Call for Papers

Deadline: 10/12/2016

Special issue

CURRICULUM HISTORY. NEW DIRECTIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

Guest Editors:

Mariano González Delgado (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain) & Christine A. Woyshner (Temple University, USA)

Curriculum history and the history of school subjects is a well-established research area in the field of History of Education, and has grown significantly since the seventies, mainly in Great Britain and the USA. Knowledge in the field of Education arose from a series of debates between and among educational leaders, shaped by political, economic and cultural contexts, and this is reflected in the features of scholarship across the different national contexts. The configuration of the curriculum depended, therefore, on a number of political and social agendas that determined the place of each school subject in the educational arena. School leaders, politicians, and policy makers also decided upon the selection, organization, distribution and definition of knowledge that was considered to be of most worth.

Since these early studies, the field has opened in new directions and spawned fresh analytical perspectives. The influence of school culture, the debates and struggles that have occurred within and outside the fields of proprietary school subjects, and the voices of the marginalized have helped foster new perspectives on the historical development of the curriculum. Influenced by these new approaches, research has, in recent years, focused on explaining the changes and continuities of mathematics, science and social studies in school. Even new perspectives have focused on how different contextual and institutional elements, such as feminist professional associations, ethnic groups or phenomena such as pedagogical importation, have facilitated the development of the curriculum.

This open call for papers welcomes contributions to the monograph entitled Curriculum History: New directions and perspectives, edited by Mariano González Delgado (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain) and Christine A. Woyshner (Temple University, USA), and aims to present these new lines of research from the perspective of the History of Education. It seeks to identify, from different approaches and national contexts, which items have been central to the social construction of school curricula and their component subjects, as well as other topics related to this field, such as textbooks, and teaching and learning processes.