Stanford University Collective of Curriculum Professors

The College of Education at Stanford University served as a collective for curriculum studies through the influence of Paul Hanna and Fannie Shaftel on social studies curricula from the end of World War II through the 1960s; the substantial scholarship of Elliot Eisner, Decker Walker, and Nel Noddings in the last three decades of the 20th century; and the influence that educational scholars in research on teaching (Nathaniel Gage), educational history (David Tyack and Larry Cuban), educational measurement and evaluation (Lee Cronbach), teacher education (Lee Schulman), and school administration and reform (Linda Darling-Hammond) have provided to curriculum scholars. Numerous other scholars, having studied at Stanford, are significant contributors to curriculum studies.

The College of Education was fashioned by Elwood P. Cubberly, recruited by the president of Stanford, David Starr Jordan. Starr served as a mentor for Cubberly in his early academic career at Indiana University. Established with Cubberly as dean in 1917, the college's initial focus was educational administration. An exception to [Page 813]Cubberly's focus on school leadership was the appointment of Harold Benjamin as associate professor of education and psychology until 1931. Benjamin, a graduate of Stanford, developed his fictional alter-ego “J. Abner Peddiwell” in lectures at Stanford, eventually emerging in print in The Saber-Tooth Curriculum.

With Cubberly's retirement in 1933, Grayson Kefauver recruited Harold Hand and Paul Hanna in 1935 to promote a more progressive orientation to the college. Hand, whose specialization was in secondary education and guidance, left for the University of Illinois after World War II; Hanna became a fixture at Stanford until his retirement. Hanna's early work was in promoting elementary school curricula based on integrative units, combining subjects thematically, particularly in the social studies. Hanna was also editor of a series of magazines for elementary schools, Building America. This periodical emerged from Hanna's work with the Society of Curriculum Study at Teachers College Columbia and was widely adopted in schools across the country, but came under criticism in 1946 when the California Society of the Sons of the American Revolution contended the series was a tool of communists in promoting social studies over classic studies in history and geography. The controversy resulted in reactionary legislation by California lawmakers and the Building America series was target of redbaiting for the next five years. Hanna spent much of the 1940s successfully lobbying the federal government for research grants for Stanford and in the 1950s turned his attention to international projects. His evolution from problem-centered education to a more hierarchical conception of curriculum is reflected in his promotion of a national curriculum center in 1959.

Elliot Eisner achieved his doctorate in education from the University of Chicago and was appointed as associate professor of education and art at Stanford in 1965. Eisner's emphasis on aesthetics and the imagination in teaching and learning are reflected in his approach to curriculum development and evaluation. Critical of the widespread acceptance of instructional behavioral objectives, Eisner suggested predetermined goals are particularly ill-suited when engaged in aesthetic expression where it is often preferred to provide activities that have no prespecified outcome. In the 1970s, Eisner crafted “educational connoisseurship” an enduring model of curriculum inquiry and evaluation employed as an alternative model for validating curriculum research and expanding scholarship to consider portrait and fiction as meaningful forms for insight. Eisner also provided a framework for understanding options in contemporary curriculum thought through development of five distinct orientations to the curriculum: (1) the development of cognitive processes, (2) academic rationalism, (3) personal relevance, (4) social reconstruction and adaptation, and (5) curriculum as technology.

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