Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Confronting the Assessment Industrial Complex: A Call for a Shift from Testing Rhetoric
No full textGiven the pervasive and impactful nature of assessments on educational outcomes of all forms, the authors posit that assessments have morphed into the Assessment Industrial Complex (AIC). Critical analysis of AIC demonstrates a narrowing of participatory dialogue while reinforcing historical hierarchies of control and exploitation. This limits students’ capacity to eventually function as citizens in a democracy. More specifically, proponents of the AIC utilize test scores to persuade the general public that standardized testing policies are achieving their intended outcomes (e.g., creating equal opportunities for individuals to achieve their goals and aspirations), despite the lack of truth and evidence to support these claims. Moreover, under the AIC rhetoric, knowledge becomes anti-dialogical and reduced to the convergence of political and corporate values. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the impact of the AIC on education and, thus, society, as well as to develop a counter-narrative that may offer an alternative discourse that empowers the public and reframes the current narrative
Life. Frayed.
No full textThrough stream-of-consciousness poetic inquiry, Seidel attempts to capture the experience of a violent body/brain crash on ice that suddenly fractured her life. She chronicals the recovery from traumatic brain injury, moving through the medical system, the frustrations and confusions of being labelled, tested, reduced to fragments, and the challenges of returning to work different and differently. The paper concludes with a reflection on what her experience of vulnerability and fragility might mean for thinking about radical diversity in teaching and learning, and for the field of curriculum studies
Beyond the Limits of Radical Educational Reform: Toward a Critical Theory of Education
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Promising Truths, in Fiction & Teaching: Sincerity
No full textIn this essay, Jarvie makes the case for teaching as a sincere act. By that, he does not mean the conventional notion of operating without “pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy” (OED), but instead a more radical uptake drawn from literature—fiction (e.g., Egan, 2010; Eggers, 2001; Wallace, 2001)—and literary theory (Kelly, 2016) that understands the concept as “always contaminated internally by the threat of manipulating the other…this sincerity depends not on purity but on trust and faith” (Kelly, 2016, p. 201). Such a sincerity offers educators ways of teaching hopefully, bringing forth themselves in conversation with students. It offers a way of rethinking teaching as primarily and problematically a manipulative and impositional act, a mode of imagining pedagogy beyond the dichotomy between oppressive transmission pedagogies and liberatory critical ones. Jarvie suggests that if we’re going to humanize (Paris & Winn, 2013) our work as educators and scholars of education, a renewed theorizing that affirms the role of the teacher as relationally important, as having something to offer through the communication of their selves, can enrich the work of teaching—as an extension of teachers’ lives, as creative and communal, compelling, complex, and deeply personal work—in ways that prove fruitful for both teachers and students.
Our monsters, ourselves: Desire, death and deviance in the Gothic narratives and how they in-form an inquiry of currere
No full textThis paper explores the idea that the creation of the monsters’ existence at the hands of Gothic authors, such as Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Brahm Stoker, serves as fictionalized examples of the inquiry of currere (or “ficto-currere” [McDermott, 2019]), and the exploration of “possibility.” Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker’s social and personal life experiences have evidently influenced their writings. This auto-ethnographic element of their stories, this self-examination and incorporation of their life experiences, becomes their currere. Through this lens of currere, their stories can tell us a lot about controversial topics that were too taboo to straightforwardly address during the 1800s, when they were written—topics such as mental and physical illnesses or queering sexual identity. The author suggests that this depends not on being rationalized, but on being “poeticized,” as happens through the three examples of speculative fiction examined here. The author extends the dread and desire of the monstrous “afflicted” identities of these authors within their historical contexts toward curriculum. The monstrosity of the desires and the dread for each of the gothic authors examined in this paper is considered from the perspective of currere-as-inquiry
Intersecting Arts Based Research and Disability Studies: Suggestions for Art Education Curriculum Centered on Disability Identity Development
No full textThis research investigates how arts based research methods contribute to the development of a positive disability identity through the act of uncovering. Through the theoretical framework of critical disability studies, the experience of having invisible disabilities in a normative society is explored via narrative and visual methods of inquiry including reflexive journaling, drawing, watercolor and sculpture. The heuristic process of arts based reflexivity is then used as a means to create a comprehensive portrait of the disability experience. This study concludes with research implications that address the ways in which teachers can integrate critical disability studies into the art classroom as well as significant considerations for when art educators introduce this type of critically reflective work into their teaching practices
