Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Politics of Not Knowing: The Disappearing Act of an Education in Music
No full textThis article presents questions related to educational practices in music through the use of cultural capital, methodolatry and salvation as guiding frameworks. These are taken as specific concepts, as we attempt to clarify and qualify problems of an institutional education in music, and as a metaphorical exercise for the exploration of political, pedagogic and practical issues reflected in and related to music in schooling. This article proposes a reflection of dilemmas, propositions and possibilities that are often taken for granted - and consequently yet to be addressed - in both general education and music education. We suggest that one way to reengage education in and through music in institutional settings is to reconfigure our understanding of the political possibilities of music as well as how politics are denied by structural and spatial confines of schooling
The Visceral Imagination: A Fertile Space for Non-Textual Knowing
No full textWe come to this work as two educators informed by our art forms of poetry and dance to explore with sense, in sensuality, and partly incensed to investigate a fertile space for understanding non-textual knowing. We embark on living in ways that exceed present limitations and open up space for the visceral imagination. Poetry and embodied engagement brings us closer to the finely nuanced textures of our experiences. To know through and with the body is an invitation to celebrate the sensuous details of the everyday world where the landscape speaks in a language which is rooted in the smell of the earth and the feel of our skin. This essay takes the readers on a journey with their full bodies and ushers them into a poetic rendering of the sensuous world within and without
Curriculum of the Eye/I
No full textI propose that sensory-based curriculum theorizing centered on inquiries of mothering in academia moves in at least two interconnected directions. First, it brings the senses of everyday experiences into the formal academic conversation where it currently lacks representation and thus marginalizes the significance of those experiences in our inquiries. Secondly, sensory-based theorizing moves the language of the senses in the everyday experiences of mothering away from the oft times limited spaces of theorizing and reaches out in a more accessible manner toward a wider community about which, and for whom, we theorize. Curriculum theories of mothering, as well as the influences that mothering has on my theorizing in general, are both in and of the senses. It is the sensual language of mothering that situates the narrative of experiences "lost" from the discourse of dominant scholarship and knowledges of what matters. To understand the process of theorizing about mothering as a curriculum of the senses is to address issues of body, of language, and of place. Such sense-level theorizing re prioritizes and re configures what we might consider to be important to the curricular conversation, to whom, and why
Risking Sentiment: Margins, Voices, and Literacy as a Social Act
No full textAn editorial introduction to the Literacies Section
Laughing White Men
No full textThe complex social production of white racial identity is the focus of this article. Drawing from a larger interview study conducted in a rural white community in the Midwest, I explore how Frank, a high school teacher, experienced being white. I pay particular attention to Frank's descriptions of two white spaces in which he said he participated: one that he called a "basement culture," characterized by laughter and racist and sexist humor, and another that he described as more formal and "politically-correct." Ralph Ellison thought that white racial identity was created in various scapegoating rituals, such as lynching and racist humor. With Ellison's help, I interpret a long comic story that Frank told about selling his van to Mexican immigrants, in which Frank was the butt of the joke, as an example of a scapegoating ritual that just might be compatible with a democratic project
Theorizing Place: Students' Navigation of Place Outside
No full textIn many disciplines, the concept of place is a point of inquiry about how and why a physical location acquires its meaning. In schools, the curriculum of place assumes that place is simple and uncontested. This does not match the real world experience of many students. This paper examines the manners in which students do navigate and make sense of places. In the end a model is developed, building on other models of place, that emphasizes the centrality of the self and perception in observing and making decisions about places. The boundaries that students draw around a particular location and their relation to other places allow students to know where and when to enter. The way in which these boundaries are made is critical in rethinking curriculum that presumes to be teaching places but not yet teaching about place
"Hands at Your Sides!" The Severing of Body and Mind in the Elementary School
No full textHere is a challenge to the "rage for order" in elementary schools and classrooms as a Cartesian mind/body duality is translated in school-actions designed to control the child's body and separate it from the day-to-day school life. While the urgent ordering might be well-intentioned"”to focus on academics, to keep property and people safe"”it overlooks a fundamental element of human teaching and learning: that contact is vital to body, mind and spirit. While the practices seeking to sever mind from body involve all of the senses, it is the sense of touch that is most impacted by schooling's obsession to coerce, bribe, and threaten children to "keep hands, feet, and other objects to your self." And because ultimately, the severance of body separates "I and thou""”it is the spirit that suffers
Sense and Sensibility: Educating the Somantic Imagination
No full textBoth experience and imagination are restricted in modern schooling, arguably because their unpredictability threatens to undermine the dominant assembly-line metaphor of curriculum. Kieran Egan's account of imaginative development assigns a foundational role to embodied understanding, but leaves its educational cultivation largely unexplored. Nonetheless, Egan's narrative metaphor of curriculum can be extended to highlight educationally important features of experience. This idea leads to a curriculum model for cultivating the imaginative meaning of sensory encounters with the world, involving the phases of Orientation, Complication, Transformation and Integration. Consideration of the role of language, along with other tools, in mediating learning within this framework lead to a revised account of imaginative development that places greater weight on the importance and variety of experience. It is suggested that this theoretical approach could enhance conversations between different traditions of experiential education
Breathing Spaces in Neoliberal Places: An Essay Review of Peter Taubman´s Teaching By Numbers
No full textIn 2009, Peter Taubman published Teaching By Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. Since that time his meticulous and detailed analysis of neoliberal policies and practices in the field of education continues to gain explanatory momentum. For those concerned with private venturing into public education, this book methodically maps out key players and provides substantial discussion on their tactics for takeover. It delves into language and ideological persuasion yet remains grounded within articulations of law, policy, and district mandates. Committed to the welfare of teachers and students, Taubman asks how systems of control and surveillance have become accepted, even invited, into classroom work, and by doing so utilizes his expertise in psychoanalytic theory to frame an understanding of complicity and resistance. This essay presents a discussion of Taubman's work while intermittently drawing from cases around the world in which teachers are carving breathing spaces for resistance
Embodiment and Performance in Pedagogy Research: Investigating the Possibility of the Body in Curriculum Experience
No full textIn this study, we consider experiential learning in relation to embodiment and performative practices. We address the need for a method of analysis to examine the role of the body in space, as text, and as experience. In order to develop our analysis, we define embodiment and performance as areas of thought with distinct histories and anatomies. Through an examination of theories of the body and concepts of the performative in pedagogy, we explore how bodies are constructed and understood within the "experience of learning" (Ellsworth, 2005), and situate performative pedagogy in relation to that. We draw on data from a drama education classroom, and poststructural theory, to illustrate how the body can be considered in analysis and can reveal complex and informative notions about teaching and learning, as well as bodies and performance practices in the classroom