Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice (Springer International Handbooks of Education) 3031211545, 9783031211546

Citation preview

Springer International Handbooks of Education

Peter Pericles Trifonas Susan Jagger Editors

Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice

Springer International Handbooks of Education

The Springer International Handbooks of Education series aims to provide easily accessible, practical, yet scholarly, sources of information about a broad range of topics and issues in education. Each Handbook follows the same pattern of examining in depth a field of educational theory, practice and applied scholarship, its scale and scope for its substantive contribution to our understanding of education and, in so doing, indicating the direction of future developments. The volumes in this series form a coherent whole due to an insistence on the synthesis of theory and good practice. The accessible style and the consistent illumination of theory by practice make the series very valuable to a broad spectrum of users. The volume editors represent the world’s leading educationalists. Their task has been to identify the key areas in their field that are internationally generalizable and, in times of rapid change, of permanent interest to the scholar and practitioner.

Peter Pericles Trifonas • Susan Jagger Editors

Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice With 27 Figures and 8 Tables

Editors Peter Pericles Trifonas Ontario Inst for Studies in Education University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

Susan Jagger School of Early Childhood Studies Toronto Metropolitan University Toronto, ON, Canada

ISSN 2197-1951 ISSN 2197-196X (electronic) Springer International Handbooks of Education ISBN 978-3-031-21154-6 ISBN 978-3-031-21155-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledging the Land

We recognize the land on which we live and learn, and the histories of this land. We are living and learning on the traditional territories of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, and this land is now home to many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. Toronto is in the “Dish with One Spoon Territory.” The Dish with One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishnaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous nations and peoples, Europeans, and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship, and respect. Toronto is also covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit. We also recognize the many lands that the contributing authors, and readers, live and learn on. We encourage you to come to know and relate to the traditional lands on which you dwell. Native Land Digital can be a great starting place for doing so: https://native-land.ca/.

v

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susan Jagger and Peter Pericles Trifonas

3

Part I

Curriculum as Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Noah Kenneally

29

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roxana Yanez Gonzalez, Christine D. Tippett, and Todd M. Milford Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum for Emergency Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aurelia Di Santo, Katie-Jay Scott, and Christa Leeder

51

65

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eugenia Arvanitis

81

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults . . . . . . . . Angela Oulton

105

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies, Progress, and Future Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonel Lim and Tang T. Heng

123

Part II

Curriculum as Placing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer S. Thom

143

vii

viii

Contents

........................

169

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susan Jagger and Meghan Hayward

181

Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum Maya-Rose Simon and Hopi Martin

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Claudia Eppert

199

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental and Sustainability Education: Nordic Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Monica Carlsson

217

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Patrick Phillips and Nicholas Ng-A-Fook

233

Part III

Curriculum as Caring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

255

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nomisha Kurian and Hilary Cremin

257

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in Young Learners: An Autoethnography on Bullying Intervention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew Yanko, Jessica Taylor, and Peter Gouzouasis

277

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and Heart in Workshop Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William W. McInerney and Hilary Cremin

295

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a Curriculum of Existential Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heather E. McGregor

315

Repurposing Public Art as Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthi Trifonas Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global Citizenship Education: Between the Universal and the Pluriversal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cathryn Teasley Part IV

Curriculum as Storying

333

345

..............................

363

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eero Ropo and Sari Yrjänäinen

365

Contents

ix

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher in Participatory Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susan Jagger

387

........................

409

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform Lovisa Fung

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juha Suoranta, Olli Pyyhtinen, Perttu Ahoketo, Rosa Dufva, Sauli Havu, Marja Hekkala, Tuomas Järvinen, Satu Kaipainen, Saara Kontio, Ella Lepistö, Maija Lintunen, Reetta Matilainen, Roosa Saukkonen, and Milla Seppälä

425

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adam W. J. Davies

443

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paige Carper and Susan Jagger

467

Part V

Curriculum as Changing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

487

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes . . . . . . . . . Christina Niemi Mølstad

489

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anja Giudici Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned from Finnish Core Curriculum Reform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jenni Sullanmaa, Lotta Tikkanen, Tiina Soini, Janne Pietarinen, and Kirsi Pyhältö Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and Curriculum Development in Ireland: Tensions, Debates, and Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas Walsh Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study of Four Cohorts of Elementary Teachers’ Life Hi/stories in the Republic of Cyprus (Late 1970s–2010s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stavroula Philippou and Stavroula Kontovourki Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid and the Liquid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elsa Estrela

507

527

543

565

587

x

Contents

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and Learning Landscape in the New Normal (The Case of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catherine K. K. Chan and Adrian M. H. Lam Part VI

607

Curriculum as Liberating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

633

Race and Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nathalia E. Jaramillo and Erik Malewski

635

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American, Normative Physics and Astronomy Post-Secondary Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thelma Akyea Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological Experiences of International Students in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adeela Arshad-Ayaz

653

671

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been Harmful and About . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carlo Ricci

691

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . H. L. J. Tsang and Ardavan Eizadirad

711

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance, Grit, and the Corporeal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Garth Stahl

727

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ardavan Eizadirad

743

Part VII

............................

761

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Douglas B. Clark, David Scott, and Joshua P. DiPasquale

763

..........

783

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds of Europeanization and Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria Erss

799

Curriculum as Designing

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture Joseph Zajda

Contents

xi

Digital Technology and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Kergel and Birte Heidkamp-Kergel

817

Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments . . . . . . . . . Marlon Simmons

833

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter Pericles Trifonas

845

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher Kirchgasler

859

Part VIII

Curriculum as Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

883

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role of Reflexivity and Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sinem Hizli Alkan

885

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing and Assembly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marc A. Ouellette and Dana Gavin

911

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to Reflect on STEM Curriculum Research and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thelma Akyea and Nenad Radakovic Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Samia Khan and Robert VanWynsberghe Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in the Pre-service Special Educator Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adam W. Jordan and Nenad Radakovic Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research: A Post-critical Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susan Jagger and Peter Pericles Trifonas

927

943

967

983

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1001

About the Editors

Peter Pericles Trifonas is a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. His areas of interest include ethics, philosophy of education, cultural studies, literacy, and technology. Among his books are the following: Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, The Ethics of Writing: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Pedagogy, Ethics, Institutions and The Right to Philosophy (with Jacques Derrida), Roland Barthes and the Empire of Signs, Umberto Eco & Football, Pedagogies of Difference, Deconstructing the Machine (with Jacques Derrida), International Handbook of Semiotics, CounterTexts: Reading Culture, Sellasia. Susan Jagger is an Associate Professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research interests include environmental education, learning gardens, place-based education, community mapping, participatory research methods, and children’s participation in curriculum and research.

xiii

Contributors

Perttu Ahoketo Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Thelma Akyea University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Adeela Arshad-Ayaz Department of Education, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada Eugenia Arvanitis University of Patras, Patras, Greece Monica Carlsson Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Paige Carper Independent Researcher, Wilmington, NC, USA Catherine K. K. Chan Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China Douglas B. Clark Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Hilary Cremin University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Adam W. J. Davies Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada Aurelia Di Santo School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada Joshua P. DiPasquale Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Rosa Dufva Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Ardavan Eizadirad Faculty of Education, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada Claudia Eppert University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada Maria Erss Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia xv

xvi

Contributors

Elsa Estrela Lusofona University, CeiED, Lisbon, Portugal Lovisa Fung Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada Dana Gavin Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA Anja Giudici School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Roxana Yanez Gonzalez University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Peter Gouzouasis Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Sauli Havu Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Meghan Hayward School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada Birte Heidkamp-Kergel Coordinator of the E-Learning, Center at Rhine Waal University of Applied Sciences, Krefeld, Germany Marja Hekkala Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Tang T. Heng National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore Sinem Hizli Alkan Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, United Kingdom Susan Jagger School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada Nathalia E. Jaramillo Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA Tuomas Järvinen Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Adam W. Jordan Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA Satu Kaipainen Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Noah Kenneally Early Childhood Curriculum Studies, Department of Human Services and Early Learning, MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada David Kergel Social Work at the IU International University of Applied Sciences, Duisburg, Germany Samia Khan Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Christopher Kirchgasler University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA Saara Kontio Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Stavroula Kontovourki University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

Contributors

xvii

Nomisha Kurian University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Adrian M. H. Lam Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China Christa Leeder School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada Ella Lepistö Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Leonel Lim National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore Maija Lintunen Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Erik Malewski Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA Hopi Martin Edge of the Bush, Toronto, ON, Canada Reetta Matilainen Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Heather E. McGregor Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada William W. McInerney University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Todd M. Milford University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada Christina Niemi Mølstad Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway Nicholas Ng-A-Fook University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Marc A. Ouellette Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA Angela Oulton George Brown College, Toronto, Canada Stavroula Philippou University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus Patrick Phillips University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Janne Pietarinen School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland Kirsi Pyhältö Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Centre for Higher and Adult Education, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa Olli Pyyhtinen Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Nenad Radakovic Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada Carlo Ricci Nipissing University, North Bay, ON, Canada Eero Ropo Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

xviii

Contributors

Roosa Saukkonen Tampere University, Tampere, Finland David Scott Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Katie-Jay Scott iACT, Redondo Beach, CA, USA Milla Seppälä Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Marlon Simmons Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Maya-Rose Simon Edge of the Bush, Toronto, ON, Canada Tiina Soini Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Garth Stahl School of Education, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Jenni Sullanmaa Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Juha Suoranta Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Jessica Taylor Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Cathryn Teasley University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain Lotta Tikkanen School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Christine D. Tippett University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Anthi Trifonas York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Peter Pericles Trifonas Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada H. L. J. Tsang Toronto, Canada Robert VanWynsberghe Faculty of Education, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Thomas Walsh Department of Education, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland Matthew Yanko Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Sari Yrjänäinen University of Turku, Turku, Finland Joseph Zajda Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Introduction

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come Susan Jagger and Peter Pericles Trifonas

Contents Curriculum as Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as Placing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as Caring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as Storying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as Changing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as Liberating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as Designing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4 7 10 13 16 18 21 24

The space of curriculum has been one of disconnection and alienation for both learners and educators. Following the lived and intellectual histories of thinking about education across cultures and contexts, progressive educational movements have struggled between, on the one hand, creating learning environments that center on the nature of the child and their curiosities and, on the other, deconstructing aspects of education that reproduce cultural norms and a learning and teaching habitus directed toward creating a particular type of epistemological subject. What both of these trajectories have in common is that they want to reduce the alienation present in the curricular mandates of educational institutions and reconnect learners and educators to the authentic nature of learning. The authenticity of learning is produced through the inter-actions of and in/between subjects whose voices, actions,

S. Jagger School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. P. Trifonas (*) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_1

3

4

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

and bodies create forms of being in curricular encounters that are unexpected and unplanned. Respect for difference can only be insaturated in the particularity of forms of curricular actions and objectives that are open and hospitable to the plurality of otherness and a diversity of lived experiences. It is not a matter of catalyzing a consciousness of divisive particularity or coalescing around a homogenizing universality; it is a matter of accepting the difference of the other and opening the educational spaces to a curriculum yet-to-come. It is not about curricular reconstruction, but about reconnecting teaching and learning to an ecology of curriculum that welcomes an ethic of self and invites differences that produce the authenticity of an education that resists alienation. This collection explores the possibilities for embracing a new ecology of curriculum that is open and hospitable, a curriculum yet-to-come. We have curated the chapters in a path of the active and dynamic themes of curriculum to be meditated on: curriculum as beginning, as placing, as caring, as storying, as changing, as liberating, as designing, and as teaching that take us from our earliest engagements with and wonderings about the world to our enaction of pedagogies and possibilities in a curriculum of not either/or but and.

Curriculum as Beginning S Beginnings are always already predicated on impossibility. I was not one of those people that had a set plan from when I was young and worked tirelessly toward it. I did not plan to be an academic. After high school and following my mother’s encouragement, I thought I would become a pharmacist (it is a good, clean job right?). My first year as a chemistry major at a northern university in Canada quickly erased those plans. I instead went with my own interests. I studied biology for my undergrad and took courses across other disciplines – History, Psychology, and Earth and Ocean Sciences. I was interested in many things and sharing those with others; I became an elementary school teacher and enjoyed learning with children for several years in different schools and contexts. But I was frustrated with boundaries and structures that held me to a set curriculum and way of teaching and thinking. This motivated me to go to graduate school and to further my studies and open my thinking about curriculum, pedagogy, and possibilities. My recent beginnings came with my realization of the permeability of the curricular structures and structural curriculum that I thought bounded me as an educator and as a learner. And now I am here. Beginnings, and openness to those possible beginnings, happen across the life span, but their start is in childhood. How might we realize the possibility of beginnings with the youngest learners? What might a multiplicity of learning opportunities look like in early childhood? Can and should we put limits or bounds on curricular possibilities? What is and what is not a moment of learning? And where, when, how, and why are these moments realized and always in play for each learner and for communities of learners?

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

5

P Embracing ambiguity, openness, and multiplicity, inter alia, “among other things,” decenters the certainty of knowledge, denatures the reason of self-certitude, and articulates an ethic of responsibility to horizons of otherness, an infinite debt and duty to what I know and do not know, bringing into focus the impossibility of knowing. The other beyond knowledge erases the self that seats its being going forward by looking endlessly for new traces of meaning, attempting to come closer to the proximity of signs of truth. I will never get there, closer to truth, in my lifelong learning, meaning forever incomplete and flawed . . . Should I give up the ghost of Kant’s “infinite im/perfectability” for a curricular incantation of what I already know I do not know?

Noah Kenneally’s exploration of play as an informal curriculum of childhood, “Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood,” begins the realization of a curriculum yet-to-come as he embraces play as a social practice, and one that is vital to children’s active socialization. Kenneally recognizes play to be both a social dynamic and a process through which children learn to dwell with and in childhood. Following Bourdieu’s thinking about practice and habitus and extending from his study of perspectives of childhood, Kenneally asserts that play is an embodied, nonrational, informal, and relational practice through which children take up behaviors and recognize social boundaries of childhood in their actions within those bounds, in their informal learning, their dialogue, and their participation.

6

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

Next, Roxana Yanez Gonzalez, Christine Tippett, and Todd Milford locate an openness to children’s interests within an emergent curriculum in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in their chapter, “Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum.” This emergent curriculum allows for children’s meaningful explorations of their worlds, through experiences planned with children’s unique interests and needs in mind, and supports children’s interpersonal skill development. Gonzalez, Tippett, and Milford share with the reader the power of an emergent STEM curriculum in the early years through their examples of child-centered learning engagements and experiences. Aurelia Di Santo, Katie-Jay Scott, and Christa Leeder continue our exploration of curricular beginnings and possibilities in “Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum for Emergency Contexts,” their overview of the innovative work of iACT’s Little Ripples program. iACT founders Gabriel Stauring and Scott imagined and realized an organization that supports those affected by conflict that empowers those very communities, recognizing their agency and honoring their voices, to cocreate and facilitate programs that meet their immediate and long-term needs. Little Ripples Early Childhood Education program affords quality, play-based learning opportunities for young children in several refugee camps in Chad, Greece, and Tanzania, as well as villages in eastern Cameroon. Di Santo, Scott, and Leeder detail how iACT realizes early years curriculum design and implementation in emergency contexts and how this responsive and respectful approach to curriculum necessarily moves beyond more traditional understandings and relationships of teaching and learning. In “Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum” Eugenia Arvantis captures this responsiveness to community and context in her reporting on early years curriculum intervention in seven early childhood schools in Greece. Here, a highly differentiated curriculum embraces diversity, recognizing and engaging with global issues while supporting reflexive learning and developing an intercultural growth mindset. Curriculum and pedagogy is guided by informed decision-making, content and materials aligned with unique learning styles and needs, lifeworlds, and interests, and active participation embraced as a way to sustain young learners’ meaningful engagement. Through these transformative, creative, and reflexive curricular realizations, children who have lived with and in spaces of conflict and trauma are empowered to become public narrators and advocates. Angela Oulton’s “School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults” digs into the learning space of the learning garden and its curricular intentions, and the historical ways that adult agendas have used the seemingly innocent and natural site as a means of controlling and shaping children’s roles and futures. Through her analysis of historical texts from the 1890s to 1920s, the peak of the school garden movement in the early twentieth century, Oulton illuminates the

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

7

often hidden goals of saving “evil” urban and poor children; producing “good,” moral, and obedient citizens; and recruiting and creating in children reliable agricultural workers in the city. The chapter invites the reader to consider their own curriculum – formal or informal – and what its implicit and explicit motivations and intentions might be and how they meet social and political desires. Finally, Lionel Lim and Tang Heng discuss early years curricular moves in Singapore that are guided by equity and are in response to increased societal, academic, and political attention in their chapter, “Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies, Progress, and Future Challenges.” They outline Singapore’s state policies and how they take up (and do not take up) calls for equity and fairness in quality early childhood education and detail key efforts by the state to support all children’s learning. Lim and Heng go further to imagine how efforts can be extended and deepened to take up in them the culturally relevant curricular and pedagogical possibilities.

Curriculum as Placing S I am from Vancouver Island, in the Salish Sea on the west coast of Canada. When I get home for a visit, I like to get up and go for a walk or run at Rathtrevor Beach. Even though months, and years, may pass, as soon as I get out and into the forest and coastal air, I feel at home. Those grays, greens, and blues of the BC coast, the blurred continuum of mountain to forest to sea, can be found nowhere else. The salty air that you can smell and even taste. The muted cushion of each footfall on the path weaving through Western Red Cedars and Douglas Firs, Salal, and Oregon Grape. This is my place. And while I live in Toronto now, this coastal place is part of me. And knowing this place, knowing my home, is really knowing myself. As I ran, as I often do, I thought about those children that I worked with mapping the park. The mapping of place opened up for them a unique way of representing what they know about place. It was a way for them to know home. Perhaps even know themselves as I did in this place. P Oikos (spell it). Home, habitus. Logos. Language, reason. Language is the house of being. A dwelling curating the reason of knowledge, for better or worse. The idea of “home” dispels the sense of alienation that washes across the shores of consciousness and disrupts being and knowledge. Reason inhabits a sense of place in language, situating the place of logic within its referentiality. Without language, knowing the materiality of space feels inhospitable in an undecidable phenomenology of signs without contextuality. What I know cannot be expressed, communicated, professed, and learned from outside of difference and deferral. Not being at home in language manifests an estrangement of knowing and how to

8

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

be, my hair stands on end, and it is uncanny, a Freudian Unheimlische, the unconscious realization I am not “at home” in what I know makes me a nomad stuck in a schizophrenic dystopia of deterritorialized signs and signifiers. I yearn for an eternal return to the garden of learning; there memory is present and absent, repeating the past with a different similarity that is a welcoming ecology, a language of home, and the home of language. Learning from the experience of belonging and not belonging provokes me to question the curricular ground of what I know, a currere at once regressive, progressive, analytical, synthetic, and always already different.

Jennifer Thom’s “Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curricular Research” begins our thinking about place and placing as it explores the place and the places that inherently and inextricably guide all of our curricular thinkings and doings. She does this by guiding the reader through her location of Ted T. Aoki – historically, geographically, genealogically, and academically – and of herself in a curricular continuum of relations to place. The resultant curriculum vitae, the path of life and of lives, invites us to (re)consider curricular places and the place of curriculum while engaging with the emerging and entangling rhizomes that allow us to find ourselves in curricular wonderings and wanderings. Next, in “Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum,” Hopi Martin and Maya-Rose Simon consider how learning happens and situate this enactment within our relations with the living and breathing Earth. From Indigenous perspectives, an essential step in reconciliation is the development of a practice, relationships with the Fire, the Land, the Water, and the Fire, and our own curricula emerge with these growing relations. Martin and Simon walk with us through thinking about Doodoom Aki as emergent curriculum by beginning with Mother Earth and its teachings and rhythms, relating to Mother Earth, acknowledging Mother Earth, and walking gently on Mother Earth.

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

9

“Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic” by Susan Jagger and Meghan Hayward extends from the Earth and shares elementary school children’s engagements with and thinking about the land. Bringing together traditional knowledge and relations with the Land with Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, Jagger and Hayward highlight the ways that children engage with the land in their school garden and in a community mural and walk project. In these beings with and in place, they locate children’s thinking about the land in their knowledge and feelings related to the school garden, their community, and the world. The children’s knowing and being in places suggest their recognition of the land and their enaction of a growing land ethic and invite us to center curriculum and pedagogical practice on the land where we learn, teach, and live. Claudia Eppert examines our ethical obligations of bearing witness to ecological devastation of places and more than human worlds in her chapter, “Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing.” Following a meditation on rocks and reflection on a Holocaust memorial, Eppert draws from the work of Levinas and others as she traces the complexity of witnessing in light of ecological ethics and the posthumanist turn. With rocks in mind, she considers what theorizing on an ethics of historical witnessing opens up for ecological witnessing and also what explorations of ecological ethics and imagination allow for in a curriculum for witnessing. Next, Monica Carlsson continues our placing of curriculum within place and environment as she explores the bringing together of political and democratic formation – Bildung – and competence in the action competence concept in “The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental and Sustainability Education: Nordic Perspectives.” Carlsson considers what forms of learning, action, and changes in justifications of curricular content, teaching and learning approaches, potentials, and constraints guide education practice within the context of Nordic environmental and sustainability education curricular guidelines. The conceptualization of the guidelines as an educational ideal align with notions of active democratic citizenship in Nordic policies and curricular frameworks and take up a nonaffirmative and transformative approach to education. Finally, “A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project?” attempts to answer situated curricular inquiries within a Canadian context. Patrick Phillips and Nicholas Ng-AFook share research done by the Canadian Curriculum Theory Project and illuminate some of the entanglements with transdisciplinary intellectual tradition influencing theoretical formations in past and present projects. They delve further into the contextual situatedness of the work within a settler colonial nation-state through narrative moments in Canadian curriculum studies that unsettle settler colonial

10

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

imaginaries in an affective turn to a responsive ethical relationality and reconciliation as an emergent field of educational studies. The chapter considers implications extending from and inviting difference in studying, theorizing, and collaborating with partners across and situated in communities and places.

Curriculum as Caring S The late Stephen Jay Gould once asserted the environmental necessity of forging an emotional bond with nature, “for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” An engagement in the curriculum of home and the pedagogy of place invites the learner into an ecological ethic of care. The children who I worked with in their school garden recognized that they were in a reciprocal relationship of care with the garden. They cared for the garden by planting, watering, and spreading compost on plants, by building and repairing garden beds, and by keeping the gardens free of litter. One grade six student said that the plants were “like little kids, like you are caring for a little kid but you have to water it and you have to weed it.” The garden in return cared for the children by providing them with a space for playing, digging, discovering, sketching, and eating. It was also an escape for the children. Alex said that “if you’re angry or pissed off, going there will make you happier. It’s peaceful and quiet.” Maya agreed that it was a place where “you get to take your mind away from stuff, there’s no stress and you don’t have to worry about stuff, like in real life.” An ethic of curriculum that grows from the ecological understanding of home allows for the nurturing of the whole child as learner. P Curriculum is a sign of immanence and eminence: the mark of possibility and impossibility. Empty and full. Like a sign, it has no motivational, contiguous of relational attachment to what it represents. Truth and meaning remain always already arbitrary. Curriculum, like language, “stands in” for the mental nurturing of our knowledge of what it refers to, not caring about the materiality of its bond with a signified world outside the lexical marks of difference that signify absence of empirical knowledge. To know demands faith in the arbitrariness of the curriculum and its epistemological construction, accepting a method and its madness, not looking for the logic of its relation to an essence of truth, but producing a consciousness of what structures the connections between a conception of knowledge and pedagogy and the outcomes it desires to reproduce as truth, not the gifts of lived experience or a being wrought in a becoming yet-to-come. Love of learning takes hope in the unanswered and sometimes the unanswerable, not in finitude or correctness; unrequited knowledge is not a loss of meaning or an end to reason, but a beginning fed by epistemological curiosity that questions signs of experience and the ecology of its claiming to know.

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

11

“Helping Young People Feel That They Matter” leads our focus on curricular care and caring in curriculum. In their exploration of students’ sense of meaning, purpose, and self-actualization, Nomish Kurian and Hilary Cremin discuss peace education and peer mediation and share the transformative experiences of leadership and altruism of one student at a school in an area of economic instability. They conclude by reflecting on how supporting young people to feel seen and heard and encouraging them to give back to their communities provides insights into teaching and learning in purpose-driven and connected ways. A space of friendship, play, and socioemotional health and well-being is important in all learning environments, and this is particularly the case with kindergarten. In “Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in Young Learners: An Autoethnography on Bullying Intervention,” Matt Yanko, Jessica Taylor, and Peter Gouzouasis share the creation of a safe learning environment, and in turn, the prevention of bullying, through young children’s music making and engagement as innovators, creators, and implementers of song writing as an intervention strategy. They identify that children’s active and shared participation in music composition and performance opens spaces for the development of caring prosocial behaviors and empathy. Music is asserted by Yanko, Taylor, and Gouzouasis to be a valuable medium for children to understand and work through challenging concepts and experiences and a meaningful way for educators to move beyond traditional intervention programs and empower

12

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

children as active agents in their own behavior and in those within their learning environment. William McInerney and Hilary Cremin’s “Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and Heart in Workshop Spaces” explores poetic peace education as an epistemological, pedagogical, and curricular reorientation that centers on poetry to engage learners’ whole selves within the context of peace education. McInerney and Cremin forge paths forward for peace education that use recent critiques of the field as an invitation to take up the creative transformation of peace education praxis and highlight the power of the arts in learning about peace and in particular how poetry can support the movement of peace education in realizing more affective, responsive, and peaceful learning processes. Heather McGregor reflects on her engagement with curriculum, pedagogy, and her students related to the climate crisis and the preparation for the environmental challenges upon us. “A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a Curriculum of Existential Threat” shares with readers their collective envisioning new forms of crisis-responsive teaching that honestly confront individual and collective mortality. McGregor and her students worked beyond bounding schooling frameworks and constraints and in turn opened up the possibility of existential threat. This provoked a consideration of the uncomfortable responsibility of the educator guiding learners through confrontation with the climate crisis and their individual and shared mortalities and the responses that such curricular and pedagogical moments may evoke. In “Repurposing Public Art as Education,” Anthi Trifonas explores public art as a curricular artifact and the possibility for it to be embraced as a catalyst for social engagement and care. Historically, public art in the form of monuments and memorials has served to remind us of people and events deemed to be important by governing bodies. However, since the 1960s, the theory and practice of public art has broadened to acknowledge its inherent and implicit political and ethical texts at work within the art while also facilitating new ways to engage with audiences and take up social issues. One such issue is of homelessness, and this is represented in the socially engaged project Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering, 2021-2022 in Toronto, Canada, and Trifonas explores its audio and visual installations through the lens of social sculpture to uncover how a phenomenology of homelessness can impact related discourses and engage attendees in a caring and activist public education for social justice. Cathyrn Teasley’s engagement with curriculum as caring is in her chapter, “Curricular Convergences and Divergences around Global Citizenship Education: Between the Universal and the Pluriversal.” In it, Teasley inquires critically into the emergence of global citizenship education as at once a transversal curricular project

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

13

and a challenge to neoliberalism’s reduction and disconnection of curriculum. Under consideration includes what global citizenship education is; the extent to which it might bring together disciplines to foster shared rights, responsibilities, and respect for the planet; the possibilities and challenges to global citizenship education; and the epistemologies and ontological implications of global citizenship education. Teasley ponders if research and practice in this field might be able to realize ways of upholding cross-cultural social justice, inter-relationality, and interdependent coexistence in their broadest and most historically situated understandings.

Curriculum as Storying S One of the maps that the children and I created of the park was an emergent bulletin board map. Here we started with just an outline of the park and its shoreline. With each class visit to the park and mapping session, we returned to the bulletin board and added to it our experiences of the park. We added our renamed paint chips: arbutus peeling bark red, fungus among us green, and slug slime brown; the places and features that starred in our adventures: the wasp attack zone, the butcher blowup, and the dragon tree; and our stories of place: the road on which we learned to ride a bicycle, the path of huckleberries that we ate and ate, and the beach where we counted seemingly countless jellyfish static on the sand. Week after week, we added layers to our map and the interaction between the layers, the relations between our understandings of home, guided our next explorations of the park in a recursive spiral of product and process, curricular knowing, and curricular being toward an outcome not to be reached. P Process is product and product process. The tautology is forceful because both words are repeated twice for maximum effect. Jerry Seinfeld said as much: “It is what it is.” Or is it? Human nature is a dichotomy for some, not a tautology of essences. There is nothing human about nature and nothing natural about being human. Phrases cannot gloss over the incommensurability between conceiving of education as methods of human intervention through curriculum and the natural phenomena of learning simply through the act of being in a place in which you feel at home. Charting the network of associations provoked by the intentionality present in pedagogical assemblages that gather from the standing reserve of epistemological materiality, curriculum becomes decentered and rhizomatic, an ecology of learning. Not an artifact of guided outcomes and discrete objects. A never-ending undecidability and stories about its empiricality of being rather than knowledge or truth. Which is better? I do not know. It is what it is.

14

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

Eero Ropo and Sari Yrjänäinen’s chapter “Curriculum as Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives” begins our meditation on storying as it studies curriculum as narrative in which multiple plots have been designed, either implicitly or explicitly. Though the current educational climate promotes transparency of learning outcomes and educational results and the adoption of high-stakes testing and evaluative accountability measures, narratives persist throughout education, in schools and institutions, in curriculum and instruction, and in sessions and lessons. Narratives connect facts, meanings, beliefs, traditions, and timelines from past to future, and thus curriculum itself might be considered as narratives, collected and composted from cultural, historical, racial, gendered, and political perspectives. Ropo and Yrjänäinen assert that theorizing curriculum from the perspectives of narratives promises new insights in our common understanding of the nature of education itself as a politically constructed yet complex conversation in which different plots are open for discussion. “Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher in Participatory Research” shares musings taking up the dually cast role of participant and researcher. In this chapter, Susan Jagger plays with Jacques Derrida’s use of the postcard, of envois, and takes up Jasper Johns’ invitation to “Take an object, do something with it, and then do something else with it” as she brings together the multiple texts of the research space in anecdotal postcards, reflective musings, and theoretical marginalia. These pieces at once inform and guide each other in conversation as Jagger meditates on the role/s of the participatory researcher, the opening (and closing) of a reciprocally respectful research space, and deconstruction at work within curricular research and the curriculum of research.

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

15

Lovisa Fung turns our gaze to the stories and storying of the lived curriculum of teacher education in “Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform.” While preservice teacher education often asserts that it takes up reflective practice, this is usually limited to techniques and methods without connection to the preservice teacher’s selfhood and its influence on practice. Fung focuses on insights gained from theoretical underpinnings of reconceptualist thought and narrative as praxis in preservice teacher education as they explore the experiences of teacher education students. The transformative experience of reflecting, creating, and sharing autobiographical teaching narratives through documentary making is explored and the subsequent emerging 5Cs Framework and its implications are discussed. Reading further into shared stories of the lived curriculum is Juha Suoranta, Olli Pyyhtinen, Perttu Ahoketo, Rosa Dufva, Sauli Havu, Marja Hekkala, Tuomas Järvinen, Satu Kaipainen, Saara Kontio, Ella Lepistö, Maija Lintunen, Reetta Matilainen, Roosa Saukkonen, and Milla Seppälä’s reflective “Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster.” They examine the unprecedented conditions surrounding their lives and the lives of their students during the COVID-19 lockdown of Spring 2020. Drawing from their observations and their students’ reflective personal narratives, the formal strategies and visions of their university’s performance- and competence-based curriculum thinking are contrasted with their daily practices as educators and sociology students and consider their lived experience and coexistence, their lives as educators and students during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adam W. J. Davies’ “Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)” responds to the often unquestioned dominance of developmental theories and conceptions in the training and subsequent practice of early childhood educators. This excludes those educators whose lived experiences with mental distress and “mental illness” – Mad ECEs – do not fit with the norm. Drawing from Mad Studies frameworks, Davies’ chapter calls for the explicit incorporation of Mad autobiographical narratives in preservice ECEC to break down exclusionary norms that persist in both preservice training and ECEC widely, forwards the centralizing of Mad epistemologies and pedagogies, and encourages wonder and curiosity through autobiography to dismantle the unrealistic ideals within preservice ECEC. Paige Carper and Susan Jagger reflect on the curricular paths taken by their book club in “Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club.” Thinking broadly and etymologically of curriculum, they recognize the openness of possibilities for learning content and contexts and currere, the self-reflective and retelling process of considering one’s own experiences through regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis, and these were taken up, unknowingly at first, by their book club as they read and responded to texts reflective of lived personal experiences, social changes, and pandemic-related tensions navigated from Spring 2020 to Summer 2021. This chapter revisits, through the curricular readings and conversational writing of two book club members,

16

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

Carper and Jagger, eight books of the books read and shares the dialogue of identity and listening, strength, loss, and possibilities that unfolded.

Curriculum as Changing S Community mapping curriculum is inherently collaborative, and its processes and products are guided by the collective voices of mapmakers. As a pedagogical engagement, community mapping shifts ownership of knowledge and decision-making about what knowledge is of value away from the educator and the prescribed curriculum of reproduction to the learner and the lived curriculum of home. Understandings are situated and created in conversation with place. P Interconnectivity, knowing acts, learning encounters, and teaching postponed. Structuring learning encounters around frames of knowing in teachable moments makes the master and the slave. A dehumanizing dialectic of Freirian proportions. Can and should the teacher ever postpone the act of teaching? Is professional responsibility abdicated if the teacher does not go through the motions of imparting the “best” of their disciplinary methods? The state sanctions the right to “owning” knowledge that only the teacher can give away as a “gift” to those disciples willing to perform the curricular rituals to be changed by it, in a way that is institutionally acceptable.

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

17

In “The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes,” Christina Niemi Mølstad follows how current Norwegian curriculum making takes place between the Bildung tradition and contemporary outcome-oriented curriculum and assessment reforms. While some language in curricular reform relates to a more outcomeoriented approach, Bildung and Didaktik can also be traced in curricular documents and practice. Mølstad argues that the Norwegian curriculum has found a way to keep Bildung and Didaktik within an outcome-oriented reform. Anja Guidici asserts that nationalism has significantly shaped curriculum development and reform around the world and that an accurate understanding of this relationship is necessary for curriculum theorists, researchers, and practitioners. Her chapter, “Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations,” provides a map to both identify useful concepts in the field and to consider methodological and theoretical consequences, benefits, and risks in its review of the ideal norm, typological, and claim-based approaches to nationalism in curriculum research. In mindful consideration of these approaches, she concludes that we are able to identify how, when, and under which conditions nationalism contributes to shaping the curriculum and when it does not. Large-scale curriculum reforms, to Jenni Sullanmaa, Lotte Tikkanen, Tiina Soini, Janne Pietarinen, and Kirsi Pyhältö, are a central tool for developing education. “Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lesson Learning from Finnish Core Curriculum Reform” proposes a theoretical model of curricular development in which reform stakeholders have a common and clear understanding of what needs to be changed and how it is to be changed. They synthesize findings of a longitudinal systemic research project on change in the national core curriculum across state, district, and school levels and share strategies used in educational reform and implications for curriculum development practice. Next, Thomas Walsh considers educational vision, content, pedagogy, and assessment in his chapter, “Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and Curriculum Development in Ireland: Tensions, Debates, and Future Directions.” Crafting coherence in policy change is an ongoing, dynamic, and intricate process. With a focus on primary schooling and its implications for curriculum development and enactment, Walsh explores this complex and diffuse education policy landscape in Ireland. The chapter analyzes the many dynamic influences on curriculum development within the wider policy system and the power dynamics in those relationships and shares key notes and implications for the Irish context that resonate with international experiences. “Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study of Four Cohorts of Elementary Teachers’ Life Hi/stories in the Republic of Cyprus (Late 1970s–2010s)” examines the connections between teacher professionalism and teacher education curriculum. Stavroula Phillipou and Stavroula Kontovourki do this by looking to the middle-ground and recognizing teacher education curriculum as emergent in teacher life hi/stories and across changing sociohistorial and

18

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

institutional contexts. In exploring the themes of disciplinarity of knowledge and the (non)academization of experience in lived teacher education curriculum and the emergence of the theory-practice debate as central to teachers’ education and perception of professionalism, the chapter calls for consideration of local meanings and narratives stemming from a changing landscape in the historicity and topology of teacher education. Political and social change is considered in Else Estrela’s “Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid and the Liquid” as Portuguese curriculum history following the democratic revolution is reviewed for adaptations to meet the needs and conditions created by present liquid times. Estrela argues that curriculum must be inscribed in a narrative paradigm whose properties allow for both contextual adaptation and resistance. The concept of refraction is used to illuminate how curriculum policies have developed and teacher narratives are key to identifying the dialectic relation between internal curricular elements, external conditions, and results. Catherine Chan and Adrian Lim situate their examination of curricular change in the “new normal” in which technology is relied upon and is a priority for future development. “Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and Learning Landscape in the New Normal (The Case of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region)” details the emerging phenomena and interactions among schools, communities, and the private sectors that are shaping curricular systems and learning landscapes. Chan and Lim consider the changing curricular system and ecology of the learning landscape, shifting public and nonpublic relationships, hybridity of the East and the West, contingent curricular leadership, and the emergence of a new cross-borderscape as curriculum and learning moves to become more responsive and resilient.

Curriculum as Liberating S The learner becomes educator, the child becomes researcher, and in response, the educator steps back to allow room for curriculum to stretch and move and transform. This is not always an easy dance for the educator to follow; indeed not taking the lead in teaching can feel very awkward. In my school garden work with children as participating researchers, I took steps back to allow the children to take the lead, and to guide our curricular mapping of the garden and the garden experience. The curriculum was and is dynamic and ever changing. P What would it mean to empower a student with the right to produce their own knowledge realized outside of normal “teaching frames,” historical and emergent conceptions of pedagogy? What would it mean to do that? To recognize

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

19

the authenticity of a knowledge ecology closer to an autogeneic production of “human nature” and not the results of a pedagogical intervention? To respect the depths of their active de-schooling, rooted in a conscientization of the effects of power on knowledge. Can knowledge free from constraints of discipline of method still be recognized as legitimate knowledge? Is the research to prove its claims valid despite its radical authenticity?

In “Race and Curriculum,” Nathalie Jaramillo and Erik Malewski share a historical understanding of race in the curriculum with particular attention paid to multicultural efforts, Black curriculum orientations, and currere. They outline a social context of the onset of multiculturalism and explore the main tenets and contradictions that have evolved, looking specifically at the work of William Watkins of Black curriculum orientations. Currere in curriculum theorizing is revisited with a focus on the race, gender, and sexuality intersections advanced by theorists in curriculum studies, and the assault on Critical Race Theory in the United States and abroad is interrogated. Thelma Akyea turns our gaze to the experiences of Black women, women of color, and white women in tertiary physical science education in “Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American, Normative Physics and Astronomy Post-Secondary Curriculum.” Drawing from critical curricularists, Akyea asserts the importance of the lived curriculum across learning content and settings and focuses on science education research that connects lived experiences and curriculum to learning. She infuses the perspectives of Black women, women of color, and white women to illuminate the normative physics and astronomy curriculum and detail

20

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

components and connections to critical perspectives on thinking and learning in science education, building on personal lived educational experiences in the field. Adeela Arshad-Ayaz’s chapter, “Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological Experiences of International Students in Canada” considers if international students are identified as solely financial beings or if their ways of knowing and being and their values are authentically woven into Canadian tertiary education discourses. Does the internationalization of higher education result in epistemological pluralism? Drawing on insights from decolonial, poststructuralist, and postcolonial perspectives, Arshad-Ayaz investigates the internationalization of curriculum and the inclusion (and exclusion) of the ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies of international students. “Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been Harmful and About” exposes the dark side of mainstream schooling and shares how we might learn in gentler ways. Carlo Ricci invites us into conversation about the purpose of mainstream schooling and its unspoken benefits to some at the expense of others as he guides us through the dangerous, controlling, and harmful history of schooling to illuminate how schools function. Who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged? Is anyone left unscathed? What are kinder, gentler, more compassionate, and fairer possibilities? What examples might we look to and learn from to educate better? H. L. J. Tsang and Ardavan Eizadirad’s “Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization” highlights the urgent need to use liberatory and revolutionary practices to move toward social change. Critical race theory, queering, and feminist lenses are used to explore ways that educators can center significant local and international events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, to symbolize ongoing systemic inequities within education institutions and systems. Tsang and Eizadirad argue for the necessary move to a curriculum of critical consciousness that opens possibilities to advance equity and social justice. Garth Stahl looks at attention to the compliance of the student body and how this increased focus on the corporeal has become the new pedagogy of the poor. Their chapter, “‘Pedagogies of the Poor’ to ‘Pedagogies on the Poor’: Compliance, Grit, and the Corporeal,” highlights how practices that blend pedagogy with codified behavioral management techniques – what Stahl terms the corporeal curriculum – monitor and control bodies of students living in poverty. Body pedagogics and socio-material theories are introduced, scholarship on students’ bodies and grit are reviewed, and the furthering of the corporeal curriculum through no-excuses schooling is discussed as a reflection of a sociohistorical imaginary regarding civilizing and disciplining disadvantaged populations.

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

21

In “Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada,” Ardavan Eizadirad outlines the limited educational opportunities and access to postsecondary programs for those incarcerated in Canada. A literature review indicates education is a significant factor in reducing recidivism, and thus access to education needs to be prioritized on a systemic level and supported by governments with funding and resource allocation. Eizadirad suggests a more holistic approach to the provision of education through partnerships with nonprofits, community agencies, and postsecondary institutions and ways to mitigate challenges and barriers identified.

Curriculum as Designing S The navigation and representation of one’s own community in nature, the mapping of home, opens up a unique curricular and pedagogical space of ecology. It is one of relations and relatedness, of connections and connectedness, and also of reconnections and reconnectedness. The content and context of place offers a curriculum that is relevant and real. A curriculum that is reflective of alternative and ecological knowledge and wisdom, teaching, and learning with and in our natural community necessarily moves away from anthropocentrality to and ecological embrace of environment and of our embeddedness in environments. In the mapwork of home, and the ecological curriculum, children can dig in and allow their understanding of place to take root and grow. P What opens us to learning is the impossibility of learning itself. A curriculum is always already an education-yet-to-come. The ideal form of teaching and learning of content is taught to an ideal student in ideal conditions. An educational construct reproduces cultural norms and a learning and teaching habitus directed toward creating a particular type of epistemological subject. It is axiomatic that what curriculum depicts is not reality as such, but a bias in the production of claims to knowledge unveiled by a method of questioning designed to elicit particular responses that are assessed for the purposes of evaluating compliance and conservation. The space of curriculum has been one of disconnection and alienation for both students and teachers from the future of knowledge and truth. Curriculum is the epistemological gathering of the standing reserve of knowledge. A pedagogical technology of fixed points of understanding maps cognition onto an image of rationality that is not “real” – a snapshot of what is the knowledge of most worth and how to get there. But for whom? Valuation of knowledge is irresponsible, uncaring, and solipsistic. Fracturing autopoiesis and diversity in the enactment of a knowledge ecology and its economy of being-for-curriculum not being-for-knowledge.

22

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

Douglas Clark, David Scott, and Joshua DiPasquale, in “Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields,” explore traditional approaches to educational design that have dominated education in the past century. They consider the limitations of these methods in motivating transformative change in schools in ways that counter normative hegemonic arrangements and imagine possibilities for design from design fields and participatory design. Clark, Scott, and DiPasquale explore various approaches that introduce new goals, structures, and roles in educational design that can transform education in service of more equitable futures. The elements of curriculum design and evaluation tools are the focus of Joseph Zajda’s chapter, “Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture.” Seven models of curriculum are discussed: curriculum as the unit to be transmitted; inquiry-based curriculum; curriculum as a process; outcome-based education curriculum; curriculum as praxis; situational curriculum model; and curriculum as social transformation. Zajda evaluates the connections between ideology, the state, education policy, and curriculum design and concludes that the school curriculum is a dynamic, complex, and multilayered policy document that is interpreted and implemented in a multitude of ways. Maria Erss asks how, following Europeanization and globalization, curricular emphases and the role and autonomy of teachers have changed since Estonia regained independence and how these changes are related to Didaktik in her chapter, “Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds of Europeanization

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

23

and Globalization.” Findings from related empirical studies show a strong European and global influence and a bringing together of Anglo-American outcome-based curriculum with Didaktik tradition and Soviet-subject centeredness. Erss shares that despite attempts to give schools and educators more autonomy, teachers and school leaders continue to identify themselves as curriculum implementers. David Kergel and Birte Heidkamp-Kergel share a synoptic overview of how digital forms of teaching and learning have developed over the past 20 years in “Digital Technology and Education.” Tracing the evolution of knowledge and information media, the chapter moves from unidirectional learning designs through various transformations of E-learning (computers, Web 2.0.0, MOOCs) in order to survey and analyze the evolution of the current space of digital education in which learning and technology can never be separated but exist in a dialectical resolution. Marlon Simmons’ timely chapter focuses on the growing dynamism to inspire academic staff to network using Zoom technologies in teaching, research, and supervision. “Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments” recognizes the demand for responsive and customized modes of understanding curriculum research and practices in online settings and considers the role of technology as driving socially shaped and coconstructed teaching and learning and as defining educational practices of learner and educator. Simmons poses and meditates on a number of questions including what are the ways of knowing made durable with synchronous platforms (e.g., Zoom) that become modes of attachment; what signification processes are theoretically embedded through sociomaterial interactions; and how we might design curriculum to build students’ trust and allow their agency to emerge through familiarity with the social and the material as shaped by the experiences embodied within network learning? Peter Trifonas’ chapter, “Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet,” engages ongoing debate around how the rapid proliferation of the World Wide Web has affected means and modes of learning as well as the sociality of knowledge media and ethical implication of access to information technologies. The chapter addresses educational issues and curricular implications around “deep learning,” and cognition, brain function and neuroplasticity, educational design and heuristics, social media and ethics, human rights and technology. “The Order of Orders: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency” imagines curriculum as a haunted house and considers the assumptions that can be traced throughout its very design. Chris Kirchgasler discusses the contingent relations of curriculum with evolutionary developmentalism, cybernetic processes, and anticipatory algorithms and examines how principles of efficiency take up hopes and fears that shape the possibilities and limits of curriculum design. In recognizing curriculum design as being guided by the norms and values of design orders themselves, Kirchgasler invites us to think otherwise to the differences and exclusions that otherwise would appear by design.

24

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

Curriculum as Teaching S The decentering of curriculum to one that stems from an ecological ethic of care changes the relationship that the learner has with home. The land is no longer known and lived in as a place to be exploited for human gain. Instead the land is understood to be a gift to be acknowledged and honored. It is an offering that requires our respect and our thanks to be reflected in our actions. Through their community mapping and school gardening, children’s actions embodied their enactment of curricular knowing and thus a present curricular being. Within the span of the projects, the children’s interactions with their natural community nurtured the diversity, health, and well-being of the individuals, relationships, and environments of home. P Dig up the words that breathe in and out of me, being a disciplined spirit, reproducing fully formed outcomes to be assessed through a reflectivity guaranteed to make me kick the habit of not acknowledging my ignorance for the passion of the search for meaning and truth. Never the unknown. Pedagogy is the reason of curriculum reproduced in mind, body, and spirit in order to belong to a tradition of how to assess and define the truth of knowledge. Is not that the point of consciously reflecting on one’s learning? To fill gaps? KWL: What I know; What I want to know; What I learned. Beyond the best of methods lies an ethic of curriculum constructing the ecology of the pedagogical event in which teachers and students are actors of their own fate, embracing the sparks of epistemological curiosity fueling a fidelity to the outcomes of the curricular event, “buying into” what is happening, hoping to make teaching and learning fade away into knowledge.

Toward a New Ecology of Curriculum: An Education Yet-to-Come

25

Sinem Hizli Alkan begins our thinking about curriculum as teaching in her chapter, “Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role of Reflexivity and Networks.” Drawing from a critical realist approach, she argues that the generative mechanisms – modes of reflexivity, relational assets, and national and organizational context – foundational to teachers’ curriculum-making practices can allow us to better understand why teachers act in different ways. Next, “A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing and Assembly” invites us to consider how the analogy of an assembly line can be, and even is already, realized in our curriculum and pedagogy as it is in our daily lives, and how technology and digital environments create new roles through altering patterns and scales of human experience. Marc Ouellette asserts that it then follows that learning takes on a new set of possibilities based on the repeated actions of knowledge assembly and the resultant effect derives from the imposition of a contingent sameness on the outcome. This necessitates the consideration of the effects of seriality that are built into our assembly practices. Thelma Akyea and Nenad Radakovic reflect on their own research and practice with and in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum. “Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to Reflect on STEM Curriculum Research and Practice” offers us a critical examination of how their work with marginalized students opened up curricular events that are both sites of liberation and also potentially sites of oppression. Using a Black Canadian Feminist theorizing and guided by practice portrait methodology, Akyea and Radakovic considered descriptions of their institutions and conditions for work, theoretical and practical underpinnings of their daily practice, and critical moments from their teaching as they sought to become better educators able to empower and liberate from oppression all learners who are marginalized. Rob VanWynsberge and Samia Khan look at STEM teaching and learning and funds of knowledge gained from community practice and household activities related to STEM learning outcomes in their chapter, “Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM.” Their research focused on the funds of knowledge of young children in a community that is marginalized and how a community-based curriculum impacts those funds. Study findings highlight that young children’s STEM funds of knowledge involve construction, technology, plant, and environmental science, and that elementary school curriculum based on children’s funds of knowledge can be a meaningful way to build upon existing STEM understandings from home and sponsor knowledge extensions. In their chapter, “Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in the Pre-service Special Educator Curriculum,” Adam Jordan and Nenad Radakovic consider the dual interactions with mathematics and mathematics knowledge that special education teachers must have: mathematics needed to operationalize the field and mathematics to effectively deliver curriculum and instruction. To support preservice, and in turn in-service, teachers in the field of

26

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

special education, teacher education curriculum, and pedagogy must promote conceptual understanding and mathematical teaching practices with the goal of empowering students to realize that math is a way of reading and writing the world. Susan Jagger and Peter Trifonas’ “Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research: A Post-critical Dialogue” enacts a form of deconstructive inquiry into teaching, learning, and educational research as it reflects on a participatory exploration of the school garden. By putting two textual columns into play with each other, Jagger and Trifonas actively decenter meaning in the interpretive moments of the act of reading as writing. The point of entry attempts to broach the set of systematic hierarchical relations underlying the relations of power and knowledge in the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research, specifically the ethics and politics of its representation, and the practices it enacts, endorses, and tries to reproduce. Respecting what Jacques Derrida has called the “exigencies” or norms of a classical protocol of reading and writing, this text exemplifies what a deconstructive mode of intervention would actually look like and do as qualitative inquiry and how its praxis of productive resistance could enable an ethical reimagining of the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research. S When the children dug down into place in the park and in their school garden, they uprooted the entangled network of curricular threads that quietly underlie teaching and learning. The rhizomes, those continuously growing horizontal botanical stems that now and then push up shoots and deepen roots, typically make themselves known only at intervals that we often call teachable moments where we allow the being to guide the knowing. Only when we begin to trace those moments on the ecological depth and breadth of knowing and being do we recognize the impossibility of possibly locating a curricular beginning and ending, a starting process and terminal product, and a curricular outcome. The children’s engagement with home is their navigation of curricular knowing and being, applying and recreating knowledge, that maps out a curriculum to be enacted and an education-yet-to-come.

Part I Curriculum as Beginning

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood Noah Kenneally

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Learning and Socialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relational Understandings of Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socialization: Traditional Models and Child-Centered Reframings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bourdieu: Habitus and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Perspectives of Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Play As a Social Practice of Childhood: Curriculum, Socialization, Relationship, and Habitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

30 30 31 35 36 38 46 48

Abstract

This chapter explores play as an informal curriculum of childhood and proposes that it is a social practice that children engage with and learn how to be and become children. Taking a sociological perspective, this chapter explores the ways that play is a vital aspect of children’s socialization, a concept reframed from passive process to active engagement. Play is framed as a social dynamic which differentiates children from adults, and as a process through which children learn to inhabit the social position of childhood. Inspired by Bourdieu’s ideas of practice and habitus, and drawing on a study conducted by the author exploring children and parents’ perspectives of childhood, this chapter makes a case for understanding play as an embodied, nonrational, informal, and relational practice – a form of social learning through which children take on the behaviors and boundaries of the social category of childhood, while also experimenting and improvising within those bounds. Ideas N. Kenneally (*) Early Childhood Curriculum Studies, Department of Human Services and Early Learning, MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_48

29

30

N. Kenneally

of play as informal learning, play as dialogue, and play as a means for children to participate in active socialization are also explored. Keywords

Play · Informal curriculum · Social practice · Childhood · Social position · Active socialization · Bourdieu · Habitus · Arts-based research

Introduction This chapter thinks within the frameworks provided by the sociology of childhood and relational early childhood curriculum studies. It attends to curriculum outside of school and education contexts, following ideas about informal learning and embodied dialogue. Sociologically, this chapter thinks with and against Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social practice. Socialization is reframed from ideas of enculturation imposed on children to participatory and embodied processes of social learning that happen through engaging in social practices. In this context, play is understood as a social practice of childhood – in Bourdieu’s words, a practical action – that children engage in, and so takes on the characteristics and boundaries of the social category of childhood. Drawing on data from a study investigating children’s perspectives regarding childhood socialization in the context of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (Kenneally, 2021), this chapter considers play from children’s perspectives, analyzed and interpreted through a critical and theoretical adults perspective by bringing those perspectives into conversation with ideas of social and informal learning, socialization, and the social position or category of childhood. Children in this study considered play a vital aspect of childhood, and a defining activity that makes them legible as children in their particular minority world context. It is important to note that play is a complex dynamic. While it is generally understood throughout this chapter as a dynamic tool that children use for learning and well-being, it must also be acknowledged that play does not always need to be in the service of development or learning, but can also exist for its own sake, as intrinsically motivated, purposeless play. This is of vital importance – children need unregulated spaces, unsurveilled activity, and purposeless activity for its own sake. However, this chapter attends to those aspects of play that support children’s social learning and sense of belonging as they play into being and becoming children.

Social Learning and Socialization The process of socialization is most commonly understood as the work done on children by adults as part of a civilizing project to bring children into social life. The sociology of childhood has for the most part avoided socialization as a concept. Researchers working within this framework have done so because common

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

31

understandings of socialization generally position children as passive recipients of cultural learning, and this is at odds with the image of the child as an engaged social actor that is a fundamental principle of the field. The broader discipline of contemporary sociology has also for the most part turned away from socialization, favoring the related concept of social reproduction. However, as Allison James (2013) contends, the concept of socialization maintains a strong hold on the popular imagination regarding childhood. This has prompted James and a handful of other contemporary childhood scholars to reassess it, and to reframe socialization as more dynamic and participative, in ways that acknowledge children’s active role in the processes involved. This section first explores ideas of social learning through relational understandings of curriculum, which occur outside of formal educational contexts. It will then briefly review traditional and newer models of socialization before taking a deeper dive into the work of James (2013) as a model for childcentered socialization.

Relational Understandings of Curriculum In the field of early childhood curriculum studies, curriculum is understood as “the whole range of experiences, planned and unplanned, direct and indirect, that occurs within an environment designed to foster learning” (p. 142, Makovichuk et al., 2014). While curriculum is generally understood as the body of knowledge explicitly engaged with through direction in a course of study, this chapter approaches curriculum as the material learned informally while the learners are engaged in social practices – following more relational conceptualizations. This relational approach, which conceives of curriculum as the material of relationships themselves, rather than as an object or product, assists in the work of this chapter. Relational understandings of curriculum have been explored in several contexts by a variety of scholars. This chapter builds on the work of these scholars – most notably the work of Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues who investigate the place of informal learning in the cultural nature of human development; Enid Elliot’s thinking around aspects of early learning, and particularly play, as dialogue; and the relational understanding of early learning and care woven throughout Flight, Alberta’s provincial early learning and child care curriculum framework (Makovichuk et al., 2014). This section of the chapter explores their ideas. Rogoff’s work emerges from anthropological studies of cultural transmission and reproduction, the education and socialization of people in particular contexts. Looking at learning that happens outside of school in many contexts, Rogoff studies the important social learning that occurs when children or learners engage in meaningful activity with others. Similar to Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective of learning (1978, 1987), from which it takes much inspiration, Rogoff’s work investigates how children take on and come to understand community norms, expectations, and activities through collaborative participation. These dynamics apply to

32

N. Kenneally

learning cultural practices as well as learning the technical skills of particular crafts or occupations (Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff et al., 2016). Rogoff and her colleagues investigate the cultural aspects of social learning, studying the ways that cultural information and practical skills are passed on to children through their participation alongside others in the everyday tasks of daily routines. They note that these collaborative engagements are a significant means that help children understand the expectations, roles, norms, beliefs, and values of their communities and cultural contexts, while at the same time helping them to develop their cultural identities and a sense of belonging. Rogoff and her colleagues identify this social learning that occurs outside of the formal school context as being critical to community members’ understanding of contextual values, norms, and practices, as well as the passing on of key skills, life ways, and knowledge that shape and differentiate contexts (Rogoff, 2003; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009; Rogoff et al., 2016). Rogoff et al. (2016) describe some of the key features of informal learning as being: • Interactive – occurs within social interactions and through relationships. • Nondidactic – it is achieved through activity that does not have the explicit intention of instruction. • Embedded in meaningful activity – happens within the sphere and routines of everyday life, and within community. • Intrinsically motivated and based on learners’ interests – generally not imposed from outside, or in ways that are removed from what is relevant to the learner. • Guidance is available – learners can get support via social interaction or are scaffolded by the structure of the activities themselves. • Not assessed externally from the activity – assessment happens to contribute to the activity itself, not for any reason external to the activity. • Improvement and innovation – learners not only develop their skills through participation, honing their already existing skills and knowledge, but also generate new ideas. This framework offers a useful perspective that supports this chapter’s consideration of curriculum as an everyday process of social learning, or as socialization. In particular, if play is a curriculum for informal learning that children engage with in order to be and become children, these key features strongly support this approach to understanding it as an active, engaged, and embodied form of socialization. Elliot (2010) extends another relational perspective of curriculum. Elliot brings her years of experience as an early childhood educator into conversation with Bakhtin’s ideas of diaologic relationship and thinks about childhood, early learning, and play through that lens. A Russian sociolinguist, Bakhtin thought deeply about how language and dialogue shape our interactions with others and our understandings of the world (1994). Elliot adapts his ideas to fit into thinking about pedagogy

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

33

and early learning, emphasizing the importance of dialogue as a critical aspect of learning. Through dialogue, Elliot notes that new meanings are constructed as we share perspective and come into contact with new ideas. Dialogue influences, shapes, and changes all involved in reciprocal ways. This reciprocal aspect of dialogue – an openness to and sharing by and influencing of new ideas, practices, perspectives, and ways of being – is a key aspect of this relational approach to pedagogy. Elliot’s concept of dialogue refers not only to talk and discussion, but also to interactions and exchanges beyond spoken conversation. While dialogue is traditionally understood as involving one subject engaging with another (or an Other), most often understood as two people – relational approaches to understanding assist with conceiving of alternative ways to think about who engages in dialogue. This understanding of dialogue as multidirectional, multisubjective, and networked is gaining ground in relational early childhood curriculum studies, drawing on poststructural and relational material theoretical lenses (Dahlberg et al., 2013; Kenneally, 2021; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Makovichuk et al., 2014; Moss, 2006, 2018; Prout, 2011; Rinaldi, 2006). Examples of this expanded understanding would include dialogue between a subject and their environment, between a subject and a concept, or potentially between a subject and themselves. Vital to the undertaking of this chapter, Elliot also proposes two other important ideas – that dialogue is multimodal, and that play can be understood as dialogue. Her first idea, that dialogue is multimodal, emphasizes that dialogue is not restricted to spoken words or written text. Dialogue can take the form of many different modes of expression, for example, visual forms such as images, graphic symbols, film, or video, or nonverbal forms such as body language, dance, and other embodied practices. Dialogue can be deeply engaged and profoundly meaningful, and yet words might never be spoken. This embodied understanding of dialogue – with self, with others, and with the norms, standards, and expectations regarding a particular type of person or social position – is vital to the ideas explored in this chapter. So is Elliot’s second proposal that play is a dialogue. Children enter into a conversation (embodied, interactive, conceptual, and relational) when they engage in play – be it with particular materials like shovels, buckets, and sand in a sandbox; other people such as a group of children interacting in a game of tag; or even concepts like family life and social dynamics as they negotiate roles and ideas in a session of pretend play of “school,” “house,” or “superheroes.” When we see play as reciprocal dialogue, we can see all the diverse actors engaged in a particular play session as adding to the conversation, shaping and influencing it, directing it along pathways that emerge based on the particular mix of actors and elements involved. Solitary play can even be a dialogue, as the player enters into a conversation with their own ideas and identities, with the materials they are playing with, or even with the environment they are playing in. We enter into both play and dialogue, contribute in a diversity of ways, and emerge changed.

34

N. Kenneally

Finally, the Flight curriculum framework, developed by Makovichuk, Hewes, Lirette, and Thomas – in consultation with practitioners and leaders in the field of early childhood curriculum – also takes a relational approach to curriculum. Inspired by the innovative early learning approach taken in Reggio Emilia, the curricular experiments expressed in Te Whāriki (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2017) and the New Brunswick Curriculum Framework for Early Learning and Child Care (Department of Social Development, 2008), and taking a sociocultural perspective toward how learning happens, the Flight framework puts forward the idea that learning is founded on and manifests through relationships. Educators are encouraged to cultivate strong, caring relationships with and between children, their families, and other early childhood professionals in order to create early childhood communities that are flexible, responsive, and nurturing “places of vitality” (Makovichuk et al., 2014, p. 10). This emphasis on relationship building – defined as a practice of relationships – provides a context that recognizes children as active contributing members of their communities who are engaged in profound processes of discovery, social interaction, and meaning making. Drawing on the sociocultural perspective of learning, Flight views learning as both socially mediated and deeply dependent on context. Flight highlights an understanding that children are resourceful and competent people and is based on a set of goals that foreground children’s play and active participation as a primary methodology for meaning making. The goals – WellBeing; Play and Playfulness; Communication and Literacies; and Diversity and Social Responsibility – provide a holistic perspective through which they can engage with children in coconstructing knowledge, skills, and feelings of belonging. The role of play in the framework is fundamental – it is understood as a ubiquitous dynamic that occurs across human culture and in other species, and that it is a particular tool of childhood. While adults are understood as able to be playful, play is strongly connected to children’s lives and experiences throughout the framework. Playful engagement with others, with environments, and with materials – in interdependent relationships with the human and more-than-human worlds – helps make meaning making concrete and intelligible. These relational approaches to understanding curriculum are all strongly aligned with ideas that connect with social learning and socialization. By considering informal learning, we can think about actors becoming inducted into particular cultural contexts and learn how to belong by participating in embedded everyday activity. Understanding learning and play as dialogue helps us to think of them as active and social dynamics – and social in the broadest sense, which could include multimodal, multidirectional, and multisubjective dialogue with others, environments, and the self. Understanding that relationships are the bedrock of learning, and that play can be a vital tool for meaning making, we can bring ideas about curriculum, socialization, and play into conversation with each other.

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

35

To facilitate that conversation, the next section unpacks some ideas about socialization. It briefly outlines some of the most prominent models of socialization and presents an introductory discussion of newer perspectives of socialization that take a more participatory and engaged approach.

Socialization: Traditional Models and Child-Centered Reframings Several models of socialization exist. The following is a brief chronological summary of those models. In Parson’s functionalist model (1951), socialization was understood as a project that began in birth and ended with the completion of adolescence, in which adults carved children into the shape of a working, purposeful, and contributing person and thus maintained the stability of society. In Skinner’s behaviorist model (1974), centered around his concept of operant conditioning, children are programmed through exposure and positive or negative reinforcement to become appropriate social machines. These first two models emphasize a structural understanding of socialization, favoring the dominating power of social structures and institutions in determining people’s lives. Denzin’s social interactionist approach ([1977] 2017), in which children are viewed as more agentive participants, incorporates codes of conduct through social interaction and language acquisition. Similarly, Kuczynski and colleagues’ bidirectional model (Kuczynski, 2003; Kuczynski & Lollis, 2004; Kuczynkski et al. 1997) views children and parents as mutually socializing each other, shaping each other to fit particular roles. In these two models, agency is emphasized and locates socialization dynamics within the interpersonal interactions of individual actors. The emphasis of either structure or agency in these models has been critiqued as insufficiently nuanced, as interpretive sociology as a field has moved away from an antagonistic understanding of structure versus agency and toward more synthetic theorizations that account for the ways that both structure and agency influence social life and childhood (Gabriel, 2017; Prout, 2011). The work of Bourdieu is one such synthetic approach to overcoming the structure/agency dichotomy, as it emphasizes relationships between these concepts as the realms for social life. His theory of socialization will be explored later in this chapter. Before that discussion, the final part of this section presents the work of Allison James, who revisits the concept of socialization to reframe it so that it can account for an active, capable, and engaged image of the child as a participant in socializing processes. In Socialising children (2013), James, a foundational theorist and researcher in contemporary childhood studies, undertakes a reworking of the concept of socialization by foregrounding children’s active role in socialization. Her reframing centers children in their own socialization processes, shaping their social lives through engagement with particular practices and quotidian daily activity. Premised on the sociology of personal life developed by Carol Smart (2007), and based in her extensive knowledge, experience, and research in childhood sociology and

36

N. Kenneally

anthropology, James personalizes the processes of socialization and emphasizes how different children experience them differently. In telling individual stories, she works to contextualize those differences by linking their subjective experiences with structural historical and political dynamics in British society. James bases her retheorization and analysis of children’s socialization experiences on five assumptions: a) that children have personal lives that they reflect on from time to time, just as adults do; b) that their lives are lived in interaction with others, and that they make decisions and choices that shape their lives as much as have their lives shaped by the decisions of others; c) that their lives are embodied and emotional; d) that their lives are effected by structures and institutions through the multifaceted interactions that they have with them; and e) that their lives are biographical and connected to changing historical, material, and social environments. The perspective offered by these assumption values children’s experiences and demonstrates the multiple ways that children are materially and conceptually embedded in society, rather than separate from it. James proposes that through actively engaging in the seemingly small and mundane activities, interactions, and negotiations undertaken by children as part of their daily routines – riding the school bus, spending time with their families, and negotiating friendships – children contribute to the formation of their status position as children. James emphasizes that it is through “the mundane and pedestrian pattern of everyday life, rather than through dramatic biographical events, that children get to know how the social world works and the parts they can play in it” (2013, p. 174). She highlights the roles of uncertainty and negotiation in this process, and in the overall process of growing up. Her retheorizing of children’s active involvement in socialization provides dynamic support to the thinking of this chapter, as do the ideas provided by Bourdieu’s approach to socialization, which has come to be known as a theory of practice (1977, 2005). Bourdieu’s work was a fundamental component of the study from which this chapter draws its data. Before investigating some of that data and looking at how children come to inhabit the social position of childhood, the next section of this chapter outlines Bourdieu’s work and, in particular, explores two of his concepts – habitus and practice.

Bourdieu: Habitus and Practice Bourdieu’s work focuses on the visible social world of practice, what people do, and how and why they may do it. He developed this approach to contrast against the Cartesian notion of the rational choosing human subject that had become dominant in social theory in the latter half of the twentieth century, and which remains popular today (Bourdieu, 2005). For Bourdieu, social life was based on a felt-sense rather than on rational thought – on unconscious, almost-unconscious, or forgotten patterns that were encoded into the body and made manifest through action. As an aspect of his theory of practice, Bourdieu developed a suite of thinking tools to use when investigating the ways that actors came to inhabit a particular social position, or the ways they negotiated power relations. Among these thinking tools is the concept of

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

37

habitus – an internalized sense of the social world shaped through experience and particular to context, social position, and history. Habitus is often described as “a system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72). These dispositions incline an actor to react, respond, value, think, and imagine along some avenues and not others, again based on social position, history, context, and the immediate moment. From within embodied habitus, an actor has access to a certain set of strategies that fit, make sense, or feel right – choice, but within a contained range of choices. With the concept of habitus, Bourdieu worked to account for both structure and agency in the ways that people became the people they were and acted in the ways that they did. Ideally, people internalize habitus to the extent that they operate in the social world with a degree of what he refers to as “mastery” or “virtuosity.” This is a deeply integrated sense of how to do things that bypasses rationality and takes the form of action Bourdieu calls practice. Bourdieu interprets practice in social worlds – the ways that people do things as both a reflection and reinforcing of habitus – as a form of art or craft, in which the “feel for the game” allows an actor to perform with ease, grace, and creativity. Based on their mastery of the particular “games” that they play in the fields in which they inhabit, actors can improvise, make choices, and strategize to make change – within the limits of their particular habitus. While habitus guides, it does not determine – it rather allows for movement and choice through this improvisatory interpretation. Within Bourdieu’s vision of social practice, agency works within the constraints of social structures, both external and internalized, and in turn their practices contribute to shaping social structures. Bourdieu’s vision of socialization is one of dialogue, relationship, and movement together along the steps of a dance concurrently shaping and shaped by habitus. A gap in the concept of habitus is that Bourdieu does not explore how it is formed or integrated. He mentions that habitus begins to be formed in early childhood but beyond that has little to say about the particular processes involved. In his words, “habitus is a set of dispositions, reflexes and forms of behaviour that people acquire through acting in society” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 19, emphasis added by author). “Acquire” does not tell us very much, and neither does “acting in society.” Wacquant (2016), Bourdieu’s longtime collaborator, proposes another term when he writes that habitus is acquired “in early childhood through osmosis in the familial microcosm and its extensions” (p. 68, emphasis added by author). Both of these are nebulous terms, and neither really reflects an agentive understanding of children as capable coconstructors of their social worlds. In particular, using the term “osmosis” promotes a passive conceptualization of the transmission of cultural knowledge and skills, amounting to a repetition of the traditional adult-centric understanding of socialization. Pushing against the dominant adult-centric understanding of socialization are some recent reframing of the concept. As discussed above, James (2013) retheorized a child-centered approach to socialization that acknowledges their active role in the process, looking through the lens provided by Smart’s sociology of personal life. Similarly, Kenneally (2021), the study from which this chapter draws its data,

38

N. Kenneally

reframes children’s socialization as active and embodied, building from Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The next section of the chapter investigates part of that study and explores how children form and integrate habitus by engaging in childhood practices – in particular play. The author does this by thinking about and with children’s perspectives regarding the importance of play in their lives, the ways that informal and social learning about being and becoming children might happen through play, and the ways in which play differentiates children from adults, helping them to inhabit the social position of childhood.

Children’s Perspectives of Play The study in which the following data was generated involved children and families and explored the question “what makes a kid a kid?” The project, led by the author of this chapter, engaged with 22 families over the course of a year, generating knowledge with children and parents through conversation and comics-making. One of the primary findings that emerged from that study were children’s feelings regarding play – almost all of the children who participated in the project talked about play as a primary activity of children. Many of the children identified play as something that differentiated children from adults. This section first briefly discusses the research project from which the ideas in this chapter emerge. It then outlines some of the findings of the study regarding children’s ideas of play. Then, bringing those findings into conversation with emerging understandings of socialization and social learning as active and participative socialization processes, a case will be made that children’s play can be understood as an informal, nonrational, embodied curriculum through which children learn how to be and become children, and thus inhabit the social position of childhood. While this was an interpretive qualitative research project, some demographic information regarding the research participants is useful in clarifying the context in which the data was generated. The conceptualization of children, childhood, and the primacy of play are particular to typical childhoods within a minority world context in the early twenty-first century. Even within that specific context, it is important to understand that this research is interpretive in nature and is not intended to be used in making generalizing statements regarding universal ideas of children and childhood. Out of 37 child participants, 28 children ranged from ages 4–9, and 9 children were 10 and 11. This is important, as in sociological study early childhood and the perspectives of children under 10 years of age are underrepresented in contemporary literature and research (McNamee & Seymour, 2013). The age-range of parents was not salient to the research and was therefore not noted. The participating families ranged across a diversity of different family formations, including single-parent families, two-parent families, blended families, families with same-sex parents, and families with different-sex parents. They lived in or nearby several urban centers in Ontario, Canada (Toronto, Ottawa, and Thunder Bay) – or in or near smaller Ontario towns (Hamilton and Stratford). Additionally, the majority of the families would fall within a middle-class range, demonstrating common social markers of

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

39

that socioeconomic demographic in contemporary Canadian society (McMahon, 2014). These markers were expressed as the following: a) the majority of parents of the participating families were employed outside of the home; b) many owned their homes; and c) most lived in or near urban areas. The remainder of participating families fell within a working-class demographic. Children identified as girls, boys, and nonbinary children. The families ranged across a diversity of cultural backgrounds, and while the majority of the families were white, some parents identified as Chinese and Filipino/a. Although gender and race are important social categories that have significant and material effects on children, parents, and families’ experiences, the majority of issues that emerged while the data was generated generally focused on issues related to class. Children are identified throughout the study and this chapter by pseudonyms they chose for themselves. Generally, data was generated through participative encounters – the researcher and participant (both children and adults) engaged in conversations that also generally involved comics-making. Comics-making as research methodology is an emerging field and builds on established arts-based research approaches that have been used in childhood studies for several years (Kuttner, Sousanis, et al., 2017; Kuttner, Weaver-Hightower, et al., 2021; Kenneally, 2021). Inspired by the work of Barry (2014) and Flowers (2017a, b), this research used comics-making as a framing device for conversations with participants in which data was generated, and as a form of graphic data themselves. A methodological approach of arts-based and embodied listening resulted in multimodal artifacts being generated in response and alongside narrative conversations exploring ideas about childhood, adulthood, parenthood, and personhood (for a more detailed account of the methodology of this study, see Kenneally, 2021). A variety of findings emerged, and one of the key ideas identified by children and parents alike was the importance of play. Almost every participant (child and adult) talked about play – playing catch; playing games; playing on swings, slides, monkey bars, and jumpy castles; playing pretend; playing sports; playing video games; playing with siblings, friends, and pets; playing with LEGOs, dolls, stickers, and puzzles; playing indoors; playing outdoors; playing with your parents; and playing with your children. This chapter highlights some of the data generated by some of the children participants, in order to think with and about their ideas regarding play and establish play as a social practice of childhood. For example, the following four cartoons were drawn by children responding to prompts regarding examples of play in their lives (Fig. 1): In the first panel, QUEEN LILY (6) runs through a field with her friend playing tag. In the second, RACOON (8) drew himself playing in the snow outside his home with another child. WILL (11) drew a comic about the way play changes as children get older, as well as how it can become a site for contested social meaning, status, and interactions. LARA (6) drew a picture of herself playing with art supplies, saying that it was what she loved to do most. Play was seen as a vital and important dynamic that kids engaged in – something that differentiated them from adults. Although several children acknowledged that adults could engage in play, it was

40

N. Kenneally

Fig. 1 Examples of play cartoons

clear that they felt that there were significant differences between children’s play and the leisure activities of adults. Normative concepts about childhood heavily influence dominant ideas regarding play that circulate discursively and materially, particularly in minority world contexts. In The trouble with play, Grieshaber and McArdle (2010) apply a poststructural lens to dominant notions of play, identifying a set of taken-for-granted assumptions that shape contemporary understanding of both play and childhood. These dominant ideas frame play as • • • • • • •

Fun Natural Normal A developmental process Reflective of childhood innocence A universal right for all children As being active, physical, loud, and boisterous

Grieshaber and McArdle contend that these dominant ideas reinforce children’s subordinate social position in society by framing their primary activity – play – as innocent, irrational, frivolous, irresponsible, and unimportant, in direct contrast with

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

41

popular notions of the adult subject (who is understood as rational, autonomous, independent, and responsible). This critique makes an important point – that these normative ideas shape and constrain what is possible to imagine about both play and childhood. For example, both play and children are normatively understood as innocent. And yet, as Grieshaber and McArdle explain, play and childhood are anything but. Children are socially competent actors who have significant impact on the world around them – who actively shape and are shaped by their environments, contexts, and relationships. The “innocent” construction of childhood is a politically and ideologically charged conceptualization – framing children as deficiently vulnerable and incompetent – denying their very evident capacities as social actors. And yet, these images of both play and childhood are circulated and recirculated, reinforcing a particular way of imagining and understanding children. This is a clear connection to the socializing power of habitus, and we can begin to see how play, as a defining social practice, might begin to make the boundaries of the social position of childhood familiar to the players. These normative concepts are visible throughout the comics and stories generated over the course of the study, as can be seen in the examples above. However, so were alternative understandings of play. Active and social types of play – running, tag, hide-and-go-seek, gymnastics, sports, climbing trees, and pretending – were more often discussed than quieter and more solitary types of play – reading, drawing, making crafts, imagining, and solo pretend play sessions – although these were also discussed and drawn about at length. Some children chose to play differently, improvising within the structuring stories provided by habitus. An example of this is the following cartoon drawn by MRS CUPCAKE (9). In this cartoon, MRS CUPCAKE has portrayed play as something that is quiet and on the surface passive. Literacy research demonstrates that reading is anything but passive, but in contrast to more physical forms of play, reading looks calm and serene. Reading is a quiet, cognitive activity connected to language acquisition and intellectual development in childhood. Contrasted with the buoyant and physical vision of childhood, reading is still an embodied practice – MRS CUPCAKE’s hands hold the book and turn the pages; her eyes scan the words and images; and her body reacts to the story via sensations and shifts in position. In this embodied form of play, MRS CUPCAKE is also in relationship – with the story, its characters, and setting; with the people involved in authoring it; with the material book itself, and everything and everyone that went into its production; with the room she reads in, and all the materials and objects that make it; with the people who helped her learn to read – likely her family members and key educators; and on and on into the whole interdependent world (Fig. 2). What becomes clear from what these children share is that play is an embodied experience – whether it is active or quiet, it engages the player’s body with different sensations, experiences, states, and behaviors. The children’s drawings and stories also clearly demonstrate that they consider play as a social action – many of the children drew pictures of children playing with, or at least relating with, other children. Play is profoundly relational. While it can be a vehicle for facilitating children’s being, becoming, and doing together, it does not always have to do so in

42

N. Kenneally

Fig. 2 Reading is play

ways that are comfortable, productive, benign, or prosocial, as Grieshaber and McArdle contend (2010). However, regardless of the social dynamics at work in play situations, play can always be understood as a relational dynamic. Even challenging play situations that might involve conflict or changing expectations are still relational processes. Even forms of play that are solitary are relational – in that they are happening in relationship with others, whether those others are objects such as art supplies, LEGO blocks, or other toys; imaginary people in pretend play; or the characters in the book being read. Understanding play as relational and as something children do with others and other bodies (whether they are material/ imaginary/people/objects) shifts the concept of play as a social learning or socializing action from a linear dynamic moving forward in time toward mastery and adulthood, and into a networked dynamic where influence, attention, and energies flow, eddy, ripple, and disperse. Play circulates in multiple directions, engages with multiple bodies and types of bodies, and flows out along different lines along webs of influence and interaction. Play is clearly important and has become a serious field of inquiry drawing a multidisciplinary body of researchers, theory, and studies. While the field has found it difficult to provide a definitive definition of play, all concerned acknowledge it as an important activity, particularly for children (Aitken, 2019; Greishaber & McArdle, 2010; Huizinga, 1949; Shipley, 2013; Sutton-Smith, 2009; Prioletta, 2020). Developmental psychology has valued play as an instrumental element of children’s growth and development. Classical developmental theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky stressed the importance of playful activity as a means toward physical, cognitive, and social development for children. Piaget is most well-known for his stages approach to understanding children’s development (1932, 1954, 1968, 1971).

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

43

He understood play as children’s primary arena for the processes of assimilation and accommodation – in which children cumulatively integrated new information and ways of thinking/being into old ones, adapting as they grew more capable of increasingly complex thought as they aged. Vygotsky’s (1978, 1987) understanding integrates a more explicitly social understanding of development – children learn by engaging in shared activity with others, in which the more skilled scaffold the less skilled. He referred to this as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), into which children entered regularly in social play. Similarly, the sociology of childhood has valued play as a way for children to develop their social capacities, mostly building on the claims made from developmental perspectives that play is a key vehicle of development (Corsaro, 2017; Gabriel, 2017). According to this perspective, play is children’s primary space in which they learn the crucial skills required for productive social interaction. Corsaro’s theory of interpretive reproduction, in which children remix and adapt social structures, norms, and standards to make them meaningful within their own frames of reference and experience centralizes play as their primary method of doing so (1992, 1993, 2012, 2017). According to Corsaro’s thinking, it is through play that children interpret the information, behaviors, and roles they observe and participate in social life within the constraints of their experiences, similar to the integration of and improvisation with habitus. Outside of these disciplinary perspectives, play can clearly be understood as a means for children to learn from and with each other – a participative process of socialization. Play can become a way for children to share cultural and contextual materials and information with each other. Play also is an arena for establishing social status based on types of play and access to resources, particularly as play and play materials have become a prominent commodities market (Wells, 2021). All of this suggests that play is powerful means for social learning in informal contexts. From infancy, children engage in playful activity as they discover their bodies, their capabilities, and their environments. Adults caring for children engage in playful activities with them – playing peekaboo, exploring different materials with them, and teaching them games as they grow and gain experience. In early learning and care contexts, children play in parallel alongside each other and interact with other children through playful activity. However, the central idea that this chapter is exploring is that it is through play that children make themselves into children – through engaging in the embodied social practice of play, they integrate into their bodies and imaginations what children do, how children act, and how children take up space in the world. In the following cartoons and narratives, children aimed to demonstrate that play is an embodied practice, in which they realize and make manifest the structuring structures of habitus at the same time as they integrate them or engrave/inscribe them into/onto their bodies – acting in ways expected of them and available to them given the particular social position of childhood (Figs. 3, 4, and 5). In these three examples, the children are drawing and talking about different play activities as being social and embodied – children are playing with others, moving their bodies through space in ways that are considered “childish” or “child-like.”

44

N. Kenneally

Fig. 3 RUBY running with her mom

Fig. 4 GORILLA-ZILLA playing with a friend at recess

Fig. 5 THE CAT’s drawing of girls playing

These childish or childlike behaviors are strongly connected to higher levels of energy and emotionality, a theme that I will engage with later in this chapter. First, however, the following close analysis of these comics and stories helps us see the ways that play reveals some of the structuring structures of how children should be in the world – and thus illustrate habitus.

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

45

For RUBY, play is a way that she engages and connects with her mother. They enter into an embodied dialogue of play together and informally teach and learn from each other about being children and adults. RUBY understands that these running races delineate differences between adulthood and childhood. RUBY notices what her child body is capable of doing in contrast with her mother’s adult body and revels in it – revealing that she values being able to run fast and win against her mother. Her ability to run and move fast fits into typical/dominant notions of childhood as active and playful, as per the critique provided by Grieshaber and McArdle (2010). The quickness and activeness of children’s bodies is contrasted with the slower moving and thoughtful rationality of adulthood and is often trivialized or valued less. Her playful races with her mother also give RUBY a space in which to resist the regular social ordering which positions children as almost always less capable than adults, or at least a space where she can resist that ordering. RUBY can run faster than her mother, and she knows it, tilting the regular power dynamic in her favor. This shifting of the ever-present power dynamic between adults and children, through the means of bodily playful interaction, could be interpreted as a nonrational, improvisational strategy that RUBY engages in to contend with the constant social reinforcement of child subordination to adulthood. For GORILLA-ZILLA, play is a way for children to connect with each other and with their environment – again, an example of play as dialogue. Playing tag with friends in the school can be a joyful and frustrating endeavor, in which friends can interact, support, and challenge each other. The bodies of children, however, are extremely regulated in schools, governed by notions of dominance, obedience, and rationality. Cognitive development becomes divorced from the body, which is seen as extraneous to the learning processes so valued in the scholastic environment, and relegated to recess or Daily Physical Activity. Recess is seen as a refreshing pause in the academic activity of school, a social time in which children can “blow off steam” in ways that will allow them to regain the capacity to focus on what is valued as the real task at hand in school – learning within a context of a formal curriculum. In this context, children’s play and their active bodies are put into the service of academic achievement and the regulation of children’s behaviors. At the same time, supervised children moving their bodies in schoolyards reinforce structuring notions of children as in need of governance, educating, and controlled release in order to maintain their subordinated social position. For GORILLA-ZILLA however, play at recess is part of the landscape of his childhood, where children can set aside the formalized, formative labor of school and are engaged in, as he put it, “. . .mostly doing active stuff. . .” In the comic drawn by THE CAT, the dialogic, interactive, and relational aspects of children’s bodies engaging in play – as well as the dispositional activities of childhood that reinforce common-sense perspectives regarding childhood – are demonstrated in several interesting ways. Children often begin the work of becoming friends through invitations to play, and their bodies – and the materials they interact with and the behaviors they engage with – are the media of that play. Play that encourages positive social interaction is highly valued, and framed in the field of early learning and care as one of the primary means for children to learn and practice

46

N. Kenneally

social skills (Shipley, 2013, Makovichuk et al., 2014). THE CAT tells a story of children engaged in playing together on a tire swing, and we can see that she has made an interesting choice in her drawing regarding children’s bodies. In one panel, THE CAT draws two of the children who are playing and invite the third child into playful activity with their heads overlapping. She does something similar in the second panel, when the children are playing on the tire swing, she represents the children with one body and three heads. In explaining her comic, THE CAT described “. . .they’re all sitting on a tire swing, although one of them is only actually sitting, and then the other ones are just popping their heads out of nowhere. . .” This could be read in several ways – THE CAT simply did not feel like drawing all the character’s bodies, did not have enough space on the page, or was following a convention in comics that features disembodied heads talking or narrating. In thinking about play as embodied practice that encourages relational interaction, however, another possible reading emerges for me. The overlapping ways that THE CAT has chosen to draw her children suggests to me that entering into play is entering into a relationship. THE CAT’s children overlap, share space and bodies, and come together in playful activity, and this could be understood as a powerful drawing-together aspect of play for children, where their bodies are engaged in concerted, complicit activities. These examples demonstrate a way of seeing play as a method for children taking on the practices of the social position of childhood. They do this not through a means of rational intention, but rather by engaging in the nonrational, embodied practice of playful activity. By playfully racing with her mother, RUBY embodies nimble, quick, and energetic childhood. By playing around on playground equipment in the schoolyard, GORILLA-ZILLA and his friends make a space for childhood apart from the formal spaces of elementary school. And through representations of invitations to engage in play, THE CAT demonstrates an awareness that play is a vital aspect of the social life of childhood. Children engage in the social practice of play and, by enacting and embodying that social practice, learn norms and expectations and the social position of childhood.

Play As a Social Practice of Childhood: Curriculum, Socialization, Relationship, and Habitus Revisiting Rogoff and colleagues’ criteria for informal learning (2003, 2016), we can see ample evidence that play meets them in a variety of ways. Analyzing the criteria of informal learning in relation with the examples above and with what other children in the study shared, the following connections are drawn between informal curriculum and play as a social practice in the context of childhood. Play is interactive – whether that interaction involves others, the environment, or the self. Play is intrinsically motivated, and although it can be in service of learning and development, it can also occur for its own sake. While play is often not considered meaningful activity in dominant popular opinion, the children discussed and demonstrated throughout the study that it is profoundly embedded in the meaningful

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

47

activity of children’s daily lives. The shapes, boundaries, rules, and expectations of play can most effectively be learned through social interaction or direct engagement with the play activities themselves. Regarding assessment, if play is assessed at all, it is assessed by the players in relation to its own internal logic. Finally, skill and knowledge construction happen through organic engagement with play – through practice – and can very often lead to new discoveries. Every one of these criteria is evident in the comics and stories shared by children throughout this chapter. Following this analysis, play can be understood as informal learning that assists children in taking on the behaviors and activities indicative of the social position of childhood in minority world contexts. In the light of the examples of play provided by RUBY, GORILLA-ZILLA, and THE CAT, we can also revisit Elliot’s idea of play as dialogue (2010), and see evidence of this throughout what the children share. In their play, these children engage in dialogue with their parents and friends, with aspects of their environments, and with ideas about what it means to be a child and what children do. Entering into these dialogues through the embodied practices of play – engaging their bodies in activity-based, intrinsically motivated, and profoundly situated and personal meaning making – children interact with the norms, standards, and expectations of both play and childhood, following Grieshaber and McArdle (2010) as discussed above. Children actively participate in play, and when understood as a social practice of childhood, by doing so they actively settle into the mantle of childhood as perceived by those norms and standards – either by adhering to them, resisting them, or playfully improvising within them to find ways of expressing and embodying them that feel right to them. Children integrate a “feel for the game” of childhood literally by playing games, and engaging in other forms of play, so that they come to inhabit the social position of childhood and become legible by others in their community – adults, family members, childhood professionals, other children, and other human and nonhuman elements and aspects of their society – as children. Additionally, by engaging in play as a social practice of childhood, children reinforce and reinscribe habitus, emphasizing those particular ways of being legible as children in society. Seen through the lens of habitus, children come to belong to the social position of childhood by engaging in playful practical action. As children play, they encounter both structural and agentive aspects of childhood – the rules of the adult world they are required to follow; the subjugated position they occupy in relation to adults; the profound contextual meanings about how children are valued and thought of; the means of expression and exploration available to them; and how they react and respond to all of these factors. Within the tensions of these interacting elements, they interpret and integrate the boundaries and activities of what is possible for them, as children, to imagine, know, become, and be. This leads to interesting lines of thinking – then, as children grow older and gain experience and move out of the social position of childhood, it seems as though an enduring understanding of what it means to be a child remains inscribed within their social selves – as memory, habit, or attitude. This includes play and playful engagement. Almost all the parents involved in the study valued the playfulness of their

48

N. Kenneally

children and lamented play as a lost or missing aspect of their lives as adults. According to Bourdieu, the enduring understanding of habitus shapes the social norms, expectations, and what is imagined as possible for people in particular social positions, and reinforces particular social relations. Is this why adults are so restricted in their playful activity – not wanting to violate the boundaries of their own social position as adults – and appear childish? This and the thinking throughout this chapter make a strong case for understanding play as an informal and relational form of learning, a nonrational, embodied, and practical curriculum through which children come to inhabit the social position of childhood. Play as a social practice is participative and active socialization – a way that children make themselves into children.

References Aitken, C. (2019). Constructing the promise of play: Exploring the concept of play in Stuart Brown and Brian Sutton-Smith’s collaborative efforts. Unpublished master’s thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto. Bakhtin, M. M. (1994). The dialogic imagination (M. Holquist & C. Emerson, trans.). In P. Morris (Ed.), The Bakhtin reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (pp. 74–80). Arnold. Barry, L. (2014). Syllabus. Drawn & Quarterly. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). The biographical illusion. In P. Du Gay & P. Redman (Eds.), Identity: A reader. SAGE. Bourdieu, P. (2005). Habitus. In J. Hillier & E. Rooksby (Eds.), Habitus: A sense of place (2nd ed.). Routledge. Corsaro, W. A. (1992). Interpretive reproduction in children’s peer cultures. Social Psychology Quarterly, 55(2), 160–177. Corsaro, W. A. (1993). Interpretive reproduction in children’s role play. Childhood, 1(2), 64–74. Corsaro, W. A. (2012). Interpretive reproduction in children’s play. American Journal of Play, 4(4), 488–504. Corsaro, W. A. (2017). The sociology of childhood (5th ed.). Pine Forge Press. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. (2013). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care: Languages of evaluation (3rd ed.). Routledge. Denzin, N. K. ([1977] 2017). Childhood socialization: Revised second edition. Routledge. Retrieved at https://www-taylorfrancis-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/books/ 9781315081410 Elliot, E. (2010). Thinking beyond a framework: Entering into dialogues. In V. Pacini-Ketchabaw (Ed.), Flows, rhythms, & intensities of early childhood education curriculum. Peter Lang. Flowers, E. (2017a). Experimenting with comics making as inquiry. Visual Arts Research, 43(2), 21–57. Flowers, E. (2017b). DrawBridge. (Publication No. ED576824) (Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Gabriel, N. (2017). The sociology of early childhood: Critical perspectives. SAGE. Grieshaber, S., & McArdle, F. (2010). The trouble with play. McGraw-Hill Education. Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Routledge & Kegan Paul. James, A. (2013). Socialising children. Palgrave Macmillan. Kenneally, N. (2021). Nests - A relational exploration of children’s and parents’ active and embodied habitus: Illustrations of child-centered and decentered socialization (Publication

Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

49

No. 28262523). (Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Kuczynski, L. (2003). Beyond bidirectionality: Bilateral conceptual frameworks for understanding dynamics in parent-child relations. In L. Kuczynski (Ed.), Handbook of dynamics in parentchild relations. Sage. Kuczynski, L., & Lollis, S. (2004). The child as agent in family life. In H. Goelman & S. K. Marshall (Eds.), Multiple lenses, multiple images: Perspectives on the child across time, space and disciplines. University of Toronto Press. Kuczynski, L., Marshall, S., & Schell, K. (1997). Value socialization in a bidirectional context. In J. E. Grusec & L. Kuczynski (Eds.), Parenting and children’s internalization of values: A handbook of contemporary theory (pp. 23–50). John Wiley & Sons Inc. Kuttner, P. J., Sousanis, N., & Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2017). How to draw comics the scholarly way: Creating comics-based research in the academy. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of arts-based research (pp. 396–422). Guildford. Kuttner, P. J., Weaver-Hightower, M. B., & Sousanis, N. (2021). Comics-based research: The affordances of comics for research across disciplines. Qualitative Research, 21(2), 195–214. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. Routledge. Makovichuk, L., Hewes, J., Lirette, P., & Thomas, N. (2014). Flight: Alberta’s early learning and care framework. Retrieved from www.flightframework.ca McMahon, T. (2014, February 26). Who belongs to Canada’s middle class? Maclean’s. Retrieved from https://www.macleans.ca/economy/who-belongs-to-canadas-middle-class/ McNamee, S., & Seymour, J. (2013). Towards a sociology of 10–12 year olds? Emerging methodological issues in the ‘new’ social studies of childhood. Childhood, 20(2), 156–168. Moss, P. (2006). Structures, understandings and discourses: Possibilities for re-envisioning the early childhood worker. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7(1), 30–41. Moss, P. (2018). Alternative narratives in early childhood: An introduction for students and practitioners. Routledge. New Brunswick Department of Social Development. (2008). New Brunswick curriculum framework for early learning and child care. Retrieved from https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/ departments/education/elcc/content/curriculum/curriculum_framework.html New Zealand Ministry of Education. (2017). Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mo ngā mōkopuna o Aotearoa. Early childhood curriculum. Retrieved from https://education.govt.nz/ assets/Documents/Early-Childhood/ELS-Te-Whariki-Early-Childhood-Curriculum-ENGWeb.pdf Paradise, R., & Rogoff, B. (2009). Side by side: Learning by observing and pitching in. Ethos, 37(1), 102–138. Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child. Free Press. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child (M. Cook, Trans.). Basic Books. Piaget, J. (1968). Six psychological studies: With an introduction, notes and glossary by David Elkind (Translation from the French by Anita Tenzer). Vintage. Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and knowledge: An essay on the relations between organic regulations and cognitive processes. University of Chicago Press. Prioletta, J. (2020). Unmasking the institutionalization of gender-based violence in Ontario’s Kindergarten education program: The hidden effects of play-based learning (Unpublished doctoral thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto). Prout, A. (2011). Taking a step away from modernity: Reconsidering the new sociology of childhood. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 4–14. Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning. Routledge. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B., Callanan, M., Gutiérrez, K. D., & Erickson, F. (2016). The organization of informal learning. Review of Research in Education, 40(1), 356–401.

