Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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“You Don’t Want to Sound Like You’re from Alabama”: Resonances of Place and Race in Student Narratives of The South
No full textUsing sounded methodologies, this paper attunes to the sonic and discursive slippages between how and Alabama are invoked in college student narratives of navigating the socio-historical context of race on a University campus. Listening and composing with sound offers a methodology for mapping the discursive, intellectual, and material geographies that reify and perpetuate the histories and ongoing traumas of white supremacy and racialization in higher education curriculum spaces at the same time as it offers entry points for refusing, re-negotiating, and resisting these legacies
From Currere to Ambire: An Ambient Curriculum
No full textThis article follows one elementary school teacher navigating the challenges to her curricular commitments posed by the coronavirus pandemic in a major city. I explore what happens when she engages with Ellen Reid’s SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled piece of sound art, to offer audiences with access to Central Park an opportunity to listen to orchestral music while maintaining social distancing. I extend Lauren Berlant’s theory of “ambient citizenship”—a way of thinking about political belonging in ordinary scenes at the intersection of sound, movement, and affect—to consider how an ambient curriculum opens up new ways of understanding knowledge, identity, and possibility. I argue that SOUNDWALK made heard an ambient curriculum that already existed—in ambulance alarms, eerie city and school silences, Zoom feedback, and feeling unheard—and, for a moment at least, dislodged the ‘stuckness’ of going on amid it all
Monstrous Intimacies: The Sounding and Mis/hearing of Will/ful Literacies
No full textIn this paper, I contend that the tolerance for and presumed necessity of “ordinary” violence within educational spaces can be thought of as monstrous intimacies. Building on Sharpe (2010), I imagine these intimacies as more-than-human sonic entanglements that highlight how the ongoing violent processes of educational subjectification are affectively linked to intimacy as well as the material-discursive codes of the Enlightenment, slavery, and post-slavery. Specifically, I argue that the making of successful literacy learners within this first-grade classroom involved will (Ahmed, 2014), or attempts to immobilize matter as an active vibrational force in order to affirm children as rational, thinking subjects disconnected from the “body of the classroom.” Such will ignored how sounds, bodies, spaces, and “things”—as a collection of affects—extended relationally into children, participated in literacy events, and made children’s bodies vulnerable to monstrous intimacies—particularly boys of color who were often excluded for transmitting willfulness
Engaging Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as a "Great" Curriculum: A Curriculum Critique
No full textFred Rogers was a master pedagogue and his magnum opus, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, is an exemplary progressive curriculum that endures as a “great curriculum” (Poetter, 2011). Using Poetter’s (2011) “great curriculum” heuristic, this curriculum critique (Eisner, 2002) explores the progressive possibilities of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This critique analyzes Rogers’ staunch advocacy for children and his masterful use of television to model democratic community life. This critique also considers the enduring legacy and, especially, the continuing curricular impact of Fred Rogers’ work
Securing our Futures through Land and Water Education: Developing an Indigenous Language Curriculum in a Tribal Nation Early Learning Program
No full textThis article depicts a process of developing an Indigenous language curriculum within a Tribal Nation Early Learning program, emphasizing the importance of developing and understanding pathways toward decolonization to secure Indigenous futurities. We share our story of curriculum development and how relationships with land, water, place, and ancestral teachings drove the efforts. The process demonstrates how commitments of language revitalization were deeply connected to upholding Indigenous lifeways through a land-and-water-based curriculum as an act of resurgence. Sharing examples from the curriculum, we describe how children’s language learning and identity as Indigenous peoples were fostered through relationships with land and water. We also discuss challenges designing and implementing an Indigenous language curriculum within public early learning. This research advances work around resistance to settler futurities by narrowing in on ways we disrupted settler-serving policy initiatives that over-standardize children’s education through a land-and-water-based language curriculum
Listening to the Sounds of Healing
No full textThis work attends to sounds that are sounded by human actors and the echoes of human actors in the lifeworlds and places where sounds are composed and consumed. The multidirectional vibrations of sounds are examined through the stories of three youth, Miriam, Sheldon, and Nellie, to understand how false communities found within schooling and familial spaces reduce listening to passive assimilation into hierarchical relationships that reify capitalistic purposes for listening, bodies, and (un)responses to sound. Within affective relationships, we explore how the youth restoried their engagements with sounds and the producers of sounds to explore and resist compliance, make agentive decisions to heal from coercive linguistic power relations, and create an otherwise sonic place of belonging
Towards a Theory of Lyric Curriculum
No full textWe take, as point of departure for this inquiry, the event of Amanda Gorman’s reading of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 US Presidential Inauguration, which did something poems rarely do: resonate widely. Its broad uptake in classrooms and communities suggests that poems are not inert words on a page; instead, they do things. This conception of poetry as a social actor is articulated by theorist Jonathan Culler, whose Theory of the Lyric examines poetry from antiquity through today to identify different social functions of lyric poems. In this paper we take up Culler’s theory and pair it with a number of lyric texts as we wonder and worry about curriculum. What happens if we imagine that curriculum might be good for freeing students (and teachers!) from prosaic perceptions of the world? Or How might curricula, like lyric texts, create communities of care and attention? What we offer, ultimately, is as much curriculum poem as academic study
Embracing Epistemological Collisions as Sites of Critical Indigenous Pedagogy: Insights From Partnering for Diné Curriculum Building
No full textBearing Witness to Violence Through Noise: A Critical Exploration of Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck’s Affective Curriculum
No full textThis paper explores the nature of earwitnessing, or the act of bearing witness through sound, via noise. Employing Thompson’s (2017) definition of the term, I argue that noise holds the pedagogical potential to address critiques of bearing witness and to pose a challenge to violent relations within the broader milieu. I do so by placing Thompson and other’s affective theorizations of sound in conversation with writings on affect in education. I then introduce scholarship on the educative potential of bearing witness to illustrate how noise can respond to the political shortcomings of witnessing by creating a pedagogical opening to critically reimagine affective economies. Finally, I ground this exploration within the album, Runzelstock & Gurgelstirn by Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck. Through the intentional deployment of noise, the album embodies the curricular potential of earwitnessing as a means to reckon with the affective relations that undergird violence.
 
Peeling the Orange and Spitting Out the Seeds: A Metaphorical Introduction to Curriculum
No full textCurriculum is a term widely used by educational stakeholders but may be hard to define. In actuality, curriculum is composed of many forces and individuals. Using the metaphor of an orange, the author presents a novel way of examining the different structures operating within and through curriculum, including societal ideologies, accountability measures, local schools, and teachers. Originally intended to be a metaphor to assist preservice teachers’ comprehension of the far-reaching connections to their work, this article serves to remind any reader that despite the extant power structures, curricular discussions must be focused on the most important aspect of education: students