Centripetal Thinking in Curriculum Studies

Published: 
Sep. 10, 2010

Source: Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 503–513, September 2010

In this article, the author describes the need of the curriculum studies community to look at a new dialectic—one marked by a physics that pull ideas inward toward some centripetal center. The author argues that this need is rising after years of generating divergent approaches to scholarship, cast mostly as reactions against a historical orthodoxy.
However, there is tension between looking for unifying ideas as they articulate with a multiplicity of incommensurate ones has marked the nature of most scholarly thinking.

Despite this tension, several projects have recently been launched in the field that might signal a new age for curriculum studies. These projects have opened a new dialogue that considers possibilities of finding some semblance of canon or disciplinarity in the field.
The search for canon or disciplinarity is less likely to yield a hard-and-fast verifiable outcome as much as an inconclusive discussion.
But, as Plato reminds us, such a discussion is precisely the point because the knowing of canon is doing the knowing of canon.

Updated: Mar. 17, 2011
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