Keywords:
Social justice, Standpoint theory, Politics of knowledge, Curricular standpoint, Curriculum
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This conceptual paper argues for the need for us to understand the relationship between curriculum and social justice, largely through the lens of what the author calls “curricular standpoint.” This framing helps define the connective tissue of how social, cultural, institutional, economic, and political context manifest within the struggle over knowledge, including which knowledge gets framed as commonsense and hegemonic through things like textbooks, state standards, and high-stakes exams – thereby also implicated student consciousness about the world. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory, this paper ultimately argues that, if we can fully recognize the extent to which social relations manifest in school knowledge, we also create the conditions for a critical examination of that knowledge as well as the possibilities for the development of increased critical consciousness about the curriculum and society – thus detailing the relationship between curriculum and social justice.
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