50

N. Kenneally

Shipley, C. D. (2013). Empowering children: Play-based curriculum for lifelong learning (5th ed.). Nelson Education. Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviour. Alfred A. Knopf. Smart, C. (2007). Personal life. Polity Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (2009). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton (Eds.), The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (N. Minick, trans.) (pp. 37–285). Plenum. Wells, K. (2021). Childhood in a global perspective (3rd ed.). Polity Press.

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum Preschool STEM Education Roxana Yanez Gonzalez, Christine D. Tippett, and Todd M. Milford

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emergent Curriculum Versus Conventional Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global Competencies and Their Connection to STEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research Partnerships and STEM Professional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preschool STEM: An Emergent Curriculum in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52 53 55 55 57 58 60 60 61

Abstract

The importance of high quality learning experiences in preschool is generally recognized within the limited academic literature examining early childhood curriculum. However, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is typically omitted from considerations of early childhood curriculum. An emergent curriculum, in which educators design unique learning experiences according to children’s interests and needs, can provide opportunities for children to explore their world in meaningful ways. An emergent curriculum also capitalizes on context, with educators co-constructing and purposefully supporting explorations that are situated in the moment. Such explorations can support the development of global competencies such as cooperation, communication, and problem solving. Important theoretical influences in emergent curriculum include R. Y. Gonzalez · C. D. Tippett (*) University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] T. M. Milford University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_44

51

52

R. Y. Gonzalez et al.

social constructivist theory, play-based learning, and loose parts theory. The power of an emergent curriculum approach is highlighted through examples in which educators support STEM-related learning experiences that arise from young children’s interests. Keywords

Early childhood education · Emergent curriculum · Global competencies · Loose parts · Preschool · Play-based learning · Social constructivist theory · STEM

Introduction The importance of early childhood education is progressively being recognized by organizations around the world because long-term cognitive and academic progress (Campbell et al., 2001; Mashburn et al., 2008), as well as well-being in adulthood (Sims, 2020), are shaped by experiences in the early years. Socioeconomic impacts on mental and physical health can be effectively addressed through high-quality preschool interventions and future outcomes of such programs also include enhanced social integration (e.g., increased employment, higher education levels, lower likelihood of delinquency or criminal offences; Sims, 2020). Consequently, high-quality early learning experiences provided in the context of an age appropriate curriculum (Melhuish, 2004) and through an approach that recognizes play as an integral part of learning (Canadian Association for Young Children, 2016) are critical in these formative years. The academic literature examining curriculum for toddlers and preschoolers (i.e., for children aged 1½ to 5 years), although limited, recognizes the importance of high-quality learning experiences. However, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is typically overlooked in this literature. STEM is an integrated approach to learning experiences that involves two or more of the four constituent disciplines (Moomaw, 2013; Tippett & Milford, 2017). Research attention is typically focused on secondary and postsecondary education, although very young children are predisposed to make sense of their worlds through first hand explorations that are related to STEM. Statements from organizations such as the National Science Teachers Association (2014) highlight the importance of science and engineering learning experiences focusing on young children’s interests in the context of purposeful play. The literature for each separate discipline indicates the appropriateness and potential of an integrated STEM approach. Simple science experiences emerge organically because of young children’s natural curiosity and sense of wonder (Eshach & Fried, 2005). Technology is part of everyday life, whether in the form of simple tools such as magnifying glasses or more complex tools such as tablets and smart phones (Hartle, 2020). Engineering practices such as problem solving and creative thinking come naturally for young children who are manipulating objects and exploring their surroundings (English, 2018). Mathematical understanding

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum

53

includes foundational concepts (e.g., number, pattern) that support children’s making sense of their natural and built environments (Papic et al., 2020). One of the barriers to early childhood STEM has been the lack of a well-articulated, age appropriate approach to curriculum. However, high-quality STEM learning experiences can be developed using an emergent curriculum.

Emergent Curriculum Versus Conventional Curriculum Despite the common use of the term curriculum in educational research, there is little agreement on its definition among specialists (Young, 2014). However, in simple terms, curriculum can be defined as a “description of what, why, how and how well students should learn in a systematic and intentional way” (International Bureau of Education, 2021, Curriculum, para. 1). In contrast to this general definition of curriculum, in early childhood education the notion of curriculum has a broader meaning and comprises all the experiences, activities, and events that take place in an early childhood setting (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2017). Emergent curriculum is an innovative approach to curriculum in the early years that incorporates Reggio Emilia inspired pedagogical practices (Dietze & Kashin, 2019) such as an emphasis on relationships, an empowered view of the child and the educator, and project-based learning (Cagliari et al., 2016). An emergent curriculum is very different from a conventional curriculum in early childhood education (e.g., theme-based, pre-planned) because its main goal is to respond to every child’s interests and abilities (Jones, 2012). When following an emergent curriculum, educators use their creativity and innovation (Biermeier, 2015) to develop a responsive curriculum based on careful observations and documentation of what children do and say and how they play (Stacey, 2018). Educators listen to children’s questions, build on those questions, and pose questions of their own back to the children (Jones, 2012). Children ask questions, engage actively in this carefully developed curriculum, and construct their own knowledge as opposed to being passive receivers of information (Biermeier, 2015). As a result, the emphasis is on a curriculum that develops from the everyday life of children and adults (Kashin, 2007). The learning context in an emergent curriculum is the children’s play and the educators’ playful practices (Jones, 2012). Both children and educators have a voice in knowledge building (Stacey, 2018) because knowledge is co-constructed “by the children and the adults and the environment itself” (Jones, 2012, p. 67). An emergent curriculum focuses on the process of learning as opposed to predictable outcomes from a standard curriculum (Biermeier, 2015; Nxumalo et al., 2018). Therefore, the content of an emergent curriculum is dynamic and flexible (Stacey, 2018) and adapts to the children’s interests, parents’ concerns, and teachers’ pedagogical intentions, which all play a role in how learning happens (Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2014). The contrasting features of an emergent and a conventional curriculum are highlighted in Table 1.

54

R. Y. Gonzalez et al.

Table 1 Contrasting features of emergent and conventional curricula Features Goal Role of the educator Role of the child Learning context Knowledge building Learning focus Content

Emergent curriculum Respond to every children’s interests and abilities Observe, document, support/ facilitate learning Active learner, ask questions, contributor Play-based

Conventional curriculum Public accountability, school-readiness

Bottom-up, co-constructed, flexible

Top-down, prescriptive, regimented

The process

The outcome

Open-ended, dynamic, follows children’s interests

Fixed, preplanned, theme-based, determined by teacher

Plan content, instruct academic content Passive learner, listen, acquire knowledge Content-oriented

Information in the table was drawn from Biermeier (2015), Dewey (1906), Jones (2012), Nxumalo et al. (2018), Stacey (2018), and University of Toronto Early Learning Centre (2017)

Although the idea of following children’s interests is essential to an emergent curriculum, it is important to address the complexity of this idea by highlighting some points raised by Malaguzzi (2016b) that are particularly relevant in the context of a STEM emergent curriculum. Malaguzzi (2016b) explained that although a pedagogy that capitalizes on children’s interests is likely to be engaging, the impact of such an approach may be diminished if the type of teaching that captures the children’s interests is superficial. Malaguzzi (2016b) made an important distinction between attractive teaching, which is often superficial, and interesting teaching, which leads to deeper learning. Consequently, Malaguzzi (2016b) highlighted the essential role of educators, not only in considering children’s interests, but also in supporting the development of children’s potential. The focus of the academic literature regarding emergent curriculum tends to be on literacy and the arts (e.g., Heydon et al., 2014; Wright, 1997). However, the features of an emergent curriculum clearly align with STEM education because of the countless possibilities of meaningful and intentional teaching that connects to the children’s interests (e.g., insects, weather, vehicles). After all, young children are innately curious about the world that surrounds them, and the questions they wonder about are often related to science concepts (Baldwin et al., 2009) as well as to technology, engineering, and mathematics. Goulart and Roth (2010) pointed out that in the context of science teaching in the early years, an emergent curriculum “is a powerful form of praxis that develops children’s participation from early childhood on” (p. 533). Similarly, explorations of the other three constituent disciplines of STEM should begin early, and in the context of an emergent curriculum. One of the benefits of such early explorations is the development of global competencies such as cooperation, communication, and problem solving.

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum

55

Global Competencies and Their Connection to STEM Global competencies can be considered as multidimensional capacities that allow individuals to explore issues, understand different perspectives, engage positively with others, and take responsibility for personal and societal well-being (OECD, 2016). According to the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC, n.d.), global competencies are the skills necessary to adapt to diverse situations and to enhance lifelong learning. The following six global competencies have been drawn from multiple sources (e.g., CMEC, 2018; Daly & Beloglovsky, 2020) and are identified as relevant for young children: • Collaboration, which includes interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies, teamwork, and co-construction of meaning • Creativity and innovation, which includes curiosity, humor, messiness, cognitive and affective engagement • Risk taking, which includes resilience and learning about capacities for physical, social-emotional, and intellectual risks • Citizenship, which includes social justice, building sustainability, sense of belonging, and empathy • Critical thinking and problem solving, which includes innovation, design thinking, and making informed decisions • Communicating, which includes personal interactions in various forms (e.g., drawing, talking, writing, visual representations) to express and construct meaning These global competencies are broader in scope and more appropriate in nature for young children than the academic or economic outcomes that are often associated with STEM.

Theoretical Perspectives Emergent curriculum and STEM, along with the development of global competencies, fit well with social constructivist theory, a play-based learning approach, and loose parts theory, three ideas which influence early childhood education in Canada and internationally. Social constructivist theory provides key ideas – such as the zone of proximal development, the role of a more competent other, socially mediated knowledge, active learning, and the importance of play (Vygotsky, 1978) – that are inherent to young children’s engagement with STEM learning experiences and with STEM creative processes (Tippett and Yanez Gonzalez, 2022). The concept of the zone of proximal development, which suggests that children benefit from the support of more knowledgeable others (Vygotsky, 1978), is in line with the implementation of an emergent curriculum in STEM. The opportunities for children to engage in learning experiences that are beyond their level of development are multiplied with the support of peers, educators, families, and other members of the community.

56

R. Y. Gonzalez et al.

Furthermore, the idea that learners are active participants in the construction of their own knowledge (Schreiber & Valle, 2013) is particularly relevant in the context of a STEM emergent curriculum because young children’s engagement with STEM should be based on interactive and hands-on experiences (Lange et al., 2019) in which children actively construct their STEM knowledge. Although there are numerous intersections between social constructivist theory and play-based learning, Vygotsky (1978) described one key relationship as follows: “play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond [their] average age, above [their] daily behaviour, in play it is as though [they] were a head taller than [themselves]” (p. 102). A play-based learning approach is in line with modern early childhood pedagogies. Even though play can include a wide range of activities such as creating pretend stores, building with blocks, and dressing up as doctors, several key features have been identified. Play is active, child-centered, and process-oriented (Henniger, 2018) as well as spontaneous, voluntary, pleasurable, and flexible (Smith, 2021). Play constitutes an essential medium through which children make sense of their world (Ebbeck et al., 2020). In an emergent play-based learning approach, educators are responsive to the children’s interests and engage with the children in meaningful learning experiences (Dietze & Kashin, 2019). The processes of play and learning promote each other (Hewes, 2006) and this symbiotic relationship is particularly visible in the context of a STEM emergent curriculum. Malaguzzi (2016a) explained that a play-based learning approach is particularly appropriate in early childhood because children create imaginary worlds in which they have opportunities to test, invent, design, plan, and construct, among other actions. Aligning with both social constructivist theory and a play-based learning approach is loose parts theory (Nicholson, 1971). Although loose parts have been defined in different ways, Stacey’s (2018) definition – “all the wonderful found, recycled, and natural materials a teacher carefully curates and makes available to children to freely use” (p. 40) – highlights the features of loose parts and the intentional way in which educators may offer loose parts to children. Loose parts are open-ended, movable, combinable, and engaging (Armitage, 2021; Daly & Beloglovsky, 2015); common examples include pinecones, cardboard boxes, buttons, pieces of wood, and rocks. Loose parts constitute a particularly interesting medium for children to explore the STEM disciplines in an age appropriate and meaningful manner. In fact, Nicholson (1971) identified benefits that are directly connected to STEM. For instance, the possibilities offered by loose parts address children’s dispositions to “interact with variables such as materials and shapes; smells and other physical phenomena, such as electricity, magnetism, and gravity” (p. 30). Nicholson also pointed out the affordances of loose parts for promoting mathematical thinking and engineering practices. Even if other technologies are absent, the loose parts themselves act as simple forms of technology. In an emergent approach, open-ended materials such as loose parts are a meaningful option because of the possibilities they offer for children’s STEM explorations.

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum

57

Even though social constructivist theory, play-based learning, and loose parts theory fit well with a STEM emergent curriculum, opportunities for young children to engage in STEM learning experiences can often be missed. Educators can sometimes be anxious or hesitant due to negative past experiences with STEM subjects, which have traditionally not been taught in a creative or hands-on manner (Lange et al., 2019). This hesitancy shows the importance of developing STEMoriented research and pedagogical practices in early childhood which include educator-researcher partnerships and practitioner professional development (Early Childhood STEM Working Group, 2017), topics that are discussed in the following section.

Research Partnerships and STEM Professional Development The long-term and continuing collaboration between researchers and early childhood educators described here highlights the possibilities of partnerships, pedagogical practices, and professional development. The initial 4-year research partnership began in a Pre-Kindergarten classroom at an all girls’ independent school in Victoria, British Columbia. This classroom provided educational services for girls from 3 to 5 years old. The partnership led to the design and validation of various data collection tools, an exploration of the benefits and challenges of STEM in the early years, and the development of suggestions for implementation of early childhood STEM education. The second research partnership had been established for 2 years in a childcare center located in Ottawa, Ontario before being curtailed by pandemic restrictions. The non-profit, bilingual French/English center provides services for toddlers (1½ to 2½ years old) and preschoolers (2½ to 5 years old). This research partnership began with a workshop for the staff in which general strategies for supporting children’s learning and thinking in STEM were presented. After the workshop, weekly visits to the childcare center were made to document STEM learning and to provide staff with teaching support as needed. When COVID19 hit, a set of online STEM resources for educators, parents, and caregivers of young children were developed based on these repeated observations (Bradley et al., 2021). The free resources are available in English, French, and Spanish, and include ideas to support STEM learning experiences, suggested children’s literature, and play-based connections (STEM in the Early Years, 2021). In 2021, a third partnership was formed with the City of Ottawa and its 10 Municipal Child Care Centers with the goal of expanding the STEM capacity of the centers while further developing the online resources. Through these longitudinal research partnerships with early childhood educators in a range of learning contexts, many of the complexities inherent in an emergent curriculum for STEM have been documented. The STEM learning experience described in the next section was the natural result of on-going professional development for educators as they reflected upon and adjusted their practice. The learning experience example illustrates how loose parts can be particularly beneficial in the context of an emergent curriculum for early childhood STEM.

58

R. Y. Gonzalez et al.

Preschool STEM: An Emergent Curriculum in Action In this example learning experience, the educators took cues from the children and supported their intentions rather than imposing a pre-established activity. As part of the center’s efforts to provide the children with opportunities to engage with loose parts and to promote risky play (Sandseter, 2007), the educators placed an assortment of used tires in the outdoor yard. After the children had used the tires in a variety of ways like stacking, rolling, constructing a path, and creating a makebelieve cake, one day the educators noticed a group of children carrying some of the tires randomly around the outdoor yard. Demonstrating supported discovery (Petriwskyj, 2020), one of the educators asked the children, “What can we make with those tires?” One of the children responded, “We should make a play structure!” The educator cheered and prompted the children to figure out what they needed to do first in order to build their play structure. The children tried to position the tires side by side in a row. After several unsuccessful attempts to get the tires to stand up and be stable, the children realized that they could dig deep holes in the sandbox where they could place the tires vertically, leaving them partially exposed. Then, the children filled the tires and the holes with sand to make their play structure sturdy (see Fig. 1a). Once the play structure was established, the children spent days climbing on the tires and exploring them. The children returned again and again to engage with the play structure. It did not matter that at times, they had to line up and wait; their engagement and evident joy remained high (see Fig. 1b). Even after the play structure was dismantled, the children continued using the tires in a variety of creative ways throughout the summer, fall, and winter (see Fig. 2). This STEM learning experience incorporated both the theoretical and pedagogical aspects of an emergent curriculum. Working in a play-based context, the educators took a social constructivist perspective on learning – the children’s and their own – using loose parts as a medium for child-directed investigations. Figure 3

Fig. 1 (a) The tire structure and (b) children waiting to climb on their structure

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum

59

Fig. 2 Children’s other uses of the tires

Areas of STEM Science: The children explored the properties of materials (e.g., sand, rubber). Technology: The children used simple technologies (e.g., shovels and buckets) to stabilize their tire structure. Engineering: The children problem-solved how (e.g., side by side, standing up) and where (e.g., in the sandbox) to place tires to build their structure. Mathematics: The children explored spatial relationships (e.g., over, in front of, behind) as they decided how and where to place the tires.

Emergent Curriculum Facilitated by educator: The educator supported the children’s interest, encouraging the children to dig deeper and explore more uses for the tires. Child-initiated: The children expressed an interest in tires, which was noticed by the educator. Collaborative: The children and the educator worked together to explore the possibilities of the tires. Flexible and Dynamic: The educator supported the children’s divergent thinking in a spontaneous exploration.

Global Competencies Collaboration: The children worked as a team to solve problems. Creativity: The children envisioned the potential of the loose parts and created something new. Risk taking: The children persevered despite repeated failure. Citizenship: The children developed a sense of ownership and belonging. Critical thinking: The children planned, built, and tested the structure through several iterations before it was stable. Communicating: The children discussed how they might use the tires in various ways.

Loose Parts Open-ended: The tires could be used in many ways and in this learning experience children used them to build a play structure. Movable: The children moved the tires from place to place as they decided where to build their structure. Combinable: The children decided to use sand to stabilize a row of tires in a sideways arrangement as they built their structure. Engaging: The children engaged physically (e.g., pushing, lifting) and mentally (e.g., problem solving, creative thinking) as they built their structure.

Note. Concepts shown in bold were drawn from Armitage (2021), CMEC (2018), Daly and Beloglovsky (2020), Jones and Nimmo (1994), Nicholson (1971), Stacey (2018), Sutton (2011), Thornhill (2017), Tippett et al. (2021), and Tippett and Milford (2017).

Fig. 3 A tire exploration connects STEM, emergent curriculum, global competencies, and loose parts

shows how a loose parts exploration can support STEM learning and illustrates how STEM education aligns with the features of an emergent curriculum, while providing opportunities for the development of global competencies.

60

R. Y. Gonzalez et al.

Additional Examples Some additional examples of learning experiences drawn from observations of young children at play, and featured in greater detail in the STEM in the Early Years website (www.stemintheearlyyears.com), further illustrate the realities of an emergent curriculum that promotes STEM with young children: • Fixing a wobbly table: The children noticed that the art table was wobbly and the educator encouraged them to find the best way to stabilize it. They tried placing different objects and materials under the table legs until the table was stable. • Sprinkling water: An educator noticed that the toddlers enjoyed filling and emptying containers at the water table and at the kiddie pool. The educator made holes in some of the containers to encourage further explorations. • Planting beans: The children noticed the changes in trees and little plants growing in the outdoor play yard at the beginning of spring. Educators supported the children’s interest by setting up a bean growing learning experience. • Observing worms on a rainy day: While playing in the yard on a rainy day, several children noticed there were worms on the ground. The educators talked to the children about the features they could observe on the worms. The rest of the children joined in making observations. • Measuring rainfall: A group of children were playing in the yard and one child asked the educator, “How much rain will fall today?” When the educator gave the child a bucket to collect rain, other children asked for buckets, too. The next day, the children checked their buckets to see how much water had accumulated in them.

Concluding Remarks High-quality learning experiences for young children are of the utmost importance. This point is especially true in STEM education, which is a relatively unexplored area of early childhood education. An emergent curriculum, where learning experiences are designed to build on young children’s interests and needs, is well positioned to offer such experiences. An emergent approach to STEM education, which aligns with social constructivist theory, can support the development of global competencies – the knowledge, skills, and understandings that are prerequisites for meaningful contributions to a rapidly evolving twenty-first-century society. Young children can build understandings of STEM concepts while at the same time practicing related skills, setting a foundation for future success. An emergent curriculum is an innovative approach that challenges conventional thinking about the need for a standard curriculum that delimits and limits what children ought to learn. By providing examples of the relationships that exist among STEM, emergent curriculum, global competencies, and loose parts, this chapter challenges the operationalization of early childhood curriculum. The natural

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum

61

connections between what children are interested in exploring and the interactive and hands-on characteristics of authentic STEM experiences are emphasized. Although early childhood educators have traditionally been less comfortable in facilitating STEM learning experiences with young children, the examples provided here show that developing curriculum with an emergent approach can be easily accessible for educators. An emergent curriculum also benefits children because it tends to result in individualized experiences that allow children to construct their own understandings in meaningful ways while being supported by more knowledgeable others. Teachers, administrators, and policy makers need to be courageous in how they develop and implement curriculum for young children. An emergent curriculum that incorporates multiple pedagogical approaches lends itself to a greater variety of learning opportunities and is more in line with current thinking about STEM education than a single curriculum intended for all children in all contexts. An emergent curriculum in preschool STEM is an approach that needs to be further explored and documented because of the potential benefits it offers for children and educators.

References Armitage, M. (2021). Simon Nicholson’s greatest contribution to Loose Parts – The word ‘theory’ [Presentation]. 2021 Loose Parts Summit. https://thinksmallinstitute.org/loose-parts-summit/ Baldwin, J. M., Adams, S. M., & Kelly, M. K. (2009). Science at the center: An emergent, standards-based, child-centered framework for early learners. Early Childhood Education Journal, 37(1), 71–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-009-0318-z Biermeier, M. A. (2015). Inspired by Reggio Emilia: Emergent curriculum in relationship-driven learning environments. Young Children, 70(5), 72–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/ycyoungchildren. 70.5.72 Bradley, H., Tippett, C. D., Yanez Gonzalez, R., & Milford, T. M. (2021). Supporting early childhood STEM education during the pandemic (and afterwards): Examining parents’ and early childhood educators’ perceptions of digital resources. [Online poster presentation]. Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Edmonton. Cagliari, P., Castagnetti, M., Giudici, C., Rinaldi, C., Vecchi, V., & Moss, P. (Eds.). (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945–1993. Routledge. Campbell, F. A., Pungello, E. P., Miller-Johnson, S., Burchinal, M., & Ramey, C. T. (2001). The development of cognitive and academic abilities: Growth curves from an early childhood educational experiment. Developmental Psychology, 37(2), 231–242. https://doi.org/10.1037/ 0012-1649.37.2.231 Canadian Association for Young Children. (2016). Position statement on play. https://www.cayc.ca/ sites/default/files/attachments/CAYC%20Position%20Paper%20on%20Play.pdf Council of Ministers of Education, Canada. (2018). Global competencies. https://www. globalcompetencies.cmec.ca/global-competencies Council of Ministers of Education, Canada. (n.d.). Global competencies. https://www.cmec.ca/682/ Global_Competencies.html Daly, L., & Beloglovsky, M. (2015). Loose parts: Inspiring play in young children. Redleaf Press. Daly, L., & Beloglovsky, M. (2020). Loose parts 4: Inspiring 21st century learning. Redleaf Press. Dewey, J. (1906). The child and the curriculum. The University of Chicago Press.

62

R. Y. Gonzalez et al.

Dietze, B., & Kashin, D. (2019). Playing and learning in early childhood education (2nd ed.). Pearson. Early Childhood STEM Working Group. (2017). Early STEM matters: Providing high-quality STEM experiences for all young learners. https://ecstem.uchicago.edu/ Ebbeck, M., Yim, H. Y., & Lee, L. W. (2020). Play-based learning. In D. Pendergast & S. Garvis (Eds.), Teaching early years: Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (pp. 185–200). Routledge. English, L. D. (2018). Early engineering: An introduction to young children’s potential. In L. D. English & T. Moore (Eds.), Early engineering learning (pp. 1–5). Springer. Eshach, H., & Fried, M. N. (2005). Should science be taught in early childhood? Journal of Science Education and Technology, 14(3), 315–336. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-005-7198-9 Goulart, M. I. M., & Roth, W.-M. (2010). Engaging young children in collective curriculum design. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 5(3), 533–562. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-0099196-3 Hartle, L. C. (2020). Technology and young children. In L. E. Cohen & S. Waite-Stupiansky (Eds.), STEM in early childhood education (pp. 22–45). Routledge. Henniger, M. L. (2018). Teaching young children: An introduction (6th ed.). Pearson. Hewes, J. (2006). Let the children play: Nature’s answer to early learning. Early Childhood Learning Knowledge Centre. https://galileo.org/earlylearning/articles/let-the-children-playhewes.pdf Heydon, R., Crocker, W., & Zhang, Z. (2014). Novels, nests and other provocations: Emergent literacy curriculum production in a childcare Centre. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.803158 International Bureau of Education. (2021). Glossary of curriculum terminology: Curriculum. http:// www.ibe.unesco.org/en/glossary-curriculum-terminology/c/curriculum-plural-curricula Jones, E. (2012). The emergence of emergent curriculum. Young Children, 67(2), 66–68. Jones, B., & Nimmo, J. (1994). Emergent curriculum. National Association for the Education of Young Children. Kashin, D. (2007). Reaching the top of the mountain: The impact of emergent curriculum on the practice and self-image of early childhood educators (Publication No. NR39435, University of Toronto). Doctoral dissertation, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Lange, A. A., Brenneman, K., & Mano, H. (2019). Teaching STEM in the preschool classroom exploring big ideas with 3-to 5-year-olds. Teachers College Press. Malaguzzi, L. (2016a). Children’s experience and research: In discovery of the self and the world. In P. Cagliari, M. Castagnetti, C. Giudici, C. Rinaldi, V. Vecchi, & P. Moss (Eds.), Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945–1993 (pp. 239–240). Routledge. Malaguzzi, L. (2016b). The pupil, the class and the teacher in an educational dynamic, in the experience of psychopedagogy. In P. Cagliari, M. Castagnetti, C. Giudici, C. Rinaldi, V. Vecchi, & P. Moss (Eds.), Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945–1993 (pp. 70–85). Routledge. Mashburn, A. J., Pianta, R. C., Hamre, B. K., Downer, J. T., Barbarin, O. A., Bryant, D., Burchinal, M., Early, D. M., & Howes, C. (2008). Measures of classroom quality in prekindergarten and children’s development of academic, language, and social skills. Child Development, 79(3), 732–749. Melhuish, E. C. (2004). A literature review of the impact of early years provision on young children, with emphasis given to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. National Audit Office. Moomaw, S. (2013). Teaching STEM in the early years: Activities for integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Redleaf Press. National Science Teachers Association. (2014). Early childhood science education. http://www. nsta.org/about/positions/earlychildhood.aspx New Zealand Ministry of Education. (2017). Te whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa early childhood curriculum. https://www.education.govt.nz/assets/ Documents/Early-Childhood/Te-Whariki-Early-Childhood-Curriculum-ENG-Web.pdf

Theory and Application of an Emergent Curriculum

63

Nicholson, S. (1971). How not to cheat children: The theory of loose parts. Landscape Architecture, 61(1), 30–34. Nxumalo, F., Vintimilla, C. D., & Nelson, N. (2018). Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education: Mapping interferences in emergent curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(4), 433–453. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1522930 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2016). PISA. Preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world: The OECD PISA global competence framework. http://www.oecd.org/education/Global-competency-for-an-inclusive-world.pdf Papic, M., Mulligan, J., & Highfield, K. (2020). Numeracy. In D. Pendergast & S. Garvis (Eds.), Teaching early years: Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (pp. 86–106). Routledge. Petriwskyj, A. (2020). Science. In D. Pendergast & S. Garvis (Eds.), Teaching early years: Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (pp. 107–124). Routledge. Queensland Curriculum & Assessment Authority. (2014). Queensland kindergarten learning guideline: Understanding emergent curriculum in practice. https://dufferincounty.ca/sites/ default/files/rtb/Queensland%20Kindergarten%20Learning%20Guideline.pdf Sandseter, E. B. (2007). Categorising risky play: How can we identify risk-taking in children’s play? European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 15(2), 237–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/13502930701321733 Schreiber, L. M., & Valle, B. E. (2013). Social constructivist teaching strategies in the small group classroom. Small Group Research, 44(4), 395–411. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496413488422 Sims, M. (2020). The importance of early years education. In D. Pendergast & S. Garvis (Eds.), Teaching early years: Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (pp. 20–32). Routledge. Smith, P. (2021). Play. In Encyclopedia of early childhood development. https://www.childencyclopedia.com/play Stacey, S. (2018). Emergent curriculum in early childhood settings: From theory to practice (2nd. ed.). Redleaf Press. STEM in the Early Years. (2021). Welcome! Bienvenue ! ¡Bienvenido!. https://www. stemintheearlyyears.com/ Sutton, M. J. (2011). In the hand and mind: The intersection of loose parts and imagination in evocative settings for young children. Children, Youth and Environments, 21(2), 408–424. Thornhill, M. (2017). Loose parts and intelligent playthings categorized by schema. https:// brucecounty.on.ca/sites/default/files/Loose%20Parts%20By%20Schema_0.pdf Tippett, C. D., & Milford, T. M. (2017). Findings from a pre-kindergarten classroom: Making the case for STEM in early childhood education. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 15(Sup 1), S67–S86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-017-9812-8 Tippett, C. D., & Yanez Gonzalez, R. (2022). STEM in preschool: Working with educators to support child-initiated learning experiences. In K. Murcia, C. Campbell, & M. Joubert (Eds.), Children’s creative inquiry in STEM. Springer. Tippett, C. D., Yanez Gonzalez, R., & Milford, T. M. (2021). How do educators engage toddlers in STEM-related learning experiences? [Online paper presentation]. Association for Science Teacher Education, Salt Lake City. University of Toronto Early Learning Centre. (2017). Emergent curriculum. https://elc.utoronto.ca/ about-us/emergent-curriculum/ Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. Wright, S. (1997). Learning how to learn: The arts as core in an emergent curriculum. Childhood Education, 73(6), 361–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/00094056.1997.10521140 Young, M. (2014). What is a curriculum and what can it do? Curriculum Journal, 25(1), 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2014.902526

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum for Emergency Contexts Aurelia Di Santo, Katie-Jay Scott, and Christa Leeder

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Ripples Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Ripples Curriculum Approach and Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Connection to Curriculum Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning Through Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mindfulness Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trauma-Informed Early Childhood Education Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Application to Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Community-Led Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Ripples Big Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Ripples Teacher Training: Early Years Curriculum in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

66 67 68 68 69 70 70 71 72 73 74 74 77 77

In Memoriam of Katie-Jay Scott who tragically passed away unexpectedly on November 23, 2021. As Executive Director of iACT, Katie-Jay worked tirelessly to improve the lives of adults and children in emergency contexts by designing and implementing programs such as Little Ripples alongside refugee community members. Katie-Jay’s commitment toward a world where dignity, humanity, and human rights are acknowledged and upheld continues through the relationships she has formed around the world. A. Di Santo (*) · C. Leeder School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] K.-J. Scott iACT, Redondo Beach, CA, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_45

65

66

A. Di Santo et al.

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of an innovative early childhood education curriculum that is designed to address the unique needs of children and communities affected by trauma, violence, and displacement. Little Ripples Early Childhood Education program operates in several refugee camps in Chad, Greece, and Tanzania, and in villages located in eastern Cameroon. Little Ripples provides quality, play-based education for preschool aged children and is grounded in social and emotional learning, trauma-informed practice, and mindfulness pedagogy while ensuring that children’s agency, voice, and dignity are upheld. The sustainability of the program is dependent on the commitment to remain a refugee-led early learning program that incorporates collaborative decisionmaking in its program design, management, and expansion. This chapter provides an overview of how a nongovernment organization approaches curriculum design and integration in hard to serve and low-resourced emergency contexts. The authors discuss how this model of early childhood education extends beyond traditional curricula approaches to teaching and learning. Keywords

Early childhood education · Early childhood education in emergency contexts · Curriculum design · Curriculum in practice · Early childhood education in emergency contexts · Refugee-led early childhood programs

Introduction When we think of early childhood education (ECE) programs, we envision children playing and learning in traditional classroom settings. ECE programs are typically located in diverse, yet conventional environments such as primary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions; churches; community centers; or purpose-built buildings. However, not all ECE programs are offered in such conventional spaces. Worldwide, organizations are working with local communities to deliver ECE programs for children in innovative environments, such as Cox’s Bazar’s first classroom in the sky, a two-story structure that “stands on 2’0” low stilts which allow the smooth flow of rainwater during monsoon” (Lateef, para. 5, 2018) and can be relocated as needed, and Save the Children’s Boxes of Wonders, a program that aims to “create a childfriendly, rich and stimulating space for childhoods on the move” and can be implemented with children in diverse settings such as “transit centres and camps” (Avramović & Stamenković, 2018, p. 26). Another such organization that offers an innovative stimulating early childhood education program for young children living in refugee camps is iACT, a Los Angeles-based international action organization whose mission is to “inspire a more mindful humanitarian system, and to envision a world where the dignity, humanity and agency of conflict-affected people are recognized, affirmed and supported” (G. Stauring & K. Scott, personal

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum. . .

67

communication, January 14 2021) by providing “humanitarian action to aid, empower, and extend hope to those affected by mass atrocities” (iACT, n.d.). Since 2013, iACT, alongside refugee communities, has delivered Little Ripples (LR), a cutting-edge refugee-led and trauma-informed ECE curriculum for emergency and protracted refugee contexts, to the world’s most vulnerable, marginalized, and often invisible citizens – preschool children living in refugee camps located in Chad, Greece, and Tanzania. In addition to refugee camps, iACT has trained teachers working in low resourced areas in Cameroon and Central African Republic to implement the LR curriculum. iACT works in countries that have accepted refugees fleeing war conflict zones. The LR curriculum evolved from iACT’s ongoing dialogue with refugee communities, working alongside refugee community members, and their dedication to designing a curriculum that offers early learning for children living in hard to serve areas. iACT’s LR approach extends beyond traditional ways of implementing curriculum approaches of teaching and learning by recognizing and responding to the unique needs of the refugee community and children living in low-resourced areas. Lu et al. (2020) suggest that ameliorating inequity in ECE – in addition to issues such as poverty and stimulating home environments – is needed in order to improve early childhood development. iACT addresses such inequities by offering the LR early learning program, which includes warm nutritious meals and opportunities to form relationships between the program teachers and home environments. Curricula designed for children living in refugee camps must consider that children have experienced and may continue to experience trauma and hardship, and that there are unique issues such as appropriate spaces to gather with children; a serious lack of learning and play resources available to teachers for the program; and lack of teacher training for implementing complex curricula programs that depend extensively on materials. To this end, the LR curriculum was “co-created with refugee communities and is “grounded in play-based education, trauma-recovery approaches, restorative practices, and incorporates social and emotional learning, empathy development, positive behavior management, peacebuilding, and mindfulness” (iACT, para. 3, n.d.) practice and is implemented in family homes (known as compounds) that are retrofitted to safely welcome high number of children. Through the development of the LR curriculum, iACT’s LR curriculum is a refugee-led community-based model that includes trauma-informed practice and mindfulness, in order to create early learning experiences for young children.

Context Refugees are “people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country” (UNHCR, 2001–2022, para. 1). The refugees involved in LR programs are among more than 300,000 refugees from Darfur, Sudan, who sought refuge in camps in Chad (Durbin, 2018). Since 2003, an estimated 300,000 individuals have been killed and more than two million internally displaced (Durbin, 2018; Human Rights Watch, 2019). Chad

68

A. Di Santo et al.

is one of the poorest countries in the world and places 187 out of 189 countries on the Human Development Index (Conceição, 2019). Of the 2,995,318 children under 5 in Chad, a mere 1% attend an early childhood education (ECE) program (UNICEF & Countdown to 2030, 2021). UNESCO (2018) has documented that the learning needs of displaced preprimary children are not met and government policies that support early education are lacking. Further, early childhood development is allotted only 2% of humanitarian aid funding (SEEK Development, 2020), demonstrating how underfunded early childhood education is and that it is not deemed a priority for the international community. In their response to iACT’s inquiry as to what they need, refugee communities identified this gap: a safe and stimulating environment for their young children. iACT responded by cocreating a cost-effective curriculum that could be adapted to diverse settings and that would support women as they implement preschool education for children ranging in age from 3 to 5 years old (G. Stauring & K. Scott, personnel communication, 2020). As a nongovernmental organization, iACT has had a far-reaching impact across refugee communities and, as of 2019, they have implemented the LR program in 56 classrooms/centers in five countries. It is not surprising, therefore, that iACT’s LR curriculum has been taken up in a number of countries and contexts. The LR curriculum and program implementation model are not considered to be a one-size-fits-all approach. While the values of helping, peace, and sharing provide a foundation for the LR curriculum worldwide, daily programming is adapted by the refugee team of teachers and cooks to reflect the context, culture, and traditions of their community. Although the LR approach encompasses key components of traditional early childhood curriculum such as recognizing the need for an environment equipped to support children’s learning and growth, materials are essential for offering a stimulating and engaging environment and creating a safe space for children to form trusting and collaborative relationships with their peers, teachers, families, and community. Furthermore, there is also an emphasis on social and-emotional learning (SEL), mindfulness pedagogy, trauma-informed practice, and health related practices, which are integral to fostering hope and childhood empowerment and effectively meeting the needs of children living in emergency contexts. The uniqueness of the curriculum also lies in iACT’s engagement with the refugee communities themselves, specifically that the LR curriculum is fundamentally driven by refugee communities who are committed to program implementation, expansion, and sustainability.

Little Ripples Curriculum Little Ripples Curriculum Approach and Values The LR curriculum supports the holistic development of 3- to 5-year-old children through play-based learning and is designed to provide experiences for children, while creating a culture of participation for children and families responding to and facing humanitarian crises. Through its emphasis on a learning through play approach, mindfulness strategies, trauma informed early childhood practices, and community-led

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum. . .

69

Table 1 Little Ripples early childhood education curriculum core values Value Helping

Peace

Sharing

Interpretation “To foster helping by creating positive personal relationships between . . . [children], teachers, and the community by building a culture of empathy, teamwork, and collaboration.” “To create safe and peaceful learning environments for children, as well as to help them learn how to create inner and outer peace for themselves. By developing peaceful children, we can help to create peaceful communities and societies.” “To promote and demonstrate sharing between . . . [children], teachers, and the entire community.”

Note. iACT (2019a). Early Childhood Education Training Manual I, p. 9

practices, teachers embrace and support children’s overall health, well-being, and development. The core values of peace, helping, and sharing guide curriculum implementation and are at the heart of the program’s practices, experiences, and interactions between teacher and child/ren, and likewise emphasized in engagements between and among the children. See Table 1 for the LR curriculum’s values of peace, helping, and sharing and how they are interpreted for use in the curriculum. Interestingly, an LR teacher shared her experiences with the LR curriculum that she “knew the words peace, helping, sharing. But . . . didn’t know their meaning until being with iACT.” This speaks to the importance of providing adequate time during the teacher training (and beyond) to unpack program values and create meaning for them within the context of the community as it is an important process for creating an understanding of how to integrate values such as peace, helping, and sharing into the lives of the children, families, teachers, and the greater community.

Connection to Curriculum Theories Early childhood curricula theories provide a framework for a range of educational approaches to early learning and ECE program outcomes. Within the global context of ECE and curricula development, several critical child-focused theories including John Dewey’s theory of inquiry, Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology theory, Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory provide a foundation for designing curricula to meet children’s holistic developmental needs. Current approaches to children’s learning place value on the learning environments and materials while providing intentional experiences that foster children’s intrinsic motivation for learning through social engagement, exploration, and problem solving. This chapter is not intended to compare and contrast these theories, but rather to provide an example of how iACT has shifted from a traditional ECE curriculum approach that focuses on learning outcomes to one that is designed to meet the needs of children living in unstable and complex emergency situations – refugee camps. In keeping with an interdisciplinary approach to developing curricula, iACT integrates concepts from the fields of early childhood education, education, and health. Furthermore, they draw on ideas from social justice, children’s rights, mindfulness pedagogy, and trauma-informed practice to inform the LR curriculum.

70

A. Di Santo et al.

Learning Through Play Learning through play (LtP) is at the heart of the LR curriculum program. This learning concept has been supported by theorists such as Froebel (1782–1852), Dewey (1859–1952), Vygotsky (1896–1934), Piaget (1896–1980), and Malaguzzi (1920–1994). Benefits of play-based learning for children’s cognitive, social (Taylor & Boyer, 2020), and emotional development (Ashiabi, 2007) are well-documented. Teachers view children as active, contributing, and participating members within the program and their greater community. Teachers offer a continuum of play that fosters playful experiences ranging from free play, guided play, games, and direct instruction (The LEGO Foundation, 2017). These four components of playful experiences are key attributes of the LtP approach to teaching and learning during the early years. Offering a variety of play experiences creates autonomy for children as they practice skills such as problem solving, turn taking, sharing, negotiating, and collaborating. Teachers from an LR program in Chad found that when children first started the program, they would often engage in conflicts with their peers such as hitting and fighting; however, by creating a space that offers a variety of playful experiences that recognizes children as active members of the community, and that embraces cultural values, the children over time began to engage in more prosocial behaviors such as playing together and sharing with each other. Additionally, families noticed that their children began to transfer their learning to their home life. A mother shared that she noticed that her son became “much more sociable and [shares], hugs people,” and talks positively about his day at the LR program. Another mother remarked that her son engages in pretend role play at home and “pretends to be a teacher with the other children who live around us. He has them sit in a circle and do activities.” Engaging in pretend play is crucial as this form of play is an important vehicle for helping children learn about their world and for making sense of their lived experiences. Incorporating an LtP approach enables the teachers and children to embrace the grassroots values of the LR curriculum as it provides opportunities for children to practice and expand upon the skills in a safe and nurturing environment. Through play, children develop empathy and learn to respect and care for themselves and others. A teacher observed that the children in her LR program demonstrate empathy as they become aware of others’ needs and interests, that they share with others, and that they have formed positive relationships with their peers. Furthermore, over time, teachers have observed that children attending the LR program begin to demonstrate an increased level of mindfulness as they learn about themselves and others through play.

Mindfulness Pedagogy Encompassing a mindfulness philosophy into the LR approach and implementing its strategies is an important component of trauma-informed practice; mindfulness strategies and games are included in the children’s daily routine. Teachers have

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum. . .

71

expressed their support for integrating mindfulness and have observed the influence of this practice on the children’s overall health and well-being. “Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn et al., 2017, para. 2). Mindfulness is introduced to and practiced with the teachers during their training. It is viewed as a way to create a tranquil and peaceful classroom environment and is integral to the implementation of the LR curriculum. The LR program uses mindfulness pedagogy to address and support the emotional health and well-being of children. Mindfulness helps children learn how to cope with stress, build resilience, and restore hope and dignity. Through a daily mindfulness practice, children learn to sit with their thoughts, and to recognize and accept their thoughts, emotions, and body sensations in the very moment they exist in the present. One mother whose three-year-old child is enrolled in the LR program shared that when they are at home, he asks his “friends to make a circle around him so he can sit in the middle and do mindfulness.” Teachers found that children enrolled in the program are viewed as being “more peaceful” and “much more . . . calm” after practicing mindfulness. A teacher reported that children have asked her if they can practice mindfulness at the end of the day before departing for home. Incorporating mindfulness strategies throughout the daily routine has created opportunities for children to deepen their learning about themselves and others. The practice of mindfulness teaches children how to respond to the present moment’s situation instead of reacting to traumatic memories from their past or worrying about the uncertainty of their future – a vital life skill for children living in emergency contexts such as refugee camps.

Trauma-Informed Early Childhood Education Practice In addition to developing a play-based learning curriculum for young children, the intent of the curriculum is also to mitigate the negative effects of toxic stress on children’s learning and their overall health and well-being. LR’s approach recognizes that refugee children may have been exposed to “prolonged adversity such as . . . exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship-without adequate adult support” (Center on the Developing Child, n.d., para. 3). To this end, LR’s approach is trauma-informed and includes well-being practices such as mindfulness and mindful movement (i.e., yoga activities but not a full yoga practice). According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (n.d., p. 1), trauma is experienced when a child perceives an event as “frightening, dangerous, or violent.” Children on the move who arrive at refugee camps have endured traumatic events such as violence, death of loved ones, the eradication of their villages, and the loss of their home and possessions. Thus, iACT embeds trauma-informed practices that “intentionally [creates] a school environment where every student feels safe and supported and where staff understand how trauma affects behaviour and emotions”

72

A. Di Santo et al.

(Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC, 2017, p. 19) into all its programs. A trauma-informed approach requires teachers to possess knowledge of child development and an understanding of how trauma can impact a child’s cognitive, emotional, physical, social, and spiritual development while also recognizing four key assumptions that guide the program. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) (2014) promotes four key approaches to trauma-informed practice: (1) realizing how trauma impacts people and their community, (2) recognizing the trauma, (3) responding to the trauma, and (4) ensuring strategies and supports are in place to avoid retraumatizing people and their communities. During the LR teacher training sessions, teachers acquire knowledge about the four approaches to practice and gain the skills, perspectives, and attitudes to infuse trauma-informed strategies into their practice: The Pyramid Model Consortium (n.d.) suggests the following strategies for early childhood practice: • recognize that trauma can be expressed in a variety of ways • form nurturing, responsive, and trusting relationships with children and their families • create a safe environment for children to engage with others, learn, and grow • provide a consistent routine, structure, and expectations • offer experiences that help children learn about their emotions and provide a safe space for children to practice regulating their emotions, build resilience and selfregulation • provide opportunities for children to learn ways to anticipate danger and keep themselves safe • create space for children to collaborate, problem solve, and form trusting and responsive relationships with their peers All children who attend an LR program are supported by their teachers, who incorporate trauma-informed attitudes, skills, and strategies into their daily practice. The LR approach uses mindfulness and mindful movement to support trauma recovery. Quality, daily mindfulness practices can help to reduce the effects of toxic stress and adverse experiences (Ortiz & Sibinga, 2017). Through the lens of trauma-informed practice, coupled with a mindfulness practice, the LR curriculum supports refugee children who live with daily uncertainty as they learn to manage their emotional responses when triggered or when they are overcome with uncontrollable feelings.

Application to Practice The LR program offers preschool children living in crisis situations quality playbased learning opportunities that focus on supporting children’s social and emotional learning, and their cognitive and physical development; promoting peacebuilding; engaging in mindfulness; and fostering social justice to instill hope and dignity in each child and to develop a “strong foundation of learning, interpersonal skills,

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum. . .

73

empathy, and peace for children and teachers to recover from severe trauma and grow into happy, healthy, and contributing members of society” (iACT, n.d., para. 4). All phases of implementing an LR program reflect a human-centered design approach that entails “an iterative process that focuses on asking better questions and embracing continual inquiry, learning and scaling” (UNICEF, n.d., p. 1) and that “emphasizes both the perspective and participation of the people . . . at every step, resulting in more inclusive, tailored and empowering solutions” (Tudor & Hickler, 2019, p. 10). It was in the spirit of this community-driven, collaborative partnership that the educational ideologies of the Little Ripples early childhood education curriculum and the notion of home-based programs were born. The home-based programs are referred to as Ponds, and they replaced the traditional focus on building large, expensive schools, hence investing in capacity development. Home-based ECE is not a new concept; however, it is a unique approach for offering preprimary education within emergency contexts and addresses one of the most challenging aspects of ECE access.

Community-Led Practice The Little Ripples curriculum design and implementation is in keeping with iACT’s framework – the community is front and center in determining their needs and related development plans. iACT and the refugee community members work and think together and look outside the box to create an alternative solution that uses the environmental challenges as assets rather than obstacles. Through an iterative process with refugee beneficiaries, our programs are shaped and molded to be the most effective for each community we work with. (iACT, 2019b, Our Model)

Little Ripples curriculum was designed based on iACT’s iterative learning and implementation model that includes compassionate listening and demonstrates that one is present and attentive, cocreating programs, connecting deeply with the community, and providing ongoing support as community members take on leadership roles. Through this approach, iACT challenges and disrupts the current structures of inequity, oppression, and social injustice which are systemically embedded in refugee camps. iACT challenges the traditional social constructs of displaced communities by offering restructuring and responsive initiatives in a meaningful and sustainable way and recognizes that community-led practices “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability” (Costanza-Chock, 2020, xvii). iACT strives tirelessly to increase opportunities for people affected by genocide and mass atrocities to use their agency, voice, and capacity to create, manage, and expand the LR programs to meet the immediate and long-term needs of their community. Through community-led practices and initiatives such as LR, displaced preprimary children are able to exercise their right to access early childhood education and to a healthy development.

74

A. Di Santo et al.

In addition to offering early learning programs to preprimary children, the LR curriculum was created with the intent that local women would receive teacher training to work with the children enrolled in LR programs. As a result, LR programs provide employment to local women and support leadership among the refugee community. The success of the LR program is due in part to the community-led practices model that recognizes LR teachers as collaborators in the curriculum design and leaders in the program delivery. The preestablished, evidence-based curriculum framework provides teachers with the knowledge and resources needed to deliver the program from a trauma-informed lens while also incorporating the principles of learning through play and mindfulness pedagogy. The unique aspect of the LR curriculum is that teachers adapt this approach to meet the specific needs of their local community. Learning about the Little Ripples curriculum and its “big ideas” help teachers to understand the curriculum concepts needed for applying theory to practice.

Little Ripples Big Ideas The LR curriculum has four overarching big ideas to create learning experiences and to scaffold children’s learning through play. These ideas include the following: connecting and exploring; family and community; culture; and the 4 Cs: critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity. Table 2 presents the big ideas and the corresponding lesson overview that teachers receive in their training. The LR curriculum’s four overarching big ideas are used in tandem with the resources available within the community and align with the children and teachers’ cultural traditions, beliefs, and values. Teachers incorporate the LR values of helping, peace, and sharing into the big ideas to create a “place for children to thrive and have hope for something better” (WISE, 2016, 3:19–3:22). Little Ripples training sessions provide opportunities for the teachers to reflect on the curriculum approach and experiment and explore a range of practical ways to implement and adapt learning experiences for children.

Little Ripples Teacher Training: Early Years Curriculum in Practice All training sessions are based on an experiential and participatory approach and are planned to model ECE classroom practice. Experiential learning is the process of using a variety of techniques to engage the learner to actively explore the concepts, experience activities that would be offered to the children, create learning experiences that are meaningful for the children, organize a safe and welcoming classroom environment, and discover alternate ways for teaching and learning with young children. Through this active engagement, the learner makes sense of the information in relation to their own experiences and prior knowledge. The learner then engages in reflective practice and considers ways to represent these experiences as

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum. . .

75

Table 2 Big Ideas Topic Connecting and exploring

Family and community

Culture

The 4 Cs: critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity

Lesson overview Children explore their community location, housing, and safety and conceptualize the lives of their friends and others within their community and globally. Children are introduced to healthy practices that promote optimal growth and development and discuss ways to connect healthy living strategies to inside the classroom, at home, and in the community. Children explore the concepts of health, safety, hygiene, and stewardship. Children explore family and community values and create connections to cultural pride. Together, children, teachers, and families celebrate a sense of community by embracing and acknowledging commonalities and differences. Attention is drawn to the disparities affiliated with living in a refugee camp such as access to clean water. Activities, exploration, and discussion take place around water safety, conservation, access, and community stewardship. Connections to culture, healthy eating practices, local resources, and health sustainability are a focus. Children learn about the functions of their community, environmental implications, and their relationship to the land and community. Children engage in experiences that empower them to take action and give back to their community. Children engage in activities that develop their dispositions and intrinsic motivation for learning. Children make connections about their own rights, needs, and wants and use this knowledge to create a community of sharing, kindness, and empathy. Children engage in a project that promotes community-led collaboration and that showcases the three foundational pillars of helping, peace, and sharing.

Note: iACT (2019c). Little Ripples: An iACT Education Program. Training Presentation PowerPoint. Slides 9–13

they move through the learning process of abstract thinking to active and concrete knowledge representation (Moon, 2013; Tomkins & Ulus, 2016). This experiential learning approach supports the learners’ understanding of learning through play and disrupts traditional notions of adult-directed didactic teaching, demonstrating firsthand how children learn through purposeful and play-based activities. Learners attend three training sessions over 18 months. Each training session supports the application of the LR curriculum to practice, builds on the previous session, and takes into account the teachers’ experiences with the program. In Teacher Training One, the LR curriculum approach is introduced, and the teachers are encouraged to contribute their ideas, share stories, and question their understanding of the program, in turn creating a community of reflective practice and collaborative curriculum implementation. Weekly staff meetings, attended by all the teachers, foster a sense of ownership by offering a safe space for sharing ideas and a

76

A. Di Santo et al.

platform to brainstorm solutions for overcoming challenges. Six to eight months later, Teacher Training Two is provided by the iACT team. The objective of this training is to strengthen the iterative, collaborative process between all LR employees that include teachers, cooks, and their education coordinator (for information regarding the roles of the cooks and education coordinator, refer to Di Santo & Scott, 2020a, b) as they engage in deeper and broader discussions about the program’s implementation and any challenges they are facing. Six to eight months after the second session, Teacher Training Three is provided. The focus of this training is based on a train-the-trainer model whereby the teachers are encouraged to take the lead in facilitating a training session. The aim is to help the teachers recognize their skills and build their self-confidence so they feel they can train new hires, eventually expanding the LR program independently from iACT’s participation in the training. The success of the LR program is dependent upon creating a safe teaching and learning space where choice and the power to make decisions are returned to the refugee team. Utilizing a refugee-led human centered approach provides an opportunity to restore the dignity, self-confidence, and self-esteem of the community members, while also recognizing and igniting the leadership skills and knowledge that already exist within them but were lost during their displacement. A sense of empowerment is crucial for the refugee women’s growth as active contributors to the LR program. Empowerment is viewed as “a process, a mechanism by which people, organizations, and communities gain mastery over their affairs” (Rappaport, 1987, p. 122). LR teachers are responsible for planning and implementing a quality early childhood education program for up to 45 children in a multiage grouping. Teachers discuss and explore the various components of the program during their training sessions and create a daily routine that reflects local needs. For example, a LR program that operates in a refugee camp in Chad operates six mornings a week from 7:00 to 11:00, a period chosen by the community members and teachers. The LR approach recognizes that the community knows its needs best, and therefore makes the final decisions regarding program structure. Children receive a nutritious daily meal, ensuring that they get the dietary requirements needed for their development and learning. Mealtime is served family style and includes the children, teachers, cooks, volunteers, and any child living in the home where the program is offered, whether or not they attend the program. Quality early childhood programming is paramount for children’s academic success and their social and emotional development (for example, HighScope Perry Preschool Study, 2020; Carolina Abecedarian Project, n.d.). The combination of play-based learning and offering children choices within the context of a purposefully organized environment fosters their independence and autonomy. Due to their precarious situation and lack of resources for early childhood education, refugee children are often denied opportunities to actively participate in their own learning and are often further marginalized, resulting in their autonomy to be virtually nonexistent. Thus, the LR curriculum is designed to provide children with a safe space in which to express their ideas, emotions, and needs, and to

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum. . .

77

actively participate in a supportive environment that provides intentional learning opportunities, materials, and engagement with others that sparks children’s intrinsic motivation for learning.

Conclusion iACT continues to work alongside the refugee community to disrupt the top-down program models that are so often found in refugee contexts. Taking the time to actively listen to community members as they share their needs and ensuring their decision-making power from the onset of the program is essential for long-term sustainability, iACT considers the mechanisms that already exist for families and children and adapts the LR curriculum and program implementation to meet the needs of each refugee community. This means that NGOs working in early childhood education in emergency contexts need to be flexible, open, and realistic in their expectations and to think about adaptability and sustainability from the inception of the program. Community decision-making power is essential; however, the adaptability of the curriculum itself is key. Cocreating the program structure and curriculum allows for teacher empowerment and choice. Training for the teachers, access to nutritious food, and safety are key elements to creating a quality ECE program. In refugee settings, people have limited choice in making decisions that affect their lives. As such, the opportunity to create a program that is right for their own community is unique and provides for local program iteration when challenges arise. It ensures cultural relevance – celebrating culture is especially important among communities that have fled from violence. The LR program is guided by the community needs, values, and traditions. These core beliefs are prevalent in the creation and implementation of the LR curriculum which in turn supports sustainability. Program implementation grounded in refugee-led approaches builds capacity within the community, thus underscoring local long-term ownership of the program. If Little Ripples stopped, we would find a solution ourselves to keep Little Ripples. This is just as iACT has taught us. To find solutions and have ideas. (Ali, iACT Project Coordinator)

References Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC (AMSSA). (2017). Creating a welcoming culture in early childhood development programs. Cultures West (Spring/Summer): 19. https://www.amssa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/CW_EarlyYears-Summer2017.pdf Ashiabi, G. S. (2007). Play in the preschool classroom: Its socioemotional significance and the teacher’s role in play. Early Childhood Education Journal, 35(2), 199–207. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10643-007-0165-8

78

A. Di Santo et al.

Avramović, M., & Stamenković, N. (2018). Boxes of wonder: Creation of the program with children on the move. Save the Children. https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/ boxes-wonder-creation-program-children-move/ Carolina Abecedarian Project. (n.d.). The abecedarian project. https://abc.fpg.unc.edu/abecedarianproject Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (n.d.). Toxic stress. 2020. https:// developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/toxic-stress/ Conceição, P. (2019). Human development report 2019 beyond income, beyond averages, beyond today. In Inequalities in human development in the 21st century. United Nations Development Programme. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr2019.pdf Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001 Di Santo, A., & Scott, K. J. (2020a). A child’s right to early childhood education in emergency contexts. Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights, 7(1), 241–262. Di Santo, A., & Scott, K. J. (2020b). Please remember us: How iACT’s Little Ripples early childhood education program Is helping refugee children and their families cope during the COVID-19 pandemic. Childhood Education: Innovations. 6–12. Durbin, A.S. (2018). The Darfur genocide 15 years on: What has changed? Jewish World Watch. https://www.jww.org/conflict-areas/sudan/darfur-genocide-15-years-what-has-changed/ HighScope. (2020). Perry preschool study. https://highscope.org/perry-preschool-project/ Human Rights Watch. (2019). Sudan: Events of 2018. World Report. https://www.hrw.org/worldreport/2019/country-chapters/sudan iACT. (2019a). Early childhood education training manual I (Unpublished manual). iACT. iACT. (2019b). Our model. https://www.iact.ngo/impact/#education iACT. (2019c). Little Ripples: An iACT education program. Training Presentation, iACT, Redondo Beach, CA, United States. iACT. (n.d.). Little Ripples: Refugee-led early childhood education. https://www.iact.ngo/impact/ little-ripples/ Kabat-Zinn, J., Rossy, L., Whitney-Coulter, A., Naidoo, U., Smookler, E., Newman, K. M., & Ho, J. (2017). Jon Kabat-Zinn: Defining mindfulness. Mindful. https://www.mindful.org/jon-kabatzinn-defining-mindfulness/ Lateef, R. W. (2018). A classroom in the sky: Building upwards in the Rohingya camps. http://blog. brac.net/a-classroom-in-the-sky-building-upwards-in-the-rohingya-camps/ Lu, C., Cuartas, J., Fink, G., McCoy, D., Liu, K., Li, Z., Daelmans, B., & Richter, L. (2020). Inequalities in early childhood care and development in low/middle-income countries: 2010–2018. BMJ Global Health, 5, 1–10. Moon, J. A. (2013). A handbook of reflective and experiential learning: Theory and practice. RoutledgeFalmer. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203416150 National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN). (n.d.). What is a traumatic event? https:// www.nctsn.org/what-is-child-trauma/about-child-trauma#:~:text¼A%20traumatic%20event% 20is%20a,one%20can%20also%20be%20traumatic Ortiz, R., & Sibinga, E. M. (2017). The role of mindfulness in reducing the adverse effects of childhood stress and trauma. Children (Basel), 4(3), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3390/ children4030016 Pyramid Model Consortium. (n.d.). Checklist of early childhood practices that support social emotional development and trauma-informed care. https://challengingbehavior.cbcs.usf.edu/ docs/Informed-Care-Checklist.pdf Rappaport, J. (1987). Terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: Toward a theory for community psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 15(2), 121–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00919275 SEEK development. (2020). Analysis of international aid levels for early childhood services in crisis contexts. Brief for Moving Minds Alliance. https://movingmindsalliance.org/wp-content/

Early Years Curriculum in Practice: iACT’s Little Ripples Curriculum. . .

79

uploads/2020/12/analysis-of-international-aid-levels-for-early-childhood-services-in-crisiscontexts.pdf Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach. HHS Publication. https:// www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/medicaid_health_homes/docs/samhsa_ trauma_concept_paper.pdf Taylor, M. E., & Boyer, W. (2020). Play-based learning: Evidence-based research to improve children’s learning experience in the kindergarten classroom. Early Childhood Education Journal, 48(2), 127–133. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-019-00989-7 The LEGO Foundation. (2017). What we mean by: Learning through play (Version 1.2). https:// cms.learningthroughplay.com/media/vd5fiurk/what-we-mean-by-learning-through-play.pdf Tomkins, L., & Ulus, E. (2016). Oh, was that “experiential learning”?!’ Spaces, synergies and surprises with Kolb’s learning cycle. Management Learning, 47(2), 158–178. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1350507615587451 Tudor, G., & Hickler, B. (2019). Demand for health services field guide – A human-centred approach. UNICEF. https://www.unicef.org/innovation/sites/unicef.org.innovation/files/201905/demand_for_healthservices_fieldguide.pdf UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). (2001–2022). What is a refugee? https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/ what-is-a-refugee.html UNESCO. (2018). Migration, displacement and education – Building bridges, not walls. Global Education Monitoring Report 2019. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000265866 UNICEF & Countdown to 2030. (2021). Thrive nurturing care for early childhood development: Country profiles for early childhood development. https://nurturing-care.org/resources/countryprofiles/ UNICEF. (n.d.). Human centered design 4 health – The process. https://www.hcd4health.org/ process WISE. (2016, November 11). 2016 WISE award winner: Little Ripples, USA [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/191202274

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum An example of responsive and differentiated praxis in Greek early childhood schools Eugenia Arvanitis

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Inclusive Education for Global Learners: Building on an Intercultural Growth Mindset . . . . . 83 Transforming Pedagogical Praxis and Differentiated Curriculum Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Differentiating Curriculum Through a Participatory Visual Arts Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Crossing Borders: A Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Abstract

The development of a diversity-sensitive curriculum remains the biggest challenge for inclusive quality education which seeks to enhance learners’ transformative learning and agency. Highly differentiated curricula embraced diversity, build on meaningful knowledge production processes, tackle challenging global issues, support reflexive learning, and aim at developing an intercultural growth mindset. Learners, when operate in inclusive and transformative learning environments, can become versatile and reflexive creators as well as responsive citizens holding a clear commitment to social justice. Thus, acquiring ethical entrepreneurialism and global citizenship skills is an important goal for curriculum differentiation (e.g., modifying content, pedagogical processes, learning products, and learning environment). This chapter focuses on differentiated curriculum intervention in seven Greek early childhood schools. Differentiated learning and informed decision-making were highly responsive to real-life conditions leading to novel pathways of meaning-making and experiencing. Scaffolded repertoires negotiated complex topics such as refugeeness, war effects, forced human mobility, and refugee E. Arvanitis (*) University of Patras, Patras, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_11

81

82

E. Arvanitis

integration. Curriculum content and multimodal materials are aligned to academic learning as well as learners’ lifeworlds, learning styles, and interests. Finally, participatory visual arts approach has proven a useful aid to sustain children’s active engagement throughout this intervention. At the end, a public visual arts exhibition allowed children to become public narrators and advocates, express their emotions, and try to be responsive to enhance refugee integration. Keywords

Transformative and reflexive curriculum · Differentiated curriculum · Synesthetic meaning-making · Intercultural responsiveness · Intercultural growth mindset · Ethical entrepreneurialism · Reflexive learning · Refugeeness · Children’s drawings · Participatory visual arts approach

Introduction Children learn best when their lifeworlds, learning styles, and interests are represented in school ecology and when teachers are culturally responsive in designing transformative, reflexive, and differentiated curricula (Arvanitis, 2018; Gay, 2010, 2013; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) that embrace students intangible knowledge assets. However, modern curricula remain focused on traditional and didactic forms of learning with no substantial connection to real-word skills leading to academic and social disparities. These forms also constrain individual and collective experiences of what situated learning is due to exposure to test-driven rote learning, factual data, decontextualized information, and memorization patterns (Anderson et al., 2001). In contrast, a more culturally inclusive and transformative approach attests that all students, regardless of their diverse characteristics (material, corporeal and symbolic), should have access to quality education and equal chance for success so to positively portray self and “others” in an interconnected world. On the other hand, effective learning becomes more transformative and meaningful on the premises of a constructivist and intercultural growth mindset (Dweck, 2012). Only purposefully planned collaborative learning may embrace both learners’ belonging and transformation (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). Responsiveness to diverse learning conditions, reflexive stance, and transformative quality education empowers inclusion in many aspects. First and foremost, it allows learners’ engagement in meaningful, situated, challenging, authentic, and real-world learning (e.g., on otherness, human predicaments, and prejudice). Secondly, it affirms and validates learners’ lifeworlds in a collaborative and reflexive (re)construction of real-world situations enhancing agency reflection and empathy. Moreover, it empowers learners to synesthetic meaning-making or mode shifting where knowledge is represented in many ways (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). Finally, it considers that all students can succeed high academic performance through different learning pathways and assessment.

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

83

A central element in inclusive approaches is the concept of curriculum differentiation in terms of modifying content, pedagogical processes, learning products, and learning environment (Tomlinson, 2014). This chapter focuses on curriculum differentiation as an important variable towards cultural reflexivity, responsiveness, and transformation of school learning. Learner diversity and multiple perspectives on refugeeness formed the basis for curriculum planning in seven Greek early childhood schools.

Inclusive Education for Global Learners: Building on an Intercultural Growth Mindset The Education 2030 Framework for Action (UNESCO, 2016) acknowledges that inclusive, equitable, and quality education could combat discrimination, inequalities, and exclusion in modern schools so that they can cater for the needs of all children in an effective and holistic way. The idea of inclusive education is portrayed as a fundamental human right for a just society (Ainscow, 2020) that captures all forms of learners’ diversity including all material, corporal, and symbolic differences (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). The mission of inclusive and equitable education “is the transformation of self and society” through the empowerment of students “in a realistic and emancipatory way” so “to achieve their best possible outcomes” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012, cited in Arvanitis, 2018: 115). This ethical position of transformative education assumes that in the age of constant change, intense diversity, risk, and ambiguity learners need to develop a balanced personality (gaining more agency) so to engage in new intercultural learning spaces and be intertwined with diverse people across cultural and spatial boundaries. In addition, learners need to acquire citizenship skills acting as global citizens “considering global issues based on a deep understanding of diverse values with genuine interest in engaging with others to solve complex problems that impact human and environmental sustainability” (Fullan & Scott, 2014: 6). Thus, for cosmopolitan learners to succeed new personal capabilities are required such as new learning and innovative skills (e.g., critical thinking and solving complex, multidisciplinary and open-ended problems, creativity and innovative thinking, communication, and collaboration), information, media and technology skills, and life and career skills (flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, leadership and responsibility) (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2019). In other words, learners need to adopt a new ethical entrepreneurialism aiming at addressing “personal and societal challenges locally and globally” and building an inclusive and collaborative social agenda to diminish social injustices and ethnocentrism (Fullan & Scott, 2014: 3). Moreover, global learners possess a “demonstrated capacity” (Petty, 2010: 15) or intercultural competence that enables them to value diversity, build cross-cultural understanding and develop empathic, tolerant, reciprocal, and (self)reflexive attitudes. Overall, intercultural competence entails both empathy of other peoples’

84

E. Arvanitis

cultural beliefs and reflexive self-awareness and critical re-examination of own values, practices, biases, and prejudices. Intercultural competence undergoes a lifelong transformation through deep self and/or collective reflexivity and cultural responsiveness (Perso, 2012). Cultural responsiveness (Banks, 2004) “is the acquired cultural competence integrated and enacted in practice.” It is manifested mainly through “accessible, equitable and quality services and delivered outcomes” (Arvanitis, 2016: 12). In the school context, intercultural responsiveness is demonstrated by the pursuit of individual and institutional transformation on the ethical position of an equitable inclusive education. Responsiveness is grounded on informed decision-making where all stakeholders hold a clear commitment to social justice through demonstrating global awareness and (intercultural) growth mindset (Dweck, 2012; Holden et al., 2021). The latter involves an unlimited potential and willingness to grow, learn, and adjust through flexibility of thinking, reflexivity, openness, respect of cultural differences, and non-judgmental attitudes. This conscious reflexive stance on self and “others” occurs in a collective frame where continuous dialogue and synesthetic meaning-making take place (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). Learners, when negotiating new knowledge and different ways of knowing, address belonging and transformation as critical conditions in the educational praxis. Thus, learning becomes meaningful, reflexive, effective, and transformative (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). When learners feel embraced in the learning process, they can successfully master new knowledge in an inclusive way. Learner’s identity and their sense of belonging is positively (re)affirmed when their lifeworlds (everyday experiences, thoughts, values, feelings, perspectives, aspirations, interests, preferences, and needs), learning profiles (multimodal meaning representations), and interests (motivations) are valued and utilized as a beneficial learning resource (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). Lack of connection with students’ prior knowledge and lifeworlds leads to fragmented and decontextualized learning. It also leads to learners’ cognitive distantiation or no meaningful attachment to new knowledge. In addition, learning is successful when it is transformative. This can be realized when learners travel out of their comfort zones (without leaving their Zone of Proximal Development – Vygotsky, 1978) through challenging their everyday assumptions (depth axis) or through acquiring new experiences (breadth axis) (Kalantzis et al., 2010). Transformative learning is meaningful as learners reach deep, coherent, and holistic understanding of the topics introduced, whereas acquired knowledge becomes usable and transferred into real-world problem-solving and decision-making. This way learners can actively construct and make sense, organize, correlate, modify, elaborate, compare, and generalize acquired knowledge in a constructivist paradigm (Getha-Eby et al., 2014). Transformative learning experience, however, is meaningful in a collective/community context as meanings are first constructed interpersonally through social interaction and only later intrapersonally (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). Overall, transformative learning in education involves both (a) understanding the “practical interests” of “others” such as their expectations and values (Habermas, 1987) and (b) negotiation, critical reflection, and revision of one’s own practices and

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

85

assumptions (“emancipatory interests” – Habermas 1978 or subjective frames of reference) (Mezirow, 2012). However, transformative learning is not just an internal dialogue that critically reflects on self-knowledge (Archer, 2012). It entails reflexivity in a relational context. Reciprocal engagement (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015) with others in the community is the point that distinguishes reflexivity from reflective thinking. Conscious reflection and decision-making is not a personal act alone, but it is contextualized in the community aiming to bring transformative social action through contrasting worldviews and diverse practices (Finlay, 2008: 6). In other words, reflexivity refers to a relational “space of contestation” (Joseph, 2014: 7) where meaning-making is a situated and socially conscious process and is created by the dynamic relationship, with “others.” In this space, continuous dialogue and mediation reconstruct broader cultural narratives. Thus, reflexivity refers to an intellectually and process of critical self-awareness and meaning-making in reallife contexts.

Transforming Pedagogical Praxis and Differentiated Curriculum Planning Meaningful and transformative learning for all learners lies at the core of inclusive education and its various paradigms such as reflexive pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), and differentiated praxis. A central premise of all three paradigms is learners’ diversity and subjectivity. For example, reflexive pedagogy explores the way learning embraces students’ symbolic differences, material conditions, and corporeal attributes (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) and not isolated facts to be memorized. Diverse learner narratives and lifeworlds are at the epicenter of learning acquisition through respectful and empathetic reflexive dialogue. Learners embark on a boundary-crossing journey where all voices are important to be heard. Similarly differentiated teaching and CRP (Gay, 2010) validate and affirm learner diversity namely diverse lifeworlds, student readiness, learning profiles, and interests. However, student lifeworlds are more interesting than learner readiness which refers strictly to learners’ cognitive knowledge with respect to the taught topic. Embracing students’ lifeworlds leads to an open, inclusive, and differentiated curriculum design that invites learner subjectivity and life narratives into the classroom and learning through differentiated processes and autonomy-supportive practices that are open, dialogic, and continuous (Kalantzis & Cope, 2016). Moreover, in terms of knowledge production, reflexive pedagogy considers learners as producers of their own sophisticated conceptual schemas through diverse ways of acquiring knowledge. “Synesthesia or mode shifting” operates “as a pedagogical device” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012: 274) that encourages dialogue and collaborative learning. The learner actively and collaboratively constructs knowledge (as a producer) through a broad range of tasks where high-order thinking activities are central. (S)he also undertakes complex and meaningful activities in real-world situations that represent different knowledge processes (experiencing, conceptualizing, applying, analyzing) (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). The sequencing

86

E. Arvanitis

of these activities provides responsive learning repertoires (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015: 16) and a scaffolded, meaningful, and transformative learning environment where learners receive recursive feedback (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012), namely just in time feedback, as well as continuous and formative assessment from peers, teachers, parents, or invited experts. Similarly, CRP also applies situated teaching, with explicit scaffolded activities and translingual pathways of learning. Its emphasis is on highly interactive and collaborative learning which empowers leaners to build on their lifeworld capacities through reflectivity. Learning is co-constructed in diverse sociocultural contexts, whereas it is shared in the learning community. Finally, CRP evidence-based practices (e.g., collaborative teaching, responsive feedback, instructional modeling, and instructional scaffolding) enhance metacognitive and highorder skills (Arvanitis, 2016). All these inclusive paradigms promote meaningful and transformative learning aiming at high academic expectations and the cultivation of critical cultural consciousness for all students (Richards et al., 2007). Furthermore, highly effective schools embrace differentiation (e.g., institutional, instructional) as part of their transformative and social justice orientation. Especially, differentiated curriculum aims at students’ deep knowledge (holistic understanding and critical ideas of a topic), higher-order thinking (the adoption of ways that transform knowledge), and substantive conversations/interactions with “others” around substantive content (Gibbons, 2008). School reforms (in the USA, the UK, and Australia) promote highly differentiated curriculum including expert teaching instruction, learners’ autonomy, as well as quality, meaningful, and efficient learning for all students (Tomlinson, 2014; Morgan, 2014). More specifically, the positive impact of differentiated instruction has been measured in learning and motivation and high academic achievements (Rock et al., 2008; Huebner, 2010). Curriculum differentiation relates to the modification of three elements: (a) the content (what), (b) the process (how), and (c) the product and learning environment (Tomlinson & Imbeau, 2010). The modification is based on student’s (a) deep subject-matter knowledge, (b) challenging goals and topics, (c) prior learning and lifeworld characteristics, (d) interests and engagement (sense of belonging, choice and agency), (e) preferred approaches to learning (learning profiles), and (f) synesthesia/multimodality and diverse learning repertoires/routines (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Tomlinson, 2014; van Geel et al., 2019). Differentiation in that effect can lead to greater flexibility in the use of multimodal materials and scaffolded teaching strategies (e.g., experiential, conceptual, analytical, and applied activities, learning/interest centers, flexible grouping, tiered assignments, individual projects, or small-group instruction). However, differentiation focus must be also on teacher underlying decision-making processes and not just on content-process-product differentiation (Bondie et al., 2019). This refers to teacher adjustable practices (e.g., teachers’ instructional reasoning, decision-making, and acting) and interrelatedness of learning during instruction as well as teacher quality skills (Bondie et al., 2019; Parsons et al., 2013, 2018; van Geel et al., 2019). Overall, an integrated and comprehensive model of differentiated instruction is conceptualized along the affective, planning, and instruction levels: (a) The affective level refers to teachers’ openness, affective response to learner diversity, and intercultural growth mindset. In other words, it refers to teachers’ endorsement of

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

87

intercultural attitudes in class and their ability to create appropriate affective conditions for all learners to feel intrinsically motivated and achieve competence, autonomy, and relatedness (van Geel et al., 2019). (b) The planning level includes teachers’ proactive planning of a high-quality differentiated curriculum based on learners’ diversified learning needs and experiences. (c) The instruction level refers to adjustable common instruction, as Bondie et al. (2019) have stated. Monitoring and formative assessment/synergetic feedback takes place during instruction in a cyclical manner that guides teacher adaptations (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; van Geel et al., 2019; Parsons et al., 2013, 2018). This cyclical responsivity in the form of continuous assessment is a higher-order type of differentiated instruction competence (Smets & Struyven, 2020) and represents teacher accumulated experience and familiarization with differentiated instruction.

Differentiating Curriculum Through a Participatory Visual Arts Approach This chapter presents a differentiated curriculum intervention in six Greek kindergartens in Achaia, Greece, and one in London. Overall, seven teachers, five undergraduate student aides, and 100 students took part (aged 3–6). This intervention started when schools were invited to an arts competition titled Crossing borders – We reach Europe organized in 2017 by the University of Patras in association with the local branch of OMEP (Organization Mondiale pour l’Éducation Préscolaire). The purpose of the competition was to allow learners to become creators and express themselves through visual arts on a very sensitive topic referred to refugeeness and refugee border crossing experience to reach Europe. The emphasis on refugee border crossing was due to the increased visibility of refugees in Greece after their massive influx in 2015 and children’s exposure to images of the boat people reaching the Greek shores. The topic of this competition was aligned to the Greek kindergarten curriculum and, in particular, the thematic area Child and Environment. The expected learning outcomes were for children to develop self and global awareness, illustrate refugee reality through their own eyes, assume civil responsibility, and act. In this context, teachers differentiated their curriculum planning and adapted instruction based on validating students’ different knowledge, ideas, feelings, and experiences on refugeeness, as well as students’ learning abilities, interests, curiosity, different learning abilities, and styles. Differentiated curriculum design occurred through modifying content, process, and product. The intervention lasted up to 1 week during April–May 2017, and it was adapted in different phases according to school routines. Differentiated curriculum planning and implementation combined collaborative knowledge production at school and an authentic final visual output (a public visual arts exhibition). A frequent pattern of instruction included the screening of the video Malak and the Boat followed by reflective discussion and other activities such as whole-class instruction, observation, rigorous dialogues, group, pair, or individual drawings. Teachers made informed adaptations according to children’s responses to include other relevant materials such as videos, visual arts, fairy tales, artwork, pictures, (Google Earth) maps, newspaper articles, and websites.

88

E. Arvanitis

More specifically, multimodal and diverse content materials included the video concerning a young refugee girl, Malak, crossing the sea to unknown destinations. Another reading material was the fairy tale “The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq” which focused on Iraq to showcase elements of a different culture, and that war had driven many refugees to leave their countries. The story deals with the adventures of Alia, the librarian of Basra, in her attempt to save as many books as possible from the library, before they are set on fire due to war in the country (Afternoon School 34). Another UNHCR film used was the “Irene – The Story of a Refugee Child,” where a little girl is forced to leave her home due to the war in her country. Initially, she experiences rejection, but then she finds the love and acceptance she seeks in Mr. Kalokardos’s house (Afternoon School 34, Morning School 34, School 40, School 42). “The Book of Peace” (by Todd Parr) was also used where the main concept of peace and its positive prospects are discussed (School 40). The UNICEF story “Mission for Peace” was an addition to class discussions which described the journey of two children from Syria to the island of Rhodes (Andravida School). Other materials included visual arts. For example, the painting “in TRANSIT” by Irini Neophytou was presented to children to address the issue of refugees in the Greek islands (London Greek School). Guernica by Picasso, depicting the tragic event of the city bombing, and similar photos by Dora Maar were also used (School 42). Finally, Valery Sharifulin’s article from the Guardian’s website entitled “Daily Life in Syria’s Largest City – In Pictures” became the focus of class deliberations together with an interactive website titled “Refugee Republic” (Mikro Gyri School). The latter depicts ordinary life conditions in a refugee camp in Iraq. Overall, the materials were taught in different manners, although this variation in content was aligned to curriculum standards allowing children to fully grasp all main concepts set by curriculum goals. Finally, teachers encouraged children to depict the main points of their learning about refugees and their migratory journey and produce visual artworks (drawings, sketches, cartoons, collages, posters). Based on their drawings, reflexive dialogues took place so that children explain the way they painted, the messages they wanted to convey, and their feelings. These responses were recorded in teachers’ reflective diaries that accompanied children’s drawings. Children created works individually or in groups, which then were presented in an arts exhibition in Patras, Greece, in June 2017. A qualitative research approach was adopted as teachers’ intervention was “a situated activity that locates the observer in the world” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017: 10). The topic of investigation was explored through the eyes of children, their meaning-making processes, and their drawings. More specifically, the research approach had a participatory visual orientation (Brown et al., 2020) moving away from a prescriptive, “top down,” model of research. During the intervention, teachers acted as facilitators following a bottom-up approach. They included children in the decision-making process and became co-inquirers in addressing debated issues. Different voices and perspectives became focal points of learning proving that there is no objective or absolute truth about global issues (Nykiforuk et al., 2011; Wee & Anthamatten, 2014).

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

89

On the other hand, visual methods aid participation because they are more accessible to children keeping them stimulated and engaged in the research allowing novelty and freedom of expression (Brown et al., 2020). In this study, participatory visual approach allowed children to activate their agency, give meaning, and negotiate complex topics attached to real-world situations. This was a highly empowering and emancipatory act as young learners talked about war effects and forced migration, whereas they had the opportunity to think for/about refugees in a novel and transformative way. Children’s drawings were both narrative and conceptual representations revealing social constructs on refugeeness. In addition, they were “semiotic landscapes” that depicted diverse experiences and children’s emotional world (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Visual artifacts empowered children’s creative expression providing an insight on their personalized perspectives, knowledge, and feelings. This creative and multimodal approach challenged social injustices giving voice to young participants, by raising their consciousness. Critical consciousness was enhanced as children constantly reflected on their drawings, as well as their meaning-making, decision-making, and action-taking procedures. Children’s drawing analysis focused on the placement of objects and people in the drawings, recurring themes, symbolisms, prevailing perceptions, the use of colors, and speech bubbles and narrative comments (Jabbar & Betawi, 2019). Children’s emotions were determined through color analysis. Black and red colors indicated depression, anger, or feeling hopeless. “[B]lue and green colors indicate calmness, yellows and oranges indicate cheerfulness and too light and faint colors indicate that the child is trying to hide his/her real experiences and emotions” (Jabbar & Betawi, 2019: 9). Finally, working with children was a challenge as it demands both respect of their rights and personality and adherence to ethical protocols (Block et al., 2012: 7). Thus, the necessary written consents from parents/guardians and teachers were obtained to allow data collection and dissemination. Children in this study were aware of their participation and acknowledged the value of their work for themselves, “others,” and their community.

Crossing Borders: A Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum Approach The curriculum intervention in the seven Greek kindergartens focused on core concepts of forced human mobility and refugeeness. Teachers differentiated their planning according to students’ prior learning and experiences on the mater. In some schools, children had already worked on broad concepts of difference, diversity, and migration. (e.g., Andravida School, London Greek School). Other main concepts that emerged were foreigners/“xenoi”/“others,” war, peace, solidarity, acceptance of difference, and refugee integration. The term “refugee” became a focal point of discussion in some schools. Students in the School 42 seemed to have no knowledge of the term, so teachers explained it to them in simple words and after using many different pictures with refugees on boats. Then, children repeated the word and spelled it by clapping in each syllable.

90

E. Arvanitis

Fig. 1 Students brainstorm in defining “refugee.” (© Courtesy of Mikro Gyri School)

Children in the Mikro Gyri School were able to brainstorm on the concept of “refugee” (Fig. 1). Students’ responses recalled phrases and words from their own lifeworld experiences to explain what refugee means. In their words, refugees are people and children without water, food, and toys and without parents, and they are alone. “Their cloths are brown like their skin or maybe be white,” said one student. Teachers had to frequently give feedback and answer on matters that required further analysis. For example, teachers had to redefine the concept of refugees as students thought that “a refugee is one who has no parents, no food and no home.” New concepts arise then such as, forced uprooting, seeking for asylum and refugee integration. Discussing war helped children to understand why people forcibly leave their country. Finally, the paintings by Irini Neophytou entitled “in TRANSIT” also helped London Greek school students to define the concept of “Immigration” – “Refugee.”

The Story of Malak: Depicting Forced Uprooting Through Children’s Eyes The story of Malak made an impression to all children. Her sea crossing in unknown territories was re-enacted to capture Malak’s emotions (e.g., fear, loneliness, sadness, insecurity), reasons for leaving her home, conditions of traveling (in the dark), and her destination. The Greek London School students described in detail Malak’s emotions. They said she should be “unhappy,” “lonely,” “thirsty,” “uncomfortable,” “frustrated,” “distressed,” “tired,” “hungry,” “scared,” and “cold.” In children’s responses, imagination was mixed with real circumstances. For example, students in the School 42 said that the storm drowned everyone except the little girl who was left alone without her parents and cried. Students in the Afternoon School 34 initially focused on the giant waves hitting the boat thinking that monstrous octopuses appeared during the storm kidnapping Malak’s

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

91

co-travelers. “Sometimes giant octopuses come and take your friends, your mom and dad, only Malak is left,” said a little boy. Similarly, children in the School 42 perceived the big waves as octopuses, while others said they were snakes. Most children persisted that it was an octopus saying that they saw “its eyes, its tentacles.” “The sea has no eyes,” concluded. Students in the Morning School 34 understood that the forced travel of Malak was an extreme and scary situation that went far beyond of what was expected for a child on a trip. The icon of a child traveling unaccompanied seemed awkward and unsafe. After intense discussions, students realized that Malak was left alone due to rough sea conditions. A toddler in the School 42 said, “I think it was the waves.” A little girl from the Afternoon School 34 also suggested that “[M]aybe due to the storm the boat turned upside down and everyone had fallen in the see and only Malak was saved.” Teacher had to intervene to say that Malak was so scared so in her eyes, waves looked like a huge sea monster or octopus that took her friends and relatives and left her on her own. Similarly, students in the Morning School 34 were able to conclude that the loss of the mother or other family members and friends was linked to massive waves and the storm hitting the boat. The passage to freedom had its tolls as many people were killed. At the end, children concluded that boat travelers left their country to be saved due to war and bombing and because they were poor. The older students in the Morning School 34 realized that Malak was traveling at night because she was hiding to avoid death. The children were greatly impressed by the dark figures that framed Malak on the boat, for which they gave various explanations, such as that they are ghosts of loved ones, monsters, octopuses, etc. Students in the School 40 discussed refugee journey in detail. They felt that refugee children have no house, toys, food, or water and that the parents must be drowned by the waves leaving them alone in the boat. Andavida school students kept asking why there was a war in Syria. They watched other videos and photos with children and adult refugees arriving in Greece by boats. All children said that it is unfair to have war where children and mothers are killed. Overall, children were moved seeing little Malak alone in the boat feeling sad because she lost her family and friends. Moreover, as one student from the Andravida School said, “it is ugly for children to be left alone without their mom.” Teaching approach at Mikro Gyri was somehow different. Students were asked to whisper to their teacher’s ear what favorite object or person they would have taken with them on a long trip. Children said they would have taken “my Playmobile castle,” “my teddy bear,” “my little car,” “my mom,” “my dog (pet),” etc. All responses were recorded on a large piece of white paper hanged on the board. Then, students watched the video “Malak and the Boat” commenting on her adventure. Google Earth came up in the interactive whiteboard. Children browsed first their kindergarten and Greece and then Syria and neighboring countries. They “landed” in a part of Damascus and commented on people and the architecture of the area. Children also spotted young women with headscarves in the courtyard of a mosque saying they are, in fact, Greek grandmothers. This observation prompted further discussion on different religions and clothing. Then, one by one, they drew with their fingers the route they believed Malak followed. After this, they sat in a

92

E. Arvanitis

group and closed their eyes. They tried to imagine what items they would have taken with them if they had to leave their homes suddenly comparing them with the list they made before. Few changed their response after the video discussion. For this reason, the teacher delved deeper by asking them “Imagine you are in a boat in the middle of the sea, and you are cold. What would you need? Could you go on a big trip without your parents? Why?” On the same note, teachers in the London Greek School used maps to locate Syria-Greece-England and encouraged students to spot their different flags and languages. They used a musical instrument to express feelings. The positive and happy ones were dressed in a loud sound/beat and the negative/sad ones with a slow sound/beat. The Andavida School students also read the UNICEF story “Mission for Peace” which described the journey of two children from Syria to the island of Rhodes. Then, they found Syria and Greece on the world map and draw the usual migratory routes to Europe. Malak and her story sparked intense interest, so the School 40 teacher searched the Internet with children to find real images depicting refugees fleeing their country. These pictures vividly illustrated the difficulties refugees encountered along the way, the flee for salvation in sea, and their arrival at reception centers. Children discussed in detail their feelings about the refugee situation, and the teacher provided them with further information. Teacher in the Morning School 34 went further to elicit children’s responses. She added on the board pictures with sad angels, Malak on the boat, and pictures with refugee rescue and wrote the phrase “When Angels cry it is that children will not play today.” Cards with words of this phrase were also used so that the children could compose it on their own and read it. Finally, Mikro Gyri students explored the interactive Refugee Republic website which depicted a refugee camp in Iraq. They followed the route “Every day in the Camp” and envisaged in an interactive way the real-life context of refugees in camps. Students discussed the conditions at the camp, why it was built, how people re-enact their daily routines in their new home, schooling conditions, etc. While touring the camp in Iraq, children seemed to understand the connection between Malak’s story and images projected on the website. Discussing War and Peace Harsh conditions that forced people to leave their homes led students to seek the causes of this flee. The fairy tale “The Librarian of Basra” has proven a useful devise to discuss war and its consequences in three schools. Children through this fairy tale envisage life circumstances in war-torn countries, such as Iraq and Syria (Malak’s country). Children in the Morning School 34 described war as “being something bad” that “people in war die, are afraid and cry.” They said that children do not go to school during war, do not play, have no food, and are poor. War resulted to an unpleasant feelings to people and had stolen the smiles from children and their parents deprived them their freedom. Children empathized feeling the pain of these people and realized the need to flee to peaceful places. A student from the Afternoon School 34 said, “In the war schools are destroyed and soldiers are in the playgrounds.” “The solution is to travel to another country and leave their homes,” said some other classmates. Children’s effortless conclusion was that we must help the

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

93

people whose country is at war, to give them food and help. Caring for refugees was important. “We must love the refugees, respect them and welcome them with love. We must take care of them and not burden them,” a little girl in the Afternoon School 34 said. Another girl from the School 42 thought that “someone could go by speedboat to pick up the refugees and save them since the speedboat is fast.” Instruction in the Mikro Gyri school took a different twist when students sat as a whole group and observed in the interactive whiteboard Valery Sharifulin’s article on the Guardian website entitled “Daily Life in Syria’s Largest City – In Pictures.” Students discussed these images and reflected on the real-life circumstances in Syria comparing them with Greece. In these pictures, children noticed evidence of disasters and war in the city, but also elements familiar to them, such as a hairdresser or a butcher. In the photo with the gun and the musical instruments, children answered that “musical instruments are for rejoicing and dancing, while the gun is for killing.” The School 42 students discussed war through reflecting on the famous painting Guernica by Picasso. They observed the figures chosen by the painter. They saw people who looked sad, angry, and scared. They also reported that some were killed, some were crying and in pain while, others were running. They commented that people, even children, could die in a bombing. Continuing their observation, they noticed a mother with her child in her arms crying, a frightened horse, a bull, and a beheaded man whose, as they characteristically described, “head was elsewhere and his body elsewhere.” Finally, all children agreed that the whole painting is only black, gray, and white, which proves, “that war is not good.” The kindergarten teacher helped children to observe the “light” in the painting as well as a flower, symbolizing hope. Continuing their deliberations, the School 42 children discussed “what should those who survived in the city of Guernica must do?” The children began to give answers such as “to take others who are not well to the hospital” and “to hide in their homes.” However, they found themselves at a dead end because hospitals and houses might have been destroyed. The kindergarten teacher raised the question of “how they could live from now on. What if the bombing continued?” Children thought for a while, concluded that the only solution is to leave, to go to another country. “Maybe in France or Greece to make a nest and a house, to hide so that bad people will not find them.” The kindergarten teacher asked children where these people would live if they did not have their own house. Children with all their moral integrity answered, “to rent a house and if they do not have money, we will give them a house or money. We are super rich; we can help them, and it does not matter if we just stay rich. Give them bricks and cement to build their own house. We can lend them our bed and accommodate them. We can give them a gift. Give them food. To play with them, so that they do not play alone. To give our toys and go for walks together.” They concluded “[T]here are many of us here and we can help them.” After discussing war, teachers in three schools (Afternoon and Morning schools 34 and School 40) responded to children’s need to focus on peace as an antidote to ease people’s pain. Children in the Afternoon School 34 watched the film “Irene – The story of a refugee child.” In the following discussion, children revealed warm feelings about the heroine Irene and her attempt to find a new peaceful home.

