Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Towards a Complicated Conversation Among Disability Studies, Complexity Thinking and Education
Get PDFThe presence of disability, an embodied form of extreme vulnerability that is socially enacted, introduces into complex systems such as education or society, a perturbation, embodied agents that are biologically and socially constructed as being 'unfit', 'mal-adapted' or who do not adapt easily to the specific ecologies in which they must operate and thus gestures toward a current limit(ation) (and new beginning) of the complexivist framework for theorizing the pragmatic question of "How we should act?" What is required of us in our interaction with dis/abled agents who are circumscribed by not being fully "capable of adapting... to the sorts of new and diverse circumstances that an active agent is likely to encounter in a dynamic world" (Davis & Sumara, 2006, p.14)? In this paper I present a "complicated conversation" among complexity thinking, curriculum theorizing, and disability studies in education and argue that dis-embodiments prompt a certain type of ethical mindfulnes
Living Love: Confessions of a Fearful Teacher
Get PDFAs an education scholar and poet, I investigate experiences of fearfulness in order to promote learning how to live with a commitment to love. I have lived my life in fear, full of fears. Now I am practicing accepting myself, acknowledging the hollow in my heart, acknowledging the holes that sometimes look like gaping wounds but are really integral to my search for wholeness. And as I learn to know myself as a subject-in-process, a person under construction, I also learn to live in relationship with others in daily experiences written with words of patience, hope, and affection, for giving each other and all of us possibilities for living with love. Love is a commitment and a practice. Love involves a daily devotion. In order to love others, we must first love ourselves. We cannot learn to love by attending to the abstract and universal. We need to begin with small acts of love. We can begin with the person we are drinking coffee with. If we are going to change the world, if we are going to undo the damage and destruction of prejudice, hatred, and fear, we need to start with love. We need a curriculum of love. In order to learn the wisdom, philosophy, and practice of love, we need to acknowledge that we are not alone, independent, autonomous. We are part of a vast network of connections and interconnections, all ecologically sustained in rhythms and memories and hopes
Social Justice and the Gender Politics of Financial Literacy Education
Get PDFIn the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, financial literacy education received increased political attention worldwide as an important policy solution to achieve a variety of ends. Cloaked in the neo-liberal language of value-neutrality, financial literacy education presumes that individuals on a level playing field become "responsible" and "empowered,” motivated and competent to make financial decisions if given certain tacit knowledge. Through its naïveté, this type of financial literacy discourse perpetuates the false impression that choices, decisions and outcomes are the same for all. In this article, we describe the gender politics of contemporary financial literacy discourse, and analyze how it fails to explore women’s experiences in financial arenas by analyzing three popular Canadian financial literacy education curriculum resources designed for use in K-12 classrooms. We describe how these resources fail to acknowledge gender injustice by presenting content through discourses of “choice” and “value neutrality” that fail to critically examine the underlying assumptions crucial to social justice. By ignoring equity issues, these resources perpetuate inequity and marginalization.
