Bloomsbury Curriculum Leadership: Virtues for a Changing World

Curriculum Leadership provides much-needed guidance and inspiration for today’s curriculum leaders. Building on his Curriculum: From Theory to Practice, now in its 3rd edition, Null provides readers with a companion text that makes the quality of the people who do curriculum work the heart of all good curriculum making. Often working within extremely challenging if not toxic environments, modern-day curriculum decision makers too often receive shallow “trainings” or pre-packaged “solutions” that promise to “fix” schools once and for all. Ready-made solutions to the complex social, political, and moral challenges that face today’s schools, however, do not exist. What leaders need is a robust philosophical and practical text that, instead of seeking to tell leaders how they must act, respects them as the professionals they are. Curriculum Leadership does that while at the same time providing those who lead curriculum discussions with a solid humanistic foundation that empowers them to lead with integrity, imagine a bright future for their schools, and make decisions that strengthen the institutions they serve. To achieve these ends, Curriculum Leadership connects the field of curriculum to recent developments within moral philosophy. For too long, the field has distanced itself from the moral problems that are the essence of all curriculum decision-making. Instead of running from this reality, Curriculum Leadership embraces the ethical aspect of curriculum and argues for an integration of curriculum deliberation with virtue theory, an approach to moral philosophy that has grown considerably during the last fifty years. The time has come for curriculum to catch up. After discussing how curriculum can benefit from the work of virtue theorists, Null focuses on ten virtues that he contends are essential for good curriculum making. They are humility, courage, compassion, justice, wisdom, practical wisdom, perseverance, faith, hope, and love. The selection of these ten virtues grows out of Null’s thirty years in education, including fifteen years as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Baylor University. Null dedicates one chapter to each of these virtues. Each chapter begins with a philosophical, psychological, and, in some cases, theological discussion of that virtue before turning to two role models who serve as moral exemplars for that virtue in their personal lives. Some of the exemplars highlighted include, for example, Mother Teresa for humility, Martin Luther King, Jr., for justice, Abraham Lincoln for perseverance, Eleanor Roosevelt for practical wisdom, and Malala Yousafzai for hope. In each chapter, Null then connects that virtue to curriculum leadership and decision making. Whether they are classroom teachers, district superintendents, or university administrators, readers of Curriculum Leadership will develop a better understanding of the unique nature of curriculum problems. They also will gain a richer understanding of how the formation of these ten virtues not only improves our lives personally but also results in stronger institutions that, of course, exist to serve the public good. Only through the formation of people who possess these ten virtues can our institutions of curriculum weather the storm that has already arrived.