Founded at the University of Birmingham (UK) in 1968, the Journal of Curriculum Studies (JCS) turns 50 in 2018. Since then, it has developed into the most widely used and cited international flagship in its field. The internationalization goes beyond its readership: Even though there is a steady growing flow of submissions from the original key constituencies of the Journal in the UK and the US, most of submissions to the Journal nowadays come from non-English speaking countries. More importantly, the Journal has developed into an active promoter of international discourse. The ongoing exchange between the curriculum and didactics traditions (started in 1996) or the likewise ongoing exchange between Chinese and Western traditions (started in 2011) might serve as examples. But the same could be said about many papers dealing with, for example, curriculum making in diverse cultures of schooling or current trends in a given subject matter area. There is always the editorial question: What would a reader in Beijing, Brussels, Brisbane, Buenos Aires or Boston gain from reading this paper?
Right from the beginning the conditions and constraints of public schooling have been a prime focus: “The Journal welcomes innovative papers that analyze the ways in which the social and institutional conditions of education and schooling contribute to shaping curriculum … (JCS Aims and Scope). In the proposed symposium, we want to take this tradition as a starting point for the question as to which challenges might lie ahead for the field of curriculum studies. This will be done by presenting three major fields of discourse, which have played a significant role, namely:
- Curriculum Theorizing,
- Curriculum History, and
- Comparative Curriculum Studies.
In each case, a paper presentation will give an outline of the development of these fields based on a critical re-reading of contributions published in JCS (all of which will be accessible again in virtual JCS issues online). Each presentation will be followed by a discussant from another theoretical and geographical background reflecting on the question of how these developments have been relevant for her or his own field of study, and what this implies for the future of curriculum studies. Finally, we want to invite the audience to come up with their views on the state of the field. We hope that this critical self-reflective approach will contribute to the development of new directions and opportunities for the international exchange in curriculum studies. All presentations and the discussion will be published in the Journal at a later point in time.
