1st Edition
Engaging Curriculum Bridging the Curriculum Theory and English Education Divide
Explicitly linking curriculum inquiry to English education via recurring themes of representation, democracy and knowledge, this book is a call for both researchers and practitioners to engage with curriculum, explicitly and deliberatively, as both a concept and a question. The approach is broadly conceptual and constitutes an exercise in theoretical and philosophical inquiry. While deeply informed by North American debates and developments, this book offers a distinctive counterpoint and a strategically ‘ex-centric’ perspective, being equally informed by the curriculum scene in Australia, as well as the UK and elsewhere. Divided into two sections, this book first addresses matters of general curriculum inquiry, while the second turns more specifically to English teaching and to associated questions of language, literacy and literature in L1 education. Green brings the two together through a critical examination of the Australian national curriculum, especially in its implications and challenges for English teaching, and with due regard for the project of transnational curriculum inquiry.
Introduction: Engaging Curriculum?
Section I
1. Rethinking the Representation Problem in Curriculum Inquiry
2. Curriculum, Representation, Democracy
3. Addressing the Curriculum Problem in Doctoral Education
4. From Communication Studies to Curriculum Inquiry?
5. Curriculum AND Pedagogy? A Complicated Conversation
6. Teaching for Difference: Learning Theory and Post-Critical Pedagogy
Section II
7. Still Insisting on the Letter? Literacy Studies and Curriculum Inquiry
8. Reviving Rhetoric? English Teaching, the Literacy Challenge, and Curriculum Change
9. Curriculum, ‘English’ and Cultural Studies; or, Changing the Scene of English Teaching
10. A Question of Value: English Teaching, Cultural Studies, Curriculum Inquiry
11. English Teaching, the Knowledge Question and the National Curriculum
12. English in the Australian Curriculum: An ‘Exceptional’ Subject?
Afterword: English Teaching as Curriculum Inquiry
Biography
Bill Green is Emeritus Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia.
"What is curriculum? Who decides what it is? What might it become? Informative, stimulating, scholarly, and of relevance far beyond English teaching and the Australian context, this book by one of our leading theorists is a must for any educator accepting its invitation to engage with curriculum constructively, critically and imaginatively. Engaging Curriculum not only encourages us to turn our critical gaze on key curriculum issues of our time, but presents curriculum itself as a fascinating object for interpretation."
-- Alex Moore, IOE University of London, UK
"As one of Australia’s most distinguished contributors to the transnational literatures of both curriculum inquiry and English education, Bill Green raises questions concerning each of these fields, and the complex assemblage produced by their juxtaposition, that many readers might not have thought to ask. If there is, indeed, a ‘divide’ between curriculum theory and English education, Green’s engaging essays and constructively critical historicising in this book not only ‘bridges’ it, but also goes a long way towards healing it."
--Noel Gough, Professor Emeritus of Education, La Trobe University, Australia
"This is an important book which sets out to bridge, as the subtitle indicates, something of a great divide between general curriculum theory and the curriculum work around the particular school subject English."
-- Wayne Sawyer, Curriculum Perspectives
