The Reconceptualization of Curriculum and Instruction

As an administrator in different schools Slattery was bombarded with innovative reforms, new technology, district programs, and packaged curricular materials designed to solve his educational problems. He won an Excellence in Education (now called Blue Ribon) award for his school from the State DOE. Afterwards there was tremendous pride in the local community. During the next school year, there was bitterness and jealousy. It had the affect of generating distrust and friction. This set the stage for Slattery’s thinking around the importance of cooperative models to replace rampant competitiveness.

Traditional curriculum development programs have a commitment to organized goals, measurable objectives, and mastery evaluation to achieve a specified educational outcome. A central feature of the Reconceptualization is attentiveness to autobiographical and phenomenological experience. Pinar’s method of currere challenges educators to begin with the individual experience and then make broader connections. Postmodern curriculum is attentive to both interconnectedness of all experiences and the importance of the autobiographical perspective.

Slattery reflects on his teacher training programs for new teachers and recalls his own experiences as he selects textbooks, structures the learning experiences, and evaluates assignments. He uses Pinar’s autobiographical method rather then the Tylerian rationale. One tangible change Reconceptualization has had on his teaching is that students sit in a seminar circle and he encourages students to share their personal perspectives. Students concerns about their needs and expectations are valued and honored. He exposes them to autobiographical methods and assigns a jounal to be kept.

He states that curriculum development in the postmodern era will see the emergence of more journals, portfolios, and autobiographical methodologies. Reconceptualization has reminded educators that we can no longer remain ahistorical, detached, impersonal, and “behaviorally objective.” In the process of exploring meaning and knowledge, we can no longer separate the context of historical events from the autobiographical experiences of teachers and students in postmodern schooling.

Historical Perspectives on Curriculum as a Field of Study

Postmodern curriculum will encourage autobiographical reflection, narrative inquiry, revisionist interpretation, and contextual understanding. Knowledge will be understood as reflecting human interests, values, and actions that are socially constructed.

The postmodern curriculum resuscitates an authentic historicity. Educators in the postmodern area can not simply “teach” history as facts to be memorized. Because the autobiographical, local, and particular are essential in order to understand history, teachers have to listen to students and their life stories.

The postmodern curriculum challenges the teacher and students to enter into the historical process as participants rather than as observers.

Postmodern curriculum says history, like, knowledge, is socially and culturally constructed. A conflict centers around whether teachers should encourage or allow subjective interpretation of literature and history, or whether critical thinking should be directed toward a range of legitimate interpretations established by scholarly authorities.

Postmodern curriculum development challenges the concept of time and linear scientific progress. The conception of curriculum and chronology that pervade modern schooling inhibits the creative genius of the Einsteins in our school today.

Students often complain about the boredom they experience in social studies classes. History is often limited to a series of events on the linear timeline to be memorized and evaluated in the context of artificially contrived epochs of sociopolitical or cultural development. This model divides time into past, present, and future, and removes autobiographical connection to the historical events being discussed in textbooks or classroom lectures. It has been decontextualized by the modern curriculum, and as a result, an ahistorical and anti-historical attitude has emerged in the modern school. In desperation, as a justification teachers echo George Santayana’s warning that those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it. National reports condemn educators because students can’t place historical events on a timeline. Chester Finn complained in “We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future” saying students couldn’t demonstrate competency in subject areas. Education was objectified. The standards were made to ensure American students could deomstrate recall of information that was determined by the reformers to be essential for cultural literacy, the socialization of American students and the reproduction of the dominant values of American society.

Teachers often agree that students don’t know the factual information required for progressing through the school system and passing standardized tests and blame boring textbooks, disinterested parents, etc. Still we use the same methods of teaching and evaluation that have dominated curriculum development for over one hundred years.

Some postmodern curriculum history research methodologies are narrative inquiry, hermeneutics, autobiography, ethnography, revisionist analysis, and primary source exploration. Predominant research methodologies are surveys of thought, surveys of practice, analyses of movements, case studies, revisionist critiques, and biographies.

A problem with the history we read about is that it’s fairly commonplace for writers of diaries to go back and rewrite them purposely to cast themselves in a good light, and the people they disliked in an even worse light. The lists of absolute facts in history is quite limited, and eventually all facts and accounts are influenced by subjective memory.

Slattery tells a story about how he never retained information he learned in school about the Civil War beyond his exams and never connected his families’ part in the Civil War that he knew from family to stories, to the Civil War he learned about in school. He maintains this was a result of having never been encouraged to make connectins between past and present, between his relatives who were shot by Union soldiers and his life as a student studying the Civil War.

Postmodern curriculum challenges the traditional curriculum which has been concerned with Ralph Tyler’s four basic questions:
1-What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2-How can learning experiences be selected which are likely to be useful in attaining these objectives?
3-How can learning experiences be organized for effective instruction?
4-How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated?

These principals have become goals, objectives, lesson plans, scope an sequence etc.

