Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Critical Consent Curriculum: Towards Ethical Self-Empowerment in Schools
No full textThinking at the intersections of curriculum theory and sound studies, this article explores what the author has named a “critical consent curriculum.” This paper traces the many reverberations of sociopolitical and cultural norms that not only devalue consent as a critical part of schooling, but how the absence of such dialogues in teacher education programs and schools has, in many ways, normalized the milieu of nonconsensual relations and relationships as they are expressed across educational contexts and communities. Alongside an analysis of several “samples” from sonic ethnographic studies, this paper serves as a call to action for teacher education programs to enmesh a critical consent curriculum and, relatedly, curriculum studies across teacher education programs. This is not an “either/or” argument but, rather, a “both/and” dialogue about how this proposed lens to education would impact everyday intra-actions in schools by foregrounding consent
Teaching as Curriculum Curation: Centering Mirrors and Windows in an Inclusive Bookshelf Project
No full textFrom increasing calls for multicultural and inclusive books to media stories about books being banned in elementary schools, curriculum debates have become increasingly contentious. These debates illuminate key questions in curriculum studies: What is the knowledge of most worth? And who decides? In this article, I utilize a curriculum studies in education framework to engage and extend the literature supporting multicultural and inclusive children’s literature and critical literacy while emphasizing the role of teachers-as-curators. After analyzing the results of a year-long project in which preservice teachers (PSTs) curated collections of multicultural books representing a mirrors and windows approach to text selection, I reflect upon how teacher educators can support preservice teachers in developing the skills to make deliberate curricular choices
Somewhere between Currere and Ficto-currere, with my Teacher The Near-Sighted Monkey
No full textIn this paper, I explore artist and teacher Lynda Barry’s practice of autobifictionalography as a kind of third practice at the intersection of currere (Pinar & Grumet, 1976/2015) and ficto-currere (McNulty, 2018, 2019). I position making autobifictionalographic comics, in which memory and imagination are intertwined, as a form of inquiry that can enable one to (re)construct the self while confronting (and even embracing) the limits of self-representation. This speculative, subversive, arts-based form of inquiry can implicate the autobiographical even as intentional gaps, traces, and inconsistencies play with notions of self-representation and generate fantastical, even monstrous, characters and situations. I explore currere and ficto-currere and situate my work in comics-based inquiry, analyzing an example from a comic of my own as I consider the limits of autobiographical inquiry. Finally, I suggest that comics rendered in reflective practice might offer alternative, expansive modes of representation that invite relationship and dialogue
The Transhumanist Tapestry: Unraveling Roles of Author and Audience
No full textArtificial Intelligence is an increasingly ubiquitous entity reshaping the ways that we interact and communicate. In all of our online interactions, the boundaries between humans and machines become blurred as we read and are being read by technology. This digital entanglement of machines and minds, of reading and being read, stands as an invitation to interrogate the historical relationship between reader and writer, audience and author. In interrogating these roles I reflect upon the implications this has for the ways that we read the digital spaces we are part of, our agency in shaping this evolving technological relationship, and begin to consider the educational implications of such shifts
Contemporary Analysis on Curriculum Theorists in Education
No full textThis is a book review for CURRICULUM WINDOWS REDUX: WHAT CURRICULUM THEORISTS CAN TEACH US ABOUT SCHOOLS AND SOCIETY TODAY, edited by Thomas S. Poetter, Kelly Waldrop, and Syed Hassan Raza (2022). It provides anlytical perspectives on the book and each of the 33 chapters. Each chapter of this book has a unique author who offers the readers a critical lens of curriculum studies by connecting the past with the present. The authors of this book use currere when they share their scholarship about curriculum studies through their own educational experiences. It advocates for and empowers the graduate student community by encouraging them to write scholarly work together
Lesson Plans as Objects of Cruel Optimism and the Rhizome as a Way Out
No full textThe objective of this article is to use a theoretical framework to reconceptualize the process and purpose of lesson planning as a way to liberate teachers from systems that prevent educator and student flourishing. I argue that an attachment to lesson plans as static objects produces a state of “cruel optimism” that erodes both student and teacher satisfaction, development, and engagement. Conversations with two social studies teachers will ground theory in practice, and will help to illuminate the ways in which thinking with theory can be an effective way to reimagine pedagogical approaches
Agential Schooling: “Where Dreams Come To Die”
No full textThis piece, a posthumanist analysis of schooling, agential schooling, puts forward a complex accounting of schooling that decenters the human acknowledging those agents – schooling discourses, clipboards, policies, handouts, etc. – that often go unacknowledged in purely humanist framings. This shifts away from dualism and linearity to repositioning educational phenomena as entanglements of multiplicities, situatedness (e.g., politics, power, material flows, etc.), becomings, and the more-than-human world. This work positions schooling as an agent rather than solely as an outcome or effect. Ethnographic entanglements, interviews, and diffraction, were mobilized to better understand the intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and discursive agents. A diffractive analysis of two phenomenon: (1) youth reproducing hierarchical schooling, and (2) the intra-action between school administration, clipboards, and classroom observations demonstrate how various apparatuses – policy, curriculum, hierarchical relations, adultism, prescriptive entanglements, discipline, and punishment – support the violence of agential schooling. Schooling, an agent, influences our ways of knowing and being
Mobilizing citational practices as feminist curriculum-making in early childhood education
No full textThis article provides three propositions for thinking and doing citational practices as more than only technical, aggregating, or evidence to bolster a particular perspective in early childhood education. Collectively, we work to complexify our understanding of enacting citational practices in early childhood education and offer provocations for how we might build novel, accountable, pedagogical citational relations as we read and think together with early childhood educators. After offering speculative propositions for thinking citational practices otherwise, we turn to one example of a moment from practice and imagine how we might mobilize citational practices while thinking with this event. We argue for citational practices as a method of feminist curriculum-making; we offer an invitation to activate citational practices as a one engagement with feminist scholars and scholarship, and feminist methods of engaging in thoughtful, locally relevant dialogue that advances and answers for the consequences of the citational practices decisions we make
Restoring the (dis)course: An inquiry into Aesthetics and Realism
No full textAesthetics is the study of beauty and aesthetic inquiry situates the study of beauty within lived experience. This paper is an inquiry into aesthetics and is aimed at restoring the (dis)course associated with direct experience and the implications of realism. Utilizing the lens of curriculum studies, a metaphoric description of a local river is incorporated into the discussion to highlight the impact of education on the life journey. Also, a discussion on literalism is utilized as an important dialectical point of departure. Finally, an examination of related literature and an autobiographical interlude offer a unique perspective leading to a more critical approach to curriculum theorizing aimed at revitalizing the aesthetic dimension within educational discourse