The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach; by Samuel D.Rocha, Routledge, 2022, 234 pp.

Sam Rocha's The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach (TSaC) is a highly personal, and in some ways idiosyncratic book. I cannot find a way to write about it that is not also personal and idiosyncratic. The book first came to my attention when the author invited me to participate in an author-meets-critics session at the Philosophy of Education Society annual conference in 2022.1 I agreed to do it, but still I wondered, why me? Why had Professor Rocha thought I might have a perspective that would stimulate his own reflection and that of others, especially given that I am not a curriculum theorist? I found one answer to my question on page 73 when I discovered my own name. I had consulted one of Rocha's Academia-published syllabi in 2018 (a syllabus that appears in TSaC) as I constructed my own course on “responsible leadership,” and I acknowledged that to him personally and online. Clearly, he appreciated that acknowledgment. But the more I read, the more I wondered at the similarity between the existential world I inhabit and Rocha's. We both live lives shaped intellectually, emotionally, and even perhaps behaviorally by our experiences of Catholicism, despite our decades of difference in age and miles of difference in cultural identification. Nonetheless, much of what Rocha writes in TSaC resonates with me — even when I think he's dead wrong or misguided. Could Rocha have known that? Before taking up these two questions directly, let me report on what I think is going on here. First, I describe TSaC in outline (and without comment). It begins with a preface (“The Poesis of Teaching”), moves through a forethought focused on “Directions” and “Transition,” then arrives at an introduction (“Curriculo Perennis, Curriculum Vitae”). That sets up “Part One: Love,” which includes four syllabi that might all be linked to courses in theory in education, and concludes with the “First Garden: Syllabus as Correspondence.” “Part Two: Art” picks up with brief introductory remarks and includes four more syllabi that take up specific philosophy of education topics but with a distinctly humanistic and humanities flavor. The “Second Garden: Syllabus as Essay” concludes the section. “Part Three: Order” takes up the ruly and the unruly; in other words, eros and discipline, resistance and supervision, all step to the fore. The “Third Garden” considers “Syllabus as Outline.” This journey is brought to some sort of synthesis in a conclusion (“Toward a Wounded Curriculum”), an afterthought (that taps “The Jetsons and Sesame Street”), and an epilogue that asks explicitly, “Humanities, What Is It Good For?” In other words, there are layers of intros and outros bookending sets of syllabi loosely characterized by their association with love, art, and order. Reading it, I was reminded of an old and now deceased friend (and my high school principal) Father Francis Taylor, who just could not finish a sermon. He would start out pretty well, construct a relatively brief but pointed pastoral (and theological) argument, and then start into his conclusion. He always had at least three. Each had its own integrity and could have served to finish off the sermon, but Father Frank just could not get out of his own way. I often wanted to stand up and yell “Stop” when he would come to the end of the first good conclusion, but I never did. Rocha's three concluding sections each make the book something different (as each of Father Taylor's endings would have made the sermon slightly different). But if Rocha employed just one ending, it would have disturbed the layered Trinitarian structure of the book — and I suspect that's the point. Despite its appearance as a work of either curricular curation or educational philosophizing, this book is profoundly autobiographical in two senses. First, it speaks to Rocha's intellectual formation, specifically his self-understanding as a phenomenologist. Phenomenology is the focus in the preface, the forethought, and all the connective tissue of this book. He offers a phenomenologically tinged view of the world not only in the explicitly philosophical material offered, but also in the course syllabi themselves, courses that are not always simply philosophical. This phenomenological narrative is something Rocha explicitly claims in the book (TSaC, preface). The second autobiographical sense arises from the text's serving as a window into Rocha's development as a teacher, mainly his pedagogical development. Although these syllabi are not presented chronologically in all cases, we can see many of the ways his thinking about his own thinking about teaching changes. Both of those autobiographical dimensions are intertwined with the descriptions of his familial Catholicism. If you are not Catholic, you might miss the Trinitarian structure of Rocha's book (but in truth, take a phenomenological look at your own, non-religious, experience; you'll see trinities everywhere). We can cite Rocha's frequent (and respectful) references to Aristotle and Aquinas. His favorite philosopher (he tells us) is William James, whose “The Will to Believe” and