What is Curriculum?

What is Curriculum? Paper details: 1) Pick a quote from the reading that you think is very interesting or important with respect to the overall argument or story. Introduce the quote. 2) Describe: explain the meaning of the quote in your own words. 3) Justify: Explain why you picked the quote - if you strongly agreed/disagreed with it don’t just say so, explain why you did. 4) Interpret: Explain how the quote you selected related to the overall argument or theme of the text. 5) Contextualize: Explain how the quote/overall argument relates to an issue of important to the study of self, culture and society. Retrospective on “What is Curriculum?” KIERAN EGAN Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies V olume 1  Number 1  Spring 2003 Retrospective on “What is Curriculum?” KIERAN EGAN Simon Fraser University It can be a tad sobering to re-read for the first time in over twenty years something written then in a hurry. I had been assigned to teach my first curriculum course at Simon Fraser University and thought it might be a good idea to find out what “curriculum” was. Many of the people I talked to in the field seemed to have rather divergent views, and some cheerfully admitted they had no idea. Some suggested I look at the kinds of books used by curriculum professors in their courses and infer what the field cov- ered from that. And, of course, I studied the big Curriculum textbooks. None of this made things much clearer, oddly enough. I also wanted to start my class off with something that would clarify what curriculum was supposed to be about for the students. Not being able to find anything that seemed to me adequate at the time, I wrote “What is Curriculum?” for my students, and later sent it off to the editor of Curriculum Inquiry , who, I tend to think looking at it now, was unduly kind in printing it. A number of issues come to mind on re-reading. First, a rather uncom- fortable awareness of showing off with the Latin quotes. I had been then closer to my schooldays, when Father Paul had tried to persuade us that Latin was our mother tongue, and this English vulgate we slopped around in was no language in which to learn precision and clarity of thought. He wasn’t very successful, but as my Latin dribbles away with years of inac- tion, I’m beginning to wonder whether maybe he had a point: a point made well by A.E. Housman (1989) in his inaugural lecture as professor of Latin 18 Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies at London University in 1892—one of the more interesting essays about education written in the previous century or so. But also, as I look at those quotes, and the argument I make about the meaning of the word moving from the container to the contained, I am doubtful both about the move- ment and whether those quotes actually support the claim. In general, I was looking at “curriculum” in a kind of Wittgensteinian way, seeking its meaning in its uses (1963). One part of my conclusion was that almost anything to do with education seemed to be encompassed in the notion of what it meant to “do” curriculum. This part won me a men- tion in the second edition of the massive Curriculum Development text, by Daniel and Laurel Tanner (1980, p. 32). This moment of glory, however, was a tad tarnished by my definition of curriculum being dismissed as being indistinguishable from the term “pedagogy.” I often wondered how writ- ers of these enormous books managed to read all the items that are cited in their vast bibliographies. This experience gave me a clue. The second part of my conclusion was that “curriculum” seemed to be the only area of genuine educational study not infected by people suppos- edly studying education through psychology or philosophy or sociology or whatever. That is, curriculum has the virtue, as it seemed to me then, of not trying to ape the methodology of some other academic inquiry and then apply it to education. This dividing up the field of education into many sub-fields, none of which apparently has much that is useful to say to any other, seems to me still to be the curse of the study of education. How much longer can we stagger on, producing mountains of “knowledge” that are supposed to improve education, while patently doing nothing of the sort— and in the process earning the contempt of the wider academic world. It seems to me impossible to show that the practice of education has been at all improved by a century of expert psychological and philosophical and sociological and whatever else study of its phenomena. Carrying on this way, in the teeth of the evidence, can be managed only by refusing to look at the world around us. The piece is dated by its references to the then popular movement called “Open Education.” I do think the point about educational scholars, faced with the question of what we should teach, preferring to deal with proce- dural questions remains generally true. E.D. Hirsch (1987) has, to the dis- tress of progressivists generally, recommended a specific curriculum. Un- fortunately, it