Reconceptualization

The concept of “reconceptualization” refers to a paradigm shift during the 1970s in the academic field of U.S. curriculum studies. This cataclysmic event occurred after the field's crisis at the end of the 1960s when, it became clear, curriculum development was no longer its primary province. The field was reconceptualized from a largely bureaucratic and procedural field to a theoretically sophisticated field devoted to understanding curriculum. This paradigm shift reflected both changed circumstances external to the field and intellectual developments internal to the field. As a consequence, not only the professional identity of curriculum studies scholars changed, but the research they conducted, the character of the courses they taught, and the very concepts scholars employed to speak about curriculum changed dramatically and in a relatively short period of time.

By the late 1960s, it is clear that the field was in crisis. The Tyler Rationale had reached the end of its intellectual legitimacy, partly for conceptual reasons, and partly for historical ones. Critics of the rationale pointed to its technicismthat is, its emphasis upon procedure to the exclusion of ethics, and so onand its political naiveté, as if procedure could resolve ideological differences. Historically, the field had been bypassed during the Kennedy administration's national curriculum reform movement of the 1960s. That was a blow not only to the prestige of the traditional field, as it co-opted the primary professional preoccupation of curriculum professors from the time of the field's inception earlier in the century. That blow, coupled with declining student enrollments in curriculum courses, politically ascendant departments of educational administration and educational psychology, the replacement of retiring curriculum generalists with subject matter specialists (such as science educators), and the paradigmatic instability [Page 736]within the field itself (i.e., dissatisfaction over the Tyler Rationale) combined to send the field into crisis. Internally, the scholarship of James B. Macdonald and Dwayne E. Huebner laid the ground for the reconceptualization.

Historical events prompted the reconceptualization of the field in another way. The worldwide student revolt of the late 1960s, in the United States linked especially to the antiwar and the civil rights movements, reached beyond even those profound issues to challenge conventional ideas of American culture generally. In addition to political and racial dissent, the 1960s gave rise to the so-called counterculture, to notions of cultural revolution, enacted perhaps most seriously in the People's Republic of China under the leadership of Mao Zedong. In the United States, “heightened consciousness”which included the practice of Eastern religionsreflected a shift in ideological struggle from conventional street politics to the domains of culture. Nearly every academic discipline associated with the social sciences, humanities, and the arts underwent self-critique and profound change. The curriculum field would be no exception.

Before the reconceptualization of the field, the concept of curriculum had been understood as the equivalent to what the school district office required teachers to teach, or what the state education department (or, in Canada, ministries of education) published in scope and sequence guides, or, for nonspecialists, simply the syllabus. After the reconceptualization, the concept of curriculum still conveyed those literal and institutional meanings, but it was by no means limited to them and was understood as not only institutional, but, as well, a highly symbolic concept. Now broadly understood, curriculum is what older generations choose to tell (and what they decide to censor) younger generations. So understood, curriculum is understood as historical, political, racial, gendered, phe-nomenological, autobiographical, aesthetic, theological, and international. These became the central categories of research and scholarship that emerged in the post-Reconceptualization period (19801995).

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