Post-Reconceptualization

Post-reconceptualization raises questions about the state of the field of curriculum studies after the reconceptualization movement of the 1970s. More specific, the term gained significance after a 2006 conference entitled “Articulating the (Present) Next Moments in Curriculum Studies: The Post-Reconceptualization Generation(s),” which focused on exploring contemporary scholarship within the field. What has become evident both at this conference and in journal articles and essays where the term post-reconceptualization is used is that although the reconceptualization movement has passedand what remains are debates about its significancepost-reconceptualization is itself a site of debate and contestation because it is still under formation. Accordingly, the remainder of this entry is focused on various perspectives that have been developed thus far to describe post-reconceptualization.

The first perspective is focused on a generational change and in the scholars who make up the field and how events of a particular time period shape scholarly outlooks. Here, what has been written about involves the challenges that mark the reconceptualization and post-reconceptualization movements and scholars' reactions to them. During the initial reconceptualization of curriculum studies, scholars were reacting to the governmental intrusion of the 1950s and 1960s into curriculum issues under the rationale of economic competitiveness and national security. Citing Sputnik and the need to advance technology and science to compete with the former Soviet Union, policy makers became more central than curriculum scholars to conceptualizing school content. Scholars of the reconceptualization movement challenged their lessening authority in regards to school curriculum matters as well as the general institutional and bureaucratic nature of curriculum thought. During this post-reconceptualization moment, a new generation of curriculum scholars reacts to the continued imposition of government within curriculum matters, particularly with the No Child Left Behind Act, but with a more robust theoretical tradition from which to draw in conducting inquiry and analysis, due in no small part to the reconceptualization movement. Regarding this first perspective, post-reconceptualization has to do with the challenges that confront a new generation involving current events and available theories and their reactions to them.

The second perspective is attentive to a new phase in curriculum theorizing. Here, what has become evident is that the post-reconceptualization generation is producing scholarship in new and unforeseen ways. Some scholars are drawing together various discourses evident in the recon-ceptualization movement to craft their own hybrid orientations. This includes holding together seemingly incompatible ideas, such as those borrowed from queer theory and personal narrative or critical race theory and autobiography. Other scholars are continuing the tradition of importing theories and ideas from other fields to complicate the nature of curriculum scholarship. Some of these other bodies include critical geography, existential philosophy, and cultural studies. Still other scholars focus on reconfiguring existing curricular concepts to shed new light on familiar topics. Some of these reconfigurations include a shift in focus from poverty to privilege and reconfiguring notions of space so as not to signify emptiness but places of relations and proximities. A few scholars are taking the ideas and concepts of the reconceptualization movement as a paradigm shift and exporting them to other fields to incite an intellectual reorientation. The disciplines of export in this process include math and art education. A select group has also concentrated on understudied and unstudied histories within the curriculum field. Here the focus is on rereading practices that shed new light on historical figures and concepts that have become important to the field. Lastly, some continue to attend to state of the field questions, but do so with a focus on multiplicity and proliferation rather than reduction to key principles and centers of curriculum scholarship.

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