Discourse, Genre and Curriculum

This paper explores the central metaphors of curriculum as 'text' and 'discourse' that are adopted as the organizing metaphors for William Pinar's 2006 book "Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses." Using the works of Michel Foucault, the paper explores relationships between discourse and curriculum as procedures of exclusion. Moving on to genre as a literary form, the paper analyses the pedagogical form of the essay and the rise of the article as one of the most pervasive forms that underlie academic culture. In our postdigital age, however, both the article and journal have significantly changed. This paper shows that a historicizing of the curriculum, understood as an approach to curriculum studies, is a process of denaturalization of commonly accepted assumptions about the curriculum. Therefore, problematizing the concepts of 'discourse', 'genre', and 'text' enables us to understand the historical and constructed notion of the curriculum and to examine its contemporary postdigital forms.