Influences and Inspirations in Curriculum Studies Research and Teaching

Reflections on the Origins and Legacy of Contemporary Scholarship

Carmen Shields, Adam Garry Podolski, John J. Guiney Yallop, Carmen Shields, Adam Garry Podolski, John J. Guiney Yallop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

This volume highlights lived experiences, personal inspirations and motivations, which have generated scholarship, and influenced the research and teaching of scholars in the field of curriculum studies.

Offering contributions from new, established and experienced scholars, chapters foreground the ways in which the authors have been influenced by the mentorship and work of others, by personal challenges, and by the contexts in which they live and work. Chapters also illustrate how scholars have engaged in variety of methodological and autobiographical processes including narrative and poetic inquiry, autoethnography and visual arts research. Through a range of contributions, the book clarifies the origins and legacy of contemporary curriculum studies and in doing so, provides inspiration for beginning scholars and academics as they continue to find their voices in academic communities.

Offering rich insight into the experiences and scholarship of a wide range of scholars, this volume will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers with an interest in curriculum studies, as well as educational research and methodologies more broadly.

1I am Grateful for Every Invitation

John J. Guiney Yallop

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154112-2

Several years ago, my niece Wendy invited me to run a 10-mile (16-kilometre) road race with her and some other family members and friends. I had not run in many years because running caused me to have severe pains in my knees. I decided, however, with new well-designed running shoes, to try it. I gave myself six months to prepare. The first kilometre of training was hard, the second not easier, and after the third I wanted to give up, but even more I wanted to follow through on my acceptance of the invitation from/for Wendy, and for myself. I finished the road race, and that was my goal – to finish. What I did not expect was that I would begin to like running again; I rediscovered how moving made me feel. I thought, “What further running goals can I work towards?” I decided to run a marathon before my sixtieth birthday. In 2018, more than three years after I began running again, and less than a year from my sixtieth birthday, I ran a marathon.

As I look back on my life, in particular on my life in the education and academic communities, so much of my growth and learning, especially my learning about myself, has been in response to invitations. Much of what I wrote about in the introduction with Carmen and Adam was invitations. The invitation to Narrative Inquiry extended by Susan Drake, which was taken up by Carmen Shields, an invitation she continued, in many forms, throughout my M.Ed. program and research. The invitation by Monica Prendergast to the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI). Prior to that, in a Directed Study course with my PhD dissertation supervisor, Cornelia Hoogland invited me to write only poetry for my assignments. Joy, like love, comes with responsibility. I do not think I worked so hard on anything prior to that, and I had never written so much poetry in one block of time before as I did in that course and in my subsequent work on my dissertation. In the past, my writing had come in spurts, in moments of crisis, when I needed to write. For my doctoral research, writing was a duty. I embraced that duty like the good Catholic I once was and with an intention of perseverance and a prayer for discernment. The Poetic Inquiry community, found mostly among the many poet scholars who attended the seven ISPIs over the years of this biennial gathering, not only invited me to join them in community, in writing, they also made my work part of their work.

One member of that poetic scholarly community, Carl Leggo, was particularly welcoming and generous. Carl, at times a colleague, a friend, a confidant, a wise counsellor, invited me to practice generosity…always. And it was/is a practice, something I keep practicing, keep getting better at and keep slipping away from, a practice to which I keep returning. Generosity is a space where I can best remember Carl. When he was dying, we emailed a few times. We joked about the shared experience of having a MRI. “I eagerly agree that a MRI is one of the strangest experiences I have had!” he wrote on January 31st in 2019. He died just over a month later, on March 7. We once wrote a poem together. Back and forth over email we sent a verse each time until one of us said it was done. Done. When we are done with life, or life is done with us, what is left? Carl left a legacy of love and generosity. Readers of this publication will have seen his name in the introduction and they will see it frequently in chapters following this one.

