Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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The Purposes of History? Curriculum Studies, Invisible Objects and Twenty-first Century Societies
No full textA new intellectual epoch has generated new enterprises to suit changed beliefs and circumstances. A widespread sentiment in both formal historiography and curriculum studies reduces the “new” to the question of how knowledge is recognized as such, how it is gained, and how it is represented in narrative form. Whether the nature of history and conceptions of knowledge are, or ought to be, central considerations in curriculum studies and reducible to purposes or elevated as present orientated requires rethinking. This paper operates as an incitement to discourse that disrupts the protection and isolation of primary categories in the field whose troubling is overdue. In particular, the paper moves through several layers that highlight the lack of settlement regarding the endowment of objects for study with the status of the scientific. It traces how some “invisible” things have been included within the purview of curriculum history as objects of study and not others. The focus is the making of things deemed invisible into scientific objects (or not) and the specific site of analysis is the work of William James (1842-1910). James studied intensely both child mind and the ghost, the former of which becomes scientized and legitimated for further study, the latter abjected. This contrast opens key points for reconsideration regarding conditions of proof, validation criteria, and subject matters and points to opportunities to challenge some well-rehearsed foreclosures within progressive politics and education
Identities-in-Practice in a Figured World of Achievement: Toward Curriculum and Pedagogies of Hope
No full textIn the current high stakes context of standardization and accountability, deficit perspectives about minoritized students are perpetuated by discourses of achievement that reproduce dominant raced, classed, and gendered norms in society. Discourses about equity, effort, and colorblindness shape figured worlds of achievement in which certain academic identities become available and function to position students as “achievers” or “non-achievers.” Focusing primarily on an assemblage of narratives from and about a “failing” student who “passes,” this article examines the interrelatedness of multiple identities, experiences of curriculum, and academic achievement of minoritized students in a selective urban middle school and conceptualizes identities-in-practice in figured worlds as a lens that can foster curricula and pedagogies of hope
Chain Reaction: A Youth-driven, Multimedia Storytelling Project Promoting Alternatives to Calling the Police
No full textThe authors detail their work with Chain Reaction, a Chicago-based participatory action research and popular education project working to spark conversations about alternatives to calling the police on young people. As volunteers for Chain Reaction, we facilitated a series of workshops an LGBTQ youth center in which youth used digital audio recorders to interview each other about their experiences with police, then curated the stories for a toolkit on alternatives to policing. As the stories consistently reflect, when young people become involved with the police, it often sets off a chain reaction that can result in dropping out of school, losing jobs, and ongoing contact with state systems. The goal of Chain Reaction is to support community-based strategies for stopping these cycles. We explore the theoretical frameworks and the limitations and successes of the project, and offer suggestions for those interested in doing similar projects
Theorizing Community and School Partnerships with Diné Youth
No full textIn this paper, the author describes how four Diné youth participants defined community and theorized about the types of community and school partnerships that could effectively support the youth academically and holistically. By researching through an indigenous methodology and theorizing through a Diné framework the author discussed the participants’ needs holistically through an inherent system of relationships that make up the Diné philosophy of community, k’é. K’é is the Diné concept of recognizing and maintaining harmonious relationships and all the positive virtues that should be inherent within a family. In the process, the author retheorized community and school partnerships and worked to contribute to the process of self-determination and self-education of the Navajo Nation
Shape of the Wound: Restorative Justice in Potential Spaces A Review of “Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture” (Exhibition, Sullivan Galleries, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2012)
No full textGrounded in restorative and transformative justice praxes, this review interprets the exhibition, Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture. The unsettled knowledge that emerges from this exhibition is represented in conceptual art objects, which are multidisciplinary proposals for memorials to over 100 cases of confessions violently coerced by Chicago Police officers. First, I discuss this context, the individual proposals on display, and the ways in which the summative exhibition as a work of public pedagogy builds up a powerful, participatory image of individual loss through torture, and resulting violence to the body politic, which affectively emphasizes impermanence and love. Next, drawing on D.W. Winnicott’s notions of transitional object and potential space, I explore the restorative potential of memorials as transitional objects which do more than memorialize the past; they enable potential space and imaginative projection of a curriculum of transformative justice
Justice Work In and Out of Justice Itself
No full textThis is my origin story. It is interwoven with three stories of justice untold, even disavowed. In an attempt to decenter the central narrative of justice as political action, I shine light on the everyday, often unnoticed moments in which justice appears. Both ordinarily mundane and extraordinary in their own right, these stories may seem familiar, even common, but to the high school youth who tell them, they are fierce acts of their own. They are about justice work that occurs, in a literal sense, in and out of schools, but also about justice work on existential and subjective levels of intimate experience. They ask us to consider the fragility of moral universals and how justice may require one to completely ignore justice in order to do justice, to step out of justice and just work
The Other Side of Silence: The Look of Separation
No full textThis is an article for JCT Special Issue –Narrative of Curriculum in the South: Lives In-Between Contested Race, Gender, Class, and Powe
Memoir of A Black Female Social Worker: Re-Collections on Black Women Parenting and Parental Involvement in the Education of Black Children
No full textThis is an article for JCT Special Issue –Narrative of Curriculum in the South: Lives In-Between Contested Race, Gender, Class, and Powe
Examining Students’ Experiences as a Foundation for Multicultural Curriculum Development
No full textIn this article, we discuss the findings of a narrative inquiry into the development of a classroom–based experiential and multicultural curriculum in the context of an urban, public, and culturally diverse K–8 school in Canada. We present the implementation of multicultural curriculum activities that drew upon students’ lived stories of culture, immigration, and settlement to explore the social and linguistic impact of such activities for English Language Learners (ELLs). We further illustrate in this paper the potential of students’ experiential narratives of schooling, culture, and cross–cultural movement for expanding the possibilities of teacher preparation and development for engaging in curricular situations and interactions with diverse student populations
