Continuing the Dialogue: Curriculum, Didaktik and Theories of Knowledge

Joseph Schwab’s famous remark, that the field of curriculum is ‘moribund’—no longer able ‘to …contribute significantly to the advancement of education’—has long echoed in curriculumstudies. Although its specific meaning has certainly changed, it still rings in our ears today. It now applies as much to discussions in the US and UK as it does to those in Northern Europe—where the cognate field of General Didaktik has been described as ‘quiet’ (Terhart, 2003, p. 25), or more recently, ‘dead’ (Zierer & Seel 2012, p. 16). This ‘virtual issue’ of the Journal of Curriculum Studies brings together five articles of direct relevance to the contemporary ‘crisis’ in transatlantic studies of curriculum and instruction that also share a common focus on the question of curricular content . ‘None of the many traditional American educational approaches have paid serious attention to the “school subject” or “instructional content,”’ as Westbury and Doyle have pointed out (1992, p. 137); and others in curriculum studies see this as the underlying reason for its ongoing crisis. This introduction provides an overview of each article included and concludes by outlining a few of the possibilities and challenges presented by questions of ‘content’ and ‘knowledge’ in curriculum studies.