Introduction

Because my academic discipline is education, my work as a scholar and theoretician is structured pedagogically. As a classroom teacher, I present what has been written on the subject I am trying to teach, invite your comments and questions, and in the process try to contribute to the conversation. As a teacher, I am not trying to implement “objectives” or be “effective,” to make an “impact,” something better left to tanks or think tanks. As a teacher, my commitment is to informing students about the subject they are studying-in this instance, curriculum theory-while helping them to understand it. As I can’t hear your questions and comments, I will do this by restating the subject in as many different terms as I can, illustrating them. I will, then, teach curriculum theory by enacting it textually. Instead of making an argument “about” curriculum, I participate in-by reconstructing-an ongoing conversation dedicated to understanding curriculum. Rather than devising an “airtight” argument, I deliberately cut “holes” in the curriculum-as-plan (Aoki 2005 [1986/1991], 159) to enable students to breathe, thereby creating space and encouraging voices (Miller 1990, 2005). Sometimes polemical, this primer for prospective and practicing teachers asks students to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, to reconstruct their own understandings of what it means to be “educated.”