Curriculum Studies, The Future of: Essay 4

The future of curriculum studies, a distinctive specialization within the academic field of education, is uncertain. This uncertainty is due to external influences and related internal disruptions. Because school reform focuses on improvement in students' scores on standardized examinations, curriculum has become relegated to a means to an end. Forty years of school reform in the United States have reshaped U.S. curriculum studies: first, by removing its main professional preoccupation—curriculum development—and then by reducing the significance of the curriculum itself—and by implication, the significance of its study—in accountability schemes.

Given these circumstances external to the field, it is unsurprising that shifts internal to the field have been dramatic in nature. That loss of curriculum development as primary domain of labor precipitated nothing less than a paradigm shift during the 1970s, forcing the field to shift its work and its identity from curriculum development to understanding curriculum. Having rejected the bureaucratic instrumentalism of the curriculum development period (informed by Tyler's Rationale), the field moved toward theory, employing concepts from social theory, phenomenology, poststructural-ism, and feminist and critical race theory. These scholarly efforts to understand curriculum did not retain their distinctive identities, but mixed and blended with each other, producing, in many instances, hybrid theory characteristic of cross-fertilization. In contrast to this tendency, efforts to understand curriculum in multicultural terms broke into separate identity-based streams of scholarship: indigenous education, Black studies, and queer theory. In recent years, identity politics has become not only more separatist, but also more shrill, attacking scholarship that does not privilege identity as central in curriculum considerations.

At the same time, a small group of curriculum studies specialists—akin to counter-reformationists during Europe's 16th century—proceeded as if the paradigm shift did not occur, extolling the work of the key figure of the first paradigmatic moment—Ralph Tyler—and employing schemes as if they had not been discredited. Other counter-reformationists [Page 243]focus nostalgically on earlier periods when school reform was under the jurisdiction not of politicians and businessmen (as recent reform has been), but driven by education professors and schoolteachers, as the Eight Year Study had been.

Finally, the complexity of theory and the continuing controversy concerning the 1970s paradigm shift—the reconceptualization—from a primarily programmatic field focused on curriculum development to an intellectually provocative interdisciplinary field focused on understanding, curriculum appears to have persuaded many to flee history and theory into ethnography. Apparently empirical, ethnography provides opportunities to study what teachers and students think and experience, functioning for some as opportunities for resistance to politician-driven school reform. At the same time, to the extent that it is atheoretical and ahistorical, ethnography functions as an anti-intellectual effort to bypass persisting controversies in the field regarding its present character and future.

One such controversy concerns the relationship between theory and practice, a controversy focused on the distance between university-based scholarship and teaching practices in schools. Given politicians' relocation of curriculum development away from curriculum professors and schoolteachers to arts-and-sciences scholars and now private corporations, it is unsurprising that the distance between university-based scholarship and school practices has increased. Because it claims to describe what occurs in schools, ethnography provides a means of bridging the divide between theory and practice. Often, however, ethnographic studies occlude theory by reproducing what is practiced, thereby contributing little to the intellectual advancement of the field.

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