Provoking Curriculum Encounters Across Educational Experience

New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory Archive

Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich, Sandra Chang-Kredl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367178642
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429603457
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book collects recent and creative theorizing emerging in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory, through an emphasis on provoking encounters. Drawn from a return to foundational texts, the emphasis on an 'encountering' curriculum highlights the often overlooked, pre-conceptual aspects of the educational experience; these aspects include the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning.

The book highlights that immediate components of one's encounters with education—across formal and informal settings—comprise a large part of the teaching and learning processes. Chapters offer both close readings of specific work from the curriculum theory archive, as well as engagements with cutting-edge conceptual issues across disciplinary lines, with contributions from leading and emerging scholars across the field of curriculum studies.

This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory.

1
Introduction

Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich and Sandra Chang-Kredl

Marking the recent re-issue of Toward a Poor Curriculum (Pinar & Grumet, 2015), our edited volume takes up the call for a curriculum attuned to provoking curriculum encounters. “Encounters” have enjoyed a deep resonance within curriculum theory since curriculum’s reconceptualization. The word has close affinities to educational experience—currere, or the running of the course: “It is the lived experience of curriculum … wherein the curriculum is experienced and enacted” (Pinar, 2015a, p. 11). Encounters are tied to subjectivity—the body-subject, as Grumet (1988) points to, invoking Merleau-Ponty’s reminder that it is “[t]he body that makes it possible for us to have a world” (pp. 143–3). Merleau-Ponty (2012) explains:

The subject that I am … is inseparable from this particular body and from this particular world. The ontological world and body that we uncover at the core of the subject are not the world and the body as ideas; rather, they are the world itself condensed into a comprehensive hold and the body itself as a knowing-body.

p. 431

To encounter, then, is to “live curriculum” (Grumet, 1999, p. 24); to become aware, as body-subject, of feeling alive, immediate, in-the-moment. An encounter marks an opening toward a pre-reflective time and space of possibility: of consciousness of someone or something that is not ourselves. Encounters are structured, then, by interruption: by alterity or non-coincidence. “When the ‘I’ coincides with itself, it contracts,” Pinar (2015d) says (p. 196); rather, “[i]t is the structural non-coincidence of the alive body—the time and space of subjectivity—that invites us to experience experience” (Pinar, 2015a, p. 113). To unsettle what would otherwise operate “unnoticed,” Gadamer (1998) observes, we need to be “provoked” or “addressed” by encounters (p. 299). Becoming more “present to ourselves” (Greene, 1978, p. 199) is also accompanied by “disquietude” with any notion of curriculum as script (Greene, 1967, p. 5). Such “moment[s] of encounter” (Pinar, 2011, p. 103), marked by “montage of ‘unlike things’” (Greene, 2001, p. 118), stretch “me to the limits of my consciousness” and compel me to think (Block cited in Pinar, 2014, p. 175).

In the present time especially, amidst the relentless pressures of testing and credentialing, to encounter is to refuse to be defined by others: it is to resist the numbness and inertia associated with reification of the curriculum tale of teacher and student subjectivities amenable to being encapsulated by test outcomes or school rankings (Au, 2011; Cochran-Smith, Piazza, & Power, 2013). Currere, with its “triple telling,” has always been about “splinter[ing] the dogmatism of a single tale” (Grumet, 1987, p. 324). Exemplary of this resistance is Mrs. Brown. In Pinar’s opening essay in Toward a Poor Curriculum, he invokes Virginia Woolf’s story of Mrs. Brown as a metaphor for the ongoing crisis in curriculum—one that continues to hold, this despite rumblings of other crises within contemporary curriculum theorizing (Deng, 2018). The story Pinar tells (with Virginia Woolf’s help) points to the importance of encounters in understanding curriculum. Implacable, Mrs. Brown sits in the train carriage. She is studied in turn by each of three passengers who enter the car and seem to encounter her: Mr. Bennet, Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Their encounters are not with her, per se. Each focuses on a point external to Mrs. Brown: the state of England’s primary schools; the exploitation of the working classes; particulars of the train carriage itself. None focuses on Mrs. Brown herself: what she thinks and feels. “To get underneath the old words we need to abandon them,” Pinar (2015b, p. 4) advises. We need to understand anew what it means to truly encounter Mrs. Brown, for “Mrs. Brown is ourselves” (p. 4). This freeing and abandoning activity is central to encounters which, even as they take their initial cue from the moment, bring us back to a pre-reflective openness to what matters. Why a “poor” curriculum, Doll (2016) asks, posing a question that has dogged him for years, this given all of the negative ascriptions that might be attached to the word but where he reaches the conclusion that “[w]hat Pinar and Grumet ask us to see, many have missed” (p. 59). “A poor curriculum is one stripped of its distractions … naked,” Pinar (2015c) explains (p. xiii). Currere has always “reach[ed]” toward a poor curriculum, toward “pre-conceptual encounters that are their foundation” (Grumet, 2015a, p. 53): a foundation that for the body-subject keeps moving, keeps encountering. “I am experience. With each breath. Experience” (Pinar, 2015d, p. xiii).