94

E. Arvanitis

Students in the School 42 were asked to choose which hero they would identify with. Half of them mentioned “Irene,” and the rest mentioned “Mr. Kalokardos” because, as they explained, he was the one who helped “Irene” to finally find a house. It is noteworthy that after watching the video, a little girl wondered “why am I crying” to receive an answer from a little boy “because you were moved.” All children had mixed feelings. They felt sad because Irene and other refugee children had to leave their homes in such terrible conditions but also felt happy because refugee children would be safe in a new home. Teacher in School 40 had to elaborate further on peace as children become particularly interested and asked for more information. Thus, a storytelling activity based on “The Book of Peace” (by Todd Parr) sparked reflections on the concept of peace and its advances. Taking Responsive Action All children demonstrated ethical entrepreneurialism and intercultural growth mindset. With selflessness and sensitivity, they attempted to diminish injustices. They were adamant that all children must go to school and that all refugees must have a school. Feelings of love, solidarity, and hospitality were also voiced as students would have welcomed all refugees in their country and in their school. All children agreed that they would be very happy to host them and that they would play with them to make them feel comfortable and safe. One child from the School 42 said that “we have a small house ready for the refugees to stay,” showing the kindergarten house. Some students from the Morning School 34 said they would have taken Irene to play at home or they would go with their moms to buy her a gift or would tell her to become friends and paint together. Other students in the School 40 were also eager to help by saying “[W]e can give them food and toys” or “give them love.” Others, in the Morning School 34, would have taken action to give them food, a house, clothes, a bed, and toys. Similarly, students at the Mikro Gyri School said that if refugee children came to their school and they “would tell them to stay here forever” or “would play with them.” The Andravida School children showed great interest because there is a reception center for Syrian refugees near their school. Children decided to visit the camp with their parents and share their own toys as well as clothes and shoes. They all said that they want to become friends with the children from Syria and teach them to speak Greek. “They are children like us,” said a little girl. The kindergarten teacher in the School 42 sparked more reflection on refugee integration. She asked what the children would do if “those who came did not look like us and have different color.” Children hesitated at the beginning. In fact, one remembered that they had told him that we do not speak to strangers. Another expressed the hope that perhaps they are a little black from the war. But then, without teacher intervention, all children agreed that “it does not matter because these unfortunate people will not have a home and will be alone, and even if they did not speak Greek, we would help them.” Facilitating refugee integration focused on effective communication. The Mikro Gyri students imagined they had two friends, Jido from Ghana and Amar from Syria who brought with them two games “Meong” and “Tokiya.” Students had to facilitate

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

95

communication with foreign friends by using appropriate words in English and Arabic. Children learned various words and pronounced them during the game or sang them softly during breaks. Both games were useful for students to understand that there are non-verbal ways to approach the “other” and to realize the positive side of cultural differences.

Children’s Multimodal Artwork: A Demonstrated Capacity of Intercultural Growth Mindset Collaborative learning created an inclusive environment where all students felt they can contribute so to describe, understand, and analyze refugee real-life circumstances. They felt being part of the learning process by giving their own ideas, experiences, and feelings. In fact, students were able to be critical, empathize, and provide solutions to correct injustices. During the public exhibition, children acted as both creators by explaining their artwork to parents and other visitors and public advocates. Their public narrations, stories, and descriptions aimed to evoke refugee visibility and humanitarian response allowing audience to consider different perspectives. Students of the School 42 with a worried look said that refugee circumstances were very “scary” and that “if they fall into the sea and swim and a big wave comes over them it will cover them and then they will not be able to breathe.” The School 40 children express how they feel about refugee children experience saying “this is very unfair,” “I am very upset that children do not have their mom and dad,” “I want the war to stop,” and “I want to cry.” A child in the Morning School 34 (who his grandfather had recently died) empathized with Malak as she had loss her mother as well. He said that “Malak’s mom was watching her from the sky she went to” wanting to ease the pain for Malak. Interestingly, the Greek London School students recalled their own migration to England describing their emotions when leaving Greece. Students’ replies capture their mixed feelings: Some of them felt sad. “I cried. I still cry when I leave Greece,” or “I felt bad because I left my grandparents,” “I cried because I liked Athens.” Some others said: “I liked it that I was with mom and dad,” or “happy because I would travel to a new country,” or “happy because I had my tablet with me but even without it, I would be happy for the new country,” or “I felt happy and a little sad but also lucky because other children have not traveled to new countries.” Student artworks illustrated effective and reflexive learning. Students also participated in decision-making concerning the way their work could be organized and presented publicly. In the Morning/Afternoon Schools 34, children worked to depict Malak’s adventure. Almost all of them painted a frightened Malak on the boat with her mom’s shadow next to her. Some students focused on war, others focused on Malak’s voyage to the sea, and others depicted Malak in the country of arrival. All three aspects were represented in a joint 3-D model for the final exhibition. Students in the School 40 created a poster to raise awareness on refugees so people can help them. After discussing several titles, they decided their poster should be titled “Do not be afraid, refugees, we will help you.” The main idea was that we all need to embrace and integrate refugees to our society.

96

E. Arvanitis

The London Greek School children through designing 3D group works captured multiple home representations. Syria, Greece, and England were depicted through maps, buildings, houses, and symbols (e.g., Big Ben, flags). Many paper boats signified Malak’s flee from her country. They also captured their own mixed feelings when they left Greece. Living in a multicultural society and having experienced migration on their own made children to associate with refugee children and empathize to a great extent. They felt different even by attending this school or by recognizing their own origin from different Greek cities. Children had their own subjective frames of reference (Mezirow, 2012) and reflected upon them so to understand “others” and act. Migratory birds helped them understand human migration. Children were able to identify their similarities and differences with “others” and respect them. After all, mutual respect is what they demand from their host country (Fig. 2). The London Greek School teacher created a brochure with information about the refugee issue for parents which was discussed in class, and it was included in children’s work. The Mikro Gyri students created a poster for the exhibition. Their drawings pictured Malak on her boat. Most of the drawings used dark colors (blue, brown, red) depicting the agony and fear of little Malak in sea. They also told a story based on their drawings empowered by the discussions, and all visual materials were exposed during the intervention (Fig. 3). The Andravida School students individually drew Malak’s flee. They had discussed and recorded at the back of each drawing what was depicted. One student painted a boat in which Malak and her mother are among the other refugees from Syria (Fig. 4). A huge wave is about to fall on the boat, and everyone is scared because they do not know how to swim. In the sea, there are many refugees drowned colored in black.

Fig. 2 Border crossing in an interconnected world. (© Courtesy of London Greek School)

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

97

Fig. 3 Malak’s flee in the sea. (© Courtesy of Mikro Gyri School)

Fig. 4 Malak and her mother. (© Courtesy of Andravida School)

Two other students chose to paint Malak alone on the boat. She is terrified and sad (Fig. 5). A group work captured collective thinking on the matter as it pictures a full boat with refugees holding hands because as children said, “the waves hit the boat, so refugees had to hold each other not to fall” (Fig. 6).

98

E. Arvanitis

Fig. 5 Malak has been left alone. (© Courtesy of Andravida School)

Fig. 6 Giving hope. (© Courtesy of Andravida School)

On the left, a man falls from the boat and another holds his leg to save him. In the sea, there are drowned people (colored in black) because “they did not know how to swim.” Malak and her mom are also on the boat. Black, blue, and brown colors prevail, whereas sad figures show despair. Despite this, children wrote the word “HOPE” depicting everyone’s desire to find a peaceful home in Greece. Finally, a group collage with three boats and a dark blue painted sea showcases refugees from Syria (Fig. 7). Everyone is crying and scared. Many have been drowned. The sea is painted in dark blue color. Dead people are drawn in black. Everyone is trying to reach Greece and specifically Rhodes. Among them is Malak with her mom. On the top left corner, a child is lying ashore drowned. This element was produced as a reminiscence of Aylan’s death in the Mediterranean Sea, a scene that many children had seen in their televisions.

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

99

Fig. 7 Crossing the Aegean. (© Courtesy of Andravida School)

Finally, the School 42 students made their own “Guernica” to depict war. Heavy bombing and people harmed are depicted (Fig. 8). Children also created a collage using gestures and body language to convey a clear message of help towards refugees (Fig. 9). Each child wrote a message next to each picture saying what short of action they would have taken to assist them such as “I will hide you,” “I will build you a house,” and “I will hold your hand.”

Concluding Remarks Differentiated learning experience and informed decision-making in the seven Greek schools were highly multimodal, transformative, responsive, reflexive, and inclusive leading to novel pathways of meaning-making and experiencing. Educators acted as designers of differentiated learning repertoires so to negotiate complex topics such as refugeeness, war effects, forced human mobility, and refugee integration. To this end, curriculum content/topics and multimodal materials aligned to academic learning as well as learners’ lifeworlds, learning styles, and interests. Participatory visual approach has proven a useful aid in addressing refugee uprooting. Utilizing a public exhibition allowed them to enter in a transformative public dialogue where the “other” can be reconstructed in multiple and non-threatening ways. Educators became co-inquirers, whereas learning was meaningful, situated, and relevant to students’ experiences as well as responsive to real-life conditions.

100

Fig. 8 Student Guernicas. (© Courtesy of School 42)

Fig. 9 Undertaking responsive action. (© Courtesy of School 42)

E. Arvanitis

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

101

Knowledge on the subject matter aligned to social justice orientation and served the purpose of addressing complex global issues. A collaborative, caring, respectful, and challenging learning environment moved away from memorization and overt instruction. Learners became co-creators of learning. They (re)created their own narratives about themselves, “others,” and the society through trust, reflexivity, and collaborative ethos. Continuous motivation and feedback were also important in each phase of the intervention so that students remain interested in the matter. Learning objectives were aligned to national curriculum standards, pointing to high academic expectations for all students. Namely, students acquired sufficient knowledge on the refugee issue as they were exposed to information about the causes of refugeeness, war effects, coexistence of and interrelationship with others, cultural and language differences in war-torn countries, multiple social/cultural inequalities, marginalized others, and growing interconnection between different countries. In addition, students demonstrated critical ability to tackle complex concepts and global issues and multimodal, collaborative, and reflexive skills. Finally, students developed empathy for refugee children who come to Greece from war-torn countries. Socializing with refugees became important element as in modern societies the mixing with “others” is constantly present. Students developed positive emotions and tried to find solutions to enhance refugee integration. Their genuine desire to solve complex global problems and diminish social injustices was vividly expressed through the visual arts exhibition and their public narration and advocacy. Young students in this study proved that when operated in an inclusive, transformative, and reflexive learning environment, they can assume agency and become versatile creators and responsible citizens. The demonstration of ethical entrepreneurialism and global citizenship skills was only possible through a highly differentiated curriculum that embraced diversity and intercultural growth mindset.

References Ainscow, M. (2020). Promoting inclusion and equity in education: Lessons from international experiences. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 6(1), 7–16. https://doi.org/10. 1080/20020317.2020.1729587 Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., Raths, J., & Wittrock, M. C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. Longman. Archer, M. S. (2012). The reflexive imperative in late modernity. Cambridge University Press. Arvanitis, E. (2016). Culturally responsive pedagogy: Modeling teachers’ professional learning to advance plurilingualism. In P. P. Trifonas & T. Aravossitas (Eds.), Handbook of research and practice in heritage language education (pp. 245–262). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-319-44694-3_4 Arvanitis, E. (2018). Preservice teacher education: Towards a transformative and reflexive learning. Global Studies of Childhood, 8(2), 114–130. Banks, J. (2004). Handbook of research on multicultural education. Macmillan. Block, K., Warr, D., Gibbs, L., & Riggs, E. (2012). Addressing ethical and methodological challenges in research with refugee-background young people: Reflections from the field. Journal of Refugee Studies, 26(1), 69–87.

102

E. Arvanitis

Bondie, R. S., Dahnke, C., & Zusho, A. (2019). How does changing “one-size-fits-all” to differentiated instruction affect teaching? Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 336–362. https:// doi.org/10.3102/0091732X18821130 Brown, A., McIsaac, J.-L. D., Reddington, S., Hill, T., Brigham, S., Spencer, R., & Mandrona, A. (2020). Newcomer families’ experiences with programs and services to support early childhood development in Canada: A scoping review. Journal of Childhood, Education & Society, 1(2), 182–215. https://doi.org/10.37291/2717638X.20201249 Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2015). The things you do to know: An introduction the pedagogy of multiliteracies. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Learning by design (pp. 1–36). Palgrave Macmillan. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2017). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5th ed.). SAGE. Dweck, C. S. (2012). Mindsets and human nature: Promoting change in the middle east, the schoolyard, the racial divide, and willpower. The American Psychologist, 67(8), 614–622. Finlay, L. (2008). Reflecting on “reflective practice”. A discussion paper prepared for practicebased professional learning centre. The Open University. http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/ opencetl/file/ecms/web-content/Finlay-(2008)-Reflecting-on-reflective-practice-PBPLpaper-52.pdf Fullan, M., & Scott, G. (2014). New pedagogies for deep learning. Whitepaper: Education PLUS. Collaborative Impact SPC. http://www.michaelfullan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Educa tion-Plus-A-Whitepaper-July-2014-1.pdf Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Gay, G. (2013). Teaching to and through cultural diversity. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(1), 48–70. Getha-Eby, T. J., Beery, T., Xu, Y., & O’Brien, B. A. (2014). Meaningful learning: Theoretical support for concept-based teaching. Journal of Nursing Education, 53(9), 494–500. https://doi. org/10.3928/01484834-20140820-04 Gibbons, P. (2008). “It was taught good and I learned a lot”: Intellectual practices and ESL learners in the middle years. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 31(2), 155–173. http://www. collaborativelearning.org/gibbons2008.pdf Habermas, J. (1987). Lifeworld and system. A critique of functionalist reason. The theory of communicative action (Vol. 2). Beacon Press. Holden, L. R., LaMar, M., & Bauer, M. (2021). Evidence for a cultural mindset: Combining process data, theory, and simulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 596246. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2021.596246 Huebner, T. (2010). What research says about differentiated instruction. Educational Leadership, 2, 79–81. Jabbar, S., & Betawi, A. (2019). Children express war and peace themes in the drawings of Iraqi refugee children in Jordan. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 24(1), 1–18. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2018.1455058 Joseph, A. (2014). Reflexive pedagogy: Towards crafting discourses of professional knowledge, practice and engagement for social justice. In: 5th CESI conference, Delhi, India, 16–18 November. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflexive-pedagogy-discourses-profes sional-knowledge-practice-joseph Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). New learning: Elements of a science of education (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139248532 Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2016). Learner differences in theory and practice. Open Review of Educational Research, 3(1), 85–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2016.1164616 Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., & Arvanitis, E. (2010). Towards a teaching ecology for diversity, belonging and transformation. In P. Mata (Ed.), Intercultural education as a project for social transformation. Linking theory and practice. Towards equity and social justice. EU Interwork Programme-Commenius. Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images. The grammar of visual design. Routledge.

Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

103

Mezirow, J. (2012). Learning to think like an adult: Core concepts of transformation theory. In E. W. Taylor & P. Cranton (Eds.), The handbook of transformative learning: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 73–95). Jossey-Bass. Morgan, H. (2014). Maximizing student success with differentiated learning. Clearing House, 87(1), 34–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2013.832130 Nykiforuk, C., Vallianatos, H., & Nieuwendyk, L. (2011). Photovoice as a method for revealing community perceptions of the built and social environment. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 10(2), 103–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691101000201 Parsons, S. A., Dodman, S. L., & Burrowbridge, S. C. (2013). Broadening the view of differentiated instruction. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(1), 38–42. Parsons, S. A., Vaughn, M., Scales, R. Q., Gallagher, M. A., Parsons, A. W., Davis, S. G., & Allen, M. (2018). Teachers’ instructional adaptations: A research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 88(2), 205–242. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317743198 Partnership for 21st Century Learning. (2019). 21st century learning for early childhood: Framework. http://static.battelleforkids.org/documents/p21/P21EarlyChildhoodFramework.pdf Perso, T. F. (2012). Cultural responsiveness and school education: Discussion paper. Northern Territory Government. Petty, S. (2010). The new frontier: An integrated framework for equity and transformative improvement in education. California Tomorrow. Richards, H. V., Brown, A. F., & Forde, T. B. (2007). Addressing diversity in schools: Culturally responsive pedagogy. Teaching Exceptional Children, 39(3), 64–68. Rock, M. L., Gregg, M., Ellis, E., & Gable, R. A. (2008). REACH: A framework for differentiating classroom instruction. Preventing School Failure, 52(2), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.3200/PSFL. 52.2.31-47 Smets, W., & Struyven, K. (2020). A teachers’ professional development programme to implement differentiated instruction in secondary education: How far do teachers reach? Cogent Education, 7(1), 1742273. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2020.1742273 Tomlinson, C. A. (2014). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners (2nd ed.). Alexandria. http://www1.kdsi.org/strategicpd/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/DifferentiatedClassroom1.pdf Tomlinson, C. A., & Imbeau, M. B. (2010). Leading and managing a differentiated classroom. VA ASCD. UNESCO. (2016). Education 2030: Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action for the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/ 48223/pf0000245656 van Geel, M., Keuning, T., Frèrejean, J., Dolmans, D., van Merriënboer, J., & Visscher, A. J. (2019). Capturing the complexity of differentiated instruction. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 30(1), 51–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2018.1539013 Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: Τhe development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Vygotsky-Mind-in-Society.pdf Wee, B., & Anthamatten, P. (2014). Using photography to visualize children’s culture of play: A socio-spatial perspective. Geographical Review, 104(1), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1931-0846.2014.12006.x

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults Angela Oulton

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Rousseau to Dewey to Jackman: Learning in the Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning to Be Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning to Be a Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning to Produce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lessons Learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

106 107 109 111 113 116 118 120

Abstract

Throughout history, the school garden has been promoted as a beneficial, nurturing site for children’s learning in, with, and about nature. Benefits to children involved in school garden learning include increased scientific knowledge, healthier eating habits, greater physical fitness, and higher academic scores. However, the school garden has also had many negative consequences for children throughout history. Historically, the school garden has been used to control, contain, correct, and exploit children for the benefit of adults under the guise of nature education. This analysis of historical texts written during 1890s– 1920s at the height of the school garden movement revealed adult agendas to use the school garden as a means of control to save the innocent/evil child; create good, moral, future citizens; and recruit children to become present and future reliable producers of agricultural goods. These adult intentions for school children were masked within the discourses which espoused the mutually beneficial relationship between children and their school garden. The natural and seemingly obvious pairing of children and nature have provided the rationale for adults’ use A. Oulton (*) George Brown College, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_54

105

106

A. Oulton

of the garden to educate and to also create obedient child citizens and laborers to fulfill social and political needs at various points in time. Keywords

School garden · History of school gardens · Discourse analysis · Childhood · Education · Nature · Gardening · Child citizens · Environmental education

Introduction Throughout the last 150 years, school garden activities have been viewed as a positive influence on the healthy development and education of young children. Some of the benefits of children’s engagements with and in a well-planned school garden include healthier eating habits, increased environmental awareness and stewardship, increased physical activity, and decreased aggression (Dyment, 2005). While there are many undeniable advantages to children’s learning in nature, the school garden has also had several negative effects on children. Historically, the school garden has also been used as a means of controlling, containing, or manipulating children (see, for example, Kolstead (2008); Trelstad (1997). What began with romantic narratives of the affinity between nature and children in the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1892) evolved over time to the use of school gardens to shape subjects under adult control. The natural and seemingly obvious pairing of children and nature have provided the rationale for adults’ use of the garden to educate and to also create obedient child citizens and workers. Throughout history, the purpose and function of the school garden has changed in response to the social and political needs and values of society at the time yet remaining consistent is education’s goal of producing ideal (present) children and future adults. This evolution was not spontaneous. A review of the literature on the history of school gardens and children identified several discursive turns or points of departure from one discourse to the next, often driven by events or changes in the social fabric that required a particular type of child at that point in time. The historical discourses on childhood highlight the nature/culture divide that persists in tension in the field of early childhood education. While not negating the biological aspect of childhood as a stage, this chapter aligns itself with the contention by sociology of childhood theorists that childhoods are socially constructed rather than simply a biological condition (James & Prout, 1997). It is important to note that while childhood is seen as being socially constructed, not all childhoods are the same. Children’s life experiences and contexts are varied; therefore, the term childhood cannot be applied or understood as universal across all children and intersections with class, gender, and ethnicity should be taken into account (James & Prout, 1997). The historical texts analyzed in this chapter reveal how adult narratives and interests varied greatly for different groups of children including rural, urban, disabled, gendered, Indigenous, immigrant, and impoverished children. This chapter therefore focuses on the impacts of these discourses on school gardening and children’s lives at specific points in history.

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

107

Related to the view of children and childhoods as socially constructed, the ontological orientation of this analysis aligns with another fundamental principle of the sociology of childhood: children are seen as having rights, and as capable, autonomous, social agents who are actively constructing their childhoods and are valued for who they are in the moment (James & Prout, 1997; United Nations, 1989). In the historical texts analyzed, the treatment of children as almost, or not-yet, adults relegated them to a subordinate category of human, one with no voice or real value, except to be manipulated, dominated, and surveilled by adults who controlled their movements and thoughts to enact their own agendas of creating future compliant adult subjects. This control and discipline of children is consistent with Foucault’s (1977) description of docile bodies where institutions of power like prisons and schools regulate spaces and time to control the way people, in this case children, act and think. As an early childhood educator (ECE) for over 15 years, my education and practice have been shaped largely by the developmental theories which have influenced the field for decades. This universalist approach treats all children as developing through fixed stages and relies on the adult’s surveillance of children to identify emergences and gaps in children’s learning and development. As an academic, I recognize that this is largely a Western approach to education and care that has positioned itself as true and natural to children’s growth. Consistent with reconceptualist approaches taken up in the sociology of childhood, I contend that childhood is socially constructed and that historical discourses of the salience of school garden have had significant and lasting consequences for its children.

Method The discourse regarding school gardens and children has been well documented in both historical and contemporary texts and research. While the school garden movement in Canada was quite prolific historically, the documentation of rationales and programs, as well as published textbooks and pamphlets regarding school gardens are limited when compared to American writing. The Canadian documents researched were instructional, written to guide the educator in how to plan and execute a school garden, whereas American accounts often included insight into how children were regarded by society. As such, this analysis of the subject more broadly draws on American historical accounts and documentation of school gardens. I began my analysis by searching for North American primary sources using the keywords “school garden,” “history,” and “nature study” in educational databases and then expanded my search to Google Scholar. These searches yielded four secondary sources recounting the history of the nature study and school garden movements. A deeper review of these secondary sources and their bibliographies revealed some commonalities among the kind of primary sources the authors used in their studies. The types of primary documents I reviewed included several textbooks written by educators in the 1880s–1920s, government and school pamphlets, and the US and Canadian newspaper articles. Specifically, I reviewed Nature Study for the

108

A. Oulton

Common Schools written by W. B. Jackman (1891) who is widely considered to be one of the founders of the nature study movement, Louise M. Greene’s (1910) Among School Gardens, Kary C. Davis’ (1918) The School and Home Garden, Professor Erasmus Schwab’s (1879) The School Garden. Being a Practical Contribution to the Subject of Education, and Louise Klein Miller’s (1904) Children’s Gardens for School and Home. Additionally, brief pamphlets and manuals written by the United States School Garden Army (USSGA) were analyzed including The Garden Army in 1919, A Manual of School Supervised Home Gardening in the Western States (1919) written by Regional Director C.A. Stebbins for the Bureau of Education, USSGA, and the Bureau of Education’s (1919) Bulletin 26 United States School Garden Army written by Director J.H. Francis. The texts, written at various points in the school garden movement, were chosen for analysis to assess possible consistencies and identify any shifts in the discourses regarding children. Two historical newspaper articles were included that offered additional insight into the societal sentiments of the times. After an initial reading of the texts, I began the process of analysis by first identifying questions to guide my thinking. I thought critically about how children were discursively represented in the texts. How did those discourses correspond with specific events or moments in history? Who was the ideal natural child? What were the consequences of the discourses surrounding children and nature? To identify and analyze these discourses, the writings of Michel Foucault were beneficial to this process. Foucault’s (2002) description of how discursive practices work to not only describe objects, but to also produce and reproduce them was central to this analysis. In a close reading of the historical texts, Foucault’s (1977) explanations of schools as disciplinary powers and governance were quite evident, and themes of adult power enacted through the garden surfaced. Given the emerging themes on how language imposed subjectivities on children, Willig’s (2014) explanation of how text can be approached through discourse analysis was helpful. On discourse analysis, Willig (2014) states, “It is a perspective on language which allows the researcher to produce a particular kind of reading of a text, a reading which foregrounds the constructive and performative properties of language” (p. 4). In the analysis of historical discourses of children and the importance of school gardens, this chapter begins by outlining the history of the innocent child in nature narrative beginning with the writings of Rousseau and traces the evolution of the purpose of the school garden to Dewey’s educational aspirations for children. Here, I follow the shift in discourse to explore how adult power was subsequently employed to control children under the guise of educating children in the garden. Specifically, a close reading of foundational texts written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries highlighted adult ambitions to create/correct ideal or disordered children in the hopes that they would become productive, ideal adults. What began as a child-centered, hands-on approach to education that nurtured the becoming child in the garden evolved over time into using the school garden as a means of adult control to save the innocent/evil child; create good, moral, future citizens; and recruit children to become present and future reliable producers of agricultural goods. These adult intentions for school children were masked within

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

109

the discourses which espoused the mutually beneficial relationship between children and their school garden. It is only when language is examined through a critical lens that we unveil the persistent relations of power between adult as oppressor and child as oppressed.

From Rousseau to Dewey to Jackman: Learning in the Garden The vision of a natural child, one that is closely connected to nature can be attributed to philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. His writings portrayed nature as an inherent part of children and lamented that the cities were unnatural evil places for children: “Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature; but everything degenerates in the hands of man” (Rousseau, 1892, p.1). Rousseau believed that children should be allowed to pursue their interests and inclinations freely in nature and that learning for a child should come from their observations and interactions in nature. They should have as little influence from society as possible to reach their full potential and to prevent moral decline. This is evidenced in Rousseau’s (1892) statement that: Cities are the graves of the human species. After a few generations, races perish or degenerate; they must be renewed, and this regeneration is always supplied by the country. Send your children away, therefore, so that they may renew themselves, so to speak, and regain, amid the fields, the vigor they have lost in the unwholesome air of places too thickly peopled. (p.24).

Rousseau’s construction of the pure and innocent childhood coupled with the perception of a pure and innocent nature still lives on today in contemporary education discourses. The discourse surrounding children and their learning environments has also been informed by John Dewey, a proponent of experiential learning and advocate for gardening as an educational endeavor. As an educator in the University of Chicago’s laboratory school, he observed that schooling in the early twentieth century was structured to transmit information to passive children and in contrast advocated for a restructuring of the physical classroom and approaches to teaching to include handson, garden-based pedagogies. Dewey’s disdain for the traditional approach to education is evident in his lecture to prospective parents in School and Society (1899) where he stated: . . .if we put before the mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly1 desks placed in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just space enough to hold books, pencils and paper, and add a table, some chairs, the bare walls and possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. It is all 1

Words bolded by the author throughout this chapter for emphasis in the analysis.

110

A. Oulton

made “for listening”- for simply studying lessons out of a book is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency of one mind upon another. (p. 48).

Dewey’s choice of terms to portray the classroom and approach to education suggests that this type of learning environment is unappealing to and even unsuitable for children. It highlights the difference between what we understand to be schooling and education. The Online Etymology Dictionary (n.d.-b) historically roots school as a place of instruction; a body of followers; and disciples of a teacher. These definitions indicate the passive act of being told, of following without thought or question, and of being groomed by a teacher. Here we recognize students to be an empty vessel where knowledge is being poured in. This does not require the child’s depth of understanding or participation at all. The act of educating, on the other hand, is described as bringing up, rearing; bringing out or leading forth. Further: educere, of a child, is "usually with reference to bodily nurture or support, while educare refers more frequently to the mind. . .There is no authority for the common statement that the primary sense of education is to 'draw out or unfold the powers of the mind.'” (Century Dictionary, n.d., as cited in Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.-a)

Therefore, we see that schools according to Dewey were simply structures enforcing unquestioned acceptance of facts rather than promoting in-depth, critical understandings of subjects and topics. Dewey’s work was part of a larger nature study movement introduced by his colleague Wilbur Jackman whose Nature Study for the Common Schools (1891) also emphasized the importance of learning in and about nature and advocated for school gardens as a necessary component of children’s science education. Jackman similarly denounced the system of schooling as being detrimental to the young child’s excitement and inherent affinity for learning about nature. According to Jackman (1891), direct experience with nature was the best way for children to learn about science: The life, health, and happiness of the individual is dependent upon his knowledge of the things about him, and upon the understanding that he has of their relations to each other and to himself. This knowledge and apprehension of relations can only be acquired by actual personal contact and experience with the things and forces which make up and govern the universe. (p.1)

Jackman’s use of the words knowledge, understanding, and experience indicate that he too recognized that the purpose of education was to develop children’s minds rather than to simply memorize facts. In his advice to teachers, he states: Turn again to the child in direct contact with nature and look into the character of the knowledge he acquires. If he tells about a flower, it will probably be something of its color; if about a bird, its song or its plumage; if about a pebble, its smoothness or roundness, and so on. The character is unmistakable. It is all breadth and no depth. This interpretation of the action of the child-mind meets with opposition because it seems to encourage superficiality. But the clew thus obtained from the child himself gives unmistakable evidence as to the

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

111

course the teacher should pursue. It is a radical error to attempt to make specialists of the pupils from the beginning. Undue prominence given to any particular branch of science in the common schools will lead to one-sided development, and in the end to superficial work. (Jackman, 1891, p. 10-11)

What is evidenced by both Dewey and Jackman is the utmost importance of the development of the child and the value of experiential learning in the garden as a natural and concrete way for children to learn about the world. Interestingly, we see that this discourse has reemerged in constructivist education in contemporary times based on the work of Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, and others that continues to center on children’s construction of knowledge and meaning making through language, interactions with more knowledgeable adults and peers, and individual actions with and in their environments.

Learning to Be Good While Rousseau’s discourse of the innocent and natural child persisted throughout the following decades, new and markedly different narratives of children emerged throughout the late 1800s to early 1900s. Set within the context of urbanization and immigration and declining rural populations, children were discursively and oppositionally represented as either inherently good or evil. The dichotomous relationship between the urban and rural child was also well documented in the historical literature. The school garden and its established reputation as an educational necessity was touted as being able to ameliorate many of the perceived ills of childhood and guide children to goodness. To understand how different discourses of childhood operated to shape and control children, Chris Jenks’ (2005) description of the Dionysian and Apollonian child is helpful. According to Greek mythology, “Apollo is the Olympian god of the sun and light, music and poetry, healing and plagues, prophecy and knowledge, order and beauty, archery and agriculture” (GreekMythology.com, 2021a). According to Jenks (2005), the Apollonian child had much in common with Rousseau’s natural child: she had an intrinsic goodness, an angelic quality, and an innate capacity for reason. It is interesting to note in the description of Apollo that he was the god of agriculture and knowledge, which is certainly reflected in Rousseau’s conception of the child as closest to nature and learning from and in nature. Jenks (2005) also notes that many of our contemporary child-centered learning frameworks are based on such views of children as individuals with unique strengths that adults should nurture. This conception of children as good and pure, and in need of adult nurturing of their natural interests is evident in the previously noted writings of Dewey and Jackman. It is clear that the interests of the child were considered central to their education and the role of the adult and consequently, the school garden was to nurture their innocence, curiosity, and love of learning about the world.

112

A. Oulton

The Dionysian child, on the other hand, was derived from biblical conceptions of human sin where children were easily corrupted, weak, and needed strict moral guidance so that they were not led astray (Jenks, 2005). “Dionysus was the god of fertility and wine. . . He had a dual nature; on one hand, he brought joy and divine ecstasy; or he would bring brutal and blinding rage, thus reflecting the dual nature of wine” (GreekMythology.com, 2021b). In his conference presentation to the Ontario Education Association, John Hartley (1915) revealed this Dionysian view of children as inherently evil as reported by a journalist covering the conference: “Young children have much in common with savages” said Mr. John Hartley in the training department. “They are greedy, self-centered, unfeeling, and give way to fits of passion. As with savages, lying seems to be instinctive and almost universal among children. The foundations for the falsehoods of children are the reality of their fancies, their passion for playing a part, the desire to astonish, and their anxiety to please. The teacher should remove all temptations to untruthfulness.” (“Professor Tells of German Gifts to School World”, 1915).

It is interesting to note the correlation between Hartley’s description of children as savages, and having fits of passion, with the qualities of mythological Dionysus, like brutal, blinding rage, and ecstasy. Hartley also alludes to the duality of children much like Dionysus in that he states children are eager to please and want to amaze adults. Hartley’s characterization of children highlights how discursive practices shaped what was “known” about children. It also reveals how subjectivities were constituted in discourses surrounding Indigenous peoples. Historical discourses of Indigenous peoples and the education of Indigenous children is a topic in its own right and is beyond the scope of this chapter. We also see the presumption of children’s latent evilness in Greene’s (1910) portrayal of schools as sites of salvation and morality in her book for novice teachers: Strive for a clean schoolyard as you would for a clean classroom but do not stop there. Beauty has its moral effect on a child. It is useless to expect untarnished morality from children whose parents provide ramshackle outbuildings and schools uninteresting and repellent outside and in, where no playgrounds exist and where no provision is made to keep investigating minds safely busy when not occupied with lessons. (pp. 68–69).

In this excerpt, Greene (1910) portrays pristine schoolyards and nature’s aesthetic as a means of ameliorating the effects of children’s poor living conditions. We see here that Greene is also laying the blame for sinful children on the bad parenting of impoverished families who live in poorly kept houses in the city. The school garden, to Greene, was not as important for educating children, but rather could serve as a context within which to correct and contain city children, keeping them safe and busy so that they did not fall into bad habits. This is also evidenced when Greene (1910) writes:

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

113

Perhaps best of all is that teaching of the saner and sweeter side of life which comes when the school garden takes the child off the city streets, away from crowded alleys, vicious surroundings, and, in the country, often from misspent leisure; where it finds happy work for idle hands, health for enfeebled bodies, and training for the will and affections. (p. 37)

The preoccupation with keeping children off the unhealthy city streets and occupied in the wholesome work of the gardens is evidenced in the narratives regarding the urban child versus the rural child. In the quote above, Greene draws the distinction between the city child and the rural one. In their book, Kary Davis (1918) similarly thought that the school garden could save city children from the streets, whereas the school garden for country children could teach them to appreciate and be proud of being a future farmer. According to Davis (1918): the effect of the school garden, when offered to children of a city, is to take them off the streets, away from bad surroundings, and give them a most wholesome environment. The effect of the garden in the country is to fill the mind of the child with thoughts which are elevating and not degrading. Idle hands and leisure hours are as bad for country children as for others. The wholesome refinement of the garden fills the place of vulgar twaddle. Country children learn to love their future life occupation. They find it has a scientific foundation. The dullest or most backward pupils become aroused and interested when given work in the garden and other school work based on what has taken place in the garden is done with renewed interest. (p. 4)

It is evident that both Greene and Davis thought idleness was unacceptable for any child and that children needed to be occupied at all times. When we examine Greene’s and Davis’ conceptions of children, we can locate the Dionysian child in the city and the Apollonian child in the country.

Learning to Be a Citizen While the nature-study movement is most recognized for advocating for students’ hands-on learning opportunities in nature and science, it initially was intended to be used in rural schools to keep their children from migrating to the cities. The nature study movement was in part related to the country life movement, one that espoused the values of living in the pure country and laboring on the farms. By the 1920s, the country life movement had lost momentum and children’s attendance in rural schools had significantly declined (Trelstad, 1997). Several reasons have been cited as possibilities for this, including that rural children did not see the value of formal education that was unrelated to their daily experiences and, as such, were uninterested in the subject matter (Miller, 1904). Miller (1904) also attributed the declining attendance to families leaving farm life for work in the cities. The migration of rural families to the cities coincided with the overwhelming influx of immigrants to the United States. The Library of Congress (n.d.) estimated that more than 15 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1915 and most of them settled in cities like New York. Health and sanitation were

114

A. Oulton

great concerns at the time as overcrowding caused many unsanitary living conditions and disease in the city (Library of Congress, n.d.). As cities grew and condensed, the initial preoccupation for the ideal rural life gave way to concern for children living in cities who had limited or no access to nature (Trelstad, 1997). The school garden was once again called upon to offset the poor social and health conditions of the city through its engagement of children. The founder of New York City’s first children’s school garden, Fannie Griscom Parsons, was particularly concerned with improving the health of urban children of immigrant and poor parents. In Parsons’ Children’s Farm Garden, children conducted experiments with beet plants, depriving them of light and water to show the effects of cramped living in apartments with little fresh air and sunlight. The children also planted beets in a stovepipe to mimic the bottom of a tenement airshaft to see what “darkness and lack of oxygen afford to tuberculosis and other germs . . . a fine breeding place” (Parsons, 1907, as cited in Warsh, 2011, p. 81). Parsons’ goal was to show children how gardening could help them overcome their own unhealthy city living conditions. While the health of children was a concern of many progressive theorists and educators who had the best interests of children as their stated goals for reform, others had economic and civic motivations for keeping children healthy. Due to the unhealthy living conditions of the poor, many of whom were also immigrants, much of the rhetoric in overcrowded cities was that work in the school gardens would serve to keep children’s bodies strong, give them fresh air and light, provide them with good food, clean up unsanitary surroundings, and beautify schoolyards. We begin to see how the discourse related to children’s health in the school garden started to take a more civic turn and evolved into discourses around tidying and beautifying the city as part of being a good citizen. Building on the success of the school gardens for nature-based study, local civic associations began to take an interest in the school garden as a means of engaging citizens in their communities. Seed packets were sold for planting in private homes, and competitions were initiated for the best children’s gardens (Miller, 1904). As a result, the school gardens extended beyond the school grounds and began to grow in vacant lots, backyards, and apartment window boxes. Children’s labor in school garden work was seen as a way to build community among both children and adults. The goal was to encourage private care for public property: School gardening often changes the attitude of children toward the school building and its surroundings. Desolate places are made beautiful. Defiled buildings are cleaned and easily kept clean. Littered grounds are cleaned up and kept in order. Work of this character arouses a community spirit. A true feeling of public interest and care of public property is engendered. The improvement of the school surroundings through gardening work soon reacts upon the homes of the pupils. They are made more beautiful and attractive. In home yards neatness often takes the place of squalor (Davis, 1918, p. 5).

Of the beautifying efforts of the American Civic Association and others, Louise Klein Miller, prominent author of Children’s Gardens for School and Home: A Manual of Cooperative Gardening (1904) wrote, “These societies have done much

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

115

valuable service in the way of organization and education. There is no better place to begin than in the public schools, the most effective means of reaching the parents being through the children” (p. 48–49). In these two statements, the vision for the school garden is focused on changing current parental behavior and engagement through the work of their children. This differs from the views of many other proponents of the school garden that aimed to change children’s actions and enlist their natural affections for the gardens to instill future citizenship sentiments. According to Schwab (1879): Great and difficult in our day is the task of the public school. The requisition is to educate well-instructed, thinking men; minds prepared for the exigencies of life; self-governing men, possessing sentiments of duty and honor, love of their fellow-men, and the power of self sacrifice —in short, characters useful to the community (p.18).

Fannie Griscom Parsons (1903) had similar motivations to Schwab’s a few decades later when she said, I did not start a garden simply to grow a few vegetables and flowers. The garden was used as a means to show how willing and anxious children are to work, and to teach them in their work some necessary civic virtues; private care of public property, economy, honesty, application, concentration, self government, civic pride, justice, the dignity of labor, and the love of nature by opening to their minds the little we know of her mysteries, more wonderful than any fairy tale. (as cited in Greene, 1910, p. 4)

It is interesting to note that both Schwab and Parsons include self-government as a characteristic of citizenship. Foucault’s concept of governmentality is evident here in that the purpose of the school garden is to recruit citizen-children to govern their own conduct. The disciplinary power of schools acts to shape character, training, and self-control so that there is no need for external intervention (Oxford Reference, n. d.). World War I was a turning point in the discourse regarding children’s citizenship. Being a good citizen evolved into being a good patriot. The growing demand for food to furnish the war effort resulted in the enactment of patriotic propaganda targeted at children. Until the war, the creation and use of the school garden in its many forms was performed mainly at the local and state levels. Recognizing an opportunity to reach all children through their schools, the Federal Bureau of Education together with the Department of the Interior created the United States School Garden Army (USSGA) to enlist the help of the children in The School Garden Campaign across the country. Cyril Stebbins (1919) in his USSGA Manual suggested that teachers organize students into companies and encourage them to “enlist.” Students were given insignias as motivation and to instill in them a patriotic sensibility. We see that children were being inculcated into the militaristic sentiments of serving one’s country and helping their fellow soldiers on the front lines. Children’s garden work was elevated in importance and was equated with adult efforts to support the war. In his letter to Secretary of the Interior Francis Lane,

116

A. Oulton

President Woodrow Wilson (1918) presumed the eagerness of children to labor for their country when he wrote: Every boy and girl who really sees what the home garden may mean will, I am sure, enter into the purpose with high spirits, because I am sure they would all like to feel that they are in fact fighting in France by joining the home garden army. They know that America has undertaken to send meat and flour and wheat and other foods for the support of the soldiers who are doing the fighting, for the men and women who are making the munitions, and for the boys and girls of Western Europe, and that we must also feed ourselves while we are carrying on this war. The movement to establish gardens, therefore, and to have the children work in them is just as real and patriotic an effort as the building of ships or the firing of cannon. I hope that this spring every school will have a regiment in the Volunteer War Garden Army. (p. 356).

The slogans and posters that were distributed to schools, teachers, and the public encouraged children’s active participation in the production of food cloaked under the guise of patriotism. It is evident that school-supervised gardening has already become an integral part of the school curriculum in most of the States. The United States School Garden Army is the needed national organization to give the children the patriotic and Americanizing impulse that makes the work, as Secretary Lane has said, one of the most important educational movements of recent times (United States School Garden Army, 1919, p.2).

At this point, we start to see the shift in the discourse once again regarding children’s education in the school garden. This time, discourses of children and the purpose of the school garden move from teaching citizenship and patriotic values to becoming an agricultural laborer and producer.

Learning to Produce While widely espoused as an educational movement, the School Garden Army campaign became more about learning to produce food than learning about and in the natural world. Labor laws enacted by the federal government protected children from working in mines and factories but allowed children to work in school gardens for small portions of the week (MacBrayne, 1918). The urgency to produce based on real and anticipated food shortages is evident in an update bulletin on the USSGA in 1919. According to the government, children were the solution to the problem: The plan consists in enlisting boys and girls between the ages of 9 or 10 and 14 or 15 in systematic garden work for food production on such plats of ground as can be had for this purpose near their homes, on back yards, side yards, and vacant lots and then providing teacher-directors for them at the rate of one teacher-director for each group of from 100 to 150 garden workers. Parents and older brothers and sisters are induced to cooperate with the children whenever this is possible. The work of the children is done after school hours and on Saturdays and vacation days, so that no time is taken from school. (Claxton, 1918, as cited in Francis, 1919, p. 3).

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

117

Work had now spread from the classroom into children’s recess, after school time, and summer vacations. Here is where we once again see the ever-present discourse that the purpose of the school gardens was to keep children from being idle. The expectation that children were to tend to their gardens during their leisure time also indicates that nature study had been devalued and once again excluded from the regular curriculum. The fact that children were expected to use their personal time to perform manual labor highlights what little voice or choice children had. The school garden therefore functioned as a disciplinary power and as a means to an end. In his previously cited letter on children’s anticipated patriotism, President Wilson’s use of the word home related to the location of the educational garden is of significance. This shows a change in the terminology that now placed school gardens in children’s homes and enlisted parents to help when needed. In this context, help can be interpreted as supervising the children’s work; thus, parents became agents in the school’s surveillance of children’s production on behalf of the government. This change in the articulation of home as location for school gardens was also explicitly stated in the United States School Garden Army: A Manual of School Supervised Gardening for the Western States. In it, C.A. Stebbins (1919) clarifies: At first glance the movement seems wrongly named. Strictly speaking this is a school directed home garden movement. The school garden is encouraged as a place where home processes may be demonstrated with greatest educational economy (p.39).

In other words, gardening lessons at school will teach children what they should be doing at home in order to provide food for their country. The involvement of children in war measures turned out to be a lucrative one. According to the United States School Garden Army Bulletin 26, author J. H. Francis (1919) reported that 1.5 million children had enlisted in the School Garden Army and with it a new goal of 5 million serving children was set for the following year. “Under proper supervision this army of boys and girls may easily produce $250,000,000 worth of food, which will reach the consumer in perfect condition without cost for transportation or handling and without loss through deterioration on the markets” (Francis, 1919, p. 3). Francis (1919) further espouses the value and cost savings of children’s labor, “Since the work will be done by children who would otherwise be idle, and on land which would not otherwise used, there will be no cost except for supervision and direction and for tools, seeds, and fertilizers” (p. 3). This means that the government has planned a creative and exploitative way of capitalizing on free land and free labor. In fact, the only paid labor would be to the adult teachers and overseers who would manage production though their home visits. Children were not only seen as the solution to the food shortage but they were also seen as contributing to the problem itself. Idle children needed to earn their keep, and according to C. A. Stebbins (1919), the Regional Director of the Western States, the United States School Garden Army, children were a drain on the public purse:

118

A. Oulton

Six hundred thousand boys and girls in California consume one-seventh of the food supply. They produce but little. Every boy and girl however limited his or her efforts should be a producer . . . Production is the first principle of education (Stebbins, 1919, as cited in Trelstad, 1997, p. 172).

Stebbins’ position is quite apparent, laying the blame for present circumstances on children. This narrative had real consequences for children as he was a prominent voice and representative of the US Bureau of Education as a regional director in the USSGA. His position afforded him the opportunity to shape curriculum related to school gardening as he was a prolific writer for the USSGA manuals that were used by teachers and schools. His comments suggest that children were seen as a distinct subordinate class with no real citizenship or voice whose purpose was to labor in a Marxist class system. Given that a large population of cities at the time were poor and recent immigrants, it is evident that the educational aim of the school garden, particularly in large cities, shifted into making workers out of poor children. Trelstad (1997) similarly concluded that progressive advocates of the school garden were setting children up to work in an industrialist system. The emphasis on teaching children how to be agricultural producers was certainly not what Charles Schwab (1879) had envisioned at the turn of the century for children’s learning with and in the school garden. In his eyes, A proper school garden may, must, and is destined to be the place where children are happiest; it must be the dearest spot in those hours which they do not spend in the school room or occupy at home in work for the school. To be shut out from the instruction and plays of the school garden will necessarily be one of the most painful punishments to the child. (Schwab, 1879, p. 22)

It would be reasonable to assume that while some children were happy to work in the garden and were quite proud of their bounties and fulfillment of their civic and patriotic duty, other children conceivably lost the joy that was so important to Schwab when garden labor and production were made compulsory through schools as institutions of power and control.

Lessons Learned The school garden movement was largely inspired by Rousseau’s romantic conception of good, innocent children in pure, pristine nature. John Dewey lamented on the state of early twentieth century education and schooling and envisioned a different type of education for children. He stated: I may have exaggerated somewhat in order to make plain the typical points of the old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method. It may be summed up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the text-book, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself. . . Now the change which is coming into our education is the shifting of the center of gravity. It is a change, a

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

119

revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the astronomical center shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he is the center about which they are organized. (Dewey, 1899, p. 51)

Dewey imagined a change in education where the child and their interests, motivations, and desires were central to all pedagogical considerations. Unfortunately, for Dewey, this change in education did not last long. By the end of the school garden movement in the 1920s, education had returned full circle to where it began, and to “its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method” (Dewey, 1899, p. 51) at the behest of a government whose aim was to turn children into patriotic producers. From the 1890s to the 1920s, the school garden was used as a locus of control in a variety of movements seeking to shape present children into better future adults. A close reading of foundational texts of the times identifies discourses of children that served as the rationale for adult intervention and control through children’s “natural” affinity with nature. Alongside the changing discourses of the “nature” of children, we see that the discourse regarding the school garden also changed. The school garden itself was socially constructed over time, first as an innocent place welcoming of its loving children, a pedagogical tool, and an object to be examined throughout scientific inquiry. It was later constructed as a holding cell for immoral or city children, a career coach for rural children, and a healer for ill and unhealthy urban children. The school garden and subsequent school-supervised home garden evolved into a city aesthetic, a citizen maker, and ultimately a wartime agricultural machine. In all these iterations, the school garden’s purpose was discursively constructed as existing to serve the interests of adult humans. Thus, the discourses which constructed childhoods consequently constructed the school garden: The school garden will not only take care of the general education of the children; but will do duty on other points, for scientific instruction forms only a part of the instruction of the people. A lively moral feeling and a sound religious direction are impressed by it upon the youth, and thus the public school may turn out a race so virtuous, brave and thrifty through independence, as it would be difficult to produce without the help of so beneficent an aid to progress as a good school garden. (Schwab, 1879, p. 26)

It is important to note that in the discourses highlighted in this analysis relating to children learning to be good, learning to be citizens, and learning to be producers through the school garden, specific groups of children were not represented in the literature. In their research of the school garden history, Trelstad (1997) noted that the role of African-American and Asian-American immigrants were two ethnic groups obscured in the discourses of the school garden. According to Nxumalo and Ross (2019) dominant environmental education discourses frequently portray racialized students as deficit and disconnected from nature. Indigenous children were also not afforded the opportunity to learn about nature or be instructed in the garden like other children. Education for Indigenous children was purely vocational. The purpose of the garden at residential schools was to teach

120

A. Oulton

agriculture to Indigenous students so that they may become self-sufficient crop farmers, to build character, and to produce food for the schoolsgardening (Kohlstedt, 2008). This was very different from the elevated school garden-based learning for children that was espoused by progressive educators of the times. The omission of specific marginalized groups of children in narratives of the school gardens merits further research; however, this is beyond the scope of this chapter’s analysis. It is evident in the research that the school garden as an extension of the school was a means of localizing adult power to shape children into ideal citizens defined by social and political bodies. The school garden in all of its forms served to place children under surveillance, ensure compliance, and inculcate children with a labor ethic to produce and contribute to an increasingly industrial society. In this way, the school garden was an oppressive force which had material effects on the children who tended it. One telling sign of the purpose of such a garden was the garden that was named “The Good Citizen’s Factory,” located in Worcester, Massachusetts (Trelstadt, 1997). This was far from what the early proponents of the school garden movement had envisioned for children. Opportunistic adults exploited the school garden and its growing recognition as a curricular benefit for children’s growth and learning and used it to promote and manipulate discourses of children for their own social and political purposes. The good, evil, urban, rural, immoral, unhealthy, and idle child were all discursively constructed by adults to fulfil particular societal needs and wants at specific points in history. The school garden had ceased to exist as a place where children could be happiest, engaging in and with nature, and became a tool in the regulation of children and in the hopes of creating complacent future adult citizens and laborers.

References Davis, K. C. (1918). School and home gardening; a text book for young people, with plans, suggestions and helps for teachers, club leaders and organizers. J.B. Lippincott Company. https://archive.org/details/CAT10946820/page/n1/mode/2up Dewey, J. (1899). The school and society: Being three lectures. University of Chicago Press. Dyment, J. E. (2005). Gaining ground: The power and potential of school ground greening in the Toronto District school board. Evergreen. https://www.evergreen.ca/tools-publications/gainingground-the-power-and-potential-of-school-ground-greening-in-the-tds/ Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of knowledge. (A. M. Sheridan smith, trans.). Routledge classics. (Original work published 1969). Francis, J. A. (1919). United States school garden Army bulletin, 1919, no.26. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED541192.pdf GreekMythology.com. (2021a, April 07). Apollo. GreekMythology.com Website. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from https://www.greekmythology.com/Olympians/Apollo/apollo.html GreekMythology.com. (2021b, April 07). Dionysus. GreekMythology.com Website. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from https://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Dionysus/dionysus.html Greene, M. E. (1910). Among school gardens. New York Charities Publication Committee. https:// archive.org/details/CAT10946826 Jackman, W. S. (1891). Nature study for the common schools. Henry Holt and Company. https:// archive.org/details/cu31924002952897/mode/2up

School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

121

James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1997). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. Taylor & Francis Group. Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis Group. Kohlstedt, S. G. (2008). “A better crop of boys and girls”: The school gardening movement, 1890-1920. History of Education Quarterly, 48(1), 58–93 https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 20462206 Library of Congress. (n.d.). Immigrants in the progressive era. Immigrants in the Progressive Era | Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1929 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress (loc.gov) MacBrayne, L. E. (1918, November 10). Young gardeners a national asset; Army of 5,000,000 boys expected to raise $50,000,000 vegetables during next summer. The New York Times. Miller, L. K. (1904). Children’s gardens for school and home; A manual of cooperative gardening. D. Appleton and Company. https://archive.org/details/CAT10946837/page/n7/mode/2up Nxumalo, F., & Ross, K. M. (2019). Envisioning black space in environmental education for young children. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(4), 502–524. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324. 2019.1592837 Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.-a). Educate. In Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved July 27, 2021, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/educate Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.-b). School. In Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved July 27, 2021, from https://www.etymonline.com/search?q¼school Oxford Reference. (n.d.). Governmentality. Oxford Reference. Retrieved August 5, 2021, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095901877 Professor tells of German gifts to school world: A feature of O.E.a. Session was prof. MacGillivray’s address. (1915, April 6). Toronto Daily Star. Rousseau, J. (1892). Rousseau’s Émile or treatise on education (H. W. Payne, trans.). D. Appleton and company. (Original work published 1762). Schwab, E. (1879). The school garden. Being a practical contribution to education (M. Mann, trans.). M. L. Holbrook and company. (Original work published 1879) https://hdl.handle.net/ 2027/loc.ark:/13960/t92810c99 Stebbins, C. A. (1919). United States school garden Army, a manual of school supervised gardening for the western states. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Education https:// archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/sgp/westmanual/westmanual.pdf Trelstad, B. (1997). Little machines in their gardens: A history of school gardens in America, 1891 to 1920. Landscape Journal, 16(2), 161–173. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43323438. U.S. Bureau of Education. (1919). The garden army in 1919. https://archive.org/details/ CAT10900560 United Nations Human Rights. (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. https://www.ohchr. org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx Warsh, M. (2011). Cultivating citizens: The Children’s school farm in New York City, 1902–1931. Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 18(1), 64–89. Willig, C. (2014). Discourses and discourse analysis. In U. Flick (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis (pp. 341–353). SAGE Publications). https://doi.org/10.4135/ 9781446282243.n23 Wilson, W. & Lane, F. K. (1918). School garden campaign. The Journal of Education, 87(13), 356. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42829366

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies, Progress, and Future Challenges Leonel Lim and Tang T. Heng

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meritocracy, Equity, and Policy in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies and Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preschool Curricula, Culture, and Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

124 125 127 132 135 135

Abstract

In recent years, societal, academic, and political attention across developed countries has increasingly turned onto the field of early childhood education as a critical leveler of social mobility. That this is the case is not surprising. For decades now, the international research community has unequivocally pointed to the gains – cognitive, social, and developmental – that a quality early childhood education provides for young children, indeed, especially for those from disadvantaged families. This chapter discusses the Singapore state’s policies and curricula in this area and considers the extent to which they provide for a more level playing field. It begins by introducing the societal context of Singapore and how the national ideology of meritocracy establishes sui generis expectations around equity and fairness. This chapter then moves on to outline the state’s key efforts in the area of preschool education, demonstrating how these embody a clear commitment by the state towards helping children from disadvantaged families. Finally, the remainder of the chapter draws upon insights from the sociology of curriculum to consider how existing efforts could go further by having the preschool curriculum take greater account of the needs and experiences of children from disadvantaged families – specifically, by adopting a focus L. Lim (*) · T. T. Heng National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_21

123

124

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

on a set of pre-academic skills and by emphasizing the development of curricula that are more culturally relevant to the home and family backgrounds of these students. Keywords

Meritocracy · Early childhood education · Curriculum · Equity · Singapore

Introduction In recent years, societal, academic, and political attention across developed countries in Asia has turned onto the field of early childhood education as a critical leveler of social mobility. That this is the case is not surprising. For decades now, international research has unequivocally pointed to the gains – cognitive, social, and developmental – that a quality early childhood education provides for young children, indeed, especially for those from socially disadvantaged families (Barnett & Masse, 2007; Duncan et al., 2007; Heckman, 2006). Due in part to the expansion of the middle classes that resulted from a period of “compressed modernization” (Lim & Apple 2016; Lim & Apple, 2020; Chang, 2010) and the attendant promises of the social and material rewards that academic achievement brings, many states in Asia have increasingly sought to improve early childhood education so that less advantaged social groups do not fall further behind (Li et al., 2017), and a politics of discontentment remains contained (Tan, 2008). Singapore provides an illuminating case in point. A tiny city-state founded upon the ideologies of meritocracy and multiculturalism, Singapore has since independence in 1965 grown to become one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Its 2020 GDP per capita when adjusted for purchasing power parity is the second highest in the world (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD? locations¼SG&most_recent_value_desc¼true, accessed 18 November 2021), and Singapore students are ranked at or near the top of a host of international student achievement assessments such as the Programme for International Student Achievement, as well as Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (Deng & Gopinathan, 2016). The national ideology of meritocracy has often been attributed a key role in these achievements (Lim, 2013; Lim 2016a, b). In Singapore, the discourse of meritocracy has traditionally emphasized equal opportunities for all, regardless of one’s social class, gender, or ethnicity, and has played no small part in fostering a highly competitive environment in both schools and workplaces (Lim & Tan 2018; Kang, 2005; Lee, 2000; Tan, 2008). Nonetheless, there have been much public debates around how to narrow social inequality so that these foundational beliefs are not destabilized (Ng, 2018; Yahya, 2018). In recent years, a large part of the government’s response to these concerns has been in the form of developing a more robust preschool education system and making this more accessible to children from disadvantaged families. This paper discusses the Singapore government’s policies and approaches in this area and considers the extent to which they provide for a more

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

125

level playing field. It begins by introducing the societal context of Singapore and how the ideology of meritocracy establishes particular expectations around equity and fairness. The paper then moves on to outline the government’s key policies and approaches in the area of preschool education, demonstrating how these embody a clear commitment by the state towards helping children from disadvantaged families. Finally, the remainder of the paper draws from research in the sociology of curriculum to consider how existing efforts could go further by having the preschool curriculum take greater account of the needs and experiences of children from disadvantaged families – in particular, by adopting a focus on a set of pre-academic skills and by emphasizing the development of curricula that are more culturally relevant to the home and family backgrounds of these students.

Meritocracy, Equity, and Policy in Singapore Originally coined by Michael F. D. Young in his 1958 political satire “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” the term commonly refers to the assumption that “people with the same level of merit – IQ plus effort – should have the same chance of success” (Swift, 2003, p. 24). By thus focusing on “careers open to talents” (Rawls, 1971, p. 65), central to the notion of meritocracy is the rewarding of individual merit with social rank, job positions, higher incomes, general recognition and prestige, and, in the education system, greater educational resources. This ensemble of ideas central to discussions of meritocracy, however, remains open to a number of interpretations and tensions – most notably between those that focus on fairness and those that focus on outcomes (Cavanagh, 2002). For example, approaches that focus on fairness usually couple a merit-based selection with a principle of non-discrimination: individuals should be selected based only on their talents and qualifications for the position and not their race, class, or gender (Satz, 2007). However, as has been multiply demonstrated, these social categories do afford unequal social benefits, both within and outside of schools (Apple, 2014). Ignoring these differences, then, may serve to deny their real influence on candidates’ prospects, perpetuating inequality in opportunities and leading to the privatization of blame among groups traditionally underserved by society. Other approaches that focus on outcomes are less concerned with non-discrimination, less interested in providing everyone with equal rights to resources, and instead more concerned about revealing the right person to manage resources in order to maximize the average level of well-being in a society (Cavanagh, 2002). Here, what matters is for meritocracy to serve as a mechanism for resource allocation, identifying individuals who have the “right” qualities that positions of leadership require. Such understandings of meritocracy often involve motivating individuals to do the best they can because, as the view goes, it is only through a fierce competition for educational resources and later material rewards that human talents may be developed to their fullest potential (Tan, 2008). Given, however, the ways in which the economic and cultural capital of one generation find their way into the educational capital of the next (Bourdieu, 1984; Lareau,

126

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

2003), this focus on outcomes, efficiency, and competition can easily displace the egalitarian aspects of meritocracy discussed earlier. These tensions inherent in the concept of meritocracy are aptly witnessed in Singapore. With a population of 5.69 million, and a resident population comprising 74% ethnic Chinese, 14% ethnic Malays, and 9% ethnic Indians (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2020a, b), meritocracy has been a key principle of governance and educational distribution. This is most visibly embodied in its highly competitive education system culminating in “bonded” government scholarships and where top positions in the civil service administration and political leadership are staffed by individuals with demonstrated track records of merit (Barr & Skrbis, 2008). In Singapore, the state’s discourse and practice of meritocracy has invariably emphasized the principle of non-discrimination (Mauzy & Milne, 2002). Historically, at the time of independence in 1965, this principle was foundational in establishing the “fairness” of Singapore’s sociopolitical system vis-à-vis the affirmative action policies of Malaysia (from which following a brief merger Singapore was bitterly expelled). Meritocracy was thus, from the outset, vital in building national unity and state legitimacy (Moore, 2000). However, as commentators have pointed out, over time a categorical good faith in non-discrimination risks giving meritocracy the veneer of equality while at the same time masking the real advantages and disadvantages across social groups (Kang, 2005; Tan, 2008). Indeed, in a context characterized by high levels of competition and, as we explain later, a highly stratified education system, such a rendering of meritocracy takes little notice of the fact that students in Singapore (as is the case elsewhere) stem from different socioeconomic backgrounds and go to school differently prepared. For example, students at elite schools come from families with double the median monthly household income of those from non-elite schools (Kwek, 2007) and are also more likely to speak English (the medium of instruction in schools) in their homes (see also Vaish et al., 2010). Fifty-three percent of parents from elite secondary schools have at least one graduate parent, compared to just 17% in public schools (Singapore Children’s Society, 2016). Further entangled with the problem of classbased disparities and home language differences is that of ethnic inequalities. From 1966 to 2016, of the 251 winners of Singapore’s most prestigious scholarship, the President’s Scholarship, only 18 (7.2%) were non-Chinese (see also Barr & Skrbis, 2008). Data from the 2020 population census indicate that the Chinese are overrepresented in terms of university graduates, forming 80% of resident university graduates, while constituting 74% of the resident population. Malays are correspondingly under-represented in terms of university graduates (4%), given that they constitute 14% of the resident population (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2020a, b). To be sure, this educational gap is already present at lower levels of schooling; compared with the Express track attended by roughly 65 percent of the secondary school cohort, minority ethnic groups are over-represented in the system’s lower-progress Normal Academic and Normal Technical tracks – the latter being the least prestigious track (Albright et al., 2006; Lim & Tan, 2018; Chiong & Lim, 2020).

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

127

In a bid to help less advantaged students from falling further behind, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has, over the past decade, introduced a number of measures expressly committed to “leveling up” students in both Normal tracks (Ministry of Education, 2010, p. 11). Some of these include offering a greater variety of applied subjects and advanced electives to strengthen the articulation of Normal Academic students to the diploma-conferring polytechnics; allowing promising Normal Academic students to bypass their final year examinations in secondary school and to proceed directly to foundational programs in the polytechnics or advanced courses in vocational training institutes; creating separate, specialized schools for Normal Technical students; and offering more opportunities for lateral transfers within the Normal tracks and between it and the Express track. Most recently, the MOE announced the abolishment of placing students into Normal and Express tracks by 2024 (Davie, 2019). In tandem with the above approaches, and in what appears to be an indirect admission of the inadequacies of meritocracy, the government has begun to provide early support for young children from low-income families through various community, home-based, and preschool channels (Lim, 2019). Major investments have also been made into improving and playing a larger role in the regulation and provision of preschool education (which, as we document below, had been previously left to the private sector) and ensuring that all children – particularly those from vulnerable families – are provided access to high quality preschool education. The next section details a number of key policies and approaches in this direction.

Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies and Approaches In Singapore, preschool education remains predominantly provided for by the private sector, comprising a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations such as religious bodies, community foundations, and social and business enterprises (Lim, 2017). As of 2020, this includes about 1500 childcare centers providing fullday care and education programs for children from 18 months to 6 years and another roughly 400 kindergartens offering 3–4 hour educational programs targeted at 4–6 year olds (https://www.ecda.gov.sg/Documents/Resources/ECDA% 20Factsheet.pdf, accessed 18 November 2021). While preschool education is not compulsory in Singapore and does not come under the formal education system, which starts at 7 years, more than 99% of Singapore children would have attended at least 1 year of preschool before entering primary school (Wong, 2013). However, despite this near universal enrolment, concerns have been raised over the quality, affordability, and accessibility of preschool in Singapore (Davie & Tan, 2012). Provided for almost entirely by the private sector, the quality of preschool education varies widely. Likewise, large differences existed in the fees assessed by centers with some providers charging S$600 (approximately US$450) for a full-day program and others charging more than four times the amount (Goy, 2016). Through the 1990s to the late 2000s, preschool teachers were only required to be certificate- (as opposed to diploma-) trained (Tan, 2017). Unsurprisingly, given these minimum qualifications,

128

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

the median wage for preschool teachers was about S$1600 in 2010, just half the national median wage in the same year (Lim & Lin, 2012); in 2016, the basic salaries of teachers with a professional certificate ranged from S$1800 to S$2100 (Choo, 2019). In 2012, the Lien Foundation – a Singapore-based philanthropic organization – commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit to conduct a research on early childhood care across 45 developed countries, and Singapore was ranked 29th, arguably reflecting the conditions aforementioned. Addressing parents’ anxieties and concerns over the state of preschool in Singapore, the then Acting Community Development, Youth, and Sports Minister cautioned against childcare programs becoming a “luxury good problem” in which the price of the program becomes the major, if not sole signal, for quality (quoted in Toh, 2012). Indeed, with increasing disparities in income and a burgeoning middle and upper class, one worry was that left to the market, the preschool landscape would be increasingly stratified with brand name centers continuing to attract better-resourced families who perceive them to be offering higher quality programs compared to lower-priced centers that cater to the broad masses (Goy, 2017). Another related worry was that given the large disparities in cost and quality of childcare programs, economically disadvantaged children would not be ready for formal school. As noted by the chief executive of the Lien Foundation, “Our pre-school system should narrow the gap between the rich and poor, not widen it as it does now” (quoted in Davie, 2012). To be sure, the Singapore government has in recent years responded through numerous policies and approaches aimed at improving the quality and affordability of preschool education. A comprehensive overview of these measures lies beyond the scope of this paper. In what follows, the discussion focuses on prominent areas and suggests how these are likely to have benefitted disadvantaged students in significant ways. Four areas are outlined below: improving teacher quality, developing regulatory frameworks for centers, lowering costs and increasing affordability, and improving curriculum experiences. One critical area of intervention was to raise the minimum academic and professional standards for preschool teachers. Up until 2008, only preschool leaders had to be diploma-trained, and preschools would need to have only one out of four teachers diploma-trained with the others certificate-trained (Tan, 2017). In 2008, the government required diplomas of all new entrants to the profession and for incumbent K1 and K2 certificate-trained teachers to upgrade to a diploma. At the same time, all centers should have at least 75% of their teachers meeting these new requirements. These requirements resulted in a significant increase, between 2006 and 2010, in the proportion of diploma-trained teachers or those undergoing diploma training from 46% to 70% for childcare teachers and 58–85.5% for kindergarten teachers (Zulkifli, 2011). To ensure that the training that was provided for by a host of private training agencies, polytechnics, and government post-secondary education institutions was rigorous and comprehensive, the government in 2008 revised and reemphasized the work of the Preschool Qualification Accreditation Committee originally set up in 2001 as a gatekeeper of teacher preparation programs, requiring from 2014 onwards all early childhood care and education courses conducted by private training

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

129

agencies to be accredited by the Workforce Development Agency (now Workforce Singapore), a statutory board under the Ministry of Manpower (Tan, 2017). Finally, and more recently, to further increase the quality of preschool training program, develop and provide a comprehensive suite of courses for career progression in the field, and strengthen the nexus between research and practice, the government established the National Institute of Early Childhood Development, a national training and research institute under the auspices of the Ministry of Education (Siau, 2017). In all this, the government’s focus on raising and ensuring uniformity in baseline teacher competencies is not insignificant and parallels efforts to raise teaching quality in public schools. Indeed, in 2008, the Ministry of Education in its efforts to improve primary school education raised the minimum qualification of primary school teachers from diplomas to degrees (Author 1). Recognizing that uneven teacher quality exists and that market forces strongly influence where welltrained teachers work, these moves to mandate the necessary skillsets of preschool teachers go a long way in ensuring that children from disadvantaged families would have access to quality and well-skilled teachers. Another significant area of intervention was the establishment of regulatory frameworks for the preschool sector. In 2011, the government launched the Singapore Preschool Accreditation Framework (SPARK), a set of structures and processes developed for preschool centers to undergo self-evaluation and external monitoring that provided recognition and support for preschools as they worked to improve in areas such as planning and administration, staff management, pedagogy, leadership, and curriculum. SPARK certifications are valid for 6 years, and all certified centers are required to conduct annual self-appraisal exercises focusing on sustainable and systematic improvements. Even though SPARK certification is not mandatory, as of 2019 roughly half of all preschools have received certification (Official numbers report 980 preschools certified, with an additional 73 more receiving the more prestigious SPARK Certification (Commendation). https://www.ecda.gov.sg/ sparkinfo/Pages/ListingOfCertifiedCentresByYear.aspx, accessed 7 Feb 2020). Since 2013, SPARK certification has been administered and overseen by the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA), a body set up by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social and Family Development, and serves as the regulatory and developmental agency for the early childhood sector in Singapore overseeing key aspects of children’s development under the age of 7 (where previously childcare services were regulated by the Ministry of Community, Youth, and Sports, later reorganized as the Ministry of Social and Family Development, and kindergartens which took on a more academic focus was overseen by the MOE). This centralization of policy levers under the auspices of a single body is crucial in understanding, reaching out to, and addressing the needs of families. Particularly for disadvantaged families who suffer from the multiple stresses of poverty, these needs fall along various dimensions – financial, social, emotional, psychological, and educative – and policy responses to these need to be made from a vantage point that recognizes these interstices (Ng, 2013, 2015; Teo, 2018). An example of the kind of multipronged work ECDA enables is KidSTART, a program launched in 2016 that aims to build an “ecosystem of support” (https://www.kidstart.sg/our-

130

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

ecosystem-of-support, accessed 18 November 2021) around children from vulnerable and disadvantaged families from birth onwards by bringing together social workers, educators, healthcare professionals, and other social services to provide home visitations, maternal healthcare, organize playgroups, imparting knowledge and skills on health, nutrition and child development, and facilitating enrolment into preschool. Indeed, even as ECDA oversees the regulation of the sector and works to raise quality standards across it, it is also tasked with ensuring that this quality remains accessible and affordable to low- and middle-income families by providing fee subsidies to families and grants to government-supported preschools and monitoring the fee increases of centers (https://www.ecda.gov.sg/pages/aboutus.aspx, accessed 18 November 2021). To this end, ECDA provides funding support to selected preschool operators under the government’s Anchor Operator scheme, established in 2009 and further enhanced in 2014, to improve access to quality and affordable programs, particularly for children from lower-income or disadvantaged families. These Anchor Operators and, under a new scheme in 2016, Partner Operators who are subject to less strict requirements but receive grants too are required to adhere to monthly fee caps and to invest in improving the quality of their programs. Over the years, the two schemes have significantly increased the accessibility of affordable preschool programs; as government-supported preschools, Anchor and Partner Operators have moved from forming just 20% of the market in 2012 to 40% in 2016 and reaching almost 50% in 2020 (Goy, 2017). This proportion is set to rise to 80% by 2025 (https://www.ecda.gov.sg/PressReleases/Pages/Making-quality-pre schools-more-affordable-and-accessible.aspx, accessed 18 November 2021). To add to the number of state-supported preschools, the government in 2014 established a small number of 15 MOE Kindergartens, a first for the sector which up to that point had seen only private providers. As observed by some, the sites of these 15 public kindergartens – nestled within the primary schools and community spaces of the heartlands – seem carefully chosen to better reach out to children from lower-income families (Tan, 2017). MOE Kindergartens are tasked to provide quality preschool education that is affordable to Singaporeans, pilot teaching, and learning resources developed by the MOE and distil and share good practices with the private sector. As of 2020, there are 28 such kindergartens across the country with a total of 60 to be in operation by 2025 (https://beta.moe.gov.sg/preschool/moe-kindergarten/overview/, accessed 8 Feb 2020). At the same time, as the government moves to support the provision of preschools, it has also provided significant subsidies for childcare and kindergarten programs to needy families through various financial assistance schemes – involving both a Basic Subsidy that is applicable to all citizens and a means-tested Additional Subsidy. Beginning from the year 2020, these subsidies have been further enhanced, so much so that a dual-income family earning $5000 per month will pay just $130 per month (compared to up to $370 per month previously) for a full-day program at an Anchor Operator preschool and a family earning $3000 or less per month will pay $3 per month (compared to $70 per month previously) (https://www.ecda.gov.sg/PressReleases/Pages/Making-quality-preschools-moreaffordable-and-accessible.aspx, accessed 18 November 2021).

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

131

Preschool centers in Singapore, unlike mainstream schools, do not follow a centralized curriculum and are able to adopt and implement curricula according to their own educational philosophies and the interest and needs of their students and the latter’s families. This, coupled with the vastly different fees that schools assess, the unequal resources at their disposal, and variegated teacher quality, has led to curricular programs of vastly different standards across centers. The fourth and, arguably, the most crucial approach taken by the government to raise the quality of preschool education was to work towards ensuring greater evenness in the quality of teaching and learning through the development of a national curriculum framework. Launched in 2003, Singapore’s first curriculum framework, Nurturing Early Learners: A Framework for A Kindergarten Curriculum in Singapore or the NEL Framework, was the first “nationally endorsed curriculum for children in preschools” (Ang, 2006, p. 205) spelling out broad principles and guidelines for curriculum and pedagogy for children between ages 4 and 6 years (In 2011 the MSF introduced the Early Years Development Framework to complement the NEL Framework in providing quality care and learning practices for children below 4 years). While non-mandatory, the establishment of the NEL Framework was accompanied by the dissemination of a comprehensive suite of curriculum resources – teaching guides for the mother tongue languages, a curriculum guide with practical teaching strategies, and a resource package for the development of learning dispositions in children – developed by the Ministry of Education and aimed at supporting preschool teachers in translating the framework into classroom teaching and learning. Key to the NEL Framework is a set of six guiding principles for the development and design of classroom curricular experiences – integrated learning, teachers as supporters of learning, engaging children in learning through play, ample opportunities for interaction, children as active learners, and holistic development – subsequently encapsulated in the acronym “iTeach” (Ministry of Education, 2013). Significantly, a set of six learning goals and learning areas forms the pillars of preschool education – aesthetics and creative expression, discovery of the world, language and literacy, motor skills development, numeracy, and social and emotional development. Updated in 2012 to include more recent educational and research developments and a seven-volume Educators’ Guide (Ministry of Education, 2013), the NEL Framework even in its non-prescriptive form powerfully signals the government’s call for a preschool curriculum that is less didactic and less narrowly focused on academics; instead, it promotes one that is more inclusive, more interactive, and more holistic in providing opportunities for all children to explore and discover their world while developing a range of social and emotional skills and learning dispositions. Taken together, the above developments – improving teacher quality, developing regulatory frameworks for centers, lowering costs and increasing affordability, and improving curriculum experiences – both signal the government’s attempts at assuaging concerns over a meritocracy that is singularly focused on academic achievement and also demonstrate its commitment to providing a more level playing field in education through ensuring that all children have access to quality

132

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

preschools. While there is certainly good sense in these moves, taking seriously the last emphasis on leveling up curricular experiences, the remainder of this paper considers how existing efforts in this area could go further.

Preschool Curricula, Culture, and Needs Drawing from sociological research around the needs and experiences of children from disadvantaged families, the final section considers how, by adopting a focus on a set of non-cognitive skills and by emphasizing the development of curricula that are more culturally relevant to the home and family backgrounds of these children, the preschool curriculum can provide a more responsive and transformative experience. Due in large part to the research in economics pioneered by James Heckman, there is now a robust and growing body of evidence arguing that non-cognitive skills are equally, if not more, important than their cognitive counterpart (such as the ability to process, learn, think, and reason, as well as substantive knowledge in traditional academic domains) in improving academic achievement and life outcomes (Heckman & Kautz, 2012; Heckman et al., 2013; Schanzenbach et al., 2016). These non-cognitive skills – often referred to in the related literature as social, emotional, and behavioral skills – include qualities such as perseverance, conscientiousness, and emotional regulation (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015; Smithers et al., 2018). Writing specifically about emotional regulation, Raver points out the importance of the development of a set of attributes involving impulse control, attention, and emotional knowledge in preschoolers for school readiness (Raver, 2002). As she notes, young children who are emotionally well-adjusted are significantly more likely to experience success in school, while those who experience serious emotional difficulty face increased risks of early school problems. Also receiving significant attention are the ways in which, as with cognitive skills, gaps in non-cognitive skills are more likely to be experienced by children from disadvantaged families who are often exposed to a wide range of psychosocial stressors, such as, poverty, broken families, social discrimination, poor health and living conditions, etc. (Heckman, 2006; Raver, 2004). Schanzenhach et al. (2016), for example, point out how children of parents who did not complete high school score almost 20 percentiles lower on measures of non-cognitive skills when compared with children of at least one parent with a postsecondary qualification. Schools and preschools in low-income neighborhoods are therefore likely to be – and indeed often are – called upon to meet the needs of a greater number of young children with behavioral and emotional troubles (Raver, 2002, 2004). Conversely, it also seems that a preschool curriculum focused on developing emotional regulation in young children may then come to serve an important protective function, whereby children who are able to effectively handle their emotions despite exposure to multiple stressors are more likely to do better academically. While it is noted that Singapore’s NEL Framework outlined above highlights social and emotional development as one of six key learning areas, this very

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

133

emphasis could go further by providing preschool teachers with more curriculum resources and professional training focused on developing curricular programs and learning experiences that pay attention to this dimension. Using modeling, role play, group discussions, and mindfulness exercises, teachers can engage and instruct young children on how to identify and label feelings, how to appropriately communicate with others about emotions, and how to resolve disputes with peers. Indeed, studies have pointed to the effectiveness of classroom curricula targeting children’s knowledge of emotions and their emotional and behavioral self-control (Pandey et al., 2018; Raver et al., 2011). To the extent that similar approaches may work in the case of Singapore’s preschools, more attention and support will be necessary in developing and enacting such curricula and identifying children who will benefit from them. In this connection, smaller class sizes in preschool centers serving a higher proportion of children from disadvantaged families would allow for increased teacher-student interaction and the early identification of children with these needs. Besides focusing on these crucial non-cognitive skills, the preschool curriculum would also do better to develop stronger connections with the cultural backgrounds of students’ homes and families. For some time now, research in the sociology of education and curriculum has consistently emphasized the critical importance of recognizing, affirming, and responding to the cultural experiences of students in schooling (Heng, 2011; Lim & Tan 2018; Dyson, 2016). Such calls are not new and can be traced back to Jane Addams’ (1910) work on the education of immigrants to the USA, Carter G. Woodson’s (1933/1990) powerful recentering of AfricanAmerican cultural achievements and humanity in the classroom, and, indeed, Paolo Freire’s (1970) writings on critical pedagogy. Indeed, undergirding many of these perspectives is the recognition that students from disadvantaged backgrounds frequently bring into the classroom cultural capital that is different from mainstream norms and worldviews. Yet this difference should not be a code word for deficiency (Howard, 2003, see also Heng, 2021). Rather, as Gay (2000, p. 29) explains, such approaches become especially important because they use “the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of [. . .] diverse students to make learning more relevant and effective. . . teaches[ing] to and through the strengths of these students.” One of the most significant pieces of work exploring the connections between culture and curriculum may be represented in Ladson-Billings’ (2009) 3-year ethnographic study of eight “exceptional” teachers of African-American students. Providing an example of how students’ cultural backgrounds may be utilized as a vehicle for learning, Ladson-Billings illustrates a case where one of the teachers developed students’ appreciation of poetry through their own love of rap music. Rather than denouncing rap music for its supposed ills, the teacher encouraged her second-grade students to bring in samples of lyrics from what both she and the students determined to be non-offensive rap songs. Students were invited to perform the songs and the teacher reproduced them on the board so that they could discuss literal and figurative meanings as well as technical aspects of poetry such as rhyme scheme, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. Another example that Ladson-Billings provides is that of a White female teacher whom she described as “culturally Black.”

134

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

This teacher encouraged her sixth-grade students to use their home language as they acquired “standard” English. Thus, her students were permitted to express themselves in language (in speaking and writing) with which they were knowledgeable and comfortable. They were later required to “translate” to the standard form. By the end of the year, the students were not only facile at this “code-switching” but could better use both languages. To the extent that these insights emphasize and document the richness of curricula that are filtered through students’ cultural experiences, they hold even more significance at the preschool level, where, as studies have demonstrated, continuities between the home and school environments are critical in helping young children make sense of and become better attuned to their learning experiences (ComptonLilly, 2003; Graue, 2005; Graue & Sherfinski, 2011). Indeed, as a number of these studies reveal, much of the discussion around “readiness” in early childhood education policies and discourses remain predicated on the congruence or lack of in home-school cultures and relationships (Barbarin et al., 2010; Diamond et al., 2000; Hill, 2001). Preschool curricula in Singapore can do well to take up a number of insights here. To be sure, while the NEL Curriculum Framework developed by the state and outlined earlier provides a powerful normative push towards less academic and more inclusive and holistic learning experiences, none of its six guiding principles and six learning goals/areas foreground explicitly this attention and sensitivity towards students’ home and cultural backgrounds – in particular, those from less advantaged families. In this regard, the academic scholarship offers a number of initial suggestions, albeit, a thorough discussion of these principles and strategies lies beyond the scope of this paper. Briefly, as many of the studies seeking to locate culturally relevant teaching into the curricular experiences of preschool children emphasize, a critical first step involves recognizing and getting to work with families as a valuable resource (Heng, 2014; González, 2016; Nash et al., 2020; Sisson et al., 2020). Research shows that teachers find it difficult to build appropriate knowledge of children from minoritized backgrounds without familial input (Durand, 2010; Mitchell et al., 2015). It is thus important for preschools to take a first step in promoting conversations and engaging in discussions with families about their (and their children’s) priorities, interests, needs, and concerns and the everyday material experiences from which these are shaped and struggled with. Such interactions and the sharing of multiple, non-dominant perspectives function powerfully in the development of what Gay (2000), Moll et al. (1992), and others call a “cultural diversity knowledge base” or “funds of knowledge” – a set of knowledges about the cultural characteristics and contributions of different ethnic groups, their family and cultural values, traditions, communication, contributions, and relational patterns. Knowing as much, these are some approaches preschools can adopt: • Identify curricula and stories that showcase characters with whom their students identify and can relate to in authentic ways. • Remove curricular materials that regurgitate and reinforce dominant stereotypes. • Invite children and their families to share their views on what is important to learn about before planning the curriculum.

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

135

• Design lessons and use pedagogies that give prominence to student voice and encourage students to draw from their home backgrounds and cultural experiences in their contributions. • Invite family members to collaborate in the delivery of instruction in the classroom to accord these perspectives and experiences with epistemic authority.

Concluding Remarks Social inequality, the political theorist Nancy Fraser (1997) points out, needs to be understood and accounted for along two dimensions: socioeconomic injustices that arise when the structures of society generate maldistribution or class inequality and cultural injustices that arise when institutionalized or hierarchical patterns of cultural value generate misrecognition or status inequality. Disadvantaged social groups thus not only suffer economic/material injustices such as low wages, work exploitation, and an unfair distribution of social and economic resources, but they also experience a lack of recognition of their social contributions and a misrepresentation of their identities, challenges, and needs, as pointed out earlier (Fraser, 1997, 2003; Honneth, 2007). Fraser’s work is not unfamiliar to critical education scholars (Power & Frandji, 2010; Raffo, 2011; Souto-Otero, 2010). Creating just social arrangements in schools and classrooms thus requires both knowing who students are and also acting upon this information to improve their circumstances. In other words, it involves recognizing how students are differently positioned in terms of their equity needs and providing or redistributing support and resources to address those needs. We have shown in the earlier sections of this paper how the state has sought to provide additional support in the preschool sector in terms of improving teacher quality, developing regulatory frameworks for centers, lowering costs and increasing affordability, and establishing a national curriculum framework. Nevertheless, in Singapore, the state’s manifest discourses of meritocracy and non-discrimination have sidelined critical conversations around how such support – particularly in terms of curricular materials, cultural experiences, and opportunities – needs to be related to and framed within wider social and cultural differences and inequalities (Heng & Lim, 2021). By outlining the importance of developing of curricula that are more culturally relevant to the home and family backgrounds of disadvantaged students, and of focusing on a set of pre-academic skills, this paper hopes to include, among efforts at building an equitable preschool education, the priorities of those for whom these endeavors are most urgent.

References Addams, J. (1910). Twenty years at Hull House. University of Illinois Press. Albright, J., Heng, M., & Harris, K. (2006). Pedagogical change in the Normal Technical classroom. Retrieved from https://repository.nie.edu.sg/handle/10497/4157 Ang, L. Y. L. (2006). Steering debate and initiating dialogue: A review of the Singapore preschool curriculum. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7(3), 203–212. Apple, M. W. (2014). Official knowledge (3rd ed.). Routledge.

136

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

Barbarin, O., Downer, J., Odom, E., & Head, D. (2010). Home–School differences in beliefs, support, and control during public pre-kindergarten and their link to children’s kindergarten readiness. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 25(3), 358–372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ecresq.2010.02.003 Barnett, W. S., & Masse, L. (2007). Early childhood program design and economic returns: Comparative benefit-cost analysis of the Abecedarian program and policy implications. Economics of Education Review, 26, 113–125. Barr, M. D., & Skrbis, Z. (2008). Constructing Singapore: Elitism, ethnicity and the nation-building project. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Harvard University Press. Cavanagh, M. (2002). Against equality of opportunity. Clarendon. Chang, K.-S. (2010). South Korea under compressed modernity: Familial political economy in transition. Routledge. Chiong, C., & Lim, L. (2020). Seeing families as policy actors: Exploring higher-order thinking reforms in Singapore through lowincome families’ perspectives. Journal of Education Policy, 37(2), 205–225. Choo, C. (2019, May 9). Study calls for pre-school teachers to be better paid, to work more with early intervention teachers. Today. Accessed 18 Nov from https://www.todayonline.com/ singapore/study-calls-pre-school-teachers-be-better-paid-work-more-early-interventionteachers Compton-Lilly, C. (2003). Reading families: The literate lives of urban children. Teachers College Press. Davie, S. (2012, July 18). Govt should run pre-schools: Experts. The Straits Times, p. A3. Davie, S. (2019, March 11). Streaming into normal and express in secondary schools to stop in 2024; to be replaced by full subject-based banding. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes. com/singapore/education/streaming-into-normal-and-express-in-secondary-schools-to-stop-in2024-to-be Davie S. & Tan, A. (2012, February 18). Giving needy children a helping hand. The Straits Times, p. C7. Deng, Z., & Gopinathan, S. (2016). PISA and high-performing education systems: Explaining Singapore’s education success. Comparative Education, 52(4), 449–472. Diamond, K., Reagan, A., & Bandyk, J. (2000). Parents’ conceptions of kindergarten readiness: Relationships with race, ethnicity, and development. Journal of Educational Research, 94(2), 93–100. Duckworth, A. L., & Yeager, D. S. (2015). Measurement matters: Assessing personal qualities other than cognitive ability for educational purposes. Educational Researcher, 44(4), 237–251. Duncan, G. J., Ludwg, J., & Magnuson, K. A. (2007). Reducing poverty through preschool interventions. The Future of Children, 17(2), 143–160. Durand, T. M. (2010). Celebrating diversity in early care and education settings: Moving beyond the margins. Early Child Development and Care, 180(7), 835–848. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03004430802466226 Dyson, A. H. (Ed.). (2016). Child cultures, schooling, and literacy: Global perspectives on composing unique lives. Routledge. Economist Intelligence Unit. (2012). Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world. Accessed 15 July 2021 from https://www.lienfoundation.org/uploads/Early%20Child hood%20Development/Starting%20Well%20Index/StartingWell_Index_Report_Full%20[ pdf].pdf Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus. Routledge. Fraser, N. (2003). Redistribution or recognition?: A political-philosophical exchange. Verso. Freire, P. (1970). Cultural action and conscientization. Harvard Educational Review, 40(3), 452–477. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching. Teachers College Press.

