Outside Curriculum in Curriculum Studies History in View of Ethnic Minority Issues and Needs

• In Event: Outside Curriculum—Necessary for Public Education: Dreaming Possibilities, Starting With China

Abstract

The first presenter is Chinese and has a long history of experience with education in China, where she was born and as a teen experienced life on a Reform Farm during the Cultural Revolution, and taught at Wuhan University. She is from a family of educators and has lengthy experience with Chinese ethnic minorities in China, Canada, and the US. She completed graduate degrees in Canada and is a professor in the US. In her recent visit to four Chinese Universities (Beijing Normal, Central Chinese Normal, Hauzhong University of Science and Technology, and Lanzhou Normal), she lectured on ethnic minority educational issues in education. Her presentation (joined by the chair/discussant) will first relate the idea of outside curriculum and set it contextually in the historical literature of the curriculum field.

This history begins with the perspective that before curriculum became a specialized area of study at the beginning of the 20th Century, it was largely a function of all institutions and relationships that helped induct the young into a culture or society. With universal schooling and specialized departments of curriculum in schools, school districts, states, and nations, curriculum development became largely a function of schooling. Nonetheless, John Dewey (1899, 1916, 1927, 1934) warned that it was important to realize that education is much broader than schooling, and cautioned that education can be mis-educative (Dewey, 1938), as did Carter G. Woodson (1933). In so doing he was doubtless influenced by J. F. Herbart and the Herbartian emphasis on the curricular importance of the apperceptive mass (Dunkel, 1970) which pertained to the accumulating repertoire of experiences through which persons see the world, i.e., lenses akin to what Kenneth Boulding (1956) called the image.

As curriculum was reconceptualized in the 1970s to become an intellectual area of study, curriculum scholars looked at a larger vision of curriculum, not only that developed for schools at the behest of the corporate state. Review of the curriculum literature in 1980 (Schubert & Lopez Schubert, 1980, pp. 347-348) indicated that too little attention was given, perhaps due to specialization, to non-school realms of society and culture as other curricular areas--other than schooling. One could, for instance, conceive of curricula of homes, families, peer groups, mass media, formal organizations or clubs, jobs, informal peer groups, and more (Schubert, 1981). As we moved through the 1980s and into the 21st Century, the field moved from curriculum development to curriculum studies and drew from many disciplines and literatures, including cultural studies (Malewski, 2010) and public pedagogy (Sandlin, et al, 2010).

As Presenter 1 shared ideas about work with ethnic minority students, Chinese curriculum scholars realized that to meaningfully conceptualize and employ the idea of outside curriculum required focus on complexities of individuals, groups, and places, relative to diversities of ethnicity, culture, language, class, health, ableness, belief, orientation, membership, gender, sexuality, and more aspects of life. The ongoing nature of subsequent discussion from this realization will feature significantly in the discussion portion of the symposium.

Author

• Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University