What Are Catholic Schools Teaching to Make a Difference? a Literature Review of Curriculum Studies in Catholic Schools in the U.S. and the U.K. since 1993

Loyola Marymount University. School of Education 1 LMU Drive, University Hall Suite 1760, Los Angles, CA 90045. e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/ce

Y

35

Foreign Countries; Comparative Education; Catholic Schools; Curriculum Development; Literature Reviews; Integrated Curriculum; Elementary Secondary Education; Outcomes of Education; Educational Practices; Academic Achievement; Religious Factors; Humanism; Social Justice; Program Evaluation; Educational History; Standards; Guidelines

United States; United Kingdom

2164-0246

This literature review sketches a landscape of scholarly debates about the curriculum in Catholic primary and secondary schools in the United States and the United Kingdom since 1993. This landscape has three main characteristics. First, scholarly debates about the curriculum in Catholic schools have been few, particularly empirically based discussions. Second, these debates have been led by U.S. scholars with theoretical approaches to the curriculum that tend to ignore the effect of current cultural and economic forces on Catholic schooling through competitiveness and effectiveness criteria. Third, there has been a disconnect between conversations about excellence and innovation, proposed mainly by U.S. scholars, and discussions about the distinctiveness of Catholic curricula, suggested primarily by scholars from the United Kingdom. This landscape poses questions about who is thinking indepth about what is currently taught in Catholic schools, and the extent to which they offer spiritual depth or educate social-justice-oriented bridge-builders. It is suggested that approaches to these questions that only look at how teachers teach underestimate the socializing power of the curriculum. After mapping the landscape, and discussing its evolution over the last decades, its limitations, and its major silences, the review concludes by outlining five major challenges for the field.

As Provided

99

2017

EJ1138809