Institutionalized Text Perspectives

Institutionalized text perspectives can be understood as an answer to the following question: What does institutionalized text mean and for whom do such meanings count? The answers to this question are highly dependent upon how one defines text. In curriculum studies, constructions of text in general and of institutionalized text in specific most often fall under two overarching categories. On one hand are those scholars such as Suzanne deCastell, Michael W. Apple, and Linda Christian-Smith whose work has focused on critical examinations of textbooks used by teachers and students in classrooms. On the other are scholars such as William F. Pinar, Willam Reynolds, Patrick Slattery, and Peter Taubman's Understanding Curriculum, a work that is organized according to how curriculum scholars read sociocultural interactions, tendencies, and implicit norms and values as text. However, whether institutionalized text is understood as (a) the textbooks that are written and approved by institutions or (b) the ways in which sociocultural precepts—race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and perceived ability, for example—can be critically examined in a fashion similar to a written text, the tendency in curriculum studies is the careful, [Page 477]discerning examination of how, for whom, and to what possible ends such texts are constructed.

Although there are other possible constructions of institutionalization that fall under the umbrella of curriculum studies, use of the term institutionalized in the field of curriculum more often refers to the scholar's work that ascribes to the following characteristics. This work critically examines the role of schools in relation to society; the ways that dominant norms and values inform schools, classrooms, teachers, and students; how schools as institutions of the state promulgate these views; and the ideas and ideals of those in power of a given nation-state.

In light of the above understandings, this entry is organized into two overarching halves. The first half addresses institutionalized text perspectives as they relate to the written word, focusing on textbooks, their content, and usage. The second considers institutionalized text as the ways in which scholars have critically explored the relationships between school actors and the institutionalizing nature of schooling. Although institutionalism in curriculum studies most often refers to social reproduction, enforcement, and the legitimization of sociocultural norms and values, both sections address questions of text according to this perspective.