Literature as Curriculum and Curriculum Studies

Abstract

Literature’s capacity to portray the complexities, nuances, and uncertainties of life makes it valuable in guiding teachers and students toward exploring issues, concerns, and conflicts that comprise the scope and depth of their humanity. Understanding literature as curriculum provides the means for individuals to continuously reflect, reconstruct, and reconceptualize their public and private lives. Literature humanizes the work of curriculum design and professional development by informing the process with philosophical, moral, historical, and aesthetic questions, considerations, challenges, and aspirations. The use of symbol, allegory, and metaphor helps make literature accessible as a pathway toward meaningful introspection through which to glean a deeper understanding of issues, conflicts, and beliefs that impact an educator’s personal and professional life. As the use of literature continues to evolve within the larger field of curriculum studies, its central tenet, that the primary aim of education is to foster critical and reflective thinking, remains constant. Literature expands the notion of teaching and learning beyond intellectual concerns into spaces of emotional, social, and ethical import. It operates as a phenomenological lens by prioritizing human experience, perception, and understanding. As this happens, the work continues to embrace an increasingly expansive landscape of political, racial, gendered, autobiographical, global, and international concerns, perspectives, and understandings. As a significant mode of aesthetic inquiry, using literature as curriculum honors the role of educators as curriculum makers and the primary agents in the construction of knowledge and experience. Using literature as part of ongoing professional development allows teachers (collectively and individually) to examine and reflect upon the political, ethical, and dispositional aspects of their work. The depth, expanse, and creativity of literature also benefit students preparing to become teachers. Literature provides an aesthetic experience in which readers recreate what the author has composed and in doing so ascertain a fresh perception of their emerging and evolving identities that draws from both their experiences and from the literature itself. Because literature resonates with the lived experiences of teachers and students, using it as currere in the classroom emphasizes insight over answers, reflection over knowledge acquisition, and deepening self-awareness over quantitative assessment data. Literature contributes immensely to this process in that it facilitates movement past the outer landscape of teaching and learning toward interior realities, values, and struggles. Consequently, the emotional expanse and philosophical depth of literature open pathways toward moral and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning.