Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Teaching and research as blurred translating
No full textThrough a form of currere, this essay traces the author’s journey to conceptualize her teaching and qualitative educational research as “blurred translating.” Practices of blurred translating are in motion and unfinished (hence, blurred) attempts to move and speak across and between languages and lives, words and worlds. These internal and inter-personal practices foster understanding across languages, identities, knowledges, and voices while acknowledging power and positionality. Drawing on stories, essays, research literature, poetry, and language and translation theories, the author argues for the relevance of this concept in an era of standardized curriculum and for those with social justice commitments. Both a responsibility and an impossibility, the messy risk of the practice of “blurred translating” engages us with a multiplicity of worlds and words as we work in relationship in the entanglement of lives, learning spaces, and research
“Dealing with Diversity and Difference”: A DisCrit analysis of teacher education curriculum at a Minority Serving Institution
No full textPreparing teachers for diverse K-12 populations generally focuses on educating white women at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) to teach students of color. This approach often focuses exclusively on race/ethnicity and essentializes teachers of color at PWIs as diversity experts. Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) graduate many teachers of color; yet, the continued focus on PWIs leaves unknown how these teachers experience diversity education. This paper explores how students at an MSI engage with the concept of dis/ability as a form of diversity. Informed by how dis/ability studies, critical race theory, and DisCrit intersect with curriculum studies, Schwitzmann examined her students’ written discussion board responses in a diversity course that she teaches at an MSI. She used multiple analytic tools to illuminate in their work the explicit mentioning of dis/ability, as well as affective encounters with equity and social justice outside the realm of discourse. She demonstrates how her students have varied understandings of difference even in a space that explicitly prioritizes social justice, equity, and diversity. Using DisCrit problematizes the assumption that experiences of being marginalized along one line of difference translate into an automatic understanding of diversity along another and highlights the affordances of centering dis/ability studies in diversity education
(Dis)orderly Potential: Ways Forward in “Post-Truth” Social Studies
No full textA growing body of literature (e.g., McIntyre, 2018; Prado, 2018; Thurston, 2018) on “post-truth” examines a marked decline in the value of objective facts and an increase in the value of personal belief, emotion, and subjective experience in the establishment of agreed-upon “truth” in society. Using empirical data from interviews and observations conducted with three social studies teachers, this project considers the disruptive potential of “post-truth” in social studies classrooms. The messy and opaque interplay between truth, emotion, and subjective experience is unpredictable within the project of learning, and this article takes it as a theoretical given that the “post-truth” emphasis on emotion and subjective experience demands a consideration of interiority—the inner-lives of teachers and students. An analysis of the interviews and observations suggests that the three teacher-participants are well-aware of the threat of disorder posed by “post-truth” discourses. In response, teachers resisted “post-truth” moments as a defense against the disorder that often accompanies emotional opinions, as well as the painful acknowledgement of truth’s inescapable discursivity. Additionally, this paper argues that many of the strategies and tactics teachers utilize to defend against “post-truth” moments suppress the emotional and psychical potentialities inherent to learning. This paper concludes by suggesting new ways forward within the “post-truth” quandary of facts, emotion, and interminable education (Felman, 1982)
(Un)building the Wall: Reinventing Ourselves as Others in the Post-truth Era
No full textThis prologue sets the stage for nine articles from a variety of disciplines, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches, that discuss curriculum theorizing in post-truth era. This is about coming out: about being, doing, and becoming uncomfortable; reflecting the space-time-mattering (Barad, 2011) in which we live. In November 2016, I proposed five panels to the Thirteenth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Annual in light (or shade) of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. In the panels, more than 20 educational scholars and activists shared their papers and discussed issues of educational policy, teaching, curriculum studies, educational research, and multicultural education in the post-election times. The significance of the topic urged us to do more with and about it. This special issue is another attempt to address the current conditions of post-truth in curriculum theorizing
Collective turning & modern-day persons unknown: An ideological critique of white supremacy in public
