The emergence of a paradigm in the curriculum field: A reply to Jickling

Abstract

It is indeed unusual to find that a thesis presented in a curriculum textbook should generate the intense reaction explicated by Jickling and some other scholars in the curriculum field. In the annals of that field one would be hard pressed to find any comparable level of intense disputation having been generated from a single thesis in a curriculum textbook. For this we are grateful to Jickling and others. When Ian Winchester, editor of Interchange, asked us to respond to JickJing's manuscript, our initial impulse was to let the record stand. However, we know that unless the reader takes pains to check Jickling's arguments and interpretations against what we actually wrote in Curriculum Development: Theory Into Practice (1975, 1980), his article would serve only to throw more heat than light on the matter. Our response to Jickling is not intended as a counter-attack or a mere defence of our thesis, but as a hopeful effort to clarify the issues and to set the record straight. Some of the inaccuracies in Jickling's interpretations of our thesis might be attributed to our failure to explicate it more clearly. However, Jickling's essay is wracked with contradictions and distortions. At one point he cites Kuhn and Masterman on the significance of paradigms for identifying problems and seeking problem solutions in a field. At another point, he argues that a paradigm delineates boundaries and therefore restricts options for investigation and progress. Nowhere in the writing of Kuhn does one find any indication that paradigms restrict options for inquiry in a field. In fact, it is held by Kuhn both that the sense of community for any group of practitioners derives from a paradigm or set of paradigms that governs their work by accounting for the relative fullness of their professional communication and consensus of judgment and that paradigms serve to guide us in the use of concrete problem solutions as models for solving other problems (pp. 175-180). Hence paradigms serve to reveal the possibilities, not the limitations, for systematic inquiry in a field. In Curriculum Development: Theory Into Practice (1980, p. 75), we state clearly that "the paradigm or set of paradigms does not eliminate debate or disagreement in a