Curriculum Studies, The Future of: Essay 1

We can think of six specific traditions of analysis that have had and will continue to have an impact on curriculum studies: technical, aesthetic, autobiographical, ethical, political, and historical. The first, technical, is concerned with what works—that is, its primary impulse is to examine the ways in which curricular and pedagogical goals are met. The second, aesthetic, treats curriculum as a construction that is best understood through the lenses of the arts so that it participates in the drama of creating meanings. The third, autobiographical, asks what curricula mean in terms of the actual experience of students, teachers, and others involved in the educational encounter. The fourth, ethical, is deeply concerned with curriculum as a moral encounter. It asks educators to treat others in a manner in which they would agree to be treated, in essence, to do unto others as one would do unto oneself. The fifth, political, is involved in questions of social justice. It is grounded in a clear commitment to equality; to asking about the differential class, race, gender, and other effects of our assumptions, policies, and practices; and to constructing curricula that interrupt dominance. Its guiding questions tend to be, “Whose knowledge is taught? To what effect?” Finally, the sixth tradition, historical, is dedicated to documenting the ways in which each of these other traditions has a significant past, a past that is filled with limits and possibilities.

Indeed, an important part of dealing with the future of curriculum studies is a firm recognition of the varied nature of its past. Many of the questions that are currently on the agenda of curriculum scholars have a long history. Although the theories that guide current research are at times more elegant and nuanced than past work, current and future scholarship becomes much more meaningful if it is connected to the issues and concerns that have guided the field since its inception. Thus, part of our task is the continual restoration and broadening of collective memory and to raise the question of who participated in or was marginalized by these historical processes and events.

Each of these six is and will continue to be crucial. Each serves as a corrective to the others. And each requires increasing levels of qualitative, quantitative, theoretical, and analytic sophistication, as well as a keen sense of the complexities involved in the practical matters of creating curricula in what are deeply complicated and often unequal institutional contexts. Increasing our sophistication and our institutional sensitivity is crucial for the future for a number of reasons.

One of the major dilemmas confronting curriculum studies will continue to be the problem of borrowing. In order to engage in serious and disciplined inquiry into the many issues that confront us, curriculum scholars have turned to other areas of knowledge and experience. Fields as wide-ranging as analytic and continental philosophies, aesthetics, phenomenology, politics, sociology, anthropology, action research, critical theory, critical cultural studies, Marxism, feminist research, postmodernism and poststructuralism, history, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and many other areas have been drawn upon. This fact is important because one of the most important tasks of the curriculum person is to “see the forest as well as the trees.”

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