No full textThrough a Critical Whiteness Studies framework, this essay engages in an ideological critique of white supremacy that conceptualizes sites of 20th century spectacle lynching as public pedagogy. After establishing historical sites of terror as teaching/learning moments, the author focuses on contemporary sites of violence—the modern classroom—and links educational structures, policies, and practices to violent legacies. Theorizing ideology within Althusserian and Žižekian frames, spectacle lynching is argued as a situation which crystallized understandings of racial dominance/violence that lay the foundation for modern educational contexts where racial violence is persistently mishandled. Theorized as a “collective turning,” legacies of violence are examined within contemporary educative situations, and readers are asked to recognize white supremacy and avoidance as active forces our contemporary realities
A ‘Race Course,’ ‘Running,’ and a ‘Chariot’: Using the Katha Upanishad to Inform a Curriculum of Selflessness
No full textJackson (1992) demonstrates that most dictionaries define curriculum as a “course of study.” However, he also includes the interpretations; “a race course,” “running,” and “the chariot used in races.” Using a critical interpretive practice of genealogy to organize discourses, Roy first characterizes learning as a yearly “race” around a track where learners pick up a “course of study.” Then, using Pinar’s (1975) method of currere to correspond with “running,” the author shifts from the “race course” to the “runner” (or the learner) and address the learner’s past, desired future, and present context. Finally, drawing upon a “chariot” analogy taken from The Upanishads of Indian Vedantic literature, she probes further into the realm of cognition and provides a philosophy, based on the yoga of selfless action, to inform the runner and the course of study. The paper ends with a bid for a curriculum of selflessness
Deficit-Laden Use of Constructs in Anti-Oppressive Curriculum
No full textIn this paper, the authors draw from critical disability scholarship (narrative prosthesis) and communications (intersectional rhetoric) to interrogate and illustrate how anti-oppressive curriculum advances deficit-ladenenss associated with dis/ability. They categorize deficit-laden constructs as negatively or positively oriented. Negative oriented constructs used to advance racial justice (i.e., color-blindness, color-mute, dysconscious racism, racial dyslexia) remind people not to be (blind, mute, dysconscious, dyslexic) racist. Positive oriented constructs (i.e., standpoint theory, voice, visible or non-visible disability) privilege ways of being, sensing, and expressing resistance to oppression using unimpaired abilities. The authors offer spectral curriculum theory based on materialist criticism to intervene in the deficit-laden use of constructs in anti-oppressive curriculum
The Incompleteness of Standards and the Potential for Deliberative Discourse
No full textApproaching academic standards from a dialogical orientation has significant implications for the normative outcomes of curriculum. Mikhail Bakhtin recognized dialogue as composed of emotional-volitional, axiological perspectives that seek responses from other positions that can embody a space of shared exchange. Entering a discussion, conversation, or testimony with the development of relationships with academic standards as a priority changes the encounter. Our condition as human presents us each with a choice at every moment and in every place to be present. We can occupy that space in a manner that is generative of potentiality and opportunity for ourselves and others or in a manner that forecloses those opportunities. What occurs in school and individual classrooms is shaped by the relationship we form with academic standards. It is the intent of this paper to expose the potential of academic standards to serve as carefully constructed public dialogues
Passages and Pivot Points: Experience and Education as Rites of Passage
No full textThis paper examines the intersection of a rite of passage and an educational experience. John Dewey’s theory of experiential learning is unpacked and compared to each element of the rite of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. This paper utilizes a theoretical perspective as it compares and contrasts Dewey’s theories of experience with that of Arnold van Gennep’s rite of passage framework. Also, Dewey’s notion of the indeterminate situation is juxtaposed with the liminality component associated with the transition phase of a rite of passage. Finally, this paper offers a discussion of how the rite of passage framework connects to the broader field of Curriculum Studies
(Re)acquaintance with Praxis: A Poetic Inquiry into Shame, Sobriety, and the Case for a Curriculum of Authenticity
No full textThrough the use of poetic inquiry, this article explores the possibilities that exist within education when we acknowledge ourselves as imperfect. Drawing upon personal experience, the author seeks to create a dialogic space for reconsidering oneself and one’s ways of being within practice. Engaging poetically with theory and experience, the author uses the method of currere to explore her journey through alcoholism and sobriety, as well as experiences in the classroom, as a means of attending to the loss of connection that often occurs when educators perform according to external definitions. Through her experience, the author discovered that it is authenticity that creates the opportunity for dialogue and connection, allowing us to move beyond definition toward a curricular landscape that embraces our humanity