Curriculum studies


Curriculum studies is a concentration within curriculum and instruction concerned with understanding curricula as an active force of human educational experience.

Overview

Specific questions related to curriculum studies include the following:
Components of CS also investigate the relationship between curriculum theory and educational practice and the relationship between school programs and the contours of the society and culture in which schools are located. There are [|programs in the field of curriculum studies] in several Colleges of Education around the world. Curriculum studies was also the first subdivision of the American Educational Research Association, known as Division B.
Important CS books include The Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility by William Schubert.
Curriculum studies emerged as a distinctive field in the late 1960s and early 1970s from educationists focused on curriculum development. The shift from developing and evaluating curriculum to understanding curriculum is known as the "Reconceptualization" of the curriculum field.
A branch of curriculum studies that investigates how society transmits culture from generation to generation has been tagged with the term "hidden curriculum" even though much of what is studied is hiding in plain sight. For instance, one of the 19th century founders of the discipline of sociology, Émile Durkheim, observed that more is taught and learned in schools than specified in the established curriculum of textbooks and teacher manuals. In Moral Education Durkheim wrote:
Phillip W. Jackson may have coined the term "hidden curriculum" in his book Life in Classrooms. He argued that primary school emphasized specific skills: learning to wait quietly, exercising restraint, trying, completing work, keeping busy, cooperating, showing allegiance to both teachers and peers, being neat and punctual, and so on. The structural functional sociologist Robert Dreeben similarly concluded that the curriculum of schooling taught students to "form transient social relationships, submerge much of their personal identity, and accept the legitimacy of categorical treatment". Dreeben argued that formal schooling indirectly conveyed to students values such as independence and achievement, essential for their later membership in society.
Since then, curriculum studies researchers ranging across the spectrum of paradigms—from conservative structural-functionalists, to neo-Marxists to narrative- and arts-based researchers—have examined formal curricula, experienced curricula, and hidden curricula. Progressive researchers like Paul Willis, Jean Anyon , and Annette Lareau have examined the ways that hidden and overt curricula reproduce social class position. Narrative and arts-based researchers like Thomas Barone have inquired about the long-term effects of curricula on student lives.
Critical theorists like Henry Giroux began to examine the roles of students and teachers in resisting curricula both official and hidden. So-called "resistance theorists" conceptualized students and teachers as active agents working to subvert, reject, or change curricula. They noted that "curriculum" was not a unified structure but incoherent conflicting and contradictory messages. Other researchers have examined the interactions between racial and ethnic cultures and the dominant curricula of the school. For instance the anthropologist John Ogbu examined curricula established by African American students. Critical race theorists like Daniel Solórzano examined how racial attitudes constitute another "hidden" curriculum in teacher education programs. Additionally, Judith Stacey proposed in the 1960s schools conveyed a hidden curriculum that perpetuated the "sexist beliefs, attitudes, and values" of the time period.
The interest in curriculum studies is thus cross disciplinary and of increasing importance to educational research and to the philosophy of education.

University programs

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