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

137

González, K. (2016). Culturally responsive pedagogy in early childhood classrooms. In A. G. Welch & S. Areepattamannil (Eds.), Dispositions in teacher education (pp. 4–11). SensePublishers. Goy, P. (2016, November 6). Better pay draws better pre-school teachers. The Straits Times. Goy, P. (2017, March 19). What the new playing field for pre-school offers. The Straits Times, pp. B4–B5. Graue, E. (2005). Theorizing and describing preservice teachers’ images of families and schooling. Teachers College Record, 107(1), 157–185. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9620.2005.00461.x Graue, M. E., & Sherfinski, M. (2011). The view from the lighted schoolhouse: Conceptualizing home–school relations within a class size reduction reform. American Journal of Education, 117(2), 267–297. https://doi.org/10.1086/657890 Heckman, J. J. (2006). Skill formation and the economics of investing in disadvantaged children. Science, 312(572), 1900–1902. Heckman, J. J., & Kautz, T. (2012). Hard evidence on soft skills. Working Paper No. 18121. National Bureau of Economic Research. Heckman, J., Pinto, R., & Savelyev, P. (2013). Understanding the mechanisms through which an influential early childhood program boosted adult outcomes. American Economic Review, 103(6), 2052–2086. Heng, T. T. (2011). Sociocultural misalignments faced by preschool Chinese emergent bilinguals: A case study. Early Childhood Education Journal, 39(1), 61–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643010-0432-y Heng, T. T. (2014). The nature of interactions between Chinese immigrant families and preschool staff: How culture class and methodology matter. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 12(2), 111–127. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718X13515423 Heng, T. T. (2021). Socioculturally attuned understanding of and engagement with Chinese international undergraduates. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10. 1037/dhe0000240 Heng, T. T., & Lim, L. (2021). Diversity difference equity: how student differences are socially constructed in Singapore. Cambridge Journal of Education, 51(6), 693–712. https://doi.org/10. 1080/0305764X.2021.1910204 Hill, N. E. (2001). Parenting and academic socialization as they related to school readiness: The roles of ethnicity and family income. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 686–697. https:// doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.93.4.686 Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect: The normative foundations of critical theory. Polity Press. Howard, T. (2003). Culturally relevant pedagogy: Ingredients for critical teacher reflection. Theory Into Practice, 42(3), 195–202. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4203_5 Kang, T. (2005). Creating educational dreams. Marshall Cavendish Academic. Kwek, K. (2007, May 18). Students of top schools worry more about elitism. The Straits Times, p. H18. Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African-American children (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. University of California Press. Lee, K. Y. (2000). From third world to first: The Singapore story 1965–2000. Times Publishing. Li, M., Fox, J. L., & Grieshaber, S. (Eds.). (2017). Contemporary issues and challenge in early childhood education in the Asia-Pacific region. Springer. Lim, L. (2013). Meritocracy, elitism and egalitarianism: a preliminary and provisional assessment of singapore’s primary education review. Asia-pacific Journal Of Education, 33(1), 1–14. Lim, L. (2016a). Knowledge, control and critical thinking in Singapore: State ideology and the politics of pedagogic recontextualization. New York: Routledge. Lim, L. (2016b). Analyzing meritocratic (in)equality in singapore: ideology, curriculum and reproduction. Critical Studies In Education, 57(2), 160–174. Lim, S. (2017). Marketization and corporation of early childhood care and education in Singapore. In M. Li, J. L. Fox, & S. Grieshaber (Eds.), Contemporary issues and challenge in early childhood education in the Asia-Pacific region (pp. 17–32). Springer.

138

L. Lim and T. T. Heng

Lim, S. (2019, September 15). Long-neglected but now in the spotlight, Singapore’s pre-school sector. Channel News Asia. Accessed 18 Nov 2021 from https://www.channelnewsasia.com/ news/commentary/pre-school-enhanced-subsidies-access-moe-kindergartens-11890488 Lim, L., & Apple, M. W. (Eds.). (2016). The strong state and curriculum reform: Assessing the politics and possibilities of educational change in Asia. New York: Routledge. Lim, L., & Apple, M. W. (Eds.) (2020). Critical studies of education in Asia: Knowledge, power and the politics of curriculum reforms. New York: Routledge. Lim, L. K., & Lin Z. (2012, June 27). “Wake-up call” for S’pore kindergartens. The Straits Times. Lim, L., & Tan, M. (2018). Culture, pedagogy and equity in a meritocratic education system: Teachers’ work and the politics of culture in Singapore. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(2), 104–202. Mauzy, D. K., & Milne, R. S. (2002). Singapore politics under the People’s Action Party. Routledge. Ministry of Education. (2010). Report of the Secondary Education Review and Implementation (SERI) committee. Retrieved from http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/files/2010/12/reportsecondary-education-review-and-implementation-committee.pdf Ministry of Education. (2013). Nurturing early learners: A curriculum for kindergartens in Singapore. Educators’ guide. Author. Mitchell, L., Bateman, A., & Ouko, A. (2015). Teaching and learning in culturally diverse early childhood settings. Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research. Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Moore, R. Q. (2000). Multiracialism and meritocracy: Singapore’s approach to race and inequality. Review of Social Economy, 58(3), 339–360. Nash, K. T., Glover, C. P., & Polson, B. (2020). Toward culturally sustain teaching: Early childhood educators honor their children with practices for equity and change. Routledge. Ng, I. Y. H. (2013). Education and intergenerational mobility in Singapore. Educational Review, 66(3), 362–376. Ng, I. Y. H. (2015). Being poor in a rich “nanny state”: Developments in Singapore social welfare. The Singapore Economic Review, 60(3), 1–17. Ng, J. S. (2018, March 1). Parliament: MPs share thoughts on tackling social inequality during Budget debate. The Straits Times. Accessed 18 Nov 2021 from https://www.straitstimes.com/ singapore/mps-share-thoughts-on-tackling-social-inequality Pandey, A., Hale, D., Das, S., Goddings, A. L., Blakemore, S. J., & Viner, R. M. (2018). Effectiveness of universal self-regulation–based interventions in children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatrics, 172(6), 566–575. https://jamanetwork. com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2677898 Power, S., & Frandji, D. (2010). Education markets, the new politics of recognition and the increasing fatalism towards inequality. Journal of Education Policy, 25(3), 385–396. Raffo, C. (2011). Barker’s ecology of disadvantage and educational equity: Issues of redistribution and recognition. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 43(4), 325–343. Raver, C. C. (2002). Emotions matter: Making the case for the role of young children’s emotional development for early school readiness. Social Policy Report, 16(3), 3–18. Retrieved from https://www.cde.state.co.us/cpp/emotionsmatter Raver, C. (2004). Placing emotional self-regulation in sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts. Child Development, 75(2), 346–353. Raver, C. C., Jones, S. M., Li-Grining, C. P., Zhai, F., Bub, K., & Pressler, E. (2011). CSRP’s impact on low-income preschoolers’ preacademic skills: Self-regulation as a mediating mechanism. Child Development, 82(1), 362–378. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press. Satz, D. (2007). Equality, adequacy, and education for citizenship. Ethics, 117(July), 623–648. Schanzenbach, D. W., Nunn, R., Bauer, L., Mumford, M., & Breitwieser, A. (2016, October). Seven facts on noncognitive skills from education to the labor market. The Hamilton Project.

Meritocracy, Equity, and Early Childhood Education in Singapore: Policies,. . .

139

Siau, M. E. (2017, August 24). NIEC to welcome first early childhood education trainees in 2019. Today. Accessed 18 Nov 2021 from https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/niec-welcomefirst-early-childhood-education-trainees-2019 Singapore Children’s Society. (2016). Schools and the class divide. Author. Singapore Department of Statistics. (2020a). Singapore census of population 2020, statistical release 1: Demographic characteristics, education, language and religion. https://www. singstat.gov.sg/publications/reference/cop2020/cop2020-sr1/census20_stat_release1 Singapore Department of Statistics. (2020b). Population trends, 2020. https://www.singstat.gov. sg/-/media/files/publications/population/population2020.pdf Sisson, J. H., Whittington, V., & Shin, A. (2020). Teaching culture through culture: A case study of culturally responsive pedagogies in an Australian early childhood/primary context. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 34(1), 108–126. Smithers, L. G., Sawyer, A. C. P., Chittleborough, C. R., Davies, N. M., Smith, G. D., & Lynch, J. W. (2018). A systematic review and meta-analysis of effects of early life non-cognitive skills on academic, psychosocial, cognitive and health outcomes. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 867–880. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0461-x Souto-Otero, M. (2010). Education, meritocracy and distribution. Journal of Education Policy, 25(3), 397–413. Swift, A. (2003). How not to be a hypocrite: School choice for the morally perplexed parent. Routledge. Tan, K. P. (2008). Meritocracy and elitism in a global city: Ideological shifts in Singapore. International Political Science Review, 29(1), 7–27. Tan, C. T. (2017). Enhancing the quality of kindergarten education in Singapore: Policies and strategies in the 21st century. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 11(7). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40723-017-0033-y Teo, Y. Y. (2018). This is what inequality looks like. Ethos. Toh, K. (2012, October 6). The $100 v $1000 difference: Do higher fees really mean better-quality facilities and teachers? The Straits Times, p. D10. Vaish, V., Tan, T. K., Bokhorst-Heng, W. D., Hogan, D., & Kang, T. (2010). Language and social capital in Singapore. In L. Lim, A. Pakir, & L. Wee (Eds.), English in Singapore: Modernity and management (pp. 159–180). Hong Kong University Press. Wong, T. (2013). Giving Malay children a good start. The Straits Times. p. 15. Woodson, C. G. (1933/1990). The mis-education of the Negro. Africa World Press. Yahya, Y. (2018, February 28). Parliament: Time to examine meritocracy and inequality, says Kok Heng Leun. The Straits Times. Accessed 18 Nov 2021 from https://www.straitstimes.com/ politics/budget-debate-time-to-examine-meritocracy-and-inequality-kok-heng-leun Zulkifli, M. (2011, March). FY 2011 Committee of supply debate: 4th reply by Mr Masagos Zulkifli BMM, Minister of State for Education and Home Affairs, on strengthening education for all. Ministry of Education.

Part II Curriculum as Placing

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research Jennifer S. Thom

Contents Where . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Place to Begin? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (Re)searching for a Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re(-)turning(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seeing and Hearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inside Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Seen and the Heard as the Shown and the Told . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seeing and Hearing the Seen and Heard as the Shown and Told . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dis-covering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inside Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dis-covering the Unseen and Unheard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recovering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inside Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recovering the (Un)seen and (Un)heard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pressing Re(-)turn: Homeward to Where . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

144 145 147 148 148 148 151 151 152 154 158 159 159 162 163 164

Abstract

What begins as a search for a photograph of Japanese-Canadian curriculum scholar Ted Tetsuo Aoki ends up as a curriculum inquiry into a documentary film. Hayashi Studio focuses on the Japanese Canadians of Cumberland, British Columbia, Canada at the turn of the 20th century up to the evacuation of them during WWII, and today more than a century later. Through photographs taken at Hayashi Studio, together with the stories shared by a community member and Aoki’s eldest son, the scholar’s life and curriculum theorizing become

J. S. Thom (*) University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_46

143

144

J. S. Thom

dialectically part and whole of the curriculum inquiry. The author explores spaces of seeing and hearing, dis-covering, and recovering, all the while asking where there might be a place for the stories and narratives of the documentary in understanding curriculum amidst doing curriculum research. Keywords

Ted Tetsuo Aoki · Hayashi Studio · Understanding curriculum · Curriculum research · Curriculum inquiry · Rhizomean · Curriculum as plan(ned) · Curriculum as live(d)

Where Where am I to begin this chapter? Mundane as this question appears, it reveals itself as anything but moot. Notice how the subject “I” sits between being (i.e., am) and doing (i.e., to begin). Staying with the question, two meanings of place emerge – where in general it is that I am to begin this chapter and more specifically, where it is that I am upon beginning this chapter. The nontriviality of the question is also apparent in how this chapter, the act of beginning it, the specific context(s) which ground it, and my place in all of this seem to dwell wholly entangled. In these ways, the question resists “attempts” to hurry it along, to linearize it, to separate or part it out, much less to “fix” it, to “settle,” “adjust,” or “arrange” it (Fix, 2022). Certainly uncertain but certainly not indifferent, the question as infinitely open discloses itself to be all the more perplexing. And as I pause to consider it some more, the image of a compass comes to mind. However, the needle of this compass is forever a spin. It points not in one direction but continuously in all directions. Returning to the question, I smile. It laughs back at me. The quandary of where am I to begin this chapter persists! I set the question aside (or so I think) and turn my attention to research I have already started. This work involves the writings of Japanese Canadian scholar Ted T. Aoki (1919–2012) and finding a photo of him. I type “Ted T. Aoki” into the search field and press “return.” Up pops familiar images of the scholar as a young adult and during his years as an academic, notably at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia. Knowing Aoki was born and raised in a community close to where I was born, raised, and am currently living here on Vancouver Island, I start another search to find a less well-known photo of him. This time I include his birth name and hometown, type in “photos of Tetsuo Aoki Cumberland,” and press “return.” Right away book covers featuring Aoki’s scholarship as well as a visual artist who shares the same name, and photos of some of his siblings fill the screen. Scrolling through, two images catch my eye and call my attention. One is of Aoki and his family taken during the early 1920s when he is all but a toddler. The other, also a very old black and white photograph, is of a man holding a trophy, perhaps a baseball player. The latter image is labeled “Portraits-Japanese Canadian Residents

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

145

and Buildings. Copyright: This image is copyright [of] The Cumberland Museum and Archives.” Above the text is a “Visit” button. Intrigued, I press the button to enter. Here a repository of 470 photographs opens. Most of the images are from the early 1900s through to the early 1940s and all from Cumberland, British Columbia. I learn that the man holding the trophy is Japanese Canadian resident “Mr. Ken[ich]i Doi (pitcher).” And within the collection are more photographs of the Aoki family, portraits of other families, community events, and places in the town such as the Japanese cemetery, the bottling works, the Japanese language school, and the sawmill. Below every photograph is a date and the words, “Taken from glass plate neg[ative].” I move on, reading articles about glass plate photography. Imagining what life might have been like during these times, I wonder about the photographer(s) who took these pictures and of these people(s), places, and moments in Cumberland. I type “glass plate negatives Cumberland Museum and Archives” in to the search field and press “return.” Hypertext links that include the name Senjiro Hayashi appear on the screen. Next, I type in “Senjiro Hayashi Japanese photographer” into the search field and press “return.” Links with “Hayashi Studio” appear. Clicking to open the first one dated April 17, 2020, I find out that Senjiro Hayashi (1880–1939) was a Japanese photographer who immigrated to Canada from Japan: Senjiro settled, then, in Cumberland, a coal-mining town on Vancouver Island, as a photographer in 1903. In 1910, he apprenticed with Shuzo Fujiwara at Fujiwara Photo Studio and eventually set up his own shop in 1912 after which time he called his wife and son from Japan. In 1913, he opened his Willard Block studio [Hayashi Studio] in downtown Cumberland. It was taken over by a Mr. Kitamura in 1919 and then Tokitaro Matsubushi in 1923. Closing briefly, it reopened and operated until 1941 when the studio was commissioned to take photos for government registration cards just prior to the mass expulsion in 1942. (Ibuki, 2020)

The article is a review of the documentary Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019). Written, directed, and co-produced by Hayley Gray, the 25-minute film features the works of Japanese photographers, Senjiro Hayashi (1913–1919), Mr. Kitamura (1919–1923), and Tokitaro Matsubuchi (1923–1941). I finish reading and search for Hayashi Studio.

A Place to Begin? The poster for the documentary reads: “Hayashi Studio. The hidden history of Cumberland, British Columbia as documented by a Japanese photographer at the turn of the [20th] century” (Storyhive, 2019). The image in the center of the poster is a black-and-white photograph of a young Japanese man. Hair combed neatly to one side, he is dressed in a dark single-breasted suit, dress shirt, and tie. The man stands in front of a dark backdrop, and characteristic of the period, looks forward with a stoic expression on his face.

146

J. S. Thom

“Watch the video.” Click. Composed in five parts, Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) features the photographs of the three photographers Hayashi, Kitamura, and Matsubuchi; anthropologist Laura Cuthbert; Japanese National Museum curator Grace Eiko Thompson; grandchildren of two of the photographers – granddaughter Sharon Hayashi, great grandson Brent Hayashi, and granddaughter Wendy Matsubuchi; and eldest son of the late Japanese Canadian curriculum scholar Ted Tetsuo Aoki, Douglas Sadao Aoki.1 The film focuses on the Japanese immigrants and their descendants who lived in Cumberland during the early 1900s leading up to the Second World War as captured through the lenses of the three photographers. Watching and listening, I am struck by how familiar each story sounds and resounds. Familiar not simply in terms of what I have read from other accounts such as Obasan (Kogawa, 1994), The Vision Fulfilled (Hoshzaki, 1995), and Challenging Racist “British Columbia” (Claxton et al. 2021) but closer to home, to that of the curriculum studies by Ted T. Aoki himself (e.g., Aoki, 1979a/1979b/1983/ 2004n, 1990b/1991f/2004t, 1995a/1995b/2004i). Even closer still is how familialingly familiar these (hi)stories are to those of my family. In deep ways these peoples and their (hi)stories touch and impress upon my own [(Japanese)(Chinese)(Canadian)] being and becoming. Here I hear Aoki (Aoki, 1991c/2004e) as theorist, specifically, one of his “curriculum memos” and “note[s] for the next half century” (p. 247) in which he makes the point that we are always and already in the midst of journeying. The memo and note remind me that in being and becoming, who I am and where I am whether in the past, present, future, or all three, is always and already located according to “the [se] time-space coordinates of my own historical situation into which I was born and within which I have lived and am now living” (Aoki, 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 333). So, while the question of where am I to begin this chapter looms large (or so I think), I am surprised and humbled to find that where I am is neither where I think I am nor where I thought I was going to be. As Aoki puts it, “I now shudder at my humiliating complicity with . . . the Cartesian [E]go” (Aoki, 1993b/1993d/2004f, p. 300). Certainly certain, this is no simple question asking to be answered simply once and for all. However, where it is that I am to begin this chapter and where it is that I am upon beginning it is becoming clearer. Here I hear Aoki’s earlier reminder but in a subtly different way. That we are always and already in the midst of journeying emphasizes there are no distinct beginnings or ends (Aoki, 1991c/ 2004e). Rather, where we are is “a circular journey in which there is always a turning homeward, a re-turn” (Aoki, 1987a/1999/2004s, p. 242). Such re-turns are not repetitious but hermeneutically recursive. This means each return holds potential for further returns wherein re-turning as coming home is “re-entering home always at a different point, [and] thus coming to know the beginning [and end] point[s] for the first time” (Aoki, 1987a/1999/2004s, p. 242).

1

As not to confuse the reader, references to Douglas Sadao Aoki use his full name. All other references which include the surname Aoki refer to Ted Tetsuo Aoki.

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

147

Recursively it is here at Hayashi Studio where this chapter begins and where I am as I begin it. Revisiting the documentary promises possibilities for curricular re(-)turnings as I re-enter by re-engaging these geographical, historical, academic, and cultural time-space coordinates that too locate who I am and where I was born, have lived, and am now living on Vancouver Island. More succinctly, this chapter begins where it continues. A [re(cursive)]-turning homeward to these places(s), these people(s), and these moments in Cumberland BC.

(Re)searching for a Question Setting off. Aoki reminds: We in the curriculum world are led to ask the place of stories and narratives in understanding curriculum or doing curriculum research. (Aoki, 1992c/2004j, p. 273)

This question emerges: Where might be a place for this documentary’s stories and narratives in understanding curriculum or doing curriculum research?

Considering Aoki’s call and the question some more, I recall the scholar’s concerns regarding the word or and in this context, how it separates understanding curriculum from doing curriculum research. What meanings might arise if rather than “or” the two doings are connected with an Aokian “and” (e.g., Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q)? Transformed as: Where might be a place for this documentary’s stories and narratives in understanding curriculum and doing curriculum research? What possibilities arise when understanding curriculum and doing curriculum research include each other and perhaps even as double(d) imaginaries wherein each and the other are conceived as “[s]imilar, yet different at the same time[?]!” (Aoki, 1996b/1996c/ 2004q, p. 415). Taking one more Aokian turn to emphasize the dialectic of understanding curriculum and doing curriculum research, a similar yet at the same time different question appears: Where might be a place for this documentary’s stories and narratives in understanding curriculum amidst doing curriculum research?

Here Aoki (year/CNK) can be heard: “So understood, [could this be] . . . a space of conjoining and disrupting, indeed, a generative space of possibilities, a space wherein . . . newness emerges[?].” (Aoki, 1996a/2004g, p. 318) Provoked and compelled, I head back to Hayashi Studio with this quest(ion).

148

J. S. Thom

Re(-)turning(s) I am keen to revisit Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) to understand it more deeply and anew. Leaning back and sinking down into my chair, I notice that what I saw when I first watched the documentary has changed. Now what I see and how I am seeing is from a completely different perspective. Instead of watching each story as before, unfolding from within and sequentially portrayed as one account to the next, the stories present as if seen from below; that is, from below the surface of them in a space not along the temporal line of beginning to end. I (keep) watch and listen. Three threads from the film emerge and call for my attention. Soon images and more threads from the other stories untangle themselves, moving in ways that animate them beyond their individual contexts. Emerging, merging, and co-emerging, contexts blur. Time-spaces perceived earlier as past and present disappear. Here in this new and “radical” space of “root[s]” and “ground” (Radical, 2022) three forms take shape. No more segment-able stor(yl)i(n)es, these (hi)storied threads co-arise, move outwards, and converge with one another. In other instances, they disperse in different directions. Yet curiously, they remain threaded together. Not as a coordinated grid of warp and weft, but as live, lived, and living networks. What can be sensed and perceived as being live(d) networks are “beings” (Aoki, 1989, 1990a/ 1991d/2004h, p. 361) that in “their being enfold in [their] “becoming”” (e.g., Aoki, 1989, 1990a/1991d/2004h, p. 361), transforming again and again before my very eyes (and ears). I invite readers to explore these forms as they co-emerged from one thread to many during my return to Hayashi Studio. Represented as graphic-texts, they offer illustrative glimpses of and into these ever-evolving networks, each of which I distinguish as: seeing and hearing, dis-covering, and recovering. These networks, inherent in and integral to the documentary, give rise to curricular spaces wherein (re)new(ed) opportunities for understanding curriculum amidst doing curriculum research open. Hermeneutically and phenomenologically these spaces appear as a continual (re)emergence of questions. The questions as quests welcome readers to “linger” (e.g. Aoki, 1991c/2004e, emphasis added, p. 260), to “be[-]long” (e.g., Aoki, 1990c/1991g/2004q, p. 397), and in this sense, continue to journey as a recursive turning homeward, always and already beginning anew.

Seeing and Hearing Inside Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) Hayashi Studio opens with a series of black and white photographs. One after another, images of “white settlers” (00:24) flicker onto the screen: loggers cutting down old growth fir trees, in the background is a steam-powered sawmill; men with rifles and deer slung over their backs; miners; the construction of large wooden

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

149

structures; workers tending to railcars from the coalmine; and the Cumberland Volunteer Fire Department. ... one thread ...

“When I was a kid learning about BC, the history books spoke about white settlers trading fur and mining gold.”3

... many threads ...

“Cumberland, a bustling boomtown with a strong mill [and] mine.”4

“People joke about how white the island is.”5

“[T]his person ... dressed in a nice suit and sitting ... a businessman.”6

“I was brought along to think of myself as just like all my friends. So I knew about John A. McDonald and Laurier and I knew about Canadian history.”7

“There’s a pattern that’s replicated all over the province ... there’s usually a Chinatown, a Japanese settlement and then there’s also a black settlement next to it ... the worst land.”8

3

Tzakok & Gray 2019, 00:24. Tzakok & Gray 2019, 04:06. 5 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 23:20. 6 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 6:07. 7 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 08:41. 8 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 07:22. 4

Different from a line which at most extends back and forth between a beginning and an endpoint, this form evokes Aoki’s theorizing inspired by Deleuze & Guattari (1987) in which he conceptualizes “textured web[s] of connecting lines that like

150

J. S. Thom

rhizomean plants, shoot from here to there, and everywhere working through, nourished by the humus” (Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q, p. 419). These (hi)storied threads that include the photographs from Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray 2019) are akin to Aoki’s textured webs. Importantly, while it is possible to conceive them as a distinguishable rhizomean form-as-thing, alive they are distinctly a rhizomean form-in-motion. Even more striking than the ways that this form embodies and enacts Aoki’s curriculum theorizing is how phenomenologically it coheres with threads from the scholar’s own life (hi)story. Born and raised in Cumberland BC and of the Hayashi Studio era, Aoki recalls these events as “my personal world of my lived experiences” (Aoki, 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 348) (see also, Aoki, 1987c/2004o, 1990b/ 1991f/2004l, 1995a/1995b/2004i). Clearly different but certainly not disparate from the scholar’s theoretical threading, these (hi)storied ones of Aoki’s have to date (in)formed his scholarship and the curriculum field at large. Yet with and in Hayashi Studio it is Aoki as theorist and also most profoundly and mundanely “as a human being endeavouring to become more human” (1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 348) where he contributes to understanding curriculum and most specifically, uniquely, and inherently here now amidst doing this curriculum research with and in this context. ... Aokian threads ....

“[D]iverse mining towns—an Italian town, a Chinese town, and two Japanese towns— all situated in clearings carved out for them in the periphery of the main English town, lorded by the huge estate of the Dunsmuirs.” (Aoki 1995a/1995b/2004i, emphasis added, p. 303).

“[W]hat it means for me to experience ethnicity in British Columbia as a human being endeavouring to become more human (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 348).... As a Japanese Canadian in British Columbia ... has been and is experiencing being a Japanese Canadian in the time-space coordinates of my own historical situation into which I was born, and within which I have lived and am now living.” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, rearranged, p. 333).

“Anyone speaking Japanese during recess shall be strapped!” (Aoki 1995a/1995b/2004i, p. 303) “[F]or me to be one with the dominant mainstream group has never been my way of life, ever since I was born (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 334).

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

151

The Seen and the Heard as the Shown and the Told Now seen and heard, what to make of the texture of these webs? To start, it is worth remembering Aoki’s point that “life in the classroom is not so much in the child, in the teacher, in the subject.” As such, the vitality of this evergrowing, ever-changing form then reverberates as it is “live[d] in the spaces between and among” (Aoki, 1993a/2004c, p. 282). Curricular meanings inherent in Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) then, as informed by Aoki’s life (hi)story and theorizing, do not merely reside in each subject or in each story but deeper below the surface of them and “what there is between . . . relations which are not separable from each other” (Aoki, 1992c/2004j, p. 269). Such a perspective calls attention to the emerging, co-emerging, and interspersing interspaces – between – among – decentered – amidst the (hi)stories. Herein lies narratives and metanarratives as {[(meta)narrative(s)][(hi)stories]} which (re)texture and cohere the threads as “web[s] . . . that . . . shoot from here to there, and everywhere” (Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q, p. 419). Further still, within these radical spaces are ontological and epistemological “understandings we come to [know without question] through narratives and stores (sic) [stories] we daily tell and hear” (Aoki, 1992b/1993c/2004m, p. 202). Here Aoki might well see and hear what is shown and told as a rhizomean curricular landscape. Understanding curriculum as such prompts onto-epistemological ways of seeing and hearing that disclose what lies beneath the surface, what is grounded in and roots through the curriculum landscape.

Seeing and Hearing the Seen and Heard as the Shown and Told Across people(s), time, space, creed, class, and color, the stories and photos of Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) together with Aoki’s experiences elucidate how the {[(meta)narrative(s)][(hi)stories]} of “certain notions about ‘truth,’ ‘progress,’ ‘goals,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘unity and totality,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘objectivity,’ ‘endmeans,’” (Aoki, 1992b/1993c/2004m, p. 208) so shown and told, so seen and heard, so unquestionably unquestioned cohere as (meta)narratives and transform to be (come) the Master (meta)narrative (Aoki, 1992b/1993c/2004m). In these contexts, mainstream dominant culture plan(ed) and live(d) plays out on(c)e and (for) all as (dis)course – (dis)currere – curriculum – curriculum vitae. As such, how a culture’s discourse can be(come) life’s only curriculum that is seen and heard. Aoki’s critique of technology in which he draws upon Heidegger (1977) echoes this point. Similar sounds resound: “What is lost is our [seeing and] hearing; we become [blind and] deaf to the call of Be[(com)]ing . . . this loss . . . is, according to Heidegger, inevitable as long as we are caught in the [monovision (Aoki, 1979a/ 1979b/1983/2004n) and] univocity of metaphysical totality” (1990c/1991e/2004p, p. 396). Speaking in curricular terms, mainstream dominant culture as the curriculum

152

J. S. Thom

“become[s] a mainstream doctrine of educational thought” (Aoki, 1984/2004b, emphasis added, p. 128). True to the meaning of the word doctrine such (hi)storied (meta)narratives materialize as the “C & I landscape (a curriculum and instruction/ implementation landscape)” (Aoki, 1992c/2004j, p. 268) – that is, as “the . . . principles, dogmas, etc., in a . . . field of knowledge” and “whatever is taught or laid down as true by a master or instructor” (Doctrine, 2022). Connected to these threads are other threads with which curriculum becomes document from docere “to show, cause to know,” “make to appear right,” and “to take, accept” (Document, 2022). Language thus is no mere tool for communication but rather produces languaging effects (Aoki & Jacknicke, 2000; Aoki, 2004k). Here, Aoki describes “[t]his totalization [a]s reductionist in that other possible metaphors and perspectives are reduced out. In totalizing, one converts a way of life into the way of life. This sense-making approach is equivalent to opting for a monovision [and univocity] existence” (Aoki, 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, emphasis added, p. 347). ... (in)dwelling10 within the seen and heard of the shown and told ... In what ways, seen and heard, is Cumberland the spitting image of its curricular “map”11? How does Aoki’s curriculum as rhizomean landscape occasion further inquiry into the textured web of the Master {Meta[narrative (hi)(story)]} as it is nourished by the hubris of dominant mainstream society ... “the discursive world of [the] English?” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 303) What alternative meanings to those inherent in doctrine and document can be found in Hayashi Studio? Meanings which enable the film to be more than and different from curriculum as documentary? 10 11

For a description of dwelling and indwelling, see Aoki 1987c/2004o, p. 355. Culturally-specific features that define the world and how it is to be experienced (Bateson 1972; Bowers 1997).

Dis-covering During the Second World War and prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, there was already widespread suspicion and fear toward Japanese Canadians, particularly those living on the coast of BC. On March 1941, it became law for all individuals of Japanese ancestry in Canada over the age of 16 to register with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Tokitaro Matsubuchi of Hayashi Studio was commissioned by the government to take photographs of the Japanese Canadian citizens for their identification cards

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

153

(W. Matsubuchi in Tzakok & Gray 2019). Identifiable by photograph, thumbprint, name, address, age, height, weight, marks of identification, occupation, and signature, each individual “The Bearer, whose photograph and specimen of signature appear hereon, ha[d] been duly registered in compliance with the provisions of Order-in Council P. C. 117” (Canadian War Museum, 2022). They were required to carry these identification cards with them at all times. These events juxtaposed with myths about concern for the safety and protection of Japanese Canadian citizens during WWII foreshadowed the passing of the War Measures Act. The Act gave the federal government power to “evacuate” and intern all “persons of the Japanese race” (Supreme Court of Canada, 1946). While they were told that the evacuation was merely a temporary precaution and they would be free to return to their homes after the war, Japanese Canadians, the vast majority of whom were born in Canada effectively became the “enemy aliens.” Ian Mackenzie, the federal cabinet minister from BC at the time asserted: It is the governments (sic) plan to get these people out of B.C. as fast as possible. It is my personal intention, as long as I remain in public life, to see they never come back here. Let our slogan be for British Columbia: No Japs from the Rockies to the seas. (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2001)

Over the course of a year near 22,000 or 90% of all Japanese Canadian citizens in BC alone – men, women, children, and elderly were forcibly removed from their homes and communities. With each adult permitted one suitcase worth of personal belongings, they were taken as “prisoners,” transported, held captive in “clearing sites” as in “the high wire fence of Hastings Park [to live in the livestock barns] just like caged animals” (Hastings Park, n.d.). Here they waited for months in deplorable conditions to be then moved inland and east to as laborers on sugar beet farms, at road camps, or prisoner-of-war camps. All possessions which did not fit in their suitcases were left behind. Houses, properties, fishing boats, cars, and anything else of worth were seized by the government and sold or auctioned off for next to nothing. The funds were used to pay for the internment of the Japanese Canadians. Hayashi Studio closed and Cumberland continued to grow without the Japanese Canadian community. “And that’s where . . . hundreds of negatives [sat] untouched unseen for decades” (Tzakok & Gray, 2019, 20:13). Out of sight and out of mind. The removal of the Japanese Canadians from Cumberland, the selling off of their homes and belongings, and the demolition, rebuilding, and repurposing of their towns banished any trace of these people ever living or having lives there. That is, until four decades later when community members found and collected hundreds of glass plate negatives at local garage sales and donated them to the museum.

154

J. S. Thom

Inside Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) One after another, the lost and found photographs taken by Hayashi, Kitamura, and Matsubuchi fill the screen. There are portraits of men, women, children, and families from “every creed, class, and colour” (Tzakok & Gray, 2019, 00:45) as well as other photos which together reveal Cumberland as a “bustling boomtown” (Tzakok & Gray, 2019, 04:06) not only made up of white settlers who lived and worked there but “Japanese and Chinese coalminers, black Pennsylvania miners brought in to break strikes, Chinese communities that were the largest on Vancouver Island” (Tzakok & Gray, 2019, 00:31); baseball teams from Japanese towns No. 1 and No. 5; Japanese fishermen; and the Japanese language school which Aoki’s parents Sadayoshi and Masa Aoki, originally teachers from Tokyo, opened and operated until 1934. Common in those days, the school also served as home to the Aoki family where they lived upstairs (F. Bell in Tzakok & Gray 2019). The Japanese language school was the place where Ted, his siblings, and the Japanese Canadian children of Cumberland would go “at the end of the public school day . . . we hiked off to Japanese school jabbering in Japanese all the way” (Aoki, 1995a/1995b/2004i, p. 304). ... one thread ... “...uncovering the photos ... uncovered what was beneath the photos ...”13

13

Tzakok & Gray 2019, 05:29.

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

155

... many threads ... “... he’s dressed in a nice suit ... sitting there, you think he’s just a businessman ... but in fact he's pretending to be living a good life to send to a woman to have her hand in marriage ...”14 “... people die. Photos remain. If we didn’t have them, we’d have only half a story ...”15 “... we didn’t ever hear very much about Cumberland ...”16 “... our Japanese Canadian history was interrupted because of the 1942 internment. Anything that happened prior to 1942 were ... things that were not properly documented ...”17 “... the Cumberland photos were very important in the sense of telling a story that is not shown from the photos ...”18 “... who are these people in Cumberland? Who were they? ...”19 “... everything is gone ... there was a community and there’s nothing there now ...” 20 “... I can just imagine them playing on those streets ...”21 “... meeting each other as children or playing on the baseball diamond ...”22

“... the young people ... were interacting ...”23 “... I went to school with the Japanese from the mill and the one Mr. Doi, Mr. Kenichi Doi, it was his children that I went to school with. The fact is, the eldest daughter ... [tears]... was my best friend ... Mae ...”24

14

Tzakok & Gray, 2019 06:05 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 23:55. Tzakok & Gray 2019, 01:05. 17 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 05:40. 18 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 05:54. 19 Tzakok & Gray 2019, emphasis added, 01:02. 20 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 12:33. 21 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 01:10. 22 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 01:12. 23 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 07:41. 24 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 11:13 15 16

156

J. S. Thom

“... segregation ...” 25 “... everything that they did was within that village that they had constructed for themselves ...”26

“... it’s not easy for any community to overcome racism when the government of Canada is leading it ...”27

“... they didn’t take their family photos with them when they went to internment because they thought they were coming home ...”28 “... if you’re given two suitcases and a couple hours and you’ve got ten kids you’re not likely to be packing up the memoirs as much as the soap, the shoyu [soy sauce], your extra bedding—you don’t know how long you’re going to be there. Is it going to be a couple months? Is it going to be seven years? ...”29 “... I remember the cemetery... the tombstones... on their sides knocked over... not been cared for... all very overgrown and that was disturbing ...” 30 “... everything that people lost—their homes, their lives, it just vanished ...”31

“... erased history ...”32

25

Tzakok & Gray 2019, 23:28. Tzakok & Gray 2019, 07:26. Tzakok & Gray 2019, 08:06. 28 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 19:52 29 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 19:57 30 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 14:51 31 Tzakok & Gray 2019, 11:50. 32 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 04:34 26 27

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

157

... Aokian threads ... “... we learned to speak English out loud and to speak Japanese silently ...” (Aoki 1995a/1995b/2004i, p. 303) “... the experiences of the Japanese Canadian evacuees—the expropriation of their properties on the Coast and their forced evacuation ... [Chief Wolfe] drew a parallel between the Japanese Canadian experience and his own forbearers' experience— the expropriation of their lands and their appropriation of reserve lands— and of his own people, then working as seasonal labourers on the sugar-beet farms in southern Alberta ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 338) “... these experiences ... of ... Japanese Canadians attest to the psychic walls and constraints that kept us caged in or caged out depending on one’s perspective— unwanted strangers in our own homeland ... these experiences we experienced; silently but bone deep we experienced them ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 342-343) “... as a cadet in the Canadian Officers Training Corps, I marched toting a relic Lee Enfield ... what more can I offer my homeland than myself? ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 336) “... early in the fall of 1941, ... Commanding Officer, Colonel Shrum ... fired me a terse question ... “Aoki, what would you do should there be a war between Japan and Canada?” I responded ... “I am a Canadian, Sir. ... about two weeks later I received ... an honourable discharge from His Majesty's service—this before Pearl Harbor ...! ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 336) “... as a Japanese Canadian born in [Cumberland,] British Columbia.... [and] from the perspective of a Japanese Canadian Nisei[33] ... who experienced the evacuation, and who as an “evacuee” holds a special experiential relationship with those who relocated me, the "evacuators ... ” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 335-337). “... Japs ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 342) “... well educated cultural devils ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 340) “... enemies ... yellow bellies! ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 340) “... the invocation in Canada of the Emergency War Measures Act in 1941 ... brought about an abrupt change in the life of most Japanese Canadians. ... me [“graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce, and was two years into getting a Master’s degree”34] ... a sugar beet worker ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 339) “humanness crushed ... disturbed.” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 335)

33 34

Japanese for first generation of children born in the new country to Japanese-born immigrants. Wakefield et. al. 2012.

158

J. S. Thom

Dis-covering the Unseen and Unheard Aoki (e.g., 1991c/2004e, 1992b/1993c/2004m, 1995a/1995b/2004i) asks again and again, how we in the curriculum world can disrupt and decenter dominant master (meta)narratives “such that multiple meanings of the word curriculum can prevail” (Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q, p. 420). The scholar explains curriculum as “a rhizomean landscape comes into being by recognizing and legitimating live (d) curricula that . . . have been rendered invisible” (Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q, p. 420). Moreover, (meta)narratives as “voices” which Aoki (n.d.-a/1988b/1991d/ 1992a/2004l) elaborates as the “layered voices of teaching” then allows “beckon [ing] all these voices to speak to us, particularly the silent ones . . . [and] the place where the silent voices dwell” (p. 188). Implied here is “understanding more fully what is not said by going beyond what is said” (Aoki, n.d.-b/1981/2004t, p. 227). Aoki’s reminder is appropriate as he echoes Heidegger who “calls upon us to dwell more sufficiently where we already are, where we are thoughtlessly blind [and/]or deaf to the near where we already are” (Aoki, 1990c/1991e/2004r, p. 397). These (hi)storied threads from Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) and Aoki reveal a twentieth century Cumberland that stands in stark contradiction to the Cumberland previously seen and heard. Within this textured web of (meta)narratives are voices that speak to a multiplicity of live(d) curricula (e.g., Aoki, 1993c/2004m; Deleuze, 1987). Curricular (meta)narratives that sound and resound the dis-covering of the unseen and the unheard as foreclosed, invisible, ignored, and to that which we have become thoughtlessly blind and deaf. Seeing and hearing them, not only do they tell of the unknown but also the known and not shown, the not told or unspoken. Other (meta)narratives bare live(d) curricula of play, friendship, trust, love, and community. Still other (meta)narratives expose and lay open curricula of deceit, invasion, forced removal, interruption, silence, absence, imprisonment, discrimination, lies, pain, grief, and loss. Clear is how the unseen and unheard materialize—not only as live(d) experiences for the issei (Japanese for first generation of Japanese immigrants to North America) and nisei (Japanese for first generation of children born in the new country to Japanese-born immigrants), but also and differently for members of the mainstream dominant culture, as well as the descendants of both peoples. The (meta)narratives that emerge from the (hi)stories of Grace Thompson, Douglas Sadao Aoki, Sharon and Brent Hayashi, and Wendy Mastubuchi expound what Aoki discreetly summarized as “[t]hese experiences we experienced; silently but bone deep we experienced them.” In contrast, the (meta)narratives of (hi)stories by Mayumi Yoshida, Laura Cuthbert, Anna Rambow, and community members, especially best friend to Mae Doi Flo(rence) Bell, give rise to a double(d) imaginary which complements Aoki’s “similar yet different at the same time” (Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q, p. 415). While not arising from the members or direct descendants of the Japanese Canadian Cumberland community, these (meta)narratives nonetheless as part of the unseen and unheard of the internment reveal an alternate double(d) imagery; one that elucidates “different yet similar at the same time.” These (meta)narratives which offer different voices to live(d) curricula than the Master (Meta)narrative of the shown and the told, render them and it as wholly

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

159

entangled and co-emergent phenomena. As a multiplicity of the unseen and unheard, these voices disquiet, disrupt, and rupture the dominant curriculum landscape. In Aoki’s words, they provoke “earth quaking such that other meanings of ‘curriculum’ can surface” (Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q, p.418). (In)dwelling Within the Unseen and Unheard “What deeper seeing into, what deeper hearing ... does [the dis-covering of these unseen and unheard (meta)narratives] allow?” (Aoki n.d.1/1988b/1991d/1992a/2004l, p. 195) How do the “stories that inevitably tell who we are and, as well, our understanding of how our world is” (Aoki 1987c/2004o, p. 349) expose further entanglements of the unseen and unheard with the shown and told? In what ways does the curriculum of inhumanity “reduce life to a half-life” (Aoki 1990c/1991g/2004q, p. 380) —not only for Japanese Canadians but as well, for those of the dominant mainstream society?

Recovering Inside Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray, 2019) It has been well over a century since Senjiro Hayashi immigrated to Canada from Japan and opened the studio in 1912. Simply comparing the technological changes between glass plate photography and digital video cameras, life today appears completely different and much faster paced than the bustling boomtown of the twentieth century Cumberland BC. Yet these live(d) (hi)stories recorded with highspeed definition video cameras in 21st century Cumberland allow for a different kind of onto-epistemological seeing and hearing; one which Aoki (1991e/1991f/2004p) reorders as hearing and seeing then reimagines them as “sonare”2 and “videre.”3 Here hearing and seeing voices-and-images as they proliferate onscreen neither inundates nor overwhelms. Rather and unhurried, these (hi)stories and conversations slow out to enable meandering, a kind of walking that (meta)narratively remembers past sites of Cumberland with present ones.

2 Drawing on several authors including Berendt (1988), Derrida (1985), and Levin (1989), Aoki conceives sonare as the complement to videre. For example, “The eye takes a person into the world. The ear brings the world into a human being.” (Lorenz Oken, as cited by Berendt) 3 Aoki characterizes videre as “to see, thinking and speaking of what eyes can see.” (1991e/1991f/ 2004p, p. 373).

160

J. S. Thom

... one thread...

“... real absence ... you go to a place where there was a community and there's nothing there now... in the emptiness in all of that ... you still have this living [apple] tree there ... to have that literally living connection with those ... people ... extraordinary ...”39

... many threads...

“... the studio helped a lot ...”40 “... a ... couple [of] community members ... found boxes of [glass plate] negatives at garage sales in Cumberland and they donated them to the Museum ...”41 “... because there is this documentation or the [glass plate] negatives and my great-grandfather's work ... [people] can revisit their history ...” 42 “... my grandparents established and taught in the Japanese language school in Cumberland ... my father was born here and grew up here ... to get a return now at this age ... to get together at least parts of that, it's really precious ... precious to me ...”43 “... this is where the houses started ... we got 31 [Mt. Fuji] cherry trees to plant because there being 31 homes ...”44 “... especially in these times ... somebody who was not directly part of the community—wasn't Japanese Canadian ... [was] so intimately and integrally a part of the memorialization and the restoration ...”45 “... the community took it upon themselves to ... reconstruct [the Japanese Chinese cemetery] as much as possible ...”46 “... to share th[e]se histories and th[e]se stories ...” 47

39

Tzakok & Gray, 2019 rearranged, 01:16. Tzakok & Gray, 2019 07:46. Tzakok & Gray, 2019 16:58. 42 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 17:27. 43 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 rearranged, 09:11. 44 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 10:16. 45 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 10:29. 46 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 15:18. 47 Tzakok & Gray, 2019 17:16. 40 41

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

161

... Aokian threads...

“... I served the University of British Columbia as a professor of curriculum studies ... I often wended my way to Nitobe’s Garden ... wherein I find no two things alike, yet together possessing a unity of their own ... a dialectic world, a paradigm of reciprocity of differences, a dialectic world of positives and negatives, of things and no-things—a world that invites the viewer to become one with it ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 345-347) “... my son Douglas brought to my attention ... how [Nitobe (1905)] allows the two flowers [Sakura48 and rose49] to symbolize ... two ways of seeing, two ways of knowing, that is, as two metaphors ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 345) “... keeping the rose and the [S]akura [Japanese cherry blossom] in view simultaneously ... instead of the power of monovision, the power of double vision may be what I should seek. The significance to me of making sense of ethnicity as a Japanese Canadian in this way may well lie in the ever-present dynamic between the [S]akura way and the rose way.” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 347) “... as a conjunction of two cultural paradigms, separate folkways ... find unity in their reciprocal influences ... viewing the[se] ... as a face-toface situation allows possibilities of a dialectical unity.” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 345) “... to see life within the fullness of a double or even a multiple vision ... such an approach may reveal [and recover] more fully within my live[d] human condition self-imposed or socially imposed distortions that call for action—action that in the very acting will empower me to become a maker of my own history, a historical being engaged in his own personal and human be[com]ing ...” Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 345) “... in Nitobe’s view the [S]akura and the rose are roots within which we could dwell and which in our daily lives guide and help us to interpret our world and to act ...” (Aoki 1987b/1991b/2004d, p. 235) “... what it means ... as a human being endeavouring to become more human ...” (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n, p. 348)

48

Aoki (1979a/1979b/1983/2004n) explains: “In Nitobe's view of the [S]akura, seen as a being ‘ready to part with life at the call of nature,’ is reflected—without a touch of morbidity—the dialectic between life and death. Such a view illuminates the notion that without life there is no meaning in death, and that without death there is no meaning to life.” (p. 346) 49 Aoki (1979a/1979b/1983/2004n) explains: “In [Nitobe’s] view of the rose as a being ‘clinging to life, loth or afraid to die’ is reflected a worldview in which there is an attempt to shunt death into the periphery of our vision or even beyond, as if that were possible. Within such a worldview, one tries to understand and to define ‘life’ by looking at ‘life’ itself. Within this scheme of things life is defined by life; death is defined by death.” (p. 346).

162

J. S. Thom

Recovering the (Un)seen and (Un)heard The seen and the heard. The unseen and the unheard. These distinct and differently textured (meta)narrative webs while co-emergent, entangled, and inseparable, in all sorts of ways “refuse to be bound together neatly” (Aoki, 1993b/1993c/2004g, p. 291). However, while no two webs may be alike, somehow, they are as Aoki (1979a/1979b/1983/2004n) theorizes – dialectic reciprocities of differences that in their togethering possess a unity of their own. Despite the (un)seen and (un)heard web as fully entangled and enfolded in its contrasting curricular (meta)narratives illuminate unique sites of possibility for be-longing together (Aoki, 1990c/2004p). Not as an amalgamation or as a collection of parts, but spaces that recognize and recover “enunciatory spaces of difference . . . marked by different . . . cultural histories, different lineages, different languages, all involved somehow in articulating in multiple ways, positively and negatively, progressively and regressively, often conflictually, sometimes even incommensurably (Aoki, 1995a/1995b/2004l, emphasis added, p. 308). And while these spaces are “site[s] of tension [they serve] . . . to remind us that we, as humans, live in a divided way, in a realm of both this and that” (Aoki, 1993b/1993d/2004f, p. 292). Such spaces contrast with divisive spaces that separate “this” from “that.” Here as dialectic (meta)narratives of the (un)seen and (un)heard offers hope and promise for be(com) ing to be(come) “this and that” (Aoki, 1993b/1993d/2004f, p. 297). Further, Aoki (1996b/1996c/2004q) assures that in spite of being “ambiguously, ambivalently – difficult places [are] nonetheless spaces of generative possibilities” (p. 422). ... (in)dwelling within the (un)seen and (un)heard ... Where are places in which the hubris of the seen and heard can be humiliated in the presence of the unseen and unheard such that “humiliating shifts its meaning ... to ... that [which] is concerned with [the] lived space where people dwell communally[?]” (Aoki 1993b/1993d/2004f, emphasis added, p. 300) Where are places in which the seen and heard with the unseen and unheard might linger and be long as “a ... lived tension between this and that ... [w]here ... humiliation is no longer a word that merely sounds negative ... [but] can indeed be a sign of our humanness[?]” (Aoki 1993b/1993d/2004f, emphasis added, p. 300) How can (meta)narratives of the (un)seen and (un)heard dialectically give rise to recovering as restoring spaces in which we endeavour to become more human?... that is, in light of the Sakura and rose (Aoki 1979a/1979b/1983/2004n; Nitobe 1905), amidst the absence of Japanese towns No. 1 and No. 5, and in the presence of the Sakura and the apple tree in Cumberland?

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

163

Pressing Re(-)turn: Homeward to Where Away from the computer screen and out through window, the sun shines high above the tall cedars. Where has the morning gone? I turn off the computer. Setting aside this chapter (or so I think), I get up from my chair to go and visit my mother. I told her we will watch the online showing of the play Hold These Truths (Sakata, 2022). It is a drama based on the life of Japanese American nisei Gordon Hirabayashi (1918–2012), the University of Alberta sociology professor who was born in Seattle Washington and conscientiously resisted the WWII internment of Japanese Americans. Just as I am about to leave, a news announcement flashes on my cellphone screen: Japanese Canadian Legacies Honoured as Part of the Redressing Historical Wrongs. Today eight decades ago on May 21 Japanese Canadians – men, woman, children, and elderly first arrived at the BC internment camps in 1942. The BC Premier announces: The $100-million initiative is the result of engagement with the community, through the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC), and will include funding for: enhanced health and wellness programs for internment-era survivors; creating and restoring heritage sites for all British Columbians to explore and learn, including a monument to honour survivors of the internment era; and updating B.C.’s curriculum to teach future generations about this dark chapter in B.C.’s history. (Office of the Premier, 2022, emphasis added)

Here in the curriculum world, Aoki speaks to us. To curriculum developers, the question is a challenging one. “How can a curriculum be so built that it will touch something deep that stirs teachers and students to animated living?” “How can a curriculum-as-plan be so built that it has the potential for a curriculum-as-live [d] that is charged with life?” (Aoki, 1992c/2004j, p. 362)4

As I pause to reflect on Aoki’s call, the curricular spaces within Hayashi Studio (Tzakok & Gray 2019), Hold These Truths (Sakata 2022), this chapter, my family (hi)story, and my visit with my mother blur together. Time-spaces of past, present, and future disappear. Again, where I am is neither where I think I am nor where I thought I was going to be. The compass needle still a-spin. (In)dwelling in Aoki’s rhizomean landscape, I return to my original question – where am I to begin this chapter? Differently from the first time however, the question does not laugh back at me. Instead, in return, it re-turns and offers a space in which to linger with understanding curriculum amidst doing curriculum research:

While “live(d)” does not appear in this published work of Aoki’s, it is consistent with his later writings. For example, Aoki, 1996b/1996c/2004q.

4

164

J. S. Thom

... where are places ... for us in the curriculum world ... to begin as this chapter continues ... to recover the (un)seen and (un)heard stories and (meta)narratives ... with these peoples ... these places ... and these moments?

References Aoki, T. T. (n.d.-a). Layered voices in teaching: The uncannily correct and the elusively true. Paper presented at the Program for Quality Teaching Conference, sponsored by the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, Vancouver, BC. Aoki, T. T. (n.d.-b). Toward understanding curriculum talk through reciprocity of perspectives: An exploration in cross-paradigmatic communication. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, St. Louis, MO. Aoki, T. T. (1979a, Fall). On being and becoming a teacher in Alberta. Paper presented at the Conference on the Japanese Canadian Experience in North America, The University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB. Aoki, T. T. (1979b, October). Experiencing ethnicity in British Columbia. Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association, Vancouver, BC. Aoki, T. T. (1981, March). Toward understanding curriculum talk through reciprocity of perspectives. Toward understanding trans-national curriculum talk: An exploration in crossparadigmatic communication symposium. Symposium conducted at the Annual Conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, St. Louis, MO. Aoki, T. T. (1983). Experiencing ethnicity as a Japanese Canadian teacher: Reflections on a personal curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 13(3), 321–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.1983. 11075888 Aoki, T. T. (1984). Competence in teaching as instrumental and practical action: A critical analysis. In E. Short (Ed.), Competence: Inquiries into its meaning and acquisition in educational settings (pp. 71–79). University Press of America. Aoki, T. T. (1987a). Toward understanding ‘computer application’. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 7(2), 168–176. Aoki, T. T. (1987b, May). The dialectic of mother language and second language: A curriculum exploration. Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review Supplement, 1. Aoki, T. T. (1987c, May). Revisiting the notions of leadership and identity. Paper presented at the National Conference of the National Association of Japanese Canadians, Vancouver, BC. Aoki, T. T. (1988b, June). Layered voices in teaching: The uncannily correct and the elusively true (Invited talk). Retrieved from New Brunswick Department of Education. Aoki, T. T. (1989, March). Inspiriting the curriculum (Invited talk at the Alberta Teachers Association). Retrieved from W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki. Aoki, T. T. (1990a). Inspiriting the curriculum. The ATA Magazine, 37–42. Aoki, T. T. (1990b). Taiko Drums and Sushi, Perogies and Sauerkraut: Mirroring a half-life in multicultural curriculum. Paper presented at the Alberta Teachers Association Multicultural Education Council’s Annual Conference, Edmonton, AB.

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

165

Aoki, T. T. (1990c, June). The sound of pedagogy in the silence of the morning calm. Paper presented at the International Conference on Korean Studies, Seoul, Korea. Retrieved from Aoki (1991j). The sound of pedagogy in the silence of the morning calm. In T. T. Aoki (Ed.), Inspiriting curriculum and pedagogy: Talks to teachers (pp. 43–48). Aoki, T. T. (1991a). The dialectic of mother language and second language: A curriculum exploration. In T. T. Aoki (Ed.), Inspiriting curriculum and pedagogy: Talks to teachers (pp. 23–28). Curriculum Praxis, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta. Aoki, T. T. (1991c). Five curriculum memos and a note for the next half-century (Invited talk Curriculum Lecture Series, Department of Secondary Education Faculty of Education, University of Alberta). Retrieved from. W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki. Aoki, T. T. (1991d). Layered voices in teaching: The uncannily correct and the elusively true. In T. T. Aoki (Ed.), Inspiriting curriculum and pedagogy: Talks to teachers (pp. 1–6). Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta. Aoki, T. T. (1991e). The sound of pedagogy in the silence of the morning calm. In T. T. Aoki (Ed.), Inspiriting curriculum and pedagogy: Talks to teachers (pp. 43–48). Curriculum Praxis, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta. Aoki, T. T. (1991f). Taiko Drums and Sushi, Perogies and Sauerkraut: Mirroring a half-life in multicultural curriculum. In T. T. Aoki (Ed.), Inspiriting curriculum and pedagogy: Talks to teachers (pp. 35–39). Curriculum Praxis, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta. Aoki, T. T. (1992a). Layered voices in teaching: The uncannily correct and the elusively true. In W. F. Pinar & W. Reynolds (Eds.), Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text (pp. 17–27). Teachers College Press. Aoki, T. T. (1992b, April). Legitimating the lived curriculum: The other curriculum that teachers in their practical wisdom know.” Paper presented at the 47th Annual ASCD Conference, New Orleans, LO. Aoki, T. T. (1992c, May). In the midst of slippery theme-words: Living as designers of Japanese Canadian curriculum. Paper presented at Designing Japanese Canadian Curriculum Conference, North York, ON. Aoki, T. T. (1993a). The child-centered curriculum: Where is the social in pedocentricism? In T. T. Aoki & M. Shamsher (Eds.), The call of teaching (pp. 67–76). British Columbia Teachers Federation. Aoki, T. T. (1993b). Humiliating the Cartesian ego. SALT: Journal of the Religious and Moral Education Council, 15(2), 5–11. Aoki, T. T. (1993c). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3), 255–268. Aoki, T. T. (1993d, April). Humiliating the Cartesian Ego. Paper presented at the conference on Values and Technology: High Touch in a Hi-Tech World, Edmonton, AB. Aoki, T. T. (1995a). In the midst of double imaginaries: The Pacific community as diversity and as difference. Contents: Pacific Asian Education, 7(1 & 2), 1–7. Aoki, T. T. (1995b, April). In the midst of doubled imaginaries: The Pacific community as diversity and as difference. Paper presented at the Imagining a Pacific Community: Representation and Education Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Aoki, T. T. (1996a). Imaginaries of “east and west”: Slippery curricular signifiers in education. International Adult and Continuing Education Conference Proceedings, 1–10. Aoki, T. T. (1996b). Spinning inspirited images in the midst of planned and live(d) curricula. FINE, 7–14. Aoki, T. T. (1996c, April). Spinning inspirited images in the midst of planned and live(d) curricula (Invited talk at the Fine Arts Council Conference). Retrieved from W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki. Aoki, T. T. (1999). Toward understanding ‘computer application’. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Contemporary curriculum discourses: Twenty years of JCT (pp. 168–176). Peter Lang Publishing.

166

J. S. Thom

Aoki, T. T. (2004a). Bridges that Rim the Pacific. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 437–439). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004b). Competence in teaching as instrumental and practical action: A critical analysis. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 125–136). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004c). The child-centered curriculum: Where is the social in pedocentricism? In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 279–289). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004d). The dialectic of mother language and second language: A curriculum exploration. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 235–245). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004e). Five curriculum memos and a note for the next half-century. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 247–261). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004f). Humiliating the Cartesian ego. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 291–301). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004g). Imaginaries of “east and west”: Slippery curricular signifiers in education. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 313–319). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004h). Inspiriting the curriculum. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Pinar (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 357–365). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004i). In the midst of doubled imaginaries: The Pacific community as diversity and as difference. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 303–312). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004j). In the midst of slippery theme-words: Living as designers of Japanese Canadian curriculum. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 263–277). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004k). Language, culture, and curriculum. . .. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 321–329). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004l). Layered voices of teaching: The uncannily correct and the elusively true. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 187–197). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004m). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 199–215). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004n). Reflections of a Japanese Canadian teacher experiencing ethnicity. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 333–348). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004o). Revisiting the notions of leadership and identity. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 349–355). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004p). The sound of pedagogy in the silence of the morning calm. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 389–401). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004q). Spinning inspirited images in the midst of planned and live(d) curricula. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 413–423). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004r). Taiko Drums and Sushi, Perogies and Sauerkraut: Mirroring a half-life in multicultural curriculum. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 377–387). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004s). Toward understanding ‘computer application’. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 151–158). Routledge. Aoki, T. T. (2004t). Toward understanding curriculum talk through reciprocity of perspectives. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 219–228). Routledge.

Understanding Curriculum Amidst Doing Curriculum Research

167

Aoki, T. T., & Jacknicke, K. (2000, May). “Language, culture, and curriculum. . .” Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies President’s Symposium. Symposium conducted at the CSSE Conference, Edmonton, AB. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Berendt, J. E. (1988). The third ear: On listening to the world. Dorset, England: Element Books. Bowers, C. A. (1997). The culture of denial: Why the environmental movement needs a strategy for reforming universities and public schools. Albany, NY: SUNY. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (2001). Japanese internment British Columbia wages war against Japanese Canadians. Retrieved July 13, 2022, from https://www.cbc.ca/history/ EPISCONTENTSE1EP14CH3PA3LE.html Canadian War Museum. (2022). Warecalline forced relocation 1 – War Museum. Retrieved July 13, 2022, from https://www.warmuseum.ca/s3/supplyline/assets/swwteacherresources/archival documents/T7.2.2-Eng-Archival.pdf Claxton, N. X., Fong, D., Morrison, F., O’Bonsawin, C., Omatsu, M., Price, J., & Sandhra, S. K. (2021). Challenging racist ‘British Columbia’: 150 years and counting. University of Victoria and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (BC Office). Doctrine. (2022). In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved July 11, 2022, from https://www. etymonline.com/search?q¼doctrine Document. (2022). In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved July 11, 2022, from https://www. etymonline.com/search?q¼document Deleuze, G. (1987). Bergsonism. Zone Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Continuum. Fix. (2022). In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved July 11, 2022, from https://www. etymonline.com/word/fix#etymonline_v_40047 Hastings Park. (n.d.). 1942 Japanese Canadian internment at Hastings Park. Retrieved July 11, 2022, from http://hastingspark1942.ca/ Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. In The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.) (pp. 3–35). Garland Publishing. Hoshzaki, B. (Ed.). (1995). The vision fulfilled (Kanae rareta yume): Historical sketches of Central Okanagan Japanese Canadians, families, and community organizations 1894–1994. The Kelowna & District Association of Japanese Canadians. Ibuki, N. M. (2020, April 27). Hayashi Studio of Cumberland, BC: A documentary by Hayley Gray. Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants. Retrieved from http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/ journal/2020/4/27/hayashi-studio/ Kogawa, J. (1994). Obasan. Anchor Books. Nitobe, I. (1905). Bushido, the soul of Japan: An exposition of Japanese thought. The Knicerbocker Press. Office of the Premier. (2022, May 21). Japanese Canadian legacies honoured as part of redressing historical wrongs. Retrieved from https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022PREM0031-000800 Radical. (2022). In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved July 11, 2022, from https://www. etymonline.com/search?q¼radical Sakata, J. (dir.) (2022). Hold these truths, recorded online performance, viewed 21 May 2022. Storyhive (2019). https://www.storyhive.com/projects/3715 Supreme Court of Canada. (1946). The Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadian and Another, Appellants; and the Attorney-General of Canada and another, Respondents: UKPC 48, AC 87. Retrieved from http://uniset.ca/other/ths/cooperative.html Tzakok, E. (Producer), & Gray, H. (Producer, Director, Writer) (2019). Hayashi Studio. [Documentary]. Scopitone. Wakefield, J, Aschkinasi, J., Bates, A., Rodgers, L., McDonald, W., Kautz, N., Pentland, C.J., Palmitesta, K., Chan, C., Joel, I., Chia, C., & McElroy, J. (Eds.) (2012). Return: A commemorative yearbook in honour of the Japanese Canadian students of 1942. University of British Columbia.

Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum Maya-Rose Simon and Hopi Martin

Contents Beginning with Mother Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relating to Mother Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledging Mother Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walking Gently on Mother Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

172 175 177 178 179

Abstract

In Ontario, Early Childhood Education has embraced the question “how does learning happen” to guide pedagogical practices within the early years resulting in an emergent curriculum. This chapter examines “how learning happens” from an Ojibwe-Anishinaabe perspective which begins with Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth). Indigenous pedagogical practices center relationships to Mother Earth, resulting in a curriculum emerging from the Land. A critical starting place for considering an “emergent curriculum” from an Indigenous perspective is expressing gratitude for Doodoom Aki. Learning from a relational and wholistic approach weaves together relationships between humans and the more-thanhuman beings on Mother Earth. A Mother Earth-based pedagogy embraces natural cycles to deepen relational learning. A curriculum emerges based on teachings of reciprocity, gratitude, and generosity. Mino Bimaadiziwin (Good Life Way) supports Ojibwe-Anishinaabe educators in walking gently and kindly with children on Aki. Walking gently on Mother Earth with children is an everyday practice that supports the development of relationships, which are the foundation of Mother Earth-based curriculum and pedagogy.

M.-R. Simon (*) · H. Martin Edge of the Bush, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_43

169

170

M.-R. Simon and H. Martin

Keywords

Indigenous pedagogy · Anishinaabe · Mother earth · Early childhood education

In recent years, particularly in early childhood education, mainstream concepts of “curriculum” have begun to shift away from describing “what” teaching and learning should look like in publicly funded settings towards descriptions of “how learning happens.” In Ontario, where we live and work, the Ministry of Education now describes “Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years” as “How Does Learning Happen?” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014). That document was particularly inspired by pedagogies from Reggio Emilia, Italy, where concepts such as the “environment as the third teacher” have been found to support children and educators in what is commonly called “emergent curriculum” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014, p. 20). The concept of “emergent curriculum” generally refers to processes of co-construction of teaching and learning between children and their educators (Kashin, 2009). Within eurocentric studies of “social constructivism,” sharing power between students and teachers in terms of directing curriculum has been found to lead towards powerful learning opportunities for students and teachers (Kashin, 2009). While this growing trend is having positive impacts on improving the quality of early childhood education particularly in improving child-educator interactions (Government of Canada, 2019), this research and worldview of early childhood education does not take into account Indigenous Knowledge of “how learning happens” (Martin, 2021; Simon, 2021). From Ojibwe-Anishinaabe perspectives, life and learning comes from Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) which is not just an “environment,” but rather a living, breathing Being that sustains all Life. She is the Air we breathe, the Water we drink, the Earth we walk on, and our physical source of connection to the life-sustaining Fire from Mishomis Giizis (Grandfather Sun). Because she does all these things for us, some old-time Ojibwe refer to her as “Doodoom (Mother)” because we are completely dependent on her “doodoosh (breast)” for our life (Lavallée, 2022; Martin, 2021). Considering this vital role, some Indigenous people might say the “environment is the first teacher.” However, for Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, Nanaboozhoo is our “First Teacher” as he was the first one to share all these teachings with Anishinaabeg (Good Beings) (Lavallée, 2022; Martin, 2021). There is a big long story about that which is too big to fit in this chapter, but it describes how the people first heard Nanaboozhoo’s name and that there was some mystery to how that happened. This caused those first Anishinaabe to say his name like a question: “Nanaboozhoo?” “Are you my Teacher?” (Lavallée, 2022; Martin, 2021). To this day, there are still Traditional Anishinaabe who introduce themselves like that, not only to each other, but to every aspect of creation (Lavallée, 2022; Martin, 2021). This way of “beginning” has particular relevance for any discussion of pedagogy or curriculum in Anishinaabe Sacred Territory. Tragically, Indigenous approaches to education such as this is precisely what settler-colonial governments and churches tried to annihilate from public consciousness through the residential school system and eurocentric

Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum

171

curricula (TRC, 2015). In fact, even though the overt violence of the residential school system (Canada) may be in the recent past, the erasure of Indigenous Knowledge from teaching and learning in all levels of formal education continues this attempted annihilation (Chiefs of Ontario, 2012). A key aspect of settler-colonial curricula that continues to be forced on all nations/peoples is that human beings are somehow separate from the natural world. On the most simple level, the “earth” is seen as an inanimate object and “land” is something that can be bought, sold, and owned by a person or corporation. If children are taught from birth to acknowledge Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) and every aspect of Creation as family, it becomes very hard to see “land as a resource” that can be bought and sold for money. From Indigenous perspectives, the “environment” is not the “third teacher,” we are all children embraced equally by Mother Earth and Father Sky. Instead of adding new theories of pedagogy and curriculum, Indigenous Knowledge of “how learning happens” invites all peoples/nations to remember their relationships to Mother Earth, Father Sky, and every aspect of the creation. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that “reconciliation” is really about “establishing and maintaining respectful relationships” between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians, but that this process will never be complete unless we also reconcile with the natural world (TRC, 2015). From Indigenous perspectives, one of the first steps towards this “reconciliation” is developing a practice (Simpson, 2014). In other words, developing respectful relationships with the Fire, the Land, the Water, and the Air. In fact, it could be said that it is through these practices of developing respectful relationships that “curriculum” emerges. While every Indigenous Nation/People has their own way of renewing those relationships, here in Ojibwe-Anishinaabe Territory, Nanaboozhoo (Our First Teacher) taught us to always begin by giving Asemaa (Sacred Tobacco) before asking for anything (Lavallée, 2022; Martin, 2021). Starting with this simple act of Kindness and Gratitude is a very powerful antidote to the colonial premise of taking resources from lands and peoples. In the same way that we commonly introduce ourselves when we meet someone, we were taught to do the same thing when we offer our Asemaa (Sacred Tobacco) to Creation. This was our beginning place even before we thought about writing this chapter sharing Indigenous perspectives of “emergent curriculum.” Even before we can start working on “reconciliation” we really need to start with the “truth” of “who we are,” “where we are from,” “who our relations are,” and “how we are feeling in our hearts.” Ultimately, it is from those relations that curriculum emerges. Nanaboozhoo (Greetings in the Name of Ojibwe First Teacher), Indaawemaageniidoog, N’Kaanisiidoog (All my Sisters and Brothers)! Gizhewe’e Inini n’dishnikaas (Kind Man I am called). Waabaazheshii Doodem gaye (I am Marten Clan too). I have also been given the names Dr. Hopi Lovell Martin. My doctorate is in Developmental Psychology and Education where I first presented a ‘Seasonal Pedagogy’ through my research titled ‘Listening to Land as Teacher in Early Childhood Education’. I am named after the Hopi Nation and the Briton Warriors that first came to Mishiikenh Minissing (Turtle Island/North America) from England. My ancestry is Lenni Lenape, Briton, and European. I was born on the western edge of Massachusetts along the Housatonic River. I was raised in Tkaronto

172

M.-R. Simon and H. Martin

(Toronto), the Traditional Territory of Anishinaabeg, Tionontati (Tobacco Nation), HuronWendat, the Seneca Nation of the Hodenosaunee, and which is currently in the care of Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. It is within this context that I belong to Waabaazheshii Doodem (Ojibwe/Anishinaabe Marten Clan) through my Auntie and Ojibwe Traditional Teacher, Gokoomis (Grandmother) Jacque(line) Lavallee, Waabaazheshii Doodem (Marten Clan), Niizho Mide'ow (2nd Degree) in the Midewigaan (Three Fires Grand Medicine Lodge). Through this relationship I am nephew and Gichitwaa Oshkaabewis (Sacred Helper, Messenger, and Fire Keeper) following an old-time Traditional Ojibwe Path called Asemaa Nitam (Tobacco First). Gichi Miigwech (A Big Thank You)! Niigaaniikina, Niigaanis Akina Gwa (All my Relations)! Nanaboozhoo! My name is Maya-Rose Simon. I am Anishinaabe from the Chippewa Tribe of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and Métis. I was born and raised on the north shore of Lake Superior. My ancestors are from the upper peninsula of Michigan, where three Great Lakes come together. It is on these Lands and Waters that my Ancestors thrived, and we sustained. The Land helped form me and lives within my heart. I carry the teachings of these Land within me wherever I go. Toronto has been a place I call home for the past twenty years. It is on this land which is in the care of the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and the Huron-Wendat, that my own children were born and raised. This land and water lives within them as does our Ancestral land. For the past twenty-five years I have had the honor of walking with children as an early childhood educator. My first teaching position was at my Tribal child care centre in Sault Ste. Marie. It is there I began sitting with Elders and learning about our way of walking with our youngest community members. This experience became the foundation of my practice, which is now called Indigenous pedagogy. Through my educational journey, I have earned a Master of Arts in early childhood studies and am currently pursuing a PhD in curriculum and pedagogy. My research concentrates on Indigenous knowledge in the early years with a focus on Indigenous early childhood educators practicing Indigenous pedagogy in mainstream childcare. My hope is to articulate the significance of our walk with children. G’chi Miigwech.

Within these introductions we are describing each of our unique relationships to Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) and Dede Giizhig (Father Sky). Acknowledging and expressing gratitude for these relationships is the key starting place for considering “emergent curriculum” from Indigenous perspectives. Just like seeds require unique combinations of Fire, Earth, Water, and Air, each of us is a composite of unique relationships to Mother Earth and Father Sky. Like seeds emerge at their opportune time, the “curriculum” in each aspect of creation emerges in ways and times that are dependent on their relationships.

Beginning with Mother Earth The most powerful way to learn about “emergent curriculum” is to walk outside with a young child and feel that embrace of Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) and Dede Giizhig (Father Sky). While adults are generally conditioned to survive in disconnected, abstract environments such as in cars, on computers, or in air-conditioned houses and workplaces, children still have such a primal connection to going outside.

Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum

173

There is some research to suggest that if we can support children’s unstructured, landbased play for extended periods of time as kind and caring adults, children naturally follow an optimal pedagogy for developing relationships with the whole creation (Martin, 2021). However, accessing this land-based, emergent curriculum requires that adults value these intergenerational experiences and are willing to step back and allow children to engage in self-directed play out on the land (Martin, 2021). Unfortunately, “beginning with Mother Earth” and “non-interference” are not part of eurocentric models of education and most educators have grown up with only surreptitious relationships to Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) and Dede Giizhig (Father Sky). Furthermore, most colonized people are afraid of the bush and of children having immersive relations with the natural world. Often the first step towards recognizing Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) as the ultimate source of emergent curriculum is first (re)discovering that relationship for ourselves. Rather than address her as “land” or as a “resource,” recognizing her as Doodoom (Mother) and thanking her for our daily sustenance is a really powerful act of decolonization that we can then share with children. From this place of “Gratitude” we begin to see that she sustains and nourishes all beings on Earth. Even if you did not grow up with Traditional Practices like starting your day with Asemaa Nitam (Sacred Tobacco First), taking time at the beginning of every day to step outside and say “thank you” to the Sun that shines, Mother Earth beneath our feet, the Water we drink, and the Air we breathe is really powerful act of decolonization. Colonization is essentially about “taking” land and resources so starting with giving thanks, first in our own practice, and then with the children in our care, is a really powerful first step. Since most (if not all) Indigenous Peoples/Nations on the planet have teachings about this practice, learning to say even just a few words of gratitude in the language of the land you are on can be yet another powerful act of decolonization and “beginning with Mother Earth.” As OjibweAnishinaabe acknowledging Kindness and expressing Gratitude is the first step in our Mino Bimaadiziwin (Good Life Way). In Ojibwe-Anishinaabe, there are two ways of thinking with your mind and your heart. The mind guides us with logical action and the heart connects us to empathy, compassion and a path to our inner Spirit (Elder Mary, Chippewa Tribe of Sault Ste. Marie, personal communication 1998). To lead with our hearts is to experience encounters that are forged from an innate origin, expressed through patience, gentleness and kindness. A simple example of a heart encounter with a child is when an infant is learning to walk. The child will wrap their tiny hand around an adult’s finger and the adult tenderly supports the child’s body as they take their first steps. This moment fills the child and adult with joy. The encounter highlights a gentle, kind interaction that places child and adult into a reciprocal relationship first modeled by Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth). Mother Earth’s endless love for all her children guides our heart walk with children. Being completely present in our body, mind, spirit, and heart ensures the path to living well together or in Anishinaabe philosophy Mino-Bimaadiziwin (Good Life Way) is achieved. Elders speak of Mino-Bimaadiziwin, meaning “living the good life.” Anishinaabe are taught to follow a life based on Debewewin (Heart Truth) teachings of wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth, also known as the Seven

174

M.-R. Simon and H. Martin

Grandfather Teachings. As we walk with children, we give our hearts to support and nurture the next generation thus fulfilling Mino-Bimaadiziwin. Educators/adults have been given the responsibility of teaching, nurturing and leading the children in a “good way” (Bédard, 2006, p72). It is through this walk that we begin to give and sustain like Mother Earth. The rhythm of life is found on the Land; it is in the seasonal cycles of plants, animals, and the more-than-human. The rhythmic heartbeat is the first sound a child hears and feels and it becomes a soothing lullaby. This rhythmic life-giving beat is programmed into our being and will continue throughout life. This may be the reason why children are naturally in tune with the rhythms of Mother Earth. On the Land, children will notice the beating wings of a bumblebee in spring, the rhythmic march of ants in the summer, the dance of leaves in the fall and the quietness of winter. The children are curious about Mother Earth’s life cycles and share with us their teaching to slow down and notice. Witnessing the rhythm of life requires educators to be fully present in the moment with the child. A pedagogy of being supports relationship building with self, others, Land, and the more-thanhuman. It is within the moments of slowing down and being that authentic relationships can develop. Maya shares a story from her walk alongside children, practicing a pedagogy of being and noticing the rhythms of life with children. There was a hill near the centre in which the children and I would visit daily. We called it the dandelion hill for in the spring it would be covered in yellow blossoms. It was early summer, the air was warm, and the sun was shining bright. The preschool children and I walked to dandelion hill and sat at the top. Some of the children went off to pick flowers, while others noticed ant hills. The children explored the hill by themselves, in pairs and small groups. They would come back and share their stories with me or call me over excited by their discovery. After a while the children made their way back to where I was sitting on the hill. Some had treasures and others had stories that they eagerly shared with their friends. A quiet contentment settled in; we were just together on dandelion hill. One child laid down and one by one we all laid on Mother Earth watching the white clouds cross the blue sky. I could feel Mother Earth and see the rhythm of life all around me. I looked at the children nearest to me and they had the sweetest smiles upon their faces. As they noticed me looking, small giggles then full belly laughter erupted. We were all there experiencing the beauty of Mother Earth. We were completely in the moment, just simply being.

Spending uninterrupted time on the Land with children helps educators to remember their own connection with Mother Earth. When an educator stops to notice the beauty of life surrounding them, it can inspire a relationship that is rooted in heart learning transforming their pedagogical practices. Learning to listen to our heart encourages educators to encounter the child in an “ethical space.” An “ethical space” is where two individuals engage with one another as equals, yet it is their individual uniqueness that constructs a theoretical space for engagement (Ermine, 2007; Simon, 2022). In an “ethical space” participants come as fully actualized individuals with lived experiences, knowledge, history, social identity markers, and their own relational realities (Simon, 2022). This concept of a child being actualized is in direct contrast to the western motivational theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow theorizes that a person’s basic and psychological needs

Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum

175

must be met prior to achieving self-actualization (McLeod, 2018). According to Maslow (1970), self-actualization is the highest state of being where the individual is self-aware, realizing their personal potential, capable of self-fulfillment, and seeking personal growth. Maslow characterizes a self-actualized person as capable of spontaneous thought and action, highly creative, an appreciation of basic lifeexperiences, establishing deep relationships, and able to problem-solve (McLeod, 2018). Maslow’s explanation and characterization of self-actualism is similar to Indigenous thoughts regarding self-actualization. However, where they differ is Maslow (1970) estimates that only two percent of the population would achieve self-actualization, therefore the majority of humans never experience selfactualization. In the Indigenous worldview, every person is self-actualized upon birth. It is within our relationships with yourself, family, community, Land, and the more-than-human that we become actualized. From birth an individual is in a state of being, with gifts, teachings, and medicine. Children therefore are active participants in their lives and within all of their environments. It is this view of the child that enables an educator to meet a child in an ethical space of engagement. Readings (1996) theorizes an ethical encounter as a pedagogy based on listening, relationship, and obligation. From an Indigenous standpoint the ethical encounter is grounded in relationality, respect, and relational accountability (Simon, 2022). Meeting the child in the ethical space changes the relationship between teacher and child and disrupts the traditional western educational hierarchical dynamics. Instead of teaching or facilitating, the educator begins to walk alongside and with the child. An educator walking with children holds space for the child to engage in theory and knowledge development with Land and all their relations, human, and more-than-human. The educator models how to walk with gentleness and kindness on Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth).

Relating to Mother Earth Developing a practice of “Beginning with Mother Earth” every day in deep, meaningful ways, especially with young children, will naturally progress towards children and adult educators developing relationships with Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth), Dede Giizhig (Father Sky), and everything in between! Anishinaabe worldviews are relational and wholistic in nature. Developing and acknowledging these interrelationships is what many Ojibwe teachings, songs, prayers, and introductions will end with some version of acknowledging “Niigaaniikina (All My Relations).” Unlike western pedagogies and curricula which take their power from dividing knowledge into discrete aspects or disciplines, Traditional Indigenous Knowledges, pedagogies, curricula tend to weave relationships together. For example, the simple act of a kind and caring educator taking young children out on the land to express their gratitude and explore the natural world weaves relationships and an emergent curriculum between human beings and our interrelationship with Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth), Dede Giizhig (Father Sky), and everything in between. Starting with this kind of “Mother-Earth-based” pedagogy means both educator/parent and child are brought

176

M.-R. Simon and H. Martin

into the natural cycles that weave these relationships. For instance, starting each day with gratitude facing East towards the rising Sun (and Moon) establishes a grounded sense of awareness that will reveal aspects of the land that may have been hidden by the dim light or morning fog. As our senses adjust, both children and adults alike will start to notice things they may not have seen before. Key to extending this experience is encouraging adults and children to move towards what captures their awareness so that they can develop deeper relationships with that “emergent curriculum” through all of their senses. In time and with practice, this “Mother-Earth-based” pedagogy begins to reveal the natural cycles of life that are all around us and that weave together our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of life in relationship to Fire, Earth, Water, and Air. As educator and child/ren develop a mutual trust this “Mother-Earthbased” pedagogy begins to embrace a walk between child and educator where Mother Earth becomes the context and relationship of learning human and morethan-human processes. While book learning has its place in eurocentric pedagogies and curriculum, an emergent curriculum from Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) requires lived, wholistic (Mind, Body, Soul/Spirit) experiences of being on the Land. Both educator and child/ren become active agents within this wholistic pedagogy. This requires long, unstructured, and uninterpreted times to explore, investigate, wonder, and think with, on, and about Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth). There is wisdom in the early steps of young children when they step out onto Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth). It can be seen in the child’s bouncing steps of joy as they have the chance to freely explore the Land. The uninhibited play of young children on the land demonstrates the power of an emergent curriculum in relationship with Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth). Key to supporting this kind of unstructured play is respecting the emerging sovereignty of a child. If as adults/educators we are focused on saying “no” and pedagogies that direct what the child is learning, then we are missing the innate wisdom of how learning happens naturally. If as educators we are able to listen, observe, express gratitude, and reciprocate the beautiful discoveries that children are making on the land, then we are beginning to support the natural relationship that exists between human development and the natural processes inherent in every level of the creation (Martin, 2021). From this perspective, the curriculum emerges naturally in relationship to the Fish, the Plants, the Animals, the Elements, and every other aspect of Creation that we interact with as children, youth, adults, and into our maturity. If the Fish, the Plants, the Animals, and the Elements are our teachers, then educators must create a space for the more-than-human lessons to be taught to children and in doing so the interconnection of life can be made visible. Unstructured time on the Land holds space for the more-than-human teachers allowing children to build a relationship with all of Mother Earth’s relations. A story from Maya’s life experience as an early childhood educator showcasing this idea. It took place in the spring when the peonies in the preschool garden were starting to bud. The children spent every morning in the garden observing the signs of spring. A child noticed ants marching up and down the peony plant. For days, the children looked closely at the ants

Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum

177

and peonies, wondering what attracted the ants. Every day, the children observed the ants’ behavior with curiosity. They noticed the majority of ants were only climbing the peony, not the other flowers and wondered why. In the western context, I could have shared my knowledge about peonies and ants, filling them with information instead we spent more time in the garden observing the flowers and ants. One day a child noticed the peony had small sticky droplets along the green leaf ridge that the ants gathered around and upon closer inspection they noticed the ants eating the thick leaf that held the flower petals inside. They theorized the peony created the sticky droplets to attract the ant, who ate the leaf to help the peony to bloom. After a couple of weeks of waiting for the peonies to bloom, one child becomes inpatient and decides to place the peony bud in his mouth. He pulled it out looking for signs of it starting to bloom and was greatly disappointed. He explains he thought he could help it like the ant “But I’m not an ant!” A few days later, the children arrive in the garden to find the peonies blooming.

In this case the children bear witness to the interconnected relationship between the peony and the ant. The peony and ant become the children’s teachers about interspecies alliance, cooperation, and patience. The children also learned about their place within the relationship of the peony and ant. Sometimes, we are only meant to be observers to Mother Earth’s processes. Shifting our mindset to include more-thanhuman teachers disrupts western educational tendency of human centrism and places humans into the democracy of species.

Acknowledging Mother Earth When the curriculum emerges from “Beginning with Mother Earth” and allows for “Relating to Mother Earth,” it is crucial that we begin to acknowledge that the learning that comes through these relationships is quite different from the eurocentric curricula we were taught in school. For example, the pattern of learning that emerges from unstructured play is quite different from the linearity of a typical lesson plan. When children experience the wonders of the natural world as sovereign beings without the imposition of adult agendas, their play follows the natural life cycles of Plants, Fish, Animals, and Elements (Martin, 2021). When we acknowledge this interrelationship between life and learning (Martin, 2021), we begin seeing the interconnection between human development and all of the other children of Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) and Dede Giizhig (Father Sky) and their teachings of reciprocity, gratitude, and generosity become perceivable. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her keynote address at Bioneers (2014), offers an inspiration in how reciprocity and gratitude can be weaved into education curriculum. She tells the story of the “honorable harvest” given to the Anishinaabe by the Plants (Bioneers, 2014). The “honorable harvest” is a covenant of reciprocity based on an ethical protocol between humans and the more-than-human (Bioneers, 2014). It recognizes the sovereignty and rights of all living things. Kimmerer describes the process of the honorable harvest as follows: “never take the first to ensure the survival of the species. . . ask permission; therefore, you are accountable for taking the life. . .listen for the answer. . .if the answer is no, go home. . .take only what you need with the less amount of harm. . . use everything that you take. . .be

178

M.-R. Simon and H. Martin

grateful. . .share with others human and more than human, and reciprocate the gift” (Bioneers, 2014). In Simon (2022), Indigenous early childhood educators share stories of children engaging in the “honorable harvest.” The educators modeled how to ask the Plants for permission to harvest. In Simon (2021), a story is shared describing how the children and educator harvest the Sacred Medicine of Cedar. The children presented the tree with an offering and asked to pick a few of its branches to be used in their morning smudge. The children listened with their hearts for an answer before harvesting the medicine. At group time the children smudged and gave thanks to all of their relations, thanking the Plants, the Animals, and the Water for all they give (Simon, 2021). The honorable harvest and the thanksgiving address supported the children’s understanding of the interconnection between human and the more-than-human relations thus deepening the immersion into the interdependency of life. Ceremonies such as this “honorable harvest” are key to “Acknowledging Mother Earth,” but we would argue that they cannot ethically be done without first “Beginning with Mother Earth” and “Relating to Mother Earth.” In other words, “Acknowledging Mother Earth” through Ceremony is not the starting place, but a natural progression that may evolve through daily practice and developing necessary relationships. At the heart of “Acknowledging Mother Earth” is the expression of gratitude. While Anishinaabe practices of offering Asemaa (Sacred Tobacco) or learning to pray in Anishinaabemowin (Anishinaabe language) are relevant steps within our contexts, finding practices within one’s own traditions of “giving before taking” and offering words of gratitude to all aspects of creation is a powerful first step towards decolonizing the settler-colonial models of education. These simple acts have tremendous power to shift peoples’ mindsets away from delivering curriculum towards inviting it to emerge naturally in relationship to children’s land-based play. Unless we as educators have developed our eyes and ears to see these relations emerging from land through our own lived and embodied practices, it is nearly impossible to lead children gently down this path towards the “edge of the bush” where settler-colonial education ends and Ojibwe/Anishinaabe Bush Knowledge begins (Martin, 2021).

Walking Gently on Mother Earth Unlike most eurocentric pedagogies where educators are encouraged to develop a plan in relationship to a written curriculum, emergent curriculum from an Anishinaabe perspective is revealed by “walking gently on Mother Earth.” “Beginning with Mother Earth” in Kindness and Gratitude, “Relating to Mother Earth” through lived, wholistic, multisensory experiences on the land naturally causes processes of “Acknowledging Mother Earth” through Ceremony. Following this natural process shifts the goals of education from achieving outcomes as is typical in eurocentric curriculum towards a natural way of “walking gently on Mother Earth.” This “Mother-Earth-based” pedagogy happens through lived, relational experiences on the land. It is a daily walk alongside children, where educators role model gentleness and kindness to all our relations. This is a patient walk that allows the curriculum to

Mother Earth as Emergent Curriculum

179

emerge in relationship to both adult and child learners over time. Indigenous peoples all over the world often talk about “lifelong learning” whereas eurocentric curriculum tends towards the achievement of “benchmarks” and “outcomes” within human timeframes. Learning out on the land through emergent curriculum may seem to take more time, but the intention is for the relationships to last a lifetime. Educators demonstrate this patience, kindness, and gentleness when they can make space in their own minds and hearts for something as simple as allowing a beetle to walk across the playground with non-interference. This is not a respect for our more-thanhuman relations that can be taught in a book or included on a curriculum plan. In fact, this simple act can really only be achieved through processes of “Beginning with Mother Earth,” “Relating to Mother Earth,” “Acknowledging Mother Earth,” and “Walking Gently on Mother Earth.” Walking gently on Mother Earth is an everyday practice that builds a relationship between human and the more-than-human. It is within the everydayness that a resurgence of Indigenous Knowledge of Mother Earth can provide deeper insights into relationships and radiating responsibilities (Corntassel & Scow, 2017). Leanne Simpson (2013) speaks of “radiating responsibilities” which links our relationships to actions of resurgence and renewal. The everydayness of lived experiences with and on the Land helps the renewal of relationality with Mother Earth. Thus, the storying of Mother Earth occurs in familiar settings, experiences, and actions at the intimate level of living. It is the everyday engagement with Land in simple ways that allow us to gain insight into the interconnection of human and more-than-human kinship networks. Emergent curriculum from Anishinaabe perspectives ultimately begins in relationship to our shared Mother Earth. While a “Mother-Earth-based” curriculum and pedagogy ultimately needs to be expressed by kind and caring educators from all Nations/Peoples, it is critical to acknowledge and develop relations with Indigenous Knowledge of “how learning happens” in order to create the “ethical space” required to establish and maintain respectful relationships between peoples and our shared parents: Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) and Dede Giizhig (Father Sky). Critically, these relationships need to develop in self-determined ways, over time, through everyday early childhood practices. The educator must consciously choose to walk with intention on Mother Earth with children while ensuring local Indigenous ways of knowing and being are guiding the practice. Through the process of self-reflection the examination of lived relational aspects of being can effectively disrupt the eurocentric curricula that continue to dominate early childhood education, resulting in the decolonization and resurgences of Indigenous ways of knowing and being on the Land with children.

References Bédard, R. (2006). Anishinaabe-Kwe ideology on mothering and motherhood. In D. M. LabellHarvard & J. Corbiere Lavell (Eds.), Until our hearts are on the ground: Aboriginal mothering, oppression, resistance and rebirth. Demeter Press. Bioneers. (2014). Robin Kimmerer-Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teaching of Grass [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼cumEQcRMY3c.

180

M.-R. Simon and H. Martin

Chiefs of Ontario. (2012). Our children, our future, our vision: First nation jurisdiction over first nation education in Ontario. Toronto: Chiefs of Ontario. Corntassel, J., & Scow, M. (2017). Everyday acts of resurgence: Indigenous approaches to everydayness in fatherhood. New Diversities, 19(2), 55–68. Ermine, W. (2007). The ethical space of engagement. Indigenous Law Journal, 6, 193–203. Government of Canada. (2019). Defining and measuring the quality of Early Learning and Child Care: A literature review. Retrieved from Employment and Social Development: https:// www.canada.ca/content/dam/esdc-edsc/documents/programs/disability-savings/2018definingquality-elcc-report-en.pdf Kashin, D. (2009). Reaching the top of the mountain: The impact of emergent curriculum on the practice and self-Image of Early Childhood Educators. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Toronto. Lambert Academic Publishing. Lavallée, J. (2022). Asemaa Nitam: Indigenous healing practices within the Ojibwe tradition. Unpublished Doctoral Research Project, University of Toronto. Martin. (2021). Listening to land as teacher in early childhood education. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Maslow, A. H. (1970). Motivation and personality. Harper & Row. McLeod, S. A. (2018). Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Retrieved from https://www.simply psychology.org/maslow.html. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2014). How does learning happen: Ontario’s pedagogy for the early years. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. Readings, B. (1996). The university in ruins. Harvard University Press. Simon, M. R. (2021). Making space for indigenous knowledge in an urban child care. In Z. Abawi, A. Eizadirad, & R. Berman (Eds.), Equity as praxis in early childhood education and care. Canadian Scholars. Simon, M. R. (2022). Indigenous early childhood educators in mainstream child care. Thesis, Ryerson University. https://doi.org/10.32920/19450301.v1. Simpson, L. B. (2013). “I am not a nation-state.” Unsettling America: Decolonization in theory and practice. https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/i-am-not-a-nation-state/. Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3, 1–25. TRC. (2015). Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the TRC of Canada. Retrieved from Truth and Reconciliation Commission: http://www.trc.ca/ websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_ 2015.pdf.

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic Susan Jagger and Meghan Hayward

Contents Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recognizing the Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research Community and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Engagement with the Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mural and Walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Thinking About the Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Land Ethic in Curriculum and Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

182 182 184 186 187 188 189 191 191 193 196 197 198

Abstract

Aldo Leopold’s (1949/1966) A Sand County Almanac offers its readers a glimpse into the natural history and ecology of the natural communities of his lived experiences. Along with the works of other nature writers, its essays helped to guide and motivate the environmental movement in the mid-twentieth century and confirmed ecology’s place within science. Leopold invites readers to review and expand on their understanding of community to one that is inclusive of all elements – soils, waters, plants, and animals – that comprise our natural world,

This project was funded by a TMU Faculty of Community Services Seed Grant. S. Jagger (*) · M. Hayward School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_32

181

182

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

collectively identified as the land. Leopold extends his thinking of the land and our place within it in his outlining of a land ethic in which he calls for a change in our role as “Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (1949/1966, p. 240). The land ethic embodies a respect of all community members and of the inherent relationships between those community members. This chapter grows from Leopold’s notion of the land, and how the land and a land ethic are understood and embraced by elementary school children as we explore how children engage with and think about the land. Keywords

Land ethic · Environmental education · School garden · Land-based curriculum · Elementary curriculum

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic Aldo Leopold’s (1949/1966) A Sand County Almanac offers its readers a glimpse into the natural history and ecology of the natural communities of Leopold’s lived experiences. Along with the works of other nature writers including Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir, its essays helped to guide and motivate the environmental movement in the mid-twentieth century and confirmed ecology’s place within science. Leopold invites the reader to review and expand on their understanding of community to one that is inclusive of all elements – soils, waters, plants, and animals – that comprise our natural world, and he identifies this collective as the land. Leopold extends his thinking of the land and our place within it in his outlining of a land ethic in which he calls for a change in our role as “Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land to plain member and citizen of it” (1949/1966, p. 240). The land ethic embodies a respect of all community members and of the inherent relationships between those community members. This chapter grows from Leopold’s notion of the land, and how the land and a land ethic are understood and embraced by elementary school children as we explore how children engage with and think about the land.

