Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
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She Blinded Me with Science: Post-Curriculum and the New Scientific Education
No full textCurriculum scholarship provides the engagement with curriculum differentiation that has defined the field since its inception. Mainly, curriculum scholars shift from the role of science as arbiter of truth to the politics of truth, as science becomes a target of ideology critique. “Post-curriculum” is a place of radical questioning about the guarantees of a traditional science of curriculum. We explore a “new scientific education” not as a rejection of scientific thought and method as much as an assertion of the centrality of skepticism to the scientific endeavor itself. New science recalls the anti-traditionalism of science in the Enlightenment, and post-curriculum is a place of ambivalence that marks a new intellectual place from which to theorize curriculum scholarship’s relationship with science
Freedom, Interconnectedness, and Curriculum Attunement: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
No full textWang takes a detour through Daoism and the West’s history of freedom to approach the notion of freedom through the thread of interconnectedness in a cross-cultural perspective, Wang argues that, without being immersed in the life-affirmative stream of interdependence, freedom cannot elevate individuals or groups above the web of life. Zhuangzi’s teaching about free wandering in Chinese indigenous wisdom is about the possibility of being free only when attuned to the rhythm of the cosmos. Incorporating both freedom and interconnectedness, curriculum attunement in the daily practice of education requires attending to both the inner and outer work of teachers and students for new openings and new relationality. In the shadows of freedom, this paper invites the transformation of the red fire of rage inside of us into the blue fire of passion (Doll, 1995) that can sustain life, for us, for our students, and for the planet
Schools of the Walking Dead: Schools, Societies, Smartness, and Educational Sanctuary
No full textThrough a close reading of a moment of schooling in The Walking Dead, this paper explores the relationship between school and society. It engages with shifting notions of smartness and raises questions of why schools both change and stay the same. Ultimately, the paper turns to see the possibilities that emerge from school as a place of refuge
Within and Beyond Religious Boundaries: Welcoming the ‘Uninvited Visitor’ through a Curriculum of Hospitality
No full textGraduate students (who are also educators) sometimes make spontaneous statements regarding their religious identities. In making these declarations, they appear to invoke boundaries that exclude certain already marginalized groups. Another implication is that “liberal” education is divesting them of their religious faith. This paper suggests that while religions create boundaries, they also mandate the crossing of those boundaries to support others with whom they significantly differ and, further, that Derrida’s notion of “hospitality” offers possibilities for welcoming what he calls the “uninvited visitor,” for whose arrival we have not planned but whom we must embrace through acts of the impossible. A theoretical framework for fostering a curriculum of hospitality is offered and includes themes of deconstructing the Judeo-Christian narrative, difference as a human right, secularization, the welcoming experience, and forgiveness. The author’s pedagogical experiences in light of this framework are woven throughout.
Doesn't Your Work Just Re-Center Whiteness? The Fallen Impossibilities of White Allyship
No full textOur purpose is to engage performative dialogue incorporative of currere on a central question in critical White studies (CWS). After precautionary notes and positionalities, we frame our dialogue within second-wave CWS. As its main section, six CWS scholars respond to the central question: Doesn’t research on White identities re-center whiteness? Analyzing the scholars’ responses, the performative dialogue is followed by an analytical discussion of CWS’ epistemological, ontological, and axiological convolutions. Via these convolutions, we recognize the impossibilities of facile “White allyship” within antiracist scholarship, curriculum and pedagogy, and related social movements. Instead of White allyship, we propose situated, relational, and process-oriented notions of alliance-oriented antiracist work. @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}@font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:Cambria;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Cambria",serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:Cambria;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;
Curricular Hauntings: Confrontations with Ghosts in Pursuit of a Place of Freedom
