Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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Shaping Professional Hats: Posthumanist Affirmative Critique of Early Childhood Curriculum and Professionalism in Aotearoa New Zealand
No full textThis article argues that posthumanist thinking can frame early childhood curriculum and professionalism to productively attend to complex ways they constitute each other. Posthumanist perspectives on early childhood curriculum and professionalism encompass multiple human and non-human components co-/re-/constituting children and teachers, teaching and learning practices and processes, policies and procedures, values and beliefs, and materials and resources of early childhood settings. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki is envisaged as a woven mat; each early childhood setting weaves its own local curriculum from a set of principles and strands of learning. This article describes how a diffractive methodology employing four theoretical approaches can weave a complex and messy cartographic story of data from a research study into emotions in early childhood teaching. Early childhood teacher participants in focus group discussions used the imaginary ‘professional hat’ to describe how their expressions of emotions with children were constrained and enabled. This article affirmatively combines critique with creativity to explore early childhood professionalism within a specific localised enactment of curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand
Essay Book Review, Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel
No full textThe present essay book review is on Jussi Saarinen's (2020) book, Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel. The book makes profound connections between philosophy of emotion and aesthetics and relational psychoanalytic thought considering the dynamic relationship artists have with their painting work, focusing on the wide range of feelings generated. Many connections can be drawn and are relevant for curriculum theorizing in teaching and curriculum work. I believe Saarinen's book to be essential for scholars working in curriculum studies, whether working in visual arts education, general education, or theorizing about creativity due to the rich interdisciplinary nexus between psychoanalysis and philosophical thought of affect and creative experience. I encourage the reader to make links between Saarinen's theorization of the 'artist and painting' and the 'teacher and curriculum.
Desire, Interspecies Love, and Becoming-Animal: Reading “The Overstory” in Social Studies Education
No full textThis article springs from our readings and re-readings of The Overstory (Powers, 2018), a text that moved us and changed us. In this article, we conceive of The Overstory as an affective aesthetic text, agentic in its capacity to jolt readers awake and precipitate ontoepistemological swerves in new and unexpected directions. We build from visions of textual engagements that bring a reader to life, disclosing new pathways and possibilities for how to be, feel, and know one another in the world, a world replete with ethical responsibilities, matterings, and entanglements that stretch far beyond the human. Disassembling The Overstory, we string together particular threads with theory and our own engagements with the novel, offering speculative curriculum/classroom futures—visions of what agentic texts like The Overstory can quite literally do (open up, bind together, create, shape, and so on) in social studies education
Material and Affective (Re)shapings within Unspeakable/Uninterrupted Territories of Violence
No full textHow might we refuse historically censored, sustained, and whitewashed frames and forms of quotidian violence that drag our attention towards registers of inevitability and predictability? This conceptual article considers assemblages of violence in the context of historical and ongoing reverberations of antiblack racism in the United States. Specifically, the authors consider various material and affective intersections that produce movements with/around/under/through time, space, and human and more-than human bodies; the liminal texture of conscious knowing and subconscious feeling that is always-already in flux; and the incalculable and perhaps unfulfilled possibilities/futures that await all encounters within the more-than-human world. We tether our theoretical orientations to three contexts implicated in unspeakable/uninterrupted territories of violence: cotton plant and fear, computer and suspicion, and skateboard and joy
The Curriculum of the Jester: An Examination of Hamilton, An American Musical
No full textRelying on a curriculum theory and cultural studies lens, this paper examines the Broadway musical Hamilton and asks "What history is it teaching?". Focusing on the cycle of cultural production, the paper further examines the lines of impact the musical has had culturally. Using a curricular lens combined with the work of Sylvia Wynter and Anne Tsing, the analysis shifts away from only looking at the musical’s historical accuracy to include a consideration of it as something more complex, as something between domination and resistance. Furthermore, this paper argues that whether the piece was written as an intentional act of resistance becomes less interesting and important when it is seen as site of friction between the hegemonic and counterhegemonic. In other words, by viewing Hamilton curricularly, in terms of what Pinar (2004) calls “the complicated conversation,” this paper moves away from judging the play in terms of its inherent counterhegemony and instead examines it as a site where the hegemonic and counterhegemonic intersect.
