The Incompleteness of Standards and the Potential of/for Deliberative Discourse (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of curriculum theorizing

Abstract

The development of curriculum, lesson plans, formative and summative assessments, and government education policy circle around the high expectations and rigor of academic standards. Whether considered from the vantage point of college and career readiness or disciplinary content knowledge, academic standards provide a content that directs schooling, if not education. How we understand academic standards indicates a great deal about how we relate to and embody education. What occurs in school and individual classrooms is shaped by the relationship we form with academic standards. In many cases, we are tempted to approach academic standards as objects of inquiry and implementation and not as subjects of intention in dialogue. It is common to see academic standards as an object of study or as a set of restraining requirements for the development of curricula, discrete lesson plans, and assessment instruments. The consequence of not considering academic standards as subjects of intention, defined by our purpose in relation to them, is serious. Approaching academic standards from an orientation that appreciates their role as contextual actors has significant potential to transform education, schooling, the development of curriculum, and classroom instructional practices. If we maintain a division between the products or objects of academic standards and our purpose in creating curricula and educative experiences within a schooling context, then the culture will develop immanently, in ways that are unpredictable (Hirschkop, 1989). If we take a phenomenological approach to our study of academic standards, we may develop a mode of discourse that will convey the normative, value-laden connection between the lessons, curriculum, and assessments, and the standards as intentional subjects. As Greg Nielsen's (2002) analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin helps to demonstrate, the answerability (Bakhtin, 1993) of our action in relation to academic standards is potentially critical: The accumulation of each individual act makes up my life history, my once-occurent-life. "To be in life, to be actually, is to act, is to be unindifferent toward the once-occurentwhole" (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 43). If I am indifferent toward the once-occurent-whole, or if I am pretending to be someone I am not, then the fact of my uniqueness and answerability are severely jeopardized. In fact, if I ignore my active self and simply live the passive self A

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (25)

  1. Agamben, G. (2000). Means without ends. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  2. Agamben, G. (2007). The coming community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  3. Apple, M. (2006). Educating the "right" way: Markets, standards, God, and inequality (2 nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
  4. Arendt, H. (1954). Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
  5. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
  6. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
  7. Bakhtin, M. (1990). Art and answerability (M. Holquist & V. Liapunov, Eds., & V. Liapunov, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
  8. Bakhtin, M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act (V. Lianpov & M. Holquist, Eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
  9. Bakhtin, M. (2008). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
  10. Buber, M. (1970). I and thou. New York, NY: Scribner.
  11. Elshtain, J. B. (1995). Political children. In B. Honig (Ed.), Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt (pp. 260-283). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
  12. Giroux, H. (2012). Education and the crisis of public values: Challenging the assault on teachers, students, & public education. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
  13. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row.
  14. Hirschkop, K. (1989). Introduction: Bakhtin and cultural theory. In K. Hirschkop & D. Shepherd (Eds.), Bahktin and cultural theory (pp. 1-38). New York, NY: Manchester University Press.
  15. Holquist, M. (2002). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world (2 nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
  16. LaVenia, M., Cohen-Vogel, L., & Lang, L. (2015). The Common Core State Standards initiative: An event history analysis of state adoption. American Journal of Education, 121, 145-182.
  17. Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence. The Hague: Nijhoff.
  18. Makiguchi, T. (1989). Education for creative living: Ideas and proposals of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (D. M. Bethel, Ed., & A. Birnbaum, Trans.). Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press.
  19. Nielsen, G. M. (2002). The norms of answerability: Social theory between Bakhtin and Habermas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
  20. Parkison. (2014). Dissidence in teacher education: Challenging the neo-liberal paradigm. Scholar- Practitioner Quarterly, 7(2), 189-206.
  21. Parkison. (2015a). Catharsis in education: Rationalizing and reconciling. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 17(2), 121-135.
  22. Parkison. (2015b). Where is citizenship education in the age of Common Core State Standards? Critical Education, 6(22). 1-17.
  23. Popkewitz, T. (1997). The production of reason and power: Curriculum history and intellectual traditions. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 29(2), 131-164.
  24. Rule, P. (2011). Bakhtin and Freire: Dialogue, dialectic and boundary learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43, 924-942. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00606.x
  25. Taylor, C. (1999). Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?). In R. Bhargava, A. Bagchi, & R. Sudarshan (Eds.), Multiculturalism, liberalism and democracy (pp. 138-163). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.