ABSTRACT
Thus far in this book I have detailed a dialectical conception of consciousness, as well as a formulation of curriculum that this conception implicates. In the process I have pointed to, both explicitly and implicitly, a corollary between the two: Consciousness is fundamentally connected to social relations, and the way knowledge is structured and accessed in the curriculum is also connected to social relations. My formulation here follows and is an extension of Apple (1988), who explains that the curriculum takes “particular social forms and embodies certain interests which are themselves the outcomes of continuous struggles within and among dominant and subordinate groups” (p. 193). Thus, not only does curriculum imply socially contested choices about content, it also carries with it explicit and implicit messages about what epistemological orientations are deemed valuable and made readily available to students, as some groups' perspectives are sanctioned over others (Au & Apple, 2009a).
