Routledge Engendering Curriculum History (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

How can curriculum history be re-envisioned from a feminist, poststructuralist perspective? Engendering Curriculum History disrupts dominant notions of history as linear, as inevitable progress, and as embedded in the individual. This conversation requires a history that seeks re-memberance not representation, reflexivity not linearity, and responsibility not truth. Rejecting a compensatory approach to rewriting history, which leaves dominant historical categories and periodization intact, Hendry examines how the narrative structures of curriculum histories are implicated in the construction of gendered subjects. Five central chapters take up a particular discourse (wisdom, the body, colonization, progressivism and pragmatism) to excavate the subject identities made possible across time and space. Curriculum history is understood as an emergent, not a finished, process – as an unending dialogue that creates spaces for conversation in which multiple, conflicting, paradoxical and contradictory interpretations can be generated as a means to stimulate more questions, not grand narratives. Review "Curriculum history, explains Hendry, transcends the history of schools to examine the social, political, and cultural dynamics of knowledge and learning. She argues that this history must be brought to light and analyzed in order to deal with a crisis in education that ahistorical presentism depicts in the shallow water of failing schools and falling test scores."--Reference and Research Book News "This invaluable book will be useful not only to curriculum studies major students and researchers but also to other history, education, gender studies majors, researchers, and teachers who are passionate about re-membering histories with/in contingent times and spaces."―Teachers College Record About the Author Petra Munro Hendry is St. Bernard Chapter of the LSU Alumni Endowed Professor, College of Education, Louisiana State University.