Stenhouse, Lawrence

The conceptualization of “curriculum as a means to an end” underlying current educational practices including the use of standards and authentic assessment can be traced to the work and theorizing of Lawrence Stenhouse (19261982). Stenhouse, a British educational theorist, framed curriculum as hypothesis and called on teachers to use an inquiry approach to develop a rigorous curriculum that promoted higher-order thinking skills and honored and attended to cultural diversity. Curriculum as a set of hypotheses moves paradigmatically away from a positivistic approach toward a metaphoric/humanistic one. Teachers then, as artistic professionals, are asked to recreate educational standards in ways that hold all students accountable for interpreting texts and constructing individual understandings.

Stenhouse is regarded as a pioneer who contributed to reshaping curriculum as a field of study during the 1970s. His masterpiece, An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, is widely known as one of the key foundational texts, alongside Ralph Tyler's Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, and Joseph Schwab's “practical papers.” Stenhouse argued that curriculum research and development should be within the purview of teachers.

Stenhouse's research deals particularly with the practical nature of curriculum problems, and Stenhouse and his collaborators from the United Kingdom extended their work into the areas of teacher research and educational change. As a visionary and practical thinker, Stenhouse offers insight into education reform in general and curriculum studies in particular.

In 1967, Stenhouse became director of the Humanities Curriculum Project (HCP), funded by the Nuffield Foundation and School Council (19671972), with the purpose of centering value-laden social and cultural themes in secondary education curricula. The HCP work included a team of eight people collaborating over 3 years. Briefly, Stenhouse attempted to mount an approach to a difficult set of teaching problems pertaining to race relations in which teachers carry heavy research and implementation responsibilities. Some of Stenhouse's views articulated in the context of the HCP may be questioned in the 21st century. For example, Stenhouse asked teachers to take a neutral position in the discussion on race relations, and this may be particularly problematic for scholars connected to critical race theory. Still, in the broader context of the contemporary standards-based education movement, the HCP exemplifies a kind of standards-based reform package that meets the need for developing richer, more meaningful curriculum content. Stenhouse foreshadowed [Page 815]contemporary meanings of standards when he came to theorize the multiplicity of standards as value-judgments that require teachers to be critics who assess the worth of the contributions children make as individuals to the culture of the class. Here, his higher vision regards the curriculum not as the materials of instruction, but rather as the basis of the students' discussion and thinking.

Stenhouse made three major contributions that advanced the curriculum field. First, indebted to Schwab's theory of curriculum deliberation, Stenhouse diagnosed the field of curriculum as problematic because of its heavy reliance on both R. S. Peters's metaphysic for purified aims and the Tylerian objectives model. Alternatively, he developed the process model in which teachers' practical and procedural thinking are encouraged with aims of achieving a balance between ends and means, ultimately identifying the better, if not the best, curricular solution. This process model expands the purview of curriculum and thus serves as a basis on which the notion of the teacher as decision maker, a prominent theme in teacher education literature, is made possible.

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