Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Dwelling in/on the Drive: Life Writing in a Mixed and Mixing Commons
No full textThrough the literary practice of métissage, two educators situated within a West Coast Canadian urban neighbourhood braid different strands of stories that explore notions of migration, home, place, and familial relations. The authors draw from their own and others’ lived experiences while working with life writing of teachers and students in this mixed and mixing cosmopolitan site. They create dialogues with the multiple local issues and identities in this commons through narratives and images. Through and in these dialogues, they investigate the significance of life writing in creating new curricular and literacy theories and practices that seek to reshape education towards more inclusive and just schools and communities
The Public Pedagogy of Student Activists in Chile: What Have We Learned From the Penguins’ Revolution?
No full textIn response to the call for more empirical research on the process of public pedagogy (Sandlin, O’Malley, & Burdick, 2011), this article examines the 2006 secondary school student protests for educational equity in Chile through the lens of public pedagogy. Drawing from interview data with student leaders in one secondary school in Santiago de Chile, this narrative inquiry centers on understanding how leadership and pedagogy function within a social movement grounded in agency for justice. The research questions and data analysis address issues of pedagogical dimensions, coalition building, and observable effects of the student movement. Findings suggest that the process employed by the participants is reflective of Brady’s (2006) feminist conceptualization of public pedagogy, which prioritizes grassroots, collective phenomena and alliances across difference
The “Gutting” of Grutter: White Racial Innocence and Post-racialism in the Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas Austin Oral Arguments
No full textAbigail Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013) is the continuation of the Supreme Court’s negotiation of the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions practices in educational settings. In this article, I undertake a Critical Race discourse analysis of the Fisher case oral arguments to examine how the Supreme Court constructs discourses on race and affirmative action. I argue that the Fisher oral arguments use a “white racial innocence” discourse that constructs whiteness and white people as unfair victims of race-conscious policies. The white racial innocence discourse corresponds with the Court’s emerging use of post-racialism. This analysis looks at post-racialism as a context for pedagogy as discourses around race established by the Court can translate into higher education. The Fisher case impacts the pedagogical context for higher education, with wider implications for students of color, especially if post-racialism is adopted by college campuses
Occupy Museums as Public Pedagogy and Justice Work
No full textFor Occupy Museums, the mainstream art museum is an informal learning space, in which social, cultural and economic hierarchies are perpetuated by powerful individuals and corporations and absorbed by the public. Museums privilege elite patrons and corporations, whose financing for exhibitions and programs has filled in the significant gaps left by severe cuts in public funding. By resisting unionization efforts and relying on low-wage precarious labor, museums perpetuate labor injustices. By furthering dominant narratives of art history and presenting an overwhelmingly white male artistic canon, museums reinforce social and cultural hierarchy. This interview is organized into themed sections. First, by exposing how museums teach visitors, Occupy Museums exposes invisible power imbalances and hierarchies. Next, through interventions at institutions such as MoMA that promote public access to museums and collaboration, Occupy Museums hacks into this problematic museum pedagogy of strict hierarchy and passive learning. Finally, Occupy Museums proposes an alternative museum pedagogy based on their own practices that promotes social justice
Organizing Against the Neo-Liberal Privatization of Education In South Los Angeles: Reflections On the Transformative Potential of Grassroots Research
No full textThis auto/ethnographic study narrates how members of the Association of Raza Educators (ARE), a grassroots teacher-led organization, came together in undertaking action-research within what eventually became a stalled campaign to defend South Los Angeles Elementary from corporate takeover. Most of the work within the campaign involved action-research, including what I term organic popular education. In this paper I analyze the ways in which action-research functions as public pedagogy, further arguing for studies conducted from the vantage point of people immersed in grassroots organizations
Lessons from The Leather Archives and Museum: On The Promises of BDSM
No full textIn this essay, the author explores the experience of taking a class of educators in a Master’s course to visit the Leather Archives and Museum (LA&M). Situated within a course on Social Theory, the author explores the possibility of doing justice to the sexual subject – in particular the queer sexual subjects represented in the museum’s exhibits and archives. Can occupying the space of a museum committed to preserving, archiving, and exhibiting sexual subcultures illuminate new ideas and concepts that might preoccupy queer educational thought in its third decade? Utilizing contemporary queer theory, the author ponders the promises of BDSM that are engaged with the lessons of Leather and BDSM objects. Can such a preoccupation do justice to queer subjects and practices allowing not only for queer survival but queer thrival
Flawed Visions of Democracy in the United States: Influences on Current Critical Social Justice Research
No full textThe visionary, John Dewey, once said that a success to a deliberative democracy is dependent on how a community communicates and then collectively enacts change. His early critiques of Democracy are foundational to current critical research about social justice because the principles that govern our current democracy have been flagrantly marginalized from our communal sense of democratic agency. Social justice research has been highly politicized by policy-makers, which has led research to be more innovative in its challenges of hegemonic principles that have mandated and inculcated compulsory, inequitable, and insensitive schooling practices. This conceptual piece highlights the importance of foregrounding critical social justice research in education as it revisits a historical critique of flawed visions of democracy, its origins in the U.S. Constitution as location for understanding how social justice has been (mis)appropriated and affixed to myriad contexts, and positions the salience of centering critical social justice research in education
“Why Don’t We Learn Like this in School?” One Participatory Action Research Collective’s Framework for Developing Policy Thinking
No full textThis article explores the ways in which schools and communities can create conditions whereby youth can develop and strengthen policy thinking as they pursue advocacy, action, and participatory policy making. Based on a participatory action research (PAR) project created to address the implications of New Jersey’s high school graduation requirements, this framework engages young people in critical policy analysis. Utilizing PAR as a critical pedagogy, we consider the curricula and structures that could nurture policy thinking, as we involve young people in deep critique, analysis, and knowledge production towards community concerns. We describe four dimensions of policy thinking and propose a PAR-based policy thinking framework
"You Must Accept Them and Accept Them With Love"--The Privileged Elite and the Struggle for Educational Justice
No full textWorking from the belief that a humanizing education for the privileged elite is a necessary element of the larger struggle for educational justice, this paper sketches a course for pre-service educators that seeks to model an active commitment to love. After defining love as a political act, I identify and explain three critical lessons in a loving pedagogy for privileged educators-in-training, using student work to anchor the ideas throughout. Ultimately, I argue that regardless of whom we teach, leveraging the power of love to resurrect the human being of our students should be the goal of any practice rooted in the struggle for educational justice
Re-Reading the Emergence of the Subject English: Disrupting NCTE’s Historiography
No full textThis article disrupts dominant narratives of English’s curriculum history in order to draw attention to configurations of knowledge and self-disciplinary practices that have fallen outside of English education’s historiography. It begins with a reading of three histories sanctioned by the National Council of Teachers of English (e.g. Applebee, 1974; Hook, 1979; Lindemann, 2010) in which history has been constituted as celebratory and complicit in maintaining education’s grand narratives. It then draws from the work of Foucault, cultural histories of education, and the new curriculum history to reexamine English education’s first programmatic texts that were published between 1896 and 1912. This analysis examines how the English curriculum was represented as a disciplinary technology that should attune youths’ minds and souls to a range of norms and ideals, foster youths’ capacities for self-governance, and constitute racial and national imaginaries. The goal of the article is to disrupt progressive readings of the field’s history so that scholars and educators might scrutinize ethical and political commitments of the subject English that have been overlooked or obscured by NCTE’s historiography