A Book Review: What is Curriculum Theory?
1000 words, 12 pt. Times New Roman and double-spaced
Author’s background
“Because my academic discipline is education, my work as a scholar and theoretician is
structured pedagogically” (p.1).
Purpose and thesis
Pinar’s purpose for writing this book:
“As a teacher, my commitment is the complication of students’ understanding of the subject they
are studying—in this instance, curriculum theory—while working to advance that field
theoretically” (p.2).
“...instead of making an argument, I work to create an impression. Rather than devising an
‘airtight’ argument, I deliberately cut ‘holes’ in my argument to enable students to ‘breathe,’ to
‘create spaces and find voices’ (Miller, 1990)” (p.2).
“Our profession is academic. Too few people appreciate the significance of studying the field’s
history” (p.33). He went on to say that many disciplines such as psychology have colonized
education instead of honouring that education is a field in its own right (p.33).
-We must study our history to avoid becoming robotic about what we do. Pinar referred to that
type of robotic behaviour as rooted in what the psychoanalytic term, “fantasmatic”, which meant
“the unconscious source of dreams and fantasies, the structuring scenario behind social action,
especially ‘overdetermined’ (often ritualistic) actions (such as lynching) structured by
transferences and other forms of repetitive behaviour” (p.59). ‘Toward that end I will disrobe
bodies of knowledge that might function like a psychoanalytic remembrance, to reconfigure the
pattern of the present in which we teachers find ourselves” (p.61).
Purpose of Chapter 3: to raise the issue that teachers have been controlled by political agendas
to use the school to resolve social issues. For example, during the Kennedy and Nixon eras, the
school was to produce strong, physically fit and mathematically and scientifically capable men
who could fight back against the Sputnik-producing Soviet Union. Since there has always been
more women teaching than men, the legislators reaction and abuse of education as a political tool
is simultaneously a reaction and abuse of women (p.69-70). He cited Bruner’s participation in
the 1960s’ national curriculum making movement as an example of men shaping school
curricula (p.72). Pinar devoted considerable time to deconstructing the racial politics of
curriculum reform by turning to the historical evolution of racial issues in the Southern United
States. For example, there was a move to omit from textbooks any references to the truth about
how white people abused black people for almost 100 years. Many, like Ross Barnett, associated
such references as promoting communism (p.75). Civil Rights movement activists were vocal
about wanting the truth printed and to have an “integrated” curriculum. Their rationale was to
battle against future racism and against “damage” to black youth who would not see themselves
in our history (p.75-76). It was the ere of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the famous 1954 Brown vs.
Board of Education, some headway was made. However, racism persisted in the Deep South.
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The SNNC was an organization of students who grew into a force when they opened “freedom
schools”. Eventually, J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI framed the leader, Carmichael< for being
a CIA agent and eventually flattened the rising good intentions of the SNNC. This was only one
example of political manoeuvring that was intended to shape education as a tool of society
according to white
male political agendas.
Pinar’s thesis:
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He defined curriculum: “Curriculum theory is the interdisciplinary study of educational
experience” (p.2). “Curriculum theory is a distinctive field of study, with a unique
history, a complex present, an uncertain future” (p.2). “Curriculum conceived of as
currere requires not only the study of autobiography, history, and social theory, it requires
as well the serious study of psychoanalytic theory” (p.57). Pinar cited Grumet to suggest
that our goal as curriculum theorists is not to do what psychotherapists claim to be able to
do in brining ourselves to a “primal scene”, but we can bring the structures of experience
into our awareness, which, in turn, enhances our ability to reposition ourselves as subjects
who are capable of changing what we have experienced instead of remaining unaware of
our experiences and therefore remaining objectified by them (pp.57-58).
“Curriculum is a form of social psychoanalysis” (p.94) because Pinar noted that
curriculum in the Deep South represented a place and became that place because it was
allowed to become a “curricular embodiment” or reconstruction of a peculiarly southern
experience (p.94). In the Southern States, especially the Deep South, practices such as
lynching black males and enslaving black men and women continued in various forms
well past the Civil War and after desegregation of schools was legally enforced and after
1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Brown vs.... Since law was imbued in
the plantation system pre-capitalistic and pre-bourgeois class system, when the North
took over the South, Southerners refused to adhere to public rule. For example, in 1864,
half of the enrolled students were kept home, away from public schools, by their parents
(p.119). Teachers refused to adhere to accepted practices pledging loyalty ot the United
States, and the children were encouraged to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy and to
sing “Dixie” (p.119). “It would take United States troops in the 1950s to desegregate
some southern schools” (p.120) Pinar raised the point that the unruly South made a
Conservative government seem necessary in the United States (p.121).
Curriculum development in the United States was about standardization in order to create
cultural homogeneity. In part, this was due to the many immigrants who entered the
country from 1890-1930, but it was also due to the industrialization and the need for a
middle class of corporate management level workers.(p.94)
Ch.7 “In the regressive moment we discovered how public education has been racialized
and gendered in the America popular imagination. Now we understand that our positions
of ‘gracious submission’ to politicians and, secondarily, to parents ( who imagine
themselves ‘consumers’ of ‘services’) are covert racialized and gendered positions in
which the academic—intellectual—freedom to develop the curriculum and devise the
means of its assessment has been usurped by politicians in the name of ‘accountability’”
(p.163). Pinar’s position is that educators have been part of a “blame the victim” tastic on
the part of politicians who insisted that we educators are to blame, and not just for what
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they judge to be low test scores. “In the early 1950s and early 1960s we were to blame
for jeopardizing the American military position vis-avis the Soviet Union and, in the
early 1980s, for U.S. currency devaluation. Now we are held ‘accountable’ for America’s
economic performance in the ‘new millennium,’ distracting the public from the unethical
and unprofitable practices of many American businesses, the most spectacular instances
of which are Enron and WorldCom” (p.164).
