ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Arthur Noble Applebee's contribution and situate it within a broader conception of speech as a cultural and historical, ongoing exploration of themes that are critical to inquiring into the nature of being. Curriculum as Conversation centers on the critique that a curriculum, in particular an English/Language Arts curriculum in US secondary schools, tends to be oriented to mastering whatever body of information is considered to be important, or at least amenable to testing, in any academic discipline. In New Criticism, only classic texts approved of by skilled technicians in New Critical tradition are worth reading in today's Common Core State Standards (CCSS) English/Language Arts classroom. In Tradition and Reform, for example—which provided a template for his thinking from which he rarely wavered, in spite of the precocious point at which he wrote it—Applebee elegantly explored the notion of educational traditions. Mikhail M. Bakhtin's construct of dialogism has often been reduced to immediate interactions between or among people.
