Critical Curriculum Studies: Education, Consciousness, and the Politics of Knowing offers a novel framework for thinking about how curriculum relates to student understanding of the world around them. Here, author Wayne Au draws heavily upon critical traditions within curriculum theory, feminist theory, and teaching and learning to develop a "critical standpoint theory" for understanding how the orientation of school curriculum relates to the development of student consciousness.Using evidence from struggles over standards, high-stakes testing, textbook adoptions, and the politics of classroom practice, the work done in Critical Curriculum Studies will help educators and educational theorists better understand how the politics of knowledge, as well as social relations, are embedded within the very structure of curricular knowledge itself as part of the environmental design of classrooms. In the process, Critical Curriculum Studies also explains how such curricular structures relate to "critical consciousness" ' a concept that has been of significant debate within education.