The promise of curriculum in the post-Covid world: Eclecticism, deliberation, and a return to the practical and the prophetic

This article focuses on the possibilities through which curriculum on the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic might contribute more proactively to future social and political crises that are multifarious yet interconnected in nature. The Covid-19 pandemic is a global crisis that touches every aspect of social life, including politics, the economy, healthcare systems, poverty, forced human migration, climate change, and importantly, education. To potentially address future crises through curriculum, the article first problematizes the present in education and society—specifically, the 50-year neoliberal project that has transformed society and education. It connects the crisis in education to a transformed social, political, and economic system that has introduced what Gordon Lafer has called a revolution of falling expectations through a hollowing-out of public institutions. The article then returns to the crisis of curriculum, contextualized in Joseph Schwab’s The Practical: A Language for Curriculum, which presaged the reconceptualization of the curriculum field. It dialogues with Schwab’s advocacy for an eclectic, deliberative, and practical curricular ethic as a form of post-reconceptualization curriculum study to contribute to understanding and managing future disruptions, such as those inevitably associated with the climate crisis. Finally, the article connects to the concept of liquidity in curriculum, through which to embody curricular eclecticism and provoke teachers and students to author a vision for a more just future that will not reinscribe the pathologies of the past.