Curriculum Perspectives (2018) 38:81–84
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-017-0038-2
POINT AND COUNTERPOINT
Understanding curriculum? Notes towards a conceptual basis
for curriculum inquiry
Bill Green 1
# Australian Curriculum Studies Association 2018
An ongoing challenge is how to conceptualise curriculum—
that is, how best to understand curriculum as concept. As
Pinar (2012) has argued, curriculum is perhaps the only truly
‘indigenous’ concept in education studies. All too often, how-
ever, and notwithstanding its pervasiveness, curriculum as
such is simply assumed, or taken-for-granted, as part of the
doxic lexicon of education. Rarely is it conceptualised in its
own right, let alone problematised. Yet, it can be argued that
this is important work to do, if curriculum inquiry is indeed to
develop as a coherent and generative field of educational re-
search and scholarship. What is curriculum? How is curricu-
lum to be understood? Relatedly, what constitutes and/or
counts as curriculum scholarship?
Formulated like this, it may be clear that my interest here is
in ‘understanding curriculum’, as a programmatic alternative
to what has been presented as a more traditional, more or less
technical focus on ‘curriculum development’. Further, in do-
ing so, I indicate my own intellectual indebtedness to the so-
called ‘Reconceptualist’ movement, arguably one of the most
influential traditions in contemporary curriculum inquiry.
Emanating from North America, and emerging in the 1970s,
this is a body of work identified with a new emphasis on
theory and an expanded view of curriculum itself, beyond
schooling. I have indeed found such work influential and often
inspiring (Green 2018). But that is not to say that it functions
for me as a doctrine, and indeed, a good case can be made that
it clearly needs to be supplemented by other perspectives and
resources, perhaps most notably the European Didaktik tradi-
tion. Moreover, there are further and important distinctions to
be made within the Anglo-American scene—for instance, be-
tween the reconceptualist and deliberationist traditions. Prior
to developing that line of argument, it is useful to take stock of
* Bill Green
bigreen@csu.edu.au
1
Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia
the field as currently constituted and how it might well be
reconfigured.
This is something discussed recently in the South African
context, with specific regard to doctoral study and curriculum
scholarship (du Preez and Simmonds 2014). Their concern is
with what they describe as ‘conceptual ambiguities in curric-
ulum studies scholarship’ and also what might be involved in
its ‘intellectual advancement’ (p. 1), especially with reference
to doctoral research in education. With their focus on the re-
lated notions of ‘curriculum’, ‘curriculum development’ and
‘curriculum studies’, understood in certain, relatively familiar
ways, they examine how the field itself—that is, the curricu-
lum field—is being represented and ‘advanced’ in doctoral
scholarship. They conclude that more clarity and coherence
is needed, and that, at the very least, the field as currently
constituted is unbalanced. It would be very interesting to see
what a study of this kind would yield in the Australian situa-
tion (cf. O’Connor and Yates 2010). As I claimed some time
ago (Green 2003), there is little being done here, explicitly and
systematically, that can be identified formally as curriculum
scholarship—as specifically located within curriculum inquiry
and as a distinctive field of research and scholarship. (It is
worth asking how we would go about teaching curriculum
studies today, in Australia, at the graduate level. What would
a doctoral curriculum in curriculum studies look like?) This is
a debate well worth pursuing. What I will do, instead, is take
up, briefly, the question of disciplinarity. What might be un-
derstood as the disciplinarity of curriculum inquiry? What
makes it, recognisably, distinctively, a ‘discipline’ and an
organised field of study?
In this regard, there is an interesting convergence in recent
curriculum scholarship. On the one hand, recent work within
what might be described as a neo-Bernsteinian framework has
been influential in focusing on issues of disciplinarity and
knowledge—for example, Young and Muller (2013). On the
other hand, and indeed on the other side of the Atlantic, Pinar
(2007) has been exploring for some time now what he ex-
pressly calls the disciplinarity of the curriculum field, drawing
82
on a rather different intellectual framework. Intriguingly,
though, both of these bodies of scholarship work with
notions of ‘verticality’ and ‘horizontality’.1 The curricu-
lum debates associated with Young and Muller, and
others, refer back to Bernstein’s classic essay ‘Vertical
and Horizontal Discourse: An Essay’ (Bernstein 1990)
and see knowledge as structured either hierarchically
(‘vertically’) or more or less aggregatively (‘horizontal-
ly’). We can ask what this might mean for curriculum
inquiry. For Pinar (2007), ‘verticality’ refers to ‘the intel-
lectual history of the discipline’, whereas ‘horizontality’
focuses on the ‘present circumstances’ of the discipline,
linked with ‘the social and political milieus, which influ-
ence, and all too often, structure’ them (p. xiv). He insists
that advancing curriculum inquiry as a ‘discipline’ re-
quires attending to both the vertical and horizontal dimen-
sions: ‘We can contribute to [its] intellectual advancement
by attending to the disciplinary structures of the field: its
verticality and horizontality’ (p. xvi). Again, we can ask
what this means for curriculum inquiry in Australia. What
can we look to regarding the historical record and the
‘present circumstances’ of the curriculum field?
