Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Memory and Creativity: Finding a Place Where a Heart May Swirl
Get PDFThis article draws from the fieldwork of my MA thesis, “For a Seed to be Born”: Exploring the Links between Emotions and Everyday Creativity in Elementary Teachers´ Classrooms in Peru (Cuculiza, 2017). Informed by collage inquiry (Butler-Kisber, 2008) and memory work (Strong-Wilson, 2015), the fieldwork comprised an arts-based workshop in which participants were asked to explore and reflect on the lived experiences that contributed towards the development of their creativity (Averill, 1999; Runco 2010; Richards 2010). In focusing on the data collected from one of the participants, namely Heart Swirl (pseudonym), I attempt to answer the following questions: In what ways do memory and creativity interconnect? What sorts of spaces are conducive to the investigation of memories in the educational field? In what ways can artistic expression assist memory and creativity? In support of a reflective practice, this article highlights the importance of recognizing how spaces—and the emotions we attach to our memories of these spaces—may be “latent” in our present (Van Manen, 2016). Engaging in play through collage inquiry in an emotionally safe workshop can assist educators in the development of their own creativity and in their ability to become conscious of the ways in which their past lived experiences influence their pedagogy
Le sous-bois de base : un curriculum de l’inter-relationnel
Get PDFThis editorial is an inquiry into the curriculum of interrelation. In preparation of the articles for this issue, I was struck by the spiritual, ecological, and genealogical resonances in the complex search for meaning. My makings invite you on a thread that networks here and there in a synaptic ontological question of re-storing experience in the languages we know. Through reverence, restoration, reflection and reparation, how might we find grace in the curriculum of learning life? What is the understory of education?Cet éditorial est une enquête sur un curriculum de l’interrelationnel. En préparant les articles de ce numéro, j’étais saisie par les résonances spirituelles, écologiques et généalogiques dans la recherche de signification. Je défile des questions ontologiques ici. Je demande si, par révérence, restauration, réflexion et réparation, nous pouvons trouver de la grâce dans le curriculum de vie. Aussi, quel est le sous-bois de l’éducation
The Arts, Loose Parts and Conversations
Get PDFEducators today are being asked to design curricula whereby learners’ abilities to analyze, question, problem-solve, evaluate and reflect are being provoked. The quest lies in uncovering suitable teaching approaches that will allow critical thinking skills to emerge organically and meaningfully. I argue that an integration of loose parts can offer a methodology and a provocation that makes way for open-ended, divergent and creative thinking skills to be activated. “Loose parts” can be open-ended materials that are manipulated, designed, dismantled and reconstructed in multiple ways. I also see “loose parts” as a mindset, a process-oriented approach whereby meaningful conversations emerge unexpectedly and add significantly to learning. This article presents two stories to show how arts-based approaches and mindfulness to loose parts can unearth thought-filled and caring conversations. The discussion is inspired and written via a reflective lens of personal encounters, first, in a longitudinal research project with young children in an Indigenous First Nations Community, and, second, with preservice teachers in a university class. It is within these periods that students, teachers and families were impacted by loose parts whereby materials and conversations made way for new perspectives in understanding the world
Mise en scène curriculaire et réorientation de l’Éducation
Get PDFCurricular enactment can be an educative medium for living well in the world with others. This is not new thinking, but it is bold thinking that schools and communities worldwide persist in avoiding and short-changing. In this article, matters concerning roles and relations across understandings of education, knowledge and curricular enactment are sketched, and in doing so, what ought to matter is foregrounded. Turning to traditions concerning the aesthetics of human understanding and to found kinships with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, curricular modes of being and habits of practice emerge. These modes and habits insist on educators, students and communities traversing the curricular terrain together, orienting towards growth and well-being, and re-thinking the world in-the-making. This article challenges all readers to envision the significances we can no longer ignore and to consider the research implications.Mis en scène collectivement, le curriculum peut servir de médium éducatif, incitant au bien vivre avec les autres, sur cette terre. Moins nouvelle qu’audacieuse, cette possibilité est continuellement évitée et court-circuitée par des écoles et des communautés de par le monde. Cet article dresse le portrait des questions qui se posent au sujet des rôles et des relations dans la construction du curriculum selon les différentes acceptations de l’Éducation et, de ce fait, témoigne de ce qui devrait être mis à l’avant-scène de nos réflexions. De nouveaux modes d’exister et de nouvelles pratiques habituelles par/dans le curriculum émergent lorsque nous nous tournons vers les traditions esthétiques de l’entendement humain et lorsque nous nous reconnaissons une affinité avec les façons d’être et de savoir autochtones. Ces modes et habitudes exigent que personnel éducatif, corps étudiant and communautés fassent collectivement la traversée du terrain curriculaire en s’orientant vers la croissance, le bien-être et la refonte du monde-en-émergence. Cet article veut lancer le défi à chaque lecteur et lectrice de se forger une image des significations qu’il est devenu impossible d’ignorer et d’en considérer les implications pour la recherche
Reframing Syllabi as Aesthetic Encounters
Get PDFThis academic work, which is comprised of three artefacts, responds to Maxine Greene’s “Spaces of Aesthetic Education” (1986). The main artefact is a syllabus, from an era of increasingly standardized syllabi, which imagines its aesthetic and educative attributes otherwise. In doing so, it reconsiders the kinds of learning a syllabus might prompt. It stems from a series of conversations we, the co-creators, shared about the ways curricular structures can come to prompt critical, creative and aesthetic attention. We had pursued those intersections in the past from our respective disciplinary perspectives and decided to collaborate on an art/research project, one that could inform and provoke a series of future curricular conversations. As our work unfolded, we spoke of curricular experiences that were meaningful and those were not and tried to articulate what we meant by “aesthetic experience”. We came to lament institutional demands for standardized curricular documents in our respective teaching contexts, especially mandated templates for syllabi. We wondered about the educative and aesthetic consequences of limiting their expression to a series of prescribed descriptors. Eventually we had an opportunity to experiment with the form through a fourth-year course on curriculum theory and practice, an ideal venue for introducing a parallel, yet supplementary, syllabus. That syllabus is displayed in full in this issue of the journal. It is also accompanied by an audio file and a corresponding transcription. Through that recording, we address some of the aesthetic considerations we incorporated into the design, delineate certain curricular choices, and explain the artefact’s discursive significance.
