ABSTRACT
Debates over curriculum have durable histories and tend to work in binary arguments that caricature and distort complex educational positions and curriculum strategies: the basics versus the postmodern, traditional versus politically correct literature, rote knowledge versus constructivism and so forth. There is often little sense of the conceptual ironies, practical contradictions and empirical anomalies that the resultant settlements may generate. In current debates, these tend to be welded together into a dual set of claims: that the resultant teaching and learning, knowledge and power relations will contribute to (1) the growth and global competitiveness of domestic human capital and economy; and, since 9/11 and the global financial crisis, (2) national and regional social cohesion, affiliation and security. In the context of many OECD countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Nordic and European states, we would add to this the national concern that the curriculum settlement will contribute to, rather than deter, an equitable and “fair” transmission and distribution of knowledge, skill and capacity to students, regardless of their ethnic, linguistic and social class background or location. It would be convenient to dismiss such debates as a recurrent set of pendulum
swings. This is the approach of the media, and often involves a harking back to mythological periods where the basics were taught, the intergenerational transmission of dominant cultural traditions ensued and meritocratic value was properly recognized. The industrial curriculum settlement of the last century was forged on two grounds. First, on the existence of a corpus of universal “skills” and “knowledges” that could be psychologically defined, transmitted through schooling and assessed through standardized instruments. Second, that these skills and knowledges were considered to be universally transferable and of exchange value in the social fields of work, civic life and community. Access to and use of these universal skills was not seen to depend on variable student background, insofar as the early
20th-century curriculum settlement was premised upon a consensually-derived, commonmonoculture: that the “dominant culture” valued the aforementioned universal skills, and that cultural, linguistic, social class characteristics of students and cohorts would not influence the desirability or accessibility of these skills. Hence, the late 20th-century curriculum settlement was predicated on stable and expanding industrial and service workforces, fair and non-discriminatory workplaces and civic spaces, culturally homogeneous populations and focused on the redesign of schooling to optimally ensure the acquisition of this corpus of universal skills. This model has proven to be remarkably durable to critique – despite the social
facts of population change and the emergence of technologically driven economic globalization. The results are ubiquitious multiculturalism and multilingualism in North America and Europe spurred by decolonization, large scale immigration and economic globalization. The historical lineage and persistence of the postwar industrial model of schooling is discussed by Patrick Shannon later in this volume and is well documented in curriculum history. Yet such historical moments blend and hybridize residual with emergent cultural traditions. They are not pendulum swings, but dialectically constitute new historical settlements, new social and cultural formations of knowledge and power – always partial and contested and, in effect, making and remaking what counts as knowledge, skill and competence, human cognition and sociocultural action. So, however extreme and polemical such curriculum debates may be, they come
to ground in a documentary and textual settlement that has an empirical consequence in the shaping of what teachers and students do in schools and classrooms, a process that occurs anew each and every day. While the actual official curriculum – the syllabus or curriculum guideline – cannot determine the curriculum in any direct and unmediated way, it nonetheless provides grounds for constraint, delimitation and prescription and, in our current accountability-focused contexts, enforcement, surveillance and monitoring of what occurs in classrooms and, indeed, in student learning, knowledge and consciousness. The normative goals and material outcomes of an equitable education remain matters for rigorous and multidisciplinary empirical scrutiny and principled theoretical and political debate (Luke, Green & Kelly, 2010). As you read this book, in some national or state or regional educational system,
teachers, consultants, union representatives, teacher educators, systems bureaucrats, along with discipline and subject-area experts are undertaking the practical task of making an official curriculum. We have participated in such gatherings in hotel conference rooms and corporate board rooms, in staffrooms and classrooms in Australia, North America and Asia and in villages and community halls in the South Pacific. These meetings aim for professional exchange, consultation and consensus upon
contents, standards, goals and objectives for teaching and learning in schools. At the onset of such meetings, marching orders are laid out: the technical parameters for the lists of skills and contents, standards and outcomes to be compiled are displayed
on powerpoint slideshows or large sheets of butchers’ paper. But there are other, not so subtle messages also being passed around these rooms. To those who might want to debate larger issues of philosophy and ideology – the implicit message is something like “leave your curriculum theory at the door” and get on with the practical task of specifying what should be taught to whom and when; inevitably arguments arise – between advocates of this curriculum content and that; between those who want basic skills and those who want more space for problem solving or hands on activities; between those who see their task as representing those “excluded” by the curriculum and those who take up the voice of the supposedly oft forgotten “majority.” But in terms of the technical vocabulary, taxonomies and categories to be used, these gatherings are more often than not fait acompli. Key decisions about curriculum philosophy and paradigm have already been made prior to these meetings beginning. Typically, the boxes to be filled in have been determined. An overall grid or map of the curriculum has already been set well before people sit down to debate. And it is in this grid that the political, cultural and ideological parameters of the curriculum are set. These are moments in the formation of “official knowledge” (Apple, 1990). They
