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Reconceiving Curriculum: an Historical Approach Stephen Shepard Triche Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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Reconceiving Curriculum: an Historical Approach Stephen Shepard Triche Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2002 Reconceiving curriculum: an historical approach Stephen Shepard Triche Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Triche, Stephen Shepard, "Reconceiving curriculum: an historical approach" (2002). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 495. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/495 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. RECONCEIVING CURRICULUM: AN HISTORICAL APPROACH A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In The Department of Curriculum and Instruction by Stephen S. Triche B.A., Louisiana State University, 1979 M.A.. Louisiana State University, 1991 August 2002 To my family for their love and support over the years as I pursue this dream and to the memory of my father. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The process of researching and writing this dissertation has brought many teachers into my life—those special people who have given me their time and unique talents. First, and foremost, I wish to thank Dr. William Doll for his unwavering confidence and determination to bring out the best that I could give. Without his wisdom and support this project could not have been accomplished. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. Karl Roider for his consistent and unending support. I have learned much from him over our twenty-five year relationship as a teacher and mentor. I would also like to acknowledge and thank my other committee members: Dr. Petra Munro, Dr. Nancy Nelson, and Dr. William Pinar, all of whom have given me guidance and useful criticism during this process. Without their continued support, I would not have succeeded in this endeavor. I would also like to thank Dr. M. Jayne Fleener of the University of Oklahoma whom I had asked to sit as a committee member, but unfortunately could not arrange her schedule to do so. Her support and advice further helped to ensure the success of this work. I also want to acknowledge the wonderful community of graduate students in curriculum theory at Louisiana State University. They, along with its professors, have provided a generative and challenging environment, which contributed greatly to the radical ideas in this work. In particular I would like to thank Dr. Doug McKnight, Dr. John StJulian, and Dr. Molly Quinn for both their friendship and collaboration over the years. Our constant gatherings over cups of espresso, and herbal teas allowed me to work through and discuss many of the ideas found in this work. I would like to thank especially Ms. Vikki Hillis, not only for her support and friendship, but for her tireless iii work reading and proofing my work, as well as, her own contributions to our coffee- house debates and discussions. Finally, I would like to thank Lucinda Martinez, a graduate student at Nicholls State University, for her help as a reader during the last two years of this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iii ABSTRACT . vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION . 1 2 RECONCEPTUALIZING CURRICULUM . 18 3 PETER RAMUS AND THE REFINEMENT OF METHOD . 52 4 LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: RECONCEIVING PHILOSOPHY . .100 5 A WITTGENSTEINIAN CURRICULUM: LANGUAGE, CURRERE, PEDAGOGY AND PERSPECTIVES . 136 6 A WITTGENSTEINIAN APPROACH TO CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTION . .170 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 197 VITA . 211 v ABSTRACT This dissertation reconceives curriculum through an historical approach that employs Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Curriculum is more than the knowledge taught in school. Curriculum, as I a theorist conceives it, is concerned with the broader intellectual and ideological ways a society thinks about education. Hence, the current school curriculum’s focus on specific learning outcomes offers a limited view of the knowledge fashioned by a society, thereby offering an intellectual and social history that is highly selective. Wittgenstein’s concept of “language-games” offers curricularists a way to re-include some of these stories. The concept of curriculum emerges at the end of the Renaissance from Peter Ramus’s refinement of the art of dialectic into a pedagogical method of logic. The modern curriculum field arose at the end of the nineteenth century as educators sought to further refine the remnants of scholasticism’s pedagogical practices by employing “social efficiency” and scientific management to more effectively organize American education. Social efficiency and scientific management became the underlying premises of Ralph Tyler’s (1949) rationalization of the school curriculum. During the nineteen seventies, curriculum theorists began disrupting Tyler’s rational foundations by reconceptualizing curriculum using philosophies and theories developed outside of education to alter the language used to describe education. I use Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to further disrupt the school curriculum’s rational underpinnings. Wittgenstein maintains that knowing does not require some internal or external authority, thereby rejecting the empirical and logical foundations of knowledge that underlie Western education. Using a Wittgenstein approach suggests that vi education is an indirect activity of teaching students the use of words. Wittgenstein suggests that educating students indirectly more closely resemble the kinds of playful activities in which children engage in their ordinary lives. He suggests that learning is a synoptic presentation that connects concepts that emerge from our everyday use of language in new and interesting ways. By asking students to see the resemblances among concepts synoptically, rather than logically, education cannot be reduced to the acquisition of a set of facts, ordered in a sequence of steps. As such, a Wittgensteinian approach reconceives curriculum as an act of language-play. vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION According to Ralph Tyler, twentieth century America’s best known curricularist, the school curriculum is “all learning, which is planned and guided by the school, whether or not it is carried on in classes, on the playground, or in other segments of the pupils’ lives.”1 The field of curriculum studies, on the other hand, is generally interested in the broader study of the cultural, social, and ideological perspectives that influence how society thinks about education. Rather than focusing on schooling alone, curriculum studies is concerned with how education generally ”shapes and is shaped by ideology and culture.”2 In this sense, curriculum might be considered a form of intellectual and social history as it reflects forms of knowledge, habits of thinking, and cultural practices that a society considers important enough to pass on to succeeding generations. The decisions a society makes about the curriculum it teaches are selective, and therefore may be seen to be a partial history. A curriculum (re)presents a society’s past, present and future beliefs about itself—its educational folkways and imaginings, some scientific and rational, others mythological, but all in flux, all with a story that serves a purpose. Thus, as historical text, the school curriculum and the field of curriculum stories are incomplete stories. The stories that are not told, like other silenced histories, beg to be revealed. Historically, the academic fields of curriculum studies and history converge in the late nineteenth century with debates over creating the American school curriculum and 1Ralph Tyler, “The Organization of Learning Experiences,” in Curriculum and Evaluation, ed. Arno A. Bellack & Herbert M. Kliebard (Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing Corp., 1977), 45 (my emphasis). Reprinted from, Toward Improved Curriculum Theory, eds. Virgil E. Herrick and Ralph W. Tyler, Supplementary Educational Monograph No. 71 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 59-67. 1 debates over creating professional historical practices. American educators and historians attempted to transform both educational and historical practices by adopting German methods of pedagogy and research. In each case, the application of German methods and theories was used to reform what could be described as more “native” practices of education and history, both of which had arisen from Puritan colonial educational and intellectual practices.3 In this first chapter, I bring forward the connections I make between my experiences with history, historicism, and curriculum theory. I suggest that a more complex “ecological”4 approach to history, learning history in various sites and ways, for example, as I suggest in my autobiographical vignettes, histories locally situated and contextualized, tell different stories than do textbooks. I suggest that the emergence of the field of curriculum studies, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, out of the positivist discourses of the “social efficiency” movement and the related concept of scientific management has similarities to scientific approaches to historiography arising during the same period. Although social efficiency had been only one of the tenets that 2Petra Munro, “Engendering
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