Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)

Miranda
					, Helena

Beisigel
					, Mary

Simmt
					, Elaine

Davis
					, Brent

Sumara
					, Dennis

English

Consciousness, Collectivity and Culture: Experiences of
Intimacy in Mathematics Learning

Iftody
					, Tammy

 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
Volume 4 Number 2 Winter 2006 
 
 
iii 
 
 
 
Countering Commonsense:  
Non‐normative Strategies for Social 
Justice 
 
 
 
DENNIS SUMARA and TAMMY IFTODY 
University of British Columbia 
 
 
In an extensive review of research relating to education for social justice, 
Hytten (2006) argues that in order “to bring more attention to alternative 
democratic, social justice–oriented visions for schooling, we need a more 
powerful  and  strident discourse  coming  from  the  educational  left, one 
that can help us to coalesce diverse movements for social justice, as well 
as  provide  impetus  and  vision  (theory  and  practice)  for  progressive 
educational change” (p. 224).  
The  articles  in  this  issue  of  JCACS  respond  to  this  call  for  more 
“powerful  and  strident  discourse”  that  is  both  critical  and  visionary. 
Poststructuralist notions of power as both the means and will to act are 
evident in many of the arguments, and reports on research employing a 
variety  of  ‘ethno‐methods’  (ethnodrama,  autoethnography,  critical 
narrative  research)  and  counter‐normative  theoretical  lenses  (critical, 
cultural and complex) shape a common desire to understand what social 
justice  as  equity  in  opportunity  means,  and  might  yet  mean,  for 
education.   
In  the  context  of  these  papers,  social  justice  is  promoted  by 
questioning  normative  (taken‐for‐granted/commonsense)  educational 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
 
 
 
 
iv 
 
 
 
structures  and  practices,  a  counter‐move  that  characterizes  what 
Kumashiro  (2004)  calls  “anti‐oppressive”  education.  As  he  puts  it: 
“Common  sense  is  not  what  should  shape  educational  reform  or 
curriculum  design;  it  is  what  needs  to  be  examined  and  challenged” 
(xxiv).  In  a  broad  sense,  the  desire  to  counter  commonsense  is  what 
binds the authors in this issue, and in some cases, is made explicit in the 
counter‐normative strategies they use to represent their research.   
Diane  Conrad’s  essay  “Justice  for  Youth  Versus  a  Curriculum  of 
Conformity  in  Schools  and  Prisons”  explores  the  possibilities  for  youth 
justice by interrogating the institutionalized “curriculum of conformity” 
that  insidiously characterizes practices and power  relations common  to 
both schools and prisons. Theoretically, she draws on Foucault’s  (1991) 
notion of governmentality and Scott’s (1990) conception of “infrapolitics” 
to  mount  a  critique  of  existing  relations  of  power  that  shape,  and 
ultimately  misrepresent,  the  resistant  behavior  of  youth.  The 
performative  (ethnodramatic) vignettes  she  shares were  the  result  of  a 
participatory  arts‐based method  of  “performative  ethnography” which 
uses popular theatre to engage youth in a critical examination of both the 
explicit and hidden aspects of institutional structures that shape their life 
experiences.  For Conrad,  the  over‐arching  concern  is  how  to  promote 
justice for, and ethical behavior from, youth; particularly in institutional 
contexts where  inequitable  distributions  of  power  inevitably  engender 
resistance. Seeking to avoid perpetuating the notion of “disposable youth 
in the age of zero tolerance”, (Giroux, 2003) Conrad argues that the acts 
of performative resistance represented in her research signal the need for 
continued research into youths’ perceptions of institutionalized practices 
in schools and prisons. For Conrad, justice for youth is recognizable only 
by  first  identifying  the  prevailing  injustices  that  undergird  the 
organizations and institutions that serve them.  
In “Learning  to  ‘Do Family’ Differently: Towards More Complex Notions 
of  Family  Culture  and  Schooling”  Linda  Laidlaw  brings  an 
autoethnographic  orientation  to  her  analysis  of  data  emerging  from 
research with parents from transracial families.  Exploring what it means 
to  ‘do  family’  in  counternormative  ways,  Laidlaw  offers  several 
examples  of  the  (mis)  representation  of  transracial  families  in  popular 
media,  interrogates  the  modernist  ‘genetic  ideology’  (Rothman,  2005) 
that constructs popular notions of adoption, and, finally, considers how 
  Countering Commonsense 
  SUMARA & IFTODY 
 