Epidemic: Learning Games Go Viral
Get PDFIn this case study, we document the development and user-testing of Epidemic: Self-care for Crisis, an online educational resource that invites users (aged 14-20) to develop game-based knowledge and practices around prevention, self-care and (mis)information in the face of contagious diseases - a timely project, given the ongoing anxieties, and false (and not so false) alarms, over SARS, Avian Flu, and H1N1. The game Contagion, the forerunner to Epidemic, mobilized the conventions and mechanics of single-player adventure games to engage players 'experientially' with health- and disease-related understandings: we configured the same basic self-care information as "narrative knowledge", intended to mobilize players' attention and intelligence voluntarily, using narrative as a rhetorical strategy. We were using narrative's traditional, paradigmatic function within literate cultural forms of interpellation - stories of playful, pleasurable persuasion designed to engage players, Epidemic takes a decidedly different tack towards delivering the same educational content. Reconfiguring digital play within social networking conventions affords us a design-based platform for fundamental theory development in game-based learning. Epidemic's modular, Flash and XML-based design allows for accessible and straightforward creation and editing of educational content, both textual and visual: players can generate and publish their own virus-like avatars, stop-motion animations, and disease-related public service announcements. Some interesting divergences in play-based education on community health/self care, between interactive narrative and social-networking configurations for ludic knowledge representation, appear noteworthy. Our user-testing, we argue, signifies a further innovation in the field of educational game design, leaving behind the clichéd concern over 'what did you learn today' in favor of focusing on when and how laughter, engagement and attention are most at work. Taken together, these innovations instantiate an approach to digitally-mediated learning that construes and practices assessment differently than in traditional education (and in educational technology design), which are more concerned with propositionally identifiable learning outcomes. In the case of Epidemic, however, we are more concerned with how play-based learning design can best support the cultivation of responsible and critically-informed attitudes towards public health
At the edge of writing and speech: The curricular implications of the evolving writing/literacy matrix
No full textAttention to Place: Learning to Listen
Get PDFIn this paper we set out to explore the speculative function and nature of narrative in autoethnographic research. We consider how place--as locus, milieu, setting in which we narrate the distance between ourselves and events we can remember, places where we can remember being (or, in this case, becoming: becoming authors)--enriches our understanding of autoethnographic research in Education. Determining autoethnography as new frontier and as site for the construction of a way of life, we offer and invite beginnings in literary enjoyment of life through autobiographical writings for the Social Science of Education. We find ourselves digressing, and suggest that this may be a turn our memory takes on its homeward journey. We celebrate life
Feeling in Crisis: Vicissitudes of Response in Experiments with Global Justice Education
Get PDFThis paper considers the nexus of affective engagement, a critical analysis of systemic discrimination, and reflexive self-implication in education committed to social change. I ask how our inherited models and theories of learning and teaching for social change can curb our vigilance vis-à-vis the ways libidinal dynamics organize our curriculum as affective wish and our pedagogy as affective defense. I focus specifically on the qualities of global justice education—the ethical and political stakes of this project, the theories of learning, pedagogical strategies and discourses of moral development it inherits—that render learning, teaching, and learning to teach (none of which are discrete) affectively and ethically fraught. The paper examines student writing samples from a mandatory pre-service course on social and global justice education, one designed to engage future teachers in considering the inequitable global distribution of precarity and recognizability (Butler) within contemporary contexts of neoliberal globalization and war. In the writing samples, students reflect on the challenges they faced making sense of representations of the ravages of militarized capitalist globalization, in particular the challenges of creating and facilitating curriculum within which their peers might encounter such difficult knowledge. I ask, firstly, what students’ narrations of teaching social justice tell us about what is difficult in studying/teaching the devastation of the contemporary militarized, imperial global capitalist order in which we are profoundly implicated as citizens in the global North. Secondly, what can student narrations of teaching social justice tell me about what is difficult in global justice teacher education, specifically the wishes, the anxieties and discursive foreclosures underpinning my own conduct of it in this course
Living as Textual Animals: Curriculum, Sustainability and the Inherency of Language
Get PDFThe ecosystems that sustain us are sending warning signals we ignore at our peril. Environmental and economic indicators tell us how we live in our respective places must change radically. Education in general and curriculum developers specifically, struggle to find an appropriate response to an impending crisis. Literacy learning focuses on the spoken and written word as well as representation that contribute vitally to how individuals understand maintain and transform their worldview. The language arts classroom is potentially a powerful site for challenging taken for granted cultural assumptions. A research project undertaken with middle school students was designed to allow the students to address questions that increase awareness of how we live in our places. The project provided students the space to record connections, observations, descriptions and evidence of ecological relationships that emerge out of daily living. By attending to felt sense through an embodied approach to writing and response, students developed a deeper sensibility for the existence of their ecological selves. Students were able to sensitively address inner connectivities of body, mind and emotions to awaken and develop a deeper connection with the living landscapes in which they dwell demonstrating the integral role the literacy classroom will have in efforts to re-orient education to teach for the values of sustainability.
Representation, (Re)Mediation, and Curricular Forms: Multimodal Possibilities and Challenges for Curriculum Studies
Get PDFEditorial introduction for JCACS Volume 8, Number 2