are the actual sites where the textual work of constructing and construing regional, state and national curriculum settlements is done. Where tensions arise, they are over curriculum content: over the “selective traditions” (Apple, 1978) of human knowledge and wisdom to be taught. Historically, curriculum content has been and remains the focal point of public, political and media debate. In part this is because questions over which versions of historical events, of politics, of religion, of science and, indeed, of the state, are readily accessible to public scrutiny and media debate. It is also because matters of the representation of the “facts” of history, society and cultures, science and religion, the representation of national formation and human virtue, models of “quality” thought, writing and belief are necessarily contentious in secular, democratic societies. This is especially the case in media saturated societies, where versions of scientific and moral truth – of evolution, climate change, ecology, economics, war and peace, race relations, friend and foe, core cultural values – are under continual public scrutiny. Consider, for example: the century-long US debate over evolution and crea-
tionism in the school curriculum, foregrounded again in the Louisiana Science Education Acts of 2008; the postwar argument in Japan over the representation of World War II (Nozaki & Inokuchi, 2000); the recent Texas discussons of the portrayal of cultural minorities, immigration and multiculturalism; the Australian disputes over the first contact of Aboriginal peoples and British colonizers in 1788 as settlement or invasion; or the ongoing debate over the uses and abuses of Huckleberry Finn as an historical, literary representation of slavery. Which texts and discourses and which versions of history and science will be represented in the official curriculum, and whose lingua franca will be the medium of instruction are important, core ideological and sociocultural decisions by education systems and by societies. These often generate full-blown paradigm wars – where competing visions of a particular
curriculum field, and indeed particular normative versions of what will count as being literate, or as “play,” as “early childhood,” as “middle years,” or, for that matter, “learning” and “teaching” generate tension. Open contestation over the selective curricular traditions of schooling is, by definition, a central element of what democratic schooling should be about – of the robust and, more often than not, divisive search for common and uncommon cultural touchstones, values and beliefs in culturally, linguistically and historically heterogeneous and heteroglossic societies. This contrasts sharply with autocratic societies where the decisions about what will count as knowledge are made in closed, inaccessible and incontestable contexts by elite interests. These curriculum conversations, then, are crucial. But in the midst of such debates
we hear little about the technical form of the curriculum. To return to the actual site of curriculum making – typically, the basic definitions and taxonomic categories of the curriculum are determined well before the curriculum writing process begins. The categories for curriculum developers, writers and consultants charged with developing state and system syllabus documents are more often than not “given,” fixed a priori in both philosophic and political senses and presented as beyond criticism. This means that the “naming of the parts” of the curriculum is never problematized: those of us engaged in this curriculum work are asked to identify and “fill in” statements of “outcomes,” “content,” or “skills.” Over the past two decades, depending on jurisdiction, this nomenclature has varied: with the emergence of categories such as “skills,” “behaviours,” “knowledge,” “competencies,” “capacities” and more recently general capabilities or cross curricular dimensions or priorities, and other attempts to name what should be taught, how and in what sequence. These are the core categories and levels of specification used by state systems. Consider this example: In one such meeting around the development of an
Australian state government’s syllabus, the task at hand was to develop “outcome statements” for infancy to Year 3. The task, we and other curriculum consultants were told, was to name “behaviourally observable” and “measurable” outcomes. The result included items such as “can hold head upright without assistance.” There is a great deal that can be said about the breaking down and parcelling of human development and cultural practice into discrete behaviours, much less about their ultimate measurability. Suffice to say, the description of the phenomena of infancy and early childhood into “outcomes” qua “observable behaviours” reflected core behaviourist assumptions. There is substantive sociological debate to be had about the extension of official knowledge into what were previously domains of family and community – the extension of official knowledge to preschool settings (Fuller, 2007). This further raises important issues about the extent to which such standards and approaches may or may not intrude upon, for example, the ways of childrearing and childhood of indigenous communities (Romero-Little, 2006). Finally, the “periodicization” or segmentation of “childhood” (cf. Grieshaber, this volume on “early childhood” and Alvermann and Marshall, this volume, on “adolescence”) was presented as a naturalized, commonsense unit or segment of curriculum. Yet
these “larger” issues were quickly swept to the side by the curriculum bureaucrats chairing these meetings as impediments to the technical task at hand; the filling in the developmental continuums of children’s growth and maturation. This event, as with so many similar events, was a “consultative” process. This volume is addressed to all those who work in scenes like this, making
curriculum documents, resource materials, guidelines and policies and official syllabi. Our principal argument here, supported by our many colleagues across these chapters, is that the technical form of the curriculum matters. Critical curriculum studies has focused largely on normative theoretical assumptions curriculum and overt ideological content as the objects of critique and reconstruction. The prevailing assumption has been that issues of equity and social justice are focal matters of curriculum content – of the actual skills, ideas, facts, beliefs, histories and cultural scripts that are represented and sanctioned in the written, spoken and visual texts of schooling. Yet this has led to a neglect of the educational effects of the technical form of the curriculum, and left curriculum developers, consultants and experts – practical curriculum workers – without clear grounds to analyze the effects of the different taxonomic categories, grids and technical specifications of the curriculum. In what follows we and our colleagues begin to unpack possible parameters for an official curriculum that aims for high quality and high equity education.