Recognizing the Land Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture. (Leopold, 1949/1966, p. xvii–xix)

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

183

While this chapter draws from Leopold’s notion of a land ethic, its embodiment cannot be considered without recognizing and respecting the concept of Land.1 Embraced by Indigenous communities around the world, in Indigenous worldviews, Land is understood to include the physical and geographical spaces that we live on and with – all water, earth, and air (Styres et al., 2013). However, Land is not a fixed entity; it is dynamic and changes over time through our shared dwellings and the relationships that inherently persist and shape the Land are an integral part of Land itself. In addition, and significantly, Land is more than the material space upon which we dwell. It runs deeper into place and relations with and in places and is grounded in the spiritual presences in the Land. It is where “the world of spirit is interconnected with the world we see and interact with on a daily basis” (Haig-Brown & Hodson, 2009, p. 168). Land is a living and sentient being (Styres et al., 2013). While dynamic and ever changing, what persists in the Land are its histories, the narratives of relations and interrelations between and among animate and spiritual beings that happened before, continue to happen, and will happen in the future. These stories of the Land shape all of those who live with it across time immemorial; Cajete (1999) identifies this as a theology of place as he shares that “the land has become an extension of Indian thought and being because, in the words of a Pueblo Elder, ‘It is this place that holds our memories and the bones of our people. . . This is the place that made us’” (p. 3). Of particular significance is the understanding of Land as a place of decolonization and reconciliation as we read the stories of the Land, those previously buried or ignored, and we necessarily turn to healing the wounds that have hurt our relations and living respectfully and carefully with the Land (Bowra et al., 2021). In its persistence and prevalence in all interactions, we can recognize the centrality of Land in the foundational tenets of Indigeneity: Values that privilege the interrelationships among the spiritual, the natural, and the self; a sacred orientation to place and space; a fluidity of knowledge exchange between past, present, and future; and an honouring of language and orality as an important means of knowledge transmission. (Greenwood & de Leeuw, 2007, p. 50)

It follows that Land is a complex space in which “the interconnectedness and interdependency of relationships, an understanding of cultural positioning, as well as subjectivities that extend beyond the borderlands of traditional mainstream conceptualizations of pedagogy” (Styres, 2011, p. 722). In curriculum and pedagogy, we see that learning based on the Land embraces that all places were once,

1

In the literature and in practice, knowledge keepers, scholars, and practitioners use land, Land [e.g., Styres & Zinga, 2013], and Land [e.g., Zinga & Styres, 2012; Styres et al., 2013]. In some cases, these choices may be editorial while others are very much intentional. For example, Zinga and Styres [2012] and Styres et al.’s [2013] use of Land highlights its inclusion of animate and spiritual realms and their complex entanglements. In sharing our research in this chapter, we use Land to respect its inherent interconnections which may or may not explicitly include spirituality.

184

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

continue to be, and will always be Indigenous lands. Here we see a deepening divergence from place-based education which does not consciously or consistently connect to Indigenous stories, knowledge, and wisdom of places. Furthermore, the often perceived urban-rural dichotomy is erased in Land-based learning. On Turtle Island, all North American cities sit on traditional Indigenous land. Learning on the Land in cities allows for the interaction stories of living and nonliving and constructed to be realized, and the complex and connected layers of natural and built environments, colonialism, capitalism, and Indigenous resistance to be unearthed (Bowra et al., 2021; Simpson, 2014; Styres et al., 2013). Bowra et al.’s (2021) review of literature on Land-based learning highlighted the shared themes across programs and these include the focus on Land as first teacher – the basis of all teachings and central to Indigenous education, holistic perspectives, Land as a place for self-reflection, and Indigenous resistance to colonial structures and reinhabitation of Land. They also share the wise practices for Land-based learning: community-initiated and community-run activities, involvement of Indigenous youth, traditional language instruction with Land-based activities, and sustenance practices that reconnect and revitalize traditional knowledge and wisdom, and the barriers of capitalism and climate change that can impede and upset Land-based learning (Bowra et al., 2021).

Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (Leopold, 1949/1966, p. 262)

With the foundational and traditional understandings and relations of the Land in mind, we now turn to the life, writings, and ethics of Aldo Leopold, an American ecologist, forester, philosopher, and author. Born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, Leopold’s childhood was spent outdoors, exploring flora and fauna near his home and enjoying birding and hunting. He attended Yale University in one of the first forestry schools, and following graduation he began work with the US Forest Service, a career that would span over a decade and see him relocating to and living in the Southwestern USA. Leopold returned to the Midwest in the 1920s and was appointed to a professorial position at University of Wisconsin in wildlife management in 1933. Here, he worked with the Arboretum Committee to research and reestablish native landscapes and plant communities, including the oak savanna and tallgrass prairie. Over his career with the Forest Service and his time in Wisconsin, Leopold was a prolific writer, keeping detailed field journals of observations and occurrences in the lands that he visited and dwelled with and in. His narratives were not only accounts of his first-hand experiences, they were also reflective and critical examinations of the impact of human interaction and dominant relationships with the

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

185

land. Exemplary and arguably most noteworthy of Leopold’s philosophical nature writings is A Sand County Almanac and in particular its essay “The Land Ethic.” Leopold’s land ethic recognizes that ethics emerges from the individual’s inclination to cooperate in spite of their instinctual drive to compete for their place and identity within a community of interdependency and extends those cooperative and respectful relations to include the entirety of the natural community: “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (Leopold, 1949/1966, p. 239). This recognition necessarily shifts the role of humans “from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold, 1949/1966, p. 240) and requires the enacted respect of all other members of that community and of the collective community, the land, itself. Following Buber (1923/1958), we can see in this the analogous move from an I-It separation from the world to an I-Thou relationship and membership in the environmental whole. We can also recognize the Indigenous worldview of interconnectedness and the acknowledgement of “all my relations,” that everyone and everything has purpose and must be respected and cared for. Realizing our ethical and inherently relational place with and in our community is a significant shift in thinking away from that of an individual acting and living solely for their own benefit and gain, a view and way of being that foundationally underpins our neoliberal, capitalist societies. Economy reigns at the expense of ecology in an arguably immoral perception of and dysfunctional relationship with home, oikos. In his foreword to A Sand County Almanac, Leopold (1949/1966) asserts that “our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy” (p. xix). Subscribing to a land ethic calls for our love, respect, and admiration of the land and all of its members, and a recognition of the land’s undeniable value beyond economy and in philosophy. This change is motivated by care and our sentimental attachments to community and community members. As summarized by Goralnik and Nelson (2011), we establish an emotional bond through our experiences with and in our shared community and environment which, through our emotional attachment, we are then motivated to act to preserve members and lands of the community to which we belong. We see this echoed in Stephen Jay Gould’s (1993) declaration that “we cannot win [the] battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love” (p. 40). Knapp (2005) identified ten ways of knowing nature drawn from Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac that support our coming to know, respect, and love our Land communities: wondering and questioning, knowing local history, observing seasonal changes, listening intently, counting and measuring, empathizing with and personifying nature, connecting elements in cycles, finding beauty, seeking solitude for reflection, and improving land health. These knowing acts can be traced in children’s engagements with and in the land, for example, in their community mapping work (see Jagger, 2013). With ecologically and culturally inclusive understandings of the Land, we build off of Leopold’s call for a land ethic and the active relations between the Land and the learner in our exploration of children’s embodiment of a Land ethic.

186

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

Research Community and Design That land is community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. (Leopold, 1949/1966, xix)

Our exploration of children’s embodiment of a land ethic evolved over the course of a year spent at City Public School2, a downtown inner-city elementary school in Toronto, Ontario. Toronto is located on the traditional lands of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewas, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. The name Toronto itself is derived from the Mohawk word Tkaronto which means the place in the water where the trees meet. City Public School enrolled over 650 children in junior kindergarten through grade 6 and is representative of the diverse community that it is situated within. Over 85% of the children speak English as an additional language and the student body represents over 50 language groups. Many children and their families are immigrants to Canada and several children and their families are refugees and are very new to the community. The school is a platinum Eco-School and this identification is reflective of the commitment of school community members to reduce their ecological impact, guide environmental leadership, and foster an environmentally responsible school community. Classes at City also regularly enjoy workshops with Gardening Kids, a local not-for-profit, for-impact group that provides food and nature literacy programs and support for schools and urban neighborhoods in the city. While we spent the year in the elementary school and with several classes, this chapter focuses on the children from one grade 1 class and one grade 3 class and their experiences and ideas about the land. We joined each class for one afternoon per week for the duration of the school year and attended and supported both environmental learning opportunities and regularly scheduled classes (e.g., math, language, and social studies). At the end of the school year, we invited children to take us on a tour of their school garden and share with us their understandings of and stories from the garden. The year spent with the classes and in the school community allowed us to establish trusting relationships with children and teachers and helped to put them at ease in our work together. We collected data from several sources: observations and field notes, transcribed conversations with children and teachers, children’s drawings and work samples, and photographs. Leopold’s prose and practice in “The Land Ethic” as well as Knapp’s (2005) and Jagger’s (2013) ways of knowing nature guided our thematic data analysis and following our initial reading, coding, and categorizing, we examined our data with children’s engagement with the Land and thinking about the Land in mind.

2

All names of participating people, organizations, and specific places have been changed and faces in photographs have been pixelated to protect the confidentiality of participants. Most children chose their own pseudonyms; for those children who did not, we selected pseudonyms for them. Our names, Susan and Meghan, have not been changed in the text.

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

187

Children’s Engagement with the Land That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten. (Leopold, 1949/1966, p. xix)

The grade 1 and 3 classes at City regularly participated in nature-based and related learning opportunities both at their school and in their community. In the classroom and on the school grounds, children learned with and in their school garden and nearby nature about plants, ecosystems, and relationships in the environment. These engagements spanned curricular disciplines of science, math, language, social studies, and art as children explored patterns in trees, seasonal changes through the year in a local city park, and animals native to the area in their garden art projects (Fig. 1). Children at City also work with and in the Land in their participation in their school’s primary and junior environmental clubs, the Green Team and Green Patrol, respectively. Particularly notable of the children’s engagements with the Land were the grade 3 children’s learning with and in their school garden and the grade 1s’

Fig. 1 Grade 3 garden art project

188

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

exploration of their community in their mural creation and walk. Below, we detail these unique beings with the Land that we observed in our year with the classes.

The Garden The grade 3 children regularly took part in school garden-based learning opportunities and their teacher, Ms. D, worked hard to bring the garden into her teaching across the curriculum. For example, plants are a major topic in the grade 3 provincial science curriculum and children learned about plant structure and function in the garden and the important role of plants in ecosystems, both in general and specific to their community. In one workshop with Gardening Kids, the children learned about trees native to the city, in particular the Kentucky coffee tree, a species at risk in Ontario. They learned about the history and importance of the tree and how dinosaurs used to disperse the seeds and the children were invited to prepare seeds for germination by sanding their seed coats ahead of planting them in their garden and neighborhood. The garden also provided a rich context for cross-curricular experiences. As the grade 3s were learning about plant biology, they used artistic modes and interpretations to share their understandings of plant forms and characteristics. The children often went to the garden to sketch the plants and changes happening in the garden. This being in place allowed for children to more intimately come to know the garden and its community members. The children also used measurement to further their exploration of the garden and its plants. Furthermore, the grade 3s participated in a seed-saving program and garden-based activities with their kindergarten buddies. Taken together these organic experiences with and in the garden, their engagements with the land, allowed children to discover, and for some to rediscover, the natural community that they are a part of. Being in place and learning through engagements in the context of the garden allowed children to connect to the land in a way not possible through in-class learning opportunities. Not only did children learn about the garden and its inhabitants in class activities, they also experienced the garden in informal learning opportunities. Many of the grade 3s were also a part of the Green Team, the school’s environmental club for primary students. The Green Team took care of the garden and tended to its needs, and during their weekly lunchtime meetings the children planted seeds, watered growing seedlings and plants, constructed and repaired raised beds, harvested produce, and sampled the fruits, vegetables, and herbs that they grew. Along with the Green Patrol, their junior student counterpart, the Green Team started a Three Sisters Garden of corn, beans, and squash, the traditional crops grown by many First Nations of Ontario (Fig. 2). At the end of the school year, the Green Team and Green Patrol had a garden celebration (Fig. 3) where they prepared and ate salad wraps with garden-grown radishes, radish leaves, and basil; enjoyed a compote of garden rhubarb, anise hyssop, and mint; and created hand-print painted flowers. Of the wraps, Uni-Lion noted that “it tastes real. When I made my wrap, it tasted so good!”

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

189

Fig. 2 Hearty’s drawing of herself and the Three Sisters Garden

Fig. 3 The garden celebration

The Mural and Walk The grade 1 s worked together for several weeks in the spring on a mural of their community and the neighboring river valley. In it, the children brought together what they had been learning about ecosystems, the local watershed, the water cycle,

190

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

transportation, and pollution. The mural began with an initial class discussion about what is important to them and children noted that they valued family, food, play, places, faith, love, and Earth and nature. Their teacher, Ms. I, delved further into their understanding and connection to nature, wondering, “What do city kids know about nature? Why is nature important for you? How is nature important to you locally and in the world?” The children responded with a lengthy list of local plants, animals, and natural features – pine trees, grass, squirrels, pigeons, foxes, rabbits, deer, worms, bats, and the East River – and animals living elsewhere in the world – leopards, jaguars, giraffes, camels, and ghost bats. Caring for nature was important to the children, even nature that is far away, with Dimetrodon asserting that “we want to take care of nature all the way over there.” Ms. I planned curriculum with the children’s interests and enthusiasm in mind and explored with the children the interactions of people and their own urban environment. They began by drawing and painting different modes of transportation that they knew in the city and as they made the cars, trucks, bicycles, buses, and streetcars, they discussed which vehicles caused a lot of environmental harm and which did not. The children next learned about pollution and how it related to the water cycle and entered the watershed. They then added to their mural the nearby river, the East River, and its valley flowing into the lake. Finally, using different materials for print making, the children created representations of their homes, the neighborhood’s high-rise apartment buildings. Over the course of several weeks, the elements of the community came together and were realized in a mural that took up much of the classroom floor as it was a work in progress (Fig. 4). Partway through their mural creation, the grade 1s took a walk together from their neighborhood, through a large park and urban farm, and into the river valley and its trail network. A few days later and back in the classroom, Ms. I wanted to talk with them about their mural, their community, and the land that they shared. She highlighted for them that their mural wasn’t just any old picture, it was their community, and asked them about the elements and impressions of the community that they experienced on their walk. Sarah commented that the river valley was the animals’ home; the animals wanted to be in the wild because they got to be free in the wild. To Sarah, the urban river valley so close to her home and part of her community was wild. Ahmad said that when he was in the river valley, he felt like the animals were coming and that it was as though the valley was surrounded by wildlife. Animals were a part of the community and to the children, this was particularly the case for the river valley. The children also recognized the cause-and-effect relationships in their community. As he recalled seeing so many cars and trucks driving along the highway, Adam traced through the path of pollution from the speeding vehicles to the sky and clouds and back down with rain into the river and valley. “The cars make pollution. It goes into the clouds and it rains and it goes down in the East River then it gets polluted.” This negative impact of humans and human actions on the Land and our shared community was clear to the grade 1s.

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

191

Fig. 4 The grade 1s’ community mural

Children’s Thinking About the Land Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free. (Leopold, 1949/1966, p. xix)

The children in grade 1 and 3 shared with us their knowledge, thinking, and feelings about their natural world in their conversations with us and in their engagements with the garden and their local environments. The children’s observing, knowing, thinking, and feeling about the environment extended beyond the local to broader, global understandings, and relations of the Land. Below, we share the children’s thinking about the Land with respect to their garden, the community, and the world.

The Garden The children’s thinking about the Land began in the curricular spaces nearest to them and with observations made of their school garden. In one class discussion, we asked the grade 3s what, given the chance, they would tell the world about their school garden. Many children spoke about the specific plants that they observed in the garden – the crabapple tree and its blossoms, the tulips flowering, the newly planted

192

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

vegetables growing in the beds, and the buffalo berry bush starting to bloom. They also shared the sensory experience and beauty of the garden. Several children noted that the garden smelled beautiful and had “beautiful plants” of many pretty colors. The grade 3s observations and knowledge of the garden also grew in their regular sketching sessions in the space. For example, in one art and science class focused on drawing plants and their structures, Samin observed that “last week it was nothing but this week it is so big with flowers!” Along with knowledge, the children’s discussion of the garden also brought in their related feelings about the garden. To the grade 3s, the garden was “cool” and “nice.” The children recognized their school garden to be a regular part of their school community with Amir noting that it was “pretty normal.” The children also shared that they took care of the garden by watering it, weeding it, and planting more plants. Furthermore, the children identified the garden to be a relaxing place to be. For example, Cinderella shared that the garden was a place of well-being for her in her assertion that “it’s nature so when you sit there it feels good because it is green.” In addition to being a space of caring and being cared for, the school garden was a place where the grade 3s had fun and they told us of the many ways that they did this. The children enjoyed planting seeds and seedlings in the garden and interestingly, many of the grade 3s shared that looking at the changes and the diversity in the garden was the most fun. They liked finding wild plants in the garden, species that were native to the area, and also discovering different plants each time they visit the garden. The children liked to watch changes happening in the garden; to Guava Juice, “when the tree[s] grow, it’s exciting.” Not only did the children enjoy exploring the garden’s plants, they also liked being able to find small creatures in the garden, including worms an insects, and also larger animals, for example, a barred owl. Like the grade 3s, the grade 1s shared with us their understandings, thoughts, and feelings about the school garden. The children spoke about the plants and animals that they observed there and also detailed the conditions in which they saw them in. For example, ahead of our school garden tour, Lily and Violet recalled to us that on our previous visit to the garden we saw so many worms. While Lily thought that we’d also see many worms on this visit, Violet disagreed because it was not raining and worms need moisture. Relations between biotic and abiotic members of the garden community were similarly clear in Cutie Pie’s musings on the garden: We should, like, get all of the plants. . . all of the fruits and vegetables, and then plant them. Plant them and then after we have trees that are grown. Beautiful trees. And then we have the sun to make it shine on the plants and then after it can grow and grow and grow. And then after whenever a squirrel or any animal eats fruits or vegetables, we could give them some of our leaves from the trees.

Here we see Cutie Pie’s recognition of the interconnectedness of sunlight, plants, and animals to support health and growth in species. The children also identified humans as being part of these relationships as they spoke about the importance of

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

193

gardens and growing produce in our own health and well-being. According to Melissa, “It’s very important to have a garden because if you didn’t have a garden, you won’t even have vegetables or fruit and you won’t survive.”

The Community Both the grade 3s and grade 1s shared with us their knowledge and thinking beyond the garden and into the local environment. The grade 3s extended their thinking from the garden to the wider community as they imagined a better city and the changes that would improve their city in writing and in artwork. Some children proposed changes that would make their city better for people. They wrote and painted about the need for more space, more water, cleaner sidewalks, traffic signals and signs, and lights (see Fig. 5). The children asserted that these changes would help to make their city a safer place for them to live. These improvements would also make the city a much more beautiful, comfortable, and enjoyable space for people living there. The grade 3s also thought about the many ways that would make their city a better home for plants and animals, the more than human world, and several of these changes would also be beneficial to humans. The children wanted more green space and more trees for plants and animals to live with and in and to be safe in (Fig. 6), and they also wanted the city to have centers that could help to protect animals.

Fig. 5 City lights and signs

194

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

Fig. 6 Green space for plants and animals

Fig. 7 Nia’s bike lanes for my ideal city

They thought that the city needed to have fewer cars and more bike lanes. This would help to keep the air clean for everyone and everything living in the city and, according to Nia, also help to keep people healthy and strong and let cyclists know they are important (Fig. 7). The children also though that the city should only have recycling bins and green bins for composting organics to help to reduce garbage and waste in the city. The grade 1s similarly recognized the inherent connections with and in the Land in their discussions of their community and environment. Noted earlier, transportation and pollution and its impact on the environment was a large part of the children’s mural. In their sharing of their mural with us, the children detailed what pollution is and how it affects plants, animals, people, and communities. According to Lily, trees

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

195

are impacted when “the [polluted] clouds rain, it goes underground, the trees suck it up from their roots. . . and it affects the trees.” Brenda added that “when [trees] have [polluted] water inside them, it makes them more sick. Kind of like they don’t grow very much.” Violet went further and alluded to the insidious nature of pollution in their community: “you can’t see it. . . it spreads all over, and it goes up into the sky. . . it goes into Lake Ontario and all the animals will get sick. . . we breathe it in, we drink it in.” Not only did the children speak about the current pollution concerns in their community, but they also shared with us the historical paths and mitigations of pollution, in particular those in the East River valley. Melissa Meghan Melissa

The East River used to be so stinky, and the Queen of England was going to come here so they put perfume in the East River. . . Why was the river stinky in the first place? Because we had factories. The factory’s pollution went in the East River Valley and so lots of it came in there. So, it caused a lot of problems. . . And so, then they picked it all, that stuff in these waters. And so, it’s almost clean.

Also like the grade 3s, the grade 1 children offered ways to reduce pollution and its impact on their community and environment and these related to transportation. The children highlighted that gasoline and diesel caused a lot of pollution and that instead we need to drive vehicles fueled by electricity and batteries. This use of alternate and clean(er) energy sources was extended to boats and the suggestion to use sailboats instead of motorboat. In addition, the children said that we needed to be riding bicycles more too as they are “powered by muscles fueled by food.” As plainly noted by Cutie Pie, “if cars are driving that means there’s pollution.” The grade 1s’ recollection of their walk in the river valley alluded to their recognition of the diversity and relations of plants, animals, people, and environments in their community. For example, when discussing the living pond that the class observed on the walk, Ms. I asked the children: “How do you know it is alive?” The children answered with an extensive and specific list of the organisms living in and with the pond: fish, turtles, crayfish, mosquitoes, muskrats, and zooplankton. This highlights both the diversity of life that children recognize in the pond and in turn in their community and that life within the pond makes the pond itself a living space. Understood relations between animals and environments is similarly clear in Annie and Melissa’s conversation with us about animals living in the valley and wonderings about why they did not see them: Annie Melissa

We didn’t see any creatures there because they thought we were predators. Some animals use camouflage.

Annie’s comment recognizes that predator-prey relations are a part of the natural world including their community environment and that animals may have been

196

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

hiding to avoid being preyed upon by us. Melissa extended this and proposed that animals may have been camouflaged and using their ability to blend into the environment to avoid possible confrontation with us. Their brief discussion highlights the actions and reactions of members of environments to each other that are inherent in their interconnectedness and living together with the Land.

The World In addition to the grade 1 and grade 3 children’s thinking about the Land situated in their school garden and in their community, the children’s understandings and feelings extended to the broader world. As noted by Melissa in grade 1, “a community means all together as a world” and so it follows that the children related their observations, knowledge, and suggestions beyond their local environments. After watching a documentary about children growing up in diverse global contexts, the grade 1s decided to poll their peers on what they might do to make their world a better place for everyone to live in. The children constructed a ballot box, placing it outside of their classroom with small pieces of paper and pencils and inviting other children to respond to the question: “How can we made the world a better place?” Responses from the school community listed many ways that we might make the world a better place for people to live in. Caring more for others was a common theme and this caring was considered in several proposed actions. They suggested that those with wealth should provide support and care for those with less wealth: “Rich countries should give food to poor countries” (Fig. 8). It was noted that we need to respect others and specifically respect the rights of children according to the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Love and Fig. 8 Rich countries should give food to poor countries

Fig. 9 Be nice and kind

Children’s Embodiment of a Land Ethic

197

Fig. 10 Clean up all the mess in the world

kindness were central to the suggestions made as school community members asserted that we must be nice to others (Fig. 9) and continue to love each other. The school community members also identified many ways that we can help to make the world a better place for the more than human world to live and for the Land to be healthy and well. These included several practical suggestions, from using both sides of a piece of paper to single-spacing our writing (i.e., not skipping lines) to save trees. Children also noted that we needed more green spaces and should plant more trees and plants, and that we must water gardens to nurture and care for the growing trees. They suggested that we should all be doing a better job of sorting our garbage into recyclables and compostable materials. Broadly, the children called for us to keep our country and our world clean (Fig. 10).

A Land Ethic in Curriculum and Pedagogy Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is heading away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. (Leopold, 1949/1966, p. 245)

In the children’s many engagements with and in their local environments, we can see their recognition of the Land and their growing and enacted ethic of the Land. Their shared stories and understandings of the environments highlight their realization of the complex relationships inherent in Land communities. They acknowledge and have a sense of awe and wonder about the magic and aesthetic of the natural world – its beauty, its intricacies, and its power. The children think and act with respect and care for the more than human world in their engagements in the school garden, community, and world environments. The garden and the environment matter to the children. These (re)connections comprise a way of being with and in the Land that actualize performatively Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. The children act cooperatively rather than competitively in respectful and inclusive relations with the community. Their role is of thoughtful, active, and engaged citizen rather than conqueror and ruler of the Land. The children’s thinking and being with the land is similarly reflective of an Indigenous worldview of the Land as a shared, dynamic, and narrative space. The engagement of the children in a curriculum of the Land follows a traditional embrace of the Land as teacher and the active involvement of children in transformative, participatory teaching and learning opportunities respect and value the knowledge and unique understandings that children and youth bring to curriculum. The children’s recollections of the garden and their Land communities center on their own being and acting in place; they are in a sense sharing their own interaction stories. The children’s connections to the Land extend into their future imaginings of their

198

S. Jagger and M. Hayward

communities. Their recognition of the disrespectful and harmful ways that we have lived, and continue to live, from and on the Land and their related motivation to live with and in the land in caring and careful ways recall processes of decolonization and reconciliation, acknowledging histories, healing wounds, and reinhabiting as plain members of the Land. And so, we see that children do recognize the Land. They acknowledge the importance of all members of our communities and the necessity of respecting the Land and interacting with the Land in a way that respects and cares for its diversity and complexity. The children are on to something here. Let us follow their lead and center our curriculum and instruction on their understandings. Let us embrace the Land’s inherent breadth in an inclusive definition of community. And let us bring together our curriculum, what we teach, and our pedagogical practices, how we teach, with the Land, where we learn, teach, and live. Imagine an education guided by a Land ethic. Acknowledgments This research has been supported by an SRC Seed Grant, Faculty of Community Services, TMU.

References Bowra, A., Mashford-Pringle, A., & Poland, B. (2021). Indigenous learning in Turtle Island: A review of the literature on land-based learning. The Canadian Geographer, 65(2), 132–140. Buber, M. (1923/1958). I and thou (2nd ed.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. Cajete, G. (1999). Look to the mountain: An ecology of indigenous education. In G. Cajete (Ed.), A people’s ecology (pp. 1–20). Clear Light. Goralnik, L., & Nelson, M. P. (2011). Framing a philosophy of environmental action: Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and the importance of community. Journal of Environmental Education, 42(3), 181–192. Gould, S. J. (1993). Unenchanted evening. In Eight little piggies (pp. 23–40). W. W. Norton. Greenwood, M., & de Leeuw, S. (2007). Teachings from the land: Indigenous people, our health, our land, and our children. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 30(1), 48–53. Haig-Brown, C., & Hodson, J. (2009). Starting with the land: Toward indigenous thought in Canadian education. In P. Woods & G. Woods (Eds.), Alternative education for the 21st century: Philosophies, approaches, visions (pp. 167–187). Palgrave Macmillan. Jagger, S. (2013). “This is more like home”: Knowing nature through community mapping. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 18, 173–189. Knapp, C. E. (2005). The “I-thou” relationship, place-based education, and Aldo Leopold. The Journal of Experimental Education, 27(3), 277–285. Leopold, A. (1949/1966). A Sand County almanac. Ballantine Books. Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25. Styres, S. (2011). Land as first teacher: A philosophical journeying. Reflective Practice, 12(6), 717–371. Styres, S., & Zinga, D. (2013). The community-first land-centred theoretical framework: Bringing a ‘good mind’ to indigenous education research? Canadian Journal of Education, 36(2), 284–313. Styres, S., Haig-Brown, C., & Blimkie, M. (2013). Towards a pedagogy of land: The urban context. Canadian Journal of Education, 36(2), 34–67. Zinga, D., & Styres, S. (2012). Land as pedagogy: Tensions, challenges, and contradictions. First Nations Perspectives.

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing Claudia Eppert

Contents Introduction: Rumination on Rocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Witnessing: “Complicated Conversations” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re/turns Toward an Ethics of Witnessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecological Ethics and Post-humanist Turns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Ecological Witnessing – Curricular Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

200 201 203 208 212 214

Abstract

This chapter examines ethical obligations of bearing witness to ecological devastation and nonhuman worlds in the Anthropocene. A meditation on rocks and reflection on a Holocaust memorial leads to a brief review of the ethical turn in scholarship on historical witnessing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. From there, with reference to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and others, the chapter explores complexities of witnessing in light of ecological ethics and the posthumanist turn. It debates what select scholarship on an ethics of historical witnessing opens up for ecological witnessing and, conversely, what explorations of ecological ethics and imagination might yield for rethinking a curriculum of witnessing more generally. The chapter throughout poses questions of witnessing specifically with rocks in mind. It concludes with reflection on the implications of ecological witnessing for English language arts education and interdisciplinary curriculum studies.

C. Eppert (*) University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_28

199

200

C. Eppert

Keywords

Ecological witnessing · Ethics · Historical witnessing · Curriculum studies · English language arts

Introduction: Rumination on Rocks Lately, I find myself ruminating on rocks; in part, because my father, before his recent passing, had spent more than a decade building walkways around his house with natural stone pavers. As I continue to pack away his books, I come across one on stone landscaping and dwell for a time on travertine, granite, slate, and sandstone. I contemplate rock shards – broken stone pieces – and how much I miss spending time with him. My father loved discussing history, politics, and philosophy, and we shared an ongoing interest in Holocaust remembrance and literature. Recently, I learned about the world’s largest decentralized and growing grassroots memorial, consisting of over 75,000 hand-crafted Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) placed across approximately 24 different countries (Deming, n.d.). Each stone is handmade, consisting of a small concrete cube affixed with a brass plate naming the birth, arrest (if known), deportation, and murder (or survival and/or liberation) of a Holocaust victim (Jewish, Sinti, Romani, disabled, AfroGerman, dissident, LGBTQ, etc.). Each has been inserted evenly into the sidewalk pavement in front of the individual’s last known place of residence. I learn that school children and teachers, among others, conduct research on Stolpersteine locations. According to the project’s creator, German artist Gunter Demnig, the stones are intended to be stumbled upon by chance (Deming, n.d.). The project is not without controversy, with some maintaining that walking on the stones is disrespectful. Munich, for one, has banned future stones, choosing instead to display photographs and plaques on steel columns. Demnig, however, remembering a schoolchild’s comment, counters that the stumbling stones are metaphoric; one won’t fall, but if one stumbles and looks, one bows down with head and heart (Deming, n.d.). As I read more about this international memorial, I ponder complexities of an ethics of witnessing, and also the ways in which responsivity/responsibility, and stumbling, constitute an indelible part of teaching and learning. I also learn that Ukraine is one of the countries that hold these stones. I imagine how dismayed my father would be by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In March 2022, a Holocaust memorial site in Kyiv, which commemorates one of the largest Nazi massacres of European Jewry at the ravine location of Babyn Yar, was bombed (Wertheimer, 2022). Holocaust memorials testify to “never again,” and yet current events unequivocally illustrate lessons remaining unlearned. While the missile attack left the memorials largely undamaged, burnt and overturned trees now mark the 140-acre site (Eppert, Forthcoming). To date, my research has been preoccupied with questions of witnessing – historical, contemplative/nondual, and, presently, ecological. Recently, I sought to compose a currere (Pinar, 1975, 2011; Pinar & Grumet, 1976) of my Bildung (self-formation) focused on attending to vulnerable, threatened, endangered, and extinct plants and

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

201

animals (Eppert, Forthcoming). I stumbled to write an ecological currere, emphasizing relationality and ethical obligation to past, present, and (likely) future species extinction. Researching lost and at-risk wildlife has challenged my studies of select past scholarship on witnessing, and my purpose in this chapter is to return to this scholarship in further considerations of an ethics of ecological witnessing. These days I find I cannot separate my embeddedness in questions of Holocaust remembrance from concerns with ecocide and witnessing of nonhuman ways of worldmaking. Like Malczynski et al. (2020), I have become interested in genocide-ecocide imbrications, which, as they assert, is by no means “to underplay human suffering and guilt, or to defer human responsibility for the tragedy of the Shoah,” but rather to recognize the “interdependence of humans and the environment” (p. 187). And so, I pose: What does select scholarship on an ethics of witnessing past atrocity open up for an ethics of ecological witnessing? What does an ecological ethics and imagination yield for rethinking a curriculum of witnessing? While my questions have to-date reflected on plant and animal life/death currently it is preoccupied with rocks. I ruminate on the stumbling stones memorial and on the sediments and crushed sedimentary rocks that compose and vitally support it. Rock/ stones serve significant roles in human remembrance and mourning and, yet, are often taken-for-granted. However, as the philosopher Michel Serres observed, according to Cohen (2015), “stone is the foundation of story at every archeological layer of human history” (p. 4). I ponder that perhaps I am presently compelled by rocks for three reasons: first, to my knowledge, they have been largely disregarded as a subject of study in curriculum studies; second, they are considered not sentient within current hegemonic worldviews and might, therefore, challenge certain understandings of witnessing focused on sentience; and, third, they are not commonly regarded as a concern at this dawn of what is being identified as the sixth extinction (Kolbert, 2014). Indeed, with regard to this latter point, the newspaper, The Onion, satirized that, according to prominent geologists, “we may be slowly running out of rocks” and recommend their preservation (Geologists, 2010). Yet, as I read more, I learn that beneath this satirical take lie grains of truth. According to paleontologist, Dave Hone (2013), the world’s fossils may be going extinct. A finite resource, their erosion marks species, and events unable to be identified. Fossils reveal traces of life/ death. They bear witness. In and of themselves, without human construction or demolition. But, in a way, don’t all rocks bear witness? In this chapter, inspired by Cohen’s (2015) Gedankenexperiment, I thus examine questions of witnessing with rocks in mind, seeking to disrupt anthropocentric discourses and explore educational dynamics of ecological witnessing.

Witnessing: “Complicated Conversations” I begin by tracing familiar and novel contours of witnessing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word derives from the Old English root wit, variably meaning the seat of consciousness, and also, thought, memory, attention, and understanding. As discussed more fully elsewhere (Eppert, Forthcoming), I have

202

C. Eppert

long thought of witnessing as an “ethical concept” (Simon & Eppert, 1997: 178) and praxis that calls us to participate in “complicated conversation among self, society, history, and culture” (Pinar, 2011: xv). In thinking about a curriculum of witnessing (Eppert, 2008), I find myself interminably wrestling with and contesting constructed dualities and divisions: remembering/forgetting, knowledge/ignorance, hope/ despair, embrace/resistance, self/other, and union/separation, to name a few. Witnessing additionally beckons complicated conversations regarding different ontological, ethical, epistemological, and methodological orientations and investments, as well as resonant and variable exigencies with respect to geographies, cultures, histories, languages, and temporalities. To briefly illustrate the contextually dynamic qualities of witnessing, one might consider what it might mean to bear witness to wildfire catastrophe from an immediate proximity compared to, for example, a more distanced but nonetheless climate impactful experience of smoke, compared to, let us say, stories told across alternate generations about catastrophic wildfires from campfire warmth. What do these different witnessing contexts do, and what are their respective resonant and divergent affects/effects? What I am seeking to underscore here is that witnessing inquiry is challenged to recognize and attend to multiple dimensions and discourses, and to notions of teaching and learning inherent in the assumptions, judgments, and organization of theorizations and practices of witnessing. As Foucault noted, discourse references “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern” (Weedon, 1987: 108). Delving into discursive complexities of witnessing in institutional and other sites of teaching and learning is critical also to the extent that witnessing as educational praxis carries possible personal and societal normative or transformative consequences. What are the relationships between ethical witnessing and the potential of witnessing to open learning up to manifold more just, compassionate, and regenerative relations? Given my role as an English language arts teacher educator, I have been particularly interested in textually mediated witnessing, that is, in learning from testimony, fiction, nonfiction, painting, sculpture, film, song, or poetry that bears witness to societal suffering and trauma. Terms such as “secondary witnessing” (LaCapra, 1998) have been deployed to comprehend dynamics of those who read, listen, or view testimonial traces of atrocity. In tandem with this interest, I have been inspired by psychoanalytic and philosophical scholarship on witnessing committed to an ethics of alterity that identifies obligations to be responsive to more than one already knows, as well as by considerations of both the lack and potential expression of such an ethics in language arts education and curriculum studies, more generally. Dwelling upon what I call a “curriculum in extinction” (Eppert, Forthcoming), particularly in light of the dearth of attention to the Anthropocene in language arts programs of study (McClanahan, 2013), I recognize an ethics of alterity of ongoing educational significance in contemplating possibilities of ecological witnessing. Questions of relationships to alterity particularly arise as I ask myself what human beings can

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

203

know of extinct species, or rocks, for that matter: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. While I previously sought to dismantle “fictions of character” (Eppert, 2008) – illusions and egoisms of knowing and being, and the sovereign self at the center of knowledge and activity – questions of ecological witnessing press me even further along these lines, inviting reconstructions of subjectivity to include nonhuman life/death and ways of worldmaking. Ecological witnessing extends complicated conversation concerning socially constructed dualities and divisions to include those of nature/culture and human/nonhuman, for example. I am inclined toward understanding ecological witnessing as involving the unlearning and undoing of essential/nonessential and other normative categorical and educational imperatives. Rocks, for example, are often taken-for-granted, rendered insignificant in much European philosophy. As commonly noted, Heidegger (1995), for instance, described them as wordless and without world (p. 196). Yet, in effect, do they not constitute a bedrock of life/death and modern civilization? Indeed, Hamilton’s (2016) Life’s Rocky Start, posits that rocks tell the story that life could not have occurred without them: geosphere and biosphere intertwine.

Re/turns Toward an Ethics of Witnessing In order to explore questions of ecological witnessing further, I first lay a foundation by returning to “the turn to ethics” in philosophy and literary/cultural theory that marked the 1990s/2000s (Garber et al., 2000). Ethics engages questions of relationships among self, other, and environment (whether acknowledged or disavowed) and ways of creating, being, and acting in the world. With respect to self-other relations, as has been extensively pointed out, traditions of Western philosophy have negated otherness by positioning it as constitutive of the same (Young, 1990). The turn to ethics critiqued this ego-centrism. A key figure in this turn was Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), who experienced the First World War, the 1917 Russian revolutions (as a youth living in Ukraine), and the Second World War (as a German prisoner of war whose brothers and fathers were killed by Hitler’s S.S.). Challenging a long metaphysical tradition with what he called ethics as “first philosophy,” or ethics as ontological rupture, Levinas emphasized otherness – alterity – as unknowable and described the self as incapable of objectifying it (Peperzak, 1995). In other words, alterity infinitely exceeds what a subject can control, master, know. Moreover, rather than subjectivity being at the center of relations, the subject is constituted in and through the address of the Other – through an infinite alterity that calls the subject into question, obligation, and becoming. Levinas’ ethics of alterity, taken up in interdisciplinary curriculum studies, has challenged, for example, inattention to questions of responsibility in science education (Blades, 2006) or, with regard to my own interests, instrumentalist conceptions in English language arts education that define reading and other ELA practices solely on terms of mastery and skill (Eppert, 1999). Levinas’s ethics and the broader ethical turn (which included the writing of such philosophers as Derrida and Foucault) influenced and variously intertwined with theorizations of witnessing in the 1990s/2000s. Levinas (1998)

204

C. Eppert

himself deployed the word, stating, for example, “witness is humility and admission” (p. 149), by which he meant being in service to the infinite beyond oneself and in ways that “does not thematize what it bears witness of, and whose truth is not the truth of representation, is not evidence” (p. 146). Informed by Levinas, among others, turn of the century scholarship on witnessing engaged in methodological critique and radical subject reconstructions, among other foci. As Glowacka (2013) affirms, Levinas’s philosophy detailed an “ethical re-formulation of subjectivity in terms of witnessing” (p. 51). Let me draw brief attention to two early texts focused on conceptualizing a witnessing ethics. The first is Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s (1992) landmark Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History Examining testimonies, literature, and film principally focused on remembrance of the Shoah, it identified not only the eye-witness but also the listener, reader, interviewer, and/or viewer of testimony as a witness. As Brinkley and Youra (1996) asserted, “[t]o receive the words of a witness is to find that one has also become a witness. . . . Once the transmission begins, one cannot stand outside its address” (p. 176). Felman and Laub emphasized complexities in listeners, readers, and/or viewers’ ethical obligation to attend to the unknowable and unspeakable in the testimonies they encounter. For example, as explored in fuller detail elsewhere (Simon & Eppert, 1997), Laub’s chapter on “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening” notably introduced contrasting methodological investments with regard to how, during a conference, historians, artists, and psychoanalysts engaged survivor interviews from Yale’s Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Laub detailed the testimony of one woman in her 60s who recounted an uprising at Auschwitz and reported that she had witnessed four chimneys blown up when, in fact, only one had done so. He observed that while the historians were consequently inclined to discredit the woman’s testimony, the psychoanalysts among them conversely underscored its significance; namely, the radical truth of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz as an “unimaginable occurrence” (p. 60). While the historians, invested in a kind of evidentiary witnessing, sought confirmation of what was already known, the psychoanalysts instead resonated with the woman’s witnessing of what exceeds comprehension and communicability. Felman’s and Laub’s text, in my view, implicitly and explicitly opened attention to witnessing as a praxis challenged to wrestle not only with the evidentiary and the imaginative and expressive, but also, more revolutionary, the inconceivable, unimaginable, and inexpressible (Eppert, Forthcoming). In other words, witnessing atrocity involves responsibilities not only to material facts and figures, not only to linguistic and aesthetic forms, genres, acts, and methodologies, but also, beyond and within these, to ruptures of all referential frames and framings. Witnessing, thus, is ethically implicated in receptiveness to disruptions and departures from prescriptions and parameters of normatively established grammars and logics. It interminably calls upon witnesses to encounter, engage, and exceed performative limits, to bear witness to testimonial excess (Simon & Eppert, 1997). Along these lines, I remember back to doctoral studies, when for a period of time my supervisor Roger I. Simon, fellow

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

205

graduate students, and I sought to study testimonies of survivors of the Vilna Ghetto (a Nazi-established and Nazi-operated Jewish ghetto in Lithuania) as a practice of learning from the past that interrupted certitudes and normative epistemologies. We endeavored to bear witness by juxtaposing testimonies in ways not reducible to “fixed terms and methods” in hopes of exploring possibilities for witnessing to “become an event in which an Other’s time may disrupt my own” (Simon et al., 2001: 289). We sought to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions, participate in experiences and difficult conversations of restless unsettlement without containment and completion, and invite openings to something new. Now, decades later, I find myself returning to this difficult work, questioning resonant possibilities for bearing witness to human and more than human testimonies of ecocide. The second text to which I seek to draw brief attention is Kelly Oliver’s (2001) Beyond Recognition. Informed by Levinas, Felman, and Laub, among others, it introduced a radical model of subjectivity rooted in ethical obligations toward alterity. Oliver critically challenged historical discourses of recognition in social theorizing and, more specifically, within these discourses, articulations of subjectivity built upon conceptions of recognition as likeness – as sameness or opposition to what is alternate to the self (p. 4). She cited Hegelian inheritances of subjectivity as exemplifying dynamics and consequences of hostile conflicts and logics of exclusion (p. 6). Divisive logics, Oliver contended, position others as invisible, silent, unavailable, impoverished, nonexistent, or not yet. She asserted, “to see oneself as a subject and to see other people as the other or objects not only alienates one from those around [them] but also enables the dehumanization inherent in oppression and domination” (p. 3). Oliver introduced witnessing as a concept more generative than notions of subjectivity founded on antagonistic recognition or, for that matter, misrecognition – as misrecognition ultimately depends upon a recognition economy. Referencing Laub’s discussion of the unimaginable occurrence of the blown up chimneys, she underscored a critical obligation to “bear witness beyond recognition, to testify and to listen to testimony—to encounter each other –because subjectivity and humanity are the result of witnessing” (p. 90). For Oliver, witnessing as address and response-ability inheres in subjectivity and communitybuilding capacities. Now focused on questions of ecological witnessing, I ponder takeaways from these texts and the ethical turn. Although Felman and Laub did not address ecological issues, and although their explorations of witnessing are largely event focused when anthropogenic environmental destruction has been sometimes eventful and catastrophic, and sometimes gradual and humanly imperceptive, I find their emphasis on ethical attendance to the limits of the knowable and communicable of ongoing educational significance. As I often note, Felman defined witnessing as: nonhabitual, estranged conceptual prisms through which we attempt to apprehend – and to make tangible to the imagination – the ways in which our cultural frames of reference and or pre-existing categories which delimit and determine our perception of reality have failed, essentially, both to contain, and to account for, the scale of what has happened in contemporary history. (Felman & Laub, 1992: xv)

206

C. Eppert

This scale, in my view, includes ecocide: in what ways have, and are, pre-existing categories – ontological, epistemological, ethical, and educational – failed, and are failing, to account for centuries of human-initiated environmental destruction? I pose this question also in light of categorical histories and genres of literary imagination, while reading Amitav Ghosh’s (2017) reflection on the ways in which “global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense” (p. 26) and on what the banishment of climate change from past “preserves of serious fiction. . .tell[s] us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion” (p. 11). Mindful of rocks, I consider historical and present responsibilities to bear witness to global extraction economies and destructive practices of surface, open pit, and strip mining. And/or precious reservoirs of petroleum and gas stored in limestones, sandstones, and dolomite rocks that have been exploited by hydraulic fracturing (fracking). I also reflect upon mountaintop removal – losses of habitat and the excess rocks along with contaminated soil deposited into surrounding valleys. To what extent have responsibilities to witness these practices been taken up and/or evaded and denied? What do testimonies of ecocide resonantly and alternately encompass, and what excesses do they bear witness to? Felman and Laub (1992) identify the Shoah as an “unprecedented, inconceivable, historical occurrence” that eliminated its own witness (p. xvii). Ecocide has also eliminated witnesses – human and nonhuman. It has disregarded, diminished, and destroyed human and nonhuman subjectivities. What complexities of obligation attend witnessing ecological violence, violation, and loss – not to mention imaginable and unimaginable occurrences of human and nonhuman refusals and insurgencies? Although Oliver’s theorization of witnessing generally concentrates on the interhuman, the latter part of Beyond Recognition explicitly critiques discourses of subjectivity based on recognition for having been built upon alienation from nature. In drawing attention, for example, to universal dynamic energy in order to dismantle hegemonies of vision informing theories of recognition as well as the idea that humans “exist as self-contained silos separated from our environment” (p. 198), Oliver initiates consideration of the wherefore and the whys of disavowals of the nonhuman from modern human imaginaries, and the ethical responsibilities humans now bear for dismantling human/nonhuman and sentient/nonsentient polarities as well as for witnessing nonhuman subjectivities. Contesting the subject-other binary and the very possibility that the other is created in the subject’s divisive gaze, she observed, “[s]ubjectivity is not the result of a war against all others. Rather it is the result of a . . . continual process of witnessing. Only by witnessing the process of witnessing itself, the unseen in vision, the unsaid in language, can we begin to reconstruct our relationships by imagining ourselves together” (p. 223). My Gedankenexperiment considers her words in rock-laden contexts, and I wonder in what measure practices of testimony and witnessing might inspire possibilities regarding returns to ethical constructions and reconstructions of nonhuman subjectivities and worlds both in (light of possible alternate construal of the term recognition) and beyond human recognition. At stake here, it seems to me, and perhaps in excess of Oliver’s text, are space/time allowances for nonhuman subjectivities without any human dependence, and awareness of the legitimacy of and human responsibilities

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

207

to bear witness to nonhuman testimonials. What do and might such testimonials and practices of witnessing look like? In what measure might it include bearing witness to not bearing witness? That said, while Oliver’s insights can valuably inform human witnessing of atrocities, I contemplate the extent to which her claim that subjectivity is a process of witnessing beyond recognition applies to nonhuman subjectivities. I wonder, does all life find its subjectivity in bearing witness? And what does such a question imply for conceptions of witnessing? Ghosh (2017) brazenly decentered agentic witnessing in radically posing that perhaps the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the nonhuman in the humanities may be due to “entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought” (p. 31). Are we ourselves, he questioned, “being ‘thought’ by other entities” (p. 31)? Unimaginable occurrences in a different sense. I struggle with these questions and the potential gaps within them this crisp, early morning as I trace a finger along the top rough edge one of my father’s rocks, intent on resisting objectifying it and rendering it on my terms. Instead of the possessive “my father’s rocks,” perhaps better to rephrase to “the rocks neighboring the house in which my father lived?” Oliver drew upon Levinas’ ethics in order to speak to the capacities of touch to disrupt hegemonies of vision: “[R]ather than return me to myself, [touch] takes me out of myself toward the other” (p. 205). Caressing the rock’s strangeness, its radical alterity to any full comprehension I am able to have of it, I recall Davy’s (2007) recommendation that Levinas’ phenomenological theorization of the face be read metaphorically, beyond categories of human, plant, wind, stone. She reminds that what is “crucial in ethical relations is that the Other expresses infinity” (p. 40). I endeavor to open myself to what is within and in excess of the factual; in and beyond, for example, knowledge that slate encompasses a metamorphic sedimentary rock composed of sericite, quartz, and minerals belonging to the chlorite group, and with a possible age of over 500 million years. I dwell on not being able to grasp 500 million years; how, indeed, to represent and make this expanse and the life and death within it tangible to the imagination? Nor can predominantly secularly raised and modern me really embody the implications of Ghosh’s questions of the uncanny. The rock I encounter and engage – too heavy for me to carry– feels both strangely solidly inert and texturally animated. Cohen (2015) remarked that, in the thirteenth century, “the philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus had to refute the idea that stones possess souls, so lively do rocks appear when examined not simply in comparison to humans but in their native thriving” (p. 2). Exploring the rock further, I remember Levinas’ (1969) words, “the absolutely foreign alone can instruct us” (p. 73). And, for the first time in the decades I have been visiting here, the question arises of where these rocks neighboring the house in which my father lived came from – underground mines or open quarries, perhaps? What were their journeys to this current place, and at what environmental costs? Educational witnessing, I am reminded, provokes “disruption of the ongoing time of the present, an interruption of ‘more of the same” (Simon et al., 2001: 298). Reflecting further on my responsibilities, I contemplate how, for Levinas, human beings are always already responsible. As Glowacka (2013) asserts, the subject is a “witness before it assumes the task of witnessing, that is, before intentionality, it

208

C. Eppert

bears witness to the source of its own obligation” (p. 55). Because human beings are always already in restless ethical relationship with alterity, awakened insight into the needs of others renders indifference impossible and compels action (Glowacka, 2013: 66). What action, then, do these rocks require of me? I also reconsider debates surrounding the Stolpersteine. I can understand concerns regarding people walking indiscriminately over public memorial, and why Munich chose an alternative commemorative practice. Concurrently, however, the Stolpersteine may uniquely and powerfully call us to responsibility – to stumble in surprise, to be caught off guard, to encounter dissonance in normative routines and hastes of daily contemporary life. The stones in the ground address us, not to run but rather to tread carefully, mindfully. To take our time. Pause. Bow down and touch. They aesthetically present facts and figures and also bear the potential to prompt our subjectivities into actions of just remembrance and social responsibility to learn from and care for lives lost – past, present, and future.

Ecological Ethics and Post-humanist Turns In tandem with the 1990s/2000s ethical turn was a growing post-humanist turn that emphasized the imperative to “think harder about the status of human subjectivity and the ethical relations, norms and values that may be worthy of the complexity of our times” (Braidotti, 2016: 13). Braidotti (2016) described the post-humanist turn as one in which human subjectivity is envisioned by an ethical imagination as reconstituted to include nonhuman and vital forces of life, as well as enlarge possibilities for inter-connection among self, others, and earth others by dismantling barriers of self-centered individualism (p. 26). Here I more fully confront the limitations of Levinas’ philosophy and the predominantly (to-date) interhuman scholarship on witnessing. On the one hand, Levinas’ philosophy would seem to offer avenues for witnessing ecocide, challenging egoism, and respectfully relating to nonhuman others. On the other hand, however, as has been widely noted, Levinas himself did not detail his ethics beyond primarily human concerns. Indeed, he describes animals and elements of air and water in more utilitarian terms and beyond relations of respect/disrespect (Blades, 2006). And, so, debating if I should let go of his ethics and its centrality to scholarship on witnessing, I turn to writings on ecological and post-humanist ethics, a relatively new research area for me, and locate three compelling rethinkings of Levinas’ work, each with implications for witnessing praxis. First, referencing the boundlessness of a pond, science educator and curriculum theorist David Blades (2006) insightfully illustrated that Levinas’ philosophy is extendable to nonhuman life. A pond’s water, soil, contact with air, microscopic and humanly visible inhabitants, and the decline of the pond’s frogs perhaps due to acidic runoff from a nearby industry, all reveal the pond’s – nature’s – interconnectivity and interdependence, from which humans are not separated. Because humankind inhabits an entirely interconnected environment, the call of alterity must, therefore, by necessity involve the call of nonhuman others. As such, Blades

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

209

concludes, “I am responsible for all nature, not only the human Other” (p. 656). While above I introduced ecological witnessing as obligation for nonhuman and more than human others, Blades provides justification for doing so. I am responsible to the rocks neighboring my father’s house, and I am responsible to the Stolpersteine – the lives lost and survived during the Holocaust and also the stones supporting the remembrance of lives lost. Not only may ecocide and genocide, as Katz (2001) suggested, “be linked together by a concept of domination” (p. 80), but, in my view, they may also be linked together through conceptions of obligation. Like Glowacka, Blades (2006) not only attended to the action required by the call of alterity but also reminded me that my awakening to my responsibility allows me freedom to choose the nature of my response, whether, for example, embrace (love), reluctance, resistance, or refusal (murder). The revelation that responsibility illustrates my truth and the truth of the world I inhabit, Blades asserted “is thus essentially pedagogic, an education on what it means to be responsible” (p. 652). Perhaps, then, a praxis of witnessing is thus necessarily and beneficially bound with curricular conversations on questions of responsibility/responsivity. In other words, the Stolpersteine can potentially awaken ethical subjectivity in and of themselves; concurrently, however, they may benefit from communities of witnessing and remembrance supported in and through questions regarding exigencies of responsibility and responsivity – questions that admit of no easy answers and endeavour to avoid trappings of strategy, agenda, utilization, and consumption; supporting instead living with ambiguity and difficulty (which includes unlearning simple/ difficult divisions). As Blades observed, Levinas’ ethics teaches that responsibility is independent of the Other’s response and that the Other is not indebted to me; the ethical relationship is asymmetrical and locates itself in the singularity of nonviolent relationship rather than in principles. That said, according to Blades, Levinas’ description of the presence of a third party, however, indicates that I am not alone in my obligation: others in nature are responsible for me. In this sense, the nature neighboring the house in which my father lived helps me “to carry out the necessary activity of living” (p. 656) in, for example, its abundant provision of raspberries, chanterelles, cedar, and soil. But, Blades cautioned, my activity necessitates interminable consideration of the processes and consequences of my activities for both human and nonhuman others. In this regard, I need ever to keep rocks, including the others dependent upon them – slugs, beetles, ants, and other insects, for example – indeed, the entire ecosystem, in mind-heart. Blades discusses how, as a science educator, he was called to responsibility by a student’s scream during a frog dissection lesson gone horribly wrong. Rocks cannot scream but they can make me stumble and fall and, in so doing, awaken me to my implication in attending to human and nonhuman life and loss, and “my inexperience to hear the testimony that addresses me” (Simon et al., 2001: 310). Second, inspired by Blades’ reference to him and his specific discussion of stones, I obtained Llewelyn’s (1991) The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience, which, also informed by Levinas, rethought injunctions of love and responsibility for one’s neighbors and neighborhood. Levinas’ contested the maxim, “love thy neighbor as oneself,” identifying it as perpetuating logics of the same; instead, Levinas’

210

C. Eppert

neighbor is radical alterity. Llewelyn’s proposed ecological neighborhood hinges neither on classification nor distinctions, not upon qualitative likeness/unlikeness but rather upon need/dependency. In other words, neighborhood constitutes infinite responsibility to needy beings – all of whom are worthy of respect, not only whether or not the sources of need are “characterized by conscience, sentience, or life” (p. 255), but also whether or not humans regard them as beautiful or sublime (p. 263). This challenge to sameness resonates with Oliver’s critique of philosophies and politics of recognition. I reflect upon the ragged gray rock I touched earlier, and destructions of neighborhood. My mind tumbles to glorious marble, gold, gemstones, and crystals inside rocks, and I research the environmental impacts of gemstone mining: habitat erosion, soil loss, land degradation, and diseases among mine workers. I remember learning of Nazi socialist plans to reforest conquered European territory by emptying villages and planting species of trees that would mirror and bolster German identity (Eppert, 2020). And I return to the Stolpersteine that appear in neighborhoods, contemplating them as strangers and difficult neighbors that call current inhabitants’ dwelling and complacencies into question and that complicatedly invoke the past rather than relegate it to oblivion. Levinas (1998) writes, “I am servant of the neighbor. . . [and] in a sense nothing is more burdensome than the neighbor,” because the neighbor could “not leave me indifferent” (pp. 87–88). The Stumbling Stones support remembrance as a difficult return and ignite unsettling juxtapositions: historical neighborhood terrors, contemporary urban attractiveness, and past and present sun, air, rain, and sky. Simon Schama (1996) noted, “[i]n our mind’s eye we are accustomed to think of the Holocaust as having no landscape—or at best one emptied of features and color, shrouded in night and fog. . . It is shocking, then, to realize that Treblinka, too, belongs to a brilliantly vivid countryside. . .rolling, gentle land, lined by avenues of poplar and aspen” (p. 26). Finally, I draw attention to ways the Stolpersteine are being witnessed (via YouTube): one person stopping before them and chanting, another diligently cleaning them, and a third researching their individual stories. Llewelyn (1991) departed from Levinas by addressing ethical obligations to nonhuman and nonsentient life/death. Moreover, responsibilities to existence, whether to tree or mosquito, are “toward them in their own right” (p. 261), prior to any material naming and regardless of whether they can feel or talk. In other words, need solicits irrespective of whether it is “experienced, unexperienced or unexperiencable, articulated, unarticulated, or unarticulable” (p. 196). Llewelyn, hence, extends neighborhood responsibility to stone: it possesses dignity without human attributions and inscriptions, and it has an ontological right to be let be, “if this stone is to be let be it is necessary that I do not grind it into dust” (p. 270). In other words, as Blades (2006) emphasized, ecological ethics calls us to action at the same time that it requires that we consider nonaction: “To hear the call of the world and to live ethically with the world the other must be allowed to be the Other” (p. 656). Concurrently, for me, it is insufficient to let be alone; I must also welcome alterity in the Life (life/death) web of relations. Returning to my earlier musings on what the rocks neighboring my father’s house require of me, Llewelyn and Blades concur: to let be and debate the ethics in moving, deploying, or destroying them.

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

211

I think again of mining and mountaintop removal, not to mention the Canadian Tar Sands neighboring me, as a resident of Edmonton, Alberta. A Levinas’ informed ecological ethics and curriculum is one humility and hospitality, rooted in ontological need. Here, I also begin to debate the measure in which scholarship on witnessing has focused on trauma (Caruth, 1995, 1996/2016). Oliver (2001), for one, suggested decoupling relational subjectivity from trauma. While trauma may encompass a portion of what “makes subjectivity othered” (p. 7), “trauma undermines subjectivity and witnessing restores it: the process of witnessing is not reduced to the testimony to trauma” (p. 7). Rothberg (2014), for another, posited that climate change challenges classically conceived event-centered trauma theory, by pointing to geological time scales, slow violence, diverse experiences of violence, suffering, and trauma, and “implicated subject positions beyond those of perpetrator and victim” (p. xvii). Finally, Matthew Calarco (2019) also impactfully defended Levinas’ humanist writing, arguing that it anticipated post-humanist preoccupations. He pointed out that not only did Levinas critique the problematic self-centered atomistic Western philosophical tradition but also the absurdity of and pretentiousness in privileging the place and domination of the rational animal. The violence endemic to previous centuries has revealed philosophical and sociopolitical paucities. Levinas also importantly pointed to the failures and eventual complicities – bureaucratic, repressive, and totalitarian – of revolutionary challenges to contemporary violence. Calarco posited that Levinas’ critique of humanism, perhaps inadvertently, thus aligns him more fully with post-humanism, even more so in the philosopher’s emphasis on the complicated sociopolitical and economic constellation of relations and dependencies in which human beings are situated. Levinas’ ethics counters humanist tradition in its attention to relational existence and singularity. Calarco noted Levinas’ focus on an individuality arising from relations with not only linguistic, historical, institutions, but also the much deeper relations with radical alterity “that gets under one’s skin without one being aware of it, an alterity that affects the individual in a way that cannot be reduced to a simple stimulus or causal relation” (p. 78). As such, Calarco recognized that Levinas’ ineffable ethical call to the human beyond rather than in nature allows for considerable post-human critique, but he suggested that perhaps post-humanism’s dismantling of human/nature divides is insufficient and that Levinas’ conception of radical alterity both shows the need of still thinking “human propriety” while also moving beyond considerations of anthropological difference to reflection on “responsibility for all our relations” (p. 81). What Calarco then offered, and which returns me to rocks and the Stolpersteine, is a compelling reading of one of Levinas’ earlier works on the power of ritual (radically understood) to disrupt “our unreflective attitudes, habits, and dispositions so that other relations might obtain. It interrupts our typical entry into the world and encourages us not to enter it unthinkingly but instead to pause, reflect, and reconstitute alternative and more respectful relations” (p. 81). In its “intentional cultivation of a disposition of attentiveness to interruption” (p. 81), Levinas’ ritual affirms obligations to alterity. Calarco illustrated that this early essay lacks the opposition to

212

C. Eppert

the natural world revealed in Levinas’ later texts and references “Others of all sorts” (p. 82, italics his). Rituals are practices of wonder that invite and recollect the already there-ness of the world apart from human creation and render the familiar and habitual strange and surprising. For Calarco, this emphasis on ritual not only supports radical rethinking of human and nonhuman relations but also offers more than “a theoretical framework (a limitation that contemporary iterations of posthumanism often fail to transcend” (p. 82). Intentional, embodied practices of ritual may thus encompass “a bridge between the established order and an alternative way of living” (p. 82). This, too, is what I appreciate about witnessing praxis: its embodiment not only in the abstract, but also in the concrete. All three scholars, therefore, in the face of Levinas’ interhuman emphasis, also locate gaps, ambivalences, and possibilities in his thinking that resist any clear posthuman departure from his radical ethics. They variously develop an ecological ethics beyond Levinas’ ethics. In so doing, as Davy (2007) points out and also attempts, Levinas is not being appropriated or distorted, but rather, read ethically: in other words, his work invites placing into question rather than “harmonizing its dissonant notes into a totality” (p. 40).

Conclusion: Ecological Witnessing – Curricular Implications As I bring this chapter to a close, I note Cohen’s (2015) observation that “stone offers a stumbling block to anthropocentrism” (p. 6). This chapter has sought to stumble through a Gedankenexperiment that explored discourses and possibilities for enlarging questions regarding a curriculum of witnessing, with rocks in mind. The focus was not to compare, contrast, or conflate genocide and ecocide, but rather to bring them, and also responsible address to nonhuman others, together into complicated interdependent conversation. I have previously considered the implications of Levinas’ thought and scholarship on witnessing atrocity for English language arts education (for example, Eppert, 1999, 2000), gesturing toward teaching and learning activities that proceed not from a taken-for-granted sovereign egoism but rather from difficult encounters and engagements with alterity. Such activities may include reading otherwise: that is, nuanced exploration of surprises and shocks; attendance to the ways I impose meaning or participate in practices of voyeurism, spectatorship, closure/reduction, or narrow empathetic identifications (and, I might now also add surveillance); contemplative observations of my resistances or openness to my presumptions, beliefs, opinions, and conclusions being challenged; participation in disruptions of levelling discourses; and explorations of keeping learning infinitely open to new embraces. Now I debate what Levinasian-informed ecological ethics might yield for language arts. Certainly, it entails bearing witness to genocide and ecocide along the aforementioned lines, including provoking boundaries of the evidentiary and the aesthetic and engaging an ethics of witnessing unimaginable loss beyond understanding, categorization, consolation, conceptualization, thematization, and direct representation. But, for me, the above readings have inspired me to more fully

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

213

consider larger contexts of neighborhood in language arts education and interdisciplinary curriculum – the neighborhood of a town, school, classroom, and subject area(s). They, along with the Stolpersteine, invite educators to pose difficult questions of neighbors and neighborhood: what is the history of my neighborhood; who are its past and present human and nonhuman inhabitants; were the neighbors protective of, indifferent to, or destructive of the lives of those who lived there; what did, does, and might neighborhood mean, do, and become; what has been subject to a narrow politics of recognition; what are my neighborhoods’ needs, and what might be let be and also welcomed? Finally, critically, what is the nature of my responsibility? These difficult questions and returns address human and nonhuman lives, loss, and flourishing. I also wonder ways in which language arts and other subject fields might include Levinasian-informed practices of wonder and ritual, as well as more ecological literature. In what ways might an interdisciplinary curriculum support a “witnessing assemblage” (Eppert, 2023)? I think here of Indigenous ways of witnessing and also of such Indigenous stories and wisdom as Victoria Bouvier’s (2009) Cree story Nipin and the Rocks, in which young Nipin learns the lesson that rocks tell stories and are not meant for possession but for sharing. Finally, as Blades (2006) noted, for Levinas contemplation alone is insufficient; response is required. Responsibility/responsivity in ecological witnessing can take shape in expressive writing, storytelling, art-making, and other representational efforts that acknowledge and remember both human and nonhuman worlds – destroyed, lost, and living – and that testify that these worlds are of consequence (Simon & Eppert, 1997). Further to this, ecological witnessing might participate in research creation and what I like to call “care creation” that, among other activities, envisions alternate futures, in the past, present, and future. Ghosh (2017) contends that it is not only politicians who future generations will blame for what he calls this epoch of “Great Derangement”: they may also hold “artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats” (p. 135). In closing, I turn to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a king whom the gods punish for his unethical actions – control, deceit, hubris, avarice, murder, and twice cheating death – by condemning Sisyphus to eternally needing to roll a boulder-size stone up a steep hill, only to have to face its rolling back down each time it neared the hill’s top. While this myth has received countless interpretations throughout history, to which we might add one of an egoistic education unawakened by responsibility/ responsivity, Michel Serres (2016) noted that readings of the myth have always focused on the scene and experience of the wretched hero’s fate, and not the ceaseless fall of the rock, thus revealing human narcissism: “This rolled stone, we had lost all memory that it was at the same time our immemorial anteriority and our total posterity, that is, the human race. Stones form the skeletons of the dead and the seeds of the future.” As Hache and Latour (2010) emphasized, the rock’s interminable fall back underscores that it is “the rock that counts” (p. 8). With regard to this chapter, the rock might encompass an alterity – both as nonhuman and as forever rolling back down despite any human exertions of will – to which Sisyphus is condemned never to be able to learn from and respond. Sisyphus’ fate is a

214

C. Eppert

monotonous, predictable education trapped in an eternal, mountainous cycle of uphill struggles and tumultuous failures of mastery over nature – unable to hear and learn from the rock’s teachings, perhaps a teaching to question and displace, and also let be and welcome. Ethical learning in this context is in proximity – in the touch and relation of rock – but never received. I conclude with a juxtaposing interpretation and question by Cohen (2015): Stone abides at the origin of story, but a narrative in which it might figure as something more than an ancillary device, a protagonist rather than prop, has yet to appear. There opens between Sisyphus and his boulder a space of peril and beauty, of the mundane become mythic, a complicated dance of touch and withdrawal. What if the tale of Sisyphus is not only about a human and a stone, each in its solitude, vying for the status of chief character, but a multifaceted narra-tive of cross-taxomic relation: a human who attempts to grasp a boulder that never ceases to tumble, hands upon hard surface, rock against hands, an epochal embrace? (p. 5).

References Blades, D. W. (2006). Levinas and an ethics for science education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(5), 647–664. Bouvier, V. (2009). Nipin and the rocks. http://www.our-story.ca/winners/writing/145:nipinand-therocks#story. Retrieved 24 Apr 2022. Braidotti, R. (2016). Chapter 2: Posthuman critical theory. In D. Banerji & M. R. Paranjap (Eds.), Critical posthumanism and planetary futures (pp. 13–32). Springer. Brinkley, R., & Youra, S. (1996). Tracing Shoah. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), 111(1), 108–127. Calarco, M. (2019). All our relations. Angelaki, 24(3), 71–85. Caruth, C. (Ed.). (1995). Trauma: Explorations in memory. John Hopkins University Press. Caruth, C. (1996/2016). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. John Hopkins University Press. Cohen, J. J. (2015). Stone: An ecology of the inhuman. University of Minnesota Press. Davy, B. J. (2007). An other face of ethics in Levinas. Ethics & the Environment, 12(1), 39–65. Deming, G. (n.d.). https://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home/ Eppert, C. (1999). Learning responsivity/responsibility: Reading the literature of historical witness. Doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto. Eppert, C. (2000). Re-learning questions: Responding to the address of past and present others. In R. Simon, S. Rosenberg, & C. Eppert (Eds.), Between hope and despair: Pedagogy and the remembrance of historical trauma (pp. 213–230). Rowman and Littlefield. Eppert, C. (2008). Fear, (educational) fictions of character, and Buddhist insights for a witnessing curriculum. In C. Eppert & H. Wang (Eds.), Cross-cultural studies in curriculum: Eastern thought, educational insights (1st ed., pp. 55–108). Lawrence Erlbaum, Taylor and Francis. Eppert, C. (2020). Forest walks in the Anthropocene: Meditations on grief, joy, and a restorative politics. In M. Bussey & C. Mozzini-Alister (Eds.), Phenomenologies of grace: The body, embodiment and transformative futures (pp. 65–84). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan. Eppert, C. (2023). After hope: Empire, ecocide, and sebald’s steller’s bildung. In: T. Strong-Wilson, R. L. Castro, W. Chrichlow & A. Yoder (Eds.), Curricular and architectural encounters with W. G. Sebald: Unsettling complacency, reconstructing subjectivity (pp. 272–291). Routledge. Eppert, C. (Forthcoming). Questions of witnessing: Historical, contemplative/nondual, and ecological. In A. M. Phelan & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), Curriculum studies in Canada: Present preoccupations. University of Toronto Press.

Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

215

Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crisis of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. Routledge. Garber, M., Hanssen, B., & Walkowitz, R. L. (Eds.). (2000). The turn to ethics. Routledge. Geologists. (2010). We may be slowly running out of rocks. The Onion. Retrieved 23 Apr 2022. https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running-out-of-rocks-1819571484 Ghosh, A. (2017). The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. University of Chicago Press. Glowacka, D. (2013). ‘Like an echo without a source’: Emmanuel Levinas’ witnessing subject and the Holocaust narrative. Teksty Drugle [Special Issue – English Edition], 2, 50–67. Hache, E., & Latour, B. (2010). Morality or moralism: An exercise in sensitization. Common Knowledge, 12(2), 311–330. Hamilton, D. (2016). Life’s rocky start. DVD. Heidegger, M. (1995). The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude (W. McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.). Indiana University Press. Hone, D. (2013). The world’s fossils are going extinct. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ science/lost-worlds/2013/jan/12/dinosaurs-fossils. Retrieved, 24 Apr 2022. Katz, E. (2001). Nature’s healing power, the Holocaust, and the environmental crisis. In M. D. Yaffe (Ed.), Judaism and environmental ethics: A reader. Lexington Books. Kolbert, E. (2014). The sixth extinction: An unnatural history. Picador. LaCapra, D. (1998). History and memory after Auschwitz. Cornell University Press. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being, or beyond presence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne Press. Llewelyn, J. (1991). The middle voice of ecological conscience. Macmillan. Malczynski, J., Domanska, E., Smykowski, M., & Klos, A. (2020). The environmental history of the Holocaust. Journal of Genocide Research, 22(2), 183–196. McClanahan, L. (2013). The greening of the language arts: Considering sustainability outside of the science classroom. Journal of Sustainability Education, 4. Oliver, K. (2001). Witnessing: Beyond recognition. University of Minnesota Press. Peperzak, A. T. (Ed.) (1995). Ethics as first philosophy: The significance of Emmanuel Levinas for philosophy, literature, and religion. Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group. Pinar, W. F. (1975). The method of ‘currere’. In Autobiography, politics and sexuality: Essays in curriculum theory. Peter Lang. Pinar, W. F. (2011). The character of curriculum studies: Bildung, currere, and the recurring question of the subject. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. R. (1976). Toward a poor curriculum. Kendall/Hunt. Rothberg, M. (2014). Preface: Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—Trauma studies for implicated subjects. In G. Buelens, S. Durrant, & R. Eaglestone (Eds.), The future of trauma theory: Contemporary literary and cultural criticism (pp. xi–xviii). Routledge. Schama, S. (1996). Landscape and memory. Vintage Books. Serres, M. (2016). Statues: The second book of foundations (R. Burks, Trans.). Bloomsbury. Simon, R. I., & Eppert, C. (1997). Remembering obligation: Pedagogy and the witnessing of testimony of historical trauma. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’éducation, 22(2), 175–191. Simon, R., Eppert, C., Clamen, M., & Beres, L. (2001). Witness-as-study: The difficult inheritance of testimony. The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 22(4), 285–322. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice & poststructuralist theory. Blackwell. Wertheimer, T. (2022). Babyn Yar: Anger as Kyiv’s Holocaust Memorial is Damaged. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60588885 Young, R. (1990). White mythologies: Writing history and the west. Routledge.

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental and Sustainability Education: Nordic Perspectives Monica Carlsson

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Policy Context for ESE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceptualizations of Action Competence in Key Theoretical Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Use of the Action Competence Concept in Nordic Guidelines for Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

218 220 222 224 227 229

Abstract

This chapter explores the twinning of Bildung (political and democratic formation) and competence in the action competence (AC) concept, highlighting its assumptions regarding what constitute appropriate forms of learning, action, and change in justifications of curricular content and teaching and learning approaches and potentials and constraints in terms of guiding educational practice. It is drawing on conceptualizations of AC in key theoretical texts within environmental and sustainability education (ESE), as well as on the concept’s use in a set of Nordic guidelines for ESE practice. Its conceptualization as an educational ideal is well aligned with notions of active democratic citizenship in Nordic educational policies and curriculum frameworks and is referring to both a non-affirmative and a transformative approach to education. On the one hand, underlining that education is not about shaping children and young people in line with a preexisting or given society; on the other hand, emphasizing the potential of education to transform and change subjectivities. The use of the concept in the Nordic guidelines illustrates different understandings of AC, validating the introductory description of the concept as a vehicular educational idea that can be taken up in different ways in pursuit of various ends, its hermeneutic, and M. Carlsson (*) Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_9

217

218

M. Carlsson

contextual flexibility allowing it to balance different interests within educational research, policy, and practice. Its use in the guidelines can furthermore be described as framed by an adaptive approach, referring to forms of learning, action, and change that do not challenge existing frameworks or rationales in schools. Keywords

Action competence · Environmental and sustainability education · Bildung · Competence · Nordic guidelines · Policy · Practice

Introduction Action competence (AC) has been described as an overall perspective on the purpose of schooling – a “democratic curriculum perspective” referring to Bildung. Bildung, translated as formation, is focusing on what it means to be educated, with the idea of human autonomy as a central perspective (Westbury, 2000). This chapter explores the twinning of Bildung and competence in AC within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) theory and this concept’s use in a set of Nordic guidelines for ESE practice. Equipping people to live with the complexity, plurality, and uncertainty of the world has become one of the principal tenets in ESE policy and theory (Stevenson et al., 2013). ESE can furthermore be described as a field of education that is especially shaped by transformative expectations in global policy from the OECD, UN, and UNESCO and in regional and national strategies addressing sustainable development, influencing curriculum frameworks and guidelines for practice. The ESE literature addresses this through various notions of transformative education: from working for change within existing social frameworks (adaptation) to seeking improvement by transgressing norms (disruption) (Bengtsson, 2019; Carlsson, 2021). Since the start of the 2000s, AC has played a central role in national curricula in a number of countries, as well as in international guidelines within the related fields of environmental, health, and sustainability education (see, e.g., Breiting et al., 2005; Espinet & Zachariou, 2014; New Zealand Ministry of Education, undated; Vilaça et al., 2019). The description of AC as dealing with questions regarding the purpose, content, and means of education in response to key societal challenges (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010) points to the inspiration from Klafki’s (2001) formulation of societal “schlüsselproblemen” (key issues typical of the epoch) that should guide the development of curricular content. Within this understanding, AC can furthermore be described as embedded in the epistemological tradition of critical-transformative theory within ESE, focusing on the potential of education to transform and change subjectivities and/or the cultural or structural formations that hold unsustainable practices in place (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2013). The twinning of such Bildung perspectives with a concept of competence, as well as the pliability of the latter, where some components can be added and others removed, would seem to partly explain why AC has proved to be a useful concept in

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental. . .

219

a range of cultural contexts and educational fields (Carlsson, 2020). At first glance, this twinning seems contradictory, as Bildung and competence have been described as incommensurable, aligned with two different understandings of the purposes of education. Willbergh (2015) accentuates the potential of the Bildung concept when it comes to viewing educational content as subject to interpretation and open debate of autonomous individuals on all levels from the transnational to the classroom. She argues that Bildung refers to theoretical perspectives on educational purposes that are generally difficult to combine with assessments of learning outcomes. Competences are often described as learning outcomes, and with their precise formulations specifying what students need to know and be able to do, articulated as knowledge and skills, concepts of competence are, broadly speaking, well aligned with demands for accountability (Prøitz, 2015). Probing the notions of competence and learning outcomes, Prøitz (2010) points out that these can also refer to wider educational purposes and be viewed as a tool for educational and instructional planning, rather than an accountability tool. As such, the twinning of Bildung and competence in AC can tentatively be described as a vehicular idea (McLennan, 2004) that can be taken up in different ways in pursuit of various ends, its hermeneutic, and contextual flexibility allowing it to balance different interests within educational research, policy, and practice. This chapter explores the twinning of Bildung and competence in the AC concept, highlighting its assumptions regarding what constitute appropriate forms of learning, action, and change in justifications of curricular content and teaching and learning approaches and potentials and constraints in terms of guiding educational practice. I draw on conceptualizations of AC in key theoretical texts, as well as on the concept’s use in a set of Nordic guidelines for ESE practice. The spread of ESE guidelines developed by policy actors and research networks within ESE can be seen as indicating a general tendency to place primary responsibility for an educational response to sustainability challenges outside national curriculum frameworks. Schools in the Nordic countries, like schools in other countries where the school system is characterized by a centralized curriculum of core subjects, face a common difficulty in finding a foothold for integrating a cross-curricular ESE approach. The use of guidelines for practice can support schools and teachers in translating the fragmented descriptions of sustainability perspectives found in curricula into teaching strategies that works in practice (Carlsson & Lysgaard, 2020). While national curricula and ministerial guidelines explicitly state their purpose as providing a legislative framework for teaching, the functional purpose of the Nordic guidelines for practice is more complex as it cross-references policy, research, and cases from teaching practice. Although such guidelines do not have legislative authority, they can draw attention to certain knowledge, practices, or identities and thus create what Coffey (2014) terms powerful documentary realities. Studies on the nexus between policy and curriculum (see, e.g., Pristley & Biesta, 2014; McKenzie et al., 2015; Short, 2008) highlight a shift in focus from teachers as curriculum makers to global and regional policy makers as curriculum makers, arguing that there is a need to pay attention to the policy dimension when considering matters of curriculum. In order to place the discussion of the AC concept and its use in the Nordic ESE guidelines

220

M. Carlsson

within a broader policy context, the following section will provide a brief outline and discussion of how educational responses to sustainability challenges are addressed by UNESCO and in Nordic policy.

Policy Context for ESE First, a clarification of the ESE (environmental and sustainability education) term is needed as it is not a homogeneous field, but can be seen as a collection of different conceptualizations of “ecological,” “environmental,” “climate change,” and “sustainability” education, addressing learning for change and transformation in different ways (Jucker & Mathar, 2014). The term sustainability education is used in many different forms (“education for/about/from/as sustainable development”), and much energy has been expended debating EE (environmental education) versus ESD (education for sustainable development). This debate is rooted in what has been described as the ambiguity of the term sustainable development. Stables (2013), for example, points out that the term can be described as an oxymoron, composed of two contradictory concepts. The concept of sustainable development gained momentum from its central position in the (UN funded) Our common future report, underlining that this development should “ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987: 15). The report refers to global environmental common resources and describes ecological, economic, social, and ethical perspectives as being at the core of sustainability challenges, arguing that these are a prerequisite for understanding the challenges jeopardizing our common future. It furthermore emphasizes sustainable economic growth and technological development as central when addressing sustainability challenges. Today, more than 30 years later, the UNESCO document Rethinking Education: Towards a global common good? once again addresses the concept of a commons, describing education and knowledge as a global common good and underlining that the knowledge commons is gradually being privatized (UNESCO, 2015: 80), leading to a lack of trust in knowledge production and dissemination. When read together with the follow-up UNESCO (2020) initiative Visioning and Framing the Futures of Education, this document can be interpreted as an intensification of calls for education to realize transformative expectations in policy. Humanist ideals of education as a common good and schools as a means of constructing community and strengthening democracy have been a powerful discourse framing curriculum thinking throughout the twentieth century, as Franklin (2015) points out. In relation to the commons perspective in education, Masschelein and Simons (2015) suggest that such approaches can encourage us to regard decisions concerning the content of teaching as a matter of common interest and to identify concrete ways of gathering young people around a common issue. However, they also advise against a view of schooling as a means of community building (as doing so might prevent it being seen as a way of giving younger generations the opportunity to reimagine society) and describe its potential as lying “in what is

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental. . .

221

transmitted being detached and released from any ‘community’ and ‘position’” (pp. 88–89). This is a perspective that draws upon a non-affirmative approach to education, highlighted in Lotz-Sisitka’s (2017) discussion of the UNESCO, 2015 document, arguing that the notion of the common good needs to be released from historical descriptions of the commons to embrace the future. In their discussion of a non-affirmative versus a transformative approach to education, Uljens and Ylimaki (2017) argue that there is a risk of manipulation and indoctrination associated with the latter, drawing on Autio (2006), who has pointed out that transformative expectations in education policy can be embedded in rationalities that can co-opt democratic dialogue concerning goals and power. They underline, however, that it is a fine line that can be drawn between the two positions as both belong to critical theory. The attention paid to both positions in discussions of the future of education within the field of ESE indicates that non-affirmative and transformative approaches can be seen as two sides of the epistemological tradition of critical theory within this field (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015). The Nordic policy documents A Good Life in a Sustainable Nordic Region: Nordic Strategy for Sustainable Development 2013–2025 and the Action Plan for 2021–2024 (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2019, 2020) include goals and indicators for the educational sector in the Nordic region as a whole. While the UNESCO 2015 and 2020 policy documents criticize discourses that construe economic values such as competitiveness as of primary worth in education and question the emphasis on economic growth and technology when addressing sustainability challenges, the Nordic strategy emphasizes such economic values when addressing education, promoting a robust green economy. At the core of these documents is a belief that “green growth plays an important role” and that there is a need for “increased competitiveness” (2019: 9, 11). The policy documents also refer to equality and democracy as general formative perspectives and to the role of education “to promote active democratic citizenship and critical thinking among children and young people” (2020: 24). This is in line with a recent report mapping how education policy and curricula within compulsory education in the Nordic countries construe ESE, noting the common emphasis on educational values such as equality and democracy in curricula and on Bildung perspectives referring to democratic formation (Jónsson, 2021). However, the formulation of goals with a specific reference to the education sector in the Nordic policy documents emphasizes competencies relevant to an international labor market, thereby supporting the Nordic countries’ global competitiveness. For example, it is stated that: “More young people in Nordic countries will study on educational programmes that provide the competencies required by the business community” (2019: 45). The stated goal is to “support knowledge and innovation and make it easier for companies throughout the Nordic Region to take full advantage of the development opportunities created by the green, technological, and digital transformation and growing bioeconomy” (2020: 13). It is worth mentioning here that the Nordic strategy’s outline of sustainability goals and (outcome) indicators refers to publicly funded education. The core assumptions regarding the mutually positive relationship between economic growth and democratic citizenship have been described as a foundation for the Nordic

222

M. Carlsson

welfare states (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017). However, the explicit references to economic growth, greater competitiveness, and the needs of the business community can be interpreted as a shift in Nordic education policy toward what Pedersen (2014) terms “mobication,” i.e. “mobility through education” in a competitive state (p. 29). As Uljens and Rajakaltio (2017) point out in their analysis of the national core curriculum for basic education in Finland, the emphasis of greater competitiveness might reflect an expectation of a weakened welfare state and reorganized labor market in the future, leading to a focus on entrepreneurship and economic citizenship in education policy and curriculum.

Conceptualizations of Action Competence in Key Theoretical Texts This section explores the conceptualization of AC, drawing on descriptions from key theoretical texts within the field of ESE research and perspectives from the GermanScandinavian Didaktik tradition. Addressing questions related to the role formal education plays in and for societal development, Kristensen (1991) points out that “action competence is not about adaptation of children and youth to a pre-existing or given society,” but about “what children and youth must learn in order to help to shape their own and other’s future” (p. 37; own translation). Mogensen and Schnack (2010) situates the AC concept within the German-Scandinavian Didaktik tradition, which has been described as focusing on the content and purpose of education, drawing on historical-philosophical and normative foundations in pedagogy (Hopmann, 2015). Contrasting the Didaktik tradition with the curriculum tradition, Hopmann (2015) characterizes the curriculum tradition as more oriented towards learning and teaching approaches. Focusing both on the content and purpose of education and learning and teaching approaches, AC seems to be drawing on both Didaktik and curriculum traditions. Schnack (2000) describes AC as oriented towards meeting societal challenges related to health, environment, sustainability, peace, democracy, and inequality, building on critical pedagogy’s values of democracy and emancipation. He suggests that this requires a “Didaktik of challenges,” posing the question: “In which ways should our common sense be qualified to face these challenges in a responsible and competent way?” (Schnack, 2000: 38). He furthermore underlines that these challenges concern issues that do not necessary have a clear solution, arguing that strengthening and qualifying democratic competencies should be considered as an overall perspective on the purpose of education. These arguments seem to draw inspiration from Klafki’s (2001) formulation of societal “schlüsselproblemen” that should guide the development of curricular content, rather than the traditional orientation towards individual academic disciplines or canonical cultural touchstones. The definition of AC as an ability to act, initiate, and bring about positive change, underlining engagement, and commitment in relation to the position one has chosen (Jensen & Schnack, 1997), furthermore, echoes Klafki’s (2001) emphasis on the need to nurture a readiness and capacity for moral action.

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental. . .

223

Two aspects of Bildung – political formation and democratic formation – stand out in conceptualizations of AC. Kristensen (1991) draws on the characterization of political formation by the Norwegian philosopher Hellesnes as a kind of socialization, which “. . . emancipates people to become political subjects” – and not just the objects of control and guidance exercised by other people (Hellesnes, 1976; own translation). With reference to a critical Bildung-centered Didaktik, education guided by this perspective is seen as an emancipatory process based on political formation through experiences with action and participation in democratic processes. Relating the German/Nordic Didaktik tradition to the moral philosophy of Hegel, Autio (2015) notes that political action occurs when individuals observe and recognize the particular “normalizing” forces of their society and decide to transform them. From this perspective, “political action is a way to get power of determination in regard to forces that affect oneself” (Autio, 2015: 241). The idea of human autonomy as a central perspective in Bildung is captured in Klafki’s formulation of three elements describing the democratic formation of the subject – self-determination, co-determination, and solidarity (Klafki, 1998). Schnack (2000) draws on this grounding of Bildung in his description of democratic formation, thus bringing power relations, dialogue, and notions of a common good to the forefront of what a “Didaktik of challenges” might entail. Inherent in this understanding of Bildung is that fixed knowledge, solutions, and correct ways of behaving in response to sustainability issues cannot be specified or given beforehand by experts, organizations, or politicians. In conceptualizations of AC, critical thinking, including consideration of conflicting interests, is seen as essential for the development of personal and collective capacities that can be transformative and point to new visions of the future (Breiting et al., 2005). Two criteria are underlined to clarify the concept of action in AC: actions must be both intentional and goal-oriented, i.e., decided by the learners themselves and directed towards a solution to a given problem (Jensen & Schnack, 1994, 1997). Together with the understanding of action as moral and political, this provides a key to understanding the transformative connotations in conceptualizations of AC, seeking improvement by focusing on actions and a change-oriented transgression of norms. The emphasis on action and change, as well as the understanding that education should increase possibilities for and qualify actions, highlights the need for a curriculum for political citizenship in ESE (Carlsson & Jensen, 2006). Consequently, it is argued that teaching should provide students with opportunities to experience both individual and social action, with the latter seen as having a special potential in relation to democratic and political formation (Carlsson & Hoffmann, 2011). The emphasis on social action, grounded in the need to scrutinize and develop criteria for action that are jointly communicated, discussed, and accepted, is described as of special importance when dealing with sustainability issues, as such issues go beyond the individual’s immediate sphere. The inspiration from critical theory is apparent, pointing out that social actions “though they express the relations of dependence, because they are ideologically fixed, are in principle subject to change” (Habermas, 1966 in Ryen, 2020: 224).

224

M. Carlsson

One of the arguments for dividing the concept of AC into a number of constituent components is that it allows for its operationalization in teaching (Jensen & Schnack, 1997). Early conceptualizations of AC include four core components: knowledge and insight (multi-dimensional knowledge), commitment (motivation to become involved in initiating change), visions (to think behind and beyond problems and take a creative approach to possible solutions), and action experiences (real-life experiences with initiating and implementing change) (Carlsson & Simovska, 2012). These components are closely related to a theory of instruction intended to promote AC, the “IVAC approach,” which emphasizes students’ Investigations, Vision work, and experiences with taking Action and initiating Change (Carlsson & Simovska, 2012). Qualification of AC is understood as a never-ending process, where actions always produce both intended and unintended changes, which in turn demand new competencies (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010: 62). The description of action as continuous and connected, a foundation for guiding future actions and changing situations, justifies the focus on action experiences in the approach to teaching and learning advocated. Although the operationalization of AC in a number of distinct components can be seen as accommodating expectations related to accountability purposes in education, it does not offer criteria that makes AC measurable in a traditional sense, i.e., with clear and validated indicators for each component. Indeed, it has been argued that AC and its components should not be measured as doing so risks weakening the concept’s critical potential by aligning it with the accountability culture that pervades contemporary schooling (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010). In conceptualizations of AC, “competence” is associated with being able, and willing, to be a qualified participant in democratic society and understood as mastering knowledge and action that meet the challenges of a given situation (Jensen & Schnack, 1997: 165). This understanding has its foundation in critical Bildungcentered Didaktik and its interest in the relation between education, democracy, and society, which differs from the understanding of competence within the natural sciences (in whose curricula the term sustainability is most likely to be mentioned in the Nordic countries). In the latter case, competencies are mainly described in terms of knowledge and skills rooted in the underlying scientific disciplines (Jónsson, 2021). By comparison, AC has more in common with conceptualizations of competence in non-formal education, underlining that “competencies do not exist independent of action and context. Instead, they are conceptualized in relation to demands and actualized by actions (which implies intentions, reasons and goals) taken by individuals in a particular situation” (Rychen & Salganik, 2003: 46).

The Use of the Action Competence Concept in Nordic Guidelines for Practice This section explores the use of the AC concept and its theory of instruction in the Nordic Working Model for Education for Sustainable Development (Scheie & Korsager, 2017), developed in collaboration between teacher educators from

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental. . .

