Synoptic curriculum texts: representation of contemporary curriculum scholarship

Building upon past studies of curriculum textbooks in the US, this paper presents an analytical framework that classifies curriculum texts according to their representation of reconceptualized curriculum scholarship. It uses four indicators of the representation of curriculum scholarship in the analyses of eight curriculum texts published in the USA in the 1990s: the author’s stated intentions; the organization of the table of contents; the treatment of the forms of reconceptualism; and the ratio of curriculum and non‐curriculum journal citations. The analysis finds that reconceptualized curriculum scholarship has been at least mentioned, if not extensively treated, in most texts since the mid‐1980s, and that this approach is most comprehensively treated in books published in the 1990s.