Curriculum Design, Equity and the Technical Form of the Curriculum

This is a volatile period for curriculum settlements in many nations, states and regions. System curriculum documents – usually in the form of a formal syllabus, curriculum guideline1 or course of study – are often the first port of call for media and political analysts and critics in intellectual paradigm wars over content. This is because the documents exist as a publically accessible texts. Unlike the “enacted curriculum” that occurs every day in student/teacher discourse, interaction and relationships, the official curriculum contains normative statements about what should be learned, and these are recoverable and available for ideological and cultural scrutiny. Hence, in periods of economic and social uncertainty and upheaval, in periods of cultural conflict and transformation, curriculum documents are often held accountable for the academic and social outcomes of schooling. While public firestorms over education may begin with claims about falling levels

of basic skills, declines in graduate outcomes and employer and media complaints about the general quality of graduates, the trail generally leads to two sources of the ostensible problem: the curriculum and teachers. That is, public attention turns to what is being taught – and who is doing the teaching. Bureaucratic incoherence or lack of political vision and will are rarely mentioned or critiqued in these public outcries. The official curriculum and the official presentation of this curriculum in syllabus

documents, what Michel Foucault (1972) referred to as “grids of specification”, that is an institutional structure for mapping human knowledge and human subjects; the divisions and categories used to specify what the curriculum will be at this time and in this context. These grids are taxonomic and categorical systems used for describing a potentially unlimited universe of human knowledge and practice. The

systems divide, contrast, regroup and derive what will constitute important and valued school knowledge, now, from the unlimited possibilities available. In this chapter, we refer to this taxonomy as the technical form of the curriculum. Our argument here is that the technical form of the curriculum matters. It has the effect of enabling and disenabling particular kinds of teacher professional interpretation and face-to-face-interaction in schools and classrooms. As an “open” or “closed” text (Luke, 1988), it encourages and discourages teacher and student autonomous action, critical analyses of local contexts, teachers’ bending and shaping of curriculum to respond to particular students’ needs and to particular school and community contingencies. We will argue and attempt to demonstrate that high definition, or extremely elaborated, detailed and enforced technical specifications and low definition, that is, less elaborated, detailed and constrained curriculum act as degrees of central prescription. We suggest that these levels of prescription – from high through to low – in turn set the conditions for local teacher professionalism or workforce deprofessionalization. The case we make is that over-prescription in the technical form of the curriculum has the effect of constraining teacher professionalism and eventually deskilling teachers, and that as a consequence less equitable educational outcomes ensue. Curriculum theory and research provide ample theoretical tools for debating and

contesting “whose knowledge should count”: whose versions of human wisdom and knowledge should and can be made to count in teaching and learning. These range from the foundational questions raised by the “new sociology of education” (Young, 1971), through “critical multiculturalist” work of the 1990s (e.g., Nieto, 1999), to the ongoing reconceptualist work of feminists, poststructuralist and queer theorists (e.g., Pinar, 2001). These are matters of the tension between educational hegemony and recognitive justice (Fraser, 1997): that is, between the representation of “dominant” views of culture, ideology and science; and of bids for the recognition and representation of “other”, minority views of the world, of cultural and linguistic practice, of everyday forms of life, human existence and experience. Such tensions play out regularly during curriculum reform processes and are evident in current curriculum debates in the US and Australia, particularly as that nation moves toward implementing its first national curriculum. Debates over “black arm band” history versus a more sanitized, less culpable version, of whether to cut content according to temporal categories or themes in history, and a revisiting of the grammar debates between traditional and functional versions continue in consultation meetings, organized to provide a wider group of interests a voice in the ultimate selections made. At this historical moment, curriculum content is an issue of contestation and

debate. There is a call for the representation of the lives and discourses of minority communities as part of a broader, half-century push for an approach that highlights both redistributive and recognitive social justice in schools (e.g., Connelly with He & Phillion, 2008). These attempts are counterposed against a new educational “fundamentalism” (Luke, 2006) that argues for a supposed self-evident corpus of the

basics; the persistent call for a return to canonical classical knowledges, and the call for a new disciplinarity that focuses on explicit access to the specialized techniques, linguistic forms and cognitive strategies of scientific disciplinary knowledge (e.g., Freebody, Martin & Maton, 2008). Taken together, these are robust and culturally-warranted debates over curriculum

