Chapter 7: Undergraduate Curricula as Networks and Trajectories

Current views of higher education, inspired in part by the spread of computer mediated forms of instruction, treat curriculum as synonymous with “content” and define teaching as the generation of content landscapes across which flexible students can pursue individualized interests. The first quote below is from the President of Teachers College, Columbia University, the second from a well-known scholar and theorist:

Claims like these conflate the uses and meanings of information artifacts with their material forms, and ignore the spatial and temporal contexts of knowledge-making activities in relations of power. I return to them at the end of this chapter, but invoke them here because they focus attention on the previously neglected topic—the spatial distribution of undergraduate curriculum—which serves as the focus of this piece. Curricula, I will suggest, are best thought of as means for connecting school-based events to events and situations outside the school. To flesh out this idea I draw on data from interviews conducted over two years at a U.S. university, Virginia Tech, with 60-some students enrolled in an introductory nutrition course. Most of these students were interviewed twice over a semester (early in a term, then at the end); some were asked to keep journals for a week, others time-logs, and these were used to structure interviews, as were photocopies of the students’ class-notes.¹ The account of curriculum I draw from this material not surprisingly reflects a student “standpoint” (Smith, 1987). However, instead of privileging this view, my aim is to use it strategically to show the inadequacies of treating curriculum as static and despatialized, and to suggest some alternative concepts, which better register how it is spatially and temporally constituted.