Short & Schubert Curriculum Studies Collections
William H. Schubert - Biographical Sketch
William H. Schubert received his Bachelors’ Degree in Liberal Arts and Elementary Education with a minor in Psychology from Manchester College, his Masters’ Degree in History and Philosophy of Education from Indiana University – Bloomington, and his Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he moved through the ranks as a professor, and was designated a University Scholar since 2005. He was Chair of Curriculum & Instruction for seven years, founder and Coordinator of the Ph.D. Program in Curriculum Studies from 1982 to 2011, which was ranked among the top ten (once first) in the U.S. by Academic Analytics, based on faculty productivity. He received university and college awards for teaching and mentoring, and a teaching excellence award from the Alumni Association. Dr. Schubert was coordinator several M.Ed. programs (Educational Studies; Curriculum & Instruction; Programs for Schools and Institutions; and a Self-Designed Program). He also coordinated the Secondary Education Program for a few years. He served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
Professor Schubert has been guest lecturer and has done pro bono consulting at Georgia Southern University since 2010. In 2016, he was named Guest Professor at Beijing Normal University. Schubert became a Fellow of the International Academy of Education in 1997 and has been an elected member of Professors of Curriculum since 1981. He is recipient of both the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the 2007 Mary Anne Raywid Award for educational excellence from the Society of Professors of Education.
Professor Schubert has published 19 books and over 250 articles and chapters (as well as numerous poems and theatrical expressions) on curriculum history, theory, and development in and out of schools, and has lectured widely on these topics throughout the United States, in China, Korea, Germany, Canada, and Mexico, among other places. Schubert has been president of the Society of Professors of Education, the John Dewey Society, The Society for the Study of Curriculum History, chair and program chair of the AERA SIG on Creation and Utilization of Curriculum Knowledge (now the AERA SIG on Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies), program chair, secretary, and vice-president of AERA for Division B (Curriculum Studies) and a member of the AERA Council, as well as a founder of the SIG on Peace Education.
Earlier in his career, Schubert was an elementary school teacher in Downers Grove, Illinois, who taught in self-contained classrooms and helped design and teach in an open-space school in collaboration with the College of Education at the University of Wisconsin - Madison; he designed learning packages that enabled multi-text experiences in several subjects, and began a theatrical performance approach to teaching, which he has parlayed in his university teaching, consulting, and lecturing to illuminate different orientations to key educational issues, as illustrated in this books and articles. He wrote a Curriculum Guide for Illinois District 58, and taught a junior high school that was converting to a middle school.
Professor Schubert’s scholarship, teaching, and service focus on curriculum theory, history, and development, especially the place of teachers, learners, and non-school educators in progressive versions of these endeavors. He has presented over 300 papers and symposia at scholarly conferences and related events. Many of his lectures, classes, and articles are characterized by use of role-play, dialogue, multilogue, and other creative forms.
Schubert was the Consulting Editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (Kridel, Sage, 2010c), and Part Editor of the Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction (Connelly, He, and Phillion, 2008), which received the Outstanding Book Award from the Curriculum Studies Division of AERA in 2009. His Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (1986/97) is recognized as the most influential curriculum text from 1970 to 1990, by a poll of Professors of Curriculum (Behar, 1994), and his Curriculum Books (Schubert & Lopez Schubert, 1980; Schubert, Lopez Schubert, Thomas, & Carroll, 2002) is considered a major bibliographical reference work in the curriculum field. His Reflections from the Heart of Educational Inquiry (Willis & Schubert, 1991/2000) received the Critic’s Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association, and his The American Curriculum (Willis, Schubert, Bullough, Kridel, & Holton, 1993) was recognized as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice, a prominent library journal. His contributions to Turning Points in Curriculum (Marshall, Sears, Schubert, 2000, & Marshall, Sears, Allen, Roberts, & Schubert, 2007) provide a postmodern history of the recent curriculum field during the last half of the 20th Century, while his Teacher Lore (Schubert & Ayers, 1992/1999) acknowledges the credibility of teachers as having perspectives worthy of study.
