Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Eventicizing Curriculum: Learning to Read and Write through Becoming a Citizen of the World
No full textWithin our contemporary globalized society exists a discourse on a changed knowledge production, where knowledge is crossing borders, exchanged, changed and re-evaluated at great speed. At the same time, there is within the field of education an enormous increase in devices intended to produce stable and permanent knowledge through the taming of learning processes as well as entire practices by planning, supervising, controlling, assessing and evaluating them towards preset goals. This article proposes a way of orienting ourselves in the current situation through describing some of the didactical and scientific work effectuated within the research project "The Magic of Language". Through weaving together examples from preschool children's learning to read and write, teachers and researchers work with pedagogical documentation and French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept "event", it is demonstrated how we can counter-effectuate current attempts to tame learning and practices and instead engage in a more creative, profound, collective and nevertheless stringent approach
An Experiment Into the Public Face of Education Scholarship: Or, How to Stop "Roiling Along" Tenure and Promotion Tracks
No full textThis piece calls for an experiment in response to the following questions: In what ways might education professors engage in furthering their public engagement as part of democratic aspirations? How might we measure the quality and quantity of such and its enhancement of intellectual life at the intersections of the academy and beyond? If, however defined, we are failing in our public service, and if this should be of concern, and if we are in part doing it to ourselves, then experimenting with how it might be otherwise seems like the scholarly thing to do.
Mapping the Doctoral Journey via Autobiographical Consciousness: Locating Self and Finding Voice in the Academy
No full textIn this paper, I map elements of self-construction that came into play as I pursued acceptance within the academy as an aspiring scholar. To explore my educational growth as a doctoral student, I weave together autobiography, expressed through anecdotal disclosure and poetic narrative, and social cartography, a research genre for mapping disputatious discursive terrain-in this case what I see as the divergence between the logic of erudition and aesthetic sensibilities, on the one hand, and the struggle between being self- or other-directed, on the other. To conduct this inquiry, I recall and revisit the 'private pole' of my upbringing constructed by disparate parental views of life and learning-the 'early curriculum' and the 'other curriculum' poetically narrated-in contrast to the 'public pole' of the doctoral journey itself. This form of artful inquiry is offered as one possible approach for others who may experience a sense of distancing or disorientation as they pursue acceptance in the academy
Understanding Curriculum as a Polyphonic Text: Curriculum Theorizing in the midst of Standardization
No full textWe live with the language of standards and standardization. This paper is a collaborative curriculum theorizing effort between a teacher educator and a high school teacher in the era of standardization. In this article, drawing upon narrative inquiry and the Bakhtinian notion of polyphony, we challenge the domination of the meta-narrative of standardization that works as an official force and explore possibilities of understanding curriculum as a polyphonic text. We argue that curriculum as a polyphonic text requires that different voices be heard without having one voice privileged over the others, producing no final, complete truth, thus promoting a genuine dialogue among stakeholders to improve curriculum.
Exploring Possibility: Challenging Curriculum, Students, and Teachers to be Engaged and Critical
No full textI situate a curricular change I made in a literature course in a preservice teacher education (TE) program in the current politics of education. Facing broad preservice teacher apathy for critical or thoughtful work, I argue that TE students who don't critically engage their worlds are (reasonably) less likely to critically engage and address issues they face as new teachers. In a state exporting teachers, and with most new teachers starting in under-serviced urban schools, the impact of students refusing to consider the racist subtext of a picturebook, for instance, could have devastating effects on schools, students, and communities who can least afford them. Not a slippery slope, here, since this phenomenon exists already in K-12 education"”I propose that by working as I did in my course, we can start to explore a much more productive and generative "possibility" for the immediate and long-term future of education
Using The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian To Teach About Racial Formation
No full textIn this review of Sherman Alexie's 2007 novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I discuss how I use an excerpt from the book in an undergraduate Sociocultural Studies in Education course. I argue that works such as this, even though they are classified as young adult fiction, hold powerful possibility for student learning when juxtaposed against theoretical texts. I explain how I use the text in class to teach students about racial formation theory. In particular, I use the experiences of Junior, the story's 14-year-old narrator and protagonist, as examples that illustrate how racialized identities get constructed and negotiated.
Wringing the Neck of the Swan: Second Language Learning as a Tool for Conviviality
No full textThe author compares industrial (and modernist) second language learning approaches to convivial second language learning approaches. The paper utilizes the ideas of conviviality as described in the writings of Ivan Illich. Examples come from the author's experiences as a second language teacher and second language learner. The author includes recommendations for a more convivial approach toward second language learning, both for school environments and for public learning experiences in the commons
Youtube's Potential as a Model for Democracy: Exploring Citizentube for "Thick" Democratic Content
No full textThe purpose of this article was to examine whether and in what ways the medium of YouTube (and in particular the Citizentube channel) can model a thick conception of democracy, and what limitations exist for democracy to be modeled and enacted in this medium. Three ideas were chosen to define "thick democracy:" active participation by citizens, pursuing social justice, and engaging in democratic dialogue. A sample of 106 videos located in the "favorites" tab of the Citizentube channel was analyzed to determine how well they modeled these three aspects of thick democracy. The article concludes that although YouTube, and in particular Citizentube, evidences many elements of democratic content including some superficial aspects of thick democracy, the more advanced aspects of democracy have yet to be developed in this medium. It may be that democracy in social networking spaces, like democracy everywhere, is a process rather than an accomplishment.
Repeating Until We Can Remember: Difficult (Public) Knowledge in South Africa
No full textAs part of the ongoing conversations in curriculum theory regarding difficult knowledge, representations of historical trauma, and public pedagogy, the authors of this paper draw from their experiences on an educational trip to South Africa. The paper begins by exploring the nature of trauma and the relationship between public displays and private understandings. The authors provide narratives of their experiences in two Apartheid museums, ones that are uncommon in their attempts to disrupt dominant narratives of progress, and subsequently use these narratives consider how the distinction between past and present collapses in the spaces of encounters with traumatic representations. Finally, the consequences of such theorization are articulated in terms of the need to reconsider the purposes of educational lessons that rest on such encounters away from learning history to prevent the repetition of past events and toward an understanding of that repetition itself
Performative Politics and Radical Possibilities: Re-framing Pop Culture Text Work in Schools
No full textThis article draws attention to radical possibilities in classroom work with pop culture texts when teachers and students acknowledge and explore the micro-level political work people undertake when negotiating meanings for those texts. Data from a year-long ethnographic study of pop culture in a tenth grade English classroom in the U.S. illustrates some ways youth used embodied pop culture texts like clothing, shoes, and accessories to negotiate racial and ethnic identities in the classroom. The author employs post-structural performance theory to analyze a moment of discursive conflict between two students - an event when categories of race, gender, and class circulated discussion of a pair of earrings. She argues that similar struggles over pop culture text meanings are events when people practice performative politics, i.e., performing, reproducing, and reinventing ways of being in school and the world. Such uses of pop culture texts carry radical possibilities for classroom participants and curriculum