Teachers’ Ethical Self-Encounters with Counter-Stories in the Classroom


Book Description

Offering unique theoretical perspectives, autobiographical insights and narrative accounts from elementary and secondary educators, this monograph illustrates the need for teachers to engage critically with counter-stories as they teach to issues including colonization, war, and genocide. Juxtaposing Pinar’s concept of ethical self-encounters with theories of subjective reconstruction, multidirectional memory, and autobiographical narration, this rich volume considers teachers’ ethical responsibility to interrogate the curriculum via self-reflection and self-formation. Using cases from workshops and classrooms conducted over five years, Strong-Wilson traces teachers’ and students’ movement from "implicated subjects" to "concerned subjects." In doing so, she challenges the neoliberal dynamics which erode teacher agency. By working at the intersections of pedagogy, literary theory and memory studies, this book introduces timely arguments on subjectivity and ethical responsibility to the field of education in the Global North. It will prove to be an essential resource for post-graduate researchers, scholars and academics working with curriculum theory and pedagogical theory in contemporary education.




Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W.G. Sebald


Book Description

This book engages with the writings of W.G. Sebald, mediated by perspectives drawn from curriculum and architecture, to explore the theme of unsettling complacency and confront difficult knowledge around trauma, discrimination and destruction. Moving beyond overly instrumentalist and reductive approaches, the authors combine disciplines in a scholarly fashion to encourage readers to stretch their understandings of currere. The chapters exemplify important, timely and complicated conversations centred on ethical response and responsibility, in order to imagine a more just and aesthetically experienced world. In the analysis of BILDUNG as human formation, the book illuminates the pertinent lessons to be learned from the works of Sebald and provokes further investigations into the questions of memory, grief, and limits of language. Through its juxtaposition of curriculum and architecture, and using the prose of Sebald as a prism, the book revitalizes questions about education and ethics, probes the unsettling of complacency, and enables conversation around difficult knowledge and ethical responsibility, as well as offering hope and resolve. An important intervention in standard approaches to understanding currere, this book provides essential context for scholars and educators with interests in the history of education, curriculum architectural education and practice studies, memory studies, narrative research, Sebaldian studies, and educational philosophy.







Restoring Soul, Passion, and Purpose in Teacher Education


Book Description

This text both challenges and traces the development of a culture of regulation, standardization, performativity, and governmentality evident in Anglophone teaching practice and education. Framed by a brief history of teacher education research and policy in North America over the last six decades, the text argues that the instrumentalization of curriculum and pedagogy has robbed teachers of their pedagogical soul, passion, and purpose. Using a conceptual model, Grimmett forges a pathway for teachers to adopt a soulful way forward in professional practice, individually and collectively enhancing autonomy over programs, and protecting the public trust placed in them as educators. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in teachers and teacher education, educational policy and politics, and curriculum thinking and enactment more broadly. Those specifically interested in pedagogy, educational change and reform, and the philosophy of education will also benefit from this book.




A Praxis of Presence in Curriculum Theory


Book Description

Building on his seminal methodological contribution to the field – currere – here William F. Pinar posits a praxis of presence as a unique form of individual engagement against current cultural crises in education. Bringing together a series of updated essays, articles, and new writings to form this comprehensive volume, Pinar first demonstrates how a praxis of presence furthers the study of curriculum as lived experience to overcome self-enclosure, restart lived and historical time, and understand technology through a process of regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis. Pinar then further illustrates how this practice can inform curricular responses to countering presentism, narcissism, and techno-utopianism in educators’ work with "digital natives." Ultimately, this book offers researchers, scholars, and teacher educators in the fields of curriculum theory, the sociology of education, and educational policy more broadly the analytical and methodological tools by which to advance their understanding of currere, and in doing so, allows them to tackle the main cultural issues that educators face today.




Engaging Currere Toward Decolonization


Book Description

This timely volume uniquely illustrates how currere can be applied to the process of decolonizing subjectivity. Centered around the experiences of one black woman from the third world, the text details the theoretical underpinnings of Currere towards Decolonizing (CTD), and walks the reader through the autobiographical analysis involved in dismantling cognitive colonization. Conceived as a four-part autobiographical process of remembering, identifying, imagining, and decolonizing, the method of CTD is demonstrated as a means of recognizing and reflecting on how the colonial project has been internalized, and of gradually dismantling the psychological, affective, and material impact of colonization. Using both theoretical and experiential standpoints, and intersecting with notions of anti-blackness, linguicide, and Africana womanhood, the volume moves curriculum theory urgently towards anti-colonial mechanisms that disrupt the colonizing process. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in curriculum studies, post-colonialism, and Black studies more broadly. Those specifically interested in interpersonal psychoanalysis, as well as gender and third world studies, will also benefit from this book.




