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Rating: 
Summary: A good introduction to postmodern curriculum thought
Review: .Back when most of the readers of this review went to college to learn to be teachers, we were good girls and good boys. We took our required courses and we studied pedagogy. We learned about Maslow's hierarchy, about Ausubel's anticipatory set, about Skinner's rewards and punishments, Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, Piaget's and Erikson's stages of development. We became certified. We entered our schools in the morning and we came home at night to our families. If we weren't teaching in our home town, our students were themselves from families, communities, cultures, that sometimes confused us. But if we didn't have knowledge of the students' families, communities, and culture, we didn't mind, for our training in the subjects we taught and our training in how to teach those subject matters told us that we were to be objective, that certain purposeful goals and plans would work to teach all students, if only we filled out our behavioral lesson plans and had enough classroom management. We believed fervently that the world of the classroom was indeed manageable, and all students could be taught no matter what by the methods of the pedagogical methodologists- the Jerome Bruner of the Woods Hole Conference (1960), who said we should teach through the structure of the discipline; the National Science Foundation who said we should engage in the new math and in MACOS (Man: A Course of Study); Benjamin Bloom, and his colleagues (1969), who made taxonomies of behavioristic objectives of learning in the affective and the cognitive domains, and who went on to invent a system called "mastery learning," which said we could "teacher proof" the curriculum so that it could be "delivered" to all students in a certain amount of time; Robert Gagné (1974) , who invented a "system approach" to teaching and learning. "The Curriculum," we had been taught, is a written document with a certain selection of materials to be read or covered, a scope and a sequence, and defined goals. This view is based on what is called the Tyler Rationale, based on the work of Ralph Tyler, who in 1949 stated four purposes for curriculum: 1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? [objectives]; 2. What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? [design]; 3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? [scope and sequence]; 4. How can we determine that these purposes are being attained? [evaluation]. We came to believe that we, as good girls and boys, would be good curriculum people if we were organized and followed the systems and suggestions of these gurus. But when we got home from those schools, when we went to lunch with our friends, when we confessed to each other that our well-laid plans were not working. Or at least not the way we thought they would. In many of our schools, chaos reigned. The leaders weren't leading; the students weren't filling in the bubbles properly on the required true and false and multiple choice tests; they said we weren't teaching them to spell; the objectives to be evaluated weren't evaluatable. We were in the world of the school, a world that encounters all of society's ills through its students, their parents, and the expectations of the larger society, the business community, the elite colleges we hope our students will be able to attend. Here we were, trundling our materials in and out of our car trunks, teaching in closets and furnace rooms, aliens in the school communities we entered for pullout classes a few hours a week, and we were being greeted not with welcome but with chaos. This wasn't the way teaching was supposed to work! As a former school principal, I often had to wearily shake my head at the notion that I would be a visionary educational leader, when every moment of every day was spent putting out fires, from pulling up the pants of the kindergartner trapped in the stall in the big girls' bathroom, to speaking soberly to the boys who put gum in the elevator keyhole. By the time I wrote my thank you notes, had my nonstop round of meetings, walked down the halls nodding and speaking to everyone, I had little time to read theory, to reflect on curriculum, and to lead my school to victory. Slattery's has been a teacher, a principal, a coach, a social activist. He's not writing from our so-called ivory tower of academe, but from a solid base in parochial schools. Slattery is of the second generation from the curriculum thinkers who formed the "reconceptualist movement" in the 1970s. A student of William Pinar's and William Doll's at Louisiana State University, he became co-author with Pinar of the recent synoptic curriculum text Understanding Curriculum (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). The reconceptualists formulated a curriculum theory that was new. In 1970, Joseph Schwab declared that the curriculum field was "moribund," and that the Tyler Rationale has reached the end of its usefulness for school planning, first because it has a false technicalism, and second because it is politically naive. The humanistic open classroom, the emphasis on values clarification, the push for affective education formed the context of the reconceptualist position. Eisner joined in with his emphasis on aesthetics, delineating five conflicting conceptions of curriculum that educators hold (Eisner 1979). Slattery's book comes out of this history, and it takes its focus not from the pretentious scientistic modernistic attempts to force human behavior (the student) and human creative work (the canon) into a list of behaviors and goals. It swiftly went to a second printing. Slattery says, "the demoralization of educators, disenfranchisement of students, and the dissatisfaction of stakeholders in educational systems are all indications that something is terribly wrong. These theories . . . have proved to be impotent in the face of growing turmoil in the modern world" (p. 245). Embracing a theory of kaleidoscopic chaos in relation to schools, Slattery points to conditions within the schools such as "departmental isolation," where colleagues don't talk to each other; where tenured teachers castigate the bureaucrats but languish in their own malaise. "Curriculum committees spend their time reviewing course proposals, clarifying goals and objectives, and debating changes in the state curriculum guides . . . oblivious to the contemporary curriculum discourses" (p. 246). As I am myself a veteran and experienced observer and participant in the schools as well as the university, when I read this I began to wake up. I began to read curriculum theory again. I began to let my moribund curriculum gene, lulled to sleep in the comfort of Tylerism, begin to question again. I began to attend innovative curriculum conferences where theory was discussed by eager and brilliant young theoreticians with flashing eyes and spiked hair. I came to consider these to be the "gifted and talented" of the education profession. Chapter 1 is called "Introduction to Curriculum Development and Postmodernity," and it discusses the various definitions and interpretations of postmodernity, for example, Giroux's conception of the border crossing taking place between feminist theory, critical theory, race theory, and multiculturalism. Slattery seems to align himself with a constructivist postmodernism as described by David Ray Griffin, where postmodernism "seeks to integrate the best features of premodern, rural, agrarian societies (e.g., spirituality, cosmology, family/tribal community values) and the best features of the modern urban, technological societies (e.g. advances in health care, global communication, transportation) in order to construct a more balanced and ecologically sustainable global economy" (p. 31). Chapter 2 considers "Historical Perspectives On Curriculum As A Field of Study" and takes into account Lyotard's influence on modern thinkers, not only thinkers in curriculum. Lyotard (1984) posited the idea that the overarching view of history is one more metanarrative, even though it is dominant. The story of the Enlightenment being a narrative of freedom and progress, the story that the Civil War was a war about slavery, the story that World War II was "The Good War," are subject, in the postmodern critical consciousness, as "they privilege one historical analysis without acknowledging their own contextuality and without acknowledging the validity of other discourses" (p. 37). Slattery comments that the emphasis on critical thinking, sets "boundaries around thinking in which the parameters of knowledge are limited by specific interpretations of human history" (p. 39). Telling a story of his own family's visit to Vicksburg and finding their own family history in the Civil War there, he asserts that social studies wouldn't be boring to students if they engaged in autobiographical encounters with the material. Chapter 3, "The Reconcept
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