“Much of the is simple scapegoating, but it has occurred and succeeded as a tactic in the
‘conservative’ restoration of the last 30 years, a political phenomenon that could not have
occurred without active participation of the reactionary white South” (p.164).
“It had been students and professors who had animated the 1960s revolt against racial
injustice and U.S. imperialism abroad, and it would be educational institutions where
‘conservative’ would focus their attention in the decades following” (p.164). “The
marginalization of curriculum theory in American teacher education is, in part, a
reflection of the anti-intellectual vocationalism of mainstream teacher education” (p.165).
Pinar is very careful to disassociate himself with Hofstadter’s (1962) view that Dewey
Progressivism is to blame for such anti-intellectualism. H. Stated, “the central idea of the
new educational thought [was] that the school should base its studies not on the demands
of society, nor on any conception of what an educated person should be, but on the
developing needs and interests of the child” (Hofstadter, 1962, p.369 as cited by Pinar on
p.165). Pinar explained that “Dewey insisted that education and society were inextricably
linked, not only together but to the pscho-social and intellectual growth of children as
well” (p.166).
Ch. 8-“For many practicing teachers, ‘curriculum’ is understood as what the district
office requires them to teach, what the state education department publish in scope and
sequence guides” (p.185).The problem, as Pinar sees it, is that curriculum has become an
institutionalized and highly abstract concept that teachers associate with government
documents, district mandates and prescribed resources. It is not “curriculum as a lived
event in itself” (cited Aoki as in agreement with him) (p.187).
Ch. 8: “The educational point of the public school curriculum is understanding,
understanding the relations among academic knowledge, the state of society, the
processes of self-formation, and the character of the historical moment in which we live,
in which others have lived, and in which our descendants will someday live. It is
understanding that informs the ethical obligation to care for ourselves and our fellow
human beings, that enables us to think and act with intelligence, sensitivity, and courage
in both the public sphere—as citizens aspiring to establish a democratic society—and in
the private sphere, as individuals committed to other individuals” (p.187).
Ch. 8-“Curriculum ceases to be a thing, and it is more than a process. It becomes a
verb, an action, a social practice, a private meaning, and a public hope. Curriculum is not
just the site of our labour, it becomes the product of our labour, changing as we are
changed by it” (Pinar et al. , 1995, p.848). It is an ongoing, if complicated, conversation”
(p.188).
Ch. 8- He criticized Bruner for associating lively talk directed toward expertise n the
school subject as measured on standardized exams as complicated conversation. Instead,
Pinar claimed that complicated conversation is like a “meeting place” where different
members of the educational community talk about many things, subjects taught, teaching,
government policies, etc. (pp.191-193). Curriculum has to move beyond what is codified
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and represented to us as curriculum documents. The main reason is: All cultural artifacts
represent certain interests and further power for certain people. E.g. university professors
who support the government to further their careers (p.194). Avoiding hard conversations
means that “ curriculum also excludes what certain communities believe is unworthy of
knowing, such as the study of lynching in secondary school history classes in the Deep
South” (Pinar, 2001) “ (p.194). “Until educators—in collaboration with colleagues in
higher education, and in conversation with parents and students—exercise greater control
over what they teach, and until what they teach permits ongoing curricular
experimentation according to student concerns and faculty interest and expertise, school
‘conversation’ will be stilted at best, limited to classroom discourse, disconnected from
student’ lived experience and from intellectual lives of the faculty. Understood as the
education of the public, complicated conversation is our professional practice” (p.196).
“In the profession of education, conversation is action. Or, as Ted Aoki (in press) put the
matter once, “competence” is “communicative action and reflection” (p.197).
“Teaching is paradoxical; it is a call ‘to participate in the ongoing, interminable cultural
production that is teaching’”(p.200).
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Curriculum theory:
o “...about discovering and articulating, for oneself and with others, the educational
significance of the school subjects for self and society in the ever-hanging
historical moment” (p.16).
o “...aspires to understand the overall educational significance of the curriculum,
focusing especially upon interdisciplinary themes—such as gender or
multiculturalism or the ecological crisis—as well as relations among the
curriculum, the individual, society, and history” (p.21)
o “ Such an aspiration means that we understand the project of public education as
the education of the public, an understanding that requires us to question—and
perhaps reject—the current public school curriculum as it is ritualistically aligned
with the academic disciplines as they exist in most colleges and universities”
(p.21).
o “...is a form of autobiographical and theoretical truth-telling that articulates the
educational experience of teachers and students as lived. As such curriculum
theory speaks from the subjective experience of history and society, the
inextricable interrelationships among which structure educational experience”
(p.25).
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Thesis: “By linking the curriculum to student performance on standardized examinations,
politicians have, in effect, taken control of what is to be taught: the curriculum.