Love in the Post-Reconceptualist Era of Curriculum Work


Book Description

By employing the autobiographical method of currere and bifocalization, this book sheds light on the significance of love and the ethics of caregiving as means to transform curriculum studies into a post-reconceptualist and collective endeavor. Advancing an understanding of curriculum as a "collective public moral enterprise," it critically asks whether we can build a world where love is not negotiated, but only proliferated. Through the creation of short and interconnected autobiographical narratives about the meanings of love, the author provides pivotal insights for curricularists who labor in conflicting and paradoxical contexts. As such, the book seeks to demonstrate how the labor of "love fortification" may be accomplished in a world of agonistic, antagonistic, and competitive becoming(s). Highlighting the role of caregiving, this book questions the role of evaluations in post-reconceptualization and provides insights for educators and policymakers on how to promote "actualization" and reconciliation in schools in contexts across the global-north and -south. Engaging with a long scholarly tradition that ultimately seeks to understand the meanings of love in our lives and in our work, supporting the "historization" of the field of curriculum, and with an international focus, this book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in curriculum studies and curriculum theory.




Curriculum Studies in Canada


Book Description

The largest specialization in faculties of education in Canada is curriculum studies. Curriculum Studies in Canada represents the present preoccupations of curriculum scholars in Canada. Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, contributors engage with significant themes, among them ongoing efforts at justice for Indigenous Peoples, the continuing arrival of immigrants and refugees, Canada’s complex relationship to the United States, and issues related to the climate crisis. Addressing such realities through the field of curriculum studies and the school curriculum is critical at this historical conjuncture given the complex and shifting intersections of local and global dynamics restricting education. To this end, contributing scholars serve as intellectual activists to address the critical need for understanding curriculum responsive to the vexed relations among schools, nation-building, social reconstruction, and identity development. Their activism yields more sophisticated understandings of what it means to be educated in Canada. Contributors trace the legacy of their work and reflect on their present scholarly preoccupations in light of their past endeavours. In doing so, Curriculum Studies in Canada offers an invitation to readers: to study, remember, dialogue, and navigate an uncertain world with them.




Dialogical Engagement with the Mythopoetics of Currere


Book Description

This volume showcases a series of chapters that elaborate on Mary Aswell Doll’s contributions to the field of curriculum theory through her examination of currere as a mythopoetics. By bringing Doll’s Jungian, autobiographical, and literary perspectives into conversation with emergent forms of subjective inquiry—including aesthetic concepts, ecological questions, and spiritual themes—the volume foregrounds the originality and significance of Doll’s book The Mythopoetics of Currere in particular, while simultaneously extending it and demonstrating its applications in various scholarly conversations. Leading scholars in the field of curriculum studies such as William F. Pinar and Molly Quinn demonstrate how they use Doll’s ideas as pedagogy, as theoretical framing for their work, and as the basis of their own study and self-exploration. A response essay from Doll herself concludes the text, bringing further thought and insight to the mythopoetic dimensions of currere. This text will benefit scholars, academics, and students in the fields of curriculum studies, curriculum theory, and the foundations of education more broadly. Teachers and teacher educators interested in the conceptualization of curriculum in humanities education will also benefit from this volume.




Lingering with the Works of Ted T. Aoki


Book Description

This unique collection of essays from emerging and established curriculum theory scholars documents individuals’ personal encounters and lingering interactions with Ted T. Aoki and his scholarship. The work illuminates the impact of Aoki’s lifework both theoretically and experientially. Featuring many of the field’s top scholars, the text reveals Aoki’s historical legacy and the contemporary significance of his work for educational research and practice. The influence of Aoki’s ideas, pedagogy, and philosophy on lived curriculum is vibrantly examined. Themes include tensionality, multiplicity, and bridging of difference. Ultimately, the text celebrates an Aokian "way of being" whilst engaging a diversity of perspectives, knowledges, and philosophies in education to reflect on the contribution of his work and its continual enrichment of curriculum scholarship today. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in curriculum studies, educational research, teacher education, and the philosophy of education more broadly. Those specifically interested in international and comparative education, as well as interdisciplinary approaches – which include perspectives in arts, language and literacy, sciences, technology, and higher education curriculum – will also benefit from this book.