Peter S. Hlebowitsh

The Burdens of the New Curricularist

AbstractA community of scholars in a field is renewed by its common history, its common basis of skills, and its examination of commonly held problems. The expression of commonality does not eliminate debate or disagreement, but it does set a foundation for divergences. This is what it means to be a field. But in recent years, a new critical element has emerged that has openly rejected the historic legacy of the curriculum field in the interest of proposing a vastly new project for curriculum scholars. The effect has been schism. I argue that a new orientation in the field cannot be accepted until it is properly reconciled along the lines of the inherited traditions of the field. These are the burdens of the new curricularists, the traditions that they manifestly reject without scholarly engagement. Increasingly, it is clear that the field has not undergone a reconceptualization at all, but instead has been subjected to ideologically inspired criticism that has resulted in miscasting the history and the t...

Generational Ideas in Curriculum: A Historical Triangulation

Abstract In this article, I examine the work of John Franklin Bobbitt, Ralph Tyler, and Joseph Schwab with the intention of identifying lines of continuity and change in the curriculum field. Most curriculum scholars cast this group of three in an analytical framework that puts Tyler in kinship with Bobbitt, and that puts Schwab, by virtue of his declaration of moribundity against the field, in separation from Tyler and the historical line of thinking that he represented. I argue, however, that the turbulence caused by Schwab’s 1969 criticism of the curriculum field, far from supporting an argument for some iconoclastic separation from the traditional lines of the field, could more accurately be interpreted as an endorsement (with improvements) of the historic field. I make this case by pointing to the sustenance of what I call generational ideas in the curriculum field, which are ideas that have their roots in the defining moments of the curriculum field and that have persisted (some with modification) over more than one generation of curriculum scholars. Generational ideas in the curriculum field include a focus on the development of the school experience and on the relevance of local school authority. Generational curriculum work also works out of a vision-building construct (without an a priori commitment to any type of vision) that advises key sources for curriculum decision-making (society, students, and subject matter). Schwab inherited these generational insights and then went an important step further by showing us the way toward a more participatory process in curriculum decision-making. In this sense, Schwab was as much a tool of continuity in the field as he was an innovator. Finally, I demonstrate that the six signs of crisis that Schwab outlined in his famous 1969 essay very much imply a return to many of the first principles that we find in Tyler’s work.

When best practices aren’t: A Schwabian perspective on teaching

The curriculum literature has much to say about the ecological fallacy embodied in the ‘best practices’ movement. The work of Schwab anticipated much of it by reminding us of the dangers of trying to control classroom practices from afar, with the use of theoretical representations of classrooms that were, by definition, never fully like their real counterparts. The North American discourse on the quality of teaching can be substantively improved by being understood through this important Schwabian lens.

Social Class Analysis in the Early Progressive Tradition

ABSTRACTMany of the progressive-liberal thinkers central to the development of the field of curriculum studies have been criticized for failing to provide a substantive social class analysis of public schooling. Much of this criticism originated from leftist commentators, aimed directly at prominent figures like John Dewey, Harold Rugg, John Childs, Jesse Newlon, and Ralph Tyler. In this paper, however, the contrary position is taken. We argue that prominent progressive thinkers in the field of curriculum viewed the explanation of social inequities in relation to schooling was vitally important to curriculum considerations. Progressive-experimentalists in particular are described using their criticisms of class division and economic injustice in the society to assert the need for more directed efforts at developing social consciousness and social insight in the school. At the same time, the social class analysis provided by many progressives was not charged with ideological rhetoric about waging political...

Pre‐service Teachers and their Students: early views of race, gender and class

ABSTRACT Whereas much teacher education continues to engage in a limited and mechanized version of the learning to teach process, many teacher educators view their work as critically important to fostering societal equality and justice, conditions that remain uncommon in many US schools. By helping pre‐service teachers to view race, class, and gender as issues central to their concern as educators, teacher educators typically and systematically introduce their students to these issues with little regard for their students’ initial thoughts on these dimensions. This study examined 235 pre‐service teachers’ early views on students’ race, class, and gender by asking them to rate their respect for students who varied on the dimensions of race (black/white), gender, and class (lower/upper middle). The results of this investigation suggest that pre‐service teachers show patterns of greater respect for black, female students of low social‐economic status, independent of the type of student described (a leader, a...

A Higher Pragmatism: Assessment in the College Curriculum.

We assess our world as we live in it. Our abilities to pass thoughtful judgments, to draw reasonable conclusions, to establish a sense of what is worthwhile, and to understand what needs to be changed (and what needs to be conserved) are, in essence, assessment abilities. To assess the world is to think actively about it, to consciously obtain and interpret information about it in a manner that leads to some value determination.

Centripetal Thinking in Curriculum Studies

Abstract After years of generating divergent approaches to scholarship, cast mostly as reactions against a historical orthodoxy, the curriculum studies community is now looking at a new dialectic—one marked by a physics that pull ideas inward toward some centripetal center. The tension between looking for unifying ideas as they articulate with a multiplicity of incommensurate ones has, in fact, marked the nature of most scholarly thinking. Isaiah Berlin personified such a tension in his use of the Greek aphorism, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In recent years, the curriculum field has been dominated by foxes, who have resisted any attempt to even consider the role of hedgehog. But several projects have recently been launched in the field that might signal a new age for curriculum studies, as a new dialogue has been opened that considers possibilities of finding some semblance of canon or disciplinarity in the field. The search for canon or disciplinarity is less likely to yield a hard‐and‐fast verifiable outcome as much as an inconclusive discussion. But, as Plato reminds us, such a discussion is precisely the point because the knowing of canon is doing the knowing of canon.

John Dewey and the Idea of Experimentalism

Widely known as a philosopher of American democracy, John Dewey always possessed a strong interest in schooling. Philosophers historically have made their marks by writing their views on logic, ethics, religion, truth, aesthetics and even reality, but very few have exercised their analytical acumen on the topic of schooling. Dewey, however, could not escape the connection that schooling had to his philosophical views, especially in relation to the concept of democracy; he even directed his own laboratory school at the University of Chicago, a rare activity for a philosopher indeed! Dewey, it should be said, also had substantive things to say about the social currents of his time, including issues related to the suffragette movement, labor unions, birth control, world peace, social class tensions, and societal transformations in Mexico, China, and Russia (Dworkin, 1954). A complete collection of Deweys works is contained in a thirty-seven-volume work edited by Jo Ann Boydston (1979).

Being there: Social service and teacher education at the University of Houston

As the school-age population grows in its ethnic and economic diversity, those who become teachers remain overwhelmingly white, female, and middle class. To assist teacher education students understand a world that is largely unfamiliar to them, the University of Houston teacher preparation program offers a volunteer experience in an urban social service agency for its students as part of a cultural awareness requirement. The results of this program suggest that it may help preservice teachers to understand better the lives of the children they will face and hence better prepare them to teach, perhaps diminishing the “revolving door” of teachers in urban classrooms.

Navigating the Normative

Over the past several decades, the curriculum field has advanced ideas that one could characterize as centrifugal in nature—outside of the lines of the school curriculum, moving along multiple epistemological levels, varied in orientation and pushing outward into the larger experience, with only a nominal regard for the institutional or the normative. My excitement about the publication of The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction has to do with the fact that it deviates from this de-centering trend by looking to pull the big ideas in the field inward, in a way that could result in finding some common cause and common understanding across our vast landscape of difference. In this sense, I very much expect that the Handbook will have a steady presence in the education of doctoral students in curriculum studies and I hope, as a consequence, that it might even make some contribution to the idea of disciplinarity in curriculum, and to what looks to be like an