Examination-driven curricula demote teachers from scholars and intellectuals to
technicians in service to the state” (p.2). Pinar cited Lasch (1978) to claim that because
the external world is so controlled by such an accountability emphasis by the
government, teachers have “retreated from a public sphere that no longer seems
meaningful” (p.3), and they have become overly focused on the present rather than
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reflecting upon the past in order to re-imagine the future for education. He makes the
claim that teachers have “...abdicated their professional authority and ethical
responsibility for the curriculum they teach” (pp.3-4) because the external world, which
includes the classroom, is so unpleasant for so many. Therefore, he stated: “My work in
curriculum theory has emphasized the significance of subjectivity to teaching, to study, to
the process of education” (p.4).
Thesis con’t: “How can university-based scholars committed to the project of education
not view intellectual activity as the main index of the field’s vitality?” (p.172). He spent
the previous two pages speaking about Journal of Curriculum Theory and new books and
articles as being the key artifacts that ought to inspire and take curriculum theorists’ time.
He proceeded to acknowledge the “To require students to study curriculum as an
intellectual rather than a narrowly institutional or practical problem sometimes provokes
that hostility” (p.173). “because students enrolment in teacher education courses amounts
to ‘arranged marriage,’ and because most bring to their education courses an expectation
that they will learn 9but cannot possibly learn, given, in part, education professor’s
remove from the schools) ‘what works,’ there is often a resistance to serious academic
study. Education professors too often capitulate this resistance, too often confer high
grades for coursework that is not always intellectually challenging” (p.173). He noted
that most professors are male and most teacher education students are female, which begs
the question as whether there is also gender politics at work in teacher education
programs (p.173). “As professors of education we should speak of schools sparingly. We
should speak of education” (p.175).
“While Bower sees little reason for hope in the institution of schooling at any level
(because it remains embedded in capitalism and Enlightenment mythology[ see Bowers,
2000, p.56], schooling remains the only official site of public instruction” (p.134).
“The first step we can take toward changing reality –waking up from the nightmare that
is the present state of public miseducation—is acknowledging that we are indeed living in
a nightmare. The nightmare that is present—in which educators have little control over
the curriculum, the very organization; and intellectual center of schooling—has several
markers, prominent among them ‘accountability’ “ (p.5).
“...racism and misogyny have been ‘deferred and displaced’ into public education...”
(p.6). Pinar argued that teachers are subjugated to a racial, gender and class politics that
has historically diminished the teaching profession. He intellectualized such subjugation
as the result of a government that has deferred and displaced such problems onto public
education (see p.6). Teachers have endured years of racism and misogyny and, therefore,
are immobilized by the weight of what he called “crippling anti-intellectualism” (p.9). He
argued that teachers have been let down by governments and professional organizations
and must now “renew our commitment to the intellectual character of our professional
labor” (p.9).
“Only when the South is (finally) reconstructed can the nation resume a progressive
course toward democratization. I propose the educational reconstruction of the South
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through a ‘curriculum as social psychoanalysis,’ schooling that speaks to persisting
problems of race, class, and gender, not only in the South but nationwide” (p.11).
“In colleges and universities most faculty—especially in the humanities and arts—remain
clear that curriculum and teaching are profoundly linked, that the curriculum is the
intellectual and organizational center of education” (p.32). His point is that at this level,
academics carefully shape their text choices, assessment choices and so on to shape their
curriculum through their teaching. However, public school teachers are far too controlled
by gendered, racialized (and classed) histories to fully control their teaching choices so as
to control the curriculum (p.32).
Pinar makes the claim that “...the American nation became mobilized after Sputnik as
politicians exploited multiple anxieties and attached them to the education of the young”
(p.93). He went on to say that “curriculum is embedded in national cultures. It is also
embedded in regions, and nowhere in the United States is that fact more obvious than in
the Deep South” (p.93).
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Significance of subjectivity: “The significance of subjectivity is that it is inseparable
from the social; it is only when we—together and in solitude—reconstruct the relations
between the two can we begin to restore ‘shattered faith in the regeneration of life’
(Lasch 1978, 207) and cultivate the ‘moral discipline...indispensible to the task of
building a new order (Lasch 1978, 235-236). Our pedagogical work is simultaneously
autobiographical and political” (p.4). “Subjectivity is cultural, and the cultural is
subjective” (p.129).
His method of currere- is not about remaking the external world to be like us or
remaking ourselves to be like the external world. It is beyond self-management. Instead,
currere is “the infintive form of curriculum—promises no quick fixes. On the contrary,
this autobiographical method asks us to slow down, to remember even re-enter the past,
and to meditatively imagine the future. Then, slowly, on one’s own terms, one analyzes
one’s experience of the past and fantasies of the future in order to understand more fully,
with more complexity and subtlety, one’s submergence in the present. This method of
currere is not a matter of psychic survival, but one of subjective risk and social
reconstruction, the achievement of selfhood and society in the age to come. To undertake
the project of social and subjective reconstruction, we teachers must remember the past
and imagine then future, however unpleasant each domain may be. Not only intellectually
but in our characters structure, we must become ‘temporal,’ living simultaneously in the
past, present and future. The autobiographical method I have devised, returning to the
past (the regressive) and imaging the future (the ‘progressive’) must be understood (the
‘analytic’) for oneself to become ‘expanded” (in contrast to being made ‘minimal’ in
Lasch’s schema) and complicated, then, finally, mobilized (in the ‘synthetical moment’)”
(p.5).
