Curriculum Theorizing Outline
Bethany Bevins
Gardner-Webb University
I. What is Curriculum Theorizing?
A. What is a Theory?
1. A coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a
class of phenomena.
2. A proposed explanation, the status of which is still conjectural.
3. A body of principles, theorems about a subject.
4. That branch of a science or an art that deals with principles and methods.
5. Guess or conjecture.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p. 97)
B. Criteria for a Good Curriculum Theory
1. According to Walker (2003), curriculum theory should include:
A. Validity, which provides meaningfulness, logical consistency, and factual
Correctness.
B. Theoretical power, which contributes to basic understanding.
C. Serviceability, which helps resolve central curriculum problems.
D. Morality, which clarifies underlying values.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p. 98)
Theories?
1. The experienced curriculum “is never sufficiently regular, orderly, and periodic to
enable principles and explanations to be developed.” (Marsh & Willis, 2007, p.
98).
2. It is extremely difficult to come up with anything close to universal
generalizations (McCutheon, 1982, 1985; Molnar, 1992).
D. Potential Use of Curriculum Theories
1. Guide the work of teachers, policymakers, administrators, and anyone else
involved in curriculum planning and development.
2. Help researchers analyze data and provide direction for curriculum research.
E. Fundamental Questions for Any Curriculum Theory
1. What should count as knowledge? As knowing? What does not count as
legitimate knowledge?
2. Who defines what counts as legitimate knowledge?
3. Who shall control the selection and distribution of knowledge?
4. Who has the greatest access to high-status and high-prestige knowledge?
5. How shall curricular knowledge be made accessible to students?
6. How do we link the curriculum knowledge to the biographies and personal
meanings of students?
(Beyer & Apple, 1998; Posner, 1998; Ross, 2000)
II. Three Categories for Classifying Curriculum Theorizers and Their Approaches
A. Prescriptive Theorizers: Creating the Best Curricula Possible
1. Attempts to create models or frameworks for curriculum development that
improve school practices.
2. Members of this group of theorizers include Hilda Taba and Ralph Tyler.
3. Many members of this group have held the belief that finding the
best way of designing curricula will lead to the best possible curricula
for schools.
4. Social Needs-Child-Centered
a. Began with Dewey
i. His books The School and Society (1900) and The Child and the
Curriculum (1902) describe his belief that the curriculum of the
individual child is related to the role of the school within society.
ii. According to Dewey, the social experiences of the child are the starting
point for developing a curriculum and are at least as important as
organized disciplines of knowledge.
iii. Needs arise out of the nature of society, and the curriculum can reflect
those general needs but also be individualized around each child’s
specific needs.
iv. Kilpatrick proposed that units of work should replace subjects in order
to enable children to focus on topics of interest and problem-
solving activities.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p. 105)
5. Social Efficiency
a. Bobbitt viewed the curriculum as being determined solely by the
characteristics of the existing society and not by the nature of
the child.
b. Bobbitt argued that the metaphor of the factory and industrial production
should be the basis for curriculum development.
c. Education is for adult life, not the life of a child, and should consist
of knowledge and skills required in adult pursuits as to fit the
individual efficiently into the society as it is.
d. Ralph Tyler emphasized social needs as a starting point for curriculum,
but unlike Bobbitt, he remained open to a variety of rational and
technical ways of determining social needs and balancing them against
other kinds of needs.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, pp. 105-106.)
6. Social Needs-Reconstructionist
a. Do not identify what is wrong with the student in comparison with the
way society is but to identify what is wrong with society in comparison
with the way it should be (Marsh & Willis, 2007).
7. Philosophical-Academic Rational
a. The nature of knowledge as the starting point of curriculum development
and as the basis for a common curriculum.
b. De-emphasize the nature of the society and the nature of the individual as
determiners of what the curriculum should be (Marsh & Willis, 2007).
8. Taba’s Approach
a. Three Major Postulates about Thinking
i. Thinking can be taught.
ii. Thinking is an active transaction between the individual and the data.
iii. The processes of thought evolve by a sequence that is “lawful.”
b. The postulates assume that individual students have to engage actively
with classroom materials if they are to learn, and that there is an
optimal sequence of learning activities.
c. The teacher’s role is to provide a supportive environment to foster
students’ use of inductive thinking and to initiate this kind of thinking
by asking questions.
d. The classroom environment is supportive and cooperative.
e. Taba’s approach has been used in both large and small curriculum
projects.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, pp. 108-112)
B. Descriptive Theorizers: Mapping the Procedures of Curriculum Development
1. Attempts to identify how curriculum development takes place, especially
in school settings.
