Graduate students and teachers of introductory graduate courses in curriculum have many textbooks to choose from. What is special about Fundamentals of Curriculum: Passion and Professionalism, Second Edition?
Content and approach: Clear, focused, and tightly structured, this text provides essential information and resources education professionals need to effectively deal with the urgent and important curriculum problems they face in schools today. Part I ("Perspectives") looks at curriculum from five fundamental perspectives: curriculum work, traditions of curriculum practice, curriculum theories, curriculum reforms, and curriculum studies. Part II ("Practice") applies these perspectives to important curriculum challenges that arise when people try to improve curriculums in schools and classrooms.
Chapter features: Each chapter opens with a thought-provoking quotation and a set of guiding questions, and ends with "Questions and Projects" and "Further Studies" essays that recommend readings, Web resources, and other ways to study more about the topic.
Distinctive qualities:
Comprehensive. Readers are acquainted with the major schools of thought, value systems, lines of activity, and forms of inquiry in the field.
Rigorous. The most rigorous research and scholarship on curriculum questions is cited and described; research and scholarship are used to ground discussions of curriculum questions; readers are introduced to the considerations involved in doing rigorous studies of curriculum questions.
Practical. First, the focus is on curriculum practice. Theory, research, and other important facets of curriculum studies are presented as vitally important to practice, but the primary subject is what teachers and others do that students experience. Second, the text is practical in a more philosophical sense, taking the fundamental questions of curriculum studies to be practical questions and the primary task of curriculum inquiry to be informing decisions about what to do.
Professional. Curriculum matters are approached professionally both in the sense that the text is designed to prepare readers for professional roles doing curriculum work, and also in the moral and ethical sense that attention is paid throughout the book to the responsibility of curriculum professionals in the public schools to serve the public interest.
New in the Second Edition: The essential message and basic structure of the first edition is preserved, but the text has been significantly reworked to be:
*leaner and simpler--the number of chapters is reduced from 13 to nine and the number of pages reduced almost as much;
*more tightly focused on the ideas, arguments, and examples that are essential learning for anyone entering the study of curriculum--chapters less central to the primary concerns of curriculum professionals and scholars have been cut;
*throughly updated and strengthened as an introduction to research and scholarship in curriculum studies--many new excellent studies have been integrated, and examples, references, and recommended readings included; and
*more direct--the practical, professional message that is the book's main message is more clearly articulated.
Decker F. Walker