Currere:
o “The method of currere—the Latin infinitive form of curriculum means to run the
course...the running of the course—provides a strategy for students of curriculum
to study the relations between academic knowledge and life history in the interest
of self-understanding and social reconstruction” (p.35). “there are four steps of
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moments in the method of currere: the regressive, the progressive, the analytical,
and the synthestical. These point to both temporal or cognitive movements in the
autobiographical study of educational experience;they suggest the temporal and
cognitive modes of relation between knower and what can be known that might
characterize the ontological structure of educational experience” (p.35).
“...seeks to understand the contribution academic studies makes to one’s
understanding of his of her life...and how both are imbricated in society, politics,
and culture ( Bruner, 1996)” (p.36).
“Currere becomes a version of cultural criticism...” (p.36)
“Due to the dangers of exhibitionism and exposure (De Castell, 1999), I have
declined to recommend the use of currere as an instructional device in the school
curricula” (p.36).
An educational experience is a “biographic experience” (Pinar and
Grumer,1976,p.51)” (p.36).
“In the regressive step of moment I conceived of one’s apparently past ‘lived’ or
existential experience as ‘data source.’ To generate ‘data’ one free associates,
after the psychoanalytic technique, to re-enter the past, and to thereby enlarge—
an transform—one’s memory” (p.36).
“On returns to the past to capture how it was, and it hovers over the present”
(p.36).
“To ask and begin to answer autobiographical questions require, then, connecting
the subjective to the social, and vice versa” (p.40)
“In the analytical stage the student examines both past and present.
Etymologically, ana means ‘up, throughout’;lysis means ‘a loosening.’ The
analysis of currere is akin to a phenomenological bracketing” (p.36)
“The point of currere is an intensified engagement with daily life, not an ironic
detachment from it” (p.37).
“In the synthetical step—etymologically syn means ‘together’; tithenai means ‘to
place’—one re-enters the lived present” (p.37).
“The regressive phase of currere is about uncovering this self, and in
psychoanalytic fashion, experiencing the relief of understanding how one came to
be psychically, which is to say, socially” (p.55).
“The regressive phase of currere is a discursive..practice of truth-telling, of
confession [to oneself]...It is to oneself one comes to practice the autobiographics
of self-shattering, revelation, confession, and reconfiguaration. Self-excavation
preceded the self-understanding, which precedes self-mobilization....” (p.55).
“The progressive phrase of currere may be understood as a kind of freeassociative ‘futuring’ during which one seeks the revelation of one’s fantasies of
what one might be. These imaginings are expressions of who one is not now, of
material felt to be missing, sought after, aspired to” (p.55).
The progressive phase of currere is distinguished as stylistic and thematic.
“Through a stylistic experimentation one might disrupt the somnolence of
linearity” (p.126). He discusses an exploration of hypertext, poetry,fiction, slash
fiction, homoerotic fanfiction writing, etc. By thematic, he means that we need to
“use theory to invoke split-off subjects, in hopes of dissolving what blocks us
from moving ‘forward’ toward a future not yet present...” (p.126). He referred to
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Focault’s famous line: “One writers to become someone other than who one is”
(cited on p.126). He also suggests that we learn how to “talk back” as Ida Wells
and Sojourner Truth did in their autobiographical projects as black women who
fought back against their oppressors and articulated the source of the oppressions
( racial and gender hatred) (p.126). In other words, we ought to write our way out
of “gracious submission” (p.127) to meta-narratives spoken from political
institutional bodies. The idea of evoking dream, thought, fantasy as modes of
releasing imagination borrowed from Maxine Greene’s (1995) notion that the
contents of dreams, thoughts and fantasies are our split-off selves that we can
acknowledge and re-imagine for a better future (p.128).Pinar wrote that “[t]he
progressive phase of currere is in this sense hallucinatory, rendering the futural
present, if immaterial. The progressive is like a ‘remembered dream,’ where the
future seems cast as already past, as now” (p.128). Roland Barthe worded such a
space as “...intertext, that is, space to be perceived simultaneously forwards and
backwards, without progressional assumptions” (p.128). “Reality is not only
manipulated by hallucination; it is, in a certain sense, created by it, co-terminus
with it” (p.129).
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Intended Audience/Readability
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Pinar is writing this book for academics, including junior curriculum theory scholars
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His writing style is direct, but he is repetitive, and he often makes complex statements
without exemplification, explanation or closure e.g. p.25.
He relies heavily upon Lasch’s work, which means that a reader feels the need to also know
psychoanalytic theory to be informed about Pinar’s background for taking such a strong
direction with his method and thesis
Emotionality of the era: There is strong voice of deep emotion and personal investment by
Pinar in his thesis, method and claims. He uses words like “nightmare”, “sleep”, “escape”
because he feels that he has been submerged below the political voice of the “No Child left
Behind” legislation and a long history of equally offensive political decisions that either took
hold in education as a “fix-it-all-for –us” mentality or was casually ignored (e.g. North has
black and white schools and the South has never bought into the political messages about
desegregation.
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How well does the author builds his argument and the theoretical assumptions?
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Assumption 1: We are caught in the present and subjugated to an oppressive racist,
gendered, classed meat-narrative that has swept us into such a state of unawareness or
sleep. We are caught in this situation because “...collective past structures our present, as
individuals and as a collectively, as teachers” (p.125).
