The Politics of Curricular Change

As different and significant peoples have joined its population, the United States has undergone various conceptions of education - its definition, purpose, content, and pedagogy, in primary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities-and education for the twenty-first century will require curricular change. The quest for an inclusive curriculum - and the politics involved in that quest - is the continuing pursuit of a strategem that both acknowledges and utilizes the racially, ethnically, politically, economically, and linguistically diverse groups, along with the dominant majority, in order to support and maintain diversity, tolerance, and ultimately, community. The Politics of Curricular Change fills an important void in the existing literature on the relationship of multicultural curricular change to race, hegemony, and power as independent constructs. Given the scant amount of research on how these constructs serve as facilitators of curricular change, this book is timely in its reassessment of the requirements of multiculturalism, and will appeal to national- and state-level policy makers, higher education officials, administrators, faculty, researchers, and the national citizenry. From a critical perspective, some early childhood educators have proposed that the knowledge base used to ground the field actually serves to support the status quo, reinforces prejudices and stereotypes, and ignores the real lives of children. The purpose of this book is to deconstruct early childhood education, identifying and evaluating the themes and forms of discourse that have dominated the field, leading to the construction of specific theories and forms of practice that privilegeparticular groups of children and adults and oppress others. An alternative avenue for early childhood education is posited that focuses on social justice and human agency.