Decomposing Curriculum, vs. Curriculum-as-Text

Abstract

The textuality of curriculum is explained in terms of the interweaving (texere) of elements in which the tissues of curriculum are textually formed. Derrida, Geertz, and other theorists are discussed, in revealing the misunderstandings of textuality that result in criticisms that the idea of curriculum as text is too restrictive and/or too expansive, and too great a departure from how curriculum has been understood historically within the field. Diverse examples from recent education literature show how the inability to see textuality results in blindness to the interweavings in which curriculum, as textual reality, is essentially composed. Historical evidence from Dewey and Bobbitt to Brown v. Bd. of Ed. (1954) demonstrates the historical continuity of this understanding of curriculum. In this article, I attempt to clarify the sense in which curriculum is fundamentally textual in its composition. This does not reduce curriculum to something like a piece of writing or a set of writings. To the contrary, it insists that no understanding of curriculum can be adequate to the actuality of curriculum without taking into account how the multiplicity of diverse aspects of the human condition are textually interwoven in the very composition of curriculum-as-text. This does not mean, on the other hand, that “curriculum” is now being reconceptualized so broadly that it loses its own proper and specific meaning, such that it becomes as broad and general as “human existence,” or “the human condition.”