Varieties of Religious Experience reveal him as a philosopher who takes religion seriously. Rocha's familial and cultural connections are foreshadowed by TSaC's dedication to his abuelita. There is another residue of Catholicism (at least of a kind I resonate with) in this book. Rocha makes references to the poeisis of teaching with statements like this: “The teacher is the guardian of the mystery of education” (TSaC, 2). His easy invocation of mystery and the miraculous as real, his focus on both the sacred and the profane, reflect a worldview that accepts both the immanent and the transcendent. Rocha's insistence on reverence and respect, not just in education but also in everyday living, evidences the phenomenological root of church and political positions that are sometimes bastardized as “pro-life.” Rocha practices Rilke's admonition to “love the questions themselves” in a kind of humility that the Benedictines among us would appreciate. The valuing of the profane in our lives emerges vividly when Rocha acknowledges who he is because of who his teachers were and who their teachers were, tracing his lineage back to educational philosophers (and oh so interesting human beings) Jerry Regan and Dick Pratte at The Ohio State University. There is nothing explicitly religious in this acknowledgment, of course, but the familial respect and humility are palpable. I suspect this last question captures what Rocha is actually up to: an attempt to be profoundly moral and humanistic without being prescriptive. I want to dig into the weeds of Rocha's syllabi just a bit to reveal some inconsistencies and quirks that are Sam Rocha as a teacher — inconsistencies and quirks that could have philosophical consequence. Those who know him as teacher or colleague will not find any of this too surprising. Professor Rocha allows his students to eat and drink in class, concerned about their physical well-being, but will not accept late work under any circumstances. He links that expectation to his organization and the students' planning — and I appreciate that logic. Still, I wonder about his care for students' emotional well-being and familial responsibilities, and not only their physical health. Is obedience to a deadline really an inviolate principle? What about being-in-time versus being-on-time? I have to believe that sometimes Professor Rocha puts off his feedback on student work — compelled by fishing, music-making, nurturing his children, or writing this or some other book. Might he bend that rule on occasion? (Even Catholicism's Canon Law has room for exceptions.) Rocha, the instructor, can be remarkably hands-off. For example, he allows students' opportunities for consequential self-assessment, a tendency I applaud. In this sense, he is careful to seek consistent messaging in his pedagogy and assessment. Rocha can also be annoyingly stipulative, as when he demands participation of a certain kind in class without acknowledging that the specified kind of participation comes easier to him than it might to many of his students. Again, I think he is right to think that participation of a certain kind matters, but then he has to scaffold rather than demand that participation. In a different syllabus (TSaC, 159), Rocha notes that attendance counts for 49 points (versus 11 points for a recitation and 40 points for a diary/memoir), and he empathizes with “the shy or the quiet student,” excusing them from “external” participation in the large group. Rocha suggests that listening can be active participation and that one can employ “wit” in group study. What is missing for me in both these instances is a clear sense of the meaning (i.e., the value and quality) of participation. This is itself an important focus for philosophizing, both phenomenologically and analytically — and Rocha sidesteps it. I am fascinated by Rocha's reading lists, punctuated as they are by sources that don't often find their way into philosophy of education archives. Alongside the usual (Paulo Freire), we find professed Dominican Bartolema de las Casas, early feminist Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and 1960s liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, whose work gave rise to an ethical guideline near and dear to me personally, the “preferential option for the poor.” I can usually discern what Rocha is up to (and I trust that the relevance of these readings is revealed to students through the course), but his purposes and priorities may not be readily accessible to the syllabus reader who is not in the class and who does not share his existential and philosophical point of view. In a related point, there is little sense in his reading list — as I apprehend it — that represents philosophy as a conversation. This feels like an oversight. And his choices sometimes seem unnecessarily idiosyncratic. In a set of sources related to normative ethics, the only philosophical ethicist he makes reference to is Shelley Kagan, a competent and accomplished ethicist for sure, but I am left wondering, why Professor Kagan of all the possibilities? I am not questioning Rocha's pedagogical choices, but in the context of TSaC as a book, I would like to see Rocha share more