Curriculum, text and forms of textuality

Abstract

Building on Peters’ and Jandric's previous work on curriculum as ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ (Peters, M. A., & Jandric, P. (2018b). The curious relationships between discourse, genre and curriculum. Open Review of Educational Research, 5(1).), this article seeks to refresh and extend the central metaphor of ‘curriculum as text’ that is adopted as the organizing metaphor of William Pinar’s 2006 book Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. We undertake this analysis by referring to five theoretical notions: Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The garden of forking paths’ (1941), Roland Barthes’ structuralism (1977), Julia Kristeva's intertextuality (1966/1986), Ted Nelson's hypertextuality (1965), and Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's extratextuality (2004/1980). In conclusion, we show that the text is neither simply an artefact nor is it simply a sequence of uttered sounds. The text does not solely reside within the domain of the reader and cannot be considered as the exclusive domain of the author. Looking at relationships between text, textuality, curriculum, and technology, we show that the metaphor of ‘curriculum as text’ is inherently postdigital and that it requires development of a new postdigital language of inquiry and new postdigital forms of textual and non-textual expressions of that language in the years to come.