Throughout the history of the United States there has been a long trajectory of dialogue within the field of education around curriculum and pedagogy. Scholars have centered questions such as: What is curriculum? What knowledge should count as curriculum? Who gets to decide? Who does not? And, in turn, what is the pedagogical process of organizing knowledge, subject matter, and skills into curriculum? While many scholars have worked on various approaches to curriculum, the work of Black intellectual scholar Anna Julia Cooper serves as an important point of departure that highlights how curriculum and pedagogy have long been immersed in broader sociopolitical issues such as citizenship, democracy, culture, race, and gender. Starting from the late 19th century, Cooper took up curricular and pedagogical questions such as: What is the purpose of education? What is the role of the educator? And what is the purpose of being student-centered? These are important questions that pull together various traditions and fields of work in education that offer different approaches to curriculum. For instance, the question of whether it’s best to center classical subjects versus striving for efficiency in the development of curriculum has been a debated issue. Across such historical debates, the work of mainstream education scholars such as John Dewey, Ralph Tyler, and Hilda Taba have long been recognized; however, voices from scholars of color, such as Cooper, have been left out or overlooked. Thus, the contributions of Black intellectual scholars such as Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and other critical scholars of color are brought to the forefront to provide deeper knowledge about the development of curriculum and pedagogy. The work of marginalized scholars is also connected with reconceptualist efforts in curriculum studies to consider current conceptual framings of schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy. Finally, critical theories of curriculum and pedagogy are further unpacked through research conducted with and alongside communities of color. This scholarship includes culturally responsive pedagogy, funds of knowledge, hip-hop pedagogy, reality pedagogy, critically compassionate intellectualism, barrio pedagogy, youth participatory action research (YPAR), and feminist of color pedagogies.
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Critical Perspectives on Curriculum and Pedagogy
Ganiva Reyes, Racheal Banda, and Brian D. Schultz
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African and Black Diaspora as Curriculum
Horace R. Hall
The African diaspora, also referred to as the African Black diaspora, is the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans and their descendants to various parts of the world. Even though voluntary widespread African diasporas occurred during precolonizing periods, the Arabic slave trade (7th to 18th centuries) and the transatlantic slave trade (16th to 19th centuries) are largely recognized as phases of involuntary movement with an estimated combined 30 million Africans dispersed across the African continent and globally. Today, the largest populations of people descended from Africans forcibly removed from Africa reside in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, with millions more in other countries. Such vast movement of a people across time and space has meant that those who are part of the African diaspora have suffered similar problems and disadvantages. The legacy of slavery, especially in relation to racism and colonialism, has garnered attention across the scholarly disciplines of history, ethnic, cultural, and religious studies. Likewise, African and Black diasporan responses to colonial oppression have manifested in multiple curricula in literature, music, philosophy, politics, civilization, customs, and so forth, designed for and by African diasporans in their efforts to unite all people of African descent, building on their cultural identity and resisting racist ideology and colonial rule.
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From Curriculum Theory to Theorizing
Gabriel Huddleston and Robert Helfenbein
Curriculum theory is shaped and held within the larger field of curriculum studies, but its distinctive focus on understanding curriculum as opposed to developing it places it is stark contrast with other parts of the larger field. This focus is further distinctive when curriculum theory shifts to curriculum theorizing. Curriculum theorizing emerged in the United States, principally at Bergamo conferences and precursor conferences, in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT), and through scholars associated with the reconceptualization. It has spread internationally via the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and its subsidiaries in many different countries and cultures. Some scholars hold that curriculum theory includes curriculum theorizing as well as normative and analytic conceptualizations that justify or explain curriculum decisions and actions. Curriculum theorizing attempts to read broadly in social theory so as to embody those insights in dealing with issues of curriculum, and can take philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or cultural studies approaches to analyses, interpretations, criticisms, and improvements. This approach has built upon what has become known as the reconceptualization, which began in the late 1970s and continues into the early 21st century. Increasingly, the field has taken up analysis of contemporary education policy and sociopolitical contexts as an outgrowth of its work. Issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and dis/ability, and the ways in which their intersectionality impact the lived experience of schools, continue to motivate and direct the field of curriculum studies. In so doing, criticism, analysis, interpretation, and expansion of such issues have moved the focus of curriculum theorizing to include any aspects of social and psychological life that educate or shape the ways human beings reflect upon or interact with the world.
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History and Social Studies Curriculum
E. Wayne Ross
Social studies education has had a turbulent history as one of the core subjects in the school curriculum. The fundamental content of the social studies curriculum – the study of human enterprise across space and time –however, has always been at the core of educational endeavors. It is generally accepted that the formal introduction of social studies to the school curriculum was instigated by the 1916 report of the National Education Association’s Committee on Social Studies, which emphasized development of citizenship values as a core aim of history and social science education. Earlier commissions of the N.E.A. and American Historical Association heavily influenced the Committee on Social Studies recommendations. The roots of the contemporary social studies curriculum, therefore, can be traced to two distinct curriculum reform efforts: the introduction of academic history into the curriculum and citizenship education. There is widespread agreement that the aim of social studies is citizenship education, that is the preparation of young people so that they possess the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for active participation in society. This apparent consensus, however, has been described as almost meaningless because social studies educators continue to be at odds over curricular content as well as the conception of what it means to be a good citizen. Since its formal introduction into the school, social studies curriculum been the subject of numerous commission and blue-ribbon panel studies, ranging from the sixteen-volume report of the American Historical Association’s Commission on Social Studies in the 1930s to the more recent movement for national curriculum standards. Separate and competing curriculum standards have been published for no less than seven areas of that are part of the social studies curriculum: United States and global history, economics, geography, civics, psychology, and social studies. Social studies curriculum is defined a lack of consensus and has been an ideological battleground with ongoing debates over its nature, purpose, and content. Historically there have been a diverse range of curricular programs that have been a prominent within social studies education at various times, including the life adjustment movement, progressive education, social reconstructionism, and nationalistic history. The debate over the nature, purpose, and content of the social studies curriculum continues today, with competing groups variously arguing for a social issues approach, the disciplinary study of history and geography, or action for social justice as the most appropriate framework for the social studies curriculum.
