Curriculum Matters: Educational Tools for Troubled Times

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Teaching the Past and Past Teaching: History and STEM as Sites of Curricular Intervention (Table 18)

Abstract

It is our contention that we are in a crisis of curriculum that can be seen from calls to defund public education to the reduction of children to scores on annual assessments. We also point to a crisis in studies of curriculum, that the critical tools necessary to consider and critique curricular practices have been intentionally removed from schools of education. In many ways, an educational terrain that conflates standards with knowledge, scripts with pedagogy, and tests with understanding can only exist in a world without curriculum traditions that refute such radical reinterpretations of education-as-usual. These are processes that obfuscate who is disenfranchised behind a veneer of sameness-as-justice, a slight of hand that insists on familiarity. In sum, curriculum matters.

Authors

• Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University

• Robert J. Helfenbein, Mercer University