225

universities and national centers for science education in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, a subregion of Northern Europe with strong cultural and linguistic ties. The aim of this model is to guide practice in schools at both national and local levels, focusing on further education of teachers. The reasoning behind the guidelines references UNESCO and Nordic policy (Global Action Programme 2015–2019 (UNESCO, 2014), Education for Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (UNESCO, 2017), and the Nordic strategy A Good Life in a Sustainable Nordic Region (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2019)), pointing out that in spite of the efforts made during the UN decade of education for sustainable development, many teachers still lack competencies within this area. It furthermore underlines the relevance of education in order to reach the targets set in the Nordic strategy: “The Nordic countries have a unique opportunity to be a frontrunner region in education for sustainable development” (Scheie & Korsager, 2017: 3; own translation). Below I distinguish between descriptions and quotes from the publication by the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish teacher educators (all quotations below are translated from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish to English by the author of this chapter). The Danish teacher educators describe Bildung as an overall aim when addressing sustainability issues in education. They note that a central part of this aim is “the ability to participate in the development of society, i.e. that students build up the ability, willingness and desire to participate” (p. 24). Alongside the emphasis on critical thinking and decision-making, which are seen as essential elements in learning processes focused on students’ development of AC, this indicates an understanding of Bildung as democratic formation. The Swedish teacher educators draw on similar notions of democratic formation, underlining that “critical thinking and reflection is important in situations where a variety of factors, sometimes uncertain, should be taken into account” and that “the opportunity for participation in decision-making can be seen as crucial for whether students develop action skills for sustainability” (p. 14). This is echoing the UNESCO policy documents (2015, 2020) which point out that many sustainability issues involve conflict regarding the definition, causes, and/or severity of a given problem and what constitutes an adequate solution, underlining the educational value of working with students’ critical thinking and decision-making. The Norwegian teacher educators describe critical thinking as a skill that is of particular relevance when addressing sustainable development, together with cognitive, practical, and communicative skills (p. 34). They furthermore refer to critical thinking as not only a core skill in ESE but as a central element in students’ democratic formation, implying a sense of engagement and a responsibility to participate in decision-making. The Nordic guidelines contain somewhat divergent conceptions of AC and assumptions about appropriate forms of learning, action, and change guided by this concept. The Norwegian teacher educators describe AC as “the knowledge about which action possibilities exist, a will to act and belief that it makes a difference” (p. 33). They furthermore refer to AC as “being able to solve tasks and meet challenges in different contexts, which requires both cognitive, practical, social and motivational aspects in students’ learning” (p. 36). The Danish teacher educators underline that “developing AC means that students work with relevant knowledge

226

M. Carlsson

and skills, as well as practicing a critical stance to concrete and authentic issues over which they have an influence” and describe the students’ actions as central elements in a teaching and learning approach aimed at the development of AC (p. 25). The Swedish teacher educators underline that it is in the process of taking action that students’ action competence can be transformed from theory to practice (p. 16). The formulations of the Danish and Swedish teacher educators indicate an understanding where taking action in one form or another is seen as appropriate in a school context, while the Norwegian teacher educators replace action and action experiences with skills in their conceptualization of AC and refer to solving tasks as an appropriate form of learning. The guidelines outline a common planning and evaluation model for visualizing learning outcomes based on AC competence components that are used in examples from all three countries. This model is based on three competence components – knowledge, skills, and attitudes (p. 33), which indicates a similar understanding of AC to traditional competence concepts (as described by Willbergh (2015) and Prøitz (2010)). In the example provided by the Norwegian teacher educators, learning outcomes are mainly described in terms of knowledge and skills: “the students know how to promote their points of view in the local community” and “have a good knowledge of what it takes to substantiate their arguments” (p. 45). The examples of learning outcomes given by the Danish and Swedish teacher educators also refer to knowledge and skills, but include action and change as well. The Swedish teacher educators point out that education should contribute to change among students, “to open new ways of thinking and acting, which is the principal tenet within transformative education” (p. 15), while the Danish teacher educators state the students have demonstrated an ability to take local, solution-oriented action in relation to sustainability issues and strategies (p. 47). The Norwegian teacher educators reflect on the constraints in evaluating learning outcomes related to AC: “to assess pupils’ learning outcomes in sustainability education is a challenge as the aim is to give them action competence” (p. 42). This indicates an understanding that there is more to AC than its operationalization in competence components used to assess learning outcomes. Reflecting on the content of sustainability education, the Danish teacher educators state that the curriculum must be as broad as possible – not only in terms of the specific content but also the chosen working methods and in relation to the values that are in focus in teaching. They hereby underline a non-affirmative curriculum approach, emphasizing that education cannot be reduced to the socialization of learners into certain norms and values (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017). Such notions can also be identified in the Swedish teacher educators’ emphasis of a pluralistic teaching and learning approach, allowing different perspectives on sustainability to arise in discussions with students and supporting the development of a critical stance instead of teaching predefined solutions (p. 31). These notions seem to reflect doubts about the need for a general overall Nordic model, pointing to the understanding of teaching as reflective practice in the Bildung tradition, guided by the essential what, how, and why questions around their teaching of their students in their classroom (Westbury, 2000). By contrast, their arguments in support of the curricular content in the

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental. . .

227

guidelines are framed by a common Nordic model for cross-disciplinary teaching, accentuating that discussion and decision-making concerning sustainability issues and solutions needs to be based on an integration of environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. This actualizes Vare’s (2018) discussion of the inherent tension when applying the concept of sustainable development in educational contexts, simultaneously trying to open up for a broader notion of human development and ways of making education for sustainable development able to operate and measurable in practice.

Concluding Discussion The Nordic guidelines’ use of AC is overall framed by what could be described as an adaptive approach, referring to forms of learning, action, and change that do not challenge existing frameworks or rationales in schools. This is most apparent in the reasoning behind the curricular content in the planning and evaluation sections of the guidelines, drawing on a model of AC that emphasizes the need for a specific set of methods and skills. This actualizes Willberg’s discussion of competence concepts, underlining that the point of these, at least to a certain degree, is to standardize understandings of learning outcomes. Empirical findings from studies addressing learning outcomes in projects based on the AC concept indicate that while knowledge and skills can be characterized as measurable, it is difficult to quantify competence components such as visions and action experiences in any meaningful sense (Breiting et al., 1997; Carlsson & Simovska, 2012; Eames et al., 2006). These findings suggest that AC as a composite concept can give direction for a formative assessment of educational attainment that is closely related to teaching and learning processes, but cannot be measured in terms of its individual components. From this perspective, it is questionable whether conceptualizations of AC in planning and evaluation models that focus on knowledge and skills while omitting the other, more difficult to measure components can offer anything that cannot be provided by the competence concepts found in the national curricula with their focus on knowledge and skills. The focus on action and change in the concept of AC is essential if it is to provide a perspective on curricular content and teaching and learning approaches of relevance for transformative education. However, this focus is also problematized in one of the main criticisms of the AC concept (Bishop & Scott, 1998), arguing that when reflections on the content of education are characterized by action-oriented rhetoric, it can lead to a way of thinking about teaching and learning that prioritizes activism ahead of academic knowledge and its forms of inquiry. The Nordic guidelines illustrate different understandings of AC, validating the introductory description of AC as a vehicular educational idea. The guidelines’ examples of what might constitute “taking action for sustainability” in a school context emphasize various forms of indirect action, including social investigative actions such as conducting a survey, as well as actions directed at change, such as persuading municipal authorities to address a local sustainability issue. The guidelines furthermore highlight action experiences alongside task solving as appropriate

228

M. Carlsson

forms of learning when the aim is to develop students’ action competence. The descriptions of critical thinking and reflection, critical decision-making, and student participation largely refer to democratic formation as an aspect of Bildung, used to justify what can be described as a learner-centered and participatory approach to teaching and learning. As previous studies have shown (see, e.g., Carlsson & Simovska, 2012; Taylor et al., 2015), conceptualizations of AC in guidelines for practice focus more on processes of democratic formation than political formation. Teaching that encourages children and young people taking social action can be viewed as risky, and school-based teaching and learning approaches seem to stick to safe versions of democratic citizenship and student participation rather than addressing expectations of transformative change. Applied in different curricular contexts, AC has been (re)conceptualized a number of times, largely focusing on adding and/or subtracting competence components, and largely justified with reference to either educational purposes or accountability purposes. The inherent pliability of the concept of AC, i.e., the possibility of including or omitting different competence components, can support its integration in different curricular contexts, as indicated in the Nordic guidelines, as well as in the examples of conceptualizations below. For example, in an environmental education study in New Zealand, Eames et al. (2006) added “connectedness” as a core component of AC, referring to an understanding of AC as developed in social relations and connected to a sense of community. This underlines aspects of democratic formation and citizenship, fitting well with environmental and sustainability education’s inclusion in the national curriculum for the social sciences in New Zealand (New Zealand Ministry of Education, undated). Connectedness is furthermore described as involving students working with and connecting subject matter from different disciplines, thus addressing the critique that AC does not focus enough on the material perspectives on the content of the curriculum (Bishop & Scott, 1998). A recent study, presenting a reconceptualization of AC within a Northern European context (Belgium and Sweden), argues that there is a need for stronger consideration of AC as a competence concept in sustainability education (rather than interpreting AC as an educational approach) (Sass et al., 2020). The authors are suggesting the integration of a range of core psychological components such as self-efficacy, which helps enable the measurement of the different components of AC and can be seen as a way of accommodating expectations concerning accountability. The conceptualization of AC as an educational ideal is well aligned with notions of active democratic citizenship in Nordic educational policies and curriculum frameworks. As such, it can potentially counter narrow understandings of qualification as purely a matter of knowledge and skills. Furthermore, underlining the composite nature of AC as something that cannot be measured in terms of individual components and emphasizing a broader sense of purpose than performativity and economic citizenship critically address the tendency to reshape education through the language of accountability. However, when conceived as something that can be operationalized and measured, AC also lends itself to a critique of common conceptualizations of competence within educational theory. Willbergh (2015), for instance,

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental. . .

229

suggests that competence, striving to be an educational concept starts out as an organic educational theory, is ending up with skills as a methods-based form of education (p. 21). The conceptualization of AC in the key theoretical texts discussed in this chapter holds notions of both a non-affirmative and a transformative approach to education. On the one hand, it underlines that education is not about shaping children and young people in line with a preexisting or given society; on the other hand, it is emphasizing the potential of education to transform and change subjectivities. It seems difficult to reconcile the conceptualization of AC, hinting at independence from existing orders, with the normative content referring to the production of a particular kind of subject – a subject that responds to demands for action and change related to sustainability issues. The conceptualization of AC thus encompasses the ambivalence that Bacchi (2009) describes as at the heart of the educational project, on the one hand, regarding education as emancipatory, liberating the subject, and, on the other hand, as attributing a normalizing effect, taming the subject.

References Autio, T. (2006). Subjectivity, curriculum and society: Between and beyond the German Didaktik and Anglo-American curriculum studies. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Autio, T. (2015). Curriculum theory, education policy, and “the recurring question of the subject”. In J. M. Paraskeva & S. Steinberg (Eds.), Curriculum: Decolonizing the field (pp. 233–242). Peter Lang. Bacchi, C. (2009). Analyzing policy, what’s the problem represented to be? Pearson Education. Bengtsson, S. (2019). Engaging with the beyond – Diffracting conceptions of T-learning. Sustainability, 11(3430), 1–20. Bishop, K., & Scott, W. (1998). Deconstructing action competence: Developing a case for a more scientifically-attentive environmental education. Public Understanding of Science, 7, 225–236. Breiting, B., Hedegaard, K., Mogensen, F., Nielsen, K., & Schnack, K. (1997). Action competence, conflicting interests and environmental education – The MUVIN Programme. Odense Forlag. Breiting, S., Mayer, M., & Mogensen, F. (2005). Quality criteria for ESD schools. Guidelines to enhance the quality of Education for Sustainable Development. ENSI and SEED network. https://www.ensi.org/global/downloads/Publications/208/QC-GB.pdf Carlsson, M. (2020). Action competence at work in education for sustainable development (Handlekompetencebegrebet på arbejde i uddannelse for bæredygtig udvikling). In J. Andreasen Lysgaard & N. Jordt Jørgensen (Eds.), The pedagogy of sustainability: Research perspectives and examples from practice (Bæredygtighedens pædagogik: Forskningsperspektiver og eksempler fra praksis) (pp. 123–139). Frydenlund Academic. Carlsson, M. (2021). Transformative expectations in environmental and sustainability education research. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 22(Special issue), 230–264. https://tidsskrift.dk/ index.php/outlines Carlsson, M., & Hoffmann, B. (2011). Action competence and democratic formation. (Handlekompetence og demokratisk dannelse). In K. K. B. Dahl, J. Læssøe, & V. Simovska (Eds.), Essays on bildung, curriculum and action competence – Inspired by Karsten Schnack. (Essays om dannelse, didaktik og handlekompetence – Inspireret af Karsten Schnack) (pp. 119– 130). Research program for Environmental and Health Pedagogy, The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University.

230

M. Carlsson

Carlsson, M., & Jensen, B. B. (2006). Encouraging environmental citizenship: The roles and challenges for schools. In A. Dobson & D. Bell (Eds.), Environmental citizenship (pp. 237– 262). MIT Press. Carlsson, M., & Lysgaard, J. A. (2020). Education for sustainable development: From policy to practice (Uddannelse for bæredygtig udvikling: Fra politik til praksis). In J. Andreasen Lysgaard & N. Jordt Jørgensen (Eds.), The pedagogy of sustainability: Research perspectives and examples from practice (Bæredygtighedens pædagogik: Forskningsperspektiver og eksempler fra praksis) (pp. 42–64). Frydenlund Academic. Carlsson, M., & Simovska, V. (2012). Exploring learning outcomes of school-based health promotion – A multiple case study. Health Education Research, 27(3), 437–447. Coffey, A. (2014). Analysing documents. In U. Flick (Ed.), The Sage handbook of qualitative data analysis (pp. 367–380). SAGE Publications Ltd. Eames, C., Law, B., Barker, M., Iles, H., McKenzie, J., Patterson, R., et al. (2006). Investigating teachers’ pedagogical approaches in environmental education that promote students’ action competence. TLRI. Espinet, M., & Zachariou, A. (2014). Key stones on school community collaboration for sustainable development. CoDeS – Schools and Community – Working Together for Sustainable Development. CoDeS Comenius Network report. Available at: https://www.ensi.org/global/downloads/ Publications/369/CoDeS-Key%20Stones.pdf Franklin, B. M. (2015). The discursive roots of community: A genealogy of the curriculum. In J. M. Paraskeva & S. Steinberg (Eds.), Curriculum: Decolonizing the field (pp. 53–66). Peter Lang. Hellesnes, J. (1976). Socialization and technocracy (Socialisering og teknokrati). Gyldendal. Hopmann, S. (2015). ‘Didaktik meets Curriculum’ revisited: historical encounters, systematic experience, empirical limits. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy. (Vol. 1). https:// doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.27007 Jensen, B. B., & Schnack, K. (1994). Action competence as an educational challenge. In B. B. Jensen & K. Schnack (Eds.), Action and Action competence as key concepts in critical pedagogy. Studies in educational theory and curriculum (Vol. 12, pp. 5–18). Royal Danish School of Educational Studies. Jensen, B. B., & Schnack, K. (1997). The action competence approach in environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 3(2), 163–178. Jónsson, O. (Ed.). (2021). Mapping education for sustainable development in the Nordic countries. Icelandic Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. https://pub.norden.org/temanord2021511/?fbclid¼IwAR3pC946C1gYHc-m9NZcOep76qH-LnguKa3WoA2WDSLjIxZQiTRo 4CShGoM#58073 Jucker, R., & Mathar, R. (2014). Schooling for sustainable development in Europe: Concepts, policies and educational experience at the end of the UN decade of education for sustainable development. Springer Science+Business Media. Klafki, W. (1998). Characteristics of a critical constructive didaktik. In S. Hopmann & B. B. Gundem (Eds.), Didaktik and/or curriculum: An international dialogue (pp. 307–330). Peter Lange. Klafki, W. (2001). Dannelsesteori og Didaktik: Nye studier [Theory of Bildung and Didaktik: New studies] (1st ed., pp. 59–103). Klim. Kristensen, H. J. (1991). Pedagogy – Theory in practice. The school in the 90’s (Pædagogik – teori i praksis. Skolen i 90’erne). Gyldendal. Lotz-Sisitka, H. (2017). Education and the common good. In B. Jickling & S. Sterling (Eds.), Postsustainability and environmental education (pp. 63–78). Palgrave Mc Millan. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-319-51322-5_5 Lotz-Sisitka, H., Fien, J., & Ketlhoilwe, M. (2013). Traditions and new niches: An overview of environmental education curriculum and learning research. In R. B. Stevensen, M. Brody, J. Dillon, & A. E. J. Wals (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 194–205). Routledge.

The Twinning of Bildung and Competence in Environmental. . .

231

Lotz-Sisitka, H., Wals, A., Kronlid, D., & McGarry, D. (2015). Transformative, transgressive social learning: Rethinking higher education pedagogy in times of systemic global dysfunction. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 16, 73–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust. 2015.07.018 Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2015). Education in times of fast learning: The future of the school. Ethics and Education, 10(1), 84–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2014.998027 McKenzie, M., Bieler, A., & McNeil, R. (2015). Education policy mobility: Reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times. Environmental Education Research, 221(3), 319–337. McLennan, G. (2004). Travelling with vehicular ideas: The case of the third way. Economy and Society, 33(4), 484–499. Mogensen, F., & Schnack, K. (2010). The action competence approach and the “new” discourses of education for sustainable development, competence and quality criteria. Environmental Education Research, 16(1), 59–74. New Zealand Ministry of Education. (undated). Guideline for education for sustainability. https:// seniorsecondary.tki.org.nz/Social-sciences/Education-for-sustainability Nordic Council of Ministers. (2019). A good life in a sustainable Nordic region: Nordic Strategy for Sustainable Development 2013–2025. Nordic Council of Ministers. https://doi.org/10.6027/ PN2019-705 Nordic Council of Ministers. (2020). The Nordic region – Towards being the most sustainable and integrated region in the world: Action plan for 2021 to 2024. Nordic Council of Ministers. https://doi.org/10.6027/politiknord2020-728 Pedersen, O. K. (2014). The competitive state and its education policy: Background, intentions and modes of operation (Konkurrencestaten og dens uddannelsespolitik: Baggrund, intentioner og funktionsmåder). In K. Illeris (Ed.), Learning in the competitive state: Race or sustainability (Læring i konkurrencestaten: Kapløb eller bæredygtighed) (pp. 13–33). Samfundslitteratur. Pristley, M., & Biesta, G. (2014). Introduction: The new curriculum. In M. Pristley & G. Biesta (Eds.), Reinventing the curriculum. New trends in curriculum policy and practice (pp. 1–12). Bloomsbury Academic. Prøitz, T. S. (2010). Learning outcomes – What are they? Who defines them? When and where are they defined? Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 22(2), 119–137. Prøitz, T. S. (2015). Learning outcomes as a key concept in policy documents throughout policy changes. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 59(3), 275–296. Rychen, D. S., & Salganik, L. H. (2003). Key competencies for a successful life and wellfunctioning society. Hogrefe Publishing. Ryen, E. (2020). Klafki’s critical-constructive didaktik and the epistemology of critical thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(2), 214–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2019.1657959 Sass, W., Boeve-de Pauw, J., Olsson, D., Gericke, N., De Maeyer, S., & Van Petegem, P. (2020). Redefining action competence: The case of sustainable development. The Journal of Environmental Education, 51(4), 292–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2020.1765132 Scheie, E., & Korsager, M. (Eds.). (2017). Nordic workingmodel for education for sustainable development (Nordisk arbeidsmodell for Undervisning for bærekraftig utvikling). Naturfagssenteret rapport nr. 1, Oslo. Schnack, K. (2000). Action competence as a curriculum perspective. In B. B. Jensen, K. Schnack, & V. Simovska (Eds.), Critical environmental and health education – Research issues and challenges (pp. 107–127). Research Centre for Environmental and Health Education, Danish University of Education. Short, E. C. (2008). Curriculum policy research. In F. M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. I. Phillion (Eds.), (pp. 420–430). Sage Publications. Stables, A. (2013). The unsustainability imperative? Problems with “sustainability” and “sustainable development” as regulative ideals. Environmental Education Research, 19(2), 177–186. Stevenson, R. B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A. E. J. (2013). International handbook of research on environmental education. Routledge.

232

M. Carlsson

Taylor, N., Quinn, F., & Eames, C. (2015). Educating for sustainability in primary schools. Teaching for the future. Sense Publishers. Uljens, M., & Rajakaltio, H. (2017). National curriculum development as educational leadership: A discursive and non-affirmative approach. In M. Uljens & R. Ylimaki (Eds.), Bridging educational leadership, curriculum theory and didaktik: Non-affirmative theory of education (pp. 411–438). Springer Open. Uljens, M., & Ylimaki, R. (2017). Non-affirmative theory of education as a foundation for curriculum studies, didaktik and educational leadership. In M. Uljens & R. Ylimaki (Eds.), Bridging educational leadership, curriculum theory and didaktik: Non-affirmative theory of education (pp. 3–36). Springer Open. UNESCO. (2014). The Global Action Programme (GAP) on Education for sustainable development. https://en.unesco.org/globalactionprogrammeoneducation UNESCO. (2015). Rethinking education: Towards a global common good? UNESCO. https:// unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232555 UNESCO. (2017). Education for sustainable development goals. UNESCO. https://bangkok. unesco.org/content/education-sustainable-development-goals-learning-objectives UNESCO. (2020). Visioning and framing the futures of education. UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/ sites/default/files/outcome_document_first_meeting_of_international_commission_on_the_ futures_of_education.pdf Vare, P. (2018). A rounder sense of purpose: Developing and assessing competences for educators of sustainable development. Form@re, 18(2), 164–173. https://doi.org/10.13128/formare-23712 Vilaça, T., Darlington, E., Velasco, M. J. M., Martinis, O., & Masson, J. (2019). SHE SCHOOL MANUAL 2.0. www.schoolsforhealth.org/resources/materials-and-tools/ Westbury, I. (2000). Teaching as reflective practice: What might Didaktik teach curriculum? In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice. The German Didaktik tradition (pp. 15–39). Lawrence Erlbaum. Willbergh, I. (2015). The problems of “competence” and alternatives from the Scandinavian perspective of Bildung. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47(3), 334–354. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00220272.2014.1002112 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). (1987). Our common future. Oxford University Press. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987ourcommon-future.pdf

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project Patrick Phillips and Nicholas Ng-A-Fook

Contents What Is a Canadian Curriculum Theory Project? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Provoking the “Idea” of Curriculum Studies in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re/constructing A Curriculum Theory Project in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

234 240 245 249

Abstract

What can a curriculum theory project be, here in Canada? In this expository chapter, we attempt to answer such kinds of situated curriculum inquiries. To do so, we begin our tracings of this story with an account of research that has emerged from our research at A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project and its associated collective of curriculum theorists at the University of Ottawa (see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca). We then provide some of our entanglements with the various transdisciplinary intellectual traditions that have influenced its theoretical formations, through to its past and present curriculum theory projects. We further examine its contextual situatedness amidst the community of curriculum scholarship in a settler colonial nation state that some of us call Canada. We offer situated and partial narrative snapshots of a Canadian field of curriculum studies in relation to unsettling settler colonial imaginaries and its affective turns toward ethical relationality in response to truth, and then reconciliation, as an emerging field of educational studies. We also discuss how understanding its curriculum-as-planned in relation to a curriculum-as-lived becomes, for us, intellectual, theoretical, and cultural processes of deconstructing and reconstructing the “isness” of “curriculum” (Aoki, 1992/2005; Ng-A-Fook, in press). We conclude with potential implications for our future work as curriculum theorists P. Phillips · N. Ng-A-Fook (*) University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_53

233

234

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

studying, theorizing, and collaborating with different community partners here in Canada, at the University of Ottawa, and on the traditional unceded and unsurrendered territories of the different Algonquin First Nations. Keywords

Curriculum studies · Curriculum theory project · Canada · Culture · Provoking curriculum · Reconstructing curriculum · Settler colonialism · Ethical relationality · Life writing

What Is a Canadian Curriculum Theory Project? Curriculum transmits culture, as it is formed by it. Curriculum modifies culture even as it transmits it. Similarly, as with culture, we live curriculum before we describe it. (Grumet, 1999, p. 24) Curriculum in Canada faces the challenge of being the passport to understanding, and acting on behalf of, all of Canada, its more fragile people and places as well as its most robust and vibrant. (Chambers, 2006, p. 11)

What can a curriculum theory project be, here in Canada? In this expository chapter, we attempt to answer such kinds of situated curriculum inquiries. To do so, we begin our tracings of this story with an account of the our historical connections to the Curriculum Theory Project at Louisiana State University. We then provide some of our entanglements with the various transdisciplinary intellectual traditions that have influenced our theoretical formations, through to its past and present curriculum theory projects. We further examine our contextual situatedness amidst the community of curriculum scholarship in a settler colonial nation state that some of us call Canada. We offer situated and partial narrative snapshots of a Canadian field of curriculum studies in relation to unsettling settler colonial imaginaries and its affective turns toward ethical relationality in response to truth, and then reconciliation, as an emerging field of educational studies. We also discuss how understanding its curriculum-as-planned in relation to a curriculum-as-lived becomes, for us, intellectual, theoretical, and cultural processes of deconstructing and reconstructing the “isness” of “curriculum” (Aoki, 1992/2005; Ng-A-Fook, in press). We conclude with potential implications for our future work as curriculum theorists studying, theorizing, and collaborating with different community partners here in Canada, at the University of Ottawa, and on the traditional unceded and unsurrendered territories of the different Algonquin First Nations. While the context of this edited collection spans many sites of curriculum experience and its theorizing, we focus in this chapter section on the transnational influence and exchange between key sites and individual authors who have influenced our work at A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project (CCTP). Indeed, as Petra Munro Hendry (2011) remarked while working at the Louisiana State University Curriculum Theory Project, “when curriculum is our lived experience, history is

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

235

always in our midst” (p. xi). Thus, we begin here with a narrative snapshot of how our curriculum theory project has emerged from a lived history of theoretical and human interactions. In particular, the work of Hendry and her colleagues at Louisiana State University (LSU) have been influential in our ongoing theoretical and methodological entanglements at the University of Ottawa. We therefore begin with LSU’s Curriculum Theory Project (CTP) as an intellectual genealogical starting point. As Ng-A-Fook (in press), who undertook his PhD studies at LSU, reflects on his time with this collective: For me, within the contexts of public schooling, it was my first formal introduction to the historical and contemporary intersectional fluid confluences of gender, race, and sexuality, and to the narrative images of black bodies hanging from southern magnolia trees. It was a “reactivation” and “reconstruction” for how I began to unlearn and relearn to look (back) at Canada, in terms of its historical harms perpetuated in the nation-state formation of a settler colonial democratic commonwealth confederacy. (in press, p. 10)

We thus begin with border-crossings and curricular passports as part of our curriculum theory project/ions (Chambers, 2006). We engage some of the LSU curriculum theorist CTP alumni, including but not limited to, Brian Casemore, William E. Doll, Claudia Eppert, Nichole A. Guillory, Petra Munroe Hendry, Denise Egéa-Kuehne, William Pinar, and Molly Quinn. Many of these scholars have shared their “ideas” about curriculum studies through different professional associations and respective conferences such as, but not limited to, the Curriculum Theory Conference at Bergamo, the American Educational Research Association’s Division B, Curriculum and Pedagogy, the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, and their respective journals. Focusing primarily on anglophone North American curriculum theory scholars and their scholarship in this section, we examine the shifting continuum of curriculum theorizing in terms of its historical and contemporary intellectual, intertextual, and material project/ions (affective, aesthetic, anti-colonial, cultural, ethical, political, posthumanism, and so on). As Claudia Eppert (2002) teaches us, to be an historical subject in curriculum, embeds us in a “sphere of relationality – between past and present; written, visual, verbal representation and witness thereto; private, experientially-based response and normative socio-historical frameworks” (p. 78). It is this sense of historical embeddedness and its implication that we trace the project/ ions of curriculum theory, of what Miller (1990) calls elsewhere curriculum theory in the making. Writing over 20 years ago, Eppert (2002) notes that “recent academic discussion has been directed toward examining the ethical and pedagogical terms of this relationality” (p. 78). Studying and collaborating within the LSU Curriculum Theory Project alongside Black colleagues and Indigenous communities provoked us to ask who is included and excluded from our historical accounting and/or curriculum theorizing (Ng-A-Fook, 2023). Indeed, whose lived experiences do our curriculum-

236

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

as-planned, implemented, and/or -lived seek to serve? While studying at the LSU, for example, Nichole A. Guillory (2011) called on us as colleagues to revisit our lived experiences and curriculum theorizing in relation to “blends of gender and race, working-class and middle-class, old school Civil Rights and new school hip hop generations, theory and practice, White feminism and Black feminism, teacher education and curriculum theory” (p. 31). The curriculum theorizing of Guillory, a self-described “runaway academic” and hip-hop Black feminist scholar, at that time, took up the plantation logics of the academy, mindful of whose bodies and knowledge are valued or exploited as part of the broader field of curriculum studies, respective culture, and sources of pedagogical power. As Edwards, Baszile, and Guillory (2016) assert, From the slave woman quoted in Gerda Lerner’s Black Women in White America to the likes of Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Barbara Christian, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Patricia Hill Collins among others, Black women’s theorising has contributed in significant ways to thinking through the dilemmas of education, liberation, and democracy. And although their voices are sometimes whispered into academic conversations, the depth and breadth of Black women’s contributions has yet to be represented as a significant and collective body of work. (p. 707)

For Guillory (2011), such boundary-crossings are often intellectual and pedagogical acts of transgression and challenge to a white, Eurocentric curricular and social imaginary. “Like other Black women curriculum theorists working in teacher education in the academy,” Guillory has “spent a long time searching for an intellectual identity” that engenders “interdisciplinary boundary-crossing” work (p. 29). Drawing on the scholarship of bell hooks, Edwards, Baszile, and Guillory (2016) stressed, “while occupying a critical and sometimes marginal space, Curriculum Studies, like other fields, struggles to identify an intellectual tradition marked by Black female subjectivity. Our field’s epistemic amnesia is an ongoing reminder of the strength of ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’” (p. 707). Even today, Guillory and colleagues prompt us to reconsider how, despite the extent to which framing curricular texts as gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized might be endemic to the field, higher education institutions, public schooling systems, and government curriculum policies are still framed through and by settler colonial project/ions. Drawing on the theoretical works of Guillory and Hendry, then, within our CTP research, we have unlearned and learned to be mindful of the kinds of places we inhabit, and our racialized and gendered bodies, as we write, and imagine into being, whom we encounter and seek to serve along the way. Real and imagined notions of our relations with place have been central to the research taken up by our research team within and as a Canadian Curriculum Theory Project (see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca). In terms of the LSU Curriculum Theory Project, Brian Casemore and Laura Jewett’s work exemplifies early examples of understanding curriculum in relation to, and as, place and its unsettling dis/locations. As Casemore (2008) reminds us, “When theorized in its complexity, the concept of place complicates our autobiographies and can unsettle our taken-forgranted views of the world” (p. 2). Moreover, for Casemore, the context of place in

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

237

the American South, where, like in Canada, questions of place pervade literature, its criticism, and everyday identifications with the curriculum-as-planned, -implemented, and -lived (see Chambers, for example, 1999, 2003, 2008, 2012; Donald, 2004, 2021; Dannenmann & Haig-Brown, 2002). Not dissimilar from the interplay of dominant and contested senses of place within the historical and contemporary curricular stories, we seek to restory the birth of a settler colonial commonwealth democratic nation called Canada. Here, place can be reread as a cultural and political settler colonial historical text in the American south, where – white, colonial, patriarchal – narratives of history are about unsettling encounters with “the pathology of white racism invades the private recesses of black experience” (Casemore, 2008, p. 105). Settler colonial forms of white supremacist systemic racisms in the Great White North have also invaded, settled, and unsettled the recesses of Indigenous, Black, and other racialized minorities’ lived experiences (Johnson & Aladejebi, 2022; Henry et al., 2017; Ng-A-Fook et al., 2023; Stanley, 2011). Combining autobiographical writing with reading of southern literature, including that of Black authors, Casemore (2008) demonstrates a curriculum as a topos of “being-in-place [as] being-in-language, a writerly act entangled in the skeins of history and our inner lives” (p. 111). We learn that a curriculum of place is emotional, physical, psychical, and relational. While it channels hegemonic cultural power, place can also “create opportunities for examining subjective displacement” and, simultaneously, a “connectedness to and agency in the social sphere and how we might communicate with estranged and unconscious aspects of the self” and others (p. 126). Reconceptualizing curriculum and pedagogy as localized in ritual ontoepistemological connection and traversal, Jewett (2005) calls on us to remember the local intercultural entanglements we may experience as and in relation to curriculum-as-place. “Minding culture,” she tells us, is akin to interpreting and understanding curriculum as a “tangled process of cultural representation. In this sense, minding culture means putting minds and words to the ways people make meaning” (p. 277). To mind curriculum, then, is to be amidst the processes of entering into the minding and meaning-making of an Other and in turn entering the relational and entangled worlds of others. The curricular question “what is knowledge” becomes “how is knowing done” (p. 293). In her teaching, Jewett (2011) guides her students into becoming “hermeneuts” or travelers across multiple hermeneutic planes. Elsewhere and more recently, Jewett and Kittleman (2021) have expanded these notions of place and mind to include the minding of the COVID-19 pandemic. They suggest that “place” now implicates engagement with curriculum as including interpretive places of dislocation from our desires, often idyllic and nostalgic, in relation to the specificity of different educational spaces. This resonates with curriculum scholars who more explicitly work toward relational thinking in curriculum studies, who, like Hendry and Winfield (2013), challenge us to find a “refractive lens” through which to see beyond the mental “grooves which provide such a seamless glide that we hardly know they are there: assumptions and boundaries around our thinking which are themselves the stuff of ideologically generated infrastructure” (p. 2).

238

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

Trying to (re)trace and (re)read such intellectual curriculum project/ions is inherently complex. Complexity theory is notably engendered by the life work of William E. Doll Jr., a founder of the Curriculum Theory Project and annual Curriculum Camp conference at LSU. Doll (1989, 1993, 2012) introduced postmodern theory to the international field of curriculum studies as a web of epistemological blinds and openings, rather than a set program, raising radical implications for theory (see Ng-A-Fook, 2019; Quinn, 2019). Doll’s scholarship invites us to rethink our curriculum theorizing in relation to the onto-epistemological potential of physical and biological sciences, quantum physics, pragmatism, and in/spirited faith. Doll (1989) sought to create a place for curriculum that could be understood as an open (as opposed to closed) system, one that is structurally complex and has the potential for transformative change (instead of simply accumulating knowledge). An open system of entanglements, diffractions, and refractions, unlike, say, a mechanical Tylerian model of curriculum, exchanges both energy and matter with the outside world, “and actually rejuvenates itself through this exchange” (p. 246). “The contrast here” is, as Doll writes, “between (a) a highly controlled (steam engine) system where external parameters shape interactions towards a preset end of efficiency, and (b) a fluctuating (living cell) system where external perturbations provide the system with the very means for internal transformation” (p. 246). Understanding curriculum then, as a complex web of relations, opens us up to a vast cosmology of epistemes. Here our curriculum theorizing in the making is “weblike with multiple interacting forces” where we are “inside, not outside, the web. Thus, knower and known are interactively entwined” (p. 247). And yet, within a settler colonial web of relations, we can become either entrapped or enabled in our social, physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychic relations with a place, space, and time. Relating across these frames of reference, their different relational registers, affords us perhaps curricular and pedagogical opportunities for transformative change, or, as Doll suggested, (2012) moving our curriculum thinking “across, sideways, diagonally, or skipping over from node to node or idea to idea” (p. 13). Curriculum as transformation is thus a “change in view, in perspective, in methodology. It permanently alters one’s relationship to nature, to life, to the environment, to learning” (Doll, 1989, p. 249). Curriculum theorizing in turn becomes a multi-versal attendance to the very disparate and sedimented intellectual genealogical discursive regimes that inform our thinking the world into being. We realize, for example, that “curriculum, as we know it,” here in certain Anglo-North American contexts “has always had a culture: Protestant,” which sought to hierarchize our relations with knowledge into linear steps (Doll, 2012, p. 10). While Doll critiques these deep roots traced back to religion and settler colonialism, which continue to undergird our North American sense of curriculum and pedagogy, his faith in both concepts is not lost. As Molly Quinn (2001) reminds us, curriculum is also a search for faith, or “the soul of metaphysics borne, and an agonizing cultural challenge” (2001, p. 29). We are always entangled in the processes of humanity as a relationship to the sacred and the sacred as a responsibility of care toward life, each other, the more-than-human world, including our ideas (Donald, 2019a, 2021). Quinn (2010) locates this sense of care in the in/hospitabilities of the “dwellings”

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

239

we “have made of education, curriculum, schools, for children” (p. 79). We are challenged, then, to reread our conceptions of “curriculum” in relation to its potential hospitality. Through “actively sensing the other as needing us,” Quinn (2015) prompts us to embody and live curriculum as a relation of ethics (p. 4). “Now, more than ever,” as Quinn asserts, “curriculum studies has taken up the call to address the ethical questions central to the work of education – the heart of which is the encounter with an other” (2009, p. 102). An ethics of place, historical subjectivity, relational complexity, and nonprogrammatic spirituality thus infuses our curriculum theory projects here in Canada. A curriculum theory project is, for us, also about creating, supporting, and sustaining conversations across and in relation to different places and communities. The LSU CTP co-founder and influential border-crossing scholar William Pinar has long offered guidance to our collective field of study. Pinar has authored numerous volumes of synoptic texts, inviting others to understand curriculum studies as a complicated conversation (Pinar, 1975, 2013, 2019a, 2019b; Pinar & Grumet, 1976; Pinar et al., 1995). Ng-A-Fook (in press) likens Pinar’s extensive body of scholarship to “intellectual pieces of art, of moving and juxtaposing historical and contemporary images, situated narrative snapshots, assembled in turn as complex temporal montages” (p. 4). Moving, or undertaking understanding, across these texts in relation to our lived experiences imbues curriculum studies with a sense of disciplinarity amidst complexity and ethical purpose. As Pinar (2019a) posits in What is Curriculum Theory?, the “complicated conversation” that is curriculum “requires interdisciplinary intellectuality, erudition, and self-reflexivity . . . a common faith in the possibility of self-realization and democratization, twin projects of social and subjective reconstruction” (p. 8). Pinar thus provides us with a grounding for collective and subjective community, our field of study, along two intellectual genealogical dimensions, namely, its transdisciplinary verticality and horizontality. “To study the discipline’s verticality,” Pinar (2019b) explains, “historical studies [become] primary, as history is the first casualty in the futurism of the present” (p. xiii). Like our genealogical restorying put forth in this chapter, “verticality becomes concrete and embodied” through studies of individuals and their contributions to the field (p. xiv). Verticality is also intertwined with horizontality, or the study of present circumstances inside and outside of our field of view. As we narrate in the following sections of this chapter, these axes implicate history and present in profound and challenging ways in the settler state we call Canada. In Canada, we continue to move along, between, and among these axes. Our professional and personal lives as sites of inquiry continue to be informed by Pinar’s (2019a) concept of currere: regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis. As Pinar (2019a) writes, The method of currere—the infinitive form of curriculum—promises no quick fixes. On the contrary, this autobiographical method asks us to slow down, to remember [or] even re-enter the past, and to meditatively imagine the future. Then, slowly and in one’s own terms, one analyzes one’s experience of the past and fantasies of the future in order to understand more fully, with more complexity and subtlety, one’s submergence in the present. The method of

240

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

currere is not a matter of psychic survival, but one of subjective risk and social reconstruction, the achievement of selfhood and society in the age to come. (p. 4)

To enact currere recognizes that one is “located in historical time and cultural place, but in a singularly meaningful way, a situation to be expressed in one’s autobiographical voice” (p. 36). Due to “this situatedness of curriculum research,” however, Pinar elsewhere (2013) has challenged us to yet think through “the provincialism that localism can invite” (p. 1). Thus, Pinar has been influential in establishing transnational networks of individuals and theories, putting nationalistic tendencies of curriculum studies in provocative tensionality. From this “generative unstable state,” Pinar (2013) argues, “concepts can be reconceived according to – perhaps in contradiction of – local circumstances, calling on intellectually and ethically engaged researchers to critique the course on which their field and their nation’s school curriculum is moving” (p. 1). As Pinar notes, speaking to some of his own contributions in creating a transnational network of curriculum scholars, the “creation of such networks is already underway within the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (www.iaacs.ca) with its affiliated organizations, the IAACS journal, and triennial IAACS meetings” (p. 1). In the following section, we trace this ethos and its trajectory as a relational ethics particular to Canada as a contested transnational settler colonial confederated commonwealth space.

Provoking the “Idea” of Curriculum Studies in Canada One site of Canadian curriculum that is particularly contentious and under-represented in (mainstream or contemporary) scholarship is Indigenous education. (Chambers, 2003, p. 223)

If, as Grumet and Yates (2011) suggest, curriculum is an “effort to name and construct and cohere the world that matters [which] does not take place on some idealized plane,” then the worlds of curriculum are born of provocations – pokes, prods, and incursions from the vibrant world outside our minds and ourselves (p. 239). Curriculum studies as an explicit tradition of provocation has a particularly Canadian history, including here at the University of Ottawa. In 2015, we hosted the Fifth IAACS Triennial Conference, 15 years after its inaugural iteration at LSU. With a theme of “What are the tasks of the curriculum scholars for the twenty-first century?,” the conference invited scholars to “defy conventions” of curriculum thinking and production to not only question neoliberal creep within education but also consider “conversing together as an act of relational renewal that is life-giving and life-sustaining to this traditional Anishnàbeg place, the conference, to each other, and to ourselves” (IAACS, 2015, para. 5). Even before provoking such relationally ethical work in curriculum studies, in 2013 scholars here at we hosted the Sixth Biennial Provoking Canadian Curriculum Studies Conference, titled “Provoking Curriculum Studies: As Strong Poets.” This conference inspired a collection

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

241

of essays edited by Ng-A-Fook, Ibrahim, and Reis (2015), further provoking the idea of curriculum as “strong poetry.” A strong poet, according to Ng-A-Fook and colleagues, commits to the role of a “radically critical and creative curriculum theorist, educational researcher, student and teacher” (p. xx). Curriculum as strong poetry attends to what Rorty (1989) calls elsewhere “blind impresses,” or the collections of beliefs, biases, and convictions that shape who and where we are. A strong poet of curriculum studies challenges existing metaphors that shape how we relate to each other and ourselves and seeks out new ones that may better relate to the peoples and places of our time. As we discuss in this section, this has meant challenging our settler colonial blind impresses, provoking a tradition of life writing research, connecting lived experiences, troubling the “isness” of curriculum, and exploring new interpretive tools. In 2014, Ng-A-Fook sought to address the “crazy ideas” provoking a Canadian curriculum study as a counterpointed situated narrative snapshot. That curriculum theorizing sought to create “a future passageway for readers to revisit, add to, challenge, deconstruct, and play with compositions of our intellectual history anew as documentary experimentations” (p. 15). Inspired by Glenn Gould’s experimentations with counterpoint radio documentaries during the 1960s and 1970s such as The Idea of the North (1967) and the conversational travels along the Muskeg Express that moved Gould, Ng-A-Fook drew on the metaphors of conversational counterpoint and expansive traversal of the train (albeit a colonial one as well) to organize this forum and “provoke” the very “idea” of a Canadian curriculum studies. Here, provocation means, at least for Ng-A-Fook (2014), “to reconsider the existing mythologies that represent the enacted hidden curriculum that performs the semiotic symbolizations of our national identities as an institutional and psychic form of disavowed,” included or excluded knowledge (p. 22). These narrative snapshots and their respective mythologies include the stories we tell (or do not) about ourselves as “Canadian” citizens. To enact a “Canadian” curricular provocation prompts a certain kind of asking: Where are we at, in this place and this time, as Canadian curriculum scholars? Ng-A-Fook reread some of the selected works of fellow colleagues and wider Canada Association of Curriculum Studies (CACS) community. In that work, he invites readers to reconceive ourselves as listeners attentive to our diverse topos of thought and action. To do so, he drew on what Hans Smits calls the “the play of counterpoint” where scholars might interweave “diverse chords and voices but also discordance or dissidence,” offering, in turn, both “complexity and the invitation to hear” each other differently (Ng-A-Fook, 2014, p. 48). Our curriculum theorizing at a Canadian Curriculum Theory Project continues to respond to Cynthia Chambers’ (1999) ground-breaking essay A Topography for Canadian Curriculum Theory. Like her, we continue to ask: 1. How are we experimenting with tools from different Canadian intellectual traditions and incorporating them into our theorizing? 2. What kinds of languages and interpretive tools have we created to study what we know and where we want to go?

242

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

3. In what ways have, and are, curriculum theorists wrote in a detailed way the topos – the particular places and regions where we live and work? 4. How are these places inscribed in our theorizing, as either presence or absence, whether we want them there or not? These four interrelated curriculum inquiries continue to call on us to challenge the discursive regimes of “social efficiency” and the current push to commodify and acquiesce our re/conceptualizations of “curriculum” to multinational corporations, governmental technocrats, and/or to a Tylerian rationale (like our counterparts to the south) (Slattery, 2012). More recently, Chambers (2012) has emphasized that our uncommon narrative countenance, in terms of our “international” conceptions of curriculum, is that we are all treaty people – that the very foundation of what it means to be Canadian curriculum scholars is invoked in our historical and present treaty relationships with the First Nations communities across Canada. Here Ng-A-Fook (2014) asks us, But if Canada is constituted by First Nations within a nation, then what does revisiting such intellectual topographies mean for scholars who take up the very shifting tectonic “ideas” of Canadian curriculum studies that move beyond the classical philosophical studies of European antiquity firmly housed within the privileged universe of its academies? (p. 22)

At the time, the context of this prompt included Indigenous youth and Elders utilizing direct action to support First Nations civil rights movements like Idle No More through peaceful blockades, flash mob round dances, human rights and constitutional lawsuits, protests on Parliament Hill, and hunger strikes to educate the next generation of Canadians as well as their leaders. Such civic movements reminded Canadians that First Nations must first and foremost be recognized as sovereign nations living within and across the geopolitical territories we settlers call Canada. Such a direct action provoked some curriculum scholars, policymakers, and the public to reconsider the existing mythologies that represent the hidden curriculum of Canadian symbolizations and disavowed knowledge that inform our “Canadian” identity (Taubman, 2012), or the colonial frontier logics of Eurocentric neoliberal and or neoconservative discursive and material regimes (see Donald, 2009). Within the field of Canadian Curriculum Studies, several Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have sought to address such present absences in both provocative and productive curricular ways (Battiste, 2011; Chambers, 2008, 2012; Cole, 2006; Dion & Dion, 2004; Donald, 2004; Haig-Brown, 2008; HasebeLudt et al., 2009; Kanu, 2011; Kulnieks et al., 2013; Stanley & Young, 2011; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Weenie, 2008). Still, how might we continue to pay more attention to present absences of untold and unacknowledged histories? Or, what Malewski and Jaramillo (2011) call elsewhere epistemologies of ignorance within our curriculum theorizing and reconceptualization of the curriculum-asplanned, -implemented, and -lived. We contend that these present absences continue as a threat to our collective historical consciousness as curriculum theorists and civically engaged treaty (and yet to be treaty) peoples.

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

243

The release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Final Report (2015) was, as Wiseman (2018) notes, “a key historical instance of documenting and acknowledging the violence and atrocities perpetuated on Indigenous young people and their families via the Canadian state” (p. 334). Over 150 years of assimilative settler colonial government policies and practices, with education as a central element, has constituted physical, biological, cultural, and material genocide of Indigenous peoples here in what some of us call Canada. The consequences of this history continue to play out today and through intergenerational trauma for Indigenous Peoples in Canada who face persistent oppression via settler colonial government as well as institutional and broader structural and systemic racisms. Central to the TRC’s findings was honoring the witness testimonies of over 6750 survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential School system, the purpose of which was to forcibly remove First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children from their families and communities to erase their cultures, languages, histories, and futures (TRC, 2015). In conjunction with witnessing survivors, the TRC included the organization and analysis of Canadian government documentation around its own policies and practices, effectively synthesizing First Nations, Inuit, and Métis and settler institutional memories into a policy-facing report with key calls for action toward a multigenerational and multilevel framework for reconciliation to transform Canadian culture, historical consciousness, and its institutions, including education. More recently, since March 2021, over 1800 suspected or confirmed unmarked graves have been found near former residential schools across the country (Lee & Parkhill, 2022). The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) found that “human rights and Indigenous rights abuses committed and condoned by the Canadian state represent genocide against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people” are the root cause for a present in which Indigenous people must confront racism and violence daily (p. 1). The continuing “mosquito” activism and advocacy work of Cindy Blackstock has put into countenance the ongoing inequity of Canada’s child welfare system and on- and off-reserve funding for First Nation communities (see Blackstock et al., 2022 for details). We thus work in an era in which truth is still needed before reconciliation is possible. “Our” commonwealth democratic settler colonial country, its diversified topographies, and the respective narratives “we” tell (or don’t tell) each other remain deeply fragmented, situated, and partial, and again (and again, now in 2023), could they be otherwise? In 2014, one had only to turn on the television and watch the electoral debates taking place in Québec. Today, one need only scroll through news feeds to learn that Québec will not change its language laws for Indigenous students, further hindering Indigenous communities’ efforts to revitalize their languages and cultures (Stevenson, 2022). Our provincialized and territorialized nation supports what scholars like Sumara, Davis, and Laidlaw (2001) have called a postmodern sensibility toward theorizing and representing diverse cultural, historical, social, political, psychic, performative, aesthetic, and discursive constructions of our hyphenated national identities within the broader field of Canadian curriculum studies. Yet, settler colonial narratives still overshadow provincial school curricula.

244

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

We continue to be inspired by curriculum scholars such as but not limited to Ted Aoki (1992/2005) who experienced the material, political, and psychic violence of Canada’s racialized policies of displacement and segregation. Aoki invited policymakers, administrators, and teachers to think about how they could collectively be more “supportive of an understanding of Canada as a multiplicity of cultures, particularly as a counterpoint whenever the dominant majority cultures become indifferent to Canada’s minorities” (p. 268). Some of the students we now seek to serve in higher education are now transnational citizens performing multicultural and multilingual hyphenated identities (see Ibrahim, 2008a, 2008b; Ng-AFook, 2009). Notions of place continue to be deeply inspirited across our work. In the introduction to Provoking Encounters Across Educational Experience: New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory Archive, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich, and Sandra Chang-Kredl (2019) suggest that what is at the heart of a Canadian curriculum theory – encounters of spaces, “affecting minds and bodies” – now (or always) implicate ethical charges. Although this volume could be considered “gathered under the categories of affect theory: spaces, intensities, pluralities, and charges,” its contents suggest that a Canadian curriculum theory is amidst an ethical turn (Grumet, 2019, p. x). Sarah Bryne Bausell (2019) advances representation in curriculum as a means of “provoking an ethicalvia-aesthetic reaction” (p. 139). An “ethical curriculum in the making,” for Basuell, is “curriculum designed to instantiate an ethical stance” (p. 142). Inviting readers into a porous and provocative encounter with our theoretical, intellectual, historical geneologies, and its futurities, Jessie L. Beier (2019) calls on us to reconceptualize curriculum thinking “which not only limits action in the present, but also occupies the horizon of the thinkable, limiting how we imagine the world and our relation to it into the future” (p. 152). Beier asserts that curriculum theory tends to deny a planetary perspective, redirecting “focus back to the individual, erasing the ways in which we are always already exposed to and co-constituted by the more-thanhuman world in which we dwell” (pp. 152–153). Instead, we might reconsider how we are not only “inside” the carriage of curriculum theory, with our singular selves, but also “co-constituted” by “relations to that which lies beyond, or that which lies ‘outside’” (p. 155). Our intellectual and theoretical topographies, then, are always in becoming through our relations to ongoing difference and multiplicity. Canadian curriculum theorizing as an ethical encounter with the archive is exemplified, within Provoking Encounters, by Jennifer Macdonald’s (2019) commitment to concepts of ethical relationality. Macdonald’s engagement with theory is also a practice of unlearning physical and psychical settler colonial grids that tend to define her relations with the land and more-than-human. Place becomes a “complex ecology of beings,” and to undertake a curriculum of place is to pay “balanced attention to the physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental aspects of the self and the interconnectedness among all beings” (p. 29). Here in Ottawa, we continue to unlearn our own colonial blind impresses through Papaschase Cree scholar Dwayne Donald’s concepts of ethical relationality. Donald (2016) relates the Cree wisdom concepts wicihitowin, the “life-giving energy that is

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

245

generated when people face each other as relatives and build trusting relationships,” and wahkohtowin, the kinship relations that sustain us and the ethical imperative to “extend our relational network so that it also includes the more-than-human beings that live amongst us” (p. 10). Together, these concepts help us remain mindful that “we human beings are fully enmeshed in a series of relationships that enable us to live” – we are called to “acknowledge and honour the fact that the sun, the land, the wind, the water, the animals and the trees (just to name a few) are quite literally our relatives” (p. 10). We are also called to unlearn Eurocentric and settler colonial ways of relating to one another. Donald (2019a) positions ethical relationality as a “dreamway” alternative to being a human being, typically engendered by settler curricula as homo economicus, “who is primarily motivated by economic self-interest and the material gains that come with it” (p. 105). Here, curriculum as dream-way or mythology is not to suggest falsehoods but to acknowledge that the stories we tell or do not tell each other construct specific worldviews of imperceptible and perceptible relationships. Curricula here become cultural “expressions of the existing epistemic orthodoxy of the dominant groups in a society. . . . The key point here is that people do not think about their mythologies; they think with them” (pp. 107–108). And settler curricula, then, are “forgetful” curricula, forgetting that as real human beings, we are part of a “sacred ecology that lives inside us” (p. 105). “These assertions,” Donald (2011) contextualizes elsewhere, “contest colonial frontier logics by instead emphasizing the relationality and connectivity that comes from living together in a particular place for a long time” (p. 93). Colonial frontier logics are embodied by the spatiotemporal signifier of the fort, so commonplace that they “are typically viewed as innocuous meeting places inscribed on the imagined topography of the mythic West” (pp. 95–96). The fort has become a “mythic sign” deeply embedded in the dream of Canada as a frontier ripe for settlement and civilization, the teleology of which has “morphed into a national ideology that has shaped the institutions and conventions of Canadian society,” including our pedagogies, schools, and universities (p. 100). The fort as our settler curricular mythology positions Indigenous peoples outside the walls of “Canadian” history and futurities of “Canada,” foreclosing potential good relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. These logics further “deplacialize” place, “effectively [enclosing] human experience and knowing within an Enlightenment-based imagination” (Donald, 2019b, p. 156). Thinking, writing, and teaching beyond this enclosure thus becomes for us an ethical imperative of a Canadian curriculum theory project.

Re/constructing A Curriculum Theory Project in Canada Creating A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project is an active response and physical, intellectual, virtual curricular, and pedagogical place where our research team can draw on different life writing research methodologies – oral history, narrative inquiry, critical ethnography, autobiography, etc. – to curriculum theorize and

246

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

study among other things the macro- and micro-relational contexts and impacts of transnational migration, settler colonialism, truth and reconciliation education, teacher education, higher education leadership, systemic inequities, curriculum studies, ethical relationality, and anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racisms. Much like the Curriculum Theory Project at Louisiana State University, here at the University of Ottawa, it seeks to create, support, and sustain a place, a communal ecosystem, for graduate students to study different intellectual histories in relation to present circumstances and prospects (see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca). Part of that educational research, life writing, and curriculum theorizing seeks to reactivate, reconstruct, juxtapose, and restory our past, present, and future relations with “settler colonialism,” “truth,” and then “reconciliation” and perhaps blaze another trail as a reconstructive intervention. In many ways, then, this section of our chapter attempts to tease out how curriculum theorizing, here in a settler colonial nation-state known as Canada and more specifically the unceded Algonquin lands on which Ottawa has “developed,” is akin to reconstructing a cultural imaginary of what we as curriculum thinkers and our theories might be(come). Different theoretical and methodological practices of life writing research in relation to curriculum theorizing have sustained and inspired us. Asking, “How might Indigenous and settler colleagues braid their stories as a praxis of reconciliation?,” Brant, Cheechoo, McGuire-Adams, Vaudrin-Charette, and Ng-A-Fook (2017) draw on the praxis and aesthetics of literary métissage to restory how our ivory towers might be ethically indigenized and reimagined (p. 87). In their book Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times, Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, and Leggo (2009) relate the spirit and intent of métissage as a conceptual and practical strategy: “a site for writing and surviving in the interval between different cultures and languages, particularly in colonial contexts; a way of merging and blurring genres, texts, and identities; an active literary stance, political strategy, and pedagogical praxis” (p. 9). Donald elsewhere (2012) advances Indigenous métissage as a means of enacting ethical relationality as curriculum scholars. Such teachings redefine notions of ecology beyond environment-human separation toward enmeshment in webs of relationships. As an ethical stance, this form of métissage thus: . . . instantiates an ethical imperative to acknowledge and honour the significance of the relationships we have with others, how our histories and experiences position us in relation to each other, and how our futures as people in the world are tied together. It is also an ethical imperative to see that despite our varied place-based cultures and knowledge systems, we live in the world together with others and must constantly think and act with reference to these relationships. Any knowledge we gain about the world interweaves us more complexly with these relationships and gives us life. (p. 536)

“In this sense,” as Donald (2012) continues, “métissage is a way to reconceptualize and decolonize culture and historical consciousness in the context of teaching and learning today” (p. 538). This today, however, is not post-colonial or a celebration of sameness or similarity. Instead, while sharing with literary métissage “the desire to treat texts – and lives – as relational and braided rather than isolated and

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

247

independent,” Indigenous métissage honors the histories of the “actual places where people live their lives” (pp. 538–540). Brant and colleagues (2017) find “the sustenance of our collegial relationships [transformed/ing] into valued friendships” while also collectively and individually always attending to how we might reconceptualize our subjectivities “and our respective responsibilities as Indigenous and settler peoples” (p. 88). We continue to practice life writing as an ethics of relationality among our collective, either through engaging with oral history and memory work or restorying curriculum and its histories. Another example is Llewellyn and Ng-A-Fook’s (2020) edited collection Oral History, Education, and Justice: Possibilities and Limitations for Redress and Reconciliation. While the contextual nature of oral histories and memory work resists a set definition, Llewellyn and Ng-A-Fook emphasize several key qualities: methodologically, they disrupt dominant historical imaginaries while centering the lived experiences of historically marginalized groups; pedagogically, they transmit critical creation stories of communities and nations, providing key touchstones for identity; and, individually and collectively, they offer pathways toward responding to “this time of redress and reconciliation, when telling and hearing the stories of lived experiences of harm are pivotal to struggles for an equitable future” (p. 8). Read as curriculum theory and method, settler life writing seeks to interrupt a settler colonial consciousness, which, if left unsettled, continues to simultaneously normalize and celebrate settler colonial logics. In the context of contemporary reconciliation initiatives, ethical listening means to not only “listen to understand historical events and experiences, but also actively engage with this past and advocate for new relationships in solidarity with Indigenous communities” (Brant-Birioukov et al., 2020, p. 117). We discuss the practical implications of such work in the conclusion to this chapter; here, we mean to emphasize that, for a Canadian curriculum theory project, writing, reading, and listening demands ethical engagement with deeply held cultural imaginaries of pasts and shared futures. For our collective of curriculum theorists, this ethical relational engagement includes re/constructing cultural imaginaries of policies and practice. As Currie, Ng-A-Fook, and Drake (2021) point out, anti-Black racism(s) “are still prominent in the various levels of education in Ontario from kindergarten to post-secondary [. . .] Such incidents are perpetrated by students and educators alike and remain largely undisrupted by those in positions to make systemic changes” (p. 1). The authors argue that Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy is not enough, on its own as a stand-alone policy or teaching framework, to disrupt antiracisms in education. Instead, antiracism work “requires understanding ‘culture’ in relational and non-tokenistic ways that unsettle the systemic ‘fixity’ of settler colonial structures,” attending to “community [as] composed of different people with their unique histories and lived experiences who in turn are in the processes of co-creating their community cultures” (pp. 17, 22). The ongoing evolution of these cultures “frames how people experience and/or counter anti-Black racism(s) inside and outside of a settler colonial public schooling system” (p. 17). Howell and Ng-A-Fook (2022) bring to bear the same concern for culture upon our settler colonial worldviews in wider public policy and pedagogy. In particular, the authors attend to the case of

248

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

Canadian senator Lynn Beyak and her public statements of anti-Indigenous racism. Beyak, who has since resigned, had on multiple occasions used her privileged voice to claim that Canada’s Residential Schooling System was in fact beneficial to First Nations, peoples. Howell and Ng-A-Fook draw on van Kessel’s (2018) work on historical evils, namely, systemic or “extensive” evils, to understand the wider curricular and cultural implications of Beyak’s conduct. The authors demonstrate that how “we begin to unlearn and renew our past, present, and future relations will be . . . a daily praxis of reconciliation, both inside and outside of teacher education programs” (Howell & Ng-A-Fook, 2022, p. 25). Such a praxis calls on us as individual and collective Canadians to confront our likewise everyday individual and collective system-wide interactions, recasting reconciliation as a process of deconstructing our settler colonial worldviews, which continue to sustain systemic violence and inequities. More than that, it becomes “relational processes of co-reconstructing” a future teacher education cultural imaginary based on affinity with Indigenous sovereignty, ontologies, epistemologies, and communities (Howell & Ng-A-Fook, 2022, p. 14; see also Madden, 2019). Finding such affinity in the curriculum presents a particular challenge of imagination while writing curriculum in predominantly white, Eurocentric institutions: “How to imagine educational work and research that refuses to confine itself to the academic or cultural boundaries of how education is currently defined – it presents the challenge of possibly writing curriculum science fiction” (Phillips, 2021, p. 12). As part of our collective, Phillips (2021) advances critical futurisms to affect affinities across difference. Phillips synthesizes the intellectual and aesthetic traditions of Afrofuturist art and literature, traditions of curriculum studies, and abolitionist teaching scholarship into a Critical Black Futurism framework and praxis. By learning to find affinity with Black culture and theorists, Phillips finds “a relational kinetics of dreaming, allowing intervention into the past and future of education and schooling as technology beyond conventional structural reform and individual curricular futurity” (p. 9). Similarly, Ng-A-Fook, Phillips, Currie, and Pind (2023) write to repurpose the deeply ingrained – within curriculum theory and its culture – settler colonial purpose of schooling. They suggest it is what we assume to be uncontested, or “a good life based on globalized technoeconomic neoliberalism and maintenance of colonial boundaries,” that must be contested. It is “such imperial habits of mind and how they continue to inform our educational imaginary that we should seek to unsettle” (p. 47). To do so, the authors propose unlearning and learning with and from Black, Indigenous, queer, and scholars of color to afford us “opportunities to reconsider schooling that addresses settler colonial education but without repeating its history of complicity in assimilation, appropriation, individual, systemic, and societal racisms, as well as other historical and contemporary harms” (p. 47). What is a curriculum theory project? Here in Canada, its scope and work calls on us to traverse while recognizing our different privilege(s) and/or marginalization (s) in relation to different contested cultural, historical, gendered, racialized, political and, and, and. . .contexts. As we write amidst a seventh wave of COVID-19 here in Ottawa, we face an uncertain future as infections rise, public messaging conflicts,

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

249

and many people succumb to pandemic fatigue (Williams, 2022). Lately, what “place” and “nation” means – including the sight of the Canadian flag – have shifted in ways we are only beginning to reflect on. So-called “Freedom Convoys” have besieged the nation’s capitol, itself resting on unceded Indigenous lands, trumpeting a particularly Canadian, white supremacist cultural imaginary rooted in settler colonialism (Dysart, 2022). At the same as curriculum scholars, we continue to participate in truth-and-then reconciliation education as an emerging field, offering a curricular perspective to national research projects like Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future and many other initiatives. And so, a curriculum theory project can be, for us, many things to many different colleagues depending on the places and communities they are collaborating with and learning from.

References Aoki, T. T. (1992/2005). In the midst of slippery theme-words: Living as designers of Japanese Canadian curriculum. In W. F. Pinar, & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key (pp. 263–278). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Battiste, M. (2011). Curriculum reform through constitutional reconciliation of Indigenous knowledge. In D. Stanley & K. Young (Eds.), Contemporary studies in Canadian curriculum: Principles, portraits, & practices (pp. 287–312). Detselig Enterprises Ltd. Bausell, S. B. (2019). The curriculum of home things. In T. Strong-Wilson, C. Ehret, D. Lewkowich, & S. Chang-Kredl (Eds.), Provoking curriculum encounters across educational experience: New engagements with the curriculum theory archive (1st ed., pp. 133–176). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058110 Beier, J. L. (2019). Close encounters of the pedagogical kind: Science-fictioning a curriculum-tocome. In T. Strong-Wilson, C. Ehret, D. Lewkowich, & S. Chang-Kredl (Eds.), Provoking curriculum encounters across educational experience: New engagements with the curriculum theory archive (1st ed., pp. 147–159). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058110 Blackstock, C., Ng-A-Fook, N., Bennet, S., Howell, L., & Brittain, M. (2022). Just because we’re small doesn’t mean we can’t stand tall: Reconciliation education in the elementary classroom. First Nations Child & Family Caring Society. https://fncaringsociety.com/publications/ research-report-just-because-were-small-doesnt-mean-we-cant-stand-tall-reconciliation Brant, K., Cheechoo, K.-L., McGuire-Adams, T., Vaudrin-Charette, J., & Ng-A-Fook, N. (2017). Indigenizing ivory towers: Poetic inquiry, métissage, and reconcilia(c)tion. In E. Lyle (Ed.), At the intersection of selves and subject (pp. 87–104). Brill. Brant-Birioukov, K., Ng-A-Fook, N., & Llewellyn, K. R. (2020). Re-storying setter teacher education: Truth, reconciliation, and oral history. In K. R. Llewellyn & N. Ng-A-Fook (Eds.), Oral history, education, and justice: Possibilities and limitations for redress and reconciliation (pp. 107–131). Routledge. Casemore, B. (2008). The autobiographical demand of place: Curriculum inquiry in the American South. Peter Lang. Chambers, C. (1999). A topography for Canadian curriculum theory. Canadian Journal of Education, 24(2), 137–150. Chambers, C. (2003). “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances”: A view of contemporary curriculum discourses in Canada. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), The internationalization handbook of curriculum research (pp. 221–252). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Chambers, C. (2006). “Where do I belong?” Canadian curriculum as passport home. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 2, 1–18. https://doi.org/10. 14288/jaaacs.v2i0.187640

250

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

Chambers, C. (2008). Where are we? Finding common ground in a curriculum of place. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 6(2), 113–128. Chambers, C. (2012). “We are all treaty people”: The contemporary countenance of Canadian curriculum studies. In N. Ng-A-Fook & J. Rottmann (Eds.), Reconsidering Canadian curriculum studies: Provoking historical, present, and future perspectives (pp. 23–38). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008978_2 Cole, P. (2006). Coyote and Raven go canoeing: Coming home to the village. McGill-Queen’s University Press (MQUP). Currie, M., Ng-A-Fook, N., & Drake, A. S. (2021). Is CRRP enough? Addressing antiracism(s) in teacher education. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 14(2), Article 2. Dannenmann, K., & Haig-Brown, C. (2002). A pedagogy of the land: Dreams of respectful relations. McGill Journal of Education, 37(3), 28. Dion, S. D., & Dion, M. R. (2004). The braiding histories story. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 2(1), 77–100. Doll, W. E. (1989). Foundations for a post-modern curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 21(3), 243–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027890210304 Doll, W. E. (1993). A post-modern perspective on curriculum. Teachers College Press. Doll, W. E. (2012). Complexity and the culture of curriculum. Complicity, 9(1), 10–29. Donald, D. (2004). Edmonton pentimento: Re-reading history in the case of the Papaschase Cree. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 2(1), 21–54. Donald, D. (2009). Forts, curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian relations in educational contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 1–24. Donald, D. (2011). Forts, colonial frontier logics, and Aboriginal-Canadian relations. In A. A. Abdi (Ed.), Decolonizing philosophies of education (pp. 91–111). Sense Publishers. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-94-6091-687-8_7 Donald, D. (2012). Indigenous métissage: A decolonizing research sensibility. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), 533–555. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398. 2011.554449 Donald, D. (2016). From what does ethical relationality flow? An “Indian” act in three artifacts. Counterpoints, 478, 10–16. Donald, D. (2019a). Homo economicus and forgetful curriculum. In H. Tomlins-Jahnke, S. Styres, S. Lilley, & D. Zinga (Eds.), Indigenous education: New directions in theory and practice (pp. 103–125). University of Alberta Press. Donald, D. (2019b). Place. In J. Wearing, M. Ingersoll, C. DeLuca, B. Bolden, H. Ogden, & T. Christou (Eds.), Key concepts in curriculum studies (pp. 156–162). Routledge. Donald, D. (2021). We need a new story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin imagination. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 18(2), 53–63. https://doi.org/10.25071/19164467.40492 Dysart, T. (2022). The Ottawa trucker convoy is rooted in Canada’s settler colonial history. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/11/ottawa-trucker-con voy-is-rooted-canadas-settler-colonial-history/ Edwards, K. T., Baszile, D. T., & Guillory, N. A. (2016). When, where, and why we enter: Black women’s curriculum theorising. Gender and Education, 28(6), 707–709. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09540253.2016.1230354 Eppert, C. (2002). Entertaining history: (Un)heroic identifications, apt pupils, and an ethical imagination. New German Critique, 86, 71–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/3115202 Gould, G. (1967). The idea of the north. In Ideas. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Grumet, M. R. (1999). Chapter three: Autobiography and reconceptualization. Counterpoints, 70, 24–30. Grumet, M. (2019). Forward. In T. Strong-Wilson, C. Ehret, D. Lewkowich, & S. Chang-Kredl (Eds.), Provoking curriculum encounters across educational experience: New engagements

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

251

with the curriculum theory archive (1st ed., pp. x–xi). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780429058110 Grumet, M., & Yates, M. (2011). The world in today’s curriculum. In M. Yates & M. Grumet (Eds.), Curriculum in today’s world: Configuring knowledge, identities, work and politics (Vol. 2011, pp. 239–247). Taylor & Francis. Guillory, N. A. (2011). What’s a hip hop feminist doing in teacher education? A journey back to curriculum theory in three acts. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27(3), Article 3. Haig-Brown, C. (2008). Taking Indigenous thought seriously: A rant on globalization with some cautionary notes. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 6(2), 8–24. Hasebe-Ludt, E., Chambers, C., & Leggo, C. D. (2009). Life writing and literary métissage as an ethos for our times. Peter Lang. Hendry, P. M., & Winfield, A. G. (2013). Curriculum history as memory. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(1), 1–24. Henry, F., James, C., Li, P. S., Kobayashi, A., Smith, M. S., Ramos, H., & Enakshi, D. (2017). The equity myth: Racialization and indigeneity at Canadian universities. UBC Press. Howell, L., & Ng-A-Fook, N. (2022). A case of Senator Lynn Beyak and anti-Indigenous systemic racism in Canada. Canadian Journal of Education, 45(1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.53967/cjerce.v45i1.4787 Ibrahim, A. (2008a). Operating under erasure: Race/language/identity. Canadian and International Education Journal, 37(2), 56–76. Ibrahim, A. (2008b). The new flâneur: Subaltern cultural studies, African youth in Canada and the semiology of in-betweenness. Cultural Studies, 22(2), 234–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09502380701789141 International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAAACS). (2015, May 5). 5th Triennial conference, University of Ottawa. Jewett, L. (2005). Minding culture. In W. F. Pinar, W. E. Doll, M. J. Fleener, J. S. Julien, & D. Trueit (Eds.), Chaos, complexity, curriculum and culture: A conversation (pp. 277–297). Peter Lang. Jewett, L. (2011). Casting curricular circles, or the sorcerer, the phantom and the troubadour. Complicity, 8(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.29173/cmplct11169 Jewett, L., & Kittleman, L. (2021). Solastalgia and the curriculum of place. Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative, 17. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cssc/2021/2021/17 Johnson, M. A., & Aladejebi, F. (Eds.). (2022). Unsettling the great white north: Black Canadian history. University of Toronto Press. Kanu, Y. (2011). Integrating Aboriginal perspectives into the school curriculum. University of Toronto Press. Kulnieks, D., Longboat, R., & Young, K. (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary studies in environmental and Indigenous pedagogies: A curricula of stories and place. Sense Publishers. Lee, M., & Parkhill, M. (2022, January 25). Where searches for remains are happening at former residential school sites. CTV News. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/where-searches-forremains-are-happening-at-former-residential-school-sites-1.5754222 Llewellyn, K. R., & Ng-A-Fook, N. (2020). Oral history, education, and justice: Possibilities and limitations for redress and reconciliation. Routledge. Macdonald, J. (2019). A poor curriculum in urban spaces: An atlas for ethical relationality. In T. Strong-Wilson, C. Ehret, D. Lewkowich, & S. Chang-Kredl (Eds.), Provoking curriculum encounters across educational experience: New engagements with the curriculum theory archive (1st ed., pp. 25–41). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058110 Madden, B. (2019). A de/colonizing theory of truth and reconciliation education. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(3), 284–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2019.1624478 Malewski, E., & Jaramillo, N. (Eds.). (2011). Epistemologies of ignorance. Information Age Publishing. Miller, J. (1990). Creating spaces and finding voices: Teachers collaborating for empowerment. State University of New York Press.

252

P. Phillips and N. Ng-A-Fook

National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG). (2019). Reclaiming power and place: The final report of the national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/ Ng-A-Fook, N. (2009). Inhabiting the hyphenated spaces of alienation and appropriation: Currere, language, and postcolonial migrant subjectivities. In J. Nahachewsky & I. Johnson (Eds.), Beyond presentism (pp. 87–103). Sense Publishers. Ng-A-Fook, N. (2014). Provoking the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 12(1), 10–68. Ng-A-Fook, N. (2019). Addressing “curriculum” as an inspirited letter. In M. Quinn (Ed.), Complexifying curriculum studies: From the echo of God’s laughter: Essays on the generative and generous gifts of William E. Doll Jr (pp. 153–162). Routledge. Ng-A-Fook, N. (2023). Placing the significance of life writing as a curriculum theory project. In Petra Munro Hendry & Molly Quinn. (Eds.), Curriculum Histories in Place, in Person, in Practice: The LSU Curriculum Theory Project. Routledge. Ng-A-Fook, N. (in press). Reconstructing curriculum studies in Canada: Life writing, settler colonialism, truth and then reconciliation. In W. F. Pinar, & A. Phelan (Eds.), Curriculum studies in Canada: Present preoccupations. University of Toronto Press. Ng-A-Fook, N., Ibrahim, A., & Reis, G. (Eds.). (2015). Provoking curriculum studies: Strong poetry and arts of the possible in education. Routledge. Ng-A-Fook, N., Phillips, P., Currie, M., & Pind, J. (2023). Purposes of education: Unsettling purposes of settler colonial public education. In T. Christou (Ed.), Historical foundations of education (pp. 39–64). Routledge. Phillips, P. (2021). Critical Black futurism: Affecting affinities within curriculum studies. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 14(2), Article 2. Pinar, W. (1975). Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists. McCutchan. Pinar, W. F. (Ed.). (2013). International handbook of curriculum research (2nd ed.). Routledge. Pinar, W. F. (2019a). What is curriculum theory? Routledge. Pinar, W. F. (2019b). Intellectual advancement through disciplinarity: Verticality and horizontality in curriculum studies. Brill. Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. (1976). Toward a poor curriculum. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses (Vol. 17). Peter Lang. Quinn, M. (2001). Dying idols, difficult commandments, and the call of faith. Counterpoints, 92, 25–54. Quinn, M. (2009). “No room in the inn”? The question of hospitality in the post (partum)-labors of curriculum studies. In E. Malewski (Ed.), Curriculum studies handbook – The next moment (pp. 119–140). Routledge. Quinn, M. (2010). “Ex and the city”: On cosmopolitanism, community and the “curriculum of refuge”. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 7(1), 77–102. https://doi.org/10.14288/tci.v7i1.287 Quinn, M. (2015). Hope and happenstance in “reading” curriculum, aesthetics, and ethics with Donald Blumenfeld-Jones. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(3), 6. Quinn, M. (Ed.). (2019). Complexifying curriculum studies: From the echo of God’s laughter: Essays on the generative and generous gifts of William E. Doll Jr. Routledge. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge University Press. Slattery, P. (2012). Curriculum development in the postmodern era: Teaching and learning in an age of accountability. Routledge. Stanley, T. J. (2011). Contesting with white supremacy: School segregation, antiracism, and the making of Chinese Canadians. University of British Columbia Press.

A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

253

Stanley, D., & Young, K. (2011). Conceptualizing complexities of curriculum: Developing a lexicon for ecojustice and the transdisciplinarity of bodies. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27(1), 36–47. Stevenson, V. (2022, May 10). First Nations leaders say Quebec has ignored their pleas to be exempt from Bill 96. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-96-quebec-refusesexemption-indigenous-students-1.6448254 Strong-Wilson, T., Ehret, C., Lewkowich, D., & Chang-Kredl, S. (Eds.). (2019). Provoking curriculum encounters across educational experience: New engagements with the curriculum theory archive (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058110 Sumara, D., Davis, B., & Laidlaw, L. (2001). Canadian identity and curriculum theory: An ecological, postmodern perspective. Canadian Journal of Education, 26(2), 144–163. https:// doi.org/10.2307/1602198 Taubman, P. M. (2012). Disavowed knowledge: Psychoanalysis, education, and teaching. Routledge. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Tuck, E., & Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(1), 72–89. van Kessel, C. (2018). Banal and fetishized evil: Implicating ordinary folk in genocide education. Journal of International Social Studies, 8(2), 160–171. Weenie, A. (2008). Curricular theorizing from the periphery. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(5), 545–557. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-873X.2008.00435.x Williams, N. (2022). Epidemiologist warns of “serious situation” by fall if COVID infections aren’t brought under control. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-covid-19-7thwave-1.6513353 Wiseman, D. (2018). Finding a place at home: The TRC as a means of (r)evolution in pre-service (science) teacher education. McGill Journal of Education, 53(2), 331–349. https://doi.org/10. 7202/1058401ar

Part III Curriculum as Caring

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter Nurturing Students’ Eudaimonic Well-Being and Their Capacity to Build Peace Nomisha Kurian and Hilary Cremin

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peace Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fostering Young People’s Eudaimonic Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rise of Well-Being Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But What Kind of Well-Being: Hedonia or Eudaimonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critiques of Well-Being Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Being-With: Holding the Space for Struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Being-Well: Young People As Agents of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Final Reflections and Ways Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

258 258 261 261 262 264 265 268 272 273

Abstract

We focus on how educators can support young people’s eudaimonic well-being, that is, their sense of meaning, purpose, growth, and self-actualization. This view of well-being suggests that a deep, transformative, and enduring form of wellbeing can be obtained through living a meaningful life. First, we discuss peace education, most notably peer mediation. Second, we draw on a case study of a young girl transformed by the experience of leadership and altruism in a highpoverty school, and we end the chapter with reflections on how helping young people feel seen and heard, and encouraging them to give back to their communities, might offer new insights on what it is to teach and learn in deeply purposedriven and connected ways.

N. Kurian (*) · H. Cremin University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_6

257

258

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

Keywords

Well-being · Peace education · Eudaimonic well-being · Peer mediation · Childcentered

Introduction In this chapter, we consider what the curriculum might look like if it were designed to ensure that all young people felt as if they mattered. What would this mattering look like? It might replace the notion of education for future mattering (once you have mastered all that we wish you to master) with the notion of always and already mattering. Mattering because we care about you and your education. Mattering because we value you, and because you add value to our various communities, near and far. This curriculum would reject ideas of deficit. It would place young people at the heart of the curriculum – not only as the beneficiaries of child-centered education – but also as meaning-makers in their own right who matter to others. We take as our starting point Aristotle’s eudaimonia. This view of well-being suggests that a deep, transformative, and enduring form of well-being can be obtained through living a meaningful life. We use it to inform our discussion of two areas of our work, first peace education, most notably peer mediation, and second education for well-being. We end the chapter with some reflections on how helping young people feel seen and heard, and encouraging them to give back to their communities, might offer new insights on what it is to teach and learn in deeply meaningful and connected ways.

Peace Education One of the authors of this chapter, Hilary Cremin, is known for her work on peace education. For several decades, she has been working with adult educators and young people to nurture caring relationships and to support them to respond positively to conflict through the use of circles (e.g., Cremin & Bevington, 2017). Her practical work with hundreds of schools involved in-service teacher training, and classroom work with children, and teaching and nonteaching staff. It also involved work with parents and community groups. She has published extensively on the challenges of working toward positive peace in schools while navigating the fraught realities of direct, structural, and cultural violence (Cremin, 2016, Kester & Cremin, 2017). Here we reflect on Hilary’s peace education work, and how eudaimonic wellbeing can be achieved through a curriculum which views young people as originators of acts of altruism, compassion, and care – rather than as recipients. We build on the work of the other author of this chapter (Nomisha) to consider how a move from the noun “wellbeing” to the verb “being well’’ entails so much more than would be implied by a simple change of language (Culshaw & Kurian, 2021). When being-

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

259

well is considered as a verb, process is all. Both Hilary Cremin’s work described here and Nomisha Kurian’s work described later in this chapter hold this as a central defining principle. For young people to be happy and well, they need a curriculum that enables them to feel heard, to be active meaning-makers in their own lives, and to feel able to make a contribution to the people and places that matter to them. Martin Buber (1970) uses a similar idea to talk about what happens when people go from treating the other as object (I-It) to treating the other as subject, capable of thought and feeling (I-Thou). This latter way of connecting was for Buber a means of accessing the divine. God, for him, was present in those moments of I-Thou relating. God is thus seen as a process, and not a static entity. Likewise, Rogers (1956) speaks of self-actualization, a continual process of becoming. Buber and Rogers have been seminal in Hilary Cremin’s work on peace education, most notably through their emphasis on processes of genuineness, empathy, and unconditional positive regard. It is these processes (and the resulting relationships) that make up a peace education curriculum that nurtures both inner and outer peace. More specifically, this form of peace education involves young people being trusted as genuine collaborators in processes of community-building and conflict resolution. Unlike popular forms of discipline and behavior management in schools, this form of peace education is about what young people think and do to generate positive peace, rather than how they can be coerced, manipulated, and controlled in public schools. It favors moral development, and learning from triumphs and mistakes, as the means by which peace can be achieved in schools. It is centered around the learning needs of children, rather than around the needs of the school for efficiency and control. Peaceful school communities are built through a curriculum that leans toward the eudaimonic while being grounded in the concrete. A peace education curriculum needs to build up skills, knowledge, values, and attitudes for peace, but there need to be opportunities to put this into practice for peace to be actualized. This is where circles come in. Circle work builds: speaking and listening; empathy; the ability to attend to the other with respect, interest, and care; emotional regulation and understanding; cooperation; self-esteem; problem-solving; group identity; and community, to name a few. If this curriculum is followed on a regular basis in all year groups and subjects in a school, and if young people are able to use what they have learnt in everyday situations, the results can be transformational. Young people can begin to take increasing responsibility for disputes in the playground and classroom, and to offer each other resolution, reconciliation, and mutual understanding through initiatives such as peer mediation and restorative practice. There are two points that we would like to make about circle work and peer mediation in the context of this chapter. The first concerns processes and relationships, and the second concerns the idea of young people as originators of altruism and eudaimonia. Both relate to the idea of young people mattering (more on this in the discussion of Nomisha’s work later in the chapter). Circles are the perfect place for relationships and mattering to be nurtured through processes of being well. As we have highlighted before (Cremin & Bevington, 2017), circles represent interconnectedness, equality, and flow. Everyone in a circle relates to the center and to each

260

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

other, not to an authority figure, or any other hierarchy. Unusually in school life, everyone can make eye-contact with everyone else and has a right to be in the space. The center is a place of focus and sharing, and the rituals involved (agreements about how the circle activities progress) can create feelings of safety and community. Peace-making circles are found in the first Nation cultures of North America, where they are seen as a sacred space for human connection, problem-solving, and feelings of wonder and curiosity. When circles are used well in schools, they have an impact on speaking and listening skills, emotional intelligence, cooperation, selfesteem, and problem-solving. If they permeate school life – from tutor-time or social skills lessons to science and foreign-language lessons, and from the youngest to the oldest classes – they build a strong culture of care and fun. They also promote positive relationships at all levels and reduce bullying (Cremin, 2007). It is the process of relationship-building that counts. In Hilary’s PhD research project (Cremin, 2001), these circles were found to be very powerful when the school was committed to embedding them into school life. When schools were using them only tokenistically, or when young people’s underlying social and emotional challenges were not being addressed in other ways, they had little effect. The key here is authenticity. When the circles were seen as a set of games and activities for the development of a school-mandated curriculum, their impact was not deep. It was as if the young people and adults in the circles were performing rather than being. It was seen as yet another curricular initiative that had to be engaged with. Everyone in the circle knew their place – whether as enabler, or as saboteur. It did not really matter which. While the challenges that the schools were facing were real and shared, there was little sense of ownership over the ways of building peace. In the doctoral project school where the circle work and peer mediation flourished, the impact was not felt immediately. The circle work was effective in enabling young people to use a new language of affirmation, cooperation, emotion, and conflict resolution. Children developed new skills and attitudes but were not applying these outside of the circle. When they were given opportunities to become mediators and to resolve their own playground disputes, however, the impact was transformational. The peer mediators spoke about using their skills at home as well as in the playground, and the teachers noticed mediation and peace-building knowledge and skills being transferred into other areas of the curriculum. This can be compared with learning to drive in theory with getting into a car and learning at the wheel! The latter enables a deep form of learning that becomes unconscious for many drivers. This is what we would want for our peer mediators. We argue that this way of learning and being enters into the territory of eudaimonia through mattering and Buber’s “I-thou.” Young people resolve conflicts and build peace, not because they need to be able to demonstrate their learning in preparation for some future time when they might apply it, but because they value Buber’s “I-thou” way of relating in the here and now. They have learnt through experience how much more meaningful this is. They can relate in these ways because teachers too have ceased to relate to their students as I-it. Rather than seeing them as needing control or coercion, young people are seen as collaborators in

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

261

community building. Teachers relate to them as originators of altruism and eudaimonia, and this is what makes a difference. The following section explores the concept of eudaimonic well-being in more detail and employs case studies from Nomisha’s work to explore this in more depth.

Fostering Young People’s Eudaimonic Well-Being We will now move from peace education to a field with a similar interest in human flourishing: education for well-being. This section presents the work of the other author, Nomisha, whose interest in school climates of care has led her to explore how teachers may safeguard young people in high-crisis settings (Kurian, 2020a); promote empathy (Kurian, 2019); protect the rights of the bullied and socially marginalized (Kurian, 2020b; Kurian & Kester, 2018); and receive care and compassion for their own well-being (Culshaw & Kurian, 2021). We begin by outlining the rise of well-being as a priority for curriculum design and delivery, and the instrumental role of positive psychology. We explain the two dominant conceptualizations of well-being in the hedonic and eudaimonic tradition; the complexity and interrelatedness of these constructs; and their implications for curricula. We also engage with critiques of the well-being movement in education and society and highlight the dangers of well-being curricula becoming mechanistic, performative, or overly individualistic. We argue that imbuing the curriculum with processes of “being-with” and “being-well” might help to guard against these pitfalls. First, we conceptualize “being-with” as recognizing and acknowledging the reality of pain and suffering, and creating safe spaces in the classroom to hold difficult emotions and experiences. Then, we conceptualize “being-well” as a process of letting pupils become givers of care and initiators of positive change, through curricula that respect and cultivate their agency. To illustrate “being-with” and “being-well” in practice, we draw on Nomisha’s previous work in secondary schools, weaving the voices of teachers and students into our conceptual explorations.

The Rise of Well-Being Curricula A younger cousin to peace education is the well-being movement in education. It was accelerated by the growth of positive psychology in the 1990s (Seligman, 2011). The psychologist Martin Seligman, now known as the father of positive psychology, argued that it was time to shift away from the (then) mainstream psychological approach of understanding human welfare solely in terms of deficit, pathology, and illness (Seligman, 2011). Instead, Seligman advocated an assets-centered approach. This meant conceptualizing well-being as more than the mere absence of illness and as the active presence of positive emotions and rich experiences that make life feel worthwhile and satisfying (Seligman & Csikszentmihaly, 2000).

262

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

Subsequently, the global spike in interest in well-being over the last three decades has been compared to an “explosion” (Mills & Klein, 2017). For the first time, individual well-being has been prioritized within global policy. Target 3.4 of the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 calls for “promoting mental health and wellbeing” (UN, 2015, p. 18). This marks a “watershed moment for mental health” (Scorza, Poku, & Pike, 2018, p. 72). This commitment is further marked by the growth of specialized policy groups. For example, the FundaMental SDG Group has been established as “a global initiative aiming to strengthen mental health” and identifies individual well-being as “one of the most pressing issues of our time” (FundaMental SDG, 2015, p. 1). The framing of well-being as a “new opportunity to raise the bar in terms of the best attainable state of health globally” (Davidson, 2019, p. 4) has attracted much educational interest. It is now well-established in research that schools exert formative and lifelong effects on young people’s mental health (Thapa et al., 2013; Weare, 2010). Consequently, schools are increasingly positioned as key relational and affective sites for well-being (McLellan & Steward, 2015). Innovations such as the “positive education” movement aim not only to safeguard students against poor mental health, but also to actively cultivate students’ intrapersonal and interpersonal assets – such as meaning, pleasure, engagement, positive relationships, and accomplishment (Seligman, 2011). The curriculum has been recognized as integral to a whole-school culture of wellbeing (Burgess et al., 2009). Waters (2014) notes that “what seems unusual now - to explicitly teach a subject on wellbeing - will one day be a normal part of the curriculum” (p. 116). Indeed, an ever-growing amount of empirical and theoretical scholarship points to the benefits of curricula that explicitly promote mental health: the capacity to foster life satisfaction, promote social connectedness, develop emotional literacy, and prevent anxiety and depression (Brooker et al., 2019; Souter et al., 2012; Waters & White, 2015). Educational settings around the world have pioneered curricular initiatives to teach elements of well-being, from self-care (e.g., Lo et al., 2017) to hope and optimism (e.g., Field & Duffy, 2012) to social belonging (e.g. Levin et al., 2019). This paradigm shift has been compared to the change ushered in through the Industrial Revolution, when teaching all children the three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic – was seen as a groundbreaking curricular innovation (Waters, 2013). In the twenty-first century, “just as it is now considered normal for all students to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, it will be considered normal to learn about wellbeing” (Waters, 2013, p. 118).

But What Kind of Well-Being: Hedonia or Eudaimonia The reader might, at this point, wonder how well-being is understood in the first place. In this regard, a major contribution of positive psychology has been to offer educators two distinctive ways of conceptualizing well-being. The first, hedonic well-being, refers to positive moment-to-moment affect, such as joy, happiness, pleasure, amusement, or comfort (McLellan & Steward, 2015). Hedonia denotes

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

263

what feels good, satisfying, or enjoyable (Waterman, 2008). Pioneering work in positive psychology favored this hedonic perspective, discussing how well-being could be promoted through “a life full of frequent experiences of positive emotions, infrequent experiences of negative emotions, and an overall evaluation of one’s life as satisfying” (Schueller, 2013, p. 2661). By contrast, eudaimonic well-being refers to meaning, purpose, growth, and selfactualization (McLellan & Steward, 2015). The word “eudaimonia” originates from the Greek word for good (eu) and spirit (daimon). Eudaimonic well-being, according to Aristotle, meant “living in truth to one’s daimon” or actualizing one’s full potential through the pursuit of excellence and virtue (Waterman, 2008, p. 235). While the ingredients of eudaimonia vary across different contexts, Huta and Waterman (2014) found that four elements emerged in almost all definitions: self-growth/personal development/self-actualization, meaning/significance, authenticity/autonomy to be one’s truest self, and excellence/quality/virtue/ethics. Eudaimonic pursuits may result in feelings of transcending the self or connecting to something greater (Vittersø, 2016). Since meaning and purpose can be more long-lasting than fleeting moment-to-moment positive affect, eudaimonic well-being is generally considered to have more enduring effects than hedonic well-being (Steger et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the two are not meant to be promoted in isolation or pitted against one another. Both are significant in promoting life satisfaction and a sense of vitality (Huta & Waterman, 2014). The majority of scholars agree that hedonic and eudaimonic well-being are closely intertwined constructs (Deci & Ryan, 2008; Ryan & Huta, 2009; Vittersø, 2016) (For a comprehensive overview of how hedonic and eudaimonic well-being have been conceptualized, operationalized, and contested, see Huta and Waterman, 2014.). We “need to interrelate both perspectives if we are to comprehend the complexities of children’s lives” (Estola et al., 2014, p. 932). Indeed, the boundaries between eudaimonic and hedonia blur within the vibrant realities of day-to-day school life. For example, a curriculum that encourages a student to invest significant time and energy to achieve a challenging goal (a eudaimonic pursuit of self-growth and purpose) may also help that student to feel joy, gratitude, happiness, or satisfaction upon attaining it (a hedonic moment of positive affect). Eudaimonic well-being and hedonic well-being thus enjoy “substantial overlap,” and “if a person experiences eudaimonic living he or she will necessarily also experience hedonic enjoyment” (Deci & Ryan, 2008, p. 3). Given this overlap, a well-known critique within well-being literature has even questioned whether separating eudaimonia into its own distinct concept is necessary, suggesting that the two concepts be integrated into a single “Big One” approach (Kashdan et al., 2008). This critique, in turn, has been countered with defenses of the distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia (Ryan & Huta, 2009; Waterman, 2008). In agreement with the latter, we consider that this distinction offers educators a rich and fine-grained vocabulary to understand well-being. Without it, subtle variations in emotion and experience might be lost. As Ryan and Huta (2009) point out, there would be no way to differentiate between “meaning, awe, inspiration, sexual pleasure, egoistic-gratifications or self-transcendent ecstasy” (p. 203). Without eudaimonia, an “oblivious person with electrodes continuously stimulating reward

264

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

centers of the brain would be, by this definition, not only happy but also well” (Ryan & Huta, 2009, p. 203). The curriculum could stagnate without crafting opportunities for young people to grow, determine their values, and discover their purpose. Retaining the Aristotelian notion of well-being, as a path to meaning and selfactualization, thus seems fruitful. For the purposes of this chapter, we focus on eudaimonic well-being, while acknowledging its connections to hedonic positive affect.

