Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Shifting Responsibilities: Researching Accountability in Three Acts
No full textIn this paper, I utilize Nancy Frazier's conception of multiple publics to investigate the terrain of educational research and how educational researchers might utilize such a framework to think differently about our work. I envision this framework as a problematic of "shifting responsibilities" in terms of what has been done and what is necessary to move forward. Shifting responsibilities suggests that the discourse practices of "accountability" are not static or fixed, but rather consist of rhetoric and imagery that is invoked at particular times and spaces to refer to how various citizen-subjects can and should be responsible to educational publics
Agamben's Theory of Biopower and Immigrants/Refugees/Asylum Seekers: Discourses of Citizenship and the Implications for Curriculum Theorizing
No full textIn this essay I attempt to map the intersection between fearism and liberal/humanitarian discourses of citizenship and discuss the implications for curriculum theorizing. Drawing on Agamben's analysis of biopower, this essay draws upon elements of Agamben's theory to highlight how liberal and humanitarian ideas to garner recognition on behalf of others risk perpetuating the logic of abandonment, which Agamben articulates in his theorization of bare life and the camp. Agamben's theory of biopower invokes a scrutinization of liberal and humanitarian perspectives in relation to issues of belonging, subjectivity, and inclusion/exclusion in citizenship education curricula. This interrogation suggests the need to form a different conceptual framework for citizenship education curricula"”one that recognizes the impact of fearism yet it moves beyond liberal and humanitarian discourses and provides opportunities for meaningful resistance to both fear and the disavowal of others
Auto/ethno/graphies as Teaching Lives: An Aesthetics of Difference
No full textIn the midst of the everyday of academia, two teaching lives collide in an office doorway, tentatively exchanging stories of students' language "art"-each sparked by the other's interest in the aesthetic of pedagogy. These intersectings of "knowing and not knowing" conspire in our lives to begin a daunting journey of evoking in teachers-to-be aesthetic possibilities in the teaching of language arts. We share the personal scriptings and scripts of our teaching lives, exposing both the vulnerabilities and the possibilities of the arts for our selves and our students in the pre-service language arts classroom. We draw from qualitative methodologies that work with biography, autobiography, and ethnography settling with "auto/ethno/graphy" to unsettle the scripts of hegemonic discourse. Clear your desk. Dip your brush...About the AuthorsCynthia M. Morawski is an associate professor of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include literacy and integrated arts, learning differences, and bibliotherapy. She is particularly interested in the intrapersonal dimensions of learning and employs multiple expressions and representations in teaching and research. Correspondence to C. Morawski, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, 145 Jean-Jacques Lussier, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5. E-mail: [email protected] Pat Palulis is an assistant professor of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include curriculum theorizing in language, literacy, culture, and spatiality; post-structural and post-colonial discourses; intertextuality; performative auto/ethno/graphy related to teaching lives and praxis. Correspondence to P. Palulis, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, 145 Jean-Jacques Lussier, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5. E-mail: [email protected]
Dangerously Knowable: A Paradoxical Case of Constructing Radical Hybrid Literacy Practices
No full textIn this paper I describe aspects of a case study of constructing radical hybrid literacy practices that show Lucy Luna, a White 2nd and 4th grade bilingual teacher and I, a White university researcher, engaged in paradoxical work. Over a year together, Lucy and I intended to utilize post-colonial concepts of hybridity and liminal spaces to create classroom practices that we hoped would disrupt dualisms in pedagogy such as English/Spanish and American/Other and open liminal spaces for students to express themselves in more relevant ways. However, I describe three paradoxical processes that unfolded: mastering hybridity, estranging the "strange," and (de)colonizing. I suggest that embracing the paradoxes of educational ethnography can push current research in multicultural education to move beyond positioning students as dangerously knowable by narrowly mapping student identities. About the Author Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, a former bilingual elementary and migrant education teacher, earned her Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. Tricia teaches, writes, and consults about methods and theory for teaching multicultural and multilingual youth. Tricia can be contacted at [email protected]
Beyond the Sole Category of Race: Using a CRT Intersectional Framework to Map Identity Projects
No full textUsing student narratives, we argue for a heuristic tool, the identity project, claiming that identity projects are artifacts of identity as both process and category. Identity projects can offer teachers, researchers, and students insights into socio-historical structures and contexts and the individual's existential relationship to these contexts. Kimberlé Crenshaw's Critical Race Theory (CRT) intersectional framework allows us to map the terrain of identity projects. Identity projects may incorporate features of CRT counterstories, but they also act as contextstories, reinscribing oppressive discourses. Understanding identity projects serves research and practice by invigorating critical multiculturalism and by opening spaces for affirmation, solidarity, and critique. About the AuthorsNikola Hobbel serves as Assistant Professor of English Education at Humboldt State University in Northern California. She researches literacies, multicultural teacher education, and the standards movement. Thandeka K. Chapman is an Associate Professor in Urban Education at UW-Milwaukee. Her research interests include desegregation policy outcomes, multicultural education curricula, and charter schools in urban districts.
Culture and Difference: Heterologies of the Other
No full textThe idea of difference and its postcolonial heterologies-diverse discourses of difference-have provided the conceptual groundwork for postcolonial theorists of nation, race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality who have worked toward the ethical purpose of actualizing equitable contexts responsive to the alterity of individuals and groups within a society or culture regardless of identity politics and its categorical constructions. Yet this altruistic desire for securing equitable environments and opportunities is also the practical juncture at which postcolonial theorists begin to partcompany with respect to the concept of difference. Difference and its heterology therefore becomes an intrinsic point of theoretical validation for asserting the legitimacy of such postcolonial discourses in practice by justifying the ethics of the methods each puts forward for the creation of grounds for equitable social environments that are fair and just. About the Author Peter Trifonas is a professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the University of Toronto. He is the author of Revolutionary Pedagogies, Pedagogies of Difference, and Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy (with Jacques Derrida), and The Ethics of Writing among other books.
