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Curriculum

Curriculum is not only the list of texts and topics a course covers. It is a decision about what counts as worth knowing: whose questions are asked, whose answers are taught as standard, and whose lives appear in the readings at all.

In The Cultural Context of Knowledge, episodes on curriculum examine the hidden curriculum, the rise of ethnic studies, the post-Reconstruction rollback of Black education, and the wave of state laws restricting how race and history can be taught. These episodes ask what changes when educators stop treating curriculum as a neutral inventory and begin examining how the choices of what to include and what to leave out carry political and developmental weight.

6 episodes on this topic, in order of publication.

  • 019

    S2 · E8 · May 13, 2026

    How State Standards Get Written: Curriculum as Compromise

    State standards are the most concentrated place in U.S. public education where decisions about other people's children get made by people who do not have to live with the consequences. This episode names curriculum as compromise, asks who is at the table when standards get written, and sketches what an accountable standards process — with community elders, classroom teachers, and learners as voting members — could look like.

  • 017

    S2 · E6 · Apr 30, 2026

    The Hidden Curriculum: When Researchers Chose the Word Violence

    Some words are not just names — they are arguments. This episode examines how researchers came to use "violence" to describe certain institutional practices in education, and what that conceptual shift reveals about adultification, developmental harm, and the unwritten rules children of color meet in kindergarten classrooms long before they meet a textbook.

  • 016

    S2 · E5 · Apr 24, 2026

    The Backlash: Why Newly Legitimate Knowledge Gets Targeted

    Marginalized knowledge does not stay marginalized, and it does not stay curricular either. This episode names the three-move cycle — dismissal, absorption, restriction — that dominant knowledge systems run when bodies of knowledge from the margin reach the record, and traces its most recent appearance in the wave of state-level curriculum laws since 2020.

  • 014

    S2 · E3 · Mar 9, 2026

    Why Some Knowledge Is Marginalized: The Evolution of Ethnic Studies

    Explores the history of ethnic studies and how student movements challenged universities to recognize marginalized histories and perspectives — and how expanding participation reshapes the boundaries of legitimate knowledge.

  • 004

    S1 · E4 · Jan 16, 2026

    From a Cultural Context: Rethinking STEM

    Challenges the common assumption that STEM is neutral. If 'math is objective' and 'data speaks for itself,' what gets hidden is the cultural design of many STEM classrooms — speed, linearity, and whose way of knowing counts.

  • 003

    S1 · E3 · Jan 16, 2026

    The Foundation — Whose Knowledge Counts? Culture, Power, and Learning

    A foundational question most schools rarely name: what counts as knowledge, and who gets to decide? Moves beyond the myth that curriculum and assessment are neutral to examine how knowledge is shaped by culture and power.

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S3 · E2
The Teacher They Built
0:0016:52