The Crisis of Curriculum Change

Revisiting Curriculum Change Theory

The great virtue of examining curriculum change theory and change initiatives at this point in time is that it allows us to scrutinise some of the paradoxes which progressive thinkers and agents face at the moment. A simple way of stating this paradox would be to say that, so inverted is the current pattern of positionality, our normal assumption that progressive forces should be in favour of change needs to be seriously scrutinised. As we shall see, such an assumption is at best naive, and at worse wilfully misguided. In troubled times, when global forces are pushing re-stratification and re-differentiation, change may have a very undesirable side to it. Hence, at the very least, change theorists and advocates of change need to examine the ‘structures of opportunity’, where their change will have its effect. For, if they do not undertake such an examination, they could be promoting changes which have quite different effects from those they might intend. Change, far from being progressive, could have the opposite effect.

The reason for starting with such a broad polemical introduction is that the issues confronting schooling and education are clearly affected by the colossal changes currently underway in the global economy. As educational work is repositioned and re-stratified inside this new global work order so, inevitably, the role of change agents is itself repositioned. In such a situation, even where people go on working as they have worked before, it is possible that the effects of their work have been redirected; sometimes so as to substantially invert or shift the effect and relevance of that work.

These global changes are mediated at national and local levels and the specific results of these negotiations, of course, vary considerably. The range of contemporary changes in the global economy then works at two general levels. At levels of economic production, there is the much analysed crisis of modernisation and a consequent need to explore and interrogate the condition of postmodernity; but at the level of cultural production, it is to the above crisis of positionality that we should be turning. Let me state clearly what this means: a crisis of positionality arises at this point because high modern capital has successfully reconstituted and repositioned the social relations of production. The newly deregulated circulation of capital globally, substantially confines and repositions those social movements that have sought to tackle issues of inequality and redistribution. Hence, progressive movements, welfare states and national trade unions can be redefined and challenged by the press of a button which moves capital from one national and local site to another.

Global capital, then, has a twin triumph to celebrate; the emasculation of social democratic and egalitarian movements within the western world, and the culminating destruction of alternative systems of production and distribution in the communist world. These twin triumphs leave would be change agents in a precarious position; detached from past histories of action for social justice and divorced from hard won visions of alternative futures. In the crisis of positionality that they face, there is no firm ground to stand on, and to remain in the same place is to risk one’s position, be it change, nonetheless.