Assumption 2: Complicated conversations that depend upon my willingness to reflect
upon the past and re-imagine myself in the present and consider the best direction for the
future is the best way of defining curriculum. The autobiographical project is done with
more than self-management in mind; it is done for political and social change reasons.
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Assumption 3: Educators must seek to reconstruct an ill-formed public sphere through
the education system: “The reconstruction o the public sphere cannot proceed without the
reconstruction of the private sphere” (p.21).
Assumption 4: “Curriculum theory, then, constitutes a public and political commitment
that requires autobiographical excavation and the self-reflexive articulation of one’s
subjectivity in society” (p.22). Pinar noted that although a person may need isolation to
prepare for complicated conversations, he/she does not have the option of remaining in
the philosopher’s cave. Hence, educators are obligated to share their views of curriculum
as dictated from the public sphere and to seek to change aspects of it that are in conflicts
with democratic values. We are required to be critically reflective of discourse
bandwagons such as “competency-based” or “outcome-based” phrases that have a
historic underpinning in need of our uncovering (p. 24).
Assumption 5: “Musil reminds me that, in an important sense, the regressiveprogressive-analytic-synthesis does not occur in discrete temporal or conceptual units,
but simultaneously...For Musil the process of education is, in part, self-revelation, a
process in which outer events provoke inner transformations one cannot easily perceive,
certainly not initially” (p. 131). Pinar cited Ronell (1992a, p.107) “’...writing for no one
to no address counts for something; it is the writer’s common lot’ There may be no
concrete other, but there is an Other to whom one is speaking; it is the other that is
oneself denied, repressed, split-off. It is a self that can only be imagined; it is culture not
yet conceived” (p.130). “In a sense, writing autobiographically is working on the cuttingroom floor” (p.131).
Assumption 6: “Self-mobilization and social reconstruction are co-extensive and
inextricably intertwined” (p.208).
Book’s strengths and weaknesses
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Strength: Pinar stretches our thinking beyond the limits of curriculum as object/subject
(noun), and he opens our view to action, process, and blurring between the curriculum as
object and subject to something that is socially constructed, dynamic and historically,
culturally, geographically shaped.
Weakness: Curriculum theory is focused upon the curriculum scholar and what that
person ought to do and study versus the teacher, student, administrator and what they do
with curriculum theory.
Weakness: As a reconstructionist, he begins with deconstruction. He spends a lot of time
deconstructing what did not work and little time considering what his vision actually is;
in other words, we search for the ground that he stands on because he keeps moving it.
Weakness: p. 29...schooling ought not to be tied to corporate goals even though it is tied
to the economy...contradictory statement. At minimum, he needs to better explain this
fine distinction because without any explanation the reader is left to either reject his these
because it seems contradictory or to wonder what he means.
Strength: “ ...[T]here is an anti-intellectualism specific to the field of American
curriculum studies, embedded as it is in A,erican culture. Beause curriculum studies is
construed as a ‘professional’ field, an ‘applied’ discipline, it has sometimes been
suspicious of scholarship not obviously linked to the workings of schools”(p.169). I find
that Pinar’s currere became an idea strictly reserved for teacher education as opposed to
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student education in opublic schools. It seemed that, at that point, he suffered what
Critical Theorists do, a deconstruction of what is that leads to a road to nowhere in
particular. However, Pinar stated “ This misunderstanding seems to assume that
education is somehow like a complex automobile engine, that if only we make the right
adjustments—in teaching, in curriculum, in assessment—that we will get it humming
smoothly, and that it will transport us to our destination, the promised land of high test
scores” (p.170).
Weakness: However, I completely disagree with him when he says: “”The
misunderstandings of our work—that we are engineers of and thereby responsible for
student learning—is circulated not only by university presidents but by many of our
won—education—colleagues. It leads to the coction of funny phrases like ‘action
research’ (redundant as that phrase is, and based on a false binary) and to a pervasive
(and anti-intellectual) suspicion of theory” (p.170). Redundancy implies that research is
action and that action is research much like saying “iterative rereading”. Lewin (1946)
argued that research was done to schools and assumed that the students, teachers and
culture were “objects of study” He constructed the term, “action research” to overcome
such an objectivist view of school research. Is this phrase redundant or was it an
oxymoron at the time Kurt Lewin thought of it? The purpose of action research is to bring
teachers and researchers together to have complicated conversations, to co-construct
meaning about expereicnes studied. How is this anti-intellectual?
How it contributes to my understanding of curriculum foundations?
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Pinar (2004) conceived of curriculum as a verb. He searched other disciplines (e.g.
phenomenology ) to locate a discourse to talk about curriculum as “a multifaceted
process, involving not only official policy, prescribed textbooks, standardized
examinations, but as well the complicated conversation’ of the participants. We have
reconceived the curriculum; no longer is it a noun. It is instead a verb: currere [emphasis
in original]” (p.19).
He argued that in curriculum studies since the 1970s is more focused upon understanding
than social engineering, establishing an intellectually independent...not tied to specific
pieces of legislation academic field of understanding”, and a “shift from the emphasis on
teaching (especially the technology of instruction to curriculum, especially
interdisciplinary configurations such as African American studies, Women’s and Gender
Studies and cultural studies” (p.19).
