EDUC 8678 - Pre-reading - Curriculum and its discontents

CURRICULUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
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The last point raises a question that seems to be answered unsatisfactorily,
if not actually dodged, by advocates of the let's-team-up-withteachers
proposal. This has to do with whether the only beneficiaries of a
particular investigation are the teacher-participants (and to a lesser extent,
presumably, the collaborating academics or research technicians) or
whether it is hoped that nonparticipating teachers might also benefit
indirectly through reading a report of the investigation in the form of a
case study. In other words, are the outcomes of these efforts purely for local
consumption or can they be generalized? On the basis of all I have read so
far, I remain puzzled. On the one hand, the mere fact that a lot of the case
study material has already been published makes it clear that persons other
than the participants are expected to gain something from reading it,
though that "something" may be nothing more than the technique of
producing a case study. On the other hand, there is much talk among
advocates of this position about helping teachers solve particular problems
in real situations, together with derisive comments about more traditional
research approaches that seek generalizations and principles that are transsituational.
Thus, this brief sketch of the argument for a closer working
relationship between practitioners and academics closes on a note of
ambiguity.
Those who advocate a more distant relationship between practitioners
and academics do so because it promises to afford those adopting it greater
objectivity in their examination of educational and curricular matters.
Until recently, so the argument goes, academics interested in the operations
of our schools-educational psychologists, sociologists, historians,
and the rest-have allowed their inquiries to be guided, if not dictated, by
the needs and perceptions of practitioners themselves. Hog-tied, as it were,
to the practitioner's view of things, the academic was not free to take a
critical stance about the operation of the schools. As a consequence, the
argument continues, most efforts at curricular or educational change or
reform amounted to little more than tinkering with the system to make it
work better. What is sought, therefore, is a perspective that allows those
adopting it to see beyond the officially sanctioned view of schools and their
operation.
The benefits that such a view might yield for practitioners themselves is
not entirely clear from the argument itself, nor is it made clearer by the
reports that claim to be the result of having adopted such a perspective. On
the one hand, there is much vague talk about such a view being
"liberating" or "emancipatory" for all who achieve it. This would include
practitioners as well as their critics. On the other hand, in almost all the
exemplary instances of having taken such a view that I have encountered,
the practitioners are portrayed in a poor light. It could be argued that
everyone benefits from having his mistakes pointed out and, less painfully,
from having the mistakes of others laid bare for all to see. But somehow
that argument leaves me with an uneasy feeling of the sort aroused by the
parent who claims that the spanking about to be delivered will hurt the
grown-up more than the child. So, like its predecessor, this brief sketch of