Book Proposal Draft One

Liberating Curriculum: What it is and Why it Matters

Wesley Null
Baylor University

Everyone who discusses teachers, schooling, or education uses the term curriculum. Few people, however, stop to think seriously about what curriculum actually means and what it entails. Even fewer people ask questions about what curriculum is for, what should serve as the proper foundation for curriculum-making, and how exactly we should go about making curriculum decisions that benefit our communities as a whole. This book is about precisely these questions.

Curriculum vs. Education

Curriculum is the heart of education. Many people make pronouncements both in the media and elsewhere using the word “education,” when in reality they are making assertions about curriculum. Often these assertions are incomplete, and sometimes they are just flat wrong. This book seeks to correct this problem by providing a deeper vision for what curriculum is and should be. Thinking and speaking clearly about curriculum is crucial to rebuilding American education today.

What is the difference between “curriculum” and “education”? My answer to this question will become more apparent as I make my argument, but the first point to recognize is that curriculum forces us to address the substance of what should be taught (which is an ethical question), whereas “education” is often discussed as if it can or should be a social science disconnected from the moral question of curriculum. We often find people with backgrounds in economics, psychology, and political science making pronouncements about “what must be done” in education. Rarely, however do such researchers address the moral question of curriculum. The basis for their claims about “education,” moreover, is almost always their standing as researchers who explain social phenomena, not as people who do curriculum.

Explanations about social phenomena, however, do not by themselves provide us with what we need in order to make curriculum decisions. The source can be economics, psychology, sociology, or any other intellectual specialty, but the result is the same. Explanations can be useful in making curriculum decisions, but, by themselves, they are not sufficient for curriculum-making. The attempt to separate education as a social science from curriculum as a moral practice is not only impossible, but dangerous. That, at least, will be a central aspect of my argument in this book.

Curriculum Questions

What should be taught, to whom, under what circumstances, and with what end in mind? This question is at the heart of any institution that seeks to educate. Curriculum is at the heart of every controversial issue surrounding teaching and schooling today. Debates rage on with regard to moral education, sex education, religious education, state mandated testing, intelligent design, whole language or phonics in reading, prayer in schools, and other similar hot-button topics, but what unites all of these debates is that, at their very foundation, they are about curriculum.

But what is curriculum? What is it for? Who should make curriculum decisions? And how should these decisions be made? In short, what should we do to make good curriculum? And what should people who specialize in curriculum development (or curriculum deliberation as I will argue in this text) do in order to make curriculum better? Dealing successfully with these questions is crucial if any educational institution expects to be effective—and indeed successful—in any long-term, substantive way.

Theoretic debates routinely take place in state legislatures or in the U.S. Senate, but, at some point, any theoretic political battle must come into contact with real-world practical decision-making in classrooms and schools. This book is about this transition that always must take place between theoretic visions for what curriculum should do and the practical decision-making that always takes place in classrooms and schools. What should be the nature of this transition? How do we take theoretic plans for curriculum and turn them into a practical curriculum? What can help us to make this transition successful? And what should be the characteristics of the people who do this curriculum work?

This book will answer these questions directly. My purpose is to persuade readers to engage in the practice of what I call “liberating curriculum.” What do I mean by “liberating curriculum”? And what do I mean specifically by “curriculum”? My answer to these questions will become more clear as I present my argument.

Liberating Curriculum From What?

Liberating curriculum from what, you might ask? This book seeks to liberate curriculum from numerous ways of thinking that have shackled the growth of curriculum for decades. These ways of thinking include the attempt to reduce curriculum to nothing but a syllabus on the one hand or an efficiency problem on the other. This book also seeks to free curriculum from institutionalized systems that reduce curriculum to an impersonal list of topics divorced from meaning, purpose, and humanity; from utopian dreamers who focus so much on what could be that they forget the reality that curriculum must start with the reality embedded in the current state of affairs; from the grasp of makeshift practitioners who reject the need to connect curriculum to a broader vision for what schooling can or should do; from revolutionaries who promote a curriculum that foments revolution but at the same time forgets to discuss what specifically should be done once the revolution has taken place; from existential theorizers who emphasize personal experience to such an extent that they forget that curriculum also must deal with community, citizenship, and concern for the common good; from intellectual specialists who wrongly assume that the structure of their prized intellectual specialty also contains a curriculum; and from economically driven executives who see curriculum as nothing but a tool to train the next generation of compliant workers. All of these views endanger the practice of liberating curriculum.