Critiques of Well-Being Curricula The blossoming of well-being literature and policy bodes well for our hope to see all young people feeling confident that they matter. Yet, this brings new challenges and dilemmas for the curriculum. Some of the assumptions of this research and praxis have been contested. Some sociologists abhor the “tyranny of the positive” (Held, 2002) arguing that the well-being movement pathologizes negative emotions and pressurizes individuals to display only positive emotions (Held, 2002; Ehrenreich, 2009). Others consider that some personality traits, such as being sociable, extroverted, cheerful, and optimistic, are extolled within positive psychology to the neglect of other personality traits, such as being introverted or contemplative (Miller, 2008). Critics point out that students in school well-being programs may be pushed to share emotions and experiences without fully consenting, and to feel anxious about nonpositive emotions (Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009). They have also questioned whether students will be assessed on their well-being and whether such assessments can fairly account for differences in students’ personalities and worldviews (Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009). Moving beyond the school to society, some sociologists argue that enshrining well-being as a policy goal for every sphere of social life is a neoliberal tool of governmentality (Joseph, 2020). That is, they see promoting “positivity” as a push to make people content with the status quo and compliant in the face of unjust social structures (Ahmed, 2010; Sointu, 2005; Miller & Klein, 2018). These critics question whether curricula encouraging young people to be happier will ignore the social structures that make them unhappy (Zembylas, 2020). While these are all different strands of critique, a unifying theme is concern about whether the well-being movement is sufficiently nuanced, critical, and societally informed: Does it heed the range and complexity of people’s emotions, needs, and experiences? While it is beyond our scope to address every strand of critique, we concur that a narrow emphasis on positivity and inattention to context could reduce well-being curricula to assembly-line products, designed for young people to consume and perform in the same manner as any other curricular unit. This risk is worrying. As Hilary expressed in her section on peace education, we do not advocate for curricula that coerce, manipulate, or pressurize young people. Rather than simply steering students to the knowledge, skills, and traits that we adults consider necessary for well-being, it also seems vital to honor the voices, emotions, and experiences they bring to us. Miller’s (2008) critique proves insightful:

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

265

The positive, optimistic attitude that Seligman associates with achievement, success and happiness and which he exemplifies with a successful insurance salesman— seems moreover to pre-suppose a very narrow range of emotional response. Indeed, one might argue that it is the mark of wisdom and maturity, of an appreciation of the mysteries, tragedies and ironies of life, not to respond unambiguously positively or negatively, optimistically or pessimistically, to any given situation. (Miller, 2008, p. 606)

In agreement with Miller, we conceptualize a curriculum for well-being as going beyond a hedonic focus on positive affect and creating possibilities for rich and varied forms of meaning-making. This brings us to the eudaimonic concept of “being-with” – holding space for a range of difficult emotions and experiences to help young people feel seen and heard.

Being-With: Holding the Space for Struggle The curriculum is a matter of process as well as content, as Houghton and Anderson (2017) remind us. A curriculum for well-being, then, is not only about teaching skills but also about the relational climate in which topics of human flourishing emerge and are discussed. In this section, we suggest that educators be willing to sit with uncomfortable emotions (such as pain) and difficult experiences (such as struggle or injustice) that students may voice in the classroom. Helping them to feel seen and heard and acknowledging the reality of the adversity and suffering they face can deepen their eudaimonic well-being. We animate this argument with extracts from Nomisha’s primary data with two participant-schools in India. The first participant-school was an urban K-12 school practicing an ethic of care. Despite their commitment to compassionate and empathetic pedagogy, teachers and students struggled to navigate forms of inequality, violence, and crisis in the region, such as gender-based violence, child labor, and child abuse (Kurian, 2020a). (See Kurian, 2020, for full details of the methodology and findings.) When asked how they engaged with youth well-being in the face of societal challenges, the teachers reflected on changes in the power dynamics between teacher and pupil. They referred to the historic Vedic tradition of “guru–shishya” in India, a form of spiritual and academic mentorship wherein pupils were expected to give their teacher absolute obedience and devotion. The curriculum provided in the guru-shishya tradition was meant to be accepted unquestioningly. Psychosocial concerns such as wellbeing were not foregrounded, given the academic imperative for the pupil to master the knowledge the teacher provided. However, the teachers noted intergenerational shifts in understandings of youth agency. There has been a cultural shift. In India and globally as well. My generation went to school in the 60s and it didn’t matter whether a teacher was strict or warm. She was the guru, we were brought up to think we have to respect her. We had to sit silently whenever we heard her coming through the corridor. Like, ‘Stay quiet, Ma’am is coming!’ But today’s generation is not like that. They want their voice to be heard. (Piya, Year 10 teacher).

266

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

The guru-shishya relationship has changed. Today’s generation will rebel if you condemn them or tell them rudely that something is not right. You have to put it in a diplomatic way and be loving, then they just might listen to you. They might ask you questions like, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why should we do this?’ This generation responds more to love and care. (Anjali, Year 9 teacher)

According to teachers, these intergenerational shifts meant that students were more vocal, curious, and critical about their social ecology. For example, students were sensitive to the social dynamics of gender discrimination. The prevalence of gender-stereotypical imagery in textbooks has been much-discussed in Indian sociology for the past two decades (Bhoge & Ghose, 2014; Blumberg, 2008; Kalia, 1986; Pandey, 2006). On the ground, students were willing to openly question curricular material they perceived as biased: Kids today are more independent-minded. For them, happiness is... asking questions, why do we have to do this, why that. They even question what they see in the textbook, like if women are only seen holding pots and pans and in the kitchen. We were not allowed to question like that when we were kids! (Ram, Year 10 teacher)

In turn, to actualize the school’s ethic of care, some of the teacher-participants adopted a receptive attitude. It keeps us on our toes and they need to feel we are listening. (Piya, Year 10 teacher)

They perceived the students’ criticality as a catalyst for social change in the long term. I think this is a good trend because if the kids are asking questions today, for example, ‘Why do girls have to be quieter than boys?’ then this will be to the good of the nation and the world later. Bring in change in society. (Ram, Year 10 teacher)

Students also expressed resistance to social norms that impinged upon their own lives. For example, the city within the school was located consistently recording the fourth-highest rate in India of sexual violence against women and girls (National Crime Records Bureau, 2011). For this reason, female students were often forbidden by their parents to take morning walks; go out to play in the evenings; travel with friends; or go anywhere unaccompanied. The effects of this restricted social mobility upon their well-being became a frequent topic of classroom discussion, even though such issues were not covered within the official curricular content. Female students spontaneously shared feelings of frustration and anger. Rather than attempting to banish or quell these emotions, teachers reflected on the need to show empathy in a reflective dialogical space: Caring for a child is no longer just about ordering them to do something. If I tell the girls, you should not go out post 7pm, we hear so many cases of attacks on girls. But today’s generation will take it negatively, the girls say, ‘Why should we have to stay in? Why

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

267

can’t it be safe for us?’ For me, helping them be happy means. . ..I have to slow down, listen to them, hear them out, not just condemn what they’re saying. (Srilata, Year 9 teacher) “If the same thing were to happen to me, I would feel upset as well. For me, their wellbeing means...just the fact that they feel they can come and open up to me, and they know their information is confidential and there is someone ready to listen to them. They know my perception is not, ‘They are children so it doesn’t matter what they say.’ I actually do care about what they want to say.” (Namha, Year 9 teacher)

In turn, students identified their teachers’ receptivity as beneficial for their wellbeing. The teachers are kind. In my previous schools teachers scold the children a lot, here they actually talk to us. I like how they listen without shouting. (Rehan, Year 7) You get this feeling that you can tell them anything. (Rishabh, Year 6) When we have Circle Time, I get to tell my teacher what I read in the newspaper. We talk about current events, sometimes the bad things too. I liked that we could freely share. It makes us have a more trusting relationship with people in our class. (Vaibhav, Year 8)

These extracts suggest a context-sensitive approach to cultivating young people’s well-being through being-with: listening to students and offering empathy and respect without shying away from difficult questions. Helping students feel that they matter, in this sense, may mean creating safe spaces for shared vulnerability (Bevington et al., 2019). Teachers’ framings of “happiness” as “asking questions” and “slowing down” to engage with “negativity” rather than “condemning it” are intriguing, given critiques that the well-being movement may overlook the productive potential of negative affect. Protesting what he sees as an uncritical push for happiness in education, Zembylas (2020) argues that a socially just curriculum must show empathy for some amount of unhappiness, because “bad feelings in the classroom can be an important resource” to “engage more actively with the alleviation or eradication of suffering in the world” (p. 29). Ahmed, a sociologist of affect, makes a similar point about the emotional cost of civic responsibility: “To recognize the causes of unhappiness is thus a part of our political cause. This is why any politics of justice will involve causing unhappiness even if that is not the point of our action. So much happiness is premised on, and promised by, the concealment of suffering, the freedom to look away from what compromises one’s happiness.” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 196)

These authors join a substantial body of critics who deplore individualistic or decontextualized framings of well-being on the grounds that these underplay the social context of pain (Jackson & Bingham, 2018; Joseph, 2020; Miller & Klein, 2018; Sointu, 2005). A paradox thus emerges about human flourishing: Helping young people feel seen and heard can mean bearing witness to uncomfortable emotions and experiences. A curriculum imbued with this empathy may, by creating

268

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

opportunities for solidarity and change, open up eudaimonic pathways for meaning. After all, “a world in which unhappiness is seen as shared allows students to mourn suffering and... opens up new possibilities for an ethical living in the world” (Zembylas, 2020, p. 28). This case study has thus sought to illuminate the value of “being-with”: curricula that make space for struggle. In contrast to a mechanical or performative push for positivity, being willing to sit with discomfort may bring greater depth and meaning to the pursuit of well-being. As Nomisha notes in previous work, “how can we seriously talk about being well if we do not understand what it means to be struggling?” (Culshaw & Kurian, 2021, p. 7). Moreover, as we saw in Hilary’s peer mediation work, students gain a sense of eudaimonic well-being once they have been given both the skills and the opportunities to transcend their everyday conflicts. We therefore call for curricula that open up “new spaces for emotion, encounter and engagement with struggle, risk and voicing” (Cremin et al., 2021, p. 2).

Being-Well: Young People As Agents of Change Nomisha’s other work has used the term “being-well” to playfully subvert the term “wellbeing” (Culshaw & Kurian, 2021). This linguistic revision signifies that wellbeing is not a static property, but a fluid state. It ebbs and flows depending on the structures and relationships that surround young people and their educators (Culshaw & Kurian, 2021). In this section, we use the term “being-well” to explore the agency of young people. In keeping with the nature of “being-well” as an active verb, we argue that the curriculum need not treat students as passive recipients of knowledge, but encourage them to take responsibility and propel positive change for individual and collective well-being. As a case study, we spotlight the story of 14-year-old Saloni, a child-participant in Nomisha’s research with a secondary school in urban India. This school served a high-poverty youth population, with approximately 60% of students living below the international poverty line of $1.90 or less a day. Interviews were conducted with 11to 14-year-old child-participants and their teachers over the course of 2 months of fieldwork. Saloni lived with her grandmother and her mother in a tenement near the school. Having lost her father and grandfather before the age of ten, Saloni identified her grandmother as her inspiration: My grandmother is the one who mostly takes care of me and I owe to her, I want to be exactly like her. She is the one who gives me inspiration because she has been through such tough times.

She went on to explain that her grandmother had had to endure multiple adversities throughout her life, including gender-based abuse and alcoholism in her marriage and the upbringing of four children and the financial support of six

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

269

extended family members while enduring extreme poverty. Saloni saw these hardships as deepening her respect and admiration for her grandmother: She is my role model. She came up in her life. She is very daring...I must be like her. It will help me in life.

She also noted that her grandmother “wants me to do well in school” since the intergenerational cycle of poverty “has to end at some point, she doesn’t want me to go through the same things.” Saloni regularly attended the “Life Skill” lessons the school provided. This curriculum included information about psychosocial elements of well-being as well as skills for personal development, such as elocution. However, when asked about the elements of school life she found most influential for her well-being, Saloni named an informal encounter with her head teacher outside formal curricular provision. I told her about my grandmother and how I am having this aim to work hard because of her. Then the next week she came to me in the corridor and said, ‘Saloni, why don’t you try being the Green House Captain?’ I was really excited and I was like, ‘Yes Ma’am, I am trying my level best now and I’ll be trying it always.

Saloni noted that “after that day, I became a lot more happy.” After becoming captain, Saloni felt the desire to work for social change and “do something for the other children” out of the knowledge that, when her grandmother faced adversity, “no-one did anything to help her or my mom, they were just thinking of themselves, it’s I, me, myself.” She elaborated: My grandmother is not like this. She admires Abdul Kalam (A former Prime Minister of India.) and she encourages everyone to look up to other people, you should never be just I, me, myself. You should take inspiration from great personalities, what they have done for the country. Even if not 100 percent, at least we can contribute 1 percent to our country. Like, India faces many problems and the girls who come from tough backgrounds, there is sadness in their life until they grow up and find their own feet. So I feel good that I can do things for other children like me, I am not going to lose hope and I will not put anyone else down that way.

Saloni put this life philosophy into practice at school. Over the course of her leadership, she initiated multiple forms of positive change: advocating for teachers to understand the plight of orphaned children enduring child labor and caregiver abuse; teaching her peers financial literacy and money management skills; talking to her peers about the value of resilience and self-discipline; and helping a bereaved child secure a fee waiver in the wake of losing her father, who was her family’s primary wage-earner. She explained how these experiences enhanced her own well-being: I feel good that I can do things for other children like me. Now, when I walk into school, I feel happy, I feel like I believe in myself, my teachers do too. Where my confidence comes from - it’s my grandmother. Because she also takes the initiative, in money matters and all.

270

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

Other ladies are looking up to her. I take inspiration from her only. And her confidence, what she has, has come upon me.

Saloni’s story suggests the potential of curricula that enable young people to “be well” as an active verb: by becoming dynamic agents of change in their communities. Saloni was taught skills in the formal curriculum. However, the moment she identified as transformative for her well-being was when she was given responsibility to work for individual and collective good herself. This finding is reminiscent of the oft-quoted observation that “mental health promotion is much more than simply inserting curriculum materials” (Wyn et al., 2000, p. 595). Perhaps the curriculum comes to life when the relational climate affirms the assets of the young people imbibing it. A promising blueprint for this capability-centered approach comes from the social psychologist Isaac Prilleltensky. Prilleltensky argues that we can help people to feel as though they matter in two stages – “recognition” (feeling valued) and “impact” (adding value) (Prilleltensky, 2014). He conceptualizes these two stages thus: The moment of recognition refers to signals we receive from the world that our presence matters, that what we have to say has meaning and that we are acknowledged in the room, in our family, at work, and in the community at large. The moment of impact, in turn, refers to our sense of agency; that what we do makes a difference in the world and that other people depend on us. (Prilleltensky, 2014, p. 151)

Indeed, both stages seem visible in Saloni’s journey to being-well. When her head teacher asked her to become a school captain, she went beyond formal curricular provision to enable the first stage of mattering – helping Saloni feel valued (Prillentensky, 2014). The moment of recognition thus took place. The potential of this first stage to make students feel appreciated seems well-captured by Elliot’s (2009) analysis of mattering: “When there are many who could fill the bill and the person notices me…I can be more confident that I really do matter.” In turn, Saloni’s altruism toward her peers ushered her into the second stage of “mattering”: which moves the giver from feeling valued to adding value (Prilleltensky, 2014). Contributing to a community has been found to foster meaning in life, as it helps the individual invest effort and time in goal-fulfillment (Ryff & Singer, 1998); fulfill their psychological needs of purpose, value, efficacy, and selfworth (Baumeister, 1991); and thereby feel that life has “significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos” (King et al., 2006, p. 180). From the lens of eudaimonic well-being, this discovery of meaning nurtures a person’s daimon: the inner spirit or “true self” uncovered through purposeful pursuit (Schueller, 2013; Little, 2016). Indeed, becoming a leader helped Saloni make meaning out of her family’s intergenerational history of trauma. Far from being a passive acceptance of the status quo, resilience can be a potent tool of

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

271

resistance to cycles of suffering (Hajir et al., 2021). Saloni’s pride in fulfilling her grandmother’s legacy also suggests the need for well-being curricula to honor young people’s life histories. As Houghton and Anderson (2017) note, an emotionally intelligent curriculum can draw on students’ lived experience to convey that educators see and value young people as multidimensional individuals in their own right, rather than as simply consumers of content. Saloni’s proactiveness and ingenuity in helping other marginalized young people also suggests that the second stage of mattering – adding value – may tether human flourishing to the pursuit of justice and equity. Since “people will go to great lengths to pursue fairness for themselves, their loved ones, their communities, and their countries,” the opportunity arises to connect “mattering and fairness on the one hand, and wellness and thriving on the other” (Prilleltensky, 2014, p. 151). Similar to Hilary’s observations of young people empowered through their work as peer mediators, Nomisha observed that Saloni gained confidence and happiness through her work as school captain. This reinforces previous findings that altruism can develop feelings of self-efficacy and social worth (Alessandri, Caprara, Eisenberg, & Steca, 2009; Grant & Gino, 2010), and “the salience and strength of one’s identity as a capable, caring contributor” (Grant & Dutton, 2012, p. 1034). Saloni’s references to positive emotions – excitement, hope, and happiness – also suggest how curricula encouraging eudaimonic pursuit need not ignore young people’s hedonic well-being. In a well-balanced curriculum, “the same circumstances giving rise to eudaimonia” can “simultaneously give rise to hedonia” (Waterman, 2008, p. 240). Age need not be a barrier to taking up responsibility. We urge caution against overly deterministic views about child development, as rising numbers of youth and well-being scholars suggest that the traditional stereotype of the young child or adolescent as self-preoccupied and ego-driven is not necessarily accurate (Epstein, 2007; Stevens et al., 2007). In fact, research has shown that young people at all ages can thrive through dedicated social and civic engagement (Lerner, 2004). This is not to suggest that all young people will make meaning in the same way. However, Saloni’s case suggests how a curriculum that encourages students to be changeagents might facilitate several components of eudaimonic well-being: being able to actualize one’s potential (Huta & Waterman, 2014); develop and utilize skills and talents (Kashdan et al., 2008); act as a role model or exemplar for others (Waterman, 2008); do good and make a positive impact on others’ lives (Steger, 2016); and express one’s values through practical action (Little, 2016). Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic have only deepened the need for educators to encourage collective action and social change (Moulin-Stożek et al., 2021). Whether we are concerned with young peer mediators in the UK or young people like Saloni in India, the urge to turn conflict and adversity into peace and well-being is strong when young people feel that they (always and already) matter. Prioritizing this in curriculum design is fundamental to nurturing care and human thriving in and through education.

272

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

Final Reflections and Ways Forward This chapter has offered two conceptualizations to help foster young people’s eudaimonic well-being. The first is “being-with” – creating safe spaces to hold the difficult emotions and experiences students may articulate with empathy, respect, and compassion. The second is “being-well” – encouraging students to actualize their potential, take up responsibility, confront the reality of adversity and suffering in the social world, and become agents of individual and collective change. Taken together, we consider that a curriculum which offers the ability to “be-with” and “bewell” may foster young people’s sense of mattering and their pursuit of self-growth, meaning, and purpose. The eudaimonic learner can certainly experience hedonia but transcends an exclusive focus on positive affect in order to embrace a “fully engaged life of trial and error, failure and success, pleasure and, at times, disappointment” (Schueller, 2013, p. 2661). In terms of practical ways forward, we suggest the following points for reflection when designing and enacting curricula for young people’s eudaimonic well-being. Start by looking at the ground beneath your feet. – How do young people experience conflict and well-being in your education setting? What opportunities do they have to make meaning from their life experiences, good and bad? Where do they learn how to resolve conflicts and build peace? What opportunities do they have to practice and develop these skills? – What do you know about the struggles that young people are facing? Do they feel safe, seen, and heard in the classroom? What supports them to feel a sense of meaning, purpose, and growth? – What processes do you have in place for finding this out? Are these processes robust? Do they involve young people as peer supporters? Continue to collate information and improve policy and curriculum for understanding young people’s experiences and acting on them. – What patterns emerge when you look at what you have found from investigating the above? – How can you improve school policy and curriculum to make it more likely that young people will have the skills and opportunities to resolve conflict and build peace and well-being as active agents? How can you involve young people themselves? Plan for sustainable peace and well-being. – Is what you are implementing having an effect? How do you know? What needs to happen next to continue to improve? What do young people say about it? How can they be involved in continually reviewing and sustaining this work?

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

273

This list is not meant to offer prescriptions, but avenues of possibility. The content and processes shaping curricula are ultimately fluid and contingent upon the priorities and capacities of their unique contexts; “a curriculum that works in one setting might not work in another” (Brooker et al., 2019, p. 61). Moreover, the daimon (spirit) that characterizes eudaimonic pursuit looks, feels, and sounds different in each individual. Rather than a standardized mold, the daimon is “an ideal, in the sense of being an excellence, a perfection toward which one strives” (Waterman, 2008, p. 240). Thus, we close this chapter in the hope of a curriculum that infuses a unique sense of meaning and mattering within each young person that encounters it. In this approach to well-being, “doing good and being well can come together” (Vittersø, 2016, p. 20).

References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press. Alessandri, G., Caprara, G. V., Eisenberg, N., & Steca, P. (2009). Reciprocal relations among selfefficacy beliefs and prosociality across time. Journal of Personality, 77(4), 1229–1259. Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Meanings of life. Guilford Press. Bevington, T., Kurian, N., & Cremin, H. (2019). Peace education and citizenship education: Shared critiques. In A. Peterson, G. Stahl, & H. Soong (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of citizenship and education. Palgrave Macmillan. Bhog, D., & Ghose, M. (2014). Writing gender in: Reflections on writing middle-school political science textbooks in India. Gender and Development, 22(1), 49–62. Blumberg, R. L. (2008). The invisible obstacle to educational equality: Gender bias in textbooks. Prospects, 38(3), 345–361. Brooker, A., McKague, M., & Phillips, L. (2019). Implementing a whole-of-curriculum approach to student wellbeing. Student Success, 10(3), 55. Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (Vol. 243). Simon and Schuster. Burgess, H., Anderson, J., & Westerby, N. (2009). Mental wellbeing in the curriculum. Higher Education Academy. Cremin, H. (2001). An investigation into whether the ‘iceberg’ system of peer mediation training, and peer mediation, reduce levels of bullying, raise self-esteem, and increase pupil empowerment amongst upper primary age children (Doctoral dissertation, University of Northampton). Cremin, H. (2007). Peer mediation: Citizenship and social inclusion revisited: Citizenship and social inclusion in action. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). Cremin, H. (2016). Peace education research in the twenty-first century: Three concepts facing crisis or opportunity? Journal of Peace Education, 13(1), 1–17. Cremin, H., Aryoubi, H., Hajir, B., Kurian, N., & Salem, H. (2021). Post-abyssal ethics in education research in settings of conflict and crisis: Stories from the field. British Educational Research Journal, 47(4), 1102–1119. Cremin, H., & Bevington, T. (2017). Positive peace in schools: Tackling conflict and creating a culture of peace in the classroom. Taylor & Francis. Culshaw, S., & Kurian, N. (2021). Love as the lifeblood of being-well: A call to care for teachers in England’s schools. Journal of Pastoral Care in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944. 2021.1938647 Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2008). Hedonia, Eudaimonia, and Well-being: An Introduction. Journal of Happiness Studies, 9(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-006-9018-1 Davidson, L. (Ed.). (2019). The Routledge handbook of international development, mental health and wellbeing. Routledge.

274

N. Kurian and H. Cremin

Ecclestone, K., & Hayes, D. (2009). The dangerous rise of therapeutic education. Routledge. Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How positive thinking is undermining America. Metropolitan Books. Elliott, G. C. (2009). Family matters: The importance of mattering to family in adolescence. Wiley. Estola, E., Farquhar, S., & Puroila, A. M. (2014). Well-being narratives and young children. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(8), 929–941. Epstein, R. (2007). The case against adolescence: Rediscovering the adult in every teen. Quill Driver Books/Word Dancer Press. Field, R., & Duffy, J. (2012). Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness: Promoting law student well-being through a first year law subject. QUT Law Review, 12, 133. https://doi. org/10.5204/qutlr.v12i1.233 Grant, A., & Dutton, J. (2012). Beneficiary or benefactor: Are people more prosocial when they reflect on receiving or giving? Psychological Science, 23(9), 1033–1039. Hajir, B., Clarke-Habibi, S., & Kurian, N. (2021). The ‘South’ speaks back: Exposing the ethical stakes of dismissing resilience in conflict-affected contexts. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 16(1), 1–17. Held, B. S. (2002). The tyranny of the positive attitude in America: Observation and speculation. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58(9), 965–991. Houghton, A. M., & Anderson, J. (2017). Embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum: Maximising success in higher education. Higher Education Academy. Huta, V., & Waterman, A. S. (2014). Eudaimonia and its distinction from hedonia: Developing a classification and terminology for understanding conceptual and operational definitions. Journal of Happiness Studies, 15(6), 1425–1456. Jackson, L., & Bingham, C. (2018). Reconsidering happiness in the context of social justice education. Interchange, 49, 217–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-018-9323-8 Joseph, J. (2020). Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan. Kalia, N. N. (1986). Women and sexism: Language of Indian school textbooks. Economic and Political Weekly, 794–797. Kester, K., & Cremin, H. (2017). Peace education and peace education research: Toward a concept of post-structural violence and second order reflexivity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(14), 1415–1427. Klein, E., & Mills, C. (2017). Psy-expertise, therapeutic culture and the politics of the personal in development. Third World Quarterly, 38(9), 1990–2008. Kurian, N. (2020a). ‘Kindness isn’t important, we need to be scared’: Disruptions to the praxis of peace education in an Indian school. Journal of Peace Education, 17(2), 1–22. Kurian, N. (2020b). Rights-protectors or rights-violators? Deconstructing teacher discrimination against LGBT students in England and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as an advocacy tool. The International Journal of Human Rights, 24(8), 1080–1102. Kurian, N. (2019). Empathy: Simple and inevitable? Development education and narratives of African poverty. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 11(1), 120–137. Kurian, N., & Kester, K. (2018). Southern voices in peace education: Interrogating race, marginalisation and cultural violence in the field. Journal of Peace Education, 16(1), 1–28. Lerner, R. M. (2004). Liberty: Thriving and civic engagement among America’s youth. Sage. Levin, E., Rixon, A., & Keating, M. (2019). How can a ‘Sense of Belonging’ inform your teaching strategy? Reflections from a core business unit. A practice report. Student Success, 10(2), 71–78. Little, B. R. (2016). Well-doing: Personal projects and the social ecology of flourishing. In J. Vittersø (Ed.), Handbook of eudaimonic well-being (pp. 297–305). Springer. Lo, K., Francis-Cracknell, A., & Hassed, C. (2017). A health enhancement program for physiotherapy students: A mixed methods pilot study. New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy, 45(3), 143–153. McLellan, R., & Steward, S. (2015). Measuring children and young people’s wellbeing in the school context. Cambridge Journal of Education, 45(3), 307–332.

Helping Young People Feel That They Matter

275

Moulin-Stożek, D., Kurian, N., & Nikolova, A. (2021). Virtue as a response to pandemic and crisis. Oxford Review of Education, 48(3), 289–302. Pandey, K. (2006). Gender issues and Indian textbooks. Caught in the Web or Lost in the Textbook, 201–206. Prilleltensky, I. (2014). Meaning-making, mattering, and thriving in community psychology: From co-optation to amelioration and transformation. Psychosocial Intervention, 23(2), 151–154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psi.2014.07.008 Rogers, C. R. (1956). Training individuals to engage in the therapeutic process. In Education and Training Institute, American Psychological Association, Aug, 1955, Palo Alto, CA, US; This paper was presented at the aforementioned meeting. American Psychological Association. Ryan, R. M., & Huta, V. (2009). Wellness as healthy functioning or wellness as happiness: The importance of eudaimonic thinking (response to the Kashdan et al. and Waterman discussion). The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(3), 202–204. Ryff, C. D., & Singer, B. (1998). The contours of positive human health. Psychological Inquiry, 9, 1–28. Scorza, P., Poku, O., & Pike, K. M. (2018). Mental health: taking its place as an essential element of sustainable global development. BJPsych international, 15(4), 72–74. Schueller, S. M. (2013). Understanding our best: Eudaimonia’s growing influence in psychology. Quality of Life Research, 22(10), 2661–2662. Seligman, M. (2011). Flourish: A new understanding of happiness and well-being – And how to achieve them. Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Seligman, M., & Csikszentmihaly, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5–14. Sointu, E. (2005). The rise of an ideal: Tracing changing discourses of wellbeing. The Sociological Review, 53(2), 255–274. Soutter, A. K., O’Steen, B., & Gilmore, A. (2012). Wellbeing in the New Zealand curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44(1), 111–142. Steger, M. F. (2016). Hedonia, eudaimonia, and meaning: Me versus us; fleeting versus enduring. In J. Vittersø (Ed.), Handbook of eudaimonic well-being (pp. 175–182). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Stevens, L. P., Hunter, L., Pendergast, D., Carrington, V., Bahr, N., Kapitzke, C., & Mitchell, J. (2007). Re-conceptualizing the possible narratives of adolescence. Australian Educational Researcher, 34(2), 107–127. Thapa, A., Cohen, J., Guffey, S., & Higgins-D’Alessandro, A. (2013). A review of school climate research. Review of Educational Research, 83(3), 357–385. Vittersø, J. (Ed.). (2016). Handbook of eudaimonic well-being. Springer International Publishing. Waterman, A. S. (2008). Reconsidering happiness: A eudaimonist’s perspective. Journal of Positive Psychology, 3, 234–252. Waters, L. (2014). Balancing the curriculum: Teaching gratitude, hope and resilience. A love of Ideas, 117–124. http://www.questions.com.au/echapters/pdf/Love-of-Ideas/Lea-Waters.pdf Waters, L., & White, M. (2015). Case study of a school wellbeing initiative: Using appreciative inquiry to support positive change. International Journal of Wellbeing, 5(1), 19–32. https://doi. org/10.5502/ijw.v5i1.2 Weare, K. (2010). Promoting mental health through schools. In P. Aggleton, C. Dennison, & I. Warwick (Eds.), Promoting health and wellbeing through schools (pp. 36–53). Routledge. Wyn, J., Cahill, H., Holdsworth, R., Rowling, L., & Carson, S. (2000). MindMatters, a wholeschool approach promoting mental health and wellbeing. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 34(4), 594–601. Zembylas, M. (2020). (Un) happiness and social justice education: Ethical, political and pedagogic lessons. Ethics and Education, 15(1), 18–32.

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in Young Learners: An Autoethnography on Bullying Intervention Matthew Yanko, Jessica Taylor, and Peter Gouzouasis

Contents Prelude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Autoethnographic Vignettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vignette One: Negotiating Differences in Songwriting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vignette Two: Developing an Ensemble of Empathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vignette Three: Sharing Our Song of Kindness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion and Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postlude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

278 281 281 283 284 285 289 291

Abstract

The prevention of bullying in kindergarten can enable a safe learning environment that nurtures the development of friendship, play, and socioemotional health and well-being. We examine how young learners seek a tangible solution to unkind behaviors in their classroom through music making and investigate how they become deeply involved as innovators, creators, and implementers of song writing as an intervention strategy. Over the course of two months, we discover that active participation in song writing and performing as an ensemble fosters opportunities to develop prosocial behaviors and empathy. Results from the present inquiry illustrate how music can become a medium for young learners to comprehend challenging concepts such as bullying. Moreover, it demonstrates how music can support educators to expand beyond traditional intervention programs and open a door to new possibilities through which young learners are empowered to be active agents in inhibiting negative behaviors.

M. Yanko · J. Taylor · P. Gouzouasis (*) Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_35

277

278

M. Yanko et al.

Keywords

Autoethnography · Bullying · Empathy · Happiness · Prosocial behavior · Early childhood · Music education · Socioemotional

Prelude The social world of kindergarten children significantly expands beyond their family as they interact with a classroom community of diverse learners. Children who develop social competence tend to have more positive interactions with classmates, and the more positive interactions they have enhances their social competence by maintaining and facilitating social contact, social skills, and socialization experiences (Fabes et al., 2006). Conversely, children who possess low social competence are at risk for negative peer interactions, disapproval, and rejection. These adverse interactions impede opportunities to gain social skills and positive socialization experiences (Ladd et al., 1999). Thus, as young learners embark on adventures in kindergarten that encompass many social and emotional challenges, it is important to cultivate empathy because the safety and well-being of children cannot be undervalued. As educators, it is our responsibility to create positive contexts that protect and support the development of healthy relationships and to minimize contexts that induce unfriendly interactions. Yet, as we strive to provide learning experiences that promote the capacity and competency for healthy relationships, there are times when negative and harmful interactions occur between children that can lead to bullying. In the present inquiry, we (the classroom teacher and music teacher at a school site) investigate how song composition and performance processes can be used as pedagogical approaches for young learners to become active agents for social change. Over a two month period, we seek to foster an engagement with music as a medium of developing meaning making and understanding, as music has the potential to break through barriers and provide alternative, humanistic perspectives. We aim to illustrate the potentials of group songwriting and performing as a preventative intervention for bullying and unkind behaviors in the context of early childhood, and the extent to which participation in those types of music activities supports the development of empathy, happiness, and positive social behaviors. Bullying is a worldwide phenomenon and is embodied in many forms (e.g., taunts, exclusion, physical violence, threats, humiliation, and both face-to-face and cyber harassment; Hymel & Swearer, 2015, pp. 295–296). Both victims and bullies are at risk of developing lifelong socioemotional and adjustment problems, including moral disengagement (Nansel et al., 2001; Schwartz et al., 2001; Hymel & Bonanno, 2014). In contrast, Noddings (2003) believes that happy individuals are rarely violent or intentionally cruel and that educators should commit “to building a world in which it is both possible and desirable for children to be good – a world in which children are happy” (p. 2). Since kindergarten plays a significant role as an agent of socialization for young learners, it seems reasonable to speculate that

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

279

encouraging the development of empathy, happiness, and positive social behaviors in early childhood settings can engender great rewards through childhood into adolescence (see Cook et al., 2010, pp. 75–80). Empathy is an emotional capacity that emerges and develops during early childhood. There is a commonly held belief that empathy is positively linked to prosocial behavior, or behavior meant to benefit others such as helping others in need, sharing when toys or implements are not distributed equally, and comforting others when they are distressed (Findlay et al., 2006). In kindergarten, it is important that young learners are able to initiate and maintain relationships with their classmates. However, to do so, they need to develop the capacity to control and adjust their emotions and actions appropriately during the course of social interactions and show positive behaviors toward their peers. Taking that into account, Roberts and Strayer (1996) found that children who were more emotionally expressive on measures of intensity regarding positive and negative emotions were also more empathic. Similarly, Light et al. (2009) suggest that children who are able to flexibly shift between negative and positive emotional states based on context may have greater ease expressing forms of empathy. Moreover, Cross et al. (2012) suggest that music can help children acquire a habit of empathizing. With that in mind, we consider the context of music making and performing – i.e., in ensembles, co-composing, and co-explorations – as such learning experiences have the potential to incubate and nurture the development of empathy, which in turn supports prosocial behaviors. From those perspectives, it makes sense that teachers and caregivers encourage students to take into account their actual feelings and desires and respond as positively as their values and capacities allow for (Noddings, 2005) in confronting ethical and social issues such as bullying. Adults who serve as role models have a special responsibility, as they can show what it means to care by demonstrating caring (Noddings, 2010), for “We do not ‘care’ in order to model caring; we model care by caring” (p. 147). If our responsibility as educators is to ensure that all children are safe and free to learn in an environment where they experience equality, civility, and acceptance, then it is important to reflect on how to care and develop reciprocal relations of care within our classroom communities. There are various intervention programs in contemporary educational practices that address bullying. Within the context of early childhood, some programs focus on improving interpersonal relationships through enhancing children’s social and emotional competencies. The most common intervention is direct training, which involves discussions, modeling, group activities, coaching, and role playing (Fabes et al., 2006, p. 308). However, to us, that model reflects stilted, teacher-directed instruction that values neither the ideas nor the rights of the children as whole beings, which in turn can suppress learners from actively participating in the actual development of an intervention plan and navigating the course of that plan alongside the teacher. If we enable children to be protagonists of their education, then we also need to empower them to take charge of their behaviors. Thus, we turn to a “contextual approach” (p. 309) for guidance, as it enables our students to remain co-constructors of knowledge as we together seek to alter facets of the social environment.

280

M. Yanko et al.

Intervention practices that impede unkind behaviors and bullying in early childhood tend to focus on role-playing, discussion, and teacher directed instruction (Fabes et al., 2006). A verbal script is an effective intervention tool. As many young learners do not have the language skills to say “no,” “stop,” “I don’t like that,” and “go away,” practicing role-playing scripts allows them to apply the language and be ready with the appropriate response before a bullying incidence occurs (Lake, 2007, p. 204). Dramatic activities appear to be a popular means of bullying intervention (i.e., Belliveau, 2005; Mavroudis & Bournelli, 2016). The process of drama encourages participants to shift positions, which invites multiple perspectives and points of view to be represented. The dramatic role-playing process allows participants to experience vicariously that which the other (e.g., the bullied) may be living through (Belliveau, 2005, p. 139). There are a handful of applied research intervention programs that involve the visual arts (see Bickley-Green, 2007; Neglia, 2016; Davidson, 2017), dance (see Griffin, 2018; Kornblum, 2002; Koshland & Wittaker, 2004), and music (see Haner et al., 2010; Epelde-Larrañaga et al., 2020). That being said, outside of bullying intervention programs, there are studies that draw upon music as a means to support empathy and prosocial behavior (see Allsup & Shieh, 2012; Cross et al., 2012; Davies, 2011; Kirschener & Tomasello, 2010; Yanko & Yap, 2020). Kindergarten students engage with the arts on a daily basis to depict meaning making and understanding, as children relate well with the arts through their inquisitive mindsets and cognitive capacities. In such contexts of learning, the arts can be seen as social activities that unite children, promote self-awareness and selfesteem, develop a sense of well-being, and encourage mutual tolerance and cooperation. Also, for young learners the conventional means of written communication falls short of empowering self-expression. Although the present study focuses on unkind behaviors that can lead to bullying, and not active bullying per se, interventions like verbal scripts are well grounded in empirical research. We seek to draw from the intent behind the verbal script and apply it to our context of composing lyrics in the hope of empowering children to practice and perform in a similar manner through song. When students elucidate connections, values, and understandings through music, they participate in co-constructivist processes that evoke subjective vulnerabilities, feelings, and ideas (Yanko & Yap, 2020). However, young learners are able to use descriptive language in conversation that evokes aesthetic understandings to assess music compositions (Yanko & Gouzouasis, 2020, pp. 703–705, 708–710). In those types of experiences, educators can provide opportunities for children to engage with purposeful focus and listening to develop openness to others’ perspectives. David Elliott (2016) believes that if we want educational experiences rooted in music to meet the potentials of learners, it is imperative that we stretch our thoughts and practices far beyond traditional notions of musical values, music making, and music teaching (p. 21). We agree with Elliott and posit that we need to move outward into largely unexplored areas of right actions by engaging with music as a medium and language for meaning making, social change, and the proliferation of happiness in learning and teaching.

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

281

Three Autoethnographic Vignettes Contemporary ethnographic methods that bring storytelling into the inquiry process illustrate new ways of writing that reconceptualizes teaching and learning. In the current investigation, we use an autoethnographic approach (Ellis, 2004; Bochner & Ellis, 2016) that empowers us to create storied vignettes based on lived experiences, observations, notes, recollections, and artifacts. In doing so, we pursue essences and meanings of learning and teaching experiences because stories are what we use to make sense of the world (Bruner, 1987, p. 11). It is important to note that although the vignettes are written from the perspective of the teachers, the experience of unkind behaviors affected the entire class. From that perspective, because their lived experiences are equally important and relevant, these stories are composed in dialogue with the children. Thus, the children’s experiences inform and form the essence of the vignettes. Alongside that, within the context of early childhood music education, autoethnographic research has been used to illuminate the learning and teaching experiences of students and teachers (Gouzouasis & Ryu, 2015; Gouzouasis & Stamou, 2019; Gouzouasis & Yanko, 2018a, b; Yanko, 2019; Yanko & Yap, 2020). Autoethnographic studies are important because researchers have raised concerns with a void in research that examines the psychological and physical costs of being victims of unkind behaviors and bullying. Moreover, research lacks the stories and conceptualizations of mistreatment by those being targeted (Pheko, 2018). We use storytelling to articulate and explore the emotions and empathy of the children and teacher-researchers during this study. Also, an advantage of autoethnographic research is that instead of hiding or assuming that subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, autoethnography values, acknowledges, and accommodates emotionality and subjectivity (Ellis et al., 2011). In consideration, the emotionality of this form of research writing is perhaps the most sensible, best-suited way to capture children’s descriptions of emotion, empathy, prosocial behavior and thoughts, feelings, and images evoked by bullying. Therefore, this framework empowers the children, and us, to reflect on our creative music making capacities to confront the social injustice and maladaptive behaviors in this particular learning environment. The following three autoethnographic vignettes depict the journey of Ms. Taylor’s kindergarten class as they arrange, practice, and perform a song about kindness. The song is a response to unkind behavior that is occurring in their classroom. These stories weave together to illustrate understandings of positive social behaviors, with the goal of making a change in their school community. Moreover, they illuminate how engagement in music as an intervention approach can encourage the development of empathy in young learners.

Vignette One: Negotiating Differences in Songwriting One morning during community circle, some of the kindergarten children bring to light a concern with unkind behaviors that have been emerging in the classroom and on the playground. As a response, Ms. Taylor provides a provocation of hiding rocks

282

M. Yanko et al.

around the school with painted messages of kindness on them. The children take to her idea, but they also want to create a song about kindness with their music teacher, Mr. Yanko. Later that day, as the children settle into the music room, Mr. Yanko comments, “Ms. Taylor tells me that you want to write a song about mean kids?” Cameron raises his hand and answers, “Yeah, I want to make a song that tells kids to stop being mean.” “Well, it is important to say ‘leave me alone’ and ‘stop,’ but if you really want to people to be nice, the song needs to have lots of positive and encouraging words. What are some of words about kindness?” Hands dart up into the air around the room and Mr. Yanko points to Shelly. “Please and thank you,” she replies. “Read a book with somebody,” adds Janine. Cameron states, “Sharing.” Mr. Yanko writes their suggestions on the board. After, he notices Adam waiting patiently with his hand up in the air and nods toward him to respond. “Do you want to play with me?” “That’s a good suggestion. Including others is a nice idea.” “What about hug?” Ashley says while hugging Shelly. As Mr. Yanko jots down more ideas, Kyle shouts out, “Be. . .!” “Kyle, hold on. I am still writing Ashley and Adam’s ideas on the board. I know you’re eager to share your ideas, but show me how you let others know that you are waiting patiently to be picked.” He ponders the idea for a moment and then slowly raises a hand. “Yes, Kyle. Thank you for silently showing me you’re ready. What is your idea?” “I forgot,” he replies with a sad look on his face. “Oh, oh, be kind!” After the students share their suggestions, Mr. Yanko helps the class brainstorm a song to use as a template. Many Disney and sports songs are suggested, but the class decides on the song “We Will Rock You” by Queen because they like the stomping and clapping. Ms. Taylor begins to arrange the song with the class by reflecting on the brainstormed ideas. “Let’s start with the verse. Buddy you’re a. . .what is buddy?” “A friend,” exclaims Janine. “So we can sing, ‘Buddy you’re a friend that. . .Hmmm, what type of friend is Buddy?’” “One that shares,” states Ashley. “Mr. Yanko sings, ‘Buddy you’re a friend that shares. . .’” “With me,” Shelly finishes, pointing her thumbs to her chest. “Perfect. The next part is ‘playing in the street,’ but we need to change it.” “Let’s say he plays all day because that’s so much fun,” says Cameron. “No. I don’t like that. He can’t play all day. He needs to learn too,” interposes Janine. “Janine, how would you feel if someone says they don’t like your idea. Is there a more kind way of adding your idea to Cameron’s?” Ms. Taylor asked.

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

283

“Sorry, Cameron,” Janine mumbles with a pouty face. “Janine, earlier you said read a book with somebody. Buddy could read a book to learn after he plays.” “Playing all day, read a book with me. I like that,” chants Janine. “And it adds your idea into Cameron’s,” Mr. Yanko comments. We move along in the song. “The chorus is the part that repeats itself. We can’t sing we will, we will, rock you. That isn’t a kind message. What can we sing instead?” “Kissing and love!” Exclaims Emma as she places her hands on her heart. “No, gross,” Cameron and Shawn respond in unison as they giggle. Ms. Taylor comments, “Well, do you love your family and friends?” Both boys pause, look at one another, and smile. After, Adam comments, “Sharing.” “Caring,” adds Kyle. “We haven’t used ‘kindness’ yet,” speaks Ashley. Ms. Taylor combines their ideas together and Mr. Yanko sings it aloud, “Sharing, caring, kindness rocks, kindness rocks.” “The word rock works well in the chorus because you placed your kindness rocks around the school, and sharing, caring, and kindness are words that rock!” Ms. Taylor explains. We finish the song and add actions. We practice it a few times before the students head back to Ms. Taylor’s classroom.

Vignette Two: Developing an Ensemble of Empathy The following week, the students rehearse their song with Mr. Yanko, but they struggle with feeling the beat. Frustration is clearly evident on their faces and body language. “Mr. Yanko it’s not working, Ashley’s too fast, Adam is too slow. . .and. . .and. . .I don’t know who to follow,” pouts Kyle. “If we count the beats out loud that will help us stay together. It will also help us know when to start the song so we don’t get lost,” Mr. Yanko replies. The children get into their starting poses with their arms crossed. When the music starts, Mr. Yanko counts aloud, which helps them keep a steady beat and perform synchronously. After a few moments, he takes a step back so they can continue to perform on their own. He notices that a few of the children have really committed to the song, as displayed by their over-the-top actions and loud singing. They appear to be keen and proud to spread their message of kindness. Even Karen, one of the quieter students in class, is participating. As the students sing the refrain, they crescendo and some begin to shout the lyrics. Mr. Yanko pauses the backing track. The students are perplexed by his action. “I had to stop the music because some of you were not using your beautiful singing voices. Is the song about one person being kind or everyone?” “It’s about everyone,” comments Cameron.

284

M. Yanko et al.

“If it’s about everyone we need to show that everyone is singing together as a group, or what we call in music, singing as an ensemble. When one person shouts, it takes away from the togetherness of performing as an ensemble. Remember, you need to be able to hear your friends and yourself. If you can’t hear your friends around you then you’re probably too loud. Singing softer will help.” Mr. Yanko resumes the song soundtrack. “Caring, sharing, kindness. . .” sings the class. This time they seem more together and cognizant of those around them. When they finish Mr. Yanko inquires, “How did it feel to sing that part of the song?” Carmela responds, “It was much better. I tried to listen for my best friend, Ashley.” Shelly adds, “When I couldn’t hear Karen beside me, I sang like a whispering mouse so I could hear her.” “It’s great that you were able to hear your friends and yourself while singing. It isn’t easy to focus on the words and actions. Also, having to listen and blend with your friends on top of that is a lot to accomplish all at once.” Mr. Yanko notices a frustrated look on Janine’s face. “What’s the matter?” “Cameron, Adam, and Shelly weren’t going like this,” Janine states, as she sways her arms in a circle. “They were doing it wrong.” Cameron begins to break down and cry. He sits on the carpet with his back to the class. “Janine, I understand that this song is important to you and you want it to be perfect. But as I mentioned singing as an ensemble involves a lot of practice. We just started the song a week ago and are still working on it. Many songs take a lot of time to learn. Of course there are going to be mistakes. Even I forgot some of the words and actions at the beginning.” Janine walks over the Cameron and rubs his back, “Sorry Cam.” He sobs, “It’s okay.” She grabs his hand and leads him back to join his friends. Over the next few weeks, the children practice their song and work on the timing, their actions, and blending as an ensemble. Mr. Yanko and Ms. Taylor notice that they are working cohesively as a team. Interestingly, the quality of the ensemble work is also affecting their behaviors in other learning experiences outside of their song.

Vignette Three: Sharing Our Song of Kindness The day of the school assembly, Ms. Taylor introduces the song and explains the class’s project about kindness rocks. As the music starts, she counts them in and steps aside so the audience can focus on the children. She looks at the audience and is startled because students have joined in and are mimicking the singing and actions. Her attention returns to her students. “Buddy, you’re a friend that shares with me.” “Playing all day, read a book with me.”

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

285

“A smile on your face, a big embrace. . .” “Hiding our rocks all over the place. . .” Ms. Taylor takes note of the smiles, welcoming body language, and enthusiasm in her students. She walks over to joins them in singing the chorus. It causes a chain reaction in the audience, and many children and staff perform the chorus with the kindergartners. When their song is finished, they receive a loud ovation. That afternoon, Ms. Taylor debriefs with her class. “How did it feel to perform your song in front of the school?” “Good,” states Carmela. “So fun,” adds Shelly. Cameron comments, “I was a bit sacred. There were so many kids watching. I didn’t sing at first, but when I saw my friends sing and dance, I wanted to sing with them, so I joined in.” “Did you notice something that the audience was doing during your performance?” Shelly responds, “Yeah, they were singing and dancing with us too.” “Remember when we started to write the song with Mr. Yanko and talked about using kind words and not mean words? Do you think your message would have been the same had we used words like ‘don’t hit, I don’t like that, stop, leave me alone?’” Cameron replies, “I think it would not be the same. It’s hard to smile and sing about that stuff. When we sing about sharing and kindness I think about happy times with my friends, and singing about mean kids doesn’t make me feel happy.” “Yeah, I don’t think the other kids would have ‘singed’ with us. Our song was catchy. I can still hear our song in my head,” Ashley adds. “I remember all of those smiles from the kids and their cheering,” Adam adds. After the discussion the children get ready to go home. As they clean up and pack their bags, no one is arguing, and everyone is singing, “Sharing, caring, kindness. . .”

Discussion and Findings The autoethnographic vignettes illuminate how the prevention of negative behaviors, that may lead to bullying, can support a safe learning environment that nurtures the development of friendship, care, well-being, and happiness. Eudaimonia (εύδαιμoνία) is concerned with happiness, success, and fulfillment, with a life that is “enjoyable and worthwhile all through” (Ackrill, 2010, p. 36). “Happiness” is the translation of eudaimonía (correctly pronounced as evtheymonía) in more common Greek dialect. Stewart (1892, p. 98) reasonably interprets that sofia (i.e., spiritual wisdom) is a factor that constitutes eudaimonía, as does ύγίεια (eegía, i.e., health). Stewart goes so far as to explain that sofía produces eudaimonia on a formal level, as the act of a virtuous individual who strides to attain eudaimonia (see pp. 98–99). Songs (i.e., composing and performing song lyrics and music) are a primary vehicle of spiritual expression). As an aim of creating a safe, healthy learning environment,

286

M. Yanko et al.

happiness should be a central role of education. As educators, we support students to reflect upon, understand, and nurture the possibilities of happiness (Noddings, 2003, p. 2). We need to provide opportunities for our students to cultivate positive social behaviors and be willing to model them ourselves. We need to listen with openness to enable learners to embrace a curriculum of care and happiness, alongside us, and become coactive agents of change. Through healthy emotional experiences, happiness is something that we need to strive for, foster, and promote in teaching and learning. Carla Rinaldi (2012) believes, “Listening is emotion. It is generated by emotions; it is influenced by the emotions of others; and it stimulates emotions” (p. 235). We share Rinaldi’s belief in developing a pedagogy of listening (Gouzouasis & Ryu, 2015) and posit that it is necessary to develop a quality of listening that is sensitive to the emotions and patterns that bring us together for the common good of growing and promoting the health and well-being of all learners and teachers. During the song composition and arrangement process, we had to be cognizant of how to guide and support the students to negotiate and weave diverse feelings and ideas together in song. Our intent was to provoke the students to begin to acknowledge, navigate, comprehend, and welcome the differences of others. It was through that process that we came to an understanding of the depth, breadth, and complexity of happiness and its crucial role in education (Noddings, 2003). Facilitating a caring relationship that promotes positive social behavior requires open dialogue that enables the search for enlightenment, responsible choice, perspective, and a means to solve problems through mutual and appropriate signs of reciprocity (Witherell & Noddings, 1991). Alongside that, prior to kindergarten most of the students’ knowledge and skill development occurred at home within a small circle of people, and upon entering kindergarten that small circle grew exponentially. Adapting to a new social environment is complex and not easy. It necessitates patience and can vary in duration. In a previous study of Grade 1 students, we witnessed children negotiate their subjectivities, but even at that age it was challenging for many because they are still beginning to develop appropriate social behaviors (Yanko & Yap, 2020). Moreover, the quality of life within a school community must yield some happiness, and students must be encouraged to put what they have learned into practice (Noddings, 2003, p. 5). During the song creation process, the young learners were challenged to see ideas from the perspectives of others, which involved the development and use of appropriate language to communicate feedback and support. Some students reacted to one another with negative language, but it was important to respond to that by providing encouraging words and phrases that they could model and utilize to negotiate their differences. Throughout the learning process, and with an awareness of framing it as a storied inquiry, we sought to encourage the use of positive language and not be caught up in the adverse language associated with unkind behavior. To us, this was significant, as our students were practicing their song daily, and we did not want them mulling over negative actions. Instead of focusing on “what not to do,” we sought to support a growth mindset in our students that fostered positivity and happiness. Thus, in promoting healthy thoughts and social behavior through a positive songwriting and performance experience, the children not only

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

287

demonstrated a complex understanding of happiness, but also partook in making the classroom a genuinely positive, happy place (Noddings, 2003, pp. 1–5). We acknowledge that there is value in the term “anti-bullying” and the language associated with it and that it is essential children come to know that being a bully is not acceptable. Yet, in the eyes, minds, and hearts of children, bullying can be perceived as many things. Monks et al. (2003) found that younger students emphasized physical aggression when defining bullying, whereas older students focused on relational aggression. Also, in a study by Smith and Levan (1995), 6- and 7-year-old participants seemed to have an overinclusive definition that included fighting and other aggressive behaviors that were not necessarily repeated. In light of its misuse and diverse interpretations, some researchers recommend not using the word “bullying” in research, as it is confusing and has lost specificity with the documented behaviors by youth and children (Toppo, 2013). Therefore, we sought to encourage the students to engage with productive language through music to make meaning, mend differences, and further develop positive social behaviors. Certainly, bullying can exist in the context of kindergarten, but it is not as prevalent as the unkind behaviors in the current study that may possibly foreshadow more serious problems. The knowledge that young learners develop through songwriting enables them to navigate their social and nonsocial worlds with increasing skill. To determine the breadth of that knowledge, we need to study how children comprehend concepts. In concepts, we refer to the mental representations that correspond to categories and individuals, which are often called the building blocks of thought (Gelman, 2006). As discussed previously, the concept of bullying evokes diverse interpretations. Although the kindergarten students had very little in the way of detailed, concrete knowledge about bullying, most understood it as doing or saying something mean. That being said, they acknowledged that bullying as a construct exists, and they were open to reasoning about it. Despite initially beginning with limited knowledge, their evolution was evident during the arrangement of the song, as the students embraced the topic quite accurately. We believe this is in part due to the children having a solid understanding of binary opposites, like good and bad, or right and wrong (see Yanko & Gouzouasis, 2020, p. 710; Egan, 1993, p. 121). Thus, the vignettes illuminate how young learners do not depend on concrete, perceptually apparent properties, as well as how music can become a catalyst for meaning making of concepts that are opaque, unfamiliar, and challenging. The arts can be a valuable medium for children to express encouraging attitudes. Richard Hickman (2005) postulates, “The arts can be seen as an effective conduit through which imagination can flow. There appears to be a link between one’s capacity for empathy and the ability to think creatively; empathy is made possible by imagination” (p. 105). The students’ brainstorming, arranging of the song, and creating actions and body percussion to accompany their singing depict how they turned to their creative capacities to develop a performance about positive acts of kindness. That engagement allowed for personal, social, and aesthetic possibilities, as by imagining, they were able to look, listen, and think about concepts concerning kindness as if they were otherwise. During the process of making their song, the children sought to

288

M. Yanko et al.

navigate their subjective differences and developed empathy while working together on a common goal, as one voice against negative social behaviors. The use of song as a medium for their message allowed us to expand beyond the confines of traditional bullying interventions and opened a door to new possibilities. Songwriting is a transformational process that enables humans to process and communicate personal experiences, and it afforded these young learners the opportunity to express feelings, share and connect themselves with others in the ensemble and audience, and communicate a positive message (Beech, 2015). With regard to our framework and conventional bullying interventions, we reflected on the ideas behind the verbal script and how composing a script could be adapted to our experience with song. There are numerous songs with positive messages that we could have used for the children perform, but we wanted to engage them in the process of group songwriting. It provided an opportunity for the entire class to participate in empathy development. In addition, similar to how one would practice the lines of a script for a presentation, we encouraged the children to rehearse their song daily and to memorize it for their performance, which in turn ingrained encouraging words into their everyday vocabulary. In a social setting, music has the potential to enable a joint sense of shared action that can result in an uplifting feeling, whereby differences and subjectivities dissolve into wordless sounds and grooves. It can also offer a sense of oneness for the members of an ensemble and audience. This was observed during the rehearsals and performance, as the children embraced the intricacies involved in being part of an ensemble to develop a sense of togetherness. The harmonization of their voices can be perceived as effective means of promoting interpersonal synchronicity and shared intentionality. In singing with the same sense of steady beat and pitches, they became physiologically entrained, which enhanced their attentional and motoric coordination to support one another as a cohesive ensemble (Cross, 2007). Such synchronization can also play an important role in developing empathy, as it has the potential to support the singers’ ability to shift from one’s own sense of rhythm, intonation, articulation, and dynamics to listen, feel, and empathize with other ensemble members’ emotional states (Cross et al., 2012). This synchronization effect was observed in the performance, as there was an upbeat and positive, contagious feeling among the children. This was not only evident as they sung and performed actions in unison, but also through their movements, facial expressions, and charisma that provoked Ms. Taylor and others to join in and embrace their positive message. The less obvious, inconspicuous outcome of our collective aspirations was a genuine expression of happiness in having created something for the greater good. At the onset of the study, the children brought to light a concern with unkind behaviors in their classroom and wanted to do something about it. We had to consider how to best support their call for change, as reading stories and discussing unkind behavior does not in and of itself move children to emulate positive behaviors. Jean Anyon (2005) reminds us, “It is doubtful that social movements would develop at all without the central participation of the young” (p. 140). Thus, we reflected on the

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

289

success of social movements that rely on the contributions of young people to empower us to guide our students to show the rest of the school that the youngest learners can help and lead in making a difference. Music has the ability to evoke powerful emotional responses in listeners. When the audience becomes a community different from parents and teachers, and the performance is conceived as a response to that community, the work of performing and making music takes on a larger purpose and action (Allsup & Shieh, 2012). The intent of the children’s song was to articulate to the school a message about kindness, and had this endeavor taken an alternative path, where the children composed the song and performed it for their parents, or us alone, it would have been a different experience altogether. Raising awareness is often seen as the first step in changing behavior (Belliveau, 2005, p. 162), and part of the success of the experience involved focusing on preparing a song of kindness for those outside of their classroom community. The preparation for that goal and the experience of sharing the song with others evoked the students to develop prosocial behaviors and become role models for those outside of their classroom. From the perspective of the audience, listening to music can allow them to experience emotions that are not their own. Stephen Davies (2011) believes that a listener’s response to emotion in music is a mirroring response brought about by emotional contagion (p. 144). Over two centuries ago, C. P. E. Bach (1949) encouraged us to consider music as a vehicle for the expression of emotions: “Music must languish, it must startle, it must be gay, it must move boldly from one sentiment to another. . .the performer must. . .translate accurately and faithfully its expressive nuances to an audience whose heart must be stirred” (p. 16). The driving rock beat of the music accompanied by the students’ intent to spread happiness and positive behavior was emotionally received by the school community, as was illustrated by the enthusiastic level of full audience participation observed in eager head nods to the steady beat, keen clapping, and joyful singing. As an audience, we are fully present when we understand what is there to be noticed in listening to a piece of music, and we allow our feelings to inform and illuminate what is there to be realized. Thus, the audience’s act of listening involved them in making meaning out of the song, which alludes to listening as a way of reflecting on oneself, and welcoming differences to recognize the value of others’ interpretations and perspectives.

Postlude This chapter brings light to the everyday struggles young learners face when managing feelings and emotions in group learning experiences with peers. We illuminate how kindergarten students are aware of the need to regulate their emotions in order to abide by social and cultural conventions. They picked up on negative behaviors that were developing inside the classroom and on the playground and brought them to the attention of their teacher. Their efforts to illustrate the comprehension of kind and unkind behaviors through a song shows how music

290

M. Yanko et al.

can develop positive social behaviors and help learners become morally engaged (Hymel & Bonanno, 2014). We also elucidate how embracing empathy can be integral to personal well-being and social relationships during this time in childhood. Our inquiry demonstrates how young learners can take responsibility for unjust social behavior and that the solution does not have to be a teacher-directed, prescriptive intervention practice. They sought to provide a tangible solution to the negative behavior and language and became deeply involved as innovators, creators, and implementers of the intervention method. Doing so empowered them to take a stance against the social injustice that was also transpiring on the playground at recess and lunch and to make a statement about that through song at their school assembly. We elaborate that there is much value in music as a medium of personal and group expression, as well as a means to support prosocial behavior and the development of empathy in young learners. Whether music is made alone or with friends, young learners use music to help maintain emotional and social well-being, promote happiness through the celebration of culture and community in ways that involve entertaining or understanding themselves, and make sense of the world around them. The basic functions of musical interactions provide excellent conditions for the emergence of positive behaviors and empathic creativity. Collaborative songwriting and ensemble participation support students in processes of negotiating differences. Music embodies the attitudes and emotions of others, which can provide us with a basis for engaging both reflectively and reflexively with music, promoting intra- and interpersonal synchronicity and shared intentionality with those whom we are making music. Ultimately, active participation in music making nurtures possibilities that align our emotional state with those of our collaborators and can catalyze a sense of empathic community. Although our inquiry only examined one specific means of music making, there are endless ways students can engage with music to express and represent empathy and positive social behaviors. “The transformative energy of art corresponds to, and possibly is, the energy of healing” (McNiff, 1989, p. 42), and music has the power to heal, transform, and inspire. Whole-heartedly participating in collaborative music making is “a way of knowing what we actually believe” (Allen, 1995, p. 3), and as evidenced in the present inquiry, has the potential to develop prosocial behaviors and beliefs. The song became internalized in the children for weeks on end. They would randomly sing it in explorations, on the playground, or on the way to music class, illustrating how a song for change can become ingrained in the minds and hearts of young learners to advance them as models of prosocial behavior. Through deep listening to ourselves, and others, we are empowered to increase our intuition and self-awareness (Feriante, 2016) and develop the knowledge that we can create positive change through music making. It is our hope to encourage educators, researchers, policy makers, and organizations to rethink the value of music in intervention programs, to create opportunities where various forms of music making and engagement support students to become active agents of social change and develop positive social behaviors.

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

291

References Ackrill, J. L. (2010). Aristotle on eudaimonia. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics (O. Höffe, Ed., D. Fernbach, Trans.). Koninklijke Brill NV. Allen, P. (1995). Art is a way of knowing. Shambhala Press. Allsup, R. E., & Shieh, E. (2012). Social justice and music education: The call for a public pedagogy. Music Educators Journal, 98(4), 47–51. Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement. Routledge. Bach, C. P. E. (1949). Essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments (W. J. Mitchell, Trans. & Ed.). W.W. Norton. Beech, H. F. (2015). Songwriting and transformation: The subjective experience of sharing self through song. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 34(1–2), 187–201. https://doi. org/10.24972/ijts.2015.34.1-2.187 Belliveau, G. (2005). An arts-based approach to teach social justice: Drama as a way to address bullying in schools. International Journal of Arts Education, 3, 136–165. Bickley-Green, C. (2007). Visual arts education: Teaching a peaceful response to bullying. Art Education: Big, 60(2), 6–12. Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling stories. Routledge. Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 11–32. Cook, C. R., Williams, K. R., Guerra, N. G., Kim, T. E., & Sadek, S. (2010). Predictors of bullying and victimization in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic investigation. School Psychology Quarterly, 25(2), 65–83. Cross, I. (2007). Music and cognitive evolution. In R. I. M. Dunbar & L. Barrett (Eds.), Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 649–667). Oxford University Press. Cross, I., Laurence, F., & Rabinowitch, T. (2012). Empathy and creativity in musical group practices: Towards a concept of empathic creativity. In G. MacPherson & G. Welch (Eds.), Oxford handbook of music education (pp. 337–533). Oxford University Press. Davidson, J. (2017). Bullying in the early grades: Giving visual form to voice. Educator’s Voice, 10, 138–147. Davies, S. (2011). Infectious music: Music-listener emotional contagion. In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy. Philosophical and psychological perspectives (pp. 134–148). Oxford University Press. Egan, K. (1993). Narrative and learning: A voyage of implications. Linguistics and Education, 5(2), 119–126. Elliott, D. J. (2016). Artistic citizenship, personhood, and music education. In L. C. DeLorenzo (Ed.), Giving voice to democracy in music education: Diversity and social justice (pp. 13–35). Routledge. Ellis, C. (2004). Autoethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Alta Mira Press. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research, 12(1), 273–290. Epelde-Larrañaga, A., Oñederra Ramírez, J. A., & Estrada-Vidal, L. I. (2020). Music as a resource against bullying and cyberbullying: Intervention in two centers in Spain. Sustainability, 12(5), 2057, 1–13. https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v12y2020i5p2057-d329622.html Fabes, R. A., Gaertner, B. M., & Popp, T. K. (2006). Getting along with others: Social competence in early childhood. In K. McCartney & D. Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of early childhood development (pp. 297–316). Blackwell. Feriante, A. (2016, November). The power of music to heal, transform and inspire [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼31iuh9pfFwg Findlay, L. C., Girardi, A., & Coplan, R. J. (2006). Links between empathy, social behavior and social understanding in early childhood. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21, 347–359.

292

M. Yanko et al.

Gelman, S. A. (2006). Early conceptual development. In K. McCartney & D. Phillips (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of early childhood development (pp. 149–166). Blackwell. Gouzouasis, P., & Ryu, J. Y. (2015). A pedagogical tale from the piano studio: Autoethnography in early childhood music education research. Music Education Research, 17(4), 397–420. Gouzouasis, P., & Stamou, L. (2019). Learning stories: Assessing the experiences of early students in early music through autoethnography. In L. Stamou (Ed.), Dialectic and pioneering in music education. Editions of the Hellenic Union for Music Education. Gouzouasis, P., & Yanko, M. (2018a). Reggio’s arpeggio: Becoming pedagogical through autoethnography. In W. Parnell & J. M. Iorio (Eds.), Disrupting early childhood education research: Imagining possibilities (pp. 56–70). Routledge. Gouzouasis, P., & Yanko, M. (2018b). Learning stories and Reggio Emilia-inspired: Formative methods of assessment for the elementary school music classroom. In P. P. Trifonas & S. Jagger (Eds.), Handbook of cultural studies and education (pp. 486–502). Routledge. Griffin, K. M. (2018). Enhancing an existing school based bullying prevention program using dance/movement therapy [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Drexel University]. Haner, D., Pepler, D., Cummings, J., & Rubin-Vaughan, A. (2010). The role of arts-based curricula in bullying prevention: Elijah’s Kite—A Children’s opera. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 25(1), 55–69. Hickman, R. (2005). Why we make art and why it is taught. Intellect Books. Hymel, S., & Bonanno, R. (2014). Moral disengagement processes in bullying. Theory Into Practice, 53, 278–285. Hymel, S., & Swearer, S. M. (2015). Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction. American Psychologist, 70(4), 300–310. Kirschener, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-yearold children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 354–364. Kornblum, R. (2002). Disarming the playground: Violence prevention through movement & pro-social skills. Wood & Barnes Publishing. Koshland, L., & Wittaker, J. B. (2004). PEACE through dance/movement: Evaluating a violence prevention program. American Journal of Dance Therapy, 26(2), 69–90. Ladd, G. W., Birch, S. H., & Buhs, E. S. (1999). Children’s social and scholastic lives in kindergarten: Related spheres of influence? Child Development, 70, 1373–1400. Lake, V. (2007). Confronting issues of bullying; Implications for early childhood education. In O. N. Saracho & B. Spodek (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on socialization and social development in early childhood education (pp. 193–207). IAP. Light, S. N., Coan, J. A., Zahn-Waxler, C., Frye, C., Goldsmith, H. H., & Davidson, R. J. (2009). Empathy is associated with dynamic change in prefrontal brain electrical activity during positive emotion in children. Child Development, 80, 1210–1231. Mavroudis, N., & Bournelli, P. (2016). The role of drama in education in counteracting bullying in schools. Cogent Education, 3(1), 1233843. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2016.1233843 McNiff, S. (1989). Depth psychology of art. Charles C Thomas Publisher, Ltd. Monks, C., Smith, P., & Swettenham, J. (2003). Aggressors, victims, and defenders in preschool: Peer, self-, and teacher reports. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 49, 453–469. Nansel, T. R., Overpeck, M., Pilla, R. S., Ruan, W. J., Simons-Morton, B., & Scheidt, P. (2001). Bullying behaviors among US youth: Prevalence and association with psychosocial adjustment. Journal of the American Medical Association, 285, 2094–2100. Neglia, E. (2016). Bullying prevention and intervention in education through the visual arts: An instrumental case study [Doctoral dissertation, Rowan University]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Noddings, N. (2003). Happiness in education. Cambridge University Press. Noddings, N. (2005). Caring in education. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education. www.infed. org/biblio/noddings_caring_in_education.htm Noddings, N. (2010). Moral education and caring. Theory and Research in Education, 8(2), 145–151.

Music Making, Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Happiness in. . .

293

Pheko, M. M. (2018). Autoethnography and cognitive adaptation: Two powerful buffers against the negative consequences of workplace bullying and academic mobbing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 13(1), 1–12. Rinaldi, C. (2012). The pedagogy of listening: The listening perspective from Reggio Emilia. In C. P. Edwards, L. Gandini & G. E. Forman (Eds.), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia experience in transformation (3rd ed.) (pp. 233–246). Praeger. Roberts, W., & Strayer, J. (1996). Empathy, emotional expressiveness and prosocial behavior. Child Development, 67, 449–470. Schwartz, D., Proctor, L. J., & Chien, D. H. (2001). The aggressive victim of bullying: Emotional and behavioral dysregulation as a pathway to victimization by peers. In J. Juvonen & S. Graham (Eds.), Peer harassment in school (pp. 147–174). Guilford Press. Smith, P. K., & Levan, S. (1995). Perceptions and experience of bullying in younger pupils. The British Journal of Educational, 65, 489–500. Stewart, J. A. (1892). Notes on the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle. Clarendon Press. Reprinted by Bibliolife. Toppo, G. (2013, May 1). Researchers: Stop using the word “bullying” in school. USA Today. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/30/bullying-american-edu cational-research-association-schools/2124991/ Witherell, C., & Noddings, N. (1991). Stories lives tell: Narrative and dialogue in education. Teachers College Press. Yanko, M. (2019). Learners’ identity through soundscape composition: Extending the pedagogies of Loris Malaguzzi with music pedagogy. LEARNing Landscapes, 12(1), 271–284. Yanko, M., & Gouzouasis, P. (2020). Storied assessment of the aesthetic experiences of young learners. In P. P. Trifonas (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research in cultural studies and education (pp. 695–712). Springer International Publishing. Yanko, M., & Yap, P. (2020). A symbiotic link between music, movement, and social emotional learning: Mindful learning in early learners. LEARNing Landscapes, 13(1), 249–264.

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and Heart in Workshop Spaces William W. McInerney

and Hilary Cremin

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peace Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Responding to the Crises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Four Paths Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arts at the Nexus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetry and Peace Education in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-Pollinating Poetry and Peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saying the Unsayable: Poetry as Second-Order Reflexivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetic Peace Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

296 298 300 301 303 304 305 307 310 312 312

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss the use of poetry in peace education curricula and explore what we call a poetic peace education approach. This epistemological, pedagogical, and curricular reorientation focuses on using poetry to dynamically engage learners’ minds, bodies, and hearts in peace education contexts. Our emphasis on multiple ways of knowing and being in the classroom is in response to a series of interlocking crises facing peace education and recent critiques that peace education has become less effective and less peaceful due to its overly psychologized and hyper-cognitive approaches. In response, we seek to explore and expand on new paths forward for peace education that have been advocated by scholars at the Cambridge Peace and Education Research Group. These works approach the crises and critiques facing the field as an opportunity for creative

W. W. McInerney (*) · H. Cremin University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_5

295

296

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

transformation of peace education praxis and collectively point toward the power of the arts in learning about peace. Using these texts as a foundation, this chapter specifically explores how poetry can support peace education in becoming a more affective, responsive, and peaceful learning process. To do so, the chapter also draws on examples from our US and UK peace education classrooms where poetry was infused with critical explorations of masculine gender norms and higher education epistemologies. In its discussion and conclusions, this chapter braids together peace education literature, original poetic texts, personal teaching reflections, and our collaborative analysis to illuminate the challenges facing peace education curricula and the potent potential of poetic peace education alternatives moving forward. Keywords

Peace education · Peace and conflict studies · Poetry · Arts education · Higher education · Critical masculinities

Introduction I come to you Not As colonizer With dreams To sell. I do Not bring Suffocating, Homogenizing Packaged Peace. I come to you As visitor-host, My-your space Gives warmth, Hospitality, Connection Nourishment. I come to you as migrant. Pilgrim, Witness, Weaver, Dreamer. Educator for peace.

(This poem by Hilary Cremin is the final section of a larger poem about peace educators. See Cremin (2018) for a larger excerpt of the poem.)

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

297

In this chapter, we seek to explore the value and possibilities of integrating poetry into peace education curricula. We frame this work by engaging with a recent body of academic literature that explores challenges facing peace education in the twentyfirst century. We then draw on examples from our own teaching to discuss the potential of what we call poetic peace education. In our experiences, using poetry as learning texts, creative writing activities, and embodied performances can complement and strengthen traditional peace education classrooms by dynamically engaging learners’ minds, bodies, and hearts. Our emphasis on multiple ways of knowing and being in the classroom is in response to recent critiques that peace education has become less effective and less peaceful due to its overly psychologized and hyper-cognitive approaches (Gur-Ze’ev, 2001; Zembylas & Bekerman, 2013). Peace education is less effective in part because it is less affective. In particular, we draw on one of this chapter’s author’s previous works (Cremin, 2016) to outline the challenges we see for peace education moving forward. We use this text as a touchstone to explore how Cremin and her colleagues in the Cambridge Peace and Education Research Group (CPERG) have responded to what they see as a crisis in peace education. We explore four responses to the crises (Cremin, 2016; Cremin & Archer, 2018; Cremin & Bevington, 2017; Cremin & Kester, 2020) that each discuss new ways forward for peace education. These works are part of an ongoing scholarly dialogue within CPERG that we find generative for our own thinking, research, and practice. In this chapter we highlight how these works share common themes, collectively point to the importance of the arts in peace education, and form the foundation of our approach to poetic peace education. Thus, this chapter has two main goals: (1) to review this recent body of academic literature exploring challenges and opportunities facing peace education in the twenty-first century and (2) to discuss how this work leads us to the integration of poetry into peace curricula through what we call poetic peace education. As this chapter will make clear, important challenges to peace education must be addressed with critical and creative praxis. We seek to unpack the proposals from Cremin and CPERG and to expand on these works by outlining a new path forward that supports peace education in becoming a more affective, responsive, and peaceful learning process through engagement with poetry in the curriculum. However, our poetic peace education is not a template to be copy and pasted, nor is it a declaration of what is best for peace education in all contexts. Rather, as the poem that starts this chapter notes, this work is a constellation of connections, a nourishing concept that we have found beneficial in our own experiences and resonant with the literature. We share our ideas of poetic peace education with you the reader not as bloodless angel experts (Cremin & Kester, 2020; MacLure, 2013), but as witnesses to its potential, weavers of its possibilities, and dreamers of a more peaceful world. In the following sections, we will (1) define peace education and explore crises facing the field, (2) highlight four potential paths forward for peace education that draw on the arts, (3) share two examples of poetry in peace education from our own practice, and (4) discuss the possibilities and potential value of poetic peace education praxis and curricula.

298

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

Peace Education We begin by defining terms. What is peace education? In 1999, Susan Fountain defined peace education for the United National International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF): Peace education in UNICEF refers to the process of promoting the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values needed to bring about behaviour changes that will enable children, youth and adults to prevent conflict and violence, both overt and structural; to resolve conflict peacefully; and to create the conditions conducive to peace, whether at an intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, national or international level. (Fountain, 1999: 1)

This is a useful and comprehensive definition that applies beyond its original context of post-war settings. Another definition from Betty Reardon also includes indirect violence and therefore offers greater facility for considering the strong relationship between peace education and education for social justice. Reardon (2000: 401) defines peace education as, “planned and guided learning that attempts to comprehend and reduce the multiple forms of violence (physical, structural, institutional and cultural) used as instruments for the advancement or maintenance of cultural, social or religious beliefs and practices or of political, economic or ideological institutions or practices.” Finally, Ian Harris’ definition is grounded in processes that are involved when communities (within and beyond formal education) work together toward peace: Peace education is the process of teaching people about the threats of violence and strategies for peace. Peace educators strive to provide insights into how to transform a culture of violence into a peaceful culture. They have to build consensus about what peace strategies can bring maximum benefit to the group. (Harris, 2009: 11)

We find this process-oriented definition of peace education useful, as is the social justice-oriented definition above. We find ourselves, however, left with more questions than answers, as is often the case when complex social and cultural practices are constrained by tight definitions. For example, is global peace really a matter of changing young people’s behaviors through a focus on their individual knowledge, skills, and attitudes? Can peace be achieved through the cumulative effects of peace education on individual learners? Is it sufficient to comprehend multiple forms of violence in order to reduce them? How can a culture of peace be established within dominant cultures of violence, and how can the consensus of any group be garnered so as to take account of diversity and unequal power relations? These questions are further compounded by considerations about the changing nature of war. While peace education grew from determined efforts after the Second World War to ensure that global violence on such a scale could never arise again, the twenty-first century has seen different kinds of war emerging. These are just as likely to occur within states as between them, and wars now can be waged on abstract notions such as terrorism. Because of this, a new form of peace education is needed. The old form of peace education is no longer fit for purpose.

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

299

In writing about this in 2016, Cremin highlighted three crises (or opportunities?) that apply to peace education: legitimacy, representation, and praxis. The first is an existential crisis – whose peace are we talking about? As Dietrich (2012) points out, there are many peaces. To impose an urban, liberal, Western view of democratic peace on the entire planet is anything but peaceful. The late-twentieth-century fantasy promoted by organizations such as the UN (Boutros-Gali, 1992) that world peace would eventually result from all nations becoming democratic and engaging in global trade has been revealed as just that – critically unaware wishful thinking. As the grand narratives of modernity have given way to more nuanced and contested ways of thinking about big topics such as peace and justice, postmodern thinking has challenged the legitimacy of notions of peace that deny structural and cultural violence permeating liberal democracies. The struggles of the oppressed are increasingly seen as having greater theoretical and practical legitimacy than the books and articles of peace scholars situated in the academy (Santos, 2018). The unsettling of taken-for-granted notions of peace of course unsettles the peace education that flows from it. Peace education needs to be grounded in a different ontology (how the world is) and epistemology (the ways of knowing we use to address this question). What do we believe about how the world is? What forms of knowing and learning can facilitate an engagement with this question? It is certainly not the case that an epistemology based on science, reason, and rationality alone can take us there. If it were simply a case of convincing learners that intolerance and direct violence are a bad thing, then the world would by now be much less intolerant and violent than it is. More than half a century of well-intended peace education curricula has not achieved this. The first crisis then is of legitimacy and epistemology. The second crisis is linked with the first and is around the idea of representation. Whose voices count in the academy and beyond, and who gets to represent whom? More will follow later in this chapter about this second crisis in one of our examples. For now, we focus on the third crisis of praxis. It is untenable (and clearly always was) to assume that learners of any kind can be taught about peace in militarized educational settings that mimic the prison and the factory. It is not a question of what we tell young people to believe, it is more a question of how we go about teaching them what we value. As any parent will attest, children learn more from what we do than from what we say. Any peace education lesson that is based on rote learning, worksheets, or an impoverished exam-driven pedagogy is not teaching about peace. As Cremin and Archer (2018) point out, peace pedagogy needs to engage with diverse ideas of peace, including those that emanate from wisdom traditions, and it needs to enable learners to integrate heart, soul, body and mind. Learners need to experience curiosity, real-world interest, connection, and freedom to engage in peace learning in ways of their choosing. This goes back to Paulo Freire (1973: 10) and his view of educators as radicals who are committed to a path that is “predominantly critical, loving, humble, and communicative.” Those who follow this route do not “deny another [person’s] right to choose.” They do, however, “have the duty, imposed by love itself, to react against the violence of those who try to silence [them] – or those who, in the name of freedom, kill [their] freedom and their own.” We take this as the basis of our own work.

300

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

Responding to the Crises Cremin (2016) argues that within the interconnected crisis of legitimacy, representation, and praxis also comes opportunity. She writes (A clarification note: In this instance “she” refers to Hilary Cremin writing in 2016. Hilary Cremin is also one of the coauthors of this chapter. In this chapter, we use “she” or “Cremin” when referring to Hilary Cremin’s past works being cited. We will use “we” when discussing new examples, analysis, and contributions from McInerney and Cremin originating in this chapter), “Are peace education and peace education research in the twenty-first century facing danger, or are they facing a turning point, a time for decision and an opportunity for change?” (2016: 2). In this second section of the chapter, we outline some of the paths forward for peace education that have been identified by Cremin and CPERG. We do this by reviewing four specific contributions we find informative (Cremin, 2016; Cremin & Archer, 2018; Cremin & Bevington, 2017; Cremin & Kester, 2020). These works discuss peace education pedagogies and ideas developed in response to the critiques highlighted above. We find these four particular responses helpful in our work here because they build upon common themes, have curricular implications relevant to our focus here, and point toward the value of arts in peace education. These articles and chapters form the foundation upon which we will further develop our poetic peace education praxis. We view this chapter as an extension of a scholarly dialogue stemming from Cremin and CPERG’s work critiquing and reimagining peace education over the past decade. However, CPERG is not the only group responding to crises within peace education. Many scholars have identified similar concerns and have explored ways to respond. Two of the most salient strands that have emerged are the renewal of critical peace education (Bajaj, 2008, 2015; Bajaj & Brantmeier, 2011) and the rise of decolonial and postcolonial peace education (Hajir & Kester, 2020; Williams & Bermeo, 2020; Zembylas, 2018). These new stems within the garden of the peace education field offer new theory and practice to further support researchers, educators, and students alike. Our work draws inspiration from all of the above while also seeking to extend these conversations by homing in specifically on the need to address the overly cognitive focus of peace education that still permeates much of the field. This specific critique turns our focus to the work of Cremin and CPERG. By selecting these four works from Cremin and CPERG to review in this chapter, we do not mean to imply that such responses are the only or most important to the field as a whole. Rather, we argue that the identified works are part of a particular scholarly dialogue (see Kester et al., 2019 for a more comprehensive review) that both authors of this chapter have taken part in and find particular resonances within our own personal and professional peace work. Thus, it is important to locate this chapter as both a part of this handbook on education curricula and as another entry in an ongoing multi-year, multi-author, trans-publication dialogue within CPERG on how best to transform peace education into a more peaceful, effective, and affective praxis.

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

301

Four Paths Forward In various works, Cremin and CPERG colleagues have called for aesthetic peace education (Cremin, 2016), an iPEACE model (Cremin & Bevington, 2017), transrational pedagogies (Cremin & Archer, 2018), and a pedagogy of vulnerability (Cremin & Kester, 2020) to address the challenges facing peace education. We will begin by exploring these ideas briefly before turning toward their engagement with arts and poetry. Aesthetic peace education (Cremin, 2016) draws on Page’s (2008) aesthetic ethics to advocate for peace education “to be implemented as a process of educating the body to be in dialogue with the senses” (Cremin, 2016: 13) through praxis that integrates the body, heart, mind, and spirit in the classroom. Cremin uses a constellation of concepts including Gur-Ze’ev’s (2011) co-poesies and improvisation, Buber’s (2004) I-Thou relations, and Dietrich’s (2012) transrational peace to envision peace education that is collaborative, creative, centered in deep relationality, and engaging with epistemological shifts away from Othering, mechanistic learning, and hyperrational modernity. The transrational onto-epistemological foundation is key here – holding space for multiple ways of knowing and being to be represented and valued. Such a peace education would value rational-based praxis but also engage the transrational, moving beyond and through traditional approaches with “a horizontal aesthetic of journeying; of being both in and beyond” (Cremin, 2016: 14). Aesthetic peace education can thus be analytical and affective, cognitive and sensory, and dialogic and embodied. Cremin concludes this beyond binaries epistemological and pedagogical path forward for peace education could be achieved in part by integrating the arts into traditional peace education curricula. The arts could help students and teachers tap into the often-under-illuminated aesthetic dimensions of learning for peace and promote the necessity of alternative ways of knowing, feeling, sensing, and being in our pursuit of peace. Cremin and Bevington (2017) extend this conversation by outlining a more specific and detailed iPEACE model to support practitioners in fostering cultures of peace in schools. The authors emphasize a turn toward the postmodern in peace education rooted in complexity, intersectionality, and the cultivation of heterotopias (Foucault, 1986). Heterotopias in this context can be understood as transgressive peace education spaces that might open up the opportunities for moments of transformation within the violent structures and cultures of schools (Zembylas & Ferreira, 2009). The iPEACE model integrates these ideas with previous concepts from Cremin (2016) and advocates for elicitive or person-centered (Lederach, 2005) pedagogies and approaches to teaching peace and responding to violence. While grounded in a postmodern turn and transrational ontoepistemological stance, this text also makes clear the importance of the rational within the transrational. The authors provide an array of practical tips for educators in schools built around Galtung’s (1969) peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding model. Cremin and Bevington note that one key way to achieve deeper peacebuilding and heterotopias within schools is through engagement with creativity and the moral

302

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

imagination (Lederach, 2005). They argue, “creativity enables adults and young people in school to locate themselves within complex frameworks and to find voice that might otherwise be hard to articulate” (Cremin & Bevington, 2017: 69). Thus, the authors conclude that incorporating the arts might help to “bring people together and enable the sharing of perspectives and emotions surrounding conflict and peace” (2017: 71). Again, the emphasis here is on engaging the arts to explore the value and complexity of affect and voice in transforming conflicts within schools and on the everyday practices of building tangible skills for peace through the curriculum. This work is not just about emoting (or at its worst, navel gazing); it is also about using affect-integrated peace education to support students in becoming more expert in skill and technique. The iPEACE model demonstrates the science and the art of peace education and the necessity of balancing skill and technique of peace work with the heart and soul of peace itself (Lederach, 2005). Cremin and Archer (2018) take this conversation one step further by more fully conceptualizing the possibilities of transrational pedagogies in responding to the peace education crisis. In discussing the role of the educator, they argue a fundamental shift is needed from the solely “rational, modern manager of knowledge and resources in neoliberal times, to the transrational postmodern pedagogue in times to come” (Cremin and Archer 2018: 1). The authors illuminate the need for this shift by unpacking Dietrich’s (2012) five families of peace – modern, moral, postmodern, energetic, and transrational – and exploring their complex resonances and dissonances in the peace education context. The authors echo and expand upon Cremin (2016) and Cremin and Bevington (2017) in calling for a transrational path forward and help further conceptualize how such an approach integrates multiple ways of knowing and being. Cremin and Archer contend transrational approaches focus on the transformation of learning and teaching itself – the process of how peace education works, more than the prescription of what peace education does. Transrational, process-based pedagogies are thus situated and relational, personal and political, concerned about both teachers’ and students’ well-being, and capable of occupying an infinite range of learning spaces throughout the life-course (Cremin & Archer, 2018: 9). In their discussion of what this might look like in practice, Cremin and Archer note the importance of art-work in the curriculum and the use of art-spaces as places with heterotopic potential for peace education. Finally, Cremin and Kester (2020) highlight the importance of a pedagogy of vulnerability in addressing the challenges of peace education. They discuss efforts to “denationalize, decolonize, and de-epistemologize peace-building education through effort toward transnational, transrational, and transformational education” (Cremin and Kester, 2020: 28). Central to this effort for them is the need for vulnerability in peace education. Practicing what they preach, Cremin and Kester engage in this exploration through dialogue noting, “vulnerability is an act of dialogue in dialogue and through dialogue” (Cremin and Kester, 2020: 25). Drawing on their own situated lived experiences and an “assemblage of literatures” (Cremin and Kester, 2020: 32), they provide guidance and techniques to support vulnerability in the classroom and argue that a vulnerable educator:

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . . (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

303

enters into the teachable moment with all of her/himself, body, mind, heart and spirit; is open to the other, noticing them, beholding them, delighting in their presence; allows others to affect him/her, is challenged, confirmed, inspired by others; takes note of the learning that does occur and plans for development and growth; and practices critical yet compassionate thinking. (Cremin & Kester, 2020: 37)

Cremin and Kester contend this practice of vulnerability in the peace education classroom brings forward heterotopic potentials, “creating spaces where normative power relations are disrupted, and where an ethos of care, openness, peace, and creativity is evoked” (p. 32). There are several themes echoing across these four contributions. Reading Cremin and Kester (2020) in conversation with Cremin (2016), Cremin and Bevington (2017), and Cremin and Archer (2018), we see the vulnerable educator as a situated and holistic pedagogue weaving the aesthetic and affective dimensions of peace – to the centrality of relationships, dialogue, and elicitive approaches to learning – to the transrational epistemological shift in peace education that integrates the analytic and the affective through the mind, body, heart, and soul. This ripe mixture of ideas points toward a multiplicity of critical and creative as well as cognitive and embodied ways to engage and reimagine peace education. Unpacking the full breadth and depth of all the ideas raised here is beyond the scope of this chapter. We instead turn our focus to one particular area, a nexus point, at which these four works and our own experiences teaching peace education all find resonance – the arts.

