ABSTRACT
This point can, of course, be applied to the issue of curricula and curriculum development in the broader sense, as the process or construct of curriculum development as now practiced in U.S. foreign language education is, quite obviously and deliberately, a construct and product of the Western world and its intellectual tradition. The same can be said of the products of such a process, including most notably the recent popularity of national standards in various disciplinary areas. As the curriculum theorist Apple (1996) argued,
While the proponents of a national curriculum may see it as a means to create social cohesion and to give all of us the capacity to improve our schools by measuring them against “objective” criteria, the effects will be the opposite. The criteria may seem objective; but the results will not be, given existing differences in resources and in class and race segregation. Rather than leading to cultural and social cohesion, differences between “we” and the “others” will be socially produced even more strongly, and the attendant social antagonisms and cultural and economic destruction will worsen. (pp. 32-33)
How, then, can critical language educators proceed in the classroom? Certainly the curriculum writ large, as well as our objectives, classroom activities, and so on, cannot and should not be randomly and arbitrarily designed and implemented. There is, in short, clearly a need for a instructional plan that seeks to further the aims of what might be termed emancipatory praxis. Arguing for a holistic model that incorporates and celebrates the social and cultural contexts of the schooling process, Kincheloe, Slattery, and Steinberg (2000) pointed out that some view curriculum as:
A process of understanding the self in relation to the world, not simply the concrete information students must memorize or master. Contemporary scholars analogize instruction to a personal journey, with the teacher as travel guide, advisor, author, wise mentor or philosopher more concerned with the growth, maturity, and empowerment of each student that with the information each student regurgitates on standardized tests. In this conception, evaluation becomes an authentic expression of each student’s unique understanding and application of learning. (p. 300)
Reflecting the process Osborn (2000) described as macrocontextualization, critical curriculum development in the foreign language classroom must proceed from the
context of the world, the self in relation to the world, and the role of language and language education in the shaping of both independent of and dependent on the others. We advocate the understanding of collectivities, but no longer in the sense of a them to be studied, but as a contextually defined construct. This theoretical starting point makes its way into, and is manifested in, practice in three ways:
• the critical language curriculum is built around problem posing; • the critical language curriculum is holistically constructed, overarching
disciplinary bounds as defined in the academic world; and • the critical language curriculum requires evaluation not as a measure of
linguistic skill, but as an expression of language awareness.
