Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Beyond Dualisms: Interdependence and Possibilities in Education Today
No full textLooking also at the past, Asher considers the present-day relevance of working through dualistic thought in order to move towards engaging interdependence and possibilities in education today. Heightened polarities of race, class, nation, and gender mark the current U.S. context, even as we find ourselves in unprecedented proximity with diverse others in a digital, global age. Drawing on curriculum and postcolonial and feminist theorizings, as well as the works of James Baldwin and Hanif Kureishi as illustrative examples, I develop the discussion in four sections—Roots and Branches, Head and Heart, Here and There and Then and Now, and Present and Future—in order to consider possibilities for our shared, multicultural, global future across different contexts.
Time to Die: Zombie as Educational Evolution in The Girl with All the Gifts
No full textUnique among horror tropes, the zombie apocalypse narrative must usually conclude either with a cure or a profoundly transformed new world. The Girl with All the Gifts (Clarke & McCarthy, 2016) instead offers a view of a world in transition – a world that offers illuminating questions for theorizing educational reform. What does it mean to come through infection with your humanity intact? What does it mean to survive a contagion so universal that it’s impossible to transcend it unchanged? The in-betweenness of humans who perservere in the strange new world must become “something not like anything that has existed before,” which suggest that survival in the neoliberal educational policy milieu may require reformers to become both less and more than they expect
Disability Plots: Curriculum, Allegory, & History
No full textThis article discusses theoretical approaches from disability studies and curriculum studies to help educators see how we position the experiences of, and discourses about, people with disabilities in the various narratives we recreate about “America” and U.S. national history. It uses Pinar’s curriculum theory of allegory (2015) to explain how historical narratives of disability can be read in diverse ways. The specific stories of disability that appear in the curriculum of history education performatively do different things. The article shares examples of disability histories taught in classrooms to argue that these are historical allegories of our present thoughts on disability with each narrative following a specific curricular mode of emplotment, ranging from romance to epic, horror, and more
Introduction: We Make Our Own Monsters
No full textThe special issues editors, devote this special issue of JCT to the theme of monsters— vampires, ghosts, aliens, and anything that identifies as more-than-human, less-than-human, post-human, sub-human, or non-human. In other words, it is the turning of what “is” human sideways, burying, killing, or transforming our Westernized dominant mythos of “humanism” in favor of something…otherwise
A “Visibilizing” Project: “Seeing” the Ontological Erasure of Disability in Teacher Education and Social Studies Curricula
No full textIn their consideration the quintessential questions of “What knowledge is of most worth? Who decides? Who benefits?” Nusbaum and Steinborn have arrived at a concept that they name ontological erasure. This concept goes beyond the absence of disability from curricular content, or silence around disability in educational justice frameworks—but rather is the active erasing of certain body-minds from “being” in the educational landscape. This paper traces their path in attempting to first understand what they both viewed as the absence or silence of disability from justice dialogues and curricular work that seeks to advance conceptions of diversity and underrepresented, marginalized groups. Then, they examine the genealogy of ableism in a brief survey of United States history and connected social studies curricula to demonstrate the necropolitical treatment and subsequent erasure of disability from academic spaces dedicated to social justice. Nusbaum and Steinborn hypothesize that pushing disability studies to the fore of those conversations requires interrogating whose histories are told, whose lives are given worth, and how the history taught in U.S. schools perpetuates a hierarchy of knowledge that is fundamentally ableist. This reconceptualization, thus, requires—demands—a “visibilizing” of disability within the educational landscapes from which it has been erased
Superheroes as Monsters as Teachers as Monsters as Superheroes
No full textSuperheroes offer a promise of not only a better tomorrow, but better versions that we, as humans, can be. They represent the epoch of our evolution, and as demonstrated by their continued popularity, it is a promise that speaks to many of us directly. This said, another reason that superheroes are intriguing, from a curriculum studies perspective, is how the superhero trope has been overlaid onto teachers and teaching. “Teachers are the real superheroes,” the saying goes. But is this belief, like superheroes themselves, simply a myth or story we tell ourselves? Is it the hope or promise that never arrives? If so, is it to shield us from some monstrous truth? Could it be that superheroes represent something much darker? Using several superhero examples, the television series Westworld, and the work of Sylvia Wynter, this paper posits that superheroes, as a metaphor for teachers, are problematic because of their true monstrous nature and that the better metaphor are the “hosts” in Westworld who are seemingly monsters but are actually “heroes.
Curriculum, Empiricisms, and Post-Truth Politics
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to approach the phenomenon of post-Truth politics as an important site of inquiry for the field of curriculum theory. The authors define curriculum as the empirical frameworks that shape our acts of knowing, being, and relating to the world, and argue that inquiries into curriculum must move beyond a concern with epistemology alone. The framework of empiricism ensures that curriculum scholars attend simultaneously to learned habits and methods of knowing and relating to the world. These habits and methods, in turn, have particular ethical, epistemic, and ontological commitments. The authors point to particular empirical frameworks that tacitly inform the disciplinary organization of schooling, before exploring a different empirical tradition in the work of John Dewey. The article ends by placing Dewey’s empirical philosophy in conversation with the work of Sylvia Wynter to inquire into new curricular possibilities
The other bad men at the door: Ontological spaces and the monstrous
No full textThe project here lies in putting two texts—The Walking Dead (TWD) and True Detective (Season 1)—to work in the effort of pedagogy, looking at the text as curriculum and as a way to teach curriculum theorizing through the use of popular culture. Using a cultural studies framework, this paper suggests that contemporary popular culture provides fertile ground for new understandings of the ways in which the socio-cultural context and its relation to contemporary issues in curriculum theory are entangled in the ethical and the ontological. In particular, representations of the spatial in the show/s provide an entrée into thinking about the ways in which space is increasingly politicized within contemporary conditions. I argue that these two shows are primarily about ontology—what it means to be, or perhaps in the “posts,” what might it mean to become. For a zombie show like TWD, this may seem obvious as we witness the transformation of the dead to the undead, but as has been offered all over the internet, the show is really about the human (or post-human?) characters. True Detective, at least at first glance, a more traditional, film noir, Southern gothic crime drama, buries these questions a little deeper and requires one to think through the dialogue and overall structure to push the ontological. Both shows involve the monstrous, however (spoiler alert), at the end of the day…the monstrous is us
“La lucha todavía no ha terminado”/The struggle has not yet ended: Teaching immigration through testimonio and difficult funds of knowledge
No full textIn spite of immigration’s influential role in American history and politics, contemporary issues in immigration are rarely addressed in elementary classrooms. This instrumental case study of a bilingual social studies methods course in an elementary teacher preparation program examined projects focused on immigration and related executive orders issued by newly elected President Trump in the spring of 2017. The lessons and student conversations analyzed revealed the importance of providing young learners with nuanced and thoughtful opportunities for testimonio, or personal narrative, that address the difficult funds of knowledge that immigrant children and the children of immigrants may possess, such as personal experiences with deportation and detention. In the midst of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and around the world, the preservice teachers’ work offers possibilities for powerful, student-centered pedagogies and counter-narratives at the elementary level.