for establishing through-lines that draw these divergent essays into a collective intervention because, for a start, it too is interventionist and situated between the diagnosis (moribund) and the cure (a shift in the field). Second, and most important when it comes to “next moments” in the curriculum field, Huebner’s response to a preoccupation (obsession?) with questions of a technical nature, ones that have confused quick fixes and educational slogans with authentic efforts to change the educational world, is to call for theoretical reflection infused with political engagement and pedagogical work in the field and in schools. Huebner was teaching us that curriculum theorizing must lead to changes in the ways that our intellectual practices are conceptualized and actualized to be considered knowledge of most worth; next moments must focus on creating a more just and equitable world by way of offering alternative language and readings to those focused on developmentalism and technique. Otherwise, he aptly warns us, we risk being “school people…the silent majority who embrace conservatism” (Huebner, 1999, p. 239).

Key to this edited collection, as the scholarship included here shapes the conditions of possibility for present and future scholarship, just as Huebner’s does for this collection, what he believes the field needs is not simply a reactionary in the streets activism but theory with the capacity to incite reflection alongside pedagogical and political engagement. To paraphrase Pinar’s reading of Huebner’s contributions to curriculum studies, the strength of Huebner’s theoretical formations is that he refuses to separate educational change from theory, without making the all too common error in the curriculum field of conflating the two (Pinar, 1999). What Huebner characterized as exhausted scholarship that neglected all but the developmental and technical aspects of curriculum (Huebner emphasized, for example, aesthetic language, curriculum history, and praxis as three unique but interrelated areas where curriculum theorists might conduct their work) called for interrogating the conditions that made such a narrow outlook possible and the careful crafting of alternative readings and understandings of the world. Pinar and others of the reconceptualist movement replied; new concepts were offered as a response.

This is exactly the claim being offered here too. Post-reconceptualization in all its as of yet indeterminability will arise from what Pinar and others of the reconceptualist movement have offered, how it shapes and is shaped by those who inherit the field, and also how it is imagined and reimagined in unforeseen ways to produce a different state, a post-reconceptual state. Or, to offer a slightly different viewpoint, that not just the next political moment confronting school curriculum, in the form of questions over what content will and will not be taught, but the next disciplinary or epistemological moment (and what that will bring to bear upon teaching, learning, and studying inside as well as outside schools)—which is referred to here as post-reconceptualization—requires careful attention be paid to theoretical shifts in the field. And, most importantly, that these shifts be read thematically as well as singularly, but not taken lightly or glossed over as regurgitations of existing theories or theories imported unchanged from other fields. As Grumet so aptly reminds us in her response essay to chapter 19 in this collection, some questions might remain the same across generations while the responses of each generation are unique. For doubled readings to occur—those that neglect neither through-lines nor particularities—epistemological and disciplinary next moments will be of paramount importance. Similarly, readers of post-reconceptualization must make discourse on curriculum account for its complicity in naturalizing what are ultimately developmental and technical understandings of contemporary and future educational moments, as well as naturalizing conventional readings of our present context and the implausibility (and impracticality) of imagining a different future.

Our work does not stop here, however. It must also provide insight into the historical conditions that allowed for the objects and concepts that have come to matter so much to the contemporary field and the practice of curriculum (see Baker, Brandon, and Winfield, this collection). In other words, even as the state of public education seems particularly bleak after 8 years of the Bush administration; the dismantling of whatever slight gains in racial equality have been allowed by affirmative action; and national education policies, such as Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind, ones that make it clear that the educational experiences of the public do not matter, the state of curriculum is not merely a matter of politics, or one to be managed exclusively through a reconfiguration of institutional discourses (It should be noted, however, as evidenced by the establishment of accreditation and professional standards by the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and the Commission on the Status of Curriculum Studies, there is a return to institutional discourses in ways that should be of benefit to the field). Questions over studying, teaching, and learning, as well as understanding, reading, and intervening, are profoundly ontological, epistemological, and political. As I argue in my contribution to the tripartite epilogue at the conclusion of this collection, after reading (and rereading) all the chapters and essays that constitute this text, curriculum demands, perhaps with even more urgency, the production and circulation of new concepts. Huebner foreshadowed such claims with his assertion that the field needs “two threads of investigation.” The first, he teaches us, involves identifying the knowledge that might constitute a course of study. The second, he shares with his readers, requires mechanisms that make that knowledge present to the public (Huebner, 1976, p. 160). As this collection illustrates, debates over the relationship between theory and practice, Marxism and existentialism, and principles and proliferation are being interwoven, extended across multiple registers, and compelled along various lines of discourse (academic language, lay language, and so on), so as to reach variously situated publics and intellectuals. This is the burden (I hope, one that is welcomed) facing the post-reconceptualization generation(s), those who must work the ruins left by the postdiscourses into what Lather (2001), as one of the field’s key poststructural scholars, terms “a fruitful site” (p. 200), one that can make use of “the concept of doubled practices” (p. 199).