 
v 
‘adoption’ itself may be used as a conceptual framework to interrupt the 
‘normative  narratives’  that  prevail  in  popular  conceptions  of  family. 
Laidlaw  suggests  that  in  acknowledging  this  counterpoint  position, 
adoptive  families become sites of perturbation and public  interrogation 
which  may  serve  to  alter  perception  and  interrupt  prevailing 
understandings of family relations.  
Following Laidlaw’s  counter‐normative  critique of  ‘doing  family’  is 
Luigi  Iannacci’s  essay  “Learning  To  ‘Do’  School:  Procedural  Display  and 
Culturally  and  Linguistically  Diverse  (CLD)  Students  in  Canadian  Early 
Childhood Education (ECE)”. He uses Critical Narrative Research (CNR) to 
represent  data  collected  during  a  year‐long  ethnography  of  four  early 
years classrooms  in  two different schools. The  four narratives provided 
here  are  linked  by  a  broader  concern  with  the    extent  to which  CLD 
students  are  required  to  participate  in  procedural  display;  that  is, 
activities that heighten a learner’s preoccupation with the “need to pass” 
and  often  lead  to  the  unquestioning  adoption  of  normative  responses 
and  behaviors.  Procedural  display  was  most  evident  in  “context‐
reduced”  (rather  than  context‐embedded)  literacy  activities  where 
students  missed  out  on  opportunities  to  negotiate  meaning  using 
interpersonal  and  situational  cues.  Iannacci  suggests  that  building 
students’  communicative  competence  requires  attention  to  context‐
embedded  communication where  learners are  encouraged  to “discover 
the properties” of  language  in use, and negotiate meaning  in situations 
where the “normal response” is no longer privileged.   
The  collaborative  essay  “Writing  Co‐Respondents:  Teacher‐educators 
reflect  on  orienting  new  students”  is  a  poetic  representation  of  the 
intersecting experiences  (and counter‐normative  inclinations) of  teacher 
educators  and  colleagues  Susan  Brigham,  Michelle  Forrest,  Valda 
Leightheizer, and Susan Walsh.   Foregrounding a  shared  concern with 
the normalizing structures of  the  teacher education program  they were 
aiming  to  reform,  the  collaborative  technique  employed  to  represent 
their  conversations  is  one  which  uses  “aleatory  operations”  (the 
imposition of  chance)  to disrupt  the  illusion of  static  subject positions. 
They  offer  11 mesostics  (poems)  to  represent  their  experiences  as  “co‐
respondents”, a  term which  refers both  to  their  collaborative  roles and 
“alludes homonymically” to the source of their writing. (i.e. e‐mails). In 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
 
 
 
 
vi 
 
 
 
sharing both  the process  and product of  their  collaborative  efforts,  the 
authors invite readers to “write” in the spaces announced by the poems.  
In  their  theoretical  piece  entitled  “Currere  to  the  rescue?  Teachers  as 
‘amateur  intellectuals’  in  a knowledge  society”, Yatta Kanu and Mark Glor 
address  the  complex  conditions  of  teaching  in  a  knowledge  society 
where  teachers  are  required  to  play  a  tripartite  role  as  catalysts  of 
opportunity,  counterpoints of  threat,  and  casualties of  standardization. 
(Hargreaves, 2003).  As announced by the title, Said’s (1996) notion of the 
‘amateur  intellectual’  as  skeptical  knower  is  considered  as  a  potential 
product of Pinar’s (1974) autobiographical method of currere. Along  the 
way,  the  authors  survey  a  breadth  of  sources  in  considering  the  key 
concepts  that  inform  their understanding of currere as autobiographical 
and  biographical  text  including  narrative,  voice,  and  collaborative 
dialogue  among  others.    From  Bruner  and  Sartre,  to  Britzman  and 
Dewey,  the  overriding  intent  is  to  trace  the  theoretical  underpinnings 
that  support  a  conception  of  preservice  teacher  education  as  an 
autobiographical opportunity for disrupting taken‐for‐granted notions of 
teaching, and thus transforming teachers into ‘amateur intellectuals.’  
The  sixth  article,  in  French,  “La  collaboration  au  sein  d’une  équipe 
pédagogique,  une  compétence  à  développer  au  cours  des  stages”  by  Liliane 
Portelance  and Nicolas Durand,  explores  the  learning  atmosphere  that 
(can)  exist  in  a  teaching  practicum  situation  between  the  supervising 
teacher and  its  supervisee. Approaching  it by  specific  case  studies,  the 
authors demonstrate that even if both supervisor and supervisee come to 
the practicum with different orientations and expectations, both parties 
can learn from the other in a dyadic learning dynamic. 
The  final paper  in  this  issue, “Consciousness, Collectivity and Culture: 
Experiences of Intimacy in Mathematics Learning” by Helena Miranda, Mary 
Beisiegel,  and  Dennis  Sumara,  explores  the  intimacy  that  may  be 
recognized  or  articulated  between  the  mathematics  doer  and 
mathematics as a subject. The claim here is that the way mathematics is 
taught must have an effect not only with the disciplinary knowledge, but 
on relationships that arise within that knowledge. Teachers engaged in a 
study of mathematics for teaching were asked to share their experiences 
of  this  professional  development  project,  and  emerging  from  the 
interactions  of  the  teachers’  responses  is  the  notion  of  ‘being  intimate 
with  mathematics.’  Echoing  this  issue’s  thematic  concern  with 
  Countering Commonsense 
  SUMARA & IFTODY 
 
