Curriculum Work and Social Justice Leadership in a Post-Reconceptualist Era

Attaining Critical Consciousness and Learning to Become

Allan Michel Jales Coutinho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032037110
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000580440
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book urgently confronts systems of privilege and oppression within education, and combines concepts including bifocality, currere, and conscientização to highlight the role of dialogical and autobiographical reflection in dismantling neoliberal and colonial logics at the level of theory, policy, and practice.

The author purposefully connects methods and concepts from curriculum, social studies and the arts, and offers insights into identity formation, social position, and social transformation. As such, Jales Coutinho presents an opportunity for curricularists to evaluate the connections between their lives and their work within and across mutually-constitutive discursive and material contexts, and critically analyze their agency, their relational encounters, and their position as changemakers within unjust social realities. Focusing on the intersection of curriculum theory with educational policy and leadership, the text calls for a mutual "becoming conscious" to illustrate how this can affect a paradigmatic shift toward social justice education, lived curriculum, and emancipatory pedagogy.

With the potential to expand and set the tone for a long-standing curriculum conversation for curriculum theorists, educational leaders and policymakers concerning the contours and dimensions of our work in schools, research institutions, and policy circles, it crucially asks: what does it mean to engage in the complicated conversation of curriculum work in a post-reconceptualist era?

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003188629-1

This text is a text of nexus and proximity, a text that envisions critical possibilities for curriculum work in this divisive post-reconceptualist era marked by structural inequalities, egregious social disparities, and malicious discrimination against groups located across several spectrums of diversity—an era highly symbolized by the torn lived experiences of students and teachers under the oppressive capitalist systems of racialization and subjugation of our (neo)liberal democracies.

For starters, this book is an invitation to expand and set the tone for a long-standing curriculum conversation concerning the contours and dimensions of our work in schools, research institutions, and policy circles: what does it mean to engage in the complicated conversation of curriculum work in a post-reconceptualist era? Following a tradition within curriculum studies, I use the term “post-reconceptualist” to allude to a shift in the field marked by “inter and intragenerational conversations” (Malewski, 2010, p. xi). This term does not refer to the ownership of the field by a specific group, or a hierarchical relationship. It is rather a representation of the field as “expansive, producing scholarly landscape that is often difficult to grasp and nearly impossible to survey” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009, p. 250). In setting the tone for this conversation, I also address questions of capital importance for leadership, social justice, schooling, and the fate of democracy.

In the first chapter of this book, I write about the intrinsic connection between curriculum work and autobiography and call upon those involved in the field—people who legislate, negotiate, write, employ, experience, research, and seek to understand the political and multifaceted text in schools—to seek mutually constitutive contexts in their autobiographical lexis so as to approximate themselves and their work to critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012) and, in this process, embrace the praxis of conscientização—(Freire, 1970), which I define here as “learning to become”¹. In this text, I use autobiography, an established discourse in curriculum studies (Pinar & Grumet, 1976), as a means to set free our critical tongues, minds, and hearts in the pursuit of justice.

Theoretically grounded on standpoint and critical theories and inspired on intersectionalities, I connect these two concepts from critical pedagogy and critical ethnography to the autobiography con(text) in order to disrupt “single thoughts” (Santos, 2017) in curriculum work, and to foster contextual and relational autobiographical understandings across differences. Above all, I link these terms to encourage curricularists to visualize the conspicuous and hidden dynamics that constitute the privileged and oppressed milieus of our lives and complex working realities so that we can embody critical theory in our habits of being and becoming and, consequently, into our curriculum practice. Indeed, this text cultivates a hopeful and necessary encounter with our inner and relational selves and an opportunity for new and established scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to articulate justice as a capital component of curriculum work.

On the one hand, the Portuguese term conscientização (English: “conscientization” or “critical consciousness”) has been widely employed in the field of education since the publication of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). The term “refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 1970, p. 35). In other words, the term “describes a process of becoming conscious of one’s social positions and the political dimensions of being in the world” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2004, p. xvi). On the other hand, the term “critical bifocality” describes a method wherein ethnographic researchers, in their pursuit to study and understand lives and the perceptions of diverse groups, look empirically and theoretically to “lives” and “structures” (Weis & Fine, 2012, p. 174). Hence, instead of analyzing lives in a vacuum, as if lives are only conditioned to the free will of individuals, critical bifocality induces researchers to see lives within the contexts of history, structure, and institutions, and to uncover circuits of privilege and power enacted through policy (Weis & Fine, 2012).

As readers shall notice, this book purposefully connects methods and concepts from curriculum and social studies, and the arts, to offer insights about identity formation, social position, and social transformation. It offers an opportunity for curricularists to evaluate the connections between their lives and their work within and across mutually-constitutive discursive and material contexts (e.g., gendered, raced, economic, historical, philosophical, postmodern, geographical, technological contexts), and to critically analyze their agency, their relational encounters, and their position as changemakers within unjust social realities. I have strong hopes that such analysis can help curricularists actualize a new moment for this field where justice and love constitute the core justification of our intentions and actions as well as the means and ends of/to development.