Pinar uses the example of autobiographical writing as freeing especially black women
like Sojourner Truth from the abuse they suffered that was both racism and sexism (p.43).
he explained how coming to a self-understanding of what it was that she went through
allowed her to articulate clearly and emphatically with the aim of upturning the truth of
American history and potentially changing the future relationship between dominant and
subordinate cultural; groups. Ida B. Wells, too, expressed that “Crusade” was the central
metaphor for her autobiographical experience (p.45). Pinar characterized these women as
examples of “remarkable individuals whose subjective struggles were simultaneously
collective ones. In our time of trial and tribulation, teachers might respectfully mime
these autobiographical practices...” (p.46).
Ch. 9- “The advancement of understanding cannot occur when government intervenes in
the intellectual lives of teachers and students, as the Bush administration is now
10



attempting. To stipulate the intellectual agenda of the nation’s teachers and professoriate
by specifying not only the categories of research to be funded but, in the “No Child Left
Behind” legislation, by the methodologies by which research is to be conducted, is
profoundly and aggressively anti-intellectual. The Bush legislation is not, finally, many
steps away from censorship” (p.207).
Ch.9- “Contrast the situation in the United States with that in Canada, where SSHRC
provides the majority of governmental research grants in education. While SSHRC
periodically targets specific topics for ‘strategic grants,’ such as the ‘new economy’ or
‘valuing literacy,’ it does so without disturbing its regular grant program. In its regular
funding program, decisions regarding the receipt of grants are made by panels of scholars
through an extensive peer review process (in which I have participated)” (p.208).
Ch 9- “We curriculum specialist were asked to help teachers become skilful
implementers of others’ objectives [based upon math and science due to fear after
Sputnik], something like an academic version of the postal service, delivering other
people’s mail. We were not to participate in what was delivered to the children...our job
was to see that the mail-the curriculum-was delivered, opened, read, then learned.
‘Accountability’ was—remains—the Orwellian watchword of the day” (p.210).
Ch.9- Pinar shared several pages of talks held by various university administrators and
the CEO of AACTE and NCATE because in 2000, NCATE published standards for “how
and what” teacher candidates learn and requested performance data from professors to
show how and what they taught (pp.211-216).0

How is the author’s perspective evident in today’s classroom curricula?


There are multiple ways that our current programs of study require students to work with
writing, digital texts, and with various ways of making meaning as consumers and
producers of texts. Since we define text broadly as including media text, all of our
English language learning outcomes apply to digital contexts.
Computers/Hypertext: Pinar (2004) cautions educators to be wary of scholars who
emphatically denounce computer use in class. He cited Bowers (2000) who noted that
computers lead us to decontextualize our encounters with the world, to think in linear,
progressive and evolutionary ways, and to experience commodificaton as engage with
digital environments (pp.133-134). Instead, Pinar views computer use as tied to our
cultural beliefs and values and that “cyberspace reconfigures subjectivity” (p.134). Pinar
cited Nelson as saying that hypertext is a form of electronic text that is non-sequential
writing...a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different
pathways...” (p.135). The discourse of intertextuality, web, network works on a an
evocative level to encourage us to think differently about working in a digital
environment. “For Landow, hypertext represents the convergence of postrstructuralists
conceptions of textuality and electronic embodiments of it. It undermines certain aspects
of the authoritativeness and autonomy of the text. In so doing, hypertext reconfigures the
author. Landow asserts, presumably be dissolving his or her unitary cohesion” (p.138).
Pinar commented that exploratory and discovery learning may flourish if teachers
undertake such learning in digital environments, but he also cautions against an uncritical
embrace of technologies: “...At least rhetorically, there has been an uncritical embrace
[by elementary and secondary teachers] of educational technology, from filmstrip to the
radio (in the 1920s and 1930s), to educational television in the 1960s and now the
11

computer...” (p.139). Current research in Canada is not giving the impression that such
teachers are uncritically accepting and using technology in their classrooms (cite Jill’s
research). At the end of the chapter, Pinar concurred with Landow (1992) that hypertext
“functions to destabilize the very conception of a permanent center, or the center as any
but travelling, momentary focus of attention” (p.141). He explained how he began the
Website for the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
(www.iaacs.org) with the intent of “diffusion and difference”. He meant that he wanted to
provide a global location for the sharing or diffusing of many experiences with
curriculum studies worldwide. At the same time, he recognized that national boundaries
and politics necessarily meant that such scholarship would have “difference” as part of
such “diffusion.” (p. 141). Finally, the computer has the potential of offering educators a
way to “diffuse and democratize” schools, schooling, learners and learning (p.142).
Chapter 6: Sex Times Technology- This chapter is written to shock and decenter the
reader. It begins with Ronell (1992) who wrote about mass communications devices (
television) and queer theory and noted that audiences are fed a t.v. discourse that
increases tolerance for violence against racial minorities (e.g.Rodney King) and
homosexual individuals. The reader is left wondering what Pinar’s connection is with
curriculum theory for 6 pages. He branches into other postmodern discourses. He
challenges us to rethink homoerotic pornography a possibly progressive tactic for gaining
authorial recognition through fanfiction writing (Penley, 1991). He uses Holwell (1995)
to say that unless we acknowledge what we would normally not read, write or think
about, we fail to unearth our “Other”, our split-off selves (p.149). “When marginalized
aspects of our identities (racial, gendered, ethnic, sexual) are expressed in the cultural
arenas of culture, Susan Bordo (1993) believes they are themselves transformed, and are
transforming” (p.149). He explains how the cyborg is “self-difference” and we ought to
embrace new ways of conceptualizing living in the everyday sense by considering digital
and comic contexts and what they have to teach us about new discourses and , therefore,
new ways of being. It is not a deductive entry into his premise that is “[There is] a
complex relationship between education and technology the curriculum theorist’s
expertise namely the pedagogical concern for configurations of knowledge, in this
instance, the structural interrelationships and its relationships to the public” (p.156). Pinar
ends the chapter by considering Willinsky’s proposal of having an “Automata Data
Corporation”, where “ [it would] provide the public with far more helpful and
comprehensive picture of what has been studied and what has been found” (p.155-156).