Arts at the Nexus When it comes to the particulars of curricular suggestions Cremin and colleagues collectively point to the arts. Art is referenced and exemplified across the four texts as an ideal peace education learning practice and as a possible answer to the challenges put forward in Cremin’s (2016) three crises facing the field. These authors argue that art in the peace education classroom works as a bridge connecting transrational epistemologies and pedagogies (Cremin, 2016; Cremin & Archer, 2018), opening space for peace learning activities that engage the mind, heart, and body. Further, arts in the curriculum act as a catalyst for bringing people together in relational, elicitive, and dialogic spaces for transformation (Cremin & Archer, 2018; Cremin & Bevington, 2017). And lastly, arts practices have a simple but powerful capacity to help individuals communicate, situate, express, uncover, and transform themselves (Cremin & Bevington, 2017). Cremin and Bevington (2017) go on to share several practical examples and curricular activities that show how artistic elements can be essential in the peace education classroom. This collection of ideas complements and builds upon the broader literature on arts and peacebuilding (see Boal, 2008; Lederach, 2005; Marshall, 2014; Shank & Schirch, 2008). We find it important and revealing that Cremin and colleagues used art, and particularly poetry, within the texts of the four works discussed here. For example,

304

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

Cremin and Kester (2020) use multiple poems from Cremin to help situate the author, to express complex points of reflection from the peace education classroom, and to model their own practice through their own vulnerability. Cremin and Bevington (2017) and Cremin and Archer (2018) also both draw on poetic text from Lederach (2005) to illustrate their points on the iPEACE model and transrational pedagogies, respectively. The authors call for elicitive and morally imaginative (Lederach, 2005) poetry in peace education while simultaneously using poetry itself to illuminate their analysis of peace education. In short, as Archer notes, the authors are walking their talk. In summary, a review of Cremin and colleagues’ work here has illuminated a range of responses to the challenges facing peace education. We see these responses as an ongoing dialogue within CPERG about how to respond to the crises in peace education with new, creative, and critical ways forward. These responses seek to address the epistemological, pedagogical, and curricular dimensions of peace education and argue for transrational, aesthetic, relational, vulnerable, and artistic peace education. The arts are specifically identified as a practical curricular addition to help facilitate the epistemological and pedagogical reorientations and transformations needed. The arts support this new path for peace education in many ways – notably by helping students and educators engage in multiple ways of knowing and being that are so vital to understanding the multiplicity of peace(s), violence(s), and transformation(s) possible in the peace education classroom. As Wood (2015) notes, “The transformative power of the arts largely lies in the fact that art operates – often simultaneously – in the physical, emotional, and existential realms.” It is this type of holistic learning that is needed for twenty-first century peace education.

Poetry and Peace Education in Practice While the arts have been noted across Cremin and colleagues works, and specifically named and used in Cremin’s other writings on this subject as well (see Cremin, 2018), there has not yet been a deeper exploration of what an arts-based peace education curriculum might entail within this specific scholarly dialogue. Drawing inspiration from the use of poetry within the texts of the works examined here, our own backgrounds as poets and peace educators, and examples of peace education and poetry from the literature (Morrison, 2009), the second half of this chapter seeks to extend this conversation by exploring the possibilities of poetic peace education in response to the present challenges and possibilities outlined above. In this third section, we introduce examples from our own practices of poetry and peace education. In doing so, we seek to practice pedagogical reflexivity and vulnerability in sharing from our teaching and in walking our talk in the process of writing this chapter. First, McInerney discusses how and why he fused peace and poetry lessons in a peace education program designed to creatively engage men in violence prevention and gender equality. Second, Cremin shares one of her own poems as she explores issues of representation in peace education and some of the ways poetry and peace education can be used in higher education contexts.

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

305

Cross-Pollinating Poetry and Peace I (William McInerney) have taught peace education and poetry education programs for the past 10 years. Over time, my education work between these two realms became more connected through a process I describe as cross-pollination. My poetry work and peace work combined to create something new. This approach resonates with the arts-infused peace pedagogies outlined by Cremin and CPERG above and provides an example of poetic peace education that this chapter seeks to further illuminate, question, and conceptualize. As a young educator, I compartmentalized my poetry and peace work. Sometimes I was hired to teach peace, helping students learn about the complexities of violence and conflict transformation. Other times I was hired to teach poetry, supporting students’ creative expression through metaphor, sensory images, and the art of storytelling. As my educational practice expanded and my engagement with more peace (Bajaj, 2008), critical (Freire, 1970), and feminist (hooks, 1994) pedagogies took root, I came to realize the potential of combining my own poetry and peace praxis in the classroom. Perhaps poetry and creative expression could be a spark to help make peace education more engaging, or a catalyst to open space for dialogue on complex issues of violence? Likewise, maybe issues of peace and justice could provide inspiration, purpose, and fuel for poetry writing and sharing? These questions shifted my identity from a poetry educator and a peace educator toward something more akin to a poet/peacebuilder/educator. At first, I used a simple additive approach – including a poem in a peace lesson or incorporating a peace-related prompt in a poetry class. This was helpful, but superficial curricular amendments failed to grasp the full potential at the nexus of poetry and peace work. A deeper dive required a consideration of the dynamic praxis links among peace and poetry curricula, pedagogy, and onto-epistemologies. Through experimentation, I started braiding my two practices and thinking more intentionally – working collaboratively with peace and poetry pedagogues to design programs, creating curricula where poetic and peace activities synergize, and making sure my poetic praxis was peaceful and peace praxis was poetic. The metaphor of cross-pollination is generative here. Pollination refers to the transfer of pollen to catalyze a process of fertilization and seed production in plants. Pollination often occurs with the assistance of an external agent – either an animal like a bee or a larger natural force like the wind. Cross-pollination is a particular type of pollination when one plant pollinates another, including those of the same species but of a different variety. Here, the genetic material of the two plants combines with the support of an agent of change to produce something new – often a stronger plant with elements of both manifesting in the creation. Cross-pollination as a metaphor echoes the transdisciplinary origins of peace studies (Galtung, 1969, 2008, 2010), as well as the more recent emergence of transrational (Cremin & Archer, 2018) and diffractive (Diffraction approaches in peace education draw inspiration from Karan Barad’s (2007) posthumanist and feminist new materialist work on the concept. See Barad (2014) for a deeper exploration and a diffraction of diffraction itself) (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; Kester et al., 2019) conceptualizations of peace education. In all

306

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

these examples, the emphasis is not on simply combining two approaches, but rather entering a process of thinking and practicing multiple onto-epistemologies, theories, or disciplines with and through one another. Cross-pollination in education is thus the integrative process of two approaches fusing into a single emergent praxis. As an example of cross-pollinating poetry and peace education, in 2014 I was hired to design and teach a 12-week peace education program at a large US public university. The institution wanted to develop a program that focused on addressing men’s violence on campus and promoting healthier and more peaceful masculinities. (Much has been written about the growing field of gender transformative work with men or engaging men in the prevention of violence against women in recent years. See Flood (2018) for a comprehensive review of the field.) I was hired because they wanted an engaging violence prevention program that incorporated creative approaches. Using a cross-pollination approach, the first step was to ensure the team developing and teaching the program included both poetry and peace experts. Neither was tokenized or added on after the fact – the process was co-creative and responsive to the poetry and peace educators’ differing positionalities and epistemological stances. Poetic and peace praxes were placed in conversation with one-another to design the goals and structure of the program and to fashion a theory of change that could inform, inspire, and equip the male participants by engaging them both effectively and affectively. Thus, the sessions sought to balance critical consciousness raising and technical skill-building with affective explorations of key issues, personal reflexive writing, and fruitful creative expression. Each week in the program featured a synergetic combination of peace education lessons with poetic infusions, examples, and activities. The peace and poetry work extended from one another, sprouting from the intertwined critical and creative roots at the foundation of the work. For example, a lesson on intersectionality started with a facilitator poem exploring his own identity and relationship with masculinity. This poetic role-modeling and vulnerability worked to destabilize hierarchical studentteacher relations and to broaden the epistemic and representational horizons to include poetic and personal narratives. These starter poems set the tone for poetic and peace sharing and learning together. This poem also served as a spark and a transition to a more traditional peace lesson on intersectionality and men’s violence. The lesson brought forward socialhistorical context, relevant statistics, and an analytical model for intersectionality, violence, and masculinity. The students then had both a creative and critical lens on the topic. This learning in-turn was used as fuel for a poetry writing exercise where the participants applied these ideas to their own complex identities and relationships with masculinities. Bringing the lesson full circle, the men were then invited to share their poems, just as the facilitator had done. This creative action of sharing and bringing the men’s personal lives and voices into the room was then the seed for a cumulative closing group discussion informed by the facilitator poem, the peace lesson, and participant poems and perspectives. Leading scholar on men and masculinities, Michael Flood has noted the importance of addressing men’s affective entanglements with sexism, privilege, power, and violence in education programs like this one (2018). The exchange of poetry and

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

307

peace in the session described above created a space to engage the men’s cognitive, emotional, and embodied relationships with masculinity and violence. This session created a conduit between the critical and creative, the abstract discussion of peace and violence, and the concrete lived experiences and feelings of the people in the room. The power of the program came not in any individual technical peace lesson on men’s violence or poetic activity exploring lived experiences, but rather in the liminal site of action and creation between the two, where peace and poetry combined to raise critical consciousness, shift epistemological horizons, cultivate a deeper learning community, and create potentially transformative moments for the men. In this case of cross-pollination, there was no bee or wind unintentionally creating something new, the combination of poetry and peace here required intentional agents of change in the form of program designers, educators, and the participants themselves in a process of co-creative planning, teaching, sharing, and learning. In reflecting on this program many years ago and writing this chapter now, I continue to draw inspiration from Lederach’s (2005) conceptualization of the moral imagination and his emphasis on making space for creative acts within peace work. In doing so, he argues we cultivate the vital capacity to think beyond what was originally thought possible. Creativity and imagination, the artist giving birth to something new, propose to us avenues of inquiry and ideas about change that require us to think about how we know the world, how we are in the world, and most important, what in the world is possible. (Lederach, 2005: 37)

This peace and poetry program was ultimately effective and affective because it stretched what the men thought was possible – moving beyond rigid ideas of masculinity and toward more peaceful ones and moving beyond silence and apathy and toward an understanding of their own roles as gender justice allies. The feminist scholar bell hooks (2004) talks about this type of vital creative work as the blueprints for change for men away from patriarchal masculinities. As an educator, I have tried to stretch what is possible in the classroom by fusing poetry and peace together. In doing so, I have tried to make space for creative acts in the pedagogy, in the curriculum, and in the onto-epistemological foundations. These spaces must be meaningful, integrated throughout, and collaborative. Such an approach goes beyond an additive incorporation producing an altered linear outcome and toward a cross-pollination creation of something new that entangles the two.

Saying the Unsayable: Poetry as Second-Order Reflexivity Despite many years of working directly with young people, families, and teaching and support staff in schools, I (Hilary Cremin) find that much of my peace education work nowadays is done with graduate students within the context of Higher Education. This often involves a triple helix of me working with teachers and educators who in turn work with children. The complexities here are significant, and

308

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

necessitate a good deal of reflexivity and feed-back. They also require a strong preoccupation with process. As with Freire, it is the path that counts, not the final destination. Getting there in ways that are critical, loving, humble, and communicative matters more than any static curriculum. I find that working with adults is often like this. While lecturers often have a certain expertise, it is important to remember that the students in higher education learning spaces have significant and diverse life experiences which enrich and add value to their studies. They are partners in learning, not recipients of pure knowledge. On this basis, learning spaces need to be interactive, dynamic, and inclusive. It is here that poetry comes in. It has enabled me to get quickly to the heart of the matter in my teaching and to make space for the deep responses of students. This in turn enables students (hopefully) to put this into practice in their work with young people, who also have valuable perspectives and experiences to contribute to the learning process. Hence the triple helix, with me, students, and young people spiraling around each other with multiple opportunities for feed-back and growth. In this example, I will describe one of the occasions when I used poetry for higher education peace learning. Here we have another helix, this time a double helix – I am returning to the topic of representation as a crisis in peace education while demonstrating how poetry can be used as a means of addressing that crisis. In November 2018, I was asked to be on a panel by a group of doctoral students who were organizing a conference on ethical debates of representation in research in Cambridge. I was given 10 minutes alongside three other presenters. I decided to use my slot to read a poem (Cremin, 2019). The poem that I wrote for the occasion had been fermenting for a while. I had found myself to be increasingly frustrated with one side of my identity as an academic researcher. This side of me is a “bloodless angel,” disembodied and formal. It is the predominant identity that is adopted by academics, in my experience, and is the one that is developed and incentivized by the academic institutions that we inhabit: I am a bloodless angel. I float in airy efficacy I exist outside of history, outside of time. I have no place, I speak from nowhere in particular. I speak from everywhere. I have no thoughts I convey what is thought I have no feet, so I leave no footprint. I have no hands, so I do not act. I have no body Prick me, and I will not bleed.

This lack of body, the voice from nowhere, serves academics well. It enables us to represent others in ways of our choosing without being represented ourselves (how

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

309

can you represent a non-entity?). This god’s-eye view of the world is very powerful. The poem goes on to point out that academics rest on their canon, their validity, their reliability, and their rationale and that powerful people want to hear what they have to say. The subjects of research, however, are a different matter: The subjects of my research Are gendered, ethnic, gay, disabled, poor. They have bodies. Entangled in the messiness of time and space, Grounded in clay. Prick them, and they bleed.

It is the disparity between these two positions that was the main impetus for the poem. Research participants, unlike academics, are seen as strongly embodied, and it is in their very embodiment that they lose their power. They become instantiations of humanity. A particular person in a particular place at a particular time. They are represented in research by those who use the authoritative voice of the universalized academic, and it is this process, and the values and assumptions that underpin it, that undermine the emancipatory potential of the research before it has even begun. When I got up to read this poem at the conference in 2018, people were expecting me to make a 10-minute presentation as a member of a panel. I stood up and looked back at the audience before I spoke, taking in the room, noticing who was there, and savoring the silence that was starting to deepen. It is unusual not to have a PowerPoint presentation and people were already looking at me quizzically. Into the deepening silence, I read my poem. When I sat back down (with no commentary) a stunned silence continued for quite a while. I had a feeling that my poem had resonated with many members of the audience, evoking an emotional response. I felt really pleased that I had managed to get to the heart of the matter, and that – as so often with poetry – a few words had managed to communicate what otherwise would have stretched to many pages of academic discourse. The quality of the discussion for the rest of the day was enhanced by the fact that people had been deeply touched by the ideas that were presented. The final part of the poem introduces a new character. This character gives me hope. The bloodless angel says of her: She stands in the mud And the clay Of her positionality, Bizarrely proud Of her bricolage. Her participatory methodology. Her new story Her research journey. She speaks of postcoloniality Patriarchy, Elitism.

310

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

She renders me an actor In this world, Gendered, embodied, classed. She dares to colour me white.

It is this new kind of researcher that pushes me forward when it comes to thinking about myself as an academic. This new researcher is certainly a challenge to the bloodless angel, but she is also perfect for the kinds of positions, values, and philosophies that we have been presenting here. Born of poetry, she embodies the poetic ideal for the peace education researcher.

Poetic Peace Education This chapter has thus far outlined crises facing peace education, discussed some potential paths forward with a nexus point converging at the arts, and provided examples from practice – exploring an approach to cross-pollinated poetry and peace praxis with men and a poetic illumination of the complexities of representation and voice within peace education. Considering this work, the final section of this chapter will situate poetic peace education within the existing literature we have discussed and explore and question what a poetic peace education praxis might look like in curricula moving forward. The interlocking crises of legitimacy, representation, and praxis facing peace education require scholars and practitioners to reflect upon their epistemological stances, pedagogical approaches, and curricular designs. These crises reveal the shortcomings of epistemologically myopic and pedagogically templated hypercognitive curricula in studying peace in the classroom. While often well-intentioned, it is through such overly mechanized education that the peace in peace education gets lost and we begin to question more broadly how peaceful peace education might really be (Cremin, 2016; Kester & Cremin, 2017; Gur-Ze’ev, 2001, 2011). However, we are not saying there is no value in cognitive-focused learning and technical skillbuilding for peace. Instead, we contend the science of peace must be balanced with the art of peace (Lederach, 2005), the rational engaged from within the transrational (Dietrich, 2012), and the analytic in conversation with the emotional (Reardon & Snauwaert, 2015). This is what Cremin (2016), Cremin and Bevington (2017), Cremin and Archer (2018), and Cremin and Kester (2020) make so patently clear – the need to include and go beyond the mind through more holistic accounts of peace and education in peace education. Doing so requires thinking about how the minds, bodies, and hearts of students are interconnected and engaged through the epistemologies, pedagogies, and praxes of peace education programs. Such a holistic approach is needed for a program to be both effective and affective. Further, this work pushes us to see how peace education must be both inward-facing (individual and relational) and outward-facing (structural and cultural). One does not exist without the other, they are co-constitutive. Peace education curricula must then be a manifestation

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

311

of such complexity, grounded just as much in the process and how we understand and work for peace as the product of what we do to learn and act for peace. We believe the arts are a powerful way to achieve such education because they unlock the power of creativity in the classroom and help facilitate multiple ways of knowing and being in the classroom. We believe poetry in particular is potent praxis to put into action in peace education. The two examples shared in this chapter demonstrate how integration of poetry into peace curricula can produce outcomes greater than the summation of its constitutive components. By this we mean, there is something new that is created in the process of combining peace and poetry in the classroom. This creative act is responsive to and reflexive of the people and context in which it is cultivated and laced through the curricula, pedagogy, and onto-epistemology of the program. The use of the metaphors of cross-pollination and double and triple helices in our examples above allude to this generative capacity at the heart of poetic peace praxis. In writing about poetic inquiry, Leggo and colleagues (2011) discuss the transformative lingering liminal spaces between poetry and research. This fertile space also exists between poetry and peace within education. Cremin and Bevington (2017) speak of this space as a heterotopia for conflict transformation within school. In the first example we shared above, such a space was cultivated through the synergized balancing of peace and poetry activities with the young men that raised both their critical consciousness of men’s violences and deepened their affective personal engagement and understanding of the issues. It is at the intersection of the two where the group’s moral imagination (Lederach, 2005) opened to what was possible beyond dominant and rigid ideas of masculinity. In the second example, the space was created by the transgressive (hooks, 1994) use of poetry in the higher education peace context to break down the fourth wall of the ivory tower – revealing the charade of bloodless angel researcher objectivity. This space was created for the students to reflect analytically and affectively on their own positionalities while listening to the words of the poem and while wading in the pools of silence surrounding the poem. Writing about poetry as peace pedagogy, Mary Lee Morrison notes, It is not just in the hearing of the words, the reading or writing of the words, but in that space between the words and the “unwords”, between the language and the unlanguage, as we hear a poem, or write a poem or read a poem, it is in that space during which the reflective processes of moving inward and outward occur, as we both hear the words and “still the words”, that the transformative educational process begins. Here, also, is the heart of educating for peace. (Morrison, 2009: 97)

In both of our examples, the language and unlanguage of poetry fused and infused with peace resulting in a generative liminal space. This heterotopic liminal site was grounded in a transrational onto-epistemological orientation (Cremin & Archer, 2018), built upon a praxis of aesthetics (Cremin, 2016) and a pedagogy of vulnerability in sharing from the educators and the students (Cremin & Kester, 2020), and manifested through both technical and artistic knowledges and practices (Cremin & Bevington, 2017).

312

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

So what does this mean for poetic peace praxis in the curriculum moving forward? This chapter has shown how poetry can be integrated into the peace education curriculum in many ways – poems as learning texts and videos, poetry writing activities, and poetry sharing performances and group circles for participants and facilitators. Poetic learning texts, videos, readings, and performances can provide an engaging and potentially more culturally responsive way to teach peace lessons. The act of listening to, watching, or reading poems can raise students’ critical consciousness about core peace topics, spark group discussions, help democratize student-teacher relationships, and help show the affective dimensions of peace and violence. Poetic writing workshops can help students reflect on their own personal connections to the topics and apply lessons learned through their own critical and creative writing. We believe peace education curricula could benefit from all of the above. However, it is essential to note that such work cannot start or stop at the curricular level. To achieve the potent lingering liminal space or the heterotopic potential, a cross-pollination of poetry and peace needs to extend deeper and expand the epistemic and pedagogic horizons. The poetic peace work we are discussing here addresses epistemology, pedagogy, curriculum, and the constant churning of praxis cycles of theory, action, and reflection in the classroom. Poetic peace education is thus a journey not an endpoint; a process not a product.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to bring forward a series of guiding lights illuminating poetry and peace education work that we think might help inform peace education scholars and practitioners. Our word choice is intentional here. These are not prescriptions, as such would be contrary to much of what we have argued throughout this chapter. Rather, these are ideas that resonate with the literature, that have supported our own work, and that push us to continue to innovate and question what might be possible in the peace classroom. Returning to the poem we started this chapter with, we are hopeful about this work, but we are not here with dreams to sell. Rather, we come to offer a glimpse of our poetic peace praxis, to place them in conversation with transdisciplinary bodies of literature, to reflect upon how poetry might change how we understand peace education, and to imagine what poetic peace education was/is/could be.

References Bajaj, M. (2008). Critical peace education. In M. Bajaj (Ed.), Encyclopedia of peace education (pp. 135–146). Information Age Publishing. Bajaj, M. (2015). Pedagogies of resistance and critical peace education praxis. Journal of Peace Education, 12(2), 154–166. Bajaj, M., & Brantmeier, E. J. (2011). The politics, praxis, and possibilities of critical peace education. Journal of Peace Education, 8(3), 221–224.

Poetic Peace Education: A Curriculum Connecting the Mind, Body, and. . .

313

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. Boal, A. (2008). Theatre of the oppressed. Routledge. Boutros-Gali, B. (1992). An agenda for peace: Preventive diplomacy, peace-making and peacekeeping. Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement by the Summit Meeting of the UN, A/47/277-S/24111, 17 June 1992. Bozalek, V., & Zembylas, M. (2017). Diffraction or reflection? Sketching the contours of two methodologies in educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(2), 111–127. Buber, M. (2004). I and Thou. Continuum. Cremin, H. (2016). Peace education research in the twenty-first century: Three concepts facing crisis or opportunity? Journal of Peace Education, 13(1), 1–17. Cremin, H. (2018). An autoethnography of a peace educator: Deepening reflections on research, practice and the field. Emotion, Space, and Society, 28(2018), 1–8. Cremin, H. (2019). Bloodless angel. The politics of representation collective. https://medium.com/ the-politics-of-representation/bloodless-angel-27ef6d07d16b Cremin, H., & Archer, T. (2018). Transrational education: Exploring possibilities for learning about peace, harmony, justice and truth in the twenty first century. In Transrational resonances (pp. 287–302). Palgrave Macmillan. Cremin, H., & Bevington, T. (2017). Positive peace in schools: Tackling conflict and creating a culture of peace in the classroom. Taylor & Francis. Cremin, H., & Kester, K. (2020). Barefoot hope for peace vulnerability in peace education. In E. J. Brantmeier & M. K. McKenna (Eds.), Pedagogy of vulnerability. Information Age Publishing. Dietrich, W. (2012). Interpretations of peace in history and culture. Springer. Flood, M. (2018). Engaging boys and men in the prevention of violence against women. Palgrave McMillion. Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. Fountain, S. (1999). Peace education in UNICEF. UNICEF, Programme Division. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. Continuum. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. Galtung, J. (2008). Toward a conflictology: The quest for transdisciplinarity. In Handbook of conflict analysis and resolution (pp. 537–550). Routledge. Galtung, J. (2010). Peace studies and conflict resolution: The need for transdisciplinarity. Transcultural Psychiatry, 47(1), 20–32. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2001). Philosophy of peace education in a postmodern era. Educational Theory, 51(3), 315. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2011). Improvisation, violence and peace education. In I. Gur-Ze’ev (Ed.), The possibility/impossibility of a new critical language in education (pp. 69–84). Brill Sense. Hajir, B., & Kester, K. (2020). Toward a decolonial praxis in critical peace education: Postcolonial insights and pedagogic possibilities. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 39, 515–532. Harris, I. (2009). A select bibliography for peace education. Peace and Change, 34(4), 571–576. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Hooks, b. (2004). The will to change: men, masculinity, and love. Washington Square Press. Kester, K. & Cremin, H. (2017) Peace education and peace education research: Toward a concept of poststructural violence and second-order reflexivity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(14), 1415–1427. Kester, K., Archer, T., & Bryant, S. (2019). Diffraction, transrational perspectives, and peace education: New possibilities. Journal of Peace Education, 16(3), 274–295. Lederach, J. P. (2005). The moral imagination: The art and soul of building peace. Oxford University Press.

314

W. W. McInerney and H. Cremin

Leggo, C., Sinner, A. E., Irwin, R. L., Pantaleo, K., Gouzouasis, P., & Grauer, K. (2011). Lingering in liminal spaces: a/r/tography as living inquiry in a languagearts class. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(2), 239–256. MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in postqualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. Marshall, L. (2014). Art as peacebuilding. Art Education, 67(3), 37–43. Morrison, M. L. (2009). Poetry and peace: Explorations of language and “unlanguage” as transformative pedagogy. In Factis Pax, 3(1), 88–98. Page, J. (2008). Peace education: Exploring ethical and philosophical foundations. Information Age Publishing. Reardon, B. (2000). Peace education: A review and projection. In B. Moon, S. Brown, & B. Peretz (Eds.), International companion to education (pp. 397–425). Routledge. Reardon, B. A., & Snauwaert, D. T. (2015). Betty A. Reardon: A pioneer in education for peace and human rights. Springer International Publishing. Santos, B. D. S. (2018). The end of the cognitive empire: The coming of age of epistemologies of the south. Duke University Press. Shank, M., & Schirch, L. (2008). Strategic arts-based peacebuilding. Peace and Change, 33(2), 217–242. Williams, H. M. A., & Bermeo, M. J. (2020). Decolonial human rights and peace education: Recognizing and re-envisioning radical praxes. International Journal of Human Rights Education, 4(1), 14. Wood, K. (2015). The arts and peacebuilding: An emerging approach. United States Institute of Peace. Accessed online https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/Insights_Summer-2015-ArtsPeacebuilding.pdf Zembylas, M. (2018). Con-/divergences between postcolonial and critical peace education: Towards pedagogies of decolonization in peace education. Journal of Peace Education, 15(1), 1–23. Zembylas, M., & Bekerman, Z. (2013). Peace education in the present: Dismantling and reconstructing some fundamental theoretical premises. Journal of Peace Education, 10(2), 197–214. Zembylas, M., & Ferreira, A. (2009). Identity formation and affective spaces in conflict-ridden societies: Inventing heterotopic possibilities. Journal of Peace Education, 6(1), 1–18.

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a Curriculum of Existential Threat Heather E. McGregor

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overview of the “Teaching in the Anthropocene” Course . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ruitenberg’s Unlocking the World: An Exploration of Derrida’s Hospitality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choice 1: Welcoming Existential Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choice 2: Welcoming No Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion: The “Never Good Enough” Climate Change Educator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

316 317 320 322 324 328 331

Abstract

In an effort to define and act on my responsibility to prepare for climate crisis as an education professor, I taught a graduate course designed as a collaborative inquiry around a question: If we were to create a “School for the Anthropocene,” what philosophies, purposes, and structures of education would better serve youth in facing and preparing for the environmental challenges that are upon us? First, when inviting students to envision new forms of crisis-responsive schooling, I did not shy away from putting individual and collective mortality at the center of our discussions. Second, I insisted we should dispense with any and all schooling frameworks or constraints within which we usually work, for the sake of the exercise (e.g., jurisdictional curriculum mandates, subject areas, assessment norms, etc.). By perhaps hasty design, these moves opened the door to existential threat for my students. I narrate these choices and my view of the outcomes to provoke consideration of the uncomfortable responsibility of the teacher who is guiding their guest through facing climate crisis, who welcomes students to their own mortality as well as our collective mortality, and the kinds of responses that such teaching work may evoke. H. E. McGregor (*) Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_29

315

316

H. E. McGregor

Keywords

Climate change education · Anthropocene · Environmental education · Hospitality · Existential threat

Introduction Taking the climate emergency seriously provokes questions about the purpose of schooling and about the responsibilities of parents, teachers, leaders – the global adult population, generally – in preparing youth for a present and future that are wildly more unpredictable, even threatening (IPCC, 2018). Decades of alarm bells from scientists about global warming and the Great Acceleration of human impacts on the planet were accompanied by worldwide calls to use education as a tool to advance the social and economic changes needed to protect the environment (Carter & Simmons, 2010; UNEP, 2005). However, these calls have not yet resulted in fundamental shifts in school curriculum or structure, and climate change still lacks priority in public education around the world (UNESCO, 2021). Schools primarily serve to prepare youth for participation and competition in capitalist, extractivist, colonial, anthropocentric nation-states in a quest for economic growth (Orr, 2004; Donald, 2019). Youth responses to this hypocrisy have become increasingly difficult to ignore. In Europe, climate strikes from school and associated youth activism had an impact on the political landscape by contributing to the European Green Deal, even pushing for the deal to be more progressive in light of other challenges like climate justice and pandemic recovery (Marquardt, 2020). In Canada, youth organizations like Climate Education Reform British Columbia are lobbying provincial education authorities to make significant changes that orient schooling and school curricula to the climate emergency (CERBC, 2021). So far, in schools, few are acting like “our house is on fire” (Thunberg, 2019). In an effort to define and act on my own responsibility as an education professor, I taught a graduate course designed as a collaborative inquiry around a question: If we were to create a “School for the Anthropocene,” what philosophies, purposes, and structures of education would better serve youth in facing and preparing for the environmental challenges that are upon us”? (This term signifies the current geological epoch, in which humans have become the dominant force on the Earth and through interconnected actions are changing the planet on an unprecedented scale (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). Although the term is not without controversy – for example, not all humans are responsible for, nor accept, the ways that a sub-set of our species has treated the planet – I use it here to bring attention to the problems created by pervasive anthropcentrism). Put more bluntly, how do we make schools less of a waste of time, when we have no time to waste in preparing for, mitigating, and coping with climate emergency? This course sought to create a space in which participants, including me, could think through approaches that are responsive to the anticipated needs of youth and also profoundly different from the status quo.

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

317

By radically disrupting what teachers offer youth in their efforts at “unlocking the world” (Ruitenberg, 2015), when the world as we know it is becoming uninhabitable (Wallace-Wells, 2020), I found myself in quandaries of what Ruitenberg, drawing on Derrida, calls “hospitable” curriculum and pedagogy. First, when inviting students to envision new forms of crisis-responsive schooling, I did not shy away from putting individual and collective mortality at the center of our discussions. Second, I insisted we should dispense with any and all schooling frameworks or constraints within which we usually work, for the sake of the exercise (e.g., jurisdictional curriculum mandates, subject areas, assessment norms, etc.). By perhaps hasty design, these moves opened the door to existential threat (van Kessel, 2020) for my students – explicitly and implicitly. In this chapter I revisit my curricular and pedagogical choices, and my impressions of student responses, to consider the hospitality of climate change education at the graduate level – a curriculum that welcomes learners to the end of the world as we know it.

Overview of the “Teaching in the Anthropocene” Course During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, with death all over the news, I began to design a new graduate course I had proposed many months earlier entitled “Teaching in the Anthropocene.” This course preparation was aligned with a shift that year in all of my teaching and research as a new professor, toward environmental and climate change education. It grew, however, from a shift in attention and career focus that happened 5 years earlier during an Arctic trip and subsequent writing to make sense of the ecological grief with which I was left (McGregor, 2019). One influence, among many, was meeting scholar/author/activist Roy Scranton on that same Arctic trip. Scranton defends the role of the humanities in serving human needs as catastrophe comes upon us, intertwined with the notion of “learning to die” in the Anthropocene (Scranton, 2015a, b). He says, “We must suspend our attachment to the continual press of the present by keeping alive the past, cultivating the infogarden of the archive, reading, interpreting, sorting, nurturing, and, most important, reworking our stock of remembrance” (p. 108). With my training in history and historical consciousness, engaging with Scranton’s work opened a pathway of purpose for me, and any alternative pathway felt futile under the circumstances. As I designed the graduate course, my purpose was underwritten by disappointment, loss, and grief – but also, echoing Scranton, a view that we must bring ourselves to encounter these uncomfortable feelings if we are to live well in the time we have, even with extinction on the horizon. “Our future will depend on our ability to confront it not with panic, outrage, or denial, but with patience, reflection, and love” (Scranton, 2015a, p. 27). The course was thus intended to guide graduate students, most of whom are practicing educators, through a learning experience wherein they could imagine acting as if “our house is on fire” in their work. The questions driving the course, as listed in the syllabus, included the following: What is the Anthropocene and why

318

H. E. McGregor

aren’t we ready for it? In what ways is education part of the problem perpetuating climate change, and is it realistic to change schooling as we know it? What educational subjects, fields, theories, or pedagogies hold the most promise in leading toward different relationships with the more-than-human? What commitments, goals, frameworks, or metaphors in your role as an educator/researcher will make the most difference in coping with environmental crises? I selected readings that would offer a range of entry points articulating or extending an educational agenda in response to human-centered ontologies, the problems they have created for our planet, and the prospects for survival of other species as well as our own. I was curious about what paradigms, pedagogies, and corresponding visions of the future would inspire each and every person in the class to find their pathway of purpose, as Scranton helped with mine. I have reproduced the course reading list in Table 1. “Teaching in the Anthropocene” was delivered remotely and synchronously, a modality that still felt new and temporary at the time. There were seven students enrolled in the course, and we met for approximately 2.5 hours, once weekly. Subsequent to discussing the assigned readings in a seminar style, each week we took up questions related to a shared inquiry described below. Course assignments included journaling; an action plan (to be undertaken after the course) for advancing their environmental commitments in their research or professional practice; and creating and presenting a project that would serve “our” hypothetical school for the Anthropocene. The premise for the shared inquiry was outlined in the syllabus. It went as follows: Imagine this: A group of youth in Ontario take Greta Thunberg’s “school strike for climate” to its fullest expression and decide to drop out completely, until they are offered a school experience that actually prepares them for dealing with climate change. They understand that we’re living in the Anthropocene – a time when humans are creating changes to the planet on a geological scale, resulting in a host of interconnected “wicked” problems. So, a wealthy philanthropist offers these youth an endowment to create a “focus” school, a place where all learning is oriented to the unique needs of this generation, those who will be living in the aftermath of climate crisis. Our focus school needs curriculum, it needs teachers and a leadership team with specialized skill sets, it needs a vision statement and core values, it needs a place to thrive. What could teaching in and for the Anthropocene look like?

The purpose of this scenario was to approximate a service learning project, without actually having to conform to the conditions of any particular partner organization. In doing so, I was sacrificing the authenticity of serving an actual school or school system for the flexibility of making up our own while still hoping for the collaborative effort. I sought a space not only to dwell together on the limitations that inhibit radical educational goals but to envision the content and conditions of learning completely otherwise. I imagined that ideas about meaningful education could escape tired debates about tuition or dominant forms of student assessment. Ideologically, I wanted to escape the confines of schools as agents and venues for anthropocentrism and its constituent theories, instead, remembering and imagining

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

319

Table 1 “Teaching in the Anthropocene” Fall 2020, assigned readings 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Introductions Van Kessel, C. (2019). Speculations on a human existentialism: Educational (im)possibilities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼byUIFyYHd5A&feature¼youtu.be Defining the Anthropocene Malhi, Y. (2017). The concept of the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 42, 77–104. Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017). On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(4), 761–780. Riordan, R., & Caillier, S. (2019). Schools as equitable communities of inquiry. In J. W. Cook (Ed.), Sustainability, human well-being, and the future of education (pp. 121–159). Palgrave Macmillan. Problems & Possibilities in Responding to Climate Catastrophe Jamieson, D. (2014). Obstacles to action & Living with climate change. In Reason in a dark time (pp. 61–104, 178–200). Oxford University Press. Orr, D. (2004). Earth in mind: On education, environment and the human prospect. Island Press. Climate Change Education Lehtonen, A., Salonen, A. O., & Cantell, H. (2019). Climate change education: A new approach for a world of wicked problems. In J.W. Cook (Ed.), Sustainability, human wellbeing, and the future of education (pp. 339–374). Palgrave Macmillan. Monroe, M. C., Plate, R. R., Oxarart, A., Bowers, A., & Chaves, W. A. (2019). Identifying effective climate change education strategies: A systematic review of the research. Environmental Education Research, 25(6), 791–812. STEM Education Mychajliw, A. M., Kemp, M. E., & Hadly, E. A. (2015). Using the Anthropocene as a teaching, communication and community engagement opportunity. The Anthropocene Review, 2(3), 267–278. Gilbert, J. (2016). Transforming science education for the Anthropocene—Is it possible? Research in Science Education, 46(2), 187–201. Experiential Learning & Wild Pedagogies Jickling, B., Blenkinsop, S., Timmerman, N., & De Danann Sitka-Sage, M. (2018). On education & Six touchstones for wild pedagogies in practice. In Wild pedagogies: Touchstones for re-negotiating education and environment in the Anthropocene (pp. 63–76, 77–107). Springer. Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. Karpudewan, M., & Mohd Ali Khan, N. S. (2017). Experiential-based climate change education: Fostering students’ knowledge and motivation towards the environment. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 26(3), 207–222. Other Pedagogical Considerations Van Kessel, C. (2020). Teaching the climate crisis: Existential considerations. Journal of Curriculum Studies Research, 2(1), 129–145. The Worldwatch Institute. (2017). EarthEd (State of the World). Island Press. Indigenous & Decolonizing Perspectives Adams, M. (2019). Indigenizing the Anthropocene? Specifying and situating multi-species encounters. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 41(3/4), 282–297. Donald, D. (2019). Homo economicus and forgetful curriculum. In H. Tomlins-Jahnke, S. Styres, S. Lilley, & D. Zinga (Eds)., Indigenous education: New directions in theory and practice (pp. 103–125). University of Alberta Press. (continued)

320

H. E. McGregor

Table 1 (continued) 9

10

Ecofeminism & Posthumanism Lloro-Bidart, T. (2015). A political ecology of education in/for the Anthropocene. Environment and Society, 6(1), 128–148. Nxumalo, F. (2017). Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances. Children’s Geographies, 15(5), 558–569. Radical Hope or Learning to Die? Lear, J. (2006). Ethics at the horizon. Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation (pp. 55–100). Harvard University Press. Scranton, R. (2015). A new enlightenment & coming home. In Learning to die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the end of a civilization (pp. 89–117). City Lights Publishers.

other ways of being human (Donald, 2019). I hoped to allow students space for critical responses to their own inheritances (Ruitenberg, 2015). While we gathered to talk about education at the end of the world as we know it, I hoped that the students in the class would feel empowered to frame their own teaching experiences toward a renewed purpose. Those who write on the space between hope and hopelessness in environmental collapse remind us that a terminally ill person can find meaning, and even freedom, in the finitude of their time (Bringhurst & Zwicky, 2018; Kelsey, 2020; Orr, 2004). I wondered if we could find freedom in imagining an education for a finite future.

Ruitenberg’s Unlocking the World: An Exploration of Derrida’s Hospitality As I was designing the graduate course, I was also reading Claudia Ruitenberg’s (2015) Unlocking the world: Education in an ethic of hospitality. I introduce it here to illuminate the commitments I thought I was bringing to the “Teaching in the Anthropocene” curriculum. I utilize it later in this chapter to reflect on the outcomes of my choices. To outline an ethical framework describing the responsibility of educators to learners, Ruitenberg (2015) deeply explores and critically translates Jacques Derrida’s metaphor of hospitality. I will focus primarily on Ruitenberg’s own language and critical translation. “Unlocking the world” is a short-hand metaphor for describing education with a particular ethic. It is the work undertaken by those who are in the world to make the world accessible to those who arrive after them. It seeks to counter the injustice of being told, “this world is not for you,” for which Ruitenberg offers examples associated with identity categories like gender or race (Ruitenberg, 2015, pp. 17–18). The implications of this ethic are even more vast in the face of possible extinction of our species, when youth are responding with despair to the world into which they are born (Ray, 2020). (In using the word extinction, I do not mean to communicate that I predict the whole human species will go extinct in one fell swoop. But, we are witnessing unprecedented levels of extinction of many species, and even whole ecosystems. Beyond the rights and value of those beings, in and of

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

321

themselves, humans clearly depend on such diversity for life. Furthermore, in the mess that climate precarity is creating, whole communities could be lost, whole subsets of population could be made inequitably vulnerable to death, and the suffering associated with such changes is already incalculable for some, making it even more important that we stop denying death). Of course, Ruitenberg explains, there is not one world for which the young need keys, but many worlds; the unlocking does not happen as a singular event, but many; and, there are constraints (both defensible and indefensible) on what to unlock, when, how, by whom, etc. (Ruitenberg, 2015, pp. 3–7). Perhaps most importantly, one cannot foresee what will come from gestures of unlocking nor how the welcome extended to those who arrive will be received. I take from Ruitenberg that as a teacher I cannot anticipate, and ought not prescribe, what my students will take from my teaching. As I serve in any given teaching role, I carry responsibility for introducing students to a canon of scholarship – knowledge that has come before. This is part of offering students access to the “keys” of human experience, and as a historically minded person, I am instinctually interested in studying past human experience, including the affordances and limitations that experience offers us now. Following Ruitenberg further, this effort cannot be an inherently conservative venture, that is, teaching the knowledge of the past as if it were still as valid as it once was or better than anything new. Rather, it is a venture that remains open to translation, creativity, and new applications, a venture that is willing to critically examine knowledge for “what is good about it and what isn’t, whom it has benefited and whom it has harmed” (Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 91). Ruitenberg (2015) summarizes this by saying, “The teacher is aware of having received an inheritance and of having a duty to pass this inheritance on to a new generation. However, this ‘passing on’ happens not in the form of an uncritical transmission but of a critical translation” (p. 74). Although it was always the case, the environmental collapse threatening how we live now brings into stark relief the insight that knowledge(s) of the past may not be useful without adaptation by new generations. Being in the position of unlocking the world does not give the teacher, or learner, an entitlement to that world. This point too becomes more important in the context of the Anthropocene, the human-dominated epoch. Ruitenberg (2015) says, “We need to remember that we are all guests, and that we have no personal entitlements to the worlds we now inhabit. We have responsibilities for these worlds but no personal entitlements to them” (p. 18). Giving students the right to interpret, question, and make meaning in their own ways does not dissolve the teacher, in this case me, of responsibility for what happens as a result of my participation in knowledge production and teaching. Freedom must be coupled with an acknowledgment of interdependence (Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 13). Offering students in my course entry points to research in a broad spectrum of disciplines, alongside an inquiry project wherein they design a new school free of constraints traditionally associated with schools, was intended to facilitate an ongoing openness to possibilities. This course structure and the disposition I tried to adopt while facilitating it was intended to offer a curriculum “open to being changed by the incoming of students and of others who

322

H. E. McGregor

may contest what have been constructed as curricular center and periphery” (Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 72). In my second year as an assistant professor, teaching a new course, teaching remotely during a pandemic, teaching on a topic I was still learning about, and with this ethic of hospitality in mind, there was little I could hang my hat on, had I even wanted to. The learning journey, framed with the purpose of envisioning what “teaching in the Anthropocene” might look and feel like, was mine to host but only as a “temporary custodian,” (Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 79) and the knowledge encountered together was, I hoped, the “gift given without particular requirements as to its reception” (p. 82). Beyond a pursuit of ethical relations with the students, my intent in adopting this stance was also aligned with seeking appropriate humility when faced with the quintessential super wicked problem: climate catastrophe. In the next two sections, I revisit two curriculum design choices encountered on the journey to becoming teachers in the Anthropocene.

Choice 1: Welcoming Existential Threat I began by searching for colleagues who were similarly preoccupied with climate crisis, seeking solidarity in questions about how precarity informs teaching, especially in history education – the subject area I am most familiar with. Cathryn van Kessel generously pointed me toward a video recording of a lecture she had given earlier that year, in which she modeled a humorous, disarming, but still unapologetic welcome to the prospect of death on a massive scale (van Kessel, 2019). As mentioned, I was already drawn to the work of Roy Scranton who calls us to actively account for “learning to die,” rather than deferring it, and so this was resonant with my own transformational learning. van Kessel’s lecture introduces terror management theory, explaining the variety of ways in which humans tend to respond to existential threats, which are “direct (i.e., mortality salience) or indirect (e.g., worldview threat)” reminders of death (see also van Kessel, 2020, p. 136). In an article published soon after, she outlines strategies that can be used in classrooms to mitigate threat so that constructive dialogue may proceed instead of the more sinister pathways of derogation, assimilation, and annihilation (van Kessel, 2020). These strategies are providing conceptual tools, narrating cascading emotions, carefully using humor to diffuse anxiety, employing language and phrasing that does not overgeneralize divergent groups, and priming ideas of tolerance and even nurturance of difference (van Kessel, 2020). Van Kessel’s lecture, set in the context of questions about what it means to face death resulting from climate crisis, appeared at the time a very fitting introduction to the “Teaching in the Anthropocene” course. Knowing that eco-anxiety and existential threat might emerge, it seemed strategic to introduce this possibility right away so that students might be less surprised by it or recognize it in themselves when it arrived. Perhaps the most important reason I thought van Kessel’s recorded lecture constructive was in the modeling she offers through her preamble. At the beginning of the lecture, van Kessel invites attendees to not be surprised by a range of

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

323

responses that might be elicited by the topic and to take a breath or a break if they are overwhelmed. She invites those who are facing (other forms of) death in their lives at that time to excuse themselves if they need to. She expresses an openness to the likelihood that attendees would (politely) disagree or reject her ideas, and she offers opportunities to release the weight of the topic periodically through funny memes embedded in her lecture slides. She articulates and embodies the disposition that imposing a single truth is a form of evil. As a teacher she is thoughtful, as a thinker she is thorough and informed by so many fields, and as a presenter she is graceful. These were all characteristics of the work in climate change education that I valued and wished to emulate in my course. I thought my students could benefit from seeing her enact this themselves rather than me attempting to offer anything close to the same, on the thinness of my experience to that date. I proceeded to assign the video as a first “reading,” to be viewed in advance of our initial synchronous, remote class. A handwritten note on my printed lesson plan for our initial class meeting records: “Question ! relieving death anxiety.” To my recollection that thoughtful and serious question from a student in my class was about what techniques a teacher could use and if they should use any techniques, with their own students to relieve them of death anxiety, when the prospect of death is a message delivered by that same teacher. Perhaps it was something like: “Heather, do you think we should (as teachers) introduce children or youth to the prospect of death, without also preparing to relieve their death anxiety? How would we do that?” A heavy question indeed. This question came late in the class time period and I side-stepped a deeper discussion and exploration, saying it was a question we must keep in mind as the course proceeded and a topic relevant to our shared inquiry around the school for the Anthropocene. Among other hopes for the forthcoming coursework, I had in mind that I had assigned van Kessel’s more practice-oriented article for reading in Week 7. In retrospect, the question went largely unanswered. The question signaled a need that graduate students arrived with as they entered my class, a need, one could argue, I could have better anticipated. At the same time, it stands in for that which we cannot anticipate the “excessive nature of hospitality” (Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 110). “Unlocking the world” in this case could have been about more than exposure to van Kessel’s modeling as a template for anticipating the difficult content to come, or giving language to existential threat for a group of learners who were about to deeply encounter climate change. It could have been accompanied by an acknowledgment that graduate students in education are often practicing teachers, and they may keep implications for what they ought to do in classrooms at the forefront of their learning, sometimes, I suspect, even at the expense of their (own) learning. It raises questions about what spaces of learning teachers require to process their own responses to the Anthropocene, before, concurrent with, and in reaction to their work of unlocking the prospect death for others. Whereas my students appeared to accept that we must talk about death when we talk about climate change, and that pedagogical measures can help us avoid the worst of responses (e.g., derogation toward the Other), that does not mean they knew what to do next. My point here is not that I made a mistake (although next time I teach the course I will adjust my approach); my point is that the “unlocking the world” ethic is

324

H. E. McGregor

a practice in “tolerating the nagging recognition that one’s hospitality is never good enough” (Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 111). Later in the term, during the second-to-last class or Week 11, I invited students in breakout groups to retrospectively review the reading list I had assigned for the course and choose a new way to represent it. I suggested they could organize the list by theme or methodological orientation, rank by importance or personal interest, select and justify a “top 5 best readings” for a particular audience, create a graphic organizer that demonstrates the influence of the readings, or draw a picture of their journey through the readings. Twenty minutes later, one group presented a one-page electronic graphic in the shape of a thermometer, on which they plotted several readings according to “existential threat content” and “level of existential threat the reading causes.” The thermometer had a color gradient from green at the bottom to yellow in the middle to bright red at the top. At the top where it was brightest red were the capitalized words “ANYTHING VAN KESSEL” in a large font, followed by a more sedate “Orr (2004), Jamieson (2014)” in a regular font. Much laughter on the part of class participants, including me, accompanied the presentation of this thermometer.

Choice 2: Welcoming No Limitations I sought to create the conditions where students could constructively and creatively engage with a hypothetical scenario of utilizing funding from a wealthy philanthropist to create a school for students who were resisting outdated education systems that did little to address the climate crisis. In each week of the course, we discussed the pros and cons of different designs for a school for the Anthropocene. This school was intended to identify and center the most important competencies students will need in the future and their relationship with the Earth and other species (recognizing the limits of our imaginations when it comes to the significant changes societies must make in response to environmental collapse). It was to be conceptualized as free from the baggage of the history of public schooling, or the idiosyncrasies of jurisdictional policy, free from attachment to disciplinary silos if that was found to be desirable, and free from neoliberal influences and socioeconomic determinants. Our shared inquiry took us on a journey of getting to know each other better, balancing a variety of research and teaching interests, and sensing to what extent consensus among us mattered when it came to a project that was ultimately contrived. I planned that we would organize ourselves into sub-teams focused on particular aspects of the school, like curriculum or student wellness. When it turned out there were only seven students, I pivoted toward working on the school for the Anthropocene as one group fairly consistently, with a few breakout room sessions to enhance remote participation. I attempted to strike a balance between giving students something to talk about in each of our school-focused discussions and leaving room for one or several of the students to take leadership. For example, I openly invited students to volunteer to facilitate an upcoming discussion on a topic

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

325

related to the school. Ultimately, I provided more facilitation than I expected, in the absence of student initiative. The school scenario inquiry process ended with what I thought were worthwhile projects, several of which pushed the boundaries I had imagined in inviting this collaborative project. However, we did not arrive at consensus about what “our” school for the Anthropocene would be and do. It is worth dwelling in the particularities surrounding even minor degrees of student resistance to collaboration or consensus, as they may signify forms of response to existential threat for which we may better prepare as educators in the Anthropocene. In Weeks 1 and 2, our conversations primarily centered around why alternative models of schooling would be needed, for whom, and the practical implications of inviting students to attend an alternative school. We discussed questions like: What would this mean for their entry into the pipeline between high school and postsecondary institutions? What would parents expect of an alternative school? What doors might be closed for a youth’s future education and career as a result of our school structure? By Week 3, likely informed by reading David Orr’s Earth in Mind, there was an increased energy and commitment among students to brainstorming radical school models, to pushing beyond the boundaries of schools as we know them, and less preoccupation with aligning to familiar educational pathways (e.g., university entrance requirements). Come Week 4, thanks to the suggestion of a student, we began to seriously consider a decentralized model of schooling. We entertained degrees of decentralization, comparing a model in which the school had more than one campus (allowing for access to both urban and rural amenities and communities) to a model where the school had no campus at all, and instead utilized preexisting public facilities as places to meet and learn. The logic of a campus-less school was that it would save capital investment in property, buildings, or ongoing maintenance, alongside diminishing our footprint on the Earth. The financial, environmental, and social viability of a decentralized, but still face-to-face, model utilizing existing public facilities presented a particularly unexpected thought experiment. My notes from Weeks 4 and 5 reflect a degree of surprise on my part that the school scenario actually did seem to offer students a constructive place to channel energy when learning what is arguably a very depressing content. I remember reading a social media post at the time by an acquaintance who was studying the environment, complaining about the impact on their mental health. I imagined my students “at least” had the benefit of “a project to work through.” I recorded how “energizing” the project would be, even while noting that few students were making “firm commitments” to one school design over another. Apart from the question of school location, I was interested in seeing more nuance in the purpose of our school. Reflecting on the absence of “firm commitments” by students, in Week 6 I decided to intervene in the inquiry to accelerate our visioning process with the hope of setting some clear priorities. I did so by creating and presenting four choices of models with relatively distinct educational visions and some associated branding. These models are partially represented in Table 2. In breakout groups, students engaged with the four models by adding to them,

Leading a consensus-building exercise Using research to make policy recommendation Environmental law case studies

Access to a network of leaders in environmental NGOs, Green Party, government policymaking, and initiation in knowledge/skills recognized as valuable by that network

What students “get” at the end

#thenewivyleague Students who want to be leaders or change makers in every sector of society while prioritizing environmental policy Students who can tolerate existing systems long enough and well enough to try changing them

Examples of core experiences

Ideal student characteristics

E-LeadershipInstitute

Table 2 School models presented to students

A customized learning journey (or several) that allows for “tryouts” in new ways of living (and making a living) at the intersection of individual passion and civilizational change

An immersion in a range of lifeways that reduce reliance on globalized production or consumerism and enhance healthy relationships within our local ecosystems

All education is environmental education Students who want closer relationships with the Earth, other living beings, and to participate in alternative economies Students seeking knowledge and skills for basic survival, vocational pathways, or personal fulfillment that cause less harm to ecosystems Participating in local food systems Using research to inform local conservation Local market analysis

Find your calling ~ reduce your footprint Students who are motivated for self-actualization, while recognizing significant societal adaptations required in climate crisis (e.g., rejecting capitalism) Students who are not having success, or don’t care about success, in existing school (and other) systems Undertaking an apprenticeship Using research to inform innovation Personal challenges

The Greenhouse

The Nest

Activist

Grassroots forever! Students passionate about action, communication, and service oriented toward progressive environmental agendas Students who want to work with teams, develop project skills, influence public opinion, mobilize resources, or even become teachers Implementing a knowledge mobilization event or art installation Using research to overcome objections Social change case studies A bootcamp and support network for the knowledge, skills, and strategies that activists and action-focused environmentalists use, ready for implementation in a range of contexts

Incubator

326 H. E. McGregor

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

327

amending the points included in them, and selecting aspects of value. One group suggested we blend two models as concurrent program tracks within one school. By Week 7, mid-way through the course, I perceived that student willingness to entertain this imaginary task (perhaps any imaginary task) waned significantly. What I will describe as student fatigue was expressed to me in several ways. The first was a desire to retreat to their areas of preexisting teaching specialty, or strongly held individual commitments and experiences. Several students knew that the aspect of schooling they were interested in had a big environmental footprint, but they still valued it personally so they would not remove it from their project or their vision of future schooling. In another expression, following a discussion about the school models in Table 2, and with clear frustration, a student explicitly entreated me to impose a decision about which school model we would use or state clearly that consensus would not be necessary. This was the most forthright, though still polite and ultimately temporary, rejection of my curriculum choices (and I will note, I did not impose a school model on the group nor give up on the notion of consensus, although I reassured students that evaluation of the final projects did not hinge on consensus). Furthermore, none of the students elected to work on their final projects, in “service” to the school for the Anthropocene, in pairs or groups. This reluctance might be explained by the remote course delivery and pandemic, but it also points toward a potential retreat to familiarity and self-reliance which are typical when under threat. Responding to the unraveling class climate, at the end of Week 7’s meeting, a perceptive student suggested that those who could gather in person might try to do so, for a social outlet (to eat chicken wings!) in light of challenging times. I took this unusual suggestion, at least during a pandemic when it barely fit with the public health restrictions of the time, as a clear indication that students were looking for security. In that moment I was particularly happy to see a student reach for the role of host. Of course, one must consider that we were in the middle of fall term and any graduate educator knows that it is an overwhelming time for students. We were grappling with a global pandemic, and the hotly contested US election was also creating significant instability in our sociopolitical outlooks. Such extraordinary conditions, however, will only be replaced in the future by other regional, national, or global extraordinary conditions. While a teacher can aim for gentleness in their unconditional welcome, in the shadow of the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, we cannot set aside our learning journeys with the excuse of global instability. And, perhaps it was not a coincidence that Week 7 was also when our class returned to van Kessel (2020) by discussing how we would use her framework to guide our pedagogies if we were to teach about climate change in a grade 10 classroom. Recall the bright red of the thermometer and its associated threat, divulged to me later in Week 11. In reflecting on this low point of the course, I wondered: What if I had made the school for the Anthropocene scenario more familiar, such as requiring that it be located with a local school board and conform to the jurisdiction’s curriculum? Or conversely, what if I had set the radical terms more forcefully – conceptualizing a set of conditions for school funding that were imposed by the “philanthropist,” so as to

328

H. E. McGregor

focus discussion on implementation rather than consensus about purpose? Perhaps students would have seen themselves and their teaching experience better reflected in the inquiry if I had not insisted on dispensing with the structures that limit us but that also provide us with guardrails. After all, one can take greater risks driving on a highway with guardrails than one without them. Does expecting students to imagine education outside of the institutions they know and are likely to encounter responsibly “unlock the world” for them?

Discussion: The “Never Good Enough” Climate Change Educator In this chapter I revisit two curriculum choices I made in teaching a graduate course on preparing for, and responding to, climate crisis in educational contexts. I share reflections and questions not to correct mistakes nor to offer solutions that will prevent other teachers from encountering these challenges (although if anything I have shared helps other teachers, I am gratified by that). I narrate these choices and my view of the outcomes to provoke consideration of the uncomfortable responsibility of the teacher who is guiding their guest through facing climate crisis, who welcomes students to their own mortality as well as our collective mortality, and the kinds of responses that such teaching work may evoke. Insofar as environmentalists tend to experience uncertainty as to whether incremental change will make material difference to the planet, environmental educators may share in uncertainty about the outcomes of any given pedagogical “gesture” (see Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 92) in any given learning situation. In another of Ruitenberg’s provocations, she calls this a “cruel optimism” associated with “the optimistic attachment to environmental education as a site where transformation may occur, but often does not” (2020, p. 835). No, this is not about curricular or pedagogical “best practices.” I share these reflections as an exercise in “plugging into” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) or “thinking with” theory in order to advance both theory and dispositions toward practice; in this case, it is Ruitenberg’s theoretical framework for the work of “unlocking the world” and an invitation to question. To discern appropriate, situated action in the tricky pedagogical work of “unlocking the world,” Ruitenberg suggests teachers ask themselves, does what I am about to do “close down a space for future questioning or questioners” (p. 30)? By extension I wonder: how might these curricular moments be understood in terms of opening up or closing down future questioning or questioners? My first choice was to anticipate that existential threat would emerge during the course and might close down dialogue. I hoped to name it and provide an orientation to it proactively through assigning van Kessel’s lecture and her article with teaching strategies. This might keep space open for difference of worldview, but it did not necessarily guide students in terms of pathways for responding to “death anxiety.” My second choice, in anticipation of the tyranny of the status quo, was asking students to leave behind schooling as we know it and conceptualize a wholly new education of value to a precarious future. Behind these choices is the conviction that

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

329

examining the loss of familiar expectations and boundaries serves to “unlock the world” because humans are indeed facing unthinkably challenging possibilities: that we must (urgently) let go of our expectations that our life will be the same or better than that of our ancestors; that human communities will feel a great deal of grief as we witness the snuffing out of life, of whole forms of life; that we may lose some or many of the terms within which life has meaning (Lear, 2006); and that we may need to learn how to die as a collective in order to make anything from the gift of individual life in the Anthropocene (Scranton, 2015a). These moves generated forms of engagement from students which might be interpreted as signals that my choices, as host, were asking too much of my guests. My students’ responses to these “invitations” included passing over their own reactions to existential threat, at least more quickly than I had anticipated, in favor of the implications for themselves as teachers facing their future students. They also responded to me by using a metaphor – the thermometer – to demonstrate the emotional burden of my curricular choices on them. Lastly, they at times sought permission to retreat from discomfort, unknowability, difference in values, and difficulty by asking me to be more decisive. In as much as the students signaled to me that they had unmet needs, this does not necessarily mean my teaching was wholly inhospitable. Their needs enact further responsibility on my part to consider, and extend, other gestures to “unlock the world” for whomever may arrive. In an ethic of hospitality, contrary to what might be associated with the activism of environmental education, the host (teacher) does not require or expect that the guest (student) “become this or that kind of person”; they have no “developmental goal in mind for the guest” (p. 110). Ruitenberg articulates a guiding question that educators might bring to planning and reflecting on our curriculum and pedagogy: “will my actions make it easier or harder for a newcomer to find a place in the world?” (p. 114). In teaching this course to graduate students in a faculty of education, where the students are commonly teachers as well, I was reminded to be conscious of double teaching. We are all still becoming-teachers and with this comes concern about the application of what is learned with real or imagined future students. In that sense, Ruitenberg’s call to keep the arrival of future students always in mind extends outward from my own future students to the future students of the teachers I teach. I had faith that my particular students could face these unfamiliar invitations in the confines of a relatively unthreatening context, a small graduate seminar, and neither they nor I shattered. But I might have been wrong. It could have been worse. And, if my students bring some of these same convictions to their teaching, they are likely to host learners who are more vulnerable in the face of existential treat, hearing the message “this world is not for you.” I emerged ambivalent about approaches to planning for, sitting with, and moving through responses to difficult emotions in the climate change classroom, not ambivalent that the teacher is responsible for what they invite students to learn but ambivalent that there will be an adequate pedagogical “solution.” Thus, to keep open a space for future questioning or questioners, I went on to seek resources in this regard and began to read the work of scholars

330

H. E. McGregor

involved in the “Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators” (https://www. existentialtoolkit.com/), including Elin Kelsey (2020) and Sarah Jaquette Ray (2020), and I remain a student of their work today. The commentary on my curriculum choices from my students, articulated through the metaphor of a thermometer, actually felt partially validating. It was an indication that the stakes of this work were not lost on them that I had achieved an invitation to the end of the world as we know it. The thermometer also felt like a representation of my intent and a constructive pedagogical tool because it allowed for the possibility that each person might plot different aspects of the curriculum (in this case readings) on different degrees of the thermometer. However, it served as a reminder that the van Kessel lecture I assigned to “welcome” students to the course produced anxiety, by design, but unintentionally without a “welcome” to the desired pathways out of a threatened state. These might have included approaches more experienced environmentalists use to cope with the affective dimensions of this learning, to nurture constructive hope, and to provide outlets for student expression (including for the benefit of the future students of my current students). This insight exemplifies the Derridean conception of hospitality which, as Ruitenberg (2015) explains, “is both a necessary and impossible demand,” and “One has to do the best one can, knowing that one’s best can never be good enough” (p. 15). This is particularly important when considering how “fundamentally unknowable” (Ruitenberg, 2015) any student or group of students is with respect to their reaction to the difficult learning associated with climate catastrophe. Months after the course, I found myself in a (real) conversation with Claudia Ruitenberg about these very questions, and she pointed me toward a change in her own thinking since the publication of her book. She demonstrates this change in her thinking first by referring to the following quotation: If the world that an educator unlocks for a student is a world inhospitable to that student, “unlocking” is not enough. The educator—especially, but not only, if it is an adult in relation to a child—also has a responsibility to help the student imagine how that currently inhospitable world may become a more hospitable place. No doing so would be akin to a host unlocking the door to a room full of poisonous spiders and saying to the guest, “There you are, make yourself at home.” (Ruitenberg, 2015, p. 139)

This quotation had in fact informed my thinking about the purpose of the school for the Anthropocene inquiry, an attempt to imagine together what we can do to make the world more hospitable. Ruitenberg went on to share her new thinking: I would say now that it is not enough for the educator to “help the student imagine” how a currently inhospitable world may become more hospitable. In light of research that suggests that the vast majority of the climate change damage was done in a very short period of time, namely that of roughly one generation, it is unconscionable for current adults to say to young people: let us educate you to be better problem-solvers and responsible ecosystem inhabitants; let us help you imagine how the world can become ecologically more hospitable again. Young people should respond (and are responding) to that message with anger at current adults’ disavowal of responsibility. (personal communication)

A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a. . .

331

Perhaps introducing students to existential threat so as to keep minds open in the face of death, without robustly modeling ways of living with grief once one faces death, was received as a transfer and a disavowal of responsibility for identifying eco-anxiety coping strategies which, in fact, are in circulation (Grose, 2020; Kelsey, 2020; Ray, 2020). Perhaps, even with my participation in the shared inquiry around the school for the Anthropocene, it was received as a transfer and a disavowal of responsibility for solutions that would make a difference. Indeed, especially if I had looked outside of formal education (and the research-oriented reading list I assigned), there are countless youth development organizations, programs, and initiatives seeking to strategize around capacity development, effective activism, and policy or political influence. Ruitenberg went on to say, “So, today I would say that adults are responsible for showing young people what adults themselves, individually and collectively, are doing to help make the world they are unlocking less ecologically inhospitable than it currently is becoming” (personal communication, emphasis in original). Clearly, a series of case studies of educational initiatives that are already tackling preparation for the Anthropocene, and supporting the educators who lead them, could serve as effective material in designing “our” school. This might communicate a shared responsibility, a solidarity, and a constructive hopefulness in “unlocking” the inhospitable world – a more supported threshold to facing the poisonous spiders together.

References Bringhurst, R., & Zwicky, J. (2018). Learning to die: Wisdom in the age of climate crisis. Carter, R. L., & Simmons, B. (2010). The history and philosophy of environmental education. In A. M. Bodzin, B. Shiner Klein, & S. Weaver (Eds.), The inclusion of environmental education in science teacher education (pp. 3–16). Springer. Climate Education Reform British Columbia. (2021). Reform to transform. https://www. climateeducationreformbc.ca/ Donald, D. (2019). Homo economicus and forgetful curriculum. In H. Tomlins-Jahnke, S. Styres, S. Lilley, & D. Zinga (Eds.), Indigenous education: New directions in theory and practice (pp. 103–125). University of Alberta Press. Grose, A. (2020). A guide to eco-anxiety: How to protect the planet and your mental health. Watkins. International Panel on Climate Change. (2018). Global warming of 1.5 C: Summary for Policy Makers. IPCC. Available from: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/SR15_ SPM_version_stand_alone_LR.pdf Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research. Taylor & Francis. Jamieson, D. (2014). Reason in a dark time: Why the struggle against climate change failed – and what it means for our future (New York, 2014; online edn, Oxford Academic, 16 Apr. 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199337668.001.0001. Accessed 5 May 2023. Kelsey, E. (2020). Hope matters: Why changing the way we think is critical to solving the environmental crisis. Greystone. Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Harvard University Press. Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2015). Defining the Anthropocene. Nature, 519(7542), 171–180.

332

H. E. McGregor

Marquardt, J. (2020, October). How the youth climate movement is influencing the green recovery from COVID-19. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-the-youth-climatemovement-is-influencing-the-green-recovery-from-covid-19-147519 McGregor, H. E. (2019). Time chased me down, and I stopped looking away. In C. Coates & G. Wynne (Eds.), The nature of Canada (pp. 334–351). On Point Press. Orr, D. (2004). Earth in mind: On education, environment and the human prospect. Island Press. Ray, S. J. (2020). A field guide to climate anxiety: How to keep your cool on a warming planet. University of California Press. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2015). Unlocking the world: Education in an ethic of hospitality. Routledge. Ruitenberg, C. W. (2020). The cruel optimism of transformative environmental education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(4), 832–837. Scranton, R. (2015a). Learning to die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the end of a civilization. City Lights Publishers. Scranton, R. (2015b, December 21). We’re doomed. Now what? The Stone. https://opinionator. blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/21/were-doomed-now-what/ Thunberg, G. (2019, January 25). Address at World Economic Forum: Our house is on fire. Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate. edu/2019/12/02/address-at-davos-our-house-is-on-fire-jan-25-2019/ UNEP. (2005). UNEP strategy for environmental education and training. UNEP. https://wedocs. unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/11278/strat_full.pdf?sequence¼1&isAllowed¼y UNESCO. (2021). Learn for our planet: A global review of how environmental issues are integrated in education. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000377362 van Kessel, C. (2019, October 8). Speculations on ahuman existentialism: Educational (im)possibilities. Lectures on ahuman pedagogy. University of Alberta. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v¼byUIFyYHd5A&feature¼youtu.be van Kessel, C. (2020). Teaching the climate crisis: Existential considerations. Journal of Curriculum Studies Research, 2(1), 129–145. Wallace-Wells, D. (2020). The uninhabitable earth: Life after warming. Tim Duggan Books.

Repurposing Public Art as Education Reconstructions of Home – A Wandering Anthi Trifonas

Contents Public Art, Cultural Politics, and Social Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolution of Social Sculpture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering as Socially Engaged Public Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Imaginative Geographies” of Homelessness and The Bentway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Remapping Public Space and Repurposing Art as Socially Engaged . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

334 336 337 339 341 342 343

Abstract

This chapter investigates the educational potential of socially engaged public art. The case study discussed is the socially engaged public art project Reconstructions of Home: A wandering (2021–2022). This project was presented by the youth arts organization SKETCH Working Arts as a part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021–2022. Reconstructions of Home: A wandering was intended as a point of humanization, connection, and education between housed people and dehoused people. Its goal was to bring to light the lost histories of those who inhabit the space beneath the Gardiner Expressway that is now called The Bentway, through in-person activations, discussion panels, audio/visual/ augmented reality installations, self-guided walking tours in addition to providing access to food and harm reduction materials. Keywords

Public art · Social engagement · Education · Community engagement · Dehousing · Unhousing A. Trifonas (*) York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_62

333

334

A. Trifonas

Historically, public art in North America has been used as a form of education. Public art in the traditional sense is exemplified as the implementation of a physical and/or visual, artistic presence, such as monuments and memorials, that teaches and reminds the public of people and events deemed important by governing forces. And yet, public art is fraught with political and ethical conflicts.

Public Art, Cultural Politics, and Social Engagement Since the 1960s, the theory and practice of public art has evolved to encompass a much broader spectrum of media with intentions of facilitating new artistic practices that engage with public audiences to address social issues. Ideally this evolution of public art should provide exciting potential and opportunity for art to be actualized as a social tool free from many of the iconological and for-profit, commodity-oriented aspects of the artworld. Across North America, there has been a widespread awakening in regard to historical public sculpture and the misuse of public art for education by ruling authorities. Many Canadian statues, monuments, and memorials such as that of Egerton Ryerson at Toronto Metropolitan University and the King Edward VII bronze equestrian statue in Queens Park in Toronto, Ontario, commemorate colonizing forces and perpetrators of genocide. Monumentalizing these kinds of people and events publicly throughout Canadian history has had a detrimental effect on both national and personal identity and memory. Although these examples are destructive and harmful, one can observe and appreciate the powerful influence that public art has had on memory through these historical examples. According to Pablo Helguera in Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (2011), socially engaged art can be considered within the tradition of conceptual process art. However, socially engaged art as a genre of artistic practice is still developing. The concept of using art as a “tool” for social and political protests is rooted in the 1960s, influenced by the avant-garde, performance art, and many other artistic subgenres; yet the development and acceptance of socially engaged art as a viable disciplinary art form is still a work in progress. I have chosen to complicate this research into socially engaged art by focusing specifically on socially engaged artworks that can be considered “public.” This means that I am interested in examining socially engaged artworks that occur in public spaces. I am most captivated by socially engaged public art because of the increased educational potential I feel it holds. In addition, education through socially engaged public art raises some powerful and important questions about the erasure of public spaces through increased privatization of public environments and the public sphere (Knight and Senie 2016). This potential for far-reaching and powerful influence held by public art has been mobilized in an optimistic manner in recent years through the practice of socially engaged public art. Socially engaged public art can be uniquely effective because it has the ability to combat the musealization and dominant narratives that govern

Repurposing Public Art as Education

335

public spaces. The musealization of publics as explained by Andreas Huyssen in Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia (2000) describes how traumatic histories have been curated by the media and marketed as ideological tropes, subsequently jeopardizing the possibility of authentic memory and destabilizing cultural identity over time. This concept is dangerous and detrimental and can be critically applied to consider historical Canadian public art, specifically sculpture and its perpetuation of the erasure of public spaces. In order to combat the musealization of the public sphere and promote the creation of authentic memory within public spaces, as well as the expression of independent cultural identity, public art must be repurposed as a socially engaged educational tool that highlights the important relationships between memory and place. The practice of socially engaged public art serves as a medium through which a person or group can use creative means to engage in discourses based on experience and memory, which is then interpreted by viewers and absorbed into each individual’s memory through the context of the site. In this way, socially engaged public art invokes connections between historical, methodological, and interdisciplinary aspects of art history and place making. Despite acknowledging optimism thus far about the potential for socially engaged public art to be used as an educational tool with the ability to foster communication within communities and aid in establishing historical narratives independent from existing authoritative ones, it is important to understand the challenges and ethical concerns associated with socially engaged public art. As previously stated, socially engaged art as an art genre is still developing, and as a result, there are major deficits in the discourses and pedagogy surrounding socially engaged public art. Pablo Helguera in Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (2011) explains that his desire to create a kind of reference text which discusses and addresses materials, techniques, and practical elements of the practice was born out of his own search for writing that provided any practical information or a clear definition of socially engaged art. As a result of the social nature, transitory, and nonmaterial elements of socially engaged art, much of the scholarship and writing on the topic is vastly theoretical and speculative. This approach, although important, limits the ability for people unversed in such a conceptual, rhetorical, and epistemological background to learn about the formal characteristics and methodology of socially engaged art, ultimately hindering its evolution and recognition as a valid and viable art genre. This kind of artwork straddles many boundaries between disciplines, ranging from art to sociology, anthropology, and politics. Because of this multiplicity, it can be thought of as a “low form” of art. However, due to its potential to challenge the traditional commodity-oriented practices of the art world and art market, I feel that further research and discussion of socially engaged public art has merit and should be nurtured. Socially engaged art is still evolving and holds great potential to expand the reach of art-based education within and beyond its disciplinary boundaries.

336

A. Trifonas

However, this practice is not without its own creative and ethical concerns. As stated by Claire Bishop in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), socially engaged art works by “diffusing single authorship into collaborative activities” (12). In this sense and according to Bishop, a critique of participatory art works, as art works, becomes nearly impossible because of the foregrounding of the collaborative social task. I venture to disagree with her statement and propose instead that the ability to effectively critique a socially engaged work of art is based on how the critique process is conducted. Because the process of the artwork itself lies in the experience of the participants, the critic must interpret the experience of the participants instead of any visual or tangible product. With this issue in mind, and referencing ideas presented by Pablo Helguera in Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (2011) as well as other educators, artists, art critics, and thinkers, such as Cher Krause Knight, Suzanne Lacy, Harriet F. Senie, and Grant Kester, I will explore how the socially engaged public art project Reconstructions of Home: A wandering (2021–2022) can be contextualized in art history and interpreted as a work of art while also exploring its educational and constructive social impact.

The Evolution of Social Sculpture Within the scope of socially engaged art lies social sculpture. The theory of social sculpture was developed by Joseph Beuys to combat the chaos of the social, economic, and political climate of WWII Germany through artworks that held holistic and spiritual intentions, according to Cara Jordan in The Evolution of Social Sculpture in the United States: Joseph Beuys and the Work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe (2013). Beuys’ theory of social sculpture sought to harness the transference of artistic energy produced through public sculpture and transform people’s minds and lives to facilitate social change in real time through creative techniques and measures. Put more simply, the theory of social sculpture strives to create dialogue, and the artistic or creative element is simply a modality of communication with an educational impetus that is employed to incite this dialogue. In contemporary Canada, there is no shortage of social issues for which aspects of the theory and practice of socially engaged art can be applied. I want to analyze and explore the socially engaged art project Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering, 2021–2022, through the lens of social sculpture in the hopes of uncovering how Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering instantiates a phenomenology of homelessness that needs to be destigmatized. I will consider questions pertaining to the social significance of the project: (1) How and why are the process, medium, and site integral to the project’s goal? (2) How will this project have a continued impact on the dialogue surrounding homelessness in the city of Toronto? (3) What elements of socially engaged art apply to the work and how does it repurpose socially engaged public art as education?

Repurposing Public Art as Education

337

Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering as Socially Engaged Public Art Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering is a socially engaged public art project that consists of seven audio and visual installations that are located at multiple sites under the Gardiner Express Way, specifically The Bentway, in Toronto, Ontario. It was created and implemented as part of a larger project, entitled Making With Place: Public Art Projects. It was produced by the youth arts organization SKETCH Working Arts as a part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021–2022 in partnership with the Bentway. This initiative so far has encompassed 10 events, featured 40 artists and a team of 10 “creatives” who engaged in meaningful and public in-person audiences throughout the past couple years of the pandemic and concluded in August of 2022. Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering is the project that impacted me the most out of the Making With Place: Public Art Projects. This body of work seeks to investigate and explore the pressure and struggles of displacement faced by homeless people who have lived under many of the bridges in Toronto while also revealing, highlighting and celebrating the positive experiences and hope shared by people within the street culture community. Sue Cohen, who was the project lead for Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering, has experienced being homeless in Toronto. In many interviews, she stated that she seeks to give a voice to and create a legacy for the homeless community that has been present but largely ignored and heavily marginalized in Toronto since the 1970s. Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering was launched on November 5, 2021, and continued to develop through the spring of 2022, finally concluding on August 21, 2022. The launch was marked by a storytelling event and commemorative walk that sought to recognize those who have endured homelessness in Toronto and those who have been lost to the opioid crisis. It should be noted that my use of the term “homeless” and “houseless” is in direct correlation with the predominant terminology used on the website and pamphlets sourced directly from the project in question. The work is comprised of physical, visual, audio, and film installations created by artists with lived experience and the help of community organizations. The project explores the experience of being homeless/houseless in Toronto with the goal of humanization and educating publics on the homeless/houseless experience in addition to bringing awareness to the ongoing opioid crisis. Stories and recollections from members of the homeless/houseless community were gathered and given to sound artist Ry King, who then created a soundscape and audio tour that was implemented in 2022. This project is incredibly relevant as the homeless/houseless crisis has been made radically more political and brought to the foreground of social problems and injustices in the city of Toronto during the past 2 years in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic. The city has seen many protests due to the eviction of homeless encampments in Toronto parks as the visibility of this community increased from 2020 to 2022 because of shelter closures throughout the pandemic that caused many

338

A. Trifonas

people to face increased marginalization, police brutality, and hardships. The homeless community is rarely given a voice or platform to share first-hand accounts and advocate for themselves publicly, let alone as individuals. The multimedia approach of Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering seeks to empower those who have lived through homelessness to share their experiences as individuals and humanize a community that faces many boundaries in capitalist society and is often perceived as “less-than” and heavily othered. The purpose of this project aside from being therapeutic for the artists who seek to share their experience is evidently to engage members of the public that encounter the project in an effort to combat stigmatization. With this objective in mind, it should be mentioned that some art critics, such as Claire Bishop who was previously quoted in this chapter, would claim that the socially engaged nature of this project risks overpowering its status and relevance as a work of art, bringing it more so into the realm of a sociological project. This kind of critique is very common and often unchallenged, which is one factor that contributes to the rejection of socially engaged public art as art, and as a result, the educational potential of this genre has been largely dismissed. What Does Public Art Teach us? Public Art, Public Pedagogy and Community Participation in Making (2016) by Debbie Qadri of Victoria University in Australia engages in a meaningful consideration of this problem to explore what lies at its roots. Qadri draws from existing theories surrounding public art discourse and public pedagogy in addition to her own lived experience as an artist and art educator throughout the text. Her goal is to consider the development of a different kind of pedagogy that could provide other narratives to an audience as a means to promote more democratic alternatives to the authorship of art in public space. According to Qadri, public art exists in a kind of purgatory between the art world, architecture, and government. Because of this unique placement, there are deeply ingrained policies and protocols involved with public art. When working in a public space and/or with publics, the primary focus on and limitations of policy and protocol often override the artistic ideological and educational purpose of the work itself, which in turn affect the potential for impactful or meaningful public art. The educational and art historical potential of Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering is impacted directly by these issues and, as a result, may be critiqued as a sociological project instead of a work of socially engaged public art. However, I feel that because the social task is enabled only by the art itself, the art should not be considered secondary to the participatory aspects and social task of the project. As stated by Pablo Helguera in his previously mentioned text, contemporary socially engaged public artworks such as Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering also carry overt agendas; their focus and intention is on creating a platform through which the participation of the audience allows the impact of the project to resonate beyond the artwork’s temporary presence and site. Artists and art historians such as Suzanne Lacy and Claire Bishop have written at length about the neoliberal assimilation of art, art practices, and the dangers of equating art to mere creativity,

Repurposing Public Art as Education

339

resulting in hyper individualism that conflates “pedagogies of privatization” (Robbins and Lacy 2013, 151) with the public sphere. In this sense, I believe that Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering has the capacity to combat the neoliberal oppression and assimilation of public art by allowing artists and members from the community in question to create a project within a space that is accessible and comprehensible to both members of the community and people outside of it, in a way restoring the idea of public space.

“Imaginative Geographies” of Homelessness and The Bentway Socially engaged art directly impacts and is impacted by the sociocultural production of urban places and spaces in which it exists. In this case, this includes urban places and spaces perceived as being “public.” I say, “perceived as being public” because the sociocultural understanding of place is constructed, and this can limit who is able to access places and spaces even though the majority of a population might interpret them as in fact being “public.” For example, Edward Said’s theory of “Imaginative Geographies” proposes that the physical and theoretical geographic design of supposed urban public spaces/places are actually transformed, in spite of the designer’s intention, by the people who interact with these spaces/places, creating individual imagined geographies. In this way, the production of public spaces/places, regardless of the intention of those who have designed them, is decided and ultimately constructed by those who exists within and interact with the actual space and its history. Along this line of thinking, one could interpret a work of socially engaged public art like Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering as radically transforming the space/place for those who engage with the work, in order to call attention to lost histories. In order to better understand the potential impact of Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering, a brief historical overview and contextualization of The Bentway is necessary. The Bentway came about as “part of multi-year planning efforts by the City and Waterfront Toronto, a waterfront development agency” (Hess and Stevenson-Blythe 2022, 7). Some other examples of urban design associated with this development agency are The CityPlace development, as well as thousands of condos and town houses that have been previously built on railway or industrial land. In this sense, The Bentway cannot be interpreted as traditional gentrified space. According to The Bentway’s website, the physical area beneath the Gardner Expressway and the park that surrounds it is a back yard to about “80,000 condominium dwellers and acts as a point of connection to a number of nearby developments” (Hess and Stevenson-Blythe 2022, 7). The Bentway is just one of many development projects that fit well into existing policy documents for the improvement of the so-called “underutilized and inhospitable areas along the GardinerLakeshore corridor through the provision of welcoming and accessible routes to the Waterfront” (P. Gramatikopoulos, personal communication, January 10, 2020,

340

A. Trifonas

from Hess and Stevenson-Blythe 2022, 8). Throughout many interviews with government officials, designers, and developers that can be easily found online, buzz phrases like “international face of Toronto,” “excellence of design,” and “highvalue tourism” are used over and over to describe the development of Toronto’s previously industrial waterfront. The configuration of The Bentway’s development and management blatantly follows a neoliberal model that commodifies space by placing an exchange value on its use, thereby territorializing the region and enacting restrictions on citizen access. Because it is on land owned by the city, it is perceived as “public”; however it was predominantly created and financed by private nongovernment agents and entities. This collection of government and private entities form what is called The Bentway Conservancy through which it is managed. The Bentway was designed by internationally distinguished urban designer Ken Greenberg. Greenberg lives in the area surrounding The Bentway and approached Toronto philanthropists Judy and Wil Mathews who donated 25 million dollars to fund The Bentway as one of their legacy projects (Hess and Stevenson-Blythe 2022, 9). Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering harnesses an ethical and historical duality of the site through visitor performativity. Through the seven installation sites, walking tour, and harm reduction supplies and resources, the project challenges one to think about the erasure of public space by highlighting the innate connections with lived environments that each person, associated with the project or not, has had through their own experience of existing and being within the same constructed spaces. This socially engaged art project that took place in the space under the Gardiner that is now The Bentway works against the neoliberal history of public art to reconfigure an appropriated space by simply bringing up alternative histories. It thus enacts a possibility, through the artistic interventions, for resistance to the legitimacy of master narratives being spun by elites who have (re)appropriated a public space for private gain. People navigating the space according to the project are experiencing the imagined geography of the space through the intention of the design of the map but are also re-mapping their understanding of public space in relation to its loss and the erasure of its history and inhabitants. Perhaps this statement could be interpreted as inflammatory; however the content and curation of this project does in fact contest the capitalist structure that has been superimposed upon this space by raising questions about the value of public space beyond its exchange value and commodification. Because of the production of Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering, the consideration of the space beneath the Gardiner Expressway that is now The Bentway has been at least temporarily reframed so that those who interact with it through the context of this project are forced to experience the space differently. This is not to say all participants of the project will understand how the art works and curation of the project functions to mediate toward a consideration of the planning of this urban space and its use value. The proposition of alternative histories and narratives highlighted in its reception and interpretation elucidates how public art is subjective and can be mobilized within preexisting structures in order to call attention to ingrained appropriation, ignorance, and injustice.

Repurposing Public Art as Education

341

Remapping Public Space and Repurposing Art as Socially Engaged That being said, for a socially engaged public art project to be effective, it needs be sensitive to the social relationships of the people who may be entering that public space. Helguera outlines elements that must be considered when creating a work of socially engaged art in order to create an environment that will successfully foster engagement. The elements are as follows: construction of a community or temporary social group through a collective experience; the construction of multilayered participatory structures; the role of social media in the construction of community; and the role of time and assumptions about audience (Helguera 2011, 17). As previously mentioned, Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering promotes an exploration of the boundaries between public and private space not only through its subject matter and physical sites but through the QR code-initiated audio tour features. Each site is accompanied by one or more QR codes that can be scanned so that the participant is led on a self-guided tour of the works and can gain insight into the intentionality of each art piece from the members of the community who contributed their stories and the artists themselves, although they may not be present. This is an integral element to the functionality of the project and my claim that Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering constitutes a repurposing of public art through social engagement as education. It is unique in the way that it allows for self-guided tours without compromising the integrity of the participatory aspects and features of the work. In this way, Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering repurposes a public art project as a self-guided exploration of the work and its social task, placing the primary importance on the active role of the participant in order for relevant meaning-making to occur. This in turn also aligns the project with the theory of socially engaged art and social sculpture. This process places the responsibility of producing a creative directive on both the artists and participants by actively engaging with the physical, virtual, audio, and ideological media of the project. The work is evidently highly educational because of how it creates “a network of dialogic, pedagogic, and political aims resulting from human creativity that work in concert to produce social change” (Jordan 2013, 149). The use of personal electronic technologies is becoming more commonplace and even an expected part of art exhibits nowadays; however in this case, it serves both a functional and symbolic purpose. During the panel discussion that I attended during the launch of Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering, on the evening of April 14, 2022, a member of the curatorial team for this project, PhD candidate Amelia Merhar, mentioned the cultural clash which Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering highlights and strives to address. Merhar discussed the tokenization of people in the street culture and homeless community, noting that even once someone becomes housed, an internalized struggle remains. The panel discussion raised questions about the concept of tension between becoming a housed person while also remaining active in the street culture community. What makes unhoused people so different than housed people other than lived experience? Why is this lived experience so marginalizing? How can this lived experience be shared as to prevent further

342

A. Trifonas

stigmatization? I feel that the social, visual, physical, and technological elements of this project reflect commonalities of the human experience, for both housed and unhoused people in the year 2022. Although the narratives are primarily oriented around personal lived experiences, these recognizable mediums serve as a throughline to try and surpass the boundaries of the previously mentioned cultural clash that could hinder the transmission of the project’s message. Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering highlights an innate connection that every person has with the physical spaces of the city and uses that commonality to frame the artworks, which aids in the transmission of the social task and creating the communicative modality for its intentionality as a phenomenology of homelessness and an educational vehicle. I experienced this cultural clash firsthand when I attended the previously mentioned April 14 launch event. The audience was small and appeared to consist primarily of members of SKETCH’s existing community. Several members of the panel mentioned and discussed struggling with an “us vs them” mentality when trying to engage with people from outside the street culture community. It became clear that this existential duality is exactly what the project is trying to combat through art; however within the event, there was a tangible separation, distance, or alienation. I felt acutely as a spectator during the panel discussion and afterward. This feeling of being an “outsider” that I experienced caused me to question the altruistic intention of the project and the representational façade of its performativity. Upon further contemplation of its radical effect on my consciousness, I realized that my experience of alienation is an example of exactly why this project is important with respect to instantiating a phenomenology of homelessness through public art that is critical and reflective and therefore has educational potential. There is an inherent division of cultural locations that exist in capitalist society that can only be bridged through modalities of communication that nurture dialogue toward the possibility of creating more cohesive social systems, which is why the repurposing of public art as a mode of participatory communication with a pedagogical impetus is integral to the practice. Along this line of thought, an important question to raise when considering the significance and validity of a work of socially engaged public art is, how will the scope of the impact of the project be measured, if at all? A potential advantage of the QR codes and participatory technological elements of Reconstructions of Home: A wandering is that they could be used to acquire quantifiable data on the number of people who have experienced and engaged with the work, although such a method would not engage or give insight into the qualitative nature of the experiences or its phenomenology of homelessness. I am uncertain on how SKETCH plans to measure the impact of the project; however, there is a page on their website where their impact and influence are published, and so perhaps once the project comes to an end, some information about the measured effects will be published.

Coda Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering is a valuable project that experiments with and explores the controversial and challenging practice of socially engaged art. As I continue to research and work in the field, I hope to bear witness to the results of this

Repurposing Public Art as Education

343

artistic intervention and historical moment whatever they may be. I consider Reconstructions of Home: A Wandering to be an important steppingstone in the continued evolution of socially engaged public art and its educational potential in Canada. Although its medium and message are extremely contemporary, it bears elements of both monumentalizing and memorialization. The project commemorates and communicates in an inimitable manner that demands the cooperation of both participant and artist in experiencing a phenomenology of homelessness. The study of socially engaged art projects that do not receive extensive media coverage or public recognition is critical to the continued development of the practice. Although this project is current and not historical, there is merit to studying and writing about it through an art historical and educational lens as it deserves to be located in the history of public art in Toronto.

References Ashford, D., et al. (2006). A conversation on social collaboration. Art Journal, 65(2), 58–83. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2006.10791205 Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso Books. Helguera, P. (2011). Education for socially engaged art: A materials and techniques handbook. Jorge Pinto Books. Hess, P., & Stevenson-Blythe, C. (2022). Infrastructural reuse projects, lost spaces, and spaces of homelessness: A case study on the Bentway in Toronto. Journal of Urbanism, 2022, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2022.2138950 Huyssen, A. (2000). Present pasts: Media, politics, amnesia. Public Culture, 12(1), 21–38. https:// doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-21 Jordan, C. (2013). The evolution of social sculpture in the United States: Joseph Beuys and the work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe. Public Art Dialogue, 3(2), 144–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 21502552.2013.818430 Kester, G. H. (2011). The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context. Duke University Press. ProQuest Ebook Central: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york/ detail.action?docID¼1173058 Knight, C. K., & Senie, H. F. (2016). A companion to public art: Introduction (pp. 1–12). Wiley. Quadri, D. (2016). What does public art teach us? Public art, public pedagogy and community participation in making. Journal of Public Pedagogies, 1, 15. Reclaiming the public in public pedagogy: A conversation between Christopher G. Robbins and Suzanne Lacy. In Problematizing public pedagogy (pp. 173–184). Routledge. (2013). Web. Robbins, C. G., & Lacy, S. (2013). Reclaiming the public in public pedagogy: A conversation between Christopher G. Robbins and Suzanne Lacy. Problematizing public pedagogy. Routledge, 149–160. Said, E. (2008). Imaginative geography and its representations: Orientalizing the oriental. In The cultural geography reader (pp. 369–376). Routledge. SKETCH. (2022, March 7). Reconstructions of home. SKETCH working arts. https://www.sketch. ca/publicart/roh/

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global Citizenship Education: Between the Universal and the Pluriversal Cathryn Teasley

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global Citizenship in Historical and Decolonial Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Coloniality of Global Citizenship Education and Its Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

346 348 353 359 359

Abstract

The following pages reflect a critical inquiry, guided by postcolonial and decolonial analysis, into how and why a rising tide of global citizenship education has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a transversal curricular project, as well as a challenge to overwhelmingly and increasingly atomized curricula under neoliberalism. To what extent might it indeed unite or encompass previously established areas of curriculum designed to foster a shared sense of rights and responsibilities, respect for and solidarity with others, and interconnectedness on this planet? Is there consensus on what global citizenship education actually consists of? What are its potentialities and possible pitfalls? On the epistemological level, what kinds of knowledge does it give rise to, and what kinds might it suppress? For instance, where would a people’s right (as protected by the United Nations) to collective self-determination and emancipation from imperial and (neo)colonial forces fit into the cosmopolitan scheme of things under global citizenship? What are the ontological implications of global citizenship education? And finally, does this field of educational research and practice hold promise for generating ways of being that uphold cross-cultural social justice,

C. Teasley (*) University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_47

345

346

C. Teasley

inter-relationality, and interdependent coexistence in the broadest and most historically situated understandings of these terms? Keywords

Global citizenship education · Post/decolonial analysis · Pluriverse · Cosmopolitanism · Human rights

Introduction For many, global citizenship education is envisioned as an overarching curricular movement aiming to absorb and transform earlier orientations toward the forms of mutual understanding and support, belonging, the common good, and social cohesion that transcend borders, including international education, multicultural or cross-cultural education, peace education, human rights education, education for sustainable development, civics/citizenship education, and education for inclusion and diversity, among others. The following pages reflect a critical inquiry – guided by postcolonial and decolonial analysis – into how and why a rising tide of global citizenship education has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a transversal curricular project, as well as a challenge to overwhelmingly and increasingly atomized curricula under neoliberalism (On the influences of neoliberal ideology on curricula across the globe, see, for instance, Apple et al. (2009), Ball (2012), Peters et al. (2015) or Rizvi and Lingard (2010). On