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MA at Educatinal Administration In Shahid Beheshti University
Abstract
Hermeneutics is an emergent discipline in the western thinking school which dates back to religious amendment movement and the enlightment era. It has recently been in the spotlight and received an outstanding philosophical status along with epistemology, analytic philosophy, and aesthetics. Now, some scholars even boast that hermeneutics has taken over the stage of western philosophical thoughts since 1970s and has transcended other theoretical orientations.When we talk about hermeneutics, what stands out is how wide it covers the various ideas. While it was primarily considered just as a method for interpreting the holy books, but Dilthey gave it a new position by making it the exclusive methodology of the humanities. By this, Dilthey meant to promote the humanities and gave it a position as high as the natural sciences. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger promoted the hermeneutics to a philosophical school, one that unlike the previous thoughts was not confined to a methodology for understanding the texts and exclusive methodology of the humanities. Hermeneutics was taken into the area of the curriculum by education neo-conceptualist theorists such as Pinar, Reynolds and Slattery. Although a new-comer, it has influenced areas like curriculum theorizing, curriculum research and development. In this paper, we try to examine the curriculum status in terms of theorizing, research and planning in philosophical hermeneutics with emphasis on Heidegger and Gadamer’ viewpoints through a glance in the roots and historical background of hermeneutics.
The results indicated to what extent philosophical hermeneutics could influence curriculum theorizing and development. We concluded that according to philosophical hermeneutics, curriculum development and theorizing is a pluralistic, dialectical, and contextual entity.
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