In moving beyond words that masquerade as curriculum, beyond a return to basics and standards, beyond online learning as reproducible box-ticking templates, and beyond content divorced from the person/subject, we open ourselves in this edited volume to provoking curriculum encounters and being provoked. The encounters described, discussed and theorized provoke editors and authors to feel alive in and to the moment, to “lived theories” (Grumet, 2015b, p. 86) and living theories, in short, to encounters of a potentially explosive and “catastrophic” kind akin to Taubman’s (2004) conceptualization of jouissance—to moments of “vulnerability and ambiguity” which are “sensuous [and] embodied” and that can help us better understand and connect with the social and ideological affects of others’ lifeworlds (Grumet, 2015b, p. 238), even as they open spaces into our own worlds as scholars, teachers, teacher-educators, leaders and practitioners.

A living, encountering curriculum is very different from prevailing conceptualizations of curriculum as “management category” preoccupied with generating a “language of input and output within a production system” (Aoki, 2005, p. 271)—and where the emphasis in education is once again skewed toward output (Cochran-Smith et al., 2013). In this volume, we especially want to turn inward, listening for the deeper resonances of curriculum “beyond the reach of the eye” (Aoki, 2005, p. 375), including this surveillance (eye) of accountability. Encounters are plural, occurring in different spaces and modalities; they are made of materialities, felt and psychic intensities, and arrangements of bodies (and minds) moving through time and space. We want to acknowledge how curriculum encounters may exceed our capacities to represent them (Massumi, 2016); that no language may be adequate to articulate their unpredictable and myriad movements. In moving in this direction, the volume joins with a theoretic impetus currently informing education research (e.g., Lesko & Niccolini, 2017), the humanities (e.g., Gregg & Seigworth, 2009) and the social sciences (e.g., Clough & Halley, 2007) that is generating new questions about how concepts come to matter imminently in emergent presents. At a time when top-down regulatory measures are placing exorbitant pressure on educators and researchers to focus all of their attention on abstractions (measures, outcomes, best practices), our attention to provoking curriculum encounters affecting minds and bodies (human and non-human) sounds a deep, resonant chord that brings us back to educational experience as moving, lived and living. As Latour (2004) puts it: “To have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated,’ moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans. If you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead” (p. 205).

