Looking back to the future

3 Looking Back to the Future: A Recursive Retrospective WILLIAM E. DOLL JR University of Victoria I, now a newly minted Canadian resident, am indebted both to Deborah Osberg and the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies for honoring me with a retrospective on my work in the curriculum studies field. This is not something I ever expected, especially back in the 1980s when I began searching for a new curriculum model to the one then prominent, the Tyler Rationale (1950). At the time I was much engaged in reading Jean Piaget, and while I had great difficulty with the usual American interpretation of his work – “ages and stages” – I did feel his biological sense of cognition (Biology and Knowledge, 1971) and his actual work in the fields of biology and zoology provided a framework the Rationale did not consider. This framework, that of an organism’s inherent self‐organizing powers,1 became clearer to me as I was introduced to Ilya Prigogine and his work on becoming. As I noted in my 1986 article, reprinted in this volume, I found a strong connection between Piaget and Prigogine and bringing this connection to the fore, with the paradigm in which it is encased, could “stand as an alternative