Curriculum Theory

1. Curriculum Theory Dr. Paul R. Carr

2. What is curriculum? • Where did it come from? • How did we end up believing that “getting a job” is the goal? Or do we believe otherwise? • What is the role of research? • How is “intellectual life” enmeshed in the curriculum project? • Why do we accept neoliberalism as an underpinning value of the curriculum? Or do we? • Is the curriculum a... moral project? a political project? a libratory project? an ideological project?...? other? • What does the curriculum say about... race, class and gender? about sexual orientation? about religion? about ethnicity?...

3. Epistemology and curriculum • How do we know what we know? and what we do not know? • Why do we know so little... but believe we know so much? • How can we understand the present without understanding the past? • Is the United States a _________ country? • White • Christian • English-speaking • Democratic

4. Think back... to what you learned,... and how you learned... • Who was represented, how, why, to what end...? • How were normative values constructed, maintained, advanced...? • How is hegemony implicated in the way we understand... everything? • If power is pivotal to making sense of our social realities, how do we address power/(inequitable) power relations in and through education?

5. Information is king/ignorance? • “Not only history presses down upon us, so does the future, fantasized as technological and ‘information-based’. If only we place computers in every classroom, if only school children stare at screens (rather than at teachers, evidently) they can ‘learn,’ become ‘competitive’ in the ‘new millennium.’ Information is not knowledge, of course, and without ethical and intellectual judgment—which cannot be programmed into a machine—the Age of Information is an Age of Ignorance.” (Pinar, 2004, xiii)

6. Learning to engage • A history of anti-intellectualism • Why do we know so much about reality shows compared to social inequalities? What do we know about (US and other) government complicity in sustaining dictatorships, for example? • Do we learn to be critical, engaged citizens? How? • Deliberative democracy... What is it? • “Complicated conversations”

7. Currere • Understanding ourselves... individually and collectively • Autobiographical method – strategy for self-study; simultaneously autobiographical and political • Breaking the isolation of solitary experiences • Curriculum theory is the... interdisciplinary study of the educational experience; it is critical of school reform (“accountability,” “standards,” “outcomes,” “skills and knowledge”) • Temporal analysis, living in past, present and future at the same time • Psychoanalytical notion of “deferred action” to explain how trauma is deferred (Freud)

8. Anti-intellectualism as ideology • (p.9) “Due to the anti-intellectualism of American culture generally, due to the deferral and displacement of racism and misogyny onto public education more specifically, and due to the anti-intellectual character of (white) southern culture and history now politically hegemonic in the United States, the field of education has (understandably) remained underdeveloped intellectually.” • Why did John Kerry refuse to speak French during the 2004 presidential campaign? Why is Obama known as a “community organizer” and not a “university professor”? • Why is FOX so popular? • Where does the expression “don’t talk about religion and politics” come from? And who complies (or is intended to comply)?

9. The first step... • (p.5) “The first step we can take toward changing reality—waking up from the nightmare that is the present state of miseducation—is acknowledging that we are indeed living a nightmare. ... In which educators have little control over the curriculum, the very organizational and intellectual center of schooling. ... Education is an opportunity offered, not a service rendered.” • “teachers first became factory workers” • Administrators are “managers of learning”

10. Educators... and their positionality • (Lasch) “culture of narcissism” • “The past and future disappear in individualistic obsession with psychic survival in the present.... ‘The narcissist has no interest in the future because, in part, he has no interest in the past.’” (p. 3) • ...because education and the classroom have become so unpleasant, many teachers have retreated within their our subjectivities, abdicating their professional authority and ethical responsibility for the curriculum they teach...

11. Our world is subjective/objective • Pinar emphasizes the significance of subjectivity re: teaching, learning and the process of education • Kincheloe: “zombies of positivism” • Freire: conscientization • Marx: historical conditions, class relations • Foucault: complexity and layering of power relations • Discourse analysis • Dei: anti-racism • Feminist theory • Is NCLB objective?

