What Is Curriculum Theory? (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

This primer for teachers (prospective and practicing) asks readers to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, to construct their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to become "educated" in the present moment. Curriculum theory is the scholarly effort – inspired by theory in the humanities, arts and interpretive social sciences – to understand the curriculum, defined here as "complicated conversation." Rather than the formulation of objectives to be evaluated by (especially standardized) tests, curriculum is communication informed by academic knowledge, and it is characterized by educational experience. Pinar recasts school reform as school deform in which educational institutions devolve into cram schools preparing for standardized exams, and traces the history of this catastrophe starting in 1950s. Changes in the Second Edition: Introduces Pinar’s formulation of allegories-of-the-present ― a concept in which subjectivity, history, and society become articulated through the teacher’s participation in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum; features a new chapter on Weimar Germany (as an allegory of the present); includes new chapters on the future, and on the promises and risks of technology.

Education & Teaching

Pinar, William F.

Schools & Teaching

Routledge

The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

Pinar positions himself against three pressing problems of the profession: <ul>
<li>the crime of collectivism that identity politics commits, </li> <li>the devaluation of academic knowledge by the programmatic preoccupations of teacher education, and </li> <li>the effacement of educational experience by standardized testing. </li> </ul> A cosmopolitan curriculum, Pinar argues, juxtaposes the abstract and the concrete, the collective and the individual: history and biography, politics and art, public service and private passion. Such a curriculum provides passages between the subjective and the social, and in so doing, engenders that worldliness a cosmopolitan education invites. Such worldliness is vividly discernible in the lives of three heroic individuals: Jane Addams (1860-1935), Laura Bragg (1881-1978), and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). What these disparate individuals demonstrate is the centrality of subjectivity in the cultivation of cosmopolitanism. Subjectivity takes form in the world, and the world is itself reconstructed by subjectivity’s engagement with it. In this intriguing, thought-provoking, and nuanced work, Pinar outlines a cosmopolitan curriculum focused on passionate lives in public service, providing one set of answers to how the field accepts and attends to the inextricably interwoven relations among intellectual rigor, scholarly erudition, and intense but variegated engagement with the world.

No study to date has drawn extensively on the collected works – including talks to teachers and his doctoral thesis in philosophy at Oxford – or upon his biography, the collected letters, and the vast secondary literature, all of which are cited extensively in this comprehensive and original study of the teachings of George Grant. Intended to serve both as a reference book for students of Grant as well as a textbook for students of education, the book emphasizes Grant’s timeliness and prescience in identifying and critiquing educational issues fifty years ago – academic vocationalism, educational technology, privatization of schooling, the ascendency of research over teaching – that remain relevant today. Grant’s prescience is also demonstrated by his concerns over the fate of what he termed particularity within Canada and globally, worried that economic globalization would erase distinctive national histories and cultures. Replacing these would be a world state, universal and homogeneous, representing the worst tyranny humanity has known. Current issues of right-wing populism – notably in the UK and the US – Grant foresaw as reactions against these historical tendencies.

Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology (Education)

Literature & Fiction

World Literature

University of Ottawa Press

This primer for teachers (prospective and practicing) asks students to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, to construct their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to become "educated." Curriculum theory is presented as the interdisciplinary study of educational experience. The mentral concept of curriculum studies as a "complicated conversation" is explored. Within this framework, Pinar offers a compelling interpretation of contemporary "school reform" policies and practices, and an explication of curriculum theory's power to bring forth understanding, resistance, and change. His argument is this: Public education today is dominated by a conservative agenda based on a business model of education focused on the "bottom line" (test scores). The origins of this agenda go back to the 1950s, when gendered anxieties over the Cold War and racialized anxieties over school desegregation coded public education (not for the first time) as "feminized" and "black." The nature of many politicians' and some parents' criticisms of public education is intelligible only as a recoding of these gendered and racialized anxieties, deferred and displaced from their originating events onto "school reform." This has rendered the classroom a privatized and racialized domestic sphere which politicians--mostly (white) men--endeavor to control, disguised by apparently commonsense claims of "accountability." What is dangerously at stake is academic freedom and control of the curriculum--what teachers are permitted to teach, what children are permitted to study. This text offers both an understanding of the problem and a way to address it. Pinar uses the concept of currere--the Latin infinitive of curriculum--to describe an autobiographical method that provides a strategy for self-study, a way for both individuals and groups to understand their situations, leading to action. Through currere, it is possible for educators to begin to reconstruct the public sphere--now a "shopping mall" in which citizens and students have been reduced to consumers--by connecting academic knowledge to their students (and their own) subjectivities, to society, and to the historical moment. In doing so, they can take back (relative) intellectual freedom and rebuild schooling to speak to persisting problems of race, class, and gender. It is this link, this promise of education for our private-and-public lives as Americans, that curriculum theory enables. Comprehensive and ground-breaking, What Is Curriculum Theory? is indispensable for scholars and students worldwide across the fields of curriculum studies, foundations of education, educational policy, school reform, and teacher education.

Understanding Curriculum As Phenomenonological and Deconstructed Text (Critical Issues in Curriculum)

Teachers College Pr

Understanding Curriculum As Phenomenon Logical and Deconstructed Text (Critical Issues in the Curriculum Series)

Like a particularly heartfelt letter to the reader, William Pinar's Autobiography, Politics and Sexuality: Essays in Curriculum Theory 1972-1992 asserts the viability of autobiography as a tool of study in the area of curriculum and instruction. As an alternative to the sterile bureaucratic style of curriculum studies that dominated the field at one time, William Pinar has reconceptualized curriculum studies in a more organic, flexible and exciting way which honors the immediacy and complexity of students, teachers and their relationships by taking into account their lives as they live them. Autobiography, Politics and Sexuality: Essays in Curriculum Theory 1972-1992 is a classic in the field of education studies.

Autobiography, Politics and Sexuality: Essays in Curriculum Theory, 1972-1992 (Counterpoints)

Higher & Continuing Education

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pinar, William F.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pinar, William F.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pinar, William F.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

What Is Curriculum Theory? (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

What Is Curriculum Theory? (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology (Education)

What Is Curriculum Theory? (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

What Is Curriculum Theory? (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

Understanding Curriculum As Phenomenonological and Deconstructed Text (Critical Issues in Curriculum)

Understanding Curriculum As Phenomenon Logical and Deconstructed Text (Critical Issues in the Curriculum Series)

Autobiography, Politics and Sexuality: Essays in Curriculum Theory, 1972-1992 (Counterpoints)