 
vii 
countering  commonsense,  it  may  be  argued  that  such  moments  of 
intimacy—with  one  another,  with  mathematics,  and  within 
mathematics—can  and  should  be  the  mainstay,  not  the  exception,  of 
school mathematical experience.  
 
 
 
References 
 
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. 
Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, (pp. 87‐
104). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 
Giroux, H. (2003). Racial injustice and disposable youth in the age of zero 
tolerance. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(4), pp. 553‐565. 
Hargreaves, A (2003). Teaching in a knowledge society: education in the age of 
insecurity.  Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.  
Hytten, K. (2006). Education for social justice: problems and 
provocations. Educational Theory, 56(2), pp. 221‐236.  
Komashiro, K. (2004). Against common sense: teaching and learning toward 
social justice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. 
Pinar (1974b). Currere: Toward reconceptualization.  In J. Jelinek (Ed.). 
Basic problems in modern education (pp. 147‐171).  Tempe, AZ: Arizona 
State University, College of Education. 
Rothman, B. K. 2005. Weaving a family: Untangling race and adoption. 
Boston: Beacon Press. 
Said, E. (1996). Representations of the intellectual.  The 1993 Reith Lectures.  
New York: Vintage. 
Scott,  J.  (1990). Domination  and  the  arts  of  resistance: Hidden  transcripts. 
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 
 


Countering Commonsense: Non‐normative Strategies for Social
Justice

Norquay
					, Naomi

How Playing the Banjo Helps Me Think about Curriculum

Kinsella
					, Anne

Poetic Resistance: Juxtaposing Personal and Professional
Discursive Constructions in a Practice Context

Portelance
					, Lilane

Durant
					, Nicolas

French

La collaboration au sein d’une équipe pédagogique, une
compétence à développer au cours des stages

Conrad
					, Diane

Justice for Youth Versus a Curriculum of Conformity in
Schools and Prisons

Prud'homme
					, Luc

Dolbec
					, André

Brodeur
					, Monique

Presseau
					, Annie

Martineau
					, Stéphane

Building an Island of Rationality around the Concept of
Differentiation

Kanu
					, Yatta

‘Currere’ to the rescue? Teachers as ‘amateur intellectuals’ in a
knowledge society

