Curriculum Knowledge

Curriculum knowledge can be taken to mean a number of things: the subject matter that falls within the curriculum of a school or college, the [Page 219]substantive learning acquired by students upon engaging in a program of study, and the expertise possessed by professionals who specialize in designing, maintaining, or changing curricular programs in educational settings. In this encyclopedia entry, curriculum knowledge refers to none of these meanings, but rather to the kind of knowledge that results from deliberate inquiry into curriculum research questions. It is the product of attempting to gain understanding of quandaries related to curriculum through formal, acceptable knowledge-producing inquiry processes. This kind of inquiry seeks curriculum knowledge on virtually anything that might be relevant to thinking about or making practical decisions on curriculum matters. Curriculum knowledge construed in this fashion intends to be useful in informing curriculum practice.

The practice of curriculum, therefore, becomes the starting point for creating curriculum knowledge and is ultimately the setting in which curriculum knowledge is utilized. What counts as curriculum practice? Curriculum practice refers to all those practical activities necessary to conceiving, justifying, explicating, enacting, and evaluating educational programs. These activities entail making a myriad of practical decisions, ideally coherent across these various processes, to actualize an educational program over a particular span of time in a particular institutional setting for a certain set of students. The practice of curriculum is not an easy undertaking and requires more than guess work, good hunches, trial and error, and merely prudential considerations; it requires knowledge of circumstances, alternatives, effects, and specialized knowledge pertaining to curriculum practice itself—knowledge that can inform these decisions. Consequently, trustworthy curriculum knowledge must be sought by methods of sound curriculum inquiry.

Curriculum practice is a shared responsibility—one that involves many different people: visionaries and policy makers; experts in academic, technical, and practical fields of knowledge; school officials and funders; teachers; pupils; and curriculum-practice professionals, coordinators, and process managers. The need for curriculum knowledge varies considerably depending upon which of these persons is doing what part of the necessary curriculum practice activities.

The burden on those who do curriculum inquiry is great. If they are to undertake to provide the curriculum knowledge needed by all these participants in curriculum practice so that they can make the best decisions possible for their particular settings and circumstances, they need to know what curriculum questions to attempt to answer. If these researchers are located outside the realm of curriculum practice, they must immerse themselves as fully as possible in the practice of curriculum in order to be able to identify the curriculum research questions that need to be examined. Or they must constantly ask participants what questions their activities raise on which they would welcome research to be done. Alternatively, in lieu of relying upon professional researchers to conduct all needed inquiry, local participants can conduct their own inquiries on their own curriculum questions in their own settings. This is becoming quite common and is often referred to as collaborative action research. This method has the advantage of knowing that the results are pertinent for the decision setting where the research is to be used. Findings produced by outside researchers sometimes do not address local needs because of their broader, more general focus and thus require scrutiny for relevance to local needs and circumstances. Still, there is a role for professional researchers to identify and pursue curriculum research questions that potentially could have value for curriculum practitioners in a number of different settings.

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