La historia del currículum como camino real a la investigación educativa internacional. Historia, perspectivas, beneficios y dificultades

Abstract

This article seeks to advocate the genre Curriculum History as a most promising way to conduct international and comparative research in education. Advocating Curriculum History as a Camino Real in education research this article is organized around two major questions or challenges: first, the historiographic challenge between the national and the global, and second the double team of constitution and curriculum. The first challenge is connected to the fact that Curriculum History owes its own emergence to particular cultural assumptions facing specific problems a century ago, namely the idea(l) of American citizenship and the challenges of massive immigration, modernization in terms of commercialization of life and the growth of large cities. In order to prevent a hegemonic export of this particular US-American construction of Curriculum History this article suggests to emancipate international research from these cultural assumptions and to define its central concepts, citizen, nation, and society, as floating signifiers that have been materialized in each case differently in the individual nation-states. The second challenge builds on this formalized analytical grid and focuses on how precisely these floating signifiers have become materialized in the different nation-states. Thereby it is assumed that the national curricula respond to nationally different idea(l)s of citizenship as bearers and implementers of a social order defined by politically dominating cultural preferences. It is therefore being suggested to analyze the relations between the different national constitutions as highest authorities to define the ideal political and social order of a given nation-states and the role of its citizens, on one side, and the curricula as crucial means of making these desired future citizens of this envisioned social order.