No full textDrawing from theories of racial and historical hauntings (Derrida, 1993; Gordon; 1997), affect studies (Ahmed, 2014; Berlant, 2011; Coleman, 2021; Stewart, 2004), the spaciocurricular (Helfenbein, 2021) and theorizations of agential assemblages (Barad, 2007; Wozolek, 2021), this paper explores possibilities for recovering solidarities, collectivities, and freedoms through considerations of place, history, and poetry. In particular, this paper will examine readings of place and poetry as curricular and methodological tools that resists narrative closures and help us stay with the remains, the uncertainties, and what cannot be spoken–the stories that “cannot be passed on” (Morrison, 1987, p. 274). In doing so, I hope to follow the call of postqualitative research to “engage more fully with the materiality of language” (MacLure, 2013, p. 663) and the work of im/possibilities in language and literature education in orienting ourselves to more just futures, and to each other
Pedagogical Pivoting, Emergent Curriculum, and Knowledge Production: But Just Don’t Call It Social Justice
No full textThe current context of skill-based curriculum and high-stakes, outside mandates makes teaching exceedingly difficult. This educational climate creates a challenging environment in which to identify opportunities for engaging students in inquiry-based, emergent forms of curriculum centering on issues and topics they name. Through side-by-side narrative inquiry, this article focuses on the perspectives drawn from a co-teaching experience of a third-grade teacher and a university professor who worked together to adjust teaching approaches from a skill-based to an emergent, knowledge-generative pedagogy. By engaging young people around issues the students identified, the teacher engages in a pedagogical pivot. While the teacher embraced new practices related to emergent curriculum, she resisted naming it as justice-oriented teaching. This inquiry raises issues around curriculum and student agency, framing curriculum as social justice, and pedagogical agility
Like a Rolling Stone: Risks, Implications, and Trajectories of Educational Events
No full textBuilding off work by Aoki, Badiou, and Biesta, the authors explore two questions about the aims of schooling and purposes of education: What might be educational about education beyond its qualification and socialization functions? In what way might we arrange knowledge for the possibility for “event” to occur and a subsequent “truth process” to proceed? In response, the authors use the career of the band The Rolling Stones as an example of key terms further elaborated through a teaching experience of failure. They conclude with a rumination of why teachers require humility in what they explore as a teacher’s “invitation” to students to encounter curricular “events.
“This Ain’t Hypothetical”: Engaging Black Aesthetics from an Ethic of Care
No full textBlack aesthetics is not a passive project; instead, it is deeply invested in curating livable logics to contend with anti-Black racism in and beyond the educational context. Embracing both theory and practice, rigorous and ethical engagement with Black aesthetics ought to be centrally concerned with what it means to exist as Black in an anti-Black world. Thus, this manuscript lifts the insights of one Black man and one Black woman and their relationship to the Black aesthetic canon, asking, how should educators and researchers handle the theory of Black aesthetics while simultaneously caring for the lived experiences of Black bodyminds? Findings suggest that engagement with Black aesthetics is generative, survival praxis, and should be handled in ways that center racialized histories and current realities. We conclude with recommendations for teaching and inquiry
My Octopus Teacher, Posthumanism, and Posthuman Education: A Pedagogical Conceptualization
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to present a method for engaging students with posthumanist thinking. The following conceptualization explores a potential pedagogical endeavor involving a documentary film, a film studies text, and four texts examining the theory of posthumanism and its relation to education. In this conception, students analyze the use of cinematic mode in documentary-making using Nichols’s (2010) Engaging Cinema: An introduction to film studies and consider how these techniques are used in Ehrlick & Reed’s My Octopus Teacher. My Octopus Teacher functions as an entrance into concepts explored in the work of Rosi Braidotti (2016; 2019) and Nathan Snaza (Snaza et al., 2014; Snaza et al., 2016). Students apply their understanding of the film to draw connections with concepts explored in the selected posthumanist literature, and in turn, inform their conceptions of humanism, anthropocentrism, and posthumanism in education. Throughout this unit, students are encouraged to depart from sedimented assumptions of the human condition (if only temporarily), and earnestly engage with ideations of posthumanism. Students mine through assumptions of human supremacy and humanist practices at large, and entertain the possibilities that a posthumanist philosophy could offer education. This paper adds to a nascently growing body of literature working to decenter the human in our everyday experience, and in education in particular. The following will be especially generative for film studies professors, researchers of posthumanism, and educators committed to the possibility of a posthuman education