Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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"All We Are Saying...":The Case for Peace in Curriculum Theory
No full textAn editorial introduction to Literacies section
Parkour and the Build Environment: Spatial Practices and the Plasticity of School Buildings
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to explore 'subversive' spatial practices as symbolic and material instances of resistance that target the physical contours of buildings and dislocate the structuring binary of inside/outside. I focus on issues of perception, mobility and corporeality in theoretical writing on the built environment. I examine Parkour, a popular form of youth culture described as the 'art of movement', and argue that it is a tactic of spatial misuse that strategically confronts the totalizing space of the school building, redefines the built environment, and puts the body back into school architecture
Editor's Note: Intersubjectively Cultivate Our Worldly Sensibility
No full textIt is the editorial for the section of International Curriculum Discourses
Curriculum as Zen: Five Moments Inspired by Aoki
No full textAvraham Cohen (2008) recalls, "There is an idea in Zen, the Gateless Gate" (91). This paper discusses curriculum-as-lived/living pedagogy in the philosophical context of Zen. Often, second language curriculum is seen as being linear - however language learning goes beyond these categorizations. Inspired by Aoki's (2000) article Locating living pedagogy in teacher 'research': five metonymic moments, I sought an understanding of the conflicts between curriculum-as-planned and curriculum-as-lived. In Zen, emptiness is crucial to entering a space void of relativity that embraces difference, change and impermanence. Operating from this space, Hori (1994) suggests we strive to teach without teaching by opening ourselves to the possibilities thriving in our students' voices. Moved by Aoki's moments, I observe my own five moments of Zen. In a practical reality, we face unending questions. Zen might offer a peaceable suspension of this problem
Chalking the Profession: Unintended Lessons about Teaching
No full textChalk, a mockumentary about teaching, goes against the more mainstream portrayal of teachers as educators as heroes. It employs the post-modern strategies of the mockumentary to challenge the notion that teachers in the cinematic world quit, are fired, or persevere in the profession because of one or a series of life-changing events. Chalk's use of the mockumentary to examine teaching complicates the ways other school films portray teaching. In order to discuss this engagement, we turn to post-modern curriculum theory to explain how high school films can make meaningful representations about students, schools, and in the case of this film, some of the reasons why 50% of teachers quit during the first three years.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination in Philip Roth's "Eli, the Fanatic"
No full text This paper aims to contribute to the small but growing field of cosmopolitanism in curriculum theory research and its intersection with literature education. While much of current scholarship in education and other disciplines tends to underscore cosmopolitanism as a normative project - as a principle or code of ethics which may or may not influence schooling from the top-down - I argue that when examined in the particularities of literature, cosmopolitanism functions in radically different, contextual ways. As a curricular case in point and examined in this paper, the cosmopolitan literary imagination illustrated in Philip Roth's short story "Eli, the Fanatic" contains a series of productive paradoxes that become a curriculum for cosmopolitanism.
The Im/Possibility of an Ethos of Curriculum Work
No full textAn interdisciplinary faculty reading group on Pinar's (2007) Intellectual advancement through disciplinarity provided the opportunity to explore questions related to working in curriculum. Their individual commentary reflects a struggle for, and against, individual disciplines as they make sense of curriculum inside of a shared ethos. Each draws from personal history, the scholarly fields they come from, and the external realities in which those histories are made. The im/possibilities that are then implied through this ethos is work that is provisional, contingent, and ultimately bound by commitment, not only to discipline, but also to the mutual protection of a common purpose
Puritan Origins of Technological Understanding in the USA: From William Ames's Technologia to Technicism
No full textThe last decade has witnessed a growing discourse within educational research about the necessary use of computer and other digital technologies as a primary tool for educating democratic citizens. Such claims incorporate assumptions about the meaning and function of "technology" that goes unrecognized by researchers who advocate theses technologies as practical instructional tools for developing democratic "skills." Technology is not only a material thing that houses manipulated data. Since the mid-1800s, while in the mind of popular culture technology has been analogous to a machine, to social and curriculum theorists, it has functioned as an efficient, rationalized method and technique to measure, store, and retrieve visually represented data in an effort to efficiently manage all aspects of society. This conception of technology has a direct relation to the history of curriculum in the US, emerging specifically out of the colonial Puritan efforts to build an educational theory of "the good life." This impulse toward mapping out for the individual a path for living "the good life," resulted in the creation of the first American college, Harvard College, and the first formal curriculum entitled Technologia (Sprunger, 1966, 1968). Technologia as a curricular construct came to the colonial Puritans by way of William Ames (1576-1633), who spent his life in England and Holland as a separatist Puritan, but whose theological and educational works and personal relationships with significant colonial Puritan figures placed him at the center of intellectual/cultural life in seventeenth-century "America" (Gibbs, 1979). Ames helped define the moral nature of curriculum as a technological construct, a "circle of knowledge" (Gibbs, 1979). However, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ames's curriculum construct of technologia as a moral enterprise devolved to just one very small part of technological understanding -- curriculum as a linear, prescriptive technological discourse, hence, losing the moral and ethical import of curriculum on the individual life
