The intersection of curriculum and pedagogy: A teacher's theory of content.

This case study is an examination of a high school English teacher's role in the curriculum process. The researcher wrote a "grammar" of a teacher's conception or theory of her subject matter from the perspective of its enactment as curriculum events. In other words, her theory of content was studied to provide an indepth examination of the teacher's role as a transformative agent of curriculum. Three different constructs were employed to capture various expressions of her theory of content during her six weeks unit on the Odyssey: (1) interviews, (2) individual lessons, and (3) academic tasks. The researcher found that the teacher had a visible theory of her subject matter. For example, she organized her curriculum around different genres (e.g., epic, tragedy, comedy, etc.), and she exposed her students to the structure of the epic. Also, her theory of literary criticism was influenced by American formalism and archetypal criticism. These schools of literary criticism complemented each other. Her version of formalism gave her a specific vocabulary and a general method to teach students to explicate literature in general. She emphasized close textual reading and required to support their ideas with passages from the text. Also, she used Joseph Campbell's monomyth to structure the narrative of the Odyssey, and she encouraged students to relate themes and symbols to their own lives and to society in general. She stressed that the Odyssey is an archetypal myth that is relevant to every epoch. In short, this study illustrates that curriculum and pedagogy are intertwined; her version of literary criticism is a pedagogy in itself, a pedagogy that is unified with--not separated from--content.This item was digitized from a paper original and/or a microfilm copy. If you need higher-resolution images for any content in this item, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Original file replaced with corrected file November 2023