General education classrooms: A study of curriculum in higher education

General education has witnessed incessant attempts at reform for over a century. General education has been the site to which the debates and struggle over the undergraduate American curriculum have been taken. The enduring debates raise questions about what general education is, the value of general education, and the curricular changes it requires. In this dissertation, I explore these questions in the context of a general education reform at a public research university setting.; Using an interpretive approach, I conduct field-work in two general education courses at a public research university. In a cultural analysis focusing on school lessons, I document and analyze how classroom participants produce an undisciplined version of general education, and how such production is reasonable, or understandable, given their specific institutional and social circumstances.; What emerges is the complexity of higher education curriculum---an issue that research and policy in higher education has been prone to neglect. However "innovative," or "exemplary," the curriculum is a social construction. As such, it is always being negotiated: From faculty plans to student responses, beyond the everydayness of classroom life to the culture of the institution, across undisciplined versions of general education to enduring curricular debates.; Unveiling the intricacies of such negotiation allows an understanding of the enduring conditions of practice that both constrain and enable general education. Seeing the complex nature of curriculum is crucial in understanding the long-standing undisciplined knowledge in general education, as well as what can be done about it.