Relationships between curriculum and didactics. conceptualizations, challenges and conflicts

Abstract

In this essay the author flips around the thesis he held in his book Didactics and Curriculum, Convergence in the Curriculum, published last century, where he proposes a complementarity between the proposals of the didactic and curricular field. His current approach is to develop an analysis of the epistemic structure of both disciplines and question that in it lies an idea of normativity about what is desirable to happen in the classroom and in the student learning. He argues that in this case what is sought is to achieve a homogeneity in the learning processes, but at the same time shows how that structure breaks with the normative aspects when the debate about the subject and its uniqueness appears on scene. The epistemic rupture that occurs in the emergence and evolution of both disciplines, although allows to sustain the search for the homogeneous, at the same time defends that the subject only can be formed based on its unique processes. To this end, he presents an analysis of the ideological conflict in which both disciplines arise, one in the 17th century and the other in the 20th, just as the way this conflict is ignored by education systems that aim more to recognize the common normative part to their projects, than to the recognition of the specific features of subjects in training.