SoTL and Social Justice

SoTL provides a foundation for democratizing the teacher-student relationship through its fertile ground for establishing more equalitarian roles among teachers and students. This chapter draws attention to the overlap between the values and essential characteristics of SoTL and the field of curriculum studies, which serves to study and examine social dynamics through curriculum inquiry. Through an exploration of forms of inquiry and research that unites curriculum studies (with its emphasis on transgressive education) and SoTL (with a focus on engagement of teachers and learners as educational community), this chapter highlights how research that dovetails SoTL and curriculum studies can provide powerful opportunity for emphasizing social justice.

Cultures of Curriculum

The concept of cultures of curriculum is an iteration of the classification system known as curricular orientations. Intended as a framework for curriculum development and a heuristic for curriculum inquiry, a culture of curriculum is a philosophy-based curricular orientation supported by coherent practices. A curricular culture is characterized by a shared and unifying vision that guides articulation of goals, inspires consensus, and stimulates the desire for change. Diverse cultures of curriculum have existed historically and are enacted in contemporary schools and universities; they are not static. Societal change, scholarly discoveries, and political or ethical discourse influence educators’ knowledge and public beliefs about education. Essentially, this conceptual model involves perceiving curriculum through a cultural perspective, as a series of interwoven dynamics and not merely as explicit content. Curriculum theorized as culture attends to continuing dialogue, values, metaphors, the environment in which education takes place, power relationships, and the norms that affect educators’ and stakeholders’ convictions about right or appropriate education. Subsequently, the cultures of curriculum framework for curriculum inquiry comprises both analysis of beliefs and ethnographic study of lived curriculum. This conceptual model also casts light on curriculum transformation, viewed through the cultural lens as reculturing curriculum. The process begins with inquiry through the cultures of curriculum framework to investigate the extant curriculum in classrooms and schools. Such examination may result in awareness of ad hoc curriculum featuring a multitude of contradictory purposes and activities or the realization that authorized curriculum work conflicts with educators’ philosophies and moral purposes. Concurrently, the study of curricular cultures may stimulate curriculum leadership as educators imagine ways to change their own curriculum work, initiate conversations with colleagues and stakeholders, and eventually commit energies and resources to reculturing curriculum. Rather than making partial modifications to school structures or trying out the latest instructional methods, curriculum transformation informed by the concept of curricular cultures embodies profound change to values, norms, and practices, as well as to classroom and school cultures.

Reciprocal Learning as a Comparative Education Model and as an Exemplar of Schwab’s The Practical in Curriculum Inquiry

The field of curriculum studies has long been tormented by a disputatious literature over theory and practice and the proper way to pursue curriculum inquiry. Roughly in the middle of the last century standard practical pursuits came into question with a dizzying array of postmodern critiques. Countering both the practical pursuits under criticism and the postmodern reconceptualist critical literature, Joseph J. Schwab advanced a theory of The Practical. Schwab’s writing remains relevant, and theoretical debates on curriculum inquiry regularly reference Schwab. These debates are driven by fundamentally different philosophical views on theory and practice and their place in curriculum studies. Although the reconceptualist literature has become theoretical orthodoxy in the field of curriculum studies, the debate is kept alive by writers who draw on Schwab’s theory of The Practical. However, little progress in mutual understanding has resulted because debate is focused on theoretical parameters, assertions, and positions at the expense of the practice of inquiry. We believe that turning attention to what people do in curriculum inquiry rather than pursuing theoretic prescriptions of how people should think in curriculum studies would help move the field forward. Our “Practical” Schwab-based work in personal practical knowledge and in narrative inquiry over the years, culminating in our current large-scale, seven-year-long longitudinal comparative education study, Reciprocal Learning Partnership Research between Canada and China, is illustrative. Using a commonplaces of inquiry framework developed by Schwab, we detail practical research qualities of The Practical and of the Reciprocal Learning Partnership Project. We discuss the situational starting and end points of curriculum inquiry in the Reciprocal Learning Partnership with special reference to the moral quality of practical situations studied. We further describe the nature of qualified knowledge outcomes in inquiry, qualities of the researcher agent, method and its relationship to a flexible, shifting database, and the understanding that inquiry and situations studied are the outcomes of narrative histories. This Schwab-based comparative education work begins with a moral position on a practical international situation and builds cross-cultural reciprocal learning strategies and outcomes using diverse theoretical positions and methodologies. In so doing Schwab’s “The Practical” is demonstrated by a new model of comparative curriculum studies. There is much to criticize in this work but there is also, we believe, much in which to take pride. Canadian and Chinese educators and their practices are enhanced through reciprocal learning. Improving practice has its own theoretical, and personal, rewards apart from the security achieved by theoretical consistency pursued by The Theoretic. Our hope is that something new in the contentious arena of curriculum studies may emerge if deliberation revolved around competing curriculum inquiry practices rather than around competing theoretical ideas on the nature of curriculum inquiry. Should this hope be unrealized, we nevertheless believe that Reciprocal Learning as an exemplar of The Practical provides useful direction for comparative curriculum studies.

Documentary Filmmaking as Curriculum Inquiry and Film as a Means to Broaden Portrayal of Curricular Phenomena

There are three areas where the Documentary Studies’ and Curriculum Studies’ literature overlap. Firstly, both literatures concern themselves with the social construction of reality in opposition to scientism and objective truth. Secondly, both literatures speak to the ethical implications of representing other people, particularly when the one doing the representing has more social capital than the represented. Lastly, both traditions speak to how the authors should account for their own biases. A case is made for Curriculum Studies scholars to use documentary filmmaking, in addition to writing, as a means for communicating the ideas, commitments, and critiques that Curriculum Studies offers.

Curricula of Museum Education: International Instances

The application of curriculum theory and models of curriculum development to museum education helps inform the analysis of the representational, communicative, epistemological, and cognitive dimensions of the formal, informal, and nonformal learning that takes place in the museum setting. Museums and other in/nonformal learning environments implicitly and explicitly engage questions of worth inherent to curriculum inquiry. Within the Curriculum Studies field, such questions reflect both an historical and a contemporary concern with issues of diversity, accessibility, social justice, civic value, and human rights in school and non-school curriculum contexts. In addition to other curriculum analysis frameworks, international instances of museum education curricula can be understood through the lenses of three “human interests”: the technical, the practical, and the emancipatory. A preference for designing educational materials and experiences around predetermined objectives reflects a technical interest in museum curricula. Within this technical approach, which can also be conceptualized as curriculum as product, the success or failure of a curriculum depends on the degree to which the intended objectives are achieved. Curriculum as practice reflects a practical interest in the way understanding and knowledge are created (rather than simply transmitted) through the dynamic social interactions between teacher and learner. A curriculum as practice orientation aligns with constructivist views on museum learning. Representing an emancipatory interest in human liberation and the overcoming of oppressive social structures is the curriculum as praxis orientation. This approach to museum curricula often assumes a social justice goal of community empowerment that seeks to translate understanding or consciousness-raising into action.