Narratives of quality and conflict: Media studies in the Ontario secondary curriculum

To look at curriculum through a human lens requires an examination of the values guiding knowledge selection. Catherine Marshall, Douglas Mitchell and Frederick Wirt name quality as a key value guiding educational policy, defIning it as a vaguely "instrumental" value, a means to achieving whatever goals one assigns to the education system: economic, civic, or personal. The present study examines the interpretation(s) of quality contained in the Ontario Ministry ofEducation's curriculum for Media Studies, a grade 11 stand-alone course and a strand (or learning area) in all compulsory English courses. It also aims to illustrate how these interpretations may be facilitated and/or constrained by the professional backgrounds of curriculum developers and the policy contexts of curriculum development. It will do so through hermeneutical analysis of the curriculum in relation to curriculum developers' narratives about media education, and about the process in which they were involved as writers or coordinators.