12. Purpose of education • Education in neoliberal terms = skills and knowledge = employability, training, vocationalism • Dewey: purpose of education: progressive insistence that education should have value for society and “self” • Individual and social, local and globaldiscovery of the educational significance of the school for self and society • Schools as part of a competitive market or part of a society? • Education is more than schoolsdemocracy

13. Knowledge • What knowledge is worth knowing? • Kincheloe: “knowledge is constructed” • Social construction of identity • How one teaches vs what one teaches • Curriulum theory is interdisciplinary • What did we do before... Women’s studies, African-American studies, Latino studies, Queer studies, Cultural studies, etc...? • What knowledge is valued within the present context, system, school curriculum?relation to power? • Public vs private knowledge (when did Mandela stop being a “terrorist”?)

14. Language • Socio-linguistics • Power of language • Are they “suicide-bombers” or “homicide-bombers”? “Accountability” for whom? What is the right way (the norm) to act in school? • Class relations and language, and education • Do we become the language we speak? Are we “democratic” because we say that we are? • When NCATE removes “social justice” from its list of criteria, does it no longer exist? • Are we in a “post-literate” society? • How has technology assisted us to become more engaged?

15. Currere: Autobiography • Four steps of moments: • The regressive • The progressive • The analytical • The synthetical • Temporal and cognitive movements • Direct and indirect autobiography • Can we understand the American autobiography(ies) in isolation from the African-American experience? The Aboriginal experience? • Whiteness (The Great White North?)

16. Piecing together authobiography • Solitariness • Perspectives • Truth • Authentic “self” • Self authenticity • Self criticality • Fantasies • Psychoanalysis

17. The historic assault on education • Why? • Ideology (can there be a leftist politics?) • War • Economics • Funding of schools and universities • Espionage • Civil rights • Violence • Manhood • Significance of the “other”

18. Can words have a meaning? • “Lynching” • “N word” • “Faggots” • Indians (Redskins, Black Hawks, Seminoles...; should there be a Cleveland Whiteman team?) • Fighting Irish – is it the same thing? • What do the B- and S-words mean to and for women? context who can speak to what, where, when and how?

19. Documenting catastrophe • Who documents travesty? How? • Rape, lynching, murder, hate crimes, genocide, political assassination... • The official record on Katrina (class for Whites, and race for Blacks?) • The official record on Iraq (the fight for freedom/democracy, or a purposefully misguided venture?) • Cuba (do we know what we are doing?) • Formal curriculum vs hidden curriculum vs divergent realities vs alterity as a new form of curriculum

20. Group experience and Group-think • How do we accept our complicity in group acts, such as Aboriginal genocide, slavery, support for dictatorships, silence re: violence toward women..? • How are influence by the media? • Media literacy • Demoracynow.org • American hegemony and citizen complacency, patriotism, disenfranchisement • Do we fear the “other”? Why? • Racial profiling vs meritocracy • Reverse racism • Can we oppose war, and be “American”?

21. Hypertext • Foucault, Derrida: link, web, network, interwoven... • Nonlinearity of texts • Multiple interpretations • Epistemological positions • New and alternative media (film, television, internet, social networking, performance...) • Metatexts • McLuhan: “the medium is the message” • Chomsky: manufacturing consent • Hollywood and Disney, and life: the American dream?

22. New World thinking • Willinsky: access to legitimated “knowledge”; Public Knowledge Project • What is peer-review, legitimate knowledge? • How does technology enhance our knowledge? • Globalization • Mass culture • “Complicated conversation” • Teachers, ethics, research, and children

23. What can we do? • Said: intellectual ethics and engagement • Strategies of resistance • Freire, critical pedagogy • Complication conversations • Carr (15 proposals) • Can we be what we cannot imagine? Cannot experience? • What is a curricular issue? • Columbine? • Hip hop? • Poverty?

24. And the potential for social transformation...?