Investigating Curricular Injustices to Uncover the Injustices of Curricula: Curriculum Evaluation as Critical Disciplinary Literacy Practice

Conversations around disciplinary literacy have often focused on the skills particular to each discipline without analyzing closely the discipline-specific properties of curricula. These silences suggest the need to nuance the ways in which curricula acts as a discipline-bound social construct, meaning that English math, history, and science curricula are fashioned, presented, and preserved differently. This article presents findings from a case study conducted with secondary English students in a World Literature course as they worked to analyze both the large-scale injustices their curriculum favored as well as the ways in which curricula itself acts as an injustice-perpetuating mechanism. Findings reveal that the injustice mini-unit positioned students to view curricula as a political entity; connect sociocultural and curricular privileging; and begin to agentively re-purpose, and re-see, curricula. Implications include the importance of delineating the phenomenon of critical disciplinary literacy, and the ways in which problematizing curricula serves as a powerful and important critical disciplinary literacy practice.