I need to return to the marathon I ran less than a year before Carl died. Unlike the ISPI that I attended in 2007, my marathon will not be my first marathon; it will be my marathon, my only marathon. I do not need another marathon, no more than I need to write another dissertation or prepare another application for tenure or promotion to associate or full professor. In some ways, however, running my marathon revealed to me more unexpected things about myself than my dissertation or any of my applications for tenure or promotion have. Perhaps, because my body was so fully engaged in running my marathon, it took me into parts of my emotional landscape I could not go into with my mind and heart no matter how much I thought I was also engaging my body in my writing. Writing a doctoral dissertation and writing applications for tenure and promotion taught me about gratitude for what I have accomplished, the gifts I have received and for those who have supported me in my journeys. Running my marathon, however, taught me about another path to gratitude, a kind of gratitude I did not know I could, or even wanted to, experience and a path I did not know I needed to travel.

Once I began my marathon, like with my dissertation and my applications for tenure and promotion, I knew that I would finish it unless I was, through serious injury or death, taken out of the race. That is not to suggest that my marathon or my dissertation or my applications for promotion were without pain. I experienced much pain in each, but, in the marathon, and perhaps the dissertation, it was pain that needed to be acknowledged, pain that I needed to feel, pain I had to push through in order to come to the understandings I would arrive at both in and through each experience. During my marathon, I got lost for a short while. I followed pylons up steps to a space that had no exit. I called a friend who had run many marathons. He told me to look around until I could see other runners. I did, and I ran down the steps I had run up and followed two other runners. I sometimes joke that I actually ran more than a marathon because of that “detour.” Similarly, with my applications for tenure and promotion I also felt lost at times. I called experienced friends who guided me back to where I needed to be. In some ways, my applications were also probably more than they needed to be. That is not an unusual experience for marginalized academics; we overcompensate for what we perceive to be our inadequacies, our defects, our unworthiness.

I passed the 39th kilometre marker. Just 3.2 kilometres and I will have finished a marathon. I saw the 40th kilometre marker up ahead. Suddenly, I felt a ball inside me; it felt like it was in my stomach, in my gut. It was not a baseball or a soccer ball; it felt more like one of those large exercise balls that became, for a while, popular as seats to improve posture and decrease back pain. It hurt. I heard voices from the ball. They were not the voices of encouragement or support to which I had become accustomed and for which I was grateful. They were the voices of people who had told me that I would never amount to anything because I was “just a faggot.” They were the voices of people who told me that I would never have any real friends, never find someone to love me, never have a job like “normal people,” and never have children. I would never accomplish anything or have anything or anyone of value in my life because I was just a faggot, I was just a queer, and I was not worthy of anything except the crap that would inevitably come my way. It was raining; the drops of rain mixed with the tears on my face as I cried while I ran.

How could those voices still be in me…now? I thought I had, many years before, gotten rid of those voices with those hateful and hurtful messages; I thought I had left them behind. Why was I hearing them, again, and why now? I received emails from family and friends before the marathon began, wishing me well. I received text messages during the marathon, again encouraging me. The friend I called when I was lost gently and lovingly guided me back on track. I was married to someone I loved deeply and who deeply loved me. We parented our beautiful daughter who adored both of us. I had had two successful careers, and I had just recently received a letter informing me of my promotion to the highest rank in the second one. And today, today I will finish a marathon!

“Fuck them!”

Those two words were my first thought about, and in response to, the voices I was hearing. Those two words, however, were more an angry reaction and frustrated attempt to get rid of, or away from, those voices again, than they were an expression of what I was feeling more deeply. What was I feeling more deeply, besides this ball in my gut? I continued to run. I had passed the 40th marker and I could see the 41st marker up ahead.

