교육과정학의 학문적 성격 재개념화를 위한 비판적 시론 = Towards a Critical Reconceptualization of the Disciplinary Status of Curriculum Inquiry

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper proposes a radical critique of the existing modes of curriculum inquiry. The field of curriculum study lacks the epistemological rigor any branch of discipline requires. Evidence abounds to show that the field is ill-defined and conceptually misguided. At this moment, we do not have strong theoretical grounds sufficient to argue that it is qualified as a science or discipline. If we want a new independent field called Curricularlogy to emerge, we have to abandon the maintream epistemologies that have prevailed in the field. They have taken for granted unwarranted apporaches that arbitrarily defined various school-curriculum phenomena as the object of inquiry and indiscriminately accepted methodological pluralism as the valid method of inquiry. In this process, numerous other independent disciplines are employed to understand and explain what is happening in the school under the suspicious, spurious, and dubious title of an academic descipline called educational research or curriculum inquiry. We should not reduce the studies of schooling to those of education. The subject matter and modes of inquiry of Curricularlogy should be deduced from a totally reconceptualized field of educational studies. It is a field that attempts to reconceptualize the universal but unique phenomenon called education in the lived-world in a radically different way, while maintaining its methodological autonomy and disciplinary identity. The new discipline does not and need not emulate the epistemologies of the traditional educational studies. curricularlogy must be drawn from a new conception of educational studies as a subfield and must establish its academic qualifications according to its disciplinary structure and conceptual, theoretical orginization. The existing school-curriculum inquiry, however, may function to serve as a subfield of the existing educational sutudies and may survive as long as it does what it is supposed to do. Curricularlogy and the research on school curriculum have their own puroposes and roles. The theoretical construction of Curricularlogy requies not only a new educational epistemology which examines the conceptual relations between education and curriculum, but also more radical and holistic critiques of the crrrent status of curriculum studies. The prospective features of the subject matter and modes of inquiry of the new Curricularlogy are expected to emerge as we devote our academic passion and commitment to the new field.