Chapter 6 Case 1: Recursions: Introduction

As a curriculum worker who is interested in intellectual history and who spent 18 years teaching in Title I schools, it is with great pleasure that I write the introductory notes and comments to this section titled “Recursions”—which we have divided into two parts, “Re/Turning to History” and “Re/Turning to Praxis.” The present field, as I witness it in curriculum studies conferences and in the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Division B sessions each year, appears increasingly ahistorical and troublingly divorced from authentic dialogue with teachers, educators, and policymakers.¹ The authors in this section, against the grain of the present field, engage and rework historical concepts and representations along with historical notions of curriculum praxis currently diminished in the field. The first group of essays, organized under the notion of re/turning to history, engage and rework concepts and representations in ways that articulate historical sensibilities for the field. The second group of essays, organized under the notion of re/turning to praxis, approach the arduous task of articulating curriculum theory that could reanimate and reengage teachers' understandings of their practice. Both groups of essays take important steps toward re/turning to history and re/turning to praxis and begin to articulate what an historicized and practical field might look like as graduate students and younger scholars take center stage in the years that come.