‘Making’ and ‘taking’ problems

Abstract

Michael Young’s work is known for its engagement with curriculum over a long period, for the very high impact of the contributions he has made and for the major shifts in his position from the ‘new sociology’ work of the 1970s to the ’social realist’ work on ‘bringing knowledge back in’ of the past decade. In this chapter I discuss the contributions he has made from the perspective of the specificity of curriculum as a field, and the role or roles that are appropriate to the work of a curriculum scholar. I take up three main issues related to Young’s body of work. One issue is whether the proper role of the curriculum scholar is that of one who stands outside educators’ problems to provide new ways of seeing curriculum, knowledge and social forms, or whether it is rather to use sociological understandings to provide direction to the curriculum questions of policy makers and schools. A second issue is the historical situatedness of curriculum work, and the logic of what Young has done in responding to this. A third issue is Young’s changing arguments about knowledge, which I discuss, drawing on my own work over roughly the same period and my particular interest in feminist theory and gender reforms. Across this terrain I argue that Young’s work has made important contributions to the curriculum field, both in his agenda-setting writings and in his engagement activities. Also, that the supposedly contradictory agendas of his early and late work continue to be important to the field: although in tension with each other, they are both productive as ways of seeing curriculum.