ABSTRACT
The work on curriculum negotiation, influenced by people like Douglas Barnes and Basil Bernstein, finds its counterpart and its complement in that of Gordon Wells on the curriculum of inquiry, and the ideal classroom for language development connects readily with postmodern notions such as Gregory Ulmer's 'textshop'. John Frow's account of cultural studies and rhetoric is particularly generative in this regard. There are further generative links to be made between the curriculum negotiation work and communication theory and between the concept of negotiation in the context and the idea of dialogism in Bakhtin. The essence of the case is that a particular social technology was installed relatively early in the nineteenth century—a quite specific pedagogy. "one of the most exciting things about the new discipline is its eclectic choice of subject matter and its pluralism of methodologies and critical discourses".