2. Understand the steps and procedures in curriculum development and the
relationships among them.
3. Decker Walker and Joseph Schwab are members of this group.
4. Deliberative
a. Most scholars under this subheading are concerned with meanings
and choices.
b. The focus is on how choices can be made well, not on what the con-
sequences of the choices should be.
c. Their concern has been described as “practical reasoning,” “practical
inquiry,” or “deliberation,” in which emphasis falls on considering the
complexities and uncertainties of specific situations and working
toward consensus about actions to be followed.
d. Reid suggests that curriculum problems have the following
characteristics:
i. They pose questions which must be answered.
ii. The grounds on which we have to make decisions are unsure.
iii. Existing resources and interests of the students and community
have to be taken into account.
iv. Each problem is unique to a specific time and setting.
v. The solutions we choose will realize some aims but reduce the
importance of others.
vi. Outcomes will be unpredictable.
vii. Each event only has meaning in terms of ultimate student
learning.
e. Three levels of justification within the process of deliberation:
i. Teachers feel they must resort to “forced” justification when
they believe they do not control curriculum decisions.
ii. Administrators who maintain that their decisions are consistent
with general school policies are using “relative” justification.
iii. Anyone who offers explanations in terms of fundamental pur-
poses, rules, or laws is using “general” justification.
f. Deliberation does not necessarily lead to a single best course of
action (or curriculum), but it is an effort to identify courses of
action for there are the most compelling justifications.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, pp. 112-115)
5. Joseph Schwab’s Approach
1. Participants in curriculum decisions must be familiar with a wide range of
theories in order to solve specific, practical problems.
2. Groups pass through three stages when solving problems.
a. The discovery of what different members of the group want and how these wants may be affected by particular actions.
b. Discovery of one’s own wants and those of other people.
i. The group sifts alternatives until it reaches some general con-
clusions about what should and can be done.
c. This is the utilization stage in which the group again sifts alternatives and decides the best way to solve the problem(s) that spurred the
deliberation.
3. Commonplaces
a. Curriculum delibration is always directed toward all four common-
places.
b. The four commonplaces are: teacher, learner, subject matter, and
milieu.
c. No commonplace is more important than any other.
C. Critical-Exploratory Theorizers
1. Attempts to understand deficiencies in past practices of curriculum
development and to replace practices by considering curriculum
in the broadest intellectual and social contexts.
2. Looks at curriculum in terms of its diversities and continuities, emphasiz-
ing what curriculum has been, is, and might be.
3. Elliot Eisner and William Pinar are members of this group.
4. Reconceptualists
a. MacDonald coined this term for a group of critical-exploratory
theorizers who “criticized existing conceptual schema and provided
new ways of viewing and exploring everything that the broadest
conceptions of curriculum seem to entail.” (Marsh & Willis, 2007, p.
120.)
b. Common Characteristics of Reconceptualists (Klohr, 1980)
i. Holistic, organic view is taken of people and their relation to nature.
ii. Individuals become the chief agents in their construction of know-
ledge.
iii. Curriculum theorists draw heavily on their own experiential
base as method.
iv. Curriculum theorizing recognizes the preconscious realms of
experience.
v. Roots of this theorizing lie in existential philosophy, phenomenon-
ology, and radical psychoanalysis.
vi. Personal liberty and the attainment of higher levels of con-
sciousness become central values in the curriculum process.
vii. Diversity and pluralism are characteristics of the social ends and
the means proposed to attain theses ends.
viii. A reconceptualization of supporting political-social operations is
basic.
ix. New language forms are generated to translate fresh meanings,
for example, metaphors.
c. Social and Cultural Control, Social Reproduction, and Cultural
Reproduction
i. These theorizers (Young, Bernstein, Althusser, Bowles, Gintis,
Bourdieu, Passeron, Giroux, and Apple) give the basic message
that curriculum decisions be made in light of the old truth that
the purpose of schooling is not only to conserve the best features
of society as it exists, but also to improve society.