This edited volume has allowed us to explore the provoking of curriculum encounters in breadth and depth through essays that we propose lie on the cutting edge of curriculum theory. The volume opens with the present short introduction, collectively written by the co-editors, which sets the stage for provoking through the prisms of pluralities, spaces, intensities and charges. Each strand is elaborated further in its own corresponding introduction. We open ourselves and others to: (1) spaces that may be disciplinary, interdisciplinary or transitional/in-between, constituted by various modalities and inhabited by (2) a plurality of voices, beings and bodies, involved in ceaseless relational movement (3) that through our encounters in such spaces and with such pluralities, affective intensities may be produced which hold the potential to (4) inspire new ethical charges. These four strands, around which the volume has been conceptualized and organized, help orient the reader. The strands map loosely onto a currere process (plurality and spaces with regression and progression; intensities and charges with analysis and synthesis) and are intended to be theoretically generative in helping think through curriculum encounters. With the three chapters in spaces (Chapters 3 to 5), we ask: how are we affected and directed—inescapably provoked—by the larger spaces in which our encounters are embedded? To keep curriculum spaces moving, we seek out productive emergent potentials for difference-making. Toward such creative ends, and drawing inspiration from Indigenous epistemologies of interconnection and embodiment, Macdonald reconsiders the grids that nurture her everyday experiences with urban life. Provoking the relation between technology and theology, Lee turns to three distinct architectural examples of curricular transcendence, and asks how built environments might also contribute to the decentering impulses of poetic experience. Honeyford explores a collaborative, experimental space of intergenerational curriculum making, and considers the value of the unexpected as a way to wonder/wander along with curriculum’s interminable potential. With pluralities, we consider which and whose voices, beings or bodies need to be considered in our curriculum encounters? Which and whose do we need to remember, understand, seek out relation with? Chapters 6 to 9 indicate possible directions (among many that might be considered): Richardson’s evocative encounters with the human and more than human, Deer’s spiritual encounters with her ancestors and ancestral world, Starr’s otherworldly experience of GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) and Abdul-Jabbar’s with medieval Islamic thinker Al-Farabi’s theory and practice. With the three chapters in intensities (Chapters 10 to 12), we ask what it means for the body-subject/the body alive to be alive and present, to confront experiences of ambiguity, incongruity and vulnerability, including instances “where the body takes over from … words” (Phillips in Lewkowich, 2015, p. 46)? How may we work with feelings of unease to provoke thinking and expand our curriculum understandings? Bausell addresses these points through reflecting on her memories of lynching photographs found amongst her grandmother’s odds-and-ends; Beier’s provokes the reader through a science fiction rewriting of Mrs. Brown’s train encounter; and Rotas’s analyzes children’s intensity of experiences through their co-use digital cameras. With the three chapters in charges (Chapters 13 to 15), we ask: what kinds of curricular charges (e.g., responsibilities, commitments, projects, movements) might catalyze consciousness and desire? How do we keep transforming and charging, and how might charges that may initially be perceived as depleting, return to us in unanticipated and unpredictable ways? These questions are explored through Balzer and Heidebrecht’s use of postcolonial literature with Indigenous students; Nellis’s analysis of stories of loss, love and mourning; and Ohito and Nyachae’s inquiry of an extracurricular program for working-class black girls.

As already mentioned, it was in the wake of the recent re-publication of Pinar and Grumet’s seminal work that the call for papers for this edited volume invited our return to encounter the curriculum theory archive. In being provoked and provoking others to re-encounter an archive (specifically Toward a Poor Curriculum but any curriculum text, widely conceived), we were also echoing the title and call of the biennial 2017 Provoking Curriculum conference. A volatile unpredictability attaches itself to the word “provoking” and also, as we have conceived it in this volume, to “encounter.” So too does it adhere to the word “archive.” The book has been framed by two chapters concerned with the curriculum archive, which lie outside of the strands but that are tied to them as well as to the book as a whole. In an opening piece (Chapter 2), we situate the book within curriculum pilgrims’ passionate “peripheral, joyful, intimate, and productive” (Robertson & Radford, 2009, p. 203) encounters with the curriculum an/archive—as we imagine the authors in this book (and potentially, readers coming to this book) to be. While the word archive can “evoke the sturdy furniture of locked cabinets” (Strong-Wilson, Yoder, Aitken, Chang-Kredl, & Radford), in curriculum theory this archive has always been understood as living, as involving “ongoing ethical engagement with alterity” (Pinar, 2015a, p. xi). The forward-looking proposition of an an archive (SenseLab, n.d.), or living archive, in which always-emergent encounters derive their meaning from embodied and relational practices in-the-moment, thus also animates this volume (Ehret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Currere Tales: Journeying as Pilgrims to the (an)Archive
• STRAND I Spaces
• STRAND II Plurality
• STRAND III Intensities
• STRAND IV Charges
• List of Contributors
• Index