Curriculum Transformation, Higher Education

Teaching about Difference in the Academy

A range of scholarly traditions has identified the relationship between knowledge and power and characterized schools, colleges, and universities as sites that reproduce inequalities of race, gender, and class. The development of culture-specific U.S. ethnic studies and women's studies provided a base from which to generate new scholarship and pedagogy that would enable curriculum transformation. Multicultural education is another essential precursor, with theorists such as James A. Banks elaborating its goals, content for integration, processes of knowledge construction, and intended outcome of whole school transformation for the benefit of all students. Various scholarly traditions today that interrogate the meaning of difference in relation to social identities and power relations include feminism, critical race theory, cultural studies, queer studies, indigenous knowledges, and postcolonialism.

Bringing multiple perspectives into the curriculum has also generated critical pedagogies that place students' experiences and learning trajectories at the center of inquiry. Curriculum transformation has thus been variously described as corrective, comparative, multiperspectival, learner-centered, and experientially based, with scholars from different fields and intellectual commitments addressing its challenges in their research and teaching.

The Curriculum Transformation Movement in U.S. Higher Education

In the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, major curricular change efforts began, sparked by the recognition that mainstream curricula had not embraced the new scholarship and by the availability of support from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Women's Educational Equity Act Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, and others. Projects varied greatly in scope and purpose—those with large external grants attempting more widespread change. Campuses embarking on major curriculum transformation projects included Wheaton College, the University of Arizona, Montana State University, Lewis and Clark College, and Smith College. Other projects aimed at reevaluating and transforming the disciplines themselves, such as the Reconstructing American Literature Project, directed by Paul Lauter, who edited—with colleagues—a version of The Heath Anthology of American Literature that includes a multiplicity of authors previously excluded from study.

These early curriculum integration projects gained recognition and traction through national educational media and professional associations and resulted in the proliferation of projects. In some cases, major state or institutional funding was allocated. The New Jersey Project, one of the longest running major projects (1986–2006), had state funding to serve all 2- and 4-year public and private colleges and universities to integrate gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation into the curriculum. Many anthologies and source-books from these projects emerged with syllabi, essays on course and curriculum change, and analyses of faculty development efforts and institutional change. Articles appeared as well in many prominent journals, such as the Harvard Educational Review and Signs: A Journal of Women in Society and Culture.

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