The field of curriculum studies has a history of looking at its own past, summarizing and synthesizing the trends and patterns across its foundations. Whether through synoptic texts, historical analyses, or edited collections, the field's foundational retrospection typically traces a lineage of curriculum studies that runs through various…

Background/Context: There historically exists significant epistemological and political tension within the field of curriculum studies. Further, although there is some application of standpoint theory in educational research generally, and little used within curriculum studies specifically, much of it is undertheorized at best and, in many cases,…

"Critical Curriculum Studies" offers a novel framework for thinking about how curriculum relates to students' understanding of the world around them. Wayne Au brings together curriculum theory, critical educational studies, and feminist standpoint theory with practical examples of teaching for social justice to argue for a transformative…

High-stakes, standardized tests have become ubiquitous in public education in the United States. Teachers across the country are feeling the intensified pressures from high-stakes testing policies and are responding to these pressures by teaching to the tests in varying ways (Renter et al., 2006). Given the hegemony of high-stakes testing in…

As part of a critical analysis of Paulo Freire's work, this paper argues that, Freire's critical, liberatory pedagogy as conceived in "Education as the Practice of Freedom" (P. Freire, 1982a), coherently systematized in "Extension or Communication" (P. Freire, 1982b) and carried out through "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (P. Freire, 1974) into his…