ABSTRACT
Pinar et al. (1995) argue that the days of curriculum development and curriculum policy and planning are numbered. The bureaucratic approaches to curriculum planning as exemplified by users of the Tyler (1949) approach are stifling. Writing on alternative approaches in the 1970s and subsequently in numerous books and papers, Pinar et al. (1995) and Pinar (2004) argue that we must move from studies of curriculum development and theory to curriculum understanding. Theorizing by Pinar (1980), Grumet (1981), Giroux (1982) and Miller (1992) has moved on many diverse fronts. Klohr (1980) considered it to be ‘gritty and ragged’ in the 1980s, Wright, writing in 2000, considered it to be impossible to define – like ‘trying to nail Jell-O to a wall’. Yet in the first decade of the twenty-first century curriculum theorizing is
needed more than ever. Pinar (2004) argues that curriculum theorizing must continue ‘to engage in complicated conversations with our academic subjects, our students and ourselves’ (p. 9).
