Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Living Inquiry: Me, My Self, and Other
No full textBelonging to the world means sharing otherness with every one and every thing there is. Hanna Arendt pointed out the paradox of human plurality: We share the sameness of being human in a way that none of us is the same as another. Still, we lack a human culture that reveres difference, reducing it to a shortfall. Moreover, as worldly beings we 'make home' on Earth and thus inhabit a human-made world of things we consume and use, which dictates our relationship with Earth and non-human entities. The following essay exemplifies Living Inquiry, a course I developed for inquiry into our 'worldliness' that encompasses both how we see the world, given our prejudiced eyes, and phenomena we experience in daily life. I discuss teaching this course with graduate students, inner-city teachers, and young adolescents. As well, I provide an example of such inquiry related to a course theme, self/other
Choreography of a Homecoming: A Narrative Exploration of Cross-Cultural Experience in Third Place/Space
No full textThis article recounts a curricular journey that walks me from childhood to adulthood. As I pull memories forward, I seek to understand how my conception of culture drew me towards the cross-cultural experience of teaching English in Japan. Interweaving Grandpa Stories, feminist discourse, and narratives of arrival and entrance into a new cultural landscape, I explore the ever-changing relationship between my inner and outer cultures. I find that the words of my outer culture do not fit my inner experiences. This tension is critically explored within a third place/ space theoretical framework that invites both security and freedom. By dwelling in a third place/ space, I become the author of my own words and I discover a home for my cross-cultural self.
The Possibilities of Sustaining Critical Intellectual Work Under Regimes of Evidence, Audit, and Ethical Governance
No full textThis paper explores three closely related practices: the turn to 'evidence' and re-endorsement of positivist assumptions; audit and the commodifcation of knowledge; and the new governance of research ethics. In each case I show that these moves involve a discursive shifts in the meaning of higher education, analyse the ways in which they represent newer forms of control within the academy, and consider the implications for critical intellectual work. I argue that disrupting dominant ideas and practices that currently pervade universities is important as part of the debate about more creative ways of moving forward.
Curriculum in the Making: Theory, Practice, and Social Action Curriculum Projects
No full textThis article explores the ways a Social Action Curriculum Project (SACP) framework offered opportunities for students in a graduate level education course to wrestle with the complexity of an ever-evolving school experience. SACPs are a curriculum process that provide for multiple and varied ways for teachers and students to engage in active democratic participation and experiential learning. SACPs challenge normative approaches to schooling in a teacher education setting and in turn in P"“12 settings because they focus on the potential of a curriculum in the making through action-oriented, theoretically-grounded projects related to the graduate students' interests reflective of social issues. Using narrative inquiry of the graduate student experience while engaged in the SACP, the authors analyze the ways that democratic skills practiced through a SACP framework push schooling beyond classrooms and schools, out into the public sphere"”a place where authentic, integrated, emergent, organic, and rigorous learning takes place
Dismantling the Monster? Reflections on Audit Culture and Evidence-Based Research
No full textThis essay addresses the emergence of audit culture and evidence-base research and its entry into the Nordic countries of Europe, using Denmark as an example. A closer look is taken at the current trends as they have reached the Danish scene, and the essay engages a discussion about ways to counter these trends, launching alternative positionings to those known from the British, American and Australian reports. The discussion offers reflections on the possibility of replacing dualisms between basic and applied science/ science and society by conceptualisations of the multitude of actors involved in knowledge production and focuses on ways to engage this choir of voices productively in order to create liveable and viable relations between science and society
Whose Ethics? Whose Interests?: The Tri-Council Policy and Feminist Research
No full textThis paper explores the implications of Canada's Tri-Council Policy Statement Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Human Subjects for feminist research and practice. Through the explication of my research experience with feminist ethnography, autobiographical inquiry, and participatory action research I trouble the ethical assumptions underlying both my work and the Policy Statement. I show how feminist research is ambiguous, contextual, and political, requiring meaningful dialogue about ethics at the local level, not the imposition of rules grounded in positivist research paradigms, and neo-liberal discourses and practices.
Governmentality and Academic Work: Shaping the Hearts and Minds of Academic Workers
No full textOver the last twenty years the liberal university has increasingly been transformed into the neoliberal or audit university. Academics are re-constituted within the audit university as an enterprising collective of individuals working within an enterprise model of the academy. This paper is about the ways in which academic subjects are re-shaped and re-shape themselves, singly and collectively, through the technologies of management and self management, including the technology of audit. We attempt here to generate a perspective that dismantles the belief in the inevitability of the enterprise model of the university and its power to shape the academics within it