is just a reassertion of the old form of the liberal or traditional curriculum. One can only hope that curriculum study in the 21 st c entury will escape from the dreary and fruitless arguments between progressivist and traditionalist forces that have dogged education through the previous century. One can hardly see any debate about education still without recog- nizing the lineaments of this division barely below the surface. What is Curriculum? KIERAN EGAN Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies V olume 1  Number 1  Spring 2003 What Is Curriculum? KIERAN EGAN Simon Fraser University Originally published in Curriculum Inquiry , volume 8, number 1 (1978): 66–72. Reprinted with permission from Blackwell Publishers. (http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/asp/journal.asp?ref=0362-6784). In all human societies, children are initiated into particular modes of making sense of their experience and the world about them, and also into a set of norms, knowledge, and skills which the society re- quires for its continuance. In most societies most of the time, this “cur- riculum” of initiation is not questioned; frequently it is enshrined in myths, rituals, and immemorial practices, which have absolute au- thority. One symptom—or perhaps condition—of pluralism is the conflict and argument about what this curriculum of initiation should contain. Today, however, the conflicts and arguments are even more profound and undermine rational discussion of what the curriculum should contain. Much discussion in the professional field of curricu- lum, at present, focuses on the basic question of what curriculum is, and this suggests severe disorientation. At a superficial level, confusion about what curriculum is, and thus what people concerned with it should do, involves argument about whether cur- riculum subsumes instruction—and thus whether a student of curriculum 10 Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies should also be a student of instructional methods—or whether curriculum involves all learning experiences, or refers simply to a blueprint for achiev- ing restricted objectives in a school setting, or includes the statement of objectives as well, or also the evaluation of their achievement, and so on. The field seems to have no clear logical boundaries. Most accounts that try to make sense of the current state of the professional field of curriculum study describe a set of more or less distinct activities carried on in its name and then argue for a preference, or suggest a compromise or further alter- native. Those who try to make sense of the present confusion by reference to the past, rarely go back beyond the emergence of the curriculum field as a profession in North America in this century. In this brief essay, I want to take a somewhat longer perspective to see whether even a very general sketch of some relevant influences might not provide a clear picture of the present situation and offer some guidance for the future. It will be useful to begin with a brief look at the history of the word “curriculum,” touching down almost randomly through the centu- ries to see what changes there have been in its meaning. It is, of course, a Latin word carried directly over into English. Its first Latin meaning was “a running,” “a race,” “a course,” with secondary mean- ings of a “race-course,” “a career.” By picking out just two of Cicero’s uses of the word, we can get a sense of the direction in which it has developed. Defending Rabirius, he tossed off the neat epigram: “ Exiguum nobis vitae curriculum natura circumscripsit, immensum gloriae ” [Nature has confined our lives within a short space, but that for our glory is infinite] (Pro Rabirio 10.30). “Curriculum” is used here to refer to the temporal space in which we live; to the confines within which things may happen; to the container, as opposed to the contents. Later in his life, Cicero described his current work—he is on the seventh volume of his Antiquities, is collecting further historical data, revising speeches for publication, and studying law and Greek literature—“ Hae sunt exercitationes ingenii, haec curricula mentis ” These are the spurs of my intellect, the course of my mind runs on] ( De Senectute 1 1. 38). “Curriculum” here refers, however slightly, to the things he is study- ing, the content. This metaphorical extension, firstly from the race-course and running to intellectual pursuits, and then from reference to the tempo- ral constraints within which things happen to reference to the things that happen within the constraints, prefigures the general movement of the term through the ancient and modern world. The kind of questions one might ask about a race-course—How long is it? What obstacles are there?—ex- tend easily to the kind of questions one might ask about an intellectual cur- riculum—How long is it? What kinds of things does it contain? These remained the important curriculum questions throughout the medieval world. The questions for the designers of curricula may be for-