Session Information
23 SES 06 C, Politics of Curriculum
Paper Session
Contribution
Curriculum, it is now widely accepted, is enacted and performed in various sites, not only at policy level. In this paper, I ask how educational publishers play a role in what counts as valuable knowledge in the construction of the curriculum. The paper explores how broad educational policies and discursive formations are subtly invoked to legitimise the inclusion and exclusion of particular knowledges. Drawing on ethnographic observations of the production of commercial educational media, it shows how dramatic debates and disagreements during the production process over what counts as knowledge, and what should be mediated to students, are smoothed into one relatively harmonious narrative. A case study focuses on the development of a chapter on the Weimar Republic in one particular history textbook. It illustrates how members of the author team had high regard for alternative social orderings which seemed possible in those years (e.g. radical democracy, communism). Yet in the final product, liberal democracy and the free market are presented as the only plausible way of ordering society. The paper explores the various justifications provided during the development process, including (i) “resignation” in the face of no other contemporary alternatives to liberal democracy and the free market, and (ii) pragmatic consideration of what students “need” at this stage, invoking current policy discourse of competencies and outcomes. To make sense of the observations, the paper draws on (i) contemporary theoretical work on the dynamics of maintaining and contesting discursive formations (Laclau, 2006; Mouffe, 2005); (ii) recent developments in memory studies (Erll & Rigney, 2009; Roediger & Wertsch, 2008); and (iii) analytic work on distributed cognition (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Analysis draws these three fields together, illustrating how the author team “think” together with the artefacts surrounding them (e.g. the curriculum, educational policies, older versions of the textbook under construction, the competitor’s books, etc.) and the time pressures facing them.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Badiou, A. (2010). The Communist Hypothesis. London: Verso. Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 10-23. Erll, A., & Rigney, A. (Eds.). (2009). Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: de Gruyter. Laclau, E. (2006). Ideology and post-Marxism. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2), 103-114. Mouffe, C. (2005). On the Political. London: Routledge. Roediger, H. L. I., & Wertsch, J. V. (2008). Creating a new discipline of memory studies. Memory Studies, 1(1), 9-22.
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