about the rationale behind his selection of readings and how his idiosyncratic preferences represent that which stimulates his students in constructive and provocative ways. Let me take up the second question first. As noted, this book is thoroughly biographical, revealing so much about who this teacher is and how he got that way. The structure of the book (three openings, three substantive sections, three closings) and its connective tissue (reflections, or “gardens,” with a truly personal quality) do indeed allow Rocha to reveal himself and his Self. But attend for a moment to the subtitle of TSaC: A Reconceptualist Approach. In the title, Rocha allies himself with Madeleine Grumet, Bill Pinar, and others who seek to theorize curriculum not simply as Tyler Rationale-inspired planning, but as an academic and political phenomenon that can suppress or liberate. The reconceptualist engages in what Pinar2 called currere, a self-analysis of educational experiences. This ongoing and always-layered conversation with one's self (ostensibly private) is what enriches one's engagement as an educator with the public sphere of pedagogy. This is, I imagine, exactly what Rocha reveals in TSaC. The three named sections — Art, Love, and Order — explicitly name what Rocha values in the educational project. The “Gardens” that cap each section of syllabi represent Rocha wrestling with the tensions among and between these three values. Not all the tensions are resolved; in truth, the task for the reconceptualist is to maintain both values and tension. As Rocha maintains, “Without right order, love and art are still insufficient” (TSaC, 183). I find myself asking whether Rocha really wants “right order” or if his goal is better captured in “right relation,” since right order can imply (especially in the Catholic context that Rocha creates) a kind of authoritarianism he clearly doesn't consciously intend. He says that order is not an a priori state but a product of dyadic movement toward Growth. To create right order, we must “organize and arrange and compose in a way that love and art cannot accomplish on their own. This requires, above all, a sense of responsibility” (TSaC, 185, emphasis added). As someone who is currently wrestling with the notion of responsibility in education, I wonder what Rocha offers here. He goes on, “The ordered outline of the teacher can offer an invitation into a responsible home, a place to dwell, to be-with, an offering to and for the other” (TSaC, 186). I agree with this, and yet… This brings me back to some of the quirks of Rocha's pedagogy and the surpassing difficulty of maintaining the kind of humility that is consistently pedagogically sound, while resisting the temptation to think that, as teacher, the order I create is the only order. For Rocha, curriculum is an instrument of force for a battle that must be renewed in every age because important lessons are forgotten in every age. So many educationalists are so poorly educated, he tells us! And, in this day and age, Rocha is on a one-man campaign to change that. In that sense, The Syllabus as Curriculum is a call to action, to “make educational objects that stand a chance of fighting against the mountains of paper and trivia that we are presently buried beneath” (TSaC, 186). In the end, this is a return to “old time religion,” a gentle but firm rejection of the trends of postmodernism as counterproductive to understanding educational experience. Rocha doesn't offer Catholicism as an alternative, but his view of the humanities is so Augustine-inflected that it is hard to pull it all apart, at least until the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber arrives in Rocha's (first) conclusion, the Wounded Curriculum: the “only right relation is one that honours the I-it and the I-You in their proper proportion and to their proper degree” (TSaC, 188). You healed me By opening the wound… Rocha recognizes the value of both eros and order in curriculum, rooted always in love. He makes room for the disciplined and the wild. He is willing to ask, what are the desires of my heart? His authorial voice in TSaC invokes for me Michael A. Singer's The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, in which Singer distinguishes between the voice inside and the one (the I) who hears the voice.3 In The Syllabus as Curriculum, we are hearing The Voice Inside of Sam Rocha. It is an old time religion, but not Rocha's Latin-flavored Catholicism, nor the humanities classically conceived, but a faith in the path one follows and the resources one picks up and takes on that shape what you hope to do and how you do it. In short, Rocha's old time religion is a phenomenological description of his own (and potentially my own) education. This, then, is the answer to both my questions. Yes, it is a return to old time religion. And yes, the structure allows Rocha to describe, somewhat indulgently, his own experience and growth as a teacher. It also constitutes a defense (via instantiation) of the reconceptualist curricular project by voicing what is in Rocha's head, layer upon layer. This is sometimes maddening but always, if incompletely, revealing and, in the end, curiously provocative.