ABOUT RECONCEPTUALIZATION IN CURRICULUM

Hi group! I’ve found this interesting article. It’s about reconceptualization in Curriculum Studies. It explains the meaning of this concept and the influence of history by shaping what is thinkable or not. Reconceptualization does not end; it is fluid, ongoing, situational, it disarticulates static forms and it’s directly linked with the cognition process.

I wish you enjoy with it. 

Reading the Work of Elliot Eisner and the Idea of Reconceptualization in Curriculum Studies

ERIK MALEWSKI

Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

Thinking  over  the drive  to codify  in curriculum studies, I speak to what  it means  to contextualize the work  of Elliot Eisner within  reconceptualization as both idea  and movement. As an education scholar  interested in post- discourses within  curriculum studies, this involves reading with  and  against efforts to constitute a field of study,  in ways  that speak to our not knowing and the constraining effects of the categories we use to undertake our work. My challenge in this short essay  is to explore how  what  is remembered is “a function  of the cultural  categories that shape  what  is thinkable and  what  is not” (Atkinson  & Coffey, 2001, p. 810) and thus invite surprise, novelty, and the unknown as a way  of knowing history  within  the spaces where we find ourselves today.

WHAT IS RECONCEPTUALIZATION?

Reconceptualization means to form a concept or idea again; to offer up a new perspective or angle on a concept or idea.  As William  Pinar notes in relation to the reconceptualization of the curriculum field,  “What became clear  was that while  the themes  of 1970s scholarship echoed earlier  ones,  the function of the new  scholarship was  not to change curriculum practice; it was  to understand curriculum as political” (Pinar, 2010, p. 736). Reconceptualization as  an  idea,   then,  suggests the  necessity of  reading with  and  against   the histories  we  inherit  to think  the concept and  practice of curriculum anew, while  acknowledging that history  shapes what  is thinkable and what  is not.

Some paramount examples of reading with and against can be found in Eisner’s work on connoisseurship, criticism,  and cognition. Connoisseurship highlights how education can  use  the arts to see  the world  in complicated, nuanced ways  and  draw  connections between seemingly disparate realities and  experiences. Criticism  speaks to how  the  arts  can  enhance the  peda- gogical capacity to disclose ideas  to others,  to help  with  the refinement  of perceptions and  ideas.  In the last,  at the 2002 John Dewey  Lecture at Stan- ford University, Eisner explains how  his work  challenges what  he calls  the “increasingly technicized cognitive culture  in  which  we  operate”  with  the idea  of education for “the preparation of artists” conceived of as “individuals who  have  developed the  ideas,  the  sensibilities, the  skills,  and  the  imagi- nation  to create  work”  (Eisner,  2002,  p. 8).  Here  Eisner reads with artistry to read against recent effort to import the hard sciences into the teaching enterprise, promulgating more expansive forms of literacy that include visual and auditory forms of representation.

HOW MIGHT RECONCEPTUALIZATION BE PUT TO USE?

Reconceptualization does not end; it is fluid, ongoing, situational, and it dis- articulates static forms. I think of Eisner’s work on becoming when he writes “cognition is a process that  makes  awareness possible. It is,  in a sense,  a matter  of becoming conscious, of noticing, of reorganizing, of perceiving” (1981,  p. 49). Here proliferation and policing intersect in an effort toward  a renewed language of emergence and imagination, as well  as an understand- ing  of sensory capacities, such  that we  gain  frameworks for understanding sensation, conception, and forms of representation.

This  brings  to  the  surface  another  aspect  of reconceptualization that might be useful:  an opportunity for critical  interpretation and unpacking the problem  of interpretation and translation such that the work  gets positioned historically. Take,  for example, the  sub-sections of Eisner’s,  The  Arts  and the Creation  of the Mind (2002):   “The  Role  of  the  Arts in  Transforming Consciousness,” “Visions and  Versions  of Arts Education,”  “What Education Can Learn from the Arts,” and  “An Agenda  for Research  in Arts Education.” Here Eisner’s work is not so much an expose´ on core precepts or one-right- way  strategies as it is a framing  from an invested positionality that unpacks the problematic of our inherited technicism and how power  and knowledge play  out in arts education.

WHAT SHOULD BE MADE OF RECONCEPTUALIZATION IN POST-TIMES?

Elliot Eisner shares with curriculum scholars  of the reconceptualization movement a focus on aesthetics, arts, and humanities, and a suspicion of curriculum development and  the full-tilt  infiltration  of instrumentalism and technicism into schools. Eisner was involved in arts focused associations and meetings for much of his career, ones that were  beyond the spaces where the reconceptualization movement took root. Bernadette Baker  (2009)  aptly notes that, positioned by some  as sorts of liberators, the arts and humanities are, quite  antithetically, overwrought with venerable objects  to be recovered from the past,  restored  to their previous glory,  and centered within  the field of education. Eisner’s scholarship illustrates these sacred stories can have oppressive effects in spite of liberatory intentions. There is an inclination to evade difficult  stories—of  colonization, elitism,  racism,  and  heterosexism in art and curriculum fields—out of the desire  to restore  the good  name  of ed- ucation  with more holistic  and comprehensive approaches to teaching. Yet, education seems to be left wanting, to continually fall short of its promise. Eisner’s  work  exemplifies the  need  to provide  counternarratives to taken- for-granted storylines and  also  highlights the  issues  that  arise  in replacing one set of truths for another.

In light of Elliot Eisner’s contributions, the reconceptualizations most helpful  are  those  that address the  promise  of art and  aesthetic curriculum studies  after the end of a belief  in uncontaminated, non-complicit humanism and the corresponding lessening of confidence and enthusiasm for aesthetic projects:  an art education post-truth  and beauty.