ABSTRACT
Curriculum work tends to be field-based and curriculum writing tends to have school teachers in mind. In short, traditional curriculum work is focused on the schools. If the process of transformation continues at its present rate, the field of curriculum studies will be profoundly different in 20 years time than it has been during the first 50 years of its existence. To a considerable extent, the reconceptualization is a reaction to what the field has been, and what it is seen to be at the present time. Just as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) is the traditionalists' organization, AERA tends to be the organization of conceptual-empiricists. Reconceptualists have no organized group, such as ASCD or AERA. Research in education, in many instances, has become indistinguishable from social science research. The appearance and proliferation of conceptual-empiricists in the curriculum field is a specific instance of the general phenomenon.