He praised Willinsky for reinforcing the point that such a structure ought to be directed at
promoting difference as opposed to unity of knowledge (p.156). This is cited as an
example of the “democratization of knowledge” (p.156). He cited Levy (2001) who
spoke about “knowledge as flow” (p.157). In other words, because of the increased
circulation of knowledge and because of the many different discourses of knowledge and
what should count as knowledge, educators ought to embrace a new approach to teaching
that does not depend upon precise planning and knowing what will be discussed in
advance (p.157). Pinar embraced Levy’s (2001) metaphor of “space” to imagine
knowledge, and he saw this metaphor as commensurate with Willinksy’s views about
knowledge as well. The only way to embrace knowledge as space is to be willing to
traverse such a space alongside others who share discourses and ways of thinking that we
may not have considered; hence, Pinar favours “personalized learning and cooperative
12
networked learning” (p.157). Pinar goes on to say that this was what he was thinking
when he began the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies”
(p.158). We need to think of globalization as “globalness” where he cited Glissant (2002)
who thought of globalness as a “world of endless multiplicities” (p.158). Globalization,
on the other hand, has been used extensively in worldwide cultural imperialist literature
to refer to economic standardization. He concluded his chapter by referring to how he
supports the Chinese term, “Internationalization” as well because it refers to a democratic
conception of the future; Wang (2002) noted that such a word means
“between/country/change (process)” (p.159). Te Aoki, too, was an important contributor
to this conversation because he stated that “authentic conversation requires ‘going
beyond’ the surface to take into account ‘unspoken’ and ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions,
including ‘ideology,’...involves open conversation that invited reciprocity, what Aoki
called “the cultural crucible and context” (p.159).
How might the book change the way we think about the process of curriculum
development?
What are issues for further discussion are raised by the work?
What evidence is there of curriculum commonplaces and Eisner’s orientations?

“Curriculum theory is, then, that interdisciplinary field committed to the study of
educational experience, especially (but not only) as that experience is encoded in the
school curriculum, itself a highly symbolic as well as institutional structuration of
(potentially educational experience. As Grumet (1988) observed, curriculum is what the
older generation chooses to tell the younger generations” (p.20).
13
Analysis of Pinar with Schwab’s Commonplaces
Pinar
Student
Teacher
Mileu
Subject Matter




Chapter 1

Aligned himself
with John Dewey
and stated that
experience
“provided the bridge
between ‘self’ and
‘society’, between
self-realization and
spheres, curriculum
becomes a
complicated
conversation, ‘a
political process as
well as a search for
subjectivity’”
(Slattery and Rapp,
2003, 89)” (p.17).
“ In calling for auto
biography in
education, I have
been asking teachers
and students to
reconstruct
themselves through
academic
knowledge,
knowledge selfreflexively studied
and dialogically
encountered. The
reconstruction of the
public sphere cannot
proceed without a
reconstruction of the
private sphere”
(p.21)




“...teaching...is a
matter of enabling
students to employ
academic knowledge
(and popular culture,
increasingly via
media and the
Internet) to
understand their own
self-formation
within society and
the whole world”
(p.16)
“..generative roles of
creativity and
individuality in
teaching” (p.26)
Teacher education
ought to be “culturein-the-making”
(p.26)
“...American
teacher’s identity is
being reconceived
from factory
supervisor to
corporate manager.
It is a promotion”
(p.30).
“Of course, we
teachers must meet
contractual
obligations
regarding
curriculum and
instruction.
However, we need
not necessarily
believe them or
uncritically accept
them” (p.30).

“Curriculum
theory rejects the
current ‘businessminded’ school
reform, with its
emphasis on test
scores on
standardized
examinations,
academic
analogues to ‘the
bottom line’ (i.e.
‘profit’). It rejects
the miseducation
of the American
public” (p.16).
“’The great
weakness’ in
Horace Mann’s
educational theory,
Lasch (1995, 151152) argues, was
his assumption that
‘education takes
place only in
schools’” (p.1617)


“The school
curriculum
communicates what
we choose to
remember about our
past, what we
believe about our
present, what we
hope for the future.”
(p.20)
“Because it is
highly symbolic, the
theorization of
curriculum requires
situating it
historically,
socially, and
autobiographically
(i.e. in terms of life
history and selfformation)” (p.20).
“To educate the
public requires us to
teach academic
knowledge, but
configured around
faculty and student
interests, addressed
to pressing social
concerns (including
global and
community)
concerns. To
educate the public
suggests that we
teach popular
culture...to enable
students to connect
their lived
experiences with
academic
knowledge, to foster
student’s
intellectual
development, and
students’ capacities
for critical thinking”
(p.21).
14
Scholarly Works
Pinar, W.F. (1978). The reconceptualization of curriculum studies. Journal of
Curriculum Studies, 10(3), 205-214.
