Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Curriculum Design and Planning: Using Postmodern Curricular Approaches
No full textThis paper offers a model for educators aiming to engage postmodern research and theory as sources of theoretical guidance for curriculum development. Rooted in the literature, this design illustrates the foundational elements of curriculum planning including the classroom environment, student learning assessment, and communication with stakeholders. This plan includes detailed aspects such as goals, content, learning opportunities, modes of presentation, and overall course evaluation procedures. This curriculum has a transformative and webbed approach to integrated, interdisciplinary curriculum design organized around the guiding question “how have campuses normalized violence in everyday life?” The authors provide examples of teaching that is oriented towards making the familiar strange, facilitating discovery, including autobiographies, and developing experiential opportunities through multi-modal approaches to teaching and learning. Further, the curriculum aims to increase perspectives integrated into the hermeneutic circle of interpretation and includes proactive, critical conversations that challenge the status quo and affirm marginalized voices
Troubling Sympathy: Teaching Refugee and Child Soldier Narratives
No full textAlthough the choice to assign stories about refugee experience and other narratives of human suffering can help teachers cultivate a global perspective with students, there is a risk that readers will reproduce asymmetrical discourses of sympathy and pity. Such discourses reinforce the perceived distance between the self and Other, positioning the reader as one who can and should uplift the protagonists of the stories. This article applies Luc Boltanksi’s theory of “distant suffering” to excerpts of student writing in order to complicate the relationship between reader and text. By examining student written responses, this article proposes that performances of sympathy be replaced with reflections on complicity in the consumption of human suffering.
Classtrophobia: the student as troll in student course evaluations [an a/r/tographical video rendering]
No full textThis a/r/tographical inquiry renders our experiences of “Student Evaluations of Course” (SEC) reports through the creation of a video art work, Classtrophobia. The work is our response to what it means to be an academic in the current neo-liberal climate of surveillance. The first section of the paper situates this inquiry within the available research literature investigating the use of SEC data to evaluate teaching quality. The second section of the paper presents two videos from the Classtrophobia body of work and examines the interplay of reflection and interpretation during the process of creation as a way to inquire into how meanings of our lived-experiences are constructed through the making process. In some sense, the creation of Classtrophobia is a cathartic exercise to help the authors manage the angst and frustrations often present in the seemingly incoherent bureaucracies of contemporary academic life.
Reading Curriculum in the Age of Spectacle: Reclaiming Experience and Dialogue in Reading
No full textUsing Fahrenheit 451 as a model for reading in the age of spectacle, this paper offers a critique of reading curriculum driven by Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (CCSS-ELA), which divorces reading from dialogue and lived experience. Drawing on Debord’s (1967/1983) notion of spectacle, the author considers how our current cultural moment may be shaping and shaped by an alienated and alienating curriculum of reading. By embracing the political implications of reading curriculum, we can reclaim reading as a dialogic activity grounded in the world
FERVENT FORTITUDES: EXPLORING EMOTIONS AND RACIAL LITERACY AS ANTIRACIST PEDAGOGY
No full textThe emotionality of race in education calls for continual pedagogical reconceptualizations that specifically address emotion. As such, the purpose of this paper is to inform and expand pedagogies related to educational equity in the context of emotionally charged race conversations in postsecondary education classrooms. We do this by first putting forth some theoretical claims about emotions within education and racial literacy. We then share our findings from our study of a job embedded professional-practice graduate course for full-time practicing educators, a course on educational equity called “Culturally Responsive Classroom Management.” We discovered two types of experiential narratives: pity and emotional negativity toward racially-minoritized children. We also found evidence that educational leaders burdened their racially-minoritized colleagues by showing emotional negativity toward the Black/African American children they served. Thus, we asked: can someone who has pity and emotional negativity about race have the competence or “fervent fortitude” needed to address racial inequality and the emotions it promulgates? Such a question is crucial in our complicated world, but the implications lie in a twofold approach that involves engaging both emotions and racial literacy curricularly
Is John Dewey's Thought "Humanist"?
No full textThis paper proposes that John Dewey’s thought is not entirely humanist, and that a dehumanist reconstruction of his philosophy opens curriculum studies toward a pragmatic, democratic engagement with the uncountable nonhumans that share the earth with those who think of themselves as “human.” The essay outlines what is meant by both humanism and dehumanism before analyzing how a cluster of keywords in Deweyan thought—habit, experience, growth, and democracy—can be put to use in ways that are not anthropocentric or exclusively human. By arguing that Dewey’s humanism (which has been taken for granted in much Deweyan scholarship) can be extracted from his potentially nonhumanist conceptualizations of democracy and pedagogy, the essay claims that Dewey’s thought can prove a pragmatic point of departure for dehumanist curriculum studies, and that Deweyan pragmatics offer nonhumanist philosophy a set of concepts for better understanding what a democracy of humans, nonhuman animals, and inhuman objects could be.