190063 SE Education, Socialisation and Society (2021W)

Education and schooling have been tasked with making certain kinds of students who will become ideal citizens with particular ways of understanding the world. The curriculum has historically been an integral part of this citizen-making process, as it defines and frames what is important to a particular society at a given time. Certain school subjects have also, therefore, emerged over time which have been imbued with the purpose of training students accordingly. At the same time, in the interaction between teacher and student, the focus is often on the teaching materials, usually textbooks. Textbooks have the task of concretizing the normative specifications of the curricula and, in doing so, have an enormous power to shape children's worlds of thought and imagination.
In the seminar, we will review the relationship between curriculum, the purposing of school subjects and textbooks, and we will show how these can be studied to reveal their normative systems.