Governmentality, Curriculum Theory, and the Synoptic Text

• In Event: 52.066 - Foucault, Postfoundations, and the Complexities of Contemporary Educational Experiences

Abstract

This paper theorizes curriculum through the lens of power, the operation and embodiment of which we suggest is poorly understood in American education and society. We analyze curriculum as a form of governmental rationalization through which students and educators embody institutional practices and values. Through Foucault’s analysis of resistance to the power of the European Christian pastorate, we assert that curriculum includes spaces of counter-conduct through new synoptic texts. Understanding the historical relationships through which institutional power emerges and becomes embodied through the application of various rationalizing techniques is essential both in understanding curriculum as a form of governmental power and how we might embody counter-conducts within governmental systems to reconfigure oppressive power as more just and equitable.

Authors

• Jim Burns, Florida International University

• Colin D. Green, The George Washington University