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Curriculum Theory

U.S. curriculum theory is the interdisciplinary study of curriculum in its historical, political, racial, gendered, postmodern, autobiographical, religious, and international dimensions. The contemporary field is structured by three main historical moments. The first was the field's inauguration and paradigmatic stabilization as curriculum development (1918–1969). The second was the field's reconceptualization, first occurring from 1969 to 1980 with the transition from curriculum development to curriculum studies and continuing from 1980 to 2000 as the interdisciplinary academic field paradigmatically organized around understanding curriculum. Most recently, the U.S. field is undergoing a process of internationalization, beginning in 2000.

Curriculum Development

The culminating event of the first paradigmatic moment was the appearance, in 1949, of what has been termed the bible of curriculum development: Ralph W. Tyler's Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. This thin book—it began as the syllabus for Tyler's course on curriculum taught during the 1930s and 1940s at the University of Chicago—is organized around four questions that, he thought, should guide curriculum development: (1) What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? (2) What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? (3) How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? (4) How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained? Within the university-based academic field of curriculum studies, however, criticism of the Tyler Rationale appeared, eventually became voluminous, and finally, became decisive, in spite of ongoing efforts to rescue it. Despite its intellectual fate within U.S. curriculum theory, bureaucratic versions of Tyler's protocol have remained in wide circulation in U.S. public schools. What is distinctive—for many critics lamentable—about Tyler's Rationale is that it links objectives to evaluation, ensuring that teaching is relegated to a form of implementation, the success of which is likely measured quantitatively. In Tyler's scheme lies the rationale for contemporary schemes of accountability of standardized examination. Before the 1960s and the events triggered by Sputnik and antiwar and civil rights protests, the Tyler Rationale was extended, but not challenged.

The Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I on October 4, 1957. The world's first artificial satellite provoked new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. It marked the start of the United States versus the USSR. space race. In the aftermath of Sputnik, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy made public education a major issue in the 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon. After Kennedy's election, his administration initiated a national curriculum reform movement, designed to transfer sophisticated disciplinary knowledge in the elite universities to the public schools. Toward this end, curriculum professors and schoolteachers were passed by; disciplinary specialists led curriculum development initiatives. A cognitive psychologist—Jerome Bruner—and a geneticist—Joseph J. Schwab—became the designated architects of reform-minded curriculum theory.

Reconceptualization and Contemporary Curriculum Theory

With its traditional raison d'être—curriculum development—hijacked by politicians and their academic allies, curriculum theory went into crisis, resulting in a paradigm shift. Bureaucratized curriculum development—associated with the Tyler protocol—was replaced by an interdisciplinary academic effort to understand curriculum: historically, politically, racially, autobiographically–biographically, aesthetically, theologically, institutionally, and internationally, as well as in terms of gender, phenomenology, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. In the reconceptualized field, there were obvious links to earlier phrases: theological curriculum studies, for instance, can be linked to John Dewey's articulation of a common faith and political curriculum theory recalled the earlier interests of the social reconstructionists. Reconceptualized theological curriculum theory emphasized Latin American liberation theology rather than U.S. traditions, however, and reconceptualized political theory was avowedly neo-Marxist in orientation. And both sectors of scholarship addressed issues of understanding curriculum rather than directing reform efforts in the schools. Due to the differences, the field became unrecognizable to many scholars who had come of intellectual age during the first paradigm.

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