Chapter 2: From Carter G. Woodson to Critical Race Curriculum Studies: Fieldnotes on Confronting the History of white Supremacy in Educational Knowledge and Practice
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Published:2014
Kristen L. Buras, 2014. "From Carter G. Woodson to Critical Race Curriculum Studies: Fieldnotes on Confronting the History of white Supremacy in Educational Knowledge and Practice", Researching Race in Education: Policy, Practice and Qualitative Research, Adrienne D. Dixson
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In the landmark compendium Understanding Curriculum, Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (1995) charted the historical and contemporary field of curriculum studies. The chapter on understanding curriculum as racial text notes the tendency to “subsume the subject of race” (p. 315) within critical curriculum theory, largely grounded in Marxist and neo-Marxist analyses of class and political economy. In distinction, they stipulate the salience of race as an “autonomous concept in the effort to study curriculum” (p. 315). The need even to make the argument is what compelled Ladson-Billings and Tate (2006a) to center critical race theory in education:
We offer as a first meta-proposition that race, unlike gender and class, remains untheorized. Over the past few decades, theoretical and epistemological considerations of gender have proliferated. Though the field continues to struggle for legitimacy in academe, interest in and publications about feminist theories abound. At the same time, Marxist and neo-Marxist formulations about class continue to merit consideration as theoretical models for understanding social inequity. We recognize the importance of both gender-based and class-based analyses while at the same time pointing to their shortcomings vis-à-vis race. (p. 13)