It was forgiveness. I was feeling forgiveness. I was feeling forgiveness for the people who had spoken those words to or about me, and I was feeling forgiveness for myself for holding onto those voices, for allowing them to stay inside me for so long. As I passed the 41st marker, the huge ball moved up through my body and out through the top of my head. As I continued to run, I heard nothing except my breath, and the voice of the police officer telling me that I was almost there, and I felt nothing except the mist on my face from the light rain. Well, I felt something else. I felt grateful as I ran towards the finish line, where my daughter was waiting, after finishing her 10-kilometre race, to run the last metres of my marathon with me.

I have thought many times since that day about that experience during the last few kilometres of my marathon; on very few occasions, I have shared it with others. It was not until editing this collection, however, and reading comments on my work, both present and previous, from my two co-editors, that I realized that forgiveness is grace, that grace (forgiveness) is a path to gratitude. I realized that if I am to fully use the gifts in my life, with gratitude for them, then I need to continue to practice grace, to show grace, even in times and places and to people, or perhaps especially, when, where and to whom I do not feel particularly inclined to show grace. Perhaps, now, more than ever, as I look to the final years of my second career, in a time when our communities struggle with, and with how to respond to, violence and fear in their many manifestations, I need to show grace. More precisely perhaps, at a time of such brokenness, the world needs more grace and I have a responsibility to give it.

I am grateful to Wendy for the invitation to run a road race with her, and with other family members and friends. I am grateful for every invitation before and after. I am particularly grateful for the invitation I heard that day of my marathon, through the voices that had caused so much pain, and very likely, because of the other voices throughout my life that have shown so much love. I heard a call to respond to violence with forgiveness, with grace, and to continue to live my life with gratitude for the many gifts I have received. Perhaps what I am realizing, finally, is that what I have been doing, or attempting to do, has been to express gratitude for the gifts I have received by teaching a curriculum, and by living a life, of grace.

2Worlding Gifts, Grace and Gratitude

A Posthuman Pedagogy of Art, Affect and Belonging

Fiona Blaikie

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154112-3

Introduction

Embracing gratitude and worlding (Stewart, 2019), I curate a chronology of experiences, ideas, and people that stick with me emotionally (Ahmed, 2004), impacting my praxis as an artist, scholar and teacher.

Consider the situatedness of childhood habitus constructs (Bourdieu, 1984), wherein lives are pre-inscribed, enculturated, gendered, classed and affective. We live in collective thinking-feeling imaginaries:

…entangled in the worlds in which we move, from home to social settings to intimate relationships with ourselves and others, as well as places of work, study and recreation…As we move through our lives, across places, subcultures and times, via explicit and implicit codes for belonging, externalized through socially un/acceptable aesthetic codes and practices

(Blaikie, 2018)

We engage constantly in worlding ourselves and others through storying. To begin worlding, I offer an image of a woman gazing at the Yamuna River in Agra, India:

Image 2.1Photograph taken by Fiona Blaikie in April 2019 at Mehtab Bagh, Agra, India.

The image of this woman sticks with me, yet, in asking “what do you see in this image?” others’ responses are unique, entangled reworldings. Places and spaces in which we live affectively, relationally, in situated conditions, frame our early and ongoing habitus of being, becoming and belonging. My father Alexander wanted people to belong: “Be a gentle person who never embarrasses anyone” he said. His deep respect for the singular situated conditions of every life, human and nonhuman, has stayed with me.

First Worlding (Storying): The Gift of Hermeneutic Phenomenology

As a masters student at the University of Victoria, Canada, in the lifechanging Summer of 1988, I took Foundations of Curriculum with visiting professor, Tom Barone (1983). Tom introduced Max van Manen's (1982) phenomenological pedagogy, intersecting scholarship, reflexivity, theory and practice via hermeneutic phenomenology, drawing on interpretations of meaning inherent in senses, experiences, feelings, words and images, and especially the vivacity of singular lived experiences. I met scholar Ted Aoki (1986): “I am honoured to speak with you, Dr. Aoki.” “On the contrary” Ted said, “it is my honour to speak with you!” Gripped with enthusiasm, adopting a phenomenological approach to my thesis (Blaikie, 198...