Opening Tensions
DENNIS SUMARA & TAMMY IFTODY
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Volume 4  Number 1  Fall 2006
iii
Opening Tensions: Stories of 
Difference, Dissonance and Discovery 
DENNIS SUMARA & TAMMY IFTODY
University of British Columbia
Unless … a word breathed by the hopeful or by writers of fiction. (Shields, 2002) 
Existentialist, Marxist, or conservative, curriculum theories are all refusals of 
the common order. … Predicated on loss, [they] replicate the rupture in human 
consciousness that strands us on one side, longing for the other. (Grumet, 1990, 
cited in Pinar et. al., 1995, p. 230)
One could easily replace the phrase “curriculum theories” in the above pas-
sage with the word “stories” and Grumet’s observation would still hold true. 
A good theory and a good story have much in common:  Both consolidate, 
compel, and challenge what is believed to be true about the world. As do 
the papers in this issue of JCACS. 
The first article, Fragmenting Narratives: The Ethics of Narrating Difference, 
by Darren Lund, Lisa Panayotidis, Hans Smits and Jo Towers explores the 
transformative power of narrative to unsettle and re-imagine curriculum 
and practice in teacher education The conditions of fragmentation, pre-
cariousness and vulnerability first addressed by Butler (2004) provide the 
backdrop for four intersecting voices engaged in exploring the ethical ten-
sions of narrating difference in a world where “the foundations for forms of 
representation, address, and action have become destabilized.” Collectively, 
the authors ask: How do we ensure that we are acting ethically, as teacher 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
educators and researchers, given the multiple “fracturing discourses” that are 
used to represent our work? Despite different positionings, each contributor 
shares a conception of difference wherein a “deep regard and responsibility 
for the Other” is necessary for ethical action. 
Prompted by the desire to live ethically in the classroom, Panayotidis 
explores her tensions around the educational stories she shares with her 
students. She attempts to disrupt her own narrative practices by questioning 
not why, but rather how she tells them. How is difference “constructed and 
mediated” by the telling? Towers is also concerned with the ethics of narrating 
difference, but from a researcher’s point of view. Specifically, she considers 
the ethical obligations of “telling the story” of teachers work by exploring the 
tensions that emerge when the researcher realizes the power narratives have 
to not only represent others, but also to transform them. Lund provides an 
overview of antiracism research in Canada to argue that education for social 
justice requires fracturing the “narrative flow of a fragile national identity” 
characterized by “collaboration and consensus.” While these counter narra-
tives may be unsettling, they are necessary to interrupt the indifference, and 
often complacency, that currently constrains anti-racism pedagogy. 
Smits foregrounds the interconnectedness of these narratives by suggest-
ing that each  contributor is, in essence, caught up in the tenuous relationship 
between the self and the ethical aim (Ricoeur, 1992). For teacher educators, 
researchers, and curriculum theorists alike, the message is clear: how we 
gather the fragments matters. 
In ‘Let us say yes to who or what turns up’: Education as Hospitality, Jen 
Gilbert also takes up the ethics of difference, but this time through Derrida’s 
notion of hospitality. As a manifestation of difference, gayness typically en-
ters education through controversy. In these cases, gayness is seen to stand 
outside, and even interrupt, the “ordinary work of teaching and learning.” 
Alternately, Gilbert draws out the social, political and psychical implications 
of welcoming gayness into public education through three contemporary 
examples: gay marriage, transgendered youth, and sex instruction. The ques-
tion overriding all three examples is: Can education be hospitable? Building 
on the work of Derrida (2000), she defines hospitality as “a welcome, but 
one that resists idealization and risks ambivalence.” An ethics of hospitality 
suggests that such welcome cannot depend on the preconditions of com-
fort, understanding or knowledge. For this reason, Gilbert suggests that a 
“certain dream” of education must be relinquished—that is, the dream that 
“prejudice can be educated and identifications anticipated.” The challenge 
for curriculum is to “hold open the tensions” around gayness, thus allow-
ing them to provoke the contesting conversations that are the foundation 
of hospitality. And as she puts it, this entails welcoming “whatever and 
whoever shows up.”
iv
Opening Tensions
DENNIS SUMARA & TAMMY IFTODY
Anne Kinsella also takes up the notion of “holding tensions open” as a 
way of conceiving curriculum. In her article, Poetic Resistance: Juxtaposing 
Personal and Professional Discursive Constructions in a Practice Context, she 
explains that in both health care and education, notions of control, certainty, 
and measurable outcomes continue to influence research, practice and policy. 
This often means that the desire to form caring relationships with others 
that likely draws health practitioners and teachers towards their respective 
professions is silenced by a professional discourse that values objective 
ways of knowing and technical efficiency. With this irony in mind, Kinsella 
describes the technique of poetic resistance as reflection on practice through 