M/othering a Bodied Curriculum: Sleeping with Cake and Other Touchable Encounters
No full textA bodied curriculum attends to the relational, social, and ethical implications of "being-with" other bodies differently and to the different knowledges such bodily encounters produce. It is a practice of being oriented to others, to touch, to reflect, and to dwell with others relationally. In this paper we re-conceptualize m/othering as a bodied curriculum opening up maternity to the in-between of corporeality, materiality, and difference. In doing so, we locate our arguments in the work of contemporary visual artist Diane Borsato, in order to develop the theoretical constructs of "touch" and "being-with." From here, we extend such understandings of relationality to a bodied curriculum and in particular attend to the ethical implications of teaching and learning "with" others. In our third and concluding section, we return to earlier deliberations on mothering as performative and suggest that a (post) reconceptualization of curriculum requires an openness to the un/thought and a process of becoming that is always incomplete. About the Authors Stephanie Springgay is an Assistant Professor of Art Education and Women's Studies at Penn State University. Her research and artistic explorations focus on issues of relationality and an ethics of embodiment. Publications include: Curriculum and the Cultural Body, with Debra Freedman and Body Knowledge and Curriculum: Pedagogies of touch in youth and visual culture. Stephanie can be contacted at [email protected] Debra Freedman teaches curriculum courses online for Ball State University and The Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching interests include curriculum theory, cultural studies, and teacher education. She is co-editor, with Stephanie Springgay, of Curriculum and the Cultural Body, Peter Lang(2007). Debra can be contacted at [email protected]
Social Justice Must Be Action: Obligatory Duty and the Institutionalizing of Activism in Schools
No full textIn this paper, I present pieces from a larger qualitative study on social justice at one public high school in New York City. By examining how students reflect upon, respond to, and reclaim an advisory curriculum dedicated to civic responsibility and activism, I argue that schools may have inadvertently standardized the non-standard of "justice" by applying upon it the complicities of power/knowledge, authority, behavior, and control. I draw from an attempted juxtaposition of critical theory and poststructuralist thought, more specifically Foucault's concept of docility-utility, to then argue that the containment of justice as a teach-able and learn-able objective may inhibit students from seeing themselves as already engaged in the world, as just individuals, on their own terms and circumstances. A reconceptualization of social justice may require a shift away from "social justice-oriented content" towards greater acknowledgment of "just encounters" among students and teachers in schools.About the Author Debbie Sonu completed doctoral work at Teachers College, Columbia University and is working as an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education at Hunter College in New York City. Her interests include ethics and justice in urban schools, critical theory and poststructuralism, as well as issues related to youth, subjectivity, and race. Debbie Sonu can be contacted at [email protected]
Digital Literacy and Public Pedagogy: Notes on the Digital Game as a Form of Literacy and Learning
No full textDigital games are both an exponent and a vehicle of cultural transformation. Not only do they form a rapidly growing part of the popular culture industry, they also instigate transformations in other cultural domains such as education. Played in a multi-player fashion, online digital games engender new forms of social relationships and new forms of shared participation in cultural literacy and modes of learning. As games are used for instructional purposes in schools, industry, and the army or airforce for training purposes, the playing of games is no longer constricted to a sphere outside normal adult life but forms part of the "serious" world of production and consumption, knowledge, and education. This suggests that digital technologies may have changed the characteristics and cultural significance of learning and what it means to be literate-not to mention the nature of play itself. This significance may be broader than the acquisition of cognitive skills. Through the act of play, computer games prepare and "train" the general public for a "culture of real virtuality" in which we require digital literacy skills for decoding and understanding media simulations in our environment and how to relate to them as public forms of learning or public pedagogy. Digital games constitute a strategic research site because they exemplify the transformations in perception and participation that are characteristic for digital culture of learning and literacy. Digital games as a form of digital literacy enact a public pedagogy through a means of educational and cultural transformation. About the Author Peter Trifonas is a professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the University of Toronto. He is the author of Revolutionary Pedagogies, Pedagogies of Difference, and Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy (with Jacques Derrida), and The Ethics of Writing among other books
Joe Kincheloe: Marxist Kritik and the Tender-Hearted
No full textThis piece is in memory of Joe Kincheloe. Here, Morris explores Kincheloe's tough-minded Marxism and tenderhearted kindness. The article looks at some of Joe's recent work and how he contributed to the field of curriculum studies. Morris draws on the German spelling of the word Kritik-as it is written in the work of Marx and Engels (1978)-to suggest that critical theory needs to return to its Marxist roots. Kincheloe's work is best represented by what is called critical pedagogy as he worked to undo oppression, embrace indigenous knowledges, and fight for the underdog. Morris discusses these issues in this piece. About the Author Dr. Marla Morris is Associate Professor of Education at Georgia Southern University. She is the author of Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing Sites of Memory and Representation (2001), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates Publishers; Jewish Intellectuals and the University (2007), New York: Palgrave; and Teaching Through the Ill Body: A Spiritual and Aesthetic Approach to Pedagogy and Illness (2008), Rotterdam: Sense Publishers