Session+2

= ** Session 2 -- Traditionalism  ** = This week’s readings will enable us to begin to consider a particular period of curriculum theory retrospectively termed « traditionalism ». But first, let’s recap a bit about our understandings of “curriculum” and to look at how these definitions have changed over time. This week’s readings will give you a better idea of that transformation. A bit of background to prepare you for this week's readings In general terms, by the late 19th century, a common definition of “curriculum” was “running a course”, drawing on the metaphor of an athletic activity, and insinuating that the course of study reflects an established set of learning objectives and activities to be applied through standardized means and conditions of teaching and learning (see also Jackson, 1992, p. 5). Yet, in "My Pedagogic Creed," Dewey took pains to define education as "a process of living and not a preparation for future living" (1929, p. 292), and he undertook specifically in Democracy and Education to point up other deficiencies in the idea. To think of children as merely getting ready for a remote and obscure world, Dewey (1916) thought, is to remove them as social members of the community. "They are looked upon as candidates," he said; "they are placed on the waiting list" (p. 63). With Dewey, as we saw in the readings last week, in contrast to this prescriptivist notion of “running a course”, there is the emergence of an emphasis on a “progressive education” movement, advocating that “it is right and proper that they should break loose from the cut and dried material which formed the staple of the old education”and to abandon “a single course of studies” with the recognition that fixed/static prescriptions could not do justice to the hetereogeneity of life experience. Yet, with the rise of scientism in the early 20th century, a competing definition of curriculum as a means to social efficiency, moves curriculum theory in a different direction. While Dewey would have sought to get rid of predetermined “subject matter”, his successors, including Franklin Bobbitt, and his student, W. W. Charters (formerly at McMaster University), and others later on, responded to rising modernism and changing conditions of work as well as the emergence of WWI, with new ideas about the kinds of skills, knowledges and experiences required to generate a particular “model citizen”. While for Dewey, the task of the teacher was to “bridge the gap” between the child and the curriculum in a balanced way that would not simply reproduce the reification of predetermined frames of “curriculum” to be inculcated in the child, but rather which would actively move from the child’s present experience. In juxtaposition, for theorists in the tradition of Bobbitt, “experience” was not specific or objective enough as a guideline for curriculum development. One way of viewing the relationship between Dewey and Bobbitt is in terms of a binary logic which would continue to pervade curriculum theory over the ensuing century:  - Rejection of traditional education in favour of an approach based on observations of children’s experience  - Emphasis on “the organic connection between education and personal experience” (Dewey, 1938, p. 25) ||  “Traditional” or “Conservative” approach to curriculum:  - Maintain standard school subjects  - Emphasis on rigor and uniformization ||  References Dewey, John (1938). // Experience and education //. New York: Touchstone. Jackson, Philip W. (1992). // Conceptions of curriculum and curriculum specialists. //In P.W. Jackson (Ed.), // Handbook of research on curriculum //. New York: Macmillan. Session 2 Discussion Questions: 1. What does the author’s notion of “curriculum objectives”, goals, trends and policies imply for relations of power and control in the school as a site of knowledge production? 2.  What is the importance in these writings of empiricism, positivism, structuralism, modernism, objectivity, or scientific rationality to “curriculum” as “science”? 3. How does the author perceive the child in relationship with “curriculum”? What insights do the authors have about the complexity of personal history? 4. How would you bring Bobbitt (or Bobbitt and/or Tyler) into conversation with more contemporary examples of education?
 * Dewey   ||    Bobbitt    ||
 * “Progressive” approach to education: