El Currículum Escolar

Curriculum Discourses and the Uses of Identity

“What do a trade unionist, a Tory, A Christian, a wife-beater, and a consumer have in common? They can all be the same person”[1]

Modern curriculum thinkers and practitioners have tended to look suspiciously at several critical developments now transforming social and cultural life outside and inside schools around the globe.Some of these developments are the processes of globalization and the intensification of migration of people, ideas, and economic and cultural capital across national boundaries.
Also, computerization and media in general have detonated an explosion of images, identities and subjectivities now facilitated by the Internet, television, film, radio, newspapers, popular music and thelike.
Along with these, new critical discourses and technologies stating new truths have been generated, largely outside the field of education, to address the challenges of this new period. There is a proliferation of images, interpretations, and narratives legitimating understandings that were left in the silent part of history. We are living in a period of time characterized by the explosionof interpretation and particular styles. In the academic realm, these discourses include perspectives such as cultural studies, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism-the two latter being the framework that informs and integrates the various elements and threads of my argument in this essay.
Against the dynamic of these existing changes, educational thinkers have tended todelineate a distinction between the established school curriculum and the outside world of multiplicity and hybridity that now blossom in the everyday lives of youth beyond the school. These educators still insist on a project of homogeneity, normalization and the production of the suitable citizen. This is true, even of contemporary progressive approaches to curriculum reform such asmulticulturalism that have sought to bring the problems of multiplicity and difference into a framework of institutional intelligibility and manageability. Therefore, proponents of the modern curriculum have sought to emphasize a technicist discourse that has separated, for example, multiculturalism from more critical discourses, such as postmodernism, and critical theory.
One consequence of this isolationfrom critical scholarship has been the fact that concepts such as “culture” and “identity”- concepts integral to curricular projects such as multiculturalism are under-theorized within the curriculum field.
As Richard Rothstein (2000) notes in a New York Times article that looks at education and society in Japan, culture and identity are treated problematically in the educational arrangementsof industrial societies. He maintains that the contemporary hierarchical understanding of schooling in countries such as Japan and the United States works to produce differentiating processes, such as testing and streaming, that undermine and fragment student identities. These differentiating processes, in turn, help to generate a powerful ground of culturally significant distinctions betweenstudent and student, student and teachers, and so forth. Peter Taubman (1993) has also stated that to consider implementing multicultural education it is imperative to design an approach which is informed by identity and its constituents. If it is not designed in this manner school will wind up with a “curriculum and pedagogy that promise an increased understanding of identity and culture but thatdeliver alienated identities and arrested intellects” (Taubman, 1993,p. 303)
In what follows I want to argue that curriculum addresses the concept of identity as a homogeneous concept, not considering the several contradictories selves we are constituted by. I believe that the two important features of the subject such as perpetual mobility and incompletion are not adequately addressed in...