book review
Behold the bible of (US) curriculum discourse. Each chapter tells the story of curriculum from a particular perspective--with 15 chapters and over 850 pages, Pinar et al to some degree survey most of what has been written in the field since its inception in the 1820s and beyond. A good 230 pages are dedicated to the history of curriculum studies, with the rest describing contemporary curriculum perspectives: political, racial, gender, phenomenological, poststructuralist/deconstructed/postmodern, auto/biographical, aesthetic, theological, institutionalized, international. Certainly it could use an update (contemporary for Pinar as of this edition is 1980-1994, and since, there have been some exciting new works in curriculum: see, the "mythopoetic" perspective, Expanding Curriculum Research and Understanding: A Mytho-Poetic Perspective, 2000 Peter Lang, and the 2008 Pedagogies of the Imagination, Springer). Also, it's a bit tedious (i.e.: encyclopedic in nature, "synop...