Curriculum, Empiricisms, and Post-Truth Politics

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to approach the phenomenon of post-Truth politics as an important site of inquiry for the field of curriculum theory. The authors define curriculum as the empirical frameworks that shape our acts of knowing, being, and relating to the world, and argue that inquiries into curriculum must move beyond a concern with epistemology alone. The framework of empiricism ensures that curriculum scholars attend simultaneously to learned habits and methods of knowing and relating to the world. These habits and methods, in turn, have particular ethical, epistemic, and ontological commitments. The authors point to particular empirical frameworks that tacitly inform the disciplinary organization of schooling, before exploring a different empirical tradition in the work of John Dewey. The article ends by placing Dewey’s empirical philosophy in conversation with the work of Sylvia Wynter to inquire into new curricular possibilities.