Acculturation, hybridity, cosmopolitanism in Ibero-American curriculum studies

José M. García Garduño

pp. 137-163

in: William F. Pinar (ed), Curriculum studies in Mexico, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Ever since Schawb (2004) declared in the late 1960s that the curriculum field was moribund, one has been reading studies signaling a permanent crisis in the field. Indeed, Wraga and Hlebowitsh (2003, 425) declared that curriculum in the "US can be seen as existing in a state of perpetual crisis." Apparently, an inherent characteristic of the curricular field is that of a permanent crisis. If this crisis is a struggle of the old and the established against the new, to a certain extent it seems natural. Certainly education in the modern and postmodern era has been in a state of constant crisis; Coombs (1971), too, cited crisis. In 1978 Pinar stated that areas such as psychology and the natural sciences regard the curriculum field as in a primitive stage of development (Pinar 1978). But 25 years later, the outlook was very different. The same author (Pinar, 2003, 27) asserted that "the central question in education is the question of curriculum." This shift is nothing but astonishing. Curriculum started as an instrumental discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century. The explosion of knowledge, due to the scientific progress of that time, demanded a discipline that could select and organize the knowledge to be taught at school (Seguel 1966).