poetic form and offers a personal example of how it may be used as a mode 
of critical discourse analysis. Poetic resistance unveils the tensions created 
by professional discourses steeped in the language of accountability and 
evidence-based practice. Kinsella further argues that reflection on practice 
rooted in poetic form not only illuminates such tensions, but also evokes 
previously silenced experiences, creates new interpretations of practitio-
ners’ life worlds, and thus may inform decisions about curricular design. 
To resist the hegemony of objectivity, Kinsella suggests health practitioners 
(and teachers) have a responsibility to tell the intimately subjective stories 
that represent the partiality of knowledge and ultimately give shape to the 
communities of practice to which they belong.
Not unlike Kinsella, Pauline Sameshima seeks new understandings 
and insights through the poetic form. Describing the relationship between 
reader and poem as a complicit one, she argues that poetry as research text 
troubles the boundaries of form, and in doing so, becomes a generative, 
rather than purely representational, space. In her poem, A Household at the 
Shore: A Marshall McLuhan Metaphor, she employs the tetrad figure (described 
as four points of change on a continuum) as a metaphor to represent the 
inter-relational and complementary melding of body, head, heart and spirit. 
Specifically, she seeks to “draw attention to the often ignored body, heart 
and spirit which are historically ‘othered’ by the head” and in doing so, 
reveal that the body speaks in ways that we must learn how to recognize. 
She suggests that attending to the Acoustic Space in which poetry dwells is 
one way of experiencing learning as dynamic, contingent, and ultimately 
dependent on the complicity between representational form and learner. 
In Art Interrupting Advertising: A Critique of the Educational Paradigms of 
‘Linny the Guinea Pig and Dora the Explorer,’ Alyson Huntly draws on complex-
ivist thinking to explore how the ways in which we express our knowledge 
affect what can be known about the world, and she adds a hermeneutic 
twist. She draws on popular culture, specifically children’s television pro-
gramming, to make the case that most of it is bound up by a metaphysical 
understanding of knowledge and knowing that in turn serves to perpetu-
v
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
ate the core assumptions of consumption-based educational structure. The 
popular Dora the Explorer is juxtaposed with the more “interstitial” program 
Linny the Guinea Pig to make the argument that imagination is necessary 
to interrupt the isolating effects of mass consumerism in Western society. 
In Dora’s world, knowledge is a possession and learning is sequential and 
measurable. This educational structure is built into the plot of each show. 
In Linny’s world however, possibility reigns. To illustrate this distinction, 
Huntly outlines a “hermeneutics of Linny,” highlighting that unlike Dora’s 
world, here knowing and learning are necessarily partial, temporal and con-
textual. There is no map to consult and no sequences to follow. While Dora 
“epitomizes the persistence of metaphysics,” Linny interrupts these “dead” 
assumptions by introducing engagement, imagination and possibility. Con-
trasting the ideologies of each program, Huntly presents both a compelling 
critique of Western society’s reluctance to abandon metaphysical attitudes, 
and a convincing case for curriculum as hermeneutic inquiry. 
In Learning the Ropes, Resisting the Rules, Anna Kirova, Fauza Mohamed, 
and Michael Emme document  and analyze the methodology of fotonovela 
as it was used to explore immigrant children’s understanding of the formal 
and informal curriculum of lunch time. As a research tool, the fotonovela is 
considered to have liberatory effects in contexts where “varying literacies 
create inequities and representational disparity.” Informed by a theory of 
power as it addresses the structure of adult-child relationships in institu-
tional contexts like schools (Giddens, 1984; Foucault, 1979), the authors 
posit that the fotonovela format allowed the embodied nature of school 
rules to be represented along with the sometimes hidden contradictions 
between the “docile body” and the “true” intentions of the person who is 
embodying it. Identified as one of the most confusing routines facing new 
students, participants developed the Lunchtime fotonovela. Although the 
series of comic-like narratives were designed to introduce new students to 
the rules and routines of the school, researchers found that they also cre-
ated spaces for questioning, and even resisting, these rules. The authors 
argue that these acts of resistance represent immigrant children’s agency 
in negotiating their multiple identities as they relate to mealtime routines 
both in and out of school. 
Taking the marriage of image and text to another level, Chloë Brushwood 
Rose envisions a virtual curriculum that draws on the aesthetic experience 
and epistemology of digital gaming. In Virtual Curriculum: Digital Games as 
Technologies of Aesthetic Experience and Potential Spaces she argues that pre-
vailing linear structures in curriculum resemble the layout of a board game: 
players progress through a series of tasks toward the achievement of pre-
determined goal. Digital games, on the other hand, necessitate “self-directed 
participation” that encourages players to learn by immersing themselves in 
vi
Opening Tensions
DENNIS SUMARA & TAMMY IFTODY
