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. 