This dissertation reconceives curriculum through an historical approach that employs Ludwig Wittgensteins later philosophy. Curriculum is more than the knowledge taught in school. Curriculum, as I a theorist conceives it, is concerned with the broader intellectual and ideological ways a society thinks about education. Hence, the current school curriculums focus on specific learning outcomes offers a limited view of the knowledge fashioned by a society, thereby offering an intellectual and social history that is highly selective. Wittgensteins concept of language-games offers curricularists a way to re-include some of these stories.
The concept of curriculum emerges at the end of the Renaissance from Peter Ramuss refinement of the art of dialectic into a pedagogical method of logic. The modern curriculum field arose at the end of the nineteenth century as educators sought to further refine the remnants of scholasticisms pedagogical practices by employing social efficiency and scientific management to more effectively organize American education. Social efficiency and scientific management became the underlying premises of Ralph Tylers (1949) rationalization of the school curriculum.
During the nineteen seventies, curriculum theorists began disrupting Tylers rational foundations by reconceptualizing curriculum using philosophies and theories developed outside of education to alter the language used to describe education. I use Wittgensteins later philosophy to further disrupt the school curriculums rational underpinnings. Wittgenstein maintains that knowing does not require some internal or external authority, thereby rejecting the empirical and logical foundations of knowledge that underlie Western education. Using a Wittgenstein approach suggests that education is an indirect activity of teaching students the use of words. Wittgenstein suggests that educating students indirectly more closely resemble the kinds of playful activities in which children engage in their ordinary lives. He suggests that learning is a synoptic presentation that connects concepts that emerge from our everyday use of language in new and interesting ways. By asking students to see the resemblances among concepts synoptically, rather than logically, education cannot be reduced to the acquisition of a set of facts, ordered in a sequence of steps. As such, a Wittgensteinian approach reconceives curriculum as an act of language-play.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-0612102-171120 |
| Date | 13 June 2002 |
| Creators | Triche, Stephen Shepard |
| Contributors | Nancy Nelson, William E. Doll, William F. Pinar, Karl Roider, Petra Munro, John Baker |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0612102-171120/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University Libraries in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. |
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