content. However at the same time, contemporary curriculum theory provides little theoretical or practical advice on the technical form of the curriculum, for the definition and specification of hierarchical and taxonomic categories or descriptive categories. As illustrated in a series of recent handbooks and encyclopaedias of curriculum, there is a broad critique of Neo-Tylerian assumptions and limitations, persistent debates over the political and social contexts of curriculum – but little substantive engagement with the institutional processes of curriculum making (see, for example, essays in Connelly with He and Phillion, 2008). This marking out of the categories, imposing the grids used to divide and contrast

the content is the core, unglamorous “dirty work” of curriculum reform. It is the textual organization and work of making official syllabus documents. The default mode is that official documents will proceed with anywhere from six to eight core curriculum areas (e.g., school subjects, disciplinary fields or key learning areas), and that these will be “filled in” with essential skills, processes and contents that correspond to specific age/grade/developmental stage (Deng & Luke, 2008). To accommodate those general competences or skills that are seen to traverse the curriculum areas and, most recently, what are referred to as “21st century” skills and competences, additional grids are added, generally for coverage in a range of grades and subjects (Reid, 2005). These range, depending on the national and regional context, from capacities with new information technology or textual modes, to overarching cognitive and textual strategies (e.g., critical thinking, higher order problem solving), to more specific cultural and linguistic capacities often, but not always, linked to achievement across core school subjects and increasingly linked to citizenship of some order (e.g., civics and ethical behaviors). Curriculum theory enables principled arguments for curriculum content. Yet while

we could identify and critique the root assumptions of particular approaches to technical form (e.g., behaviorist skills versus traditional knowledge content statements), we have little programmatic theory or empirical evidence on the efficacy of one programmatic approach to another. Simply, there is little in the curriculum studies literature and research that actually makes the case for any particular technical form of curriculum. There has been little interest in or problematizing of the shape, format and form of the curriculum – beyond teachers’ practical notions of use and ease of working with this frame or that. If we follow Dewey’s (1915) analogy about the curriculum as a journey or a

map – those of us actually involved in making the curriculum in official syllabus documents too often proceed without map or compass. We may have varying views about the nature of the terrain, and, indeed, the eventual destination and be willing to argue for these views and beliefs. But we have tended to have a

limited technical sense of the effects of different approaches to the cartography – of the implications of variable options in nomenclature, conventions for describing the terrain or the journeys eventually traversed. We have often found in our travels, that these categories were tabled by Departments and Ministries of Education on the basis of precedent, previous syllabi or those of other jurisdictions, and in some contexts on the very real necessities of printing and page counts for systems relying on external support. In many instances these decisions are made on the latest received wisdom about what kinds of formats teachers found useful and that they would comply with and work within, or which formats would enable accountability requirements to be met. Across all the contexts where curriculum work remains a key feature of education systems there continues to be little principled or robust debate on how to actually structure and write a curriculum document. The history of curriculum is written as a debate over content. Whether we construe

that content in terms of dominant ideologies, available discourses, disciplinary and knowledge paradigms or cultural narratives and values – at any historical moment, the process of reaching a curriculum settlement in democratic educational systems is subject to academic, public, media and political contestation. The ongoing debates in Japan over the textbook representation of WWII, the recent revisionist approach to the representation of Stalinism in Russian history texts and the ongoing debates in the US over the representation of immigration and migrant cultures are cases in point. Since the civil rights and feminist movements in the US, and more recently in relation to the land and knowledge claims of indigenous peoples, much of the controversy over curriculum has centered on the inclusion of revisionist histories, and the voices and experiences of cultural and linguistic minority groups, women and others who have historically been marginalized in official knowledge. Additionally, and of immediate relevance to our task here, the hundred-year debate in the US over the optimal way to teach reading (Chall, 1967) – phonics versus word recognition, whole language versus direct instruction and so forth – has been a focus of “back to the basics” movements in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Curriculum settlements are by definition unstable, contingent and volatile. These are the debates of this chapter. We frame an approach to curriculum writing

that foregrounds the technical form of the curriculum. While we do not diminish the importance of content in curriculum theory, we do claim that the identified gap in research that has investigated the very material effects of the technical form of the curriculum has left curriculum writers, policy makers, teachers and educators with little to call on as they make decisions about the shape and structure of curriculum documents and syllabi. We also make the claim that technical form matters for equity and for the quality of a system, even though it has been ignored within the curriculum field more generally. Before moving to these arguments however we take the time to define curriculum, syllabus and school subject as key terms for the chapter and for this volume.