Curriculum can of course address some if not all of the problems emphasized by these ways of thinking, but when curriculum is captured by any one of these perspectives, it loses its life and vitality. By “liberating curriculum,” I mean the task of avoiding narrow conceptions of curriculum while at the same time making decisions that further the ideal of liberal curriculum for all. The best hope for achieving this ideal is to build upon what I call, following others, a deliberative approach to curriculum problems.

A Deliberative Tradition in Curriculum

The research for this book will draw upon the acclaimed curriculum work of Joseph J. Schwab and William A. Reid. Schwab was a professor of education and natural sciences at the University of Chicago for nearly forty years. I will draw specifically on Schwab’s “practical” papers that he first began to publish in the late 1960s. William A. Reid is a British curriculum philosopher who has published numerous books on curriculum theory and practice. The research for Liberating Curriculum draws heavily upon Reid’s book The Pursuit of Curriculum.

In order to provide a long-term foundation for curriculum theory and practice, Reid and Schwab focus on the practical art of deliberation. They see deliberation as the animating principle that enables curriculum workers to avoid the extreme thinking that has harmed curriculum and teaching for at least a century. Liberating Curriculum follows in the tradition of Schwab and Reid in order to provide a foundation for curriculum that, if followed, can lead to more successful—and indeed more effective—schooling in the future.

To provide background for what curriculum deliberation is, the first chapter of Liberating Curriculum will demonstrate how the emphasis on deliberation in curriculum studies grows out of the work of Schwab’s colleague at the University of Chicago, Ralph W. Tyler. Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction helped to establish the practice of curriculum development throughout the United States. Even though deliberation is embedded in what Tyler was doing, he does not explicitly address deliberation in Basic Principles. Tyler emphasized curriculum development more than he did deliberation. The significance of this distinction will become more apparent throughout this book. I draw upon Tyler’s work to demonstrate the significance of curriculum development, but, more importantly, to show how curriculum deliberation is the more inclusive practice.

Much work remains to be done to take the framework that Tyler developed and connect it to a new generation of curriculum workers. Schwab and Reid have been working on this task for the last half-century, and I plan to continue in the Tyler-Reid-Schwab tradition by making curriculum deliberation accessible to 21st century curriculum workers and teachers.

Book Outline

Before expanding on what good curriculum deliberation is and should be, this book will examine three other well-known traditions within the curriculum field. Drawing upon Reid’s The Pursuit of Curriculum, I will provide an outline of three curriculum philosophies that are commonly practiced today. I have incorporated Reid’s language and labeled these views with the terms systematic, existentialist, and radical. Each of these traditions provides a vision for curriculum that has strengths and weaknesses. I will explore these strengths and weaknesses in detail during chapters one, two, and three, respectively. I will identify major figures who have shaped the systematic, existentialist, and radical traditions. Then, I will demonostrate why each of these traditions has been powerful at different times in American history.

Liberating Curriculum, however, is not a work of history. It is a work of curriculum. My goal is to provide curriculum workers at the classroom, district, and legislative levels with clear thinking about how to create a curriculum that is rich in knowledge, successful at connecting with diverse groups of students, and rooted in the ideal of serving the common good.

Chapters four and five of Liberating Curriculum will focus specifically on the deliberative tradition within the curriculum field. I will demonstrate how deliberative curriculum-making differs from the three traditions that I have discussed previously. I will show how deliberation helps curriculum workers to maximize the strengths of the other three traditions while at the same minimizing their weaknesses.

In chapter five, I will take four specific examples of contemporary curriculum problems and show what a deliberative curriculum worker likely would do in order to resolve these problems. In order to broaden the scope of the audience for Liberating Curriculum, I will choose examples of curriculum problems from both the K-12 and the higher education levels.


Timeline for Writing Liberating Curriculum

May-July 2007
Begin collecting articles and doing research for relevant books and articles
Outline of Book prepared—This is done.

October-November 2007
Draft Chapter 1—in progress.

December 2007/January 2008
Draft Chapter 2

February-May 2008
Draft Chapters 3 and 4

June-August 2008
Draft Chapters 5-6

September 2008-January 2009
Make revisions

February-March 2009
Complete manuscript