General Education Classrooms: An Interpretive Study of Curriculum in Higher Education

General education has witnessed incessant attempts at reform for over a century. It is the site to which the debates and struggle over the undergraduate American curriculum are taken. The enduring debates raise questions about what general education is,the value of general education, and the curricular changes it requires. In this book, Méndez explores these questions in the context of a general education reform at a public university. With an interpretive approach and a cultural analysis focusing on school lessons, the author documents and analyzes how classroom participants produce an undisciplined and trivialized version of general education, and how such production is reasonable, or understandable, given their specific institutional and social circumstances. What emerges is the complexity of higher education curriculum - an issue that research and policy in higher education has been prone to neglect. However innovative, the curriculum is asocial construction. Thus, it is always being negotiated. Unveiling the intricacies of such negotiation allows an understanding of the enduring conditions of practice that both constrain and make general education possible.