Open Visions: Transforming the Multicultural Curriculum

216Rocky Mountain Review Open Visions: Transforming the Multicultural Curriculum Martha Weidman Young University of Nevada, Las Vegas Drucilla Cornell. Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference. New York: Routledge, 1993. 239 p. William E. Doll, Jr. A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press, 1993. 215 p. Liza Fiol-Matta and Mariam K. Chamberlain, eds. Women of Color and the Multicultural Curriculum: Transforming the College Classroom. New York: Feminist Press, 1994. 390 p. Barbara Frey Waxman. Multicultural Literatures through Feminist/ Poststructuralist Lenses. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. 225 p. Jr ostmodernism, transformation, and gender and ethnic issues in curriculum re-creation are concepts stimulating curricular debates among college and university faculty. There is resistance to these concepts and to curricular transformation from defenders of traditional teaching methods which, in the past, have boldly excluded women and ethnic writers. With postmodern thinking and the legitimatizing of feminist scholarship Eind ethnic studies, however, curriculum development projects that embrace these areas have gained significant momentum. The focus of this essay is on texts that explore postmodernism and transformation as dynamic forces promoting and validating the multicultural curriculum. At the heart of curriculum decisions, lively debate challenges the status quo—to "question the assumptions and prejudgments we hold so dear" (Doll 136). This debate seeks to resolve whose values, beliefs, and perspectives are promoted in the classroom. As Karen E. Rowe states, "curriculum integration is neither an easy nor a comfortable process because it calls into question many of the fundamental assumptions of traditional academic methods, values and hierarchies" (Fiol-Matta 36). In A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum, William E. Doll, Jr., describes political and social elements that place us "in the midst of radical intellectual , social, and political change" (157). His perspectives provide insights into postmodernism as a transformative paradigm. He provides a rich history of modernist and early post-modern educational thought through an overview of contributions by contemporary thinkers, e.g., Noam Chomsky, B.F. Skinner, Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, and Thomas Kuhn. This historical approach to the evolution of postmodernism and the implications for curricular transformation offers a "vision of teaching and curriculum built from the base of a constructivist and experiential epistemology" (xi). Doll prefers to use the hyphen in post-modern to emphasize the connec- Book Reviews217 tion between modernism and post-modernism and to promote the idea that post-modernism transcends rather than rejects modernism. The linear, controlled, and cause-and-effect-based modernist framework mirrored the scientific method; "concepts of transformation, growth, development , and evolution were either non-existent or severely limited" (50). In the old modern paradigm, knowledge was transmitted or transferred in a closed system shaping the teaching-learning processes. Doll makes the point that modernism promoted the transfer-of-knowledge approach to teaching based on the canon of Western humanist tradition. This constrained concept of curriculum cannot accommodate the multi-layered and often undefined curriculum based on "non-traditional" texts in which new values replace what were once absolute values. Doll also provides insight on the elements of transformation which include human powers of creative organization "that maintain [a] healthy tension between the need to find closure and the desire to explore" (x). Doll explains that the post-modern paradigm is an open vision, and he asks his reader to become a creator of transformative transactions and to accept that "curricular actions" are personal decisions rooted in culture and history. "By dialoging with the texts, their creators, and ourselves we come to a deeper, fuller understanding not only of issues but of ourselves, as personal and cultural beings" (136). Doll explains that we accomplish this by exploring what is unknown; "through exploration students and teachers 'clear the land together ,' thereby transforming both the land and themselves" (155). But, transformation does not occur without risk because the traditional elements of curriculum (i.e., our historical past) are rejected, requiring a "querulous faith in ourselves. Curriculum's role. . . should be rich, recursive, relational, and rigorous" (156). Doll's full perspectives explain why curricular reform, to fully integrate cross-cultural texts, reflects a unique challenge to the academy. His views also reveal that postmodernism evolved in reaction, rather than in response , to...