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Peace and Curriculum Studies
Molly Quinn
To contemplate the question or concern of peace in curriculum studies, and as has been taken up in the field, is to traverse terrain neither simple nor singular. Peace as a concept, and an ideal, is itself complex and contested, elusory even, and approached in manifold ways, often in relation to other equally intricate and disputed ideas, like violence, war, justice, freedom, hope, and love (as well as human rights, hospitality, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism)—historically informed and context-specific as well. The challenges, too, in undertaking such a task are further compounded as concerning curriculum studies, where there is neither a clearly established nor a cohesive body of work upon which to turn or draw here, where no formalized attention has been given systematically to the study of peace, peace education, or peace studies in relation to such. Nevertheless, one could argue that the field of curriculum from its inception, and enduringly so, has been implicitly and integrally connected to the interest of peace and point to a diversity of work therein, of some breadth and depth, to support this claim and examine this interest. The contemporary scholarship that has emerged in the field and explicitly addressed matters of peace and nonviolence, as well as the work of peace advocates and educators, portends further advancement of this line of inquiry—particularly in response to the growing threats and realities of inequality, conflict, violence, war, ecological devastation, and genocide worldwide—in the hopes of creating a more beautiful world of justice, harmony, and human flourishing via education.
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Psychological Well-Being and Resilience
Shelva Paulse Hurley
Resilience is the ability to adapt and thrive despite facing adversity. There are various ontological approaches to conceptualizing resilience, including the pathological perspective, defining it in terms of protective factors, and exploring the impact of intervention in the manifestation of resilience. The pathological perspective defines resilience in terms of risk factors located at the individual level. A second area of research on resilience defines it in terms of protective factors that may contribute to its manifestation. The final area of research takes into account not only individual-level risk or protective factors, but also accounts for structural influence in an assessment of resilience. As an example of the interaction between individual and structural factors, Caleon and King proposed the concept of Subjective School Resilience. This perspective on resilience suggests it is a malleable construct and influenced by factors relating to both intra- and interpersonal processes.
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Social Sciences Education in New Zealand Schools
Genaro Oliveira and Bronwyn Wood
Prior to colonization, tangata whenua (people of the land) in Aotearoa (New Zealand) developed robust knowledge traditions. Formal social sciences education in New Zealand began with the schooling system introduced by European settlers in the late 19th century. It has been subject to recurrent review and reform since its foundation. The Education Act of 1877 led to the first formal national curriculum that introduced geography and history teaching in primary schools. During the first half of the 20th century, social sciences education in New Zealand saw a greater emphasis on citizenship education due to increasing migration and geopolitical changes resulting from the two world wars. Enduring and contentious curricular changes would follow the recommendations of the Thomas Report (1944), which introduced social studies in secondary schools as a new integrated school subject to promote learning across the social sciences.
Since the 1990s, the social sciences have been named as one of New Zealand’s eight curriculum learning areas. Social studies (junior social sciences) remain as a core integrated subject taught compulsorily from years 1 to 10 (primary, intermediate, and junior secondary years), while a suite of discrete social sciences disciplines is optional for students at senior secondary levels (years 11–13). For almost 80 years, social sciences curricula have been the primary vehicle for citizenship education. The most recent curricular reforms have emphasized the importance of Mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge) to promote culturally-responsive social sciences learning in commitment to Aotearoa New Zealand’s bicultural foundations.
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Sociocultural Factors and the Global Goals of Education for All
Eric A. Hurley
All over the world, nations have spent much of the last 20 years scrambling to increase and improve access to basic education. Globally, the number of people without access to a basic education has fallen significantly in the years since the goals of Education For All (EFA) were announced in 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and extended at Incheon, South Korea, in 2016. This is ostensibly very good news. While universal access to a basic education is certainly a worthy goal, one can raise significant questions about the orientation of these efforts and the manner in which they are being pursued. For example, very little attention seems to have been paid to what the schools are or will be like, or to how the nations and people they must serve may be different from those for whom they were designed.
To understand the inevitable problems that flow from this potential mismatch, it is useful to examine education in nations that have achieved more or less universal access to basic education. Many of the educational, social, economic, and social justice disparities that plague those nations are today understood as natural effects of the educational infrastructures in operation. Examination of recent empirical research and practice that attends to the importance of social and cultural factors in education may allow nations that are currently building or scaling up access to head off some predictable and difficult problems before they become endemic and calcified on a national scale. Nations who seize the opportunity to build asset-based and culturally responsive pedagogies into their educational systems early on may, in time, provide the rest of the world with much needed leadership on these issues.
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Spirituality and Education in the United States
Roland W. Mitchell, Nicholas E. Mitchell, and Chaunda A. Mitchell
Spirituality and education have historically been tightly intertwined concepts. Spirituality is the timeless pursuit by humanity for certainty, understanding, and an abiding connection to each other and the cosmos. Education represents humanity’s efforts at grouping practices, insights, and often contested knowledges in such a manner that they are passed across generations, groups, and communities. The combination of the two reflects humanity’s pursuit at making sense out of the environment.