In this regard, Pinar (2007, p. xx) observes of the disciplin-
ary work of curriculum inquiry that there are recognisable
‘scholarly moves’, reformulated by du Preez and Simmonds
(2014, pp. 5–6) thus:
& a synopsis of curriculum studies, on its own terms as a
discipline;
& analysing curriculum studies concept(s) within pertinent
historical disciplinary traditions and present disciplinary
circumstances;
& critiquing the concept(s) on their own terms and from
perspectives and proposals already extant within the intel-
lectual history and evident in the present circumstances of
the field;
& extending the idea(s) by adding to or revising these con-
cepts (and perhaps drawing upon scholarship outside the
field) to do so; and/or
& replacing the concept(s) with ‘new’ ones that perform their
specific labours of understanding in a more satisfactory
fashion (with more explanatory force, for instance) than
the initial conceptualization.
This is an intriguing guide to inquiry, as well as to pedago-
gy. What might be the key concepts or arguments in curricu-
lum research and scholarship, where have they come from,
and how might they be ‘extended’? (In the Australian scene,
I would nominate Musgrave’s [1979] notion of the ‘moral
1
They seem to have developed quite independently of each other, too, and as
far as I know, there has been no acknowledgement of their coincidence in
curriculum scholarship.
Curric Perspect (2018) 38:81–84
curriculum’ as one such concept and for another, the idea of
‘curriculum negotiation’).
At this stage, I want to return to my earlier point about the
value of seeking to bring together the reconceptualist and
deliberationist perspectives in curriculum inquiry. It is not
the first time that this has been proposed—Gough (2003)
pointed to it some time ago, and his own work demonstrates
what this might involve, and what it might yield, although he
never brought the two together in any fully theorised fashion.
The reconceptualist movement is perhaps exemplified in the
monumental volume Understanding Curriculum (Pinar et al.
1995). Clearly written from the standpoint of the post-1970s
‘Reconceptualisation’, its account of the field presented it in
terms of a proliferation of different ‘discourses’, ranging from
‘curriculum-as-historical-text’ through ‘curriculum-as-politi-
cal-text’ and ‘curriculum-as-theological-text’ to ‘curriculum-
as-international-text’—ten in all, in that original account. By
2007, this had been extended to fourteen ‘discourses’ (Pinar
2007, p. xxv). Given its acknowledgement of the significance
of poststucturalist theory and continental philosophy, it is
appropriate to see this overall movement as manifesting the
‘linguistic turn’ in curriculum inquiry, in that formulation’s
broader symbolic sense. It introduced into the field influen-
tial, albeit complex and controversial, notions of ‘curriculum
as text’ and ‘curriculum as discourse’. My own work on
curriculum and representation can be read in this context
(Green 2018).
The deliberationist tradition (i.e. ‘curriculum deliberation’)
is associated with well-known curriculum scholars such as
William Reid, Joseph Schwab and Ian Westbury. Working
within a neo-Aristotelian framework, its emphasis is on ratio-
nality, practice and the conduct of public schooling. As Deng
(2017, p. 8) writes, it is ‘centrally concerned with curriculum
making—including curriculum policymaking, curriculum de-
velopment, classroom enactment or classroom teaching—
with the intention to improve the work of schooling as an
institution’, and moreover, it ‘construes curriculum making
as a practical and deliberative endeavor’. (There are links here
to the European Didaktik tradition). In Gough’s (2003, p. 8)
terms, ‘Because it eschews abstract procedural rules for re-
solving practical curriculum problems, deliberative curricu-
lum inquiry is exploratory, eclectic and pragmatic in relating
knowledge to policy and action’. Its central concepts, argu-
ably, are those of ‘practice’ and ‘institution’.2 It needs to be
said, too, that this work takes a quintessentially modernist
stance.
What I propose is that these two traditions—the
reconceptualist and the deliberationist—can be brought
2
These concepts have been extended in recent work on professional educa-
tion, in the context of practice theory and philosophy (Green, Reid and
Brennan 2017). There are links still to be made here with curriculum scholar-
ship (e.g. Westbury 2005).