Several of Schubert’s major projects include: The Teacher Lore Project; The Student Lore Project; The Curriculum Improvement Project; and the Project on Curriculum, Globalization, and Peace. Today, he is interested in international, transnational, and counter-national education, particularly at the grassroots level, in his continuing search for progressive interpretations of education in theory and practice in a diverse array of cultures. Some of his key contributions include the concept of outside curriculum (Schubert, 1981, 2010), the notion that we are curricula for one another, and commitment to education that is nurtured by seeking love and justice. Throughout is eighteen books and over 250 articles and chapters, Schubert contends that it is of utmost importance to keep the what’s worthwhile questions alive as we create curricula for ourselves and others throughout their lives.
Professor Schubert has served as Associate Editor of Educational Theory for many years, and has been a member of the editorial boards of Curriculum Inquiry, Educational Studies, Phenomenology and Pedagogy, Teaching Education, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Curriculum and Teaching, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Catalyst, Taboo, and Educational Horizons; moreover, he has been a member of the Publication Committee of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). He currently co-edits a book series on Landscapes of Education for Information Age Publishing with Ming Fang He, and in 2009 authored Love, Justice, and Education: John Dewey and the Utopians. In 2010, he contributed a landmark essay on the history of curriculum studies for the 40th Anniversary Issue of Curriculum Inquiry.
Dr. Schubert has chaired over 66 Ph.D. dissertations and has served as a member of over 150 dissertation committees. He has served as an external evaluator on dissertations at Georgia Southern University, University of South Carolina, University of Alberta, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His former doctoral students hold positions at many universities throughout the United States and in other countries (e.g., Indonesia, Cyprus, Greece, Japan, Korea, China, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, India, Pakistan) as well as leadership positions in schools and other educational organizations.
Over the years, his teaching and advising have been amply recognized by receipt of the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award from the College of Education at UIC in 1988, the UIC Excellence in Teaching Award in 1998, and in 2008 both the UIC Graduate Mentoring Award and the UIC Flame Award for Teaching Excellence from the Alumni Association. In 2006, Professor Schubert to honor his late wife, he established the Ann Lynn Lopez Schubert Memorial Fund to honor students of curriculum studies, and in 2008, a set of articles in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy honored her scholarly contributions. He was designated a University Scholar at UIC in 2004. In 2009 he gave Inaugural Marcella Kysilka Lecture for an annual lecture series established by the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum, and in 2011 he gave the DeGarmo Lecture for the Society of Professors of Education.
In 2012, Professor Schubert’s published and collected works and files were designated as the William H. Schubert Curriculum Studies Collection at the Zach S. Henderson Library of Georgia Southern University, where he has worked with doctoral students and faculty. With Professor Ming Fang He, his spouse since 2013, Professor Schubert continues to pursue numerous publication projects in curriculum studies, curriculum inquiry, and cross-cultural curriculum work, including co-editing a book series with Information Age called Landscapes of Education, and co-editing both The Sage Guide to Curriculum in Education (He, Schultz, Schubert, 2015), and the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (circa 2021). Together, Schubert and He have lectured and consulted with universities in China (Beijing Normal; Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, Gonsu Province; Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan; Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China; the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue in Boston.
Books in preparation include: memoirs on experiences of absurdity and hope in education and life; historical examples of education that transcends state, nation, and corporate control; a synoptic curriculum text for the internet era; and collections of his essays on curriculum theory, history, exemplars, research, teacher education, teaching curriculum studies, students and curriculum, practical ideas for teachers, outside curriculum, neglected curricula, and more. Moreover, Dr. Schubert is currently preparing books of his essays on selected educational topics and he is writing a volume of stories of his educational experiences. Throughout his work he has coined terms such as synoptic text (Schubert & Lopez Schubert, 1980), theory within (Schubert & Lopez Schubert, 1980, and outside curriculum (Schubert, 1981), and he continues to advocate curriculum of, by, and for students (Schubert & Lopez Schubert, 1982) in order to make education a life-long process of refining one’s embodied and evolving curriculum by asking basic curriculum questions and sharing them with others: What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, contributing, sharing, wondering, imagining, reconstructing, and improving?