Seeking Race: Finding Racism
Get PDFThis article explores the somatic lessons that I have learned about race and racism from participating in schooling. Using arts-based research inquiry methods of storytelling, dance and poetry, I allowed my somatic knowledge of race to surface. In analyzing this emergent knowledge, I examined how the null curriculum in schools has influenced my own understandings of both race and racism. Here, I question how maintaining the status quo in school is perpetuating fractured self identities in students, as well as a social fractal of repeated racism in society. This article explores the interconnections between race and racism and the impact of erasure on student identity. By delving into and sharing my own personal experiences of race in school, this article aims to provoke educators to consider the impact of the choices made around diversity in schools
Contributors' Biography Notes
No full textThe contributor biography notes for the JCACS Special Issue, Summer 2018: The Arts in Curriculum: Aesthetics, Embodiment and Well-Being
Creating the Dance and Dancing Creatively: Exploring the Liminal Space of Choreography for Emergence
Get PDFIn this paper, three dance scholars explore the tensions and bliss inherent in curriculum delivery through dance integration. It meets the call for a curriculum attuned to provoking encounters (Pinar & Grumet, 2015) through philosophical narration that interweaves experiences as dancers, dance educators, dance scholars and dance integrators. Personal vignettes unveil the sense-making of creative artists tasked with the duty to “deliver” curriculum, and as arts integration specialists tasked with the duty to share knowledge, with teachers, for designing learning through dance. The authors liken the inherent tensions to those of a tight rope walker balancing between forces pulled in opposite directions. They share their own encounters of pedagogical balance and counterbalance, of choreography and emergence, and of leading and following, as each relates to learning design. They also explore the duality of meeting curricular ends and unfolding endless possibilities (Aoki, 2005; Roth, 2014). Together, the authors find that their collective experience leads to three charges for curricular reform: 1) embed dance integration in teacher preparation; 2) infuse dance integration in K-12 curriculum; and 3) provide time for pedagogical experimentation through dance-based inquiry
Epiphany in Waiting
Get PDFRumi writes “Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances . . . move within” (Barks, 1997, p. 278). In this lyrical essay, I begin by enacting a walk I took with my mother along the ocean. I poetically dwell in a sensual phenomenological inquiry where I attune to the experience of this walk as it is unfolding: the images, the colours, the gestures, the scents, the sounds and the silences. Through the (re)telling of this pivotal event, I am then transported to the past, where I (re)enter a painful moment in a classroom. As in the line of the altering hues of the horizon that we walk alongside of, I relinquish to this line of inquiry. As I theorize this space in between the present and the past, I am brought to an epiphany and transcend both experiences into a renewed understanding of my pedagogical self. Here, I learn how the body holds the words; and in poetry as a physical, emotional, and spiritual walking through, I then enter into a place of light. The keen lessons of an encountering give in healing and meaning, illuminating the future with promise and with purpose
Recension : Place, Being, Resonance: A Critical Ecohermeneutic Approach to Education
No full textAs a poet, I am always seeking to live poetically, informed and motivated by the rhythms and wisdom of poetry. Michael W. Derby’s Place, Being, Resonance: A critical Ecohermeneutic Approach to Education is a poetic rumination on place and ecological living. With attention to the etymology of ecopoiesis, Michael is making a home for dwelling, and he is calling others to engage in this home-making, where we do not take for granted the cultural norms and processes. Michael understands the efficacy of education for transformation. He understands the mystery of the ineffable, but he also understands the urgency to acknowledge how the ineffable is always dancing a wild tango with the effable. The role of education is to keep the mind, heart, spirit, intuition and imagination supple and nimble, always attuned to other possibilities.Poète, je suis toujours à la quête d’une vie poétique, informée et motivée par les rythmes et la sagesse de la poésie. Place, Being, Resonance: A Critical Ecohermeneutic Approach to Education de Michael W. Derby est une rumination poétique portant sur l’esprit des lieux et la vie écologique. En portant attention à l’étymologie de « l’ecopoiesis », Michael crée un espace où il fait bon vivre et nous interpelle tous et toutes à nous engager dans cet acte de création d’un espace-vital où les normes et processus culturels ne sont pas pris pour acquis. Michael comprend la force transformative de l’éducation. Il comprend le mystère de ce qui est ineffable, mais également l’urgence de reconnaitre que l’ineffable est dans une danse éternelle avec l’exprimable. L’éducation a la responsabilité de toujours garder la tête, le cœur, l’esprit, l’intuition et l’imagination souples et agiles, toujours aux aguets de nouvelles possibilités