Curriculum studies

Curriculum studies (CS) is a concentration within curriculum and instruction concerned with understanding curricula as an active force of human educational experience.

Specific questions related to curriculum studies include the following:

Proponents of CS also investigate the relationship between curriculum theory and educational practice and the relationship between school programs and the contours of the society and culture in which schools are located. There are programs in the field of curriculum studies in several Colleges of Education around the world. Curriculum Studies was also the first subdivision of the American Educational Research Association, known as Division B.

Important CS books include The Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility by William Schubert (New York: Macmillan, 1986; and Understanding Curriculum by William Pinar, et al. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995).

Curriculum Studies emerged as a distinctive field in the late 1960s and early 1970s from educationists focused on curriculum development. The shift from developing and evaluating curriculum to understanding curriculum is known as the "Reconceptualization" of the curriculum field.

A branch of curriculum studies that investigates how society transmits culture from generation to generation has been tagged with the term “Hidden curriculum” even though much of what is studied is hiding in plain sight. For instance, one of the 19th Century founders of the discipline of Sociology, Émile Durkheim, observed that more is taught and learned in schools than specified in the established curriculum of textbooks and teacher manuals. In Moral Education Durkheim wrote:

Phillip W. Jackson (1968) may have coined the term “hidden curriculum” in his book Life in Classrooms. He argued that primary school emphasized specific skills: learning to wait quietly, exercising restraint, trying, completing work, keeping busy, cooperating, showing allegiance to both teachers and peers, being neat and punctual, and so on (Jackson, Philip (1968). Life in Classrooms.). The structural functional sociologist Robert Dreeben (1968 On What is Learned in School) similarly concluded that the curriculum of schooling taught students to "form transient social relationships, submerge much of their personal identity, and accept the legitimacy of categorical treatment". Dreeben argued that formal schooling indirectly conveyed to students values such as independence and achievement, essential for their later membership in society.

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