Curric Perspect (2018) 38:81–84
together, albeit in a re-articulated form. That is, to what extent
is it productive, conceptually and pragmatically, to bring to-
gether ‘text’ and ‘discourse’, ‘practice’ and ‘institution’ as a
representation of the curriculum field? (Fig. 1).
Each of these terms would need to be reworked, and their
relations systematically theorised. For instance, I would sug-
gest that attending to the particular relations of ‘text’ and
‘practice’ in curriculum thought leads, almost inevitably, to
due consideration of the body and of corporeality (Green
and Hopwood 2015), which clearly has implications for teach-
er education as well as classroom pedagogy and much else.
There would also be possibilities here for finding ways of
moving beyond charges of ‘textualism’, etc. This would only
be enhanced by due consideration of ‘discourse’ and ‘institu-
tion’ and their interplay. What is foregrounded here, impor-
tantly, are issues of constraint and power. However, it is that
larger material-discursive field which is important to attend to,
finally, in thinking curriculum—that is, a total field organised
by these concepts and their interrelational dynamics. I see this
formulation as a hypothesis, to be ‘tested’, but perhaps more
importantly as contributing to the exploration and interroga-
tion of a concept, in the philosophical sense. Needless to say,
all this warrants further investigation.
I want to conclude this short piece by taking up, briefly, one
challenge of recent neo-Bernsteinian work in curriculum inqui-
ry. This is the argument that disciplinarity is to be understood
in terms of knowledge building, or cumulation—disciplinary
knowledge accumulates, explicitly building on previous work
in the scholarly field. Contrasted to this is knowledge that more
or less simply proliferates. A complex argument, and not alto-
gether satisfactory or appropriate, nonetheless it enables me to
speak to the issue of the seemingly serial proliferation of ‘dis-
courses’ in contemporary Anglo-American curriculum theory.
More positively, this can be seen as taking the form of ‘a series
of specialized languages with specialized modes of
practice
text discourse
instituiton
Fig. 1 The curriculum field
83
interrogation, [and] specialized criteria for the production and
circulation of texts’ (Bernstein 1990, p. 160). As I have already
noted, there were ten such discourses nominated in their orig-
inal context in 1995, and this was extended a decade later to
fourteen, and potentially at least others can be added ad
finitum—‘curriculum-as-intergenerational-text’, for instance.
What marks such work from the outset, however, is its
deliberate backgrounding of public schooling, which it desig-
nated as ‘curriculum-as-institutional-text’, or at least its stra-
tegic de-privileging. (This was perhaps the most unsatisfacto-
ry chapter in the 1995 book, in fact.) It is a view that sharply
contrasts with that adopted elsewhere, in Europe for instance,
which positions schooling much more centrally, and also in
countries like Australia, although here it may be more by
default than anything else. To be fair, the Anglo-American
stance has been nuanced since—witness for instance this
statement from the website of the American Association for
the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, describing curricu-
lum inquiry as ‘entail[ing] rigorous attention to cultural issues
and methodological concerns involved with understanding
curriculum as many kinds of texts, including, but significantly
extending beyond, curriculum-as-administrative-text’ (http://
www.aaacs.org/journal.html). Still, there seems to be an
ongoing problem here, in linking curriculum inquiry to work
in teacher education and the school curriculum, as I argue
elsewhere (Green 2018).
It might be useful therefore to see these various discourses
as more closely and systematically interwoven into and with
each other, rather than existing more or less side by side, or
serially.3 The way they tend to be (re)presented implies at
times an incompatibility, or even a certain measure of incom-
mensurability.4 This is more so with some than with others, it
must be said. What is described as ‘curriculum-as-political-
text’is clearly less positively regarded, as is ‘curriculum-as-
institutional-text’. (There is a history in this, of course, and a
perhaps distinctively American perspective.) I want however
to see these as part of the total potential of curriculum, in
thought and in the world. The political and the institutional
are always already implicated in curriculum inquiry, whatever
its focus is. It is the weave of discourses that matters, in the
end, in opening up the field to truly generative conversations
and productive debate and curriculum and schooling that
makes a difference.
3
It is worth recalling an earlier (Australian) description of ‘curriculum studies’
as involving ‘a critical investigation of a series of partial, layered, interlaced
and superimposed socially constructed historical narratives’ (Smith and Ewing
2002, p. 32).
4
Pinar’s (2007, p. xxvii) observation that ‘post-1995 scholarship is
characterised by mixed versions of what were depicted in Understanding
Curriculum as distinct discourses’ needs to be acknowledged here.
84
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