Pedagogies of Attending and Mourning: Posthumanism, Death, and Affirmative Ethics
No full textIn a 1992 chapter, “Cries and Whispers,” William Pinar called for conversations around death to become normative in education, but that call has largely been ignored in curriculum theory. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, this article engages death as a site of curriculum inquiry. The author begins by discussing the fragility of human life and the necessity of death to the ecological world and highlighting the interconnections between Western death-denying culture and the Anthropocene. The author then discusses the material facts of death (the corpse) in conversation with posthumanism, ultimately suggesting an emergent environmental ethic—attending to waste. The notion of attending is then presented and elaborated as a form of pedagogy through its close relationship to the concept of mourning. The author concludes by suggesting attending as an affirmative sort of pedagogy that denies the binaries of negativity and positivity through a discussion of Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics
“Weaving an Otherwise” Through Black Lives Mattering in U.S. Schools: A Book Review
No full textBlack Lives Matter in U.S Schools, edited by Boni Wozolek (2022), brings together present-day thinkers and curriculum theorizers, including Walter Gershon, Roland Mitchell, Denise Taliaferro Baszile and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, to make meaning of the Movement for Black Lives in the polyvocal curricula of U.S. schools from K-12 through higher education. Leaning on the works of Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauli Murray, Sylvia Wynter, Marimba, and other Black scholars, the authors offer many examples of the historical and current ways Black life does not (yet) matter in U.S. schools, but they also acknowledge, through an afro-realist lens, that Black lives have always mattered to Black people. The essays in Black Lives Matter in U.S. Schools weave together to create a curriculum of refusal that confronts the neoliberal paradox in academia. Museus and Wang (2022) offer an apt framework for this review, posing that research seeking to refuse neoliberal logics needs to attend to issues of reflexivity, responsibility, and relationships. This review considers Black Lives Matter in U.S. Schools through this framework
Re/membering Curricular Entanglements: A Currere of the Present-Absent Curriculum of a Gay High School Student
No full textAs a gay male who went to a predominately white high school in the 1970s, I was deeply immersed in and contributed to entangled curricular discourses. These included an official curriculum that privileged heterosexual white males and attempted to erase and silence all others, a hidden curriculum echoing the official curriculum, an present-absent curriculum of both guilt and resistance, and a counter-curriculum offering critique and a possible reimagining of the dominant discourses. To examine this entanglement dialogically and reflexively, I use aesthetic currere framed by queer theory to re/member and shift the peripheral-center relationship of the counter-and-official curricula. To surface, explore, and move discursive meanings in these entangled locations, I examine old school artifacts: first, my high school yearbook as a representation and proxy of my school’s dominant traditional curriculum and second my own photography as an expression of counter-narratives and cultural change also taking place. As I look back at my youth from an adult vantage point, I know this inquiry is about the present as much as the past. By my not interrogating my relationship to the official school curriculum and its ongoing hegemonic supremacy, I remain complicit to it and allow curricular entanglements to mutate and reproduce
Alan Collins's What's Worth Teaching?
No full textAbstract: In What’s Worth Teaching? Rethinking Curriculum in the Age of Technology, Alan Collins, Professor Emeritus of learning sciences at Northwestern University, coins a post-modern reconceptualization of education and curriculum. He resoundingly voices that we clearly are not preparing students for success in the 21st century. Moving beyond critique, Collins also describes how educators and policy makers might restructure learning in a pragmatic fashion that develops the required dispositions for success in the age of technology.
Curriculum as Shadow Play
No full textThis essay seeks to trouble the binary of light and dark in the theorizing of curriculum. Through our play with shadows (as umbral, penumbral, and anteumbral), we seek to show how shadowy spaces—refuge—can emerge in curriculum. We do this by exploring social studies teaching and the digital ethics of shadowy spaces (Black Twitter, cancel ‘culture,’ and the dark web) to illustrate the differences between spaces of speaking back versus hiding from. We do so to critique the binary of light and dark both as a metaphor for official and unofficial curricula, but also seen and unseen in discourse.