Chapter 10: English Teachers’ Narratives in the Midst of Sacred Curriculum Stories

The formal curriculum can be seen as the “steering of a field” (Westbury, 2008, p. 57) that is aimed at attending to the most prominent voices of curriculum stakeholders. Curriculum is, therefore, a negotiation that might be understood as largely political in orientation rather than educational. Recent U.S. curriculum reform has concentrated on the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSS; Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2016a). Some states have adopted these standards or they have used CCSS as a basis for state-based learning standards. For example, in the state of Missouri, which is the common state for this study, the CCSS were used as a guide for establishing the Missouri Learning Standards (MLS; Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2016). Although the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) asserted that these standards for learning “do not dictate curriculum” (Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2016), teachers who have been inducted into the profession during this current era of enhanced standardization might experience a “sacred story” (Clandinin et al., 2006) of curriculum standards as curriculum mandates that equal the curriculum (Schlein, 2013).