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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Despite the significance of post-World War II social sciences for curriculum reforms in the US, the connections and disconnections of their epistemological assumptions with today’s curriculum studies have yet to be explored. The symposium investigates how the principles generated in post-war social scientific practices related to behaviorism, cybernetics, risk management, and systems thought were (re)assembled with anticipatory logics, rendering the future and the body (of individuals and populations) actionable and governed. The studies also examine how post-war epistemological principles connect and disconnect in today’s STEM curriculum, entrepreneurship education, action research, learning science, and educational R&D models. The session highlights, despite the changing epistemological assemblies, the body and the open horizon of the future remain objects of intervention for power relations.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 2: Pasts and Emerging Futurities (The Theorizing Moments of Curriculum)

Chair

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin

Papers

• Out of the Box: Behaviorism and the Mangle of Practice - Antti Saari, University of Tampere

• Locating Teachers' Vision as Part of the System: Troubling the Participatory Rationale of "Action" + "Research" - Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University

• The Post–World War II Risk Paradigm and Its (Dis)Connections With Entrepreneurship Education - Mariam Sedighi, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Can Problem Solving Be Problematized? Preparing Children for Security Through Performing and Enacting Human-in-Crisis - Lei Zheng, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• How Benchmarks and "Scientific Evidence" Become Possible in Curriculum Change: Postwar American Research - Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin

Discussant

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison