The spectre of the literary curriculum

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Abstract The literary curriculum is not the literacy curriculum. The literary curriculum encompasses aspects of the taught curriculum, the assessed curriculum, and the processes of curriculum development and adjustment. The literary curriculum is named as such because it results from the systematic drive to make curriculum space legible, readable, and enumerable in ever-increasing detail. The aim is to display this space as ordered, predictable, and regulable. Unfortunately, the literary curriculum produces the opposite of its aim. It leaves teachers illiterate and disoriented. Instead of order, it produces a manufactured disorder. Introduction There are experts and there are pretenders. How can we tell the difference? Charlie Parker showed us. In jazz culture an up-and-coming musician sometimes requests the privilege of sitting in--for a couple of pieces--with an established combo. Commonly these requests are refused because any failure to uphold the band's standards is resented. Charlie Parker, arguably the jazz idiom's greatest player, saw things differently. He received such requests with enthusiasm. Why? Because he liked to learn from the newcomers' ideas. He overlooked their weaknesses, encouraged them, engaged with them and, as a consequence, enriched both his and their music (Berliner, 1994). That is the distinguishing test. The genuine expert feels deeply her equality with the rest of us; the fake is acutely conscious that only she knows best. Parker's approach to leadership is simple, but, by the standards of contemporary education, most peculiar. In education there are three kinds of expert. I'm referring to archetypes, not actual individuals. They are each genuinely a cut above the rest of us because they have some heightened level of understanding about education. But they differ in their willingness to listen and respond to others as equals. The flame of democracy burns differently within them. The first type of expert, although blessed with great insight and wisdom--born of years of experience and thoughtful reading of history's outstanding thinkers--is eager to learn from the ideas of the novice. The second type is not really wise and insightful, but scholarly. The works of esteemed thinkers are read and chewed over; usually somewhat deferentially, in a conversation among almost equals. But the teacher next door has nothing of interest to say. These experts bend the knee to the departed while turning their back on their neighbour. The third is neither wise nor scholarly. They are superior because they have command of a method. Their democratic spirit, anaemic at best, disregards both the human experience of contemporaries and the wisdom bequeathed by scholarly tradition. They know how to collect and interpret data, and they hear the data's disembodied voice speak to them of facts. So, the first kind of expert extends the education conversation to both the living and the dead; the second, only to the dead; and the third, to neither the living nor the dead. In our day the third kind of expert speaks loudest, and with a newly authorised language. The new grammar and vocabulary make it easier to ask questions like: Are our schools effective? How can we obtain better information? and Are our policies being implemented? In time such expressions become so familiar they slip off the tongue. When this happens we know that the forensic metaphor is likely to be guiding educational thought (Neyland, 2003). When the forensic metaphor guides, we can be sure of the weakening of those narratives and larger visions that uniquely express and shape our deeper commitment to those we teach. These practice-enriching stories and ideals are the essential of education--gods with a small g. When these essential gods of education are silenced there arises a new deism, expertocracy, and a new oracle, information. This, more or less, is the current state of things. Is there a credible alternative to the forensic metaphor, expertocracy, and the worship of data? …