ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the cases which have been written to promote understanding for the advance of the discipline of curriculum studies, rather than for the needs of a client. Earlier curriculum theorists tended to look not at the subtlety and complexity of what was going on in schools, but rather behind it to deeper levels. Concern for curriculum evaluation has probably been the main precipitating cause of a renewed interest in case study approaches. There Walker shows the undeveloped state of empirical curriculum research and how the existing theory, being in the main analytic and prescriptive, generates few hypotheses for testing. The limitation of the mainly descriptive case study is that, as has frequently been stressed, curriculum pattern, school organization, context and roles are parts of a single web. The contribution of case studies is to concentrate attention on the way particular groups of people confront specific problems, taking a holistic view of the situation.
