How Benchmarks and "Scientific Evidence" Become Possible in Curriculum Change: Postwar American Research

• In Event: 28.022 - How the Sciences of Curriculum Became Reasonable: Their Emergence in Postwar Years and Its (Dis)Continuity

Abstract

The massive US social welfare reforms in the post-World War years of the Great Society and War on Poverty mobilized the social and education sciences to engage in massive social reforms (Solovey & Cravens, 2012). This paper examines the epistemic principles of the research formed in a nation-wide elementary school reform developed by The Wisconsin Center for Research and Development (R&D) for Learning and Reeducation, one of the seven federally-funded centers to assist the state educational reform to increase social mobility and equity in society.

Theoretically, it examines the social epistemology of the research conducted (Hacking, 2004). It considers the principles generated about the nature of people and the processes of change in the Research & Development Center’s research in mathematics, reading education, and its psychologies of learning used to design curriculum innovations (Diaz, 2017; Lesko, 2001). The study draws on the data sources from archival materials of research, programs and research grant proposals from the Wisconsin Educational Research Center.

The paradox of the epistemic framing of the educational research is discussed: system theory inscribed principles of stability as models about models of change about an anticipated future; there was a comparative style of reasoning that (re)visioned the early 20th century Social Question about social disorder into questions of changing urban populations considered as deviant.

These epistemic changes in the center’s research are related to research about what counts today as practical and useful knowledge in designing change through benchmarks and reforms based on scientific evidence.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin