Disconceptualizing Curriculum: Is There a Next in the Generational Text‪?‬

The reconceptualists were excellent conceptual terrorists, in the Foucauldian sense, and their first children did a fine job of building new conceptual discourses out of the rubble left by their Doktorvaters and -mutters. Yet what are the youngest children to do? Looked upon as spoiled and too comfortable by their elders, less enterprising and disrespectful by their older siblings, they (we) seek a way of being curriculum workers not restricted or denatured like those from whom they (we) inherit discourses and projects. Dissing the notion of a conceptual discourse itself, I read recent curriculum theorizing as ideological practices, discursive generational texts, and aesthetic responses to a theory-practice dichotomy. I am egged on by my colleagues, yet ignored like a ranting adolescent by those interested in systems engineering and power textiles. The technology of morality this envelopes is surprisingly similar to the very traditions that the "terrorists" themselves were hoping to disinherit. When a set of rebels now sits back and scans the terrain--delights in their achievements, there is less textile fashion experimentation encouraged and more appropriation expected of the proteges. It is tempting to orchestrate institutions and dynastic realms of power. This is the state of contemporary curriculum theorizing if read as a canonical text of difference. However, new scholars are refusing the roles of appropriator and executor; some are advocating a playfulness with conceptual discourse itself. (1) In doing so they point out the modernist project of the reconceptualists and even of their older siblings' (the earlier doctoral students of the reconceptualist Doktorvaters/mutters) "post-modern" projects, which turn out to be just as modernist in their hegemonic goals and objectives. The field of curriculum in this reading looks more and more monolithic, more and more of the same fabric whether of the traditionalist cloth or the reconceptualist cloth.