Curriculum Studies in Relation to the Field of Educational Foundations

If one were to consider the intellectual genealogy of curriculum studies and social foundations of education, one could assert that they had many common ancestors. Both are in part descendents of politically and socially progressive early 20th-century thinkers and social reformers who were responding to the social, economic, and cultural contexts of the times. And finally both emerged from a strong, optimistic, and widely held belief that education could make the world better for a wider group of people. Although there was and continues to be a vibrant common area of overlap, the fields also evolved into separate entities.

The identity of social foundations of education has been characterized by a plurality since its birth. On the one hand, there were the cross-disciplinarians who were concerned with studying and writing about education for the purposes of bringing about social, cultural, and economic changes that would benefit the masses. There was and continues to be an equally strong strand comprised of scholars located firmly within the disciplines of history of education, comparative education, sociology of education, and philosophy of education. At its inception, educational psychology was also considered a part of educational foundations, but it eventually separated into its own field.

One of the major differences between social foundations and curriculum studies is related to the scope of the research agenda of each field. The area of social foundation is in part focused on study of the relationship between society and education. Part of this could overlap with curriculum studies in the sense that the curriculum broadly [Page 256]defined could have great impact on the culture and politics of the society that it serves. The relationship between schools and society is reciprocal—that is, society also influences education. This influence can be seen recently in the emergence of the No Child Left Behind legislation, the increased use of standardized testing, and the political context since the 1990s. Thus social foundations is focused on the social and cultural contexts of education and on the impact of education on social and cultural forms.

Curriculum studies could be a component of both of these issues, but social foundations research scope is much broader. For example social foundations research could encompass the history of high schools in the Southwest without touching on cur-ricular issues. In fact, there are a variety of social foundations topics that do not contain the study of curriculum. One could, for example, study the relationship between 4-year universities and quality of life in the country of Uganda. This research would be in the social foundations area of comparative education.

The research in the area of social foundations could be either quantitative or qualitative or interpretive, whereas research in the area of curriculum studies tends to be qualitative, interpretive, or autobiographical. There is a strand within the field of social foundations that is well connected with the area of curriculum studies. George Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order? written in the 1930s, was characteristic of the optimism that permeated particular strands of the teacher education movement in the 1940s, which were pioneers of both fields and began to chart a path for progressive educators seeking to devote their professional energies to making the world a better place for more people. It was at that point at Teachers College that the Foundations Idea was started by a handful of scholars including those mentioned above who were intent on utilizing their positions as professional educators to bring about a world that was more humane, and more comfortable for the masses of the people who were living lives of economic and cultural marginalization. In a recollection of the times, R. F. Butts, one of the early directors of the Social Foundations Program at Teachers College, asserted that the one thing they all had in common was that they were for the underdog, they were international, and they wanted to change the world. Later, the group would be strengthened by the emergence of Maxine Greene, also at Teachers College, who was to become greatly important to both the areas of curriculum studies and to social foundations of education.

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