Traditionalists
“What is reconceptualization?...To a considerable extent, the reconconceptualization is a reaction
to what the field has been, and what it is seen to be at the present time” (p.205).
“Most curriculum work in 1977 can be characterized as traditionalists. Their work continues to
make use of the ‘coventional wisdom’ of the field epitomized still by the work of Tyler” (p.205).
“Curriculum work tend to be field-based and curriculum writing tends to have school teachers in
mind” (pp.205-206).
“There were no departments of curriculum in colleges of education in the 1920s; Newton and
other administrators could go nowhere else but to teh classroom for curriculum personnel”
(p.206).
“It was a time of ermging scientism when the so-called scientific techniques from business and
industry were finding their way into educational theory and practice” (p.206). There is a
technological rationality dedicated to the “improvement of schools” (p.206)
“ ‘Curriculum change’ is measured by comparing resulting behaviours with original objectives”
(p.206).
“From Tyler to Taba and Saylor and Alexander to the current expression of this genre in Daniel
and Tanner’s book...What makes this work one territory is its fundamental interest in working
with school people, with revising the curricula of schools. Traditional writing tends to be
journalistic, necessarily so, in order that it can be readily accessible to a readership seeking quick
answers to pressing practical problems. The publications of the Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development also exemplify, to a considerable extent, this writing. ASCD is the
traditionalists’ professional organization”(p.207).
15
Conceptual-empiricists
“...the traditional curriculum field has been declared terminally ill or already deceased by several
influential observers, among them Schwab and Huebner” (p.207).
Several reasons existed for the development of what Pinar called the “conceptual-empiricist”
phase: 1. “The leadership of the so-called curriculum reform movement of the 1960s was outside
of the field” (p.207), 2. “The economic situation of the past six years has meant a drying up of
funds for in-service work and for curriculum proposal generally” (p.207)., 3. “research in
education...has become indistinguishable from social science research” (p.208)., 4. One
discovers resear5chers whose primary identity is with a cognate field[ psychology, philosophy,
or sociology” (p.208). All of this contributes to “the view that education is not a discipline in
itself but an area to be studied by the disciplines is evident in the work of those curricularists I
have called conceptual empiricists. The work of this group can be so characterized, employing
conceptual and empirical in the sense social scientists typically employ them. This work is
concerned with developing hypotheses to be tested...” (p.208)
-“AERA tends to be an organization of conceptual-empiricists” (p.208).
-Walker fascinated Pinar because he delivered a “hard blow to the Tyler rationale” and he was
“moving away from social science...it is closer to the work of some reconceptualists than it is to
Posner and other conceptual-empiricists. Walker studied how curriculum unfolded in a school
and concluded that “curricularists ought to abandon the attempt to make actual curriculum
development mirror prescriptive theories, accept deliberation as a core aspect of the development
process” (p.109)
Reconceptualists
Pinar claimed that such a group is still concerned with generalization. He noted how Professor
Apple presented his case study research and Pinar found that it diverged from c.e. research in
two ways, First, it was value-laden and second, he had a “politically emancipator intent” (p.210).
“That is, in contrast to the canon of traditional social science, which prescribes data collection,
hypothesis substantiation or disconfirmation in the disinterested service of building a body of
knowledge, a reconceptualist tends to see research as an inescapably political as well as
intellectual act” (p.210).
By 1975, the ASCD Yearbook reflected a more historically situated view of curriculum than
what had been presented in the past.
“What is necessary is a fundamental reconceptualization of what curriculum is, how it functions
and how it might function in emancipator ways. It is this commitments to a comprehensive cri
tique and theory development that distinguishes the reconceptulaists phenomenon” (p.211).
16
Pinar, W.F. (1988). The reconceptualization of curriculum studies: Appendix. In W.F.
Pinar (Ed.), Contemporary curriculum discourses: Twenty years of JCT. New York:
Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
-p.483-“Their work, termed Reconceptualism and the Reconceptualization, challenged
the dominant tradition in the field, a tradition characterized by behavioral objectives,
planning, and evaluation. Curriculum studies had begin in the 1920s as a subfield of
educational administration. The main function of this emerging discipline was to develop
and manage curricula for a public school system in a period of rapid expansion.
Consequently, the early texts of the field addressed issues of development, including
curriculum planning and evaluation. The term, Reconceptualists suggested that the
function of curriculum studies was not the development and management but the
scholarly and disciplined understanding of educational experience, particularly in its
cultural, gender, and historical dimensions. During the past two decades the field of
curriculum has been reconceptualised from an extensively practice-oriented field to a
more theoretical, historical, research-oriented field” (p.484).
-p.484-485- First volley was Joseph Schwab in 1969 in “The Practical: A Language for
Curriculum.” Pinar noted that he identified the field’s apparent demise in its “flight form
the practical” (p.484). He also listed Westbury, Connelly, Reid, Kliebard and Huebner,
McNeil and himself as the primary people who began with the idea that curriculum had
to change away from a Tylerian Rationale. Each had a different focus i.e. Pinar wanted to
establish his method of currere; Schwab wanted a practical curriculum that involved
multiple players in curriculum-making.
-p.486- Michael Apple and other Marxixts were assigned to Critical Theorists and Pinar
named reconceptulaists as post-critical because such theorists were concerned with the
individual as opposed to strictly social change and a political critique of curriculum.
17