Contested Curriculum
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Curriculum as Contestation
In 2015 a social movement swept across the South African higher education sector fuelled by the anger of the ‘born free’ generation, the students born into post-apartheid South Africa. The movement found solidarity in other parts of the globe where the past decade has witnessed the rise of student protests in the UK, the US, Chile, Turkey and Hong Kong to name a few. While the demands are specific to national contexts, the underlying obstacles of economic, cultural and political access into higher education are consistent. These protests have put a spotlight on the global academy that, like the society of which it is a part, is increasingly characterized by inequality. At its core these movements call for a more socially just higher education system. This call is profoundly dissonant to the dominant neoliberal discourses currently shaping higher education. Against the backdrop of these discourses there has been an unprecedented pressure on higher education curricula. This edited collection is dedicated to exploring what a socially just curriculum reform agenda might involve. The authors share a commitment to socially just curricula and a concern about the ways in which curricula are deeply implicated in the processes of producing and reproducing inequality. Each chapter opens up a different vista on the contested curriculum space drawing on a range of theoretical tools – Archer, Bernstein, Giroux, and Maton to name a few – to illuminate the contestation. Perhaps even more importantly they also draw on a range of voices from both inside and outside the academy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education.
Contentious Curricula
Author: Amy Binder
language: en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date: 2009-01-10
This book compares two challenges made to American public school curricula in the 1980s and 1990s. It identifies striking similarities between proponents of Afrocentrism and creationism, accounts for their differential outcomes, and draws important conclusions for the study of culture, organizations, and social movements. Amy Binder gives a brief history of both movements and then describes how their challenges played out in seven school districts. Despite their very different constituencies--inner-city African American cultural essentialists and predominately white suburban Christian conservatives--Afrocentrists and creationists had much in common. Both made similar arguments about oppression and their children's well-being, both faced skepticism from educators about their factual claims, and both mounted their challenges through bureaucratic channels. In each case, challenged school systems were ultimately able to minimize or reject challengers' demands, but the process varied by case and type of challenge. Binder finds that Afrocentrists were more successful in advancing their cause than were creationists because they appeared to offer a solution to the real problem of urban school failure, met with more administrative sympathy toward their complaints of historic exclusion, sought to alter lower-prestige curricula (history, not science), and faced opponents who lacked a legal remedy comparable to the rule of church-state separation invoked by creationism's opponents. Binder's analysis yields several lessons for social movements research, suggesting that researchers need to pay greater attention to how movements seek to influence bureaucratic decision making, often from within. It also demonstrates the benefits of examining discursive, structural, and institutional factors in concert.
10 Great Curricula
With: Susan L. M. Bartow, Lara A. Chatman, Daniel Ciamarra, Christopher L. Cox, Dawn Mann, Kevin J. Smith, Kevin M. Talbert, Mary A. Webb and Amy Fisher Young. 10 Great Curricula is a collection of stories written by educators who have come to understand curricula differently as a result of their engagement with a graduate course and its instructor. The book represents the best of what can be found in teaching and learning, in general, and in the quest for meaningful ways to understand curricula in particular. The co-authors of this volume on “10 Great Curricula” framed their inquiries into progressive, democratic curricula, at least initially, through Marsh and Willis’ (2007) notions of planned, enacted, and lived curricula. These frames helped the writers think about how to engage a curriculum as it is developed, delivered, and lived by its participants, and for the inquirers to actually become participantinquirers in the curriculum at hand. The chapters depict the power, the possibility, and the transformational potential of “great” progressive curricula today by locating them in schools and in the community, by making them come alive to the reader, and by suggesting means through which the reader can adopt a more progressive, democratic stance to curriculum despite the seemingly overwhelming nature of the conservative, traditionalist, instrumentalist movements in curriculum, teaching, and assessment today. The book is intended for students of education, teaching, and curriculum, undergraduates, graduates, and practicing educational professionals, especially those looking for examples in the world in which progressive, democratic ideals are nurtured and practiced.