Postmodern curriculum is concerned with biographical and autobiographical narrative that will not only enhance the study of history but also make connections for long-term memory. Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain published by ASCD recognizes that, “Many capable youngsters are either so bored with their education or so stressed out by their experiences, that optimum learning cannot take place. They have also seen students “flower” in a learning environment that builds on their current knowledge base and personal experiences. Teachers must become facilitators of learning, and they must expect students to go beyond the surface kknkowledge frequently achieved through rote memorization and unconnected content. By integrating curriculum, we can assist students in their search for deeper meaning and thus enhance the brains quest for patterning.

Postmodern curriculum challenges the nineteenth century faculty psychology movement. Key concepts is that the aim of the curriculum is to expand the powers of the mind and store it with knowledge. This philosophy of curriculum seeks to arrange the information that the memory gathers like furniture in a room. It also proposes that the brain should be exercised routinely like other body parts and the brain is a muscle in need of rote memorization exercises and mental drills to enhance functioning of the mind which could accumulate more information, rearrange the data, and expand the knowledge base. Postmodern Curriculum calls into question that learning must take place through rote memorization. They assert that being too specific about facts to be remembered and outcomes to be produced, may prohibit students’ genuine understanding and transfer of learning.

The postmodern curriculum rejects formal, standardized evaluation instruments designed for universal application.

Introduction to Curriculum Development and Postmodernity

This postmodern shift involves rethinking some very sacred beliefs and structures that have been firmly entrenched in human consciousness for at least the past five hundred years. . . . humanity is moving to a new zone of cognition with an expanded concept of the self-in-relation" (p. 17). In this regard, postmodernism offers an explanation for the breakdown in the meta-narrative of history, to make room for non-mainstream viewpoints from multi-cultural perspectives. The shift, from a mono-cultural approach to education, to a multi-cultural approach carries with it curricular approaches in which learners are encouraged to construct meaning grounded in relationships of self to others, self to knowledge, self to nature. Emerging curriculum models emphasize interdisciplinary courses, open-ended systems, intergenerational and interprofessional relationships, socratic dialogue, multi-dimensional assessments. Technology is viewed as a useful tool in helping teachers facilitate and implement these new curriculums.

In short, postmodernism regards the world as an organism rather than as a machine, the earth as a home rather than as a functional possession, and persons as interdependent rather than as isolated and independent.

Introduction

Postmodern curriculum challenges the rationale used in most modern curriculum books which follow the Tylerian Rationale named after Tyler's book "Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction." Postmodernism wants to reconceptualize the field of curriculum. Traditional texts tend to ignore the Reconceptualization and new theoretical understandings of curriculum and instruction identified in the book such as issues of race, gender, hermeneutics, autobiography, critical theory, phenomenology, post structuralism, ecology, theology, and global education.

States an intended audience for this book are people in the schools who are interested in curricular philosophies such as whole language instruction, integrated language arts, interdisciplinary studies, curricular immersion ,

Refers the reader to many other resources to read more on this topic.

Preface

Education needs to remain focused on its primary purpose of learning and instruction for students. Slattery advocates reflection and action and a renewed understanding of curriculum and instruction in the global society.

Terms emphasized are:
curriculum development, postmodernism, hermeneutics, paradigm, chaos theory, poststructuralism, critical theory.

Three sections of the book are:
1Curriculum development as a field of study in a postmodern context
2-Issues with contempory curriculum discourses in areas of hermeneutics, race, gender, culture, philosophy, politics, demoncracy, ecology, aesthtics, autobiography, and cosmology.
3-Proposal for rethinking curriculum development for the postmodern era.

Front Cover Explained: Piazza D'Italia in New Orleans is an example of the eclecticism, irony, and playfulness of postmodern architecture. While the Piazza stands in stark contrast to the linear and functional skyscrapers of Downtown Nawlins, it is also intimately integrated into the modern milieu of the financial district on Poydras Street. The building has now fallen in disrepair and was slated to be destroyed for a major building near the largest land-based casino in the Nation.

Series Editors’ Introduction

Slattery pounds modernists. Modern Textbooks are typically a cold, impersonal compilation of facts inserted into the passive minds of students void of the personal or subjective. Slattery’s postmodern book allows him to inject radical love (a combustible spirit and passion that fuels our lives in areas such as work and relationships) into his work. The book is personal, reflecting human interests and values making it more interesting and meaningful than the traditional approach.

Slattery Blog Format

I will post comments about the "Big Idea" or "Main Idea" I am reflecting on as I read each chapters. You can get a sense of the book as you look at the Chapters:

Series Editor’s Introduction
Preface
Introduction

Part I: Postmodern Curriculum Development as a Field of Study
Introduction to Curriculum Development and Postmodernity
Historical Perspectives on Curriculum as a Field of Study
The Reconceptualization of Curriculum and Instruction
Postmodern Schooling, Curriculum, and the Tehological Text

Part II: Contemporary Curriculum Development Paradigms
The Hermeneutic Circle and Postmodern Community
Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Multicultural Milieu
Postmodern Philosophies in Curriculum Studies
Curriculum for interdependence and Ecological Sustainability
Utopian Visions, Democracy, and the Egalitarian Ideal
Qualitative Inquiry, Fine Arts, and the Synthetical Moment
Time Management and Chaos in the Infinite Cosmos

Part III Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era
Postmodern Education: Kaleidoscopic Sensibilities
A Postmodern Postscript: Proleptic Prolegomena