a particular environment that rewards taking risks and making mistakes. 
In either case, games and curriculum both provide a particular “structure of 
experience” that delimits what learning is. Intersecting object relations theory 
and the aesthetic experience of digital gaming, the key question Brushwood 
Rose poses for curriculum studies is this: “How might the object relations of 
digital games elucidate the relations of curriculum?” Drawing on her own 
game playing experiences and aesthetic theory, she characterizes digital 
games as immersive and exploratory structures that provide intermediate 
areas of experience (or “holding environments”) where tensions between 
the real and the imaginary are revealed and reconciled. To further elucidate 
a theory of learning in these intermediate spaces, Brushwood Rose turns to 
object relations theory and Winnicott’s (1989) notion of playing. Abandoning 
the cognitive model of the subject, object relations theory suggests that learn-
ing is far from linear and predictable, but rather, emerges as an interminable 
process of renegotiating tensions between external and internal realities; a 
process marked by idiosyncrasy and affect more than intellect. Digital games 
encourage learning in these terms as they offer temporary “sites of creative 
illusion” where the psychic experience of playing takes precedence over the 
content of the game. In the context of both digital gaming and curriculum 
then, Brushwood Rose seems to suggest that what is learned is not neces-
sarily more important than how it is learned. 
The importance of play is implicit in Naomi Norquay’s autobiographical 
inquiry entitled How Playing the Banjo Helps Me Think about Curriculum. Nor-
quay uses playing the banjo as a metaphor for engagement with curriculum 
arguing that in both cases, a “structuring grammar of identity formation” is 
created. The banjo stories she shares present a curriculum that is dynamic and 
relational, always and already racial, and inherently embodied. Juxtaposing 
her banjo stories with stories about learning to play the piano as a child, 
Norquay critiques formal curricular structures where “officially sanctioned 
content” is preserved to reproduced by the learner “regardless of who the 
learner is or the context of the learning.” An undercurrent of her argument 
is Pinar’s (1993) suggestion that curriculum mirrors who we think we are 
and who we want our children to be. 
Norquay also identifies the four phases of “currere” as they emerge in 
her narratives about the banjo and banjo playing. Currere, as Pinar (2004) 
has described it, seeks to understand the intricate relationship between one’s 
academic studies and one’s autobiography. Norquay makes the case that a 
cultural artifact like the banjo serves as a focal point from which to engage in 
the regressive, progressive, analytic and synthetic phases of autobiographical 
research. Inspired by currere’s ability to frame “an ongoing project of self-
understanding,” Norquay has given us an autobiographical account that, 
in the end, is clearly “mobilized for engaged pedagogical action.”
vii
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
In Building an ‘Island of Rationality’ around the Concept of Educational Dif-
ferentiation, Luc Prud’homme, André Dolbec, Monique Brodeur, Annie Pres-
seau, and Stéphane Martineau demonstrate that the concept of differentiation 
is ubiquitous yet over-determined in the language of educational reform. 
In response to this nebulousness, the authors attempt to build an “island 
of rationality” around the concept in order to encourage conversation and 
debate. As an intentionally temporary representational technique, this theo-
retical approach avoids presenting “static visions” of what differentiation is. 
Instead, the authors present an extensive review of literature detailing the 
evolution of differentiation as an educational agenda, and in the process, 
reveal how this one concept has come to represent a variety of initiatives in 
education. The authors conclude by presenting an initial (convergent) defini-
tion of differentiation in terms “a collaborative model of teaching practice 
centered on diversity” that aims to encourage social justice
Curriculum, like language, is a moving form; conceived as an aspiration, 
the object and hope of our intentionality, it comes to form and slips, at the 
moment of its actualization, into the ground of our situation. (Grumet, 
1988, p. 131)
“Sooo-ooo-ooo!”
That’s what people say when they are about to introduce a narrative into 
the conversation or when they are clearing a little space so that you can 
begin a story yourself. It can be sung to different tunes, depending on the 
circumstances. (Shields, 2002, p. 74)
References
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York: 
Verso.
Derrida, J. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1984). The construction of society: Outline of theory of structuration. Los 
Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Harmondsworth, 
UK: Peregrine.
Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of 
Massachusetts Press.
Pinar, W., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum: 
An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. 
New York: Peter Lang.
Pinar, W. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum As-
sociates.
Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
Shields, C. (2002). Unless: A novel. Toronto: Random House.
Winnicott, D. (1989). Playing and reality. New York: Routledge.
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