From Communication Theory to Curriculum Inquiry?

It is perhaps commonplace now, a truism even, to describe curriculum in terms of communication. This is all the more the case when curriculum is seen as simply a matter of teaching and learning, talking and listening (and reading and writing), or rather as the transmission of school knowledge, from its initial representation and design through its classroom delivery to its final destination in testing and grading. The whole, time-honoured machinery of curriculum planning, implementation and evaluation is testament to what seems so compelling and yet so mundane: curriculum as communication. Yet what if this was far from straightforward? What if each of these terms and their attendant concepts was open (still) to debate and deliberation, and even to contestation? What if it made little sense, in fact, to try to understand the former in terms of the latter, at last in this somewhat stark, rather cryptic way: curriculum is communication? What value would there be in pursuing such a line of inquiry ' that is, the relationship between curriculum and communication? This is, however, precisely what I want to do in the paper that follows.