What, then, is meant by post-reconceptualization? In some sense, the term is misleading. While it certainly envelops the postdiscourses and the uncertainty they have brought to bear upon the field in terms of transparency of language, self-presence, and tendencies toward dominance in spite of libratory intentions, this ambivalence is not the interpretive whole of an increasingly complex and interdisciplinary field. It has also been used to refer to a generational shift among scholars working in the field (Malewski, 2006; Morris, 2005); a new phase in curriculum theorizing (Wright, 2005); the move to see a lack of definition and proliferation not as balkanization but as a healthy state (Lather, this collection); the pursuit of translations across difference (Wang, this collection); and the reconceptualization of existing theories of curriculum and pedagogy (Appelbaum, in press). Therefore, by deploying post-reconceptualization, I want to signal less a field at a particular juncture or in a particular state than a site of debate, of contention and struggle. Displacing a paradigmatic take that the “post” indicates a break, the “post” in post-reconceptualization signifies scholarship that is trying to come to terms with reconceptualization through counterdiscourses that challenge concepts and objects that have come to matter so much to the field and the field of practice, and coadunate-discourses that so intermingled “provoke existing terminology into doing new work” (Rolleston, 1996).

The reading practices so evident in this collection—and therefore associated with post-reconceptualization—have been made possible by way of larger struggles with empiricism and its grounding in the empirical. That is, post-reconceptualization is not the equivalent of postempiricism but becomes possible out of the condition it makes— struggles not so much with the idea of structure itself but instead an intellectual practice that involves confronting, attempting to displace, and also admitting complicity with empiricism. As Derrida (1978) teaches us, in his now infamous response to Lévi-Strauss, the system-dream of philosophy could not deliver on its promise of a break with empiricism. Instead, he refers to structuralism’s failure as “the empirical endeavor of either a subject or a finite richness which it can never master” (p. 289). So within curriculum studies postempiricism becomes a method for critical persuasion at the site of post-reconceptualization (not one that begins with post-reconceptualization, if such a demarcation is even possible, but one that is put to work with increasing frequency in both conventional and innovative ways) that assumes the following: that reading practices and textual analyses are a point of departure toward new and different understandings. Empiricism, of course, assumes that language is transparent, that it has the capacity to function efficiently and neutrally as a vehicle for representation and can therefore capture the real, the social, the event. Those operating under empiricism assume what Fustel de Coulanges (cited in Barthes, 1989, p. 132) termed the chastity of history, that an objective persona can be adopted by the utter so that the referent might speak all on it own. Via the empiricist lens, language is a vehicle and has no signatory function of its own. Even with attempts to account for the effects of postdiscourses, as seems to be the trend in contemporary educational research, what has been termed the “interpretive” turn in the social sciences, empiricism remains and the object under study is assumed transparent, the “real,” on the other side of language, discourse, and the play of signification, waiting to be brought into understanding. Postempiricism, at least as it informs the site of debate over post-reconceptualization, does not assume the subject as autonomous or the complete source for agency; it does assume object as subject and subject as object. In short, the process of reading so evident in the chapters and response essays that makes up this collection works toward the discomposition of the divide between the two.

You might question, what is the relationship between Huebner’s assertions, empiricism, and next moments in the field of curriculum studies? What do debates in literary and social science circles have to do with educational research in general and curriculum studies in particular? To offer a response, a series of other questions might illuminate for the reader what is at stake in terms of what postempiricism makes possible within post-reconceptualization: what is this object, this concept, this thing called curriculum in the first place? How might the features of this object be characterized? Why? How have educators come to know this object? This concept? How has the “state” of this object or concept changed over time? Has it changed? Do educators claim to see it, read about it, hear about it? In what contexts? Do educators find what they learned intelligible? What would have made what they learned more or less recognizable? In an interdisciplinary field, such as curriculum studies, do educators give consideration to how different clusters of theorizing within the field might produce and promulgate curriculum differently? That those who work in autobiography might see ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Proliferating Curriculum
• Part I: Openness, Otherness, and the State of Things
• Part II: Reconfiguring the Canon
• Part III: Technology, Nature, and the Body
• Part IV: Embodiment, Relationality, and Public Pedagogy
• Part V: Place, Place–Making, and Schooling
• Part VI: Cross–Cultural International Perspectives
• Part VII: The Creativity of an Intellectual Curriculum
• Part VIII: Self, Subjectivity, and Subject Position
• Part IX: An Unusual Epilogue: A Tripartite Reading on Next Moments in the Field
• About the Contributors