I warn readers that the focus given on justice in this book is not a platitude. The centrality offered to justice is rather a call, or even better, a move towards new forms of solidarity, intimacy, and reciprocity with ourselves and with those who we aim to serve and love through our curriculum work. Back in 2015, Professor Gloria J. Ladson-Billings presented a lecture at the Social Justice Educator Award Session of the American Education Research Association (AERA). Ladson-Billings troubled the concept of “social justice,” for it is not “expansive enough to account for the injustices we see in society” (AERA, 2015). In this lecture, she enunciated three dominant theories of justice in Western societies: (1) John Stuart Mills’ utilitarian justice, which is synonymous with morality and moral action; (2) Robert Nozick’s libertarian concept of justice, which favors negative rights, small governments, and free markets; and (3) John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness, which calls upon self-interested individuals to place themselves in an “original position,” in a state of ignorance to conceive justice principles (AERA, 2015). Ladson-Billings (2015) challenged Western conceptualizations of justice and proposed a non-Western theory of justice, as well as a shift from “justice as theory to justice as praxis.”

I embrace Ladson-Billings’ criticism and invite curricularists to perceive justice in this book through a decolonial lens. I utilize an approach to justice by Tejeda et al. (2003) who recognize the contemporaneity of colonialism, defined as internal (neo)colonialism, and the normalcy through which social injustices are “sanctioned by dominant ideologies, [policies], and institutional arrangements” (p. 10). Justice is then conceived not only as a discourse “derived and informed by the experiences and interpretations of those living an internal neocolonial existence” (Tejeda et al., 2003, p. 33), but also as the praxis of transformation of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of schooling through decolonizing consciousness, “[which can] ameliorate and ultimately end the mutually constitutive forms of violence that characterize our internal neocolonial condition” (Tejeda et al., 2003, p. 19).

In this text, not only do I see the necessity to make purposeful connections to guide our thinking, sentiments, desires, and actions toward justice, but I also find the need to turn the very term “critical bifocality” into a verb: to bifocalize. I transformed this powerful concept into a verb because I cannot see this term as a static object among the various tools that constantly emerge in critical scholarship, a passive reference to interrogation and denunciation of systemic injustices, but rather the very action of “seeking contexts” (Greene, 1995, pp. 9–16) to overcome blindness of insight and self-aggrandizing absorptivity, unfolding new situated and relational meanings for “self” and “work” in one’s autobiographical lexis so that bonds of friendship and companionship across differences become possible in curriculum work. To bifocalize is to engage in the praxis of conscientização—from a nexus of love, hospitality, and solidarity— as we commit to analyzing our “selves” and our “work” within and across contexts, uncovering circuits of privilege and oppression while locating these elements in more expansive, liberating, and veracious perspectives. Indeed, the verb connotes the flux of fearless interpretations and negotiations, the commitment to alterity from a standpoint of love, hospitality, and solidarity, and our move towards justice—a liberating project of knowing, doing. and becoming in the world.

For example, rather than just looking at the “self” as an agentic being, someone who produces and negotiates the “self” and the “work” without the influence of structural arrangements, one bifocalizes the “self” and the “work” to see across grand narratives and structures. This constitutes a yearning and an action: to understand “self” and “work” in mutually constitutive contexts filled with conspicuous and subtle circuits of privilege and oppression. Moreover, one can bifocalize the “self” to put one’s intersectional identities such as whiteness and maleness in broader and deeper perspectives, analyzing their socially constructed meanings in relation to other discursive and material contexts, understanding how these dimensions of “being” can (re)produce, contest, and even (re)shape asymmetrical power relations in our lives and in our work. In other words, this book invites curricularists to conceive the “running of the course” not only as an opportunity to understand our human experiences and attain “deepened agency” (Pinar & Grumet, 1976, pp. 1–18), but also as an opportunity to become conscious in relation to oneself and others, locally and globally (Evans, 2002), and to trace and counter the often subtle circuits of privilege and oppression (re)produced through schools’ “hidden curricula” (Apple & King, 1977).

I argue that this project of “becoming” serves as a compass to foster social justice leadership identities in this post-reconceptualist era of curriculum work, identities that are capable of actualizing our “social imagination” (Greene, 1995) towards justice, especially in the communal spaces where schooling mediates students’ relational encounters in the world. As we attain greater levels of conscientização by engaging in this complicated conversation whilst departing from a nexus of love, hospitality, and solidarity, we become more conditioned to preclude the (re)production of colonial, patriarchal, and neoliberal structural arrangements and logics in our work, be it in classrooms, schools, and/or policy circles. Conceptualizing “curriculum as nexus,” I contend that once we commit to this project towards oneself and others, we engage in the “complicated conversation” (Pinar et al., 1995, p. 25) of curriculum work as a collective “public moral enterprise” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2004, p. xv). In a nutshell, I postulate that in the process of bifocalizing “self” and “work,” we engender critical agency, that is, the enactment of relational and situated reflections about lives in context(s), which lead us to this collective struggle to sustain critical action in our labor, from a nexus of love, towards justice.

As readers shall notice, I have referred to my own lived experiences in the course of running to craft this text, sometimes projecting these to the whole enterprise of curriculum work. I do so cautious of generalizations and universalist claims. However, as I will subsequently purport, we have to find some common ground from where we can depart, a standpoint that may help us position and proliferate curriculum work as a collective public moral enterprise. Following these pivotal discussions, I speak about the significance and the interplay between voice and space for curriculum work. I write about curriculum-as-plan, the integration of indigenous knowledge in curricula, and the fight for space and voice in hierarchical spaces in nation-states located both in global-north and global-south contexts. I then highlight the importanc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Engaging in the complicated conversation of curriculum work in a post-reconceptualist era
• 3 A short autobiographical account about conscientização: Critically bifocalizing “self” and “work” to learn to become
• 4 Reconceptualizing the concept of “informed dialogue” in policy circles: Embracing curriculum “as lived”
• 5 Valorizing the autobiographical con(text) in curriculum work to learn to become
• 6 Conclusion
• Index