ii. Curriculum developers must constantly examine society and
school practices for their underlying and unintended cones-
quences and to keep those values and consequences as close
as possible to the surface of the planned, enacted, and ex-
perienced curriculum.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p.124)
d. Literary Artist
i. Similar to deliberative approach but personal experience
is emphasized in addition to public meetings and group
decisions.
ii. Learning is highly personal.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, pp. 124-125)
e. Existential and Psychoanalytic Theorizing
i. Emphasize the importance of how schooling influences ex-
perience.
ii. The task is to transform schooling that constrains human feel-
ing (Grumet, 1981; Miller, 1992, 2000; Pinar, 1980, 1995).
iii. To be free, people need to know how they as individuals ex-
perience the world around them and how their decisions
about transforming the world are related to their decisions
about how to define themselves as individuals (Reynolds,
2003).
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p. 125)
f. Phenomenological Theorizing
i. Phenomenology refers to the “life world” of the individual
and suggests that each individual holds a personal and
peculiarly human consciousness about each concrete
situation experienced (Willis, 1979).
ii. Phenomenology attempts to get at the curriculum each
person lives.
iii. Involves teachers constantly seeking out the essence of
the experience of teaching.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p. 126)
g. Autobiographical/Biographical Theorizing
i. Focuses on personal experience in the curriculum.
ii. Pinar (1972) formulated the term currere, referring to an
existential experience of institutional structures.
iii. The method of currere is a strategy for self-reflection
that enables the individual to encounter experience more
fully and clearly, as if creating a highly personal auto-
biography (Pinar & Grumet, 1976).
iv. One does not only accumulate personal knowledge but
uses personal knowledge to transform both the personal
and social worlds.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, pp. 126-127)
h. Gender Analysis and Feminist Pedagogy
i. Gender text: analyzing unequal ways in which people
are treated because of their gender and sexuality, and
how knowledge and values develop under society’s
prevailing assumptions about gender (Pinar et al., 1995).
ii. Feminist Pedagogy (Kenway & Willis, 1998) describes the
social theory and politics of feminists, explaining
several variations of feminism.
iii. Liberal feminism: equality with males in access to edu-
cation.
iv. Socialist feminism: criticizing educational practices
exploitive of females.
v. Radical feminism: seeking a distinctively female edu-
cational culture.
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p. 127)
i. Gender Analysis and Male Identity
i. Sears (1992a, 1992b, 1999) uses the term queer to sig-
nify “those who have defined or have chosen to define
themselves as sexual outsiders” (1999, p.4).
ii. Sears (1999) defines teaching queerly as “creating
classrooms that challenge categorical thinking, promote
interpersonal intelligence, and foster critical conscious-
ness” (p. 5), contending that such teaching requires a
reexamination of taken for-granted assumptions about
diversity, identities, childhood, and prejudice.
iii. Other theorizers include Sumara and Davis (1999),
Aitken (1999), Pinar (1983, 2000), Lopez (2001), and
Leck (1999), who observes that “many of the conse-
quences we see in the lives of racialezed, gendered,
and sexualized minorities are the results of the dogmas,
that have disallowed teachers, parents, and schools
from participating in an open dialogue about children,
sexuality, and diversity” (p. 257).
j. Racial Theorizing
i. Watkins (2003) portrays issues concerning race in terms
of six historical orientations:
- Functionalism: self-help efforts and religious altruism
(18th century).
- Accomodationism: vocational training, manual labor,
and character building, all premised on subservience
for Negroes (late 19th century).
- Liberalism: liberal education was initiated in some
Black colleges (early 20th century).
- Black Nationalism: Political oppression and separation was promoted by Black nationalists such
Malcolm X (20th century).
- Afrocentrism: Africa-oriented education (Recent).
- Social Reconstructionism: Promotes a reformed,
egalitarian society (throughout 20th century).
(Marsh & Willis, 2007, p. 130)
k. Postmodern Theorizing
i. Major emphasis on rational, scientific methods and the use
of technology to control nature.
ii. Division of production methods involving separation of
family and work.
iii. Development of specialized, hierarchical bureaucracies
to control decision making
iv. Achievement of social progress by systematic develop-
ment and rational applications.
v. Economic and social organizations focused upon cap-
italist production (Hangreaves, 1995).
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