Curriculum Studies: The Reconceptualization

In preparation for the upcoming AAACS conference in New York (March 21-24, 2008), on a daily basis I will read and respond to excerpts from Curriculum Studies: The Reconceptualization as a meditative practice of currere.

"Curriculum theory and theorizing," Macdonald (1971/2000) tells us, "may be characterized as being in a rather formative condition, for essentially there are no generally accepted clear-cut criteria to distinguish curriculum theory and theorizing from other forms of writing in education" (p.5). Last year I was hired as a tenure track Curriculum Theory professor at the University of Ottawa. Over the course of this past year, and perhaps even longer, if we date a coursing of my studies back to the Curriculum Theory Project at Louisiana State University with Bill Pinar, Petra Munro Hendry, Claudia Eppert, Bill Doll, and Denise Egéa-Kuehne, I have been trying to situate my thinking, educational experiences, in relation to the following question (among many others): What is Curriculum Theory (for me)? Perhaps, we can push this question a little further and ask What is Curriculum Theory in Canada? What/where/who is part of the field that might help one answer this particular situated question. During the 1970s in the United States, Macdonald (1971/2000) explains, that there were three major camps of theorizers:

1. One group (by far the largest) sees the theory as a guiding framework for applied curriculum development and research and as a tool for evaluation of curriculum development.

2. A second "camp" of ofttime younger (and far fewer) theorizers is committed to a more conventional concept of scientific theory. This groups has attempted to identify and describe the variables and their relationship in curriculum.

3. A third group of individuals look upon the task of theorizing as a creative intellectual task which they maintain should be neither used as a basis for prescription or as an empirically testable set of principles and relationships. The purpose of these persons is to develop and criticize conceptual schema in the hope that new ways of talking about curriculum, which may in the future be far more fruitful than present orientations, will be forthcoming. (pp. 5-6)

Can we trace former graduates students (now professors), their intellectual genealogies, back to these groups? Can I?

until tomorrow.....

Continuing from yesterday.

Returning to his essay entitled Curriculum Theory:

“A further interesting and sometimes complicating factor,” Macdonald (1971/2000) tells us, “is that individuals who theorize [such as myself, as well as others] may well operate in all three realms upon different occasions as specific professional pressures and tasks appear” (p. 6). Furthermore, Macdonald asks us to carefully consider scholars intents, when assessing the works of those who have gone before us. Yet how does the next generation of curriculum theorizers, such as myself, read and study their theoretical works in order to complicate our understandings of their respective intents? Before responding to this specific question, Macdonald first turns our attention to the historical work of Huebner. “Curriculum theory,” Macdonald suggests [now drawing on the writings of Huebner, specifically his essay entitled The Task of the Curriculum Theorist], “can be categorized in terms of the various uses of language by theorists” (p. 6). Huebner calls our attention to six possible kinds of language used (at least at that moment in time):

1. Descriptive
2. Explanatory
3. Controlling
4. Legitimizing
5. Prescriptive
6. Affiliative

An important part of reading and studying such curricular theorizing, Macdonald warns us, is to situate these six kinds of curricular language in relation to the sociopolitical and historical contexts from which they emerged. Since the 1970s have curriculum theorists gone beyond these six linguistic curricular categories? Is curriculum theory, its field, still a discursive field? How might such language help us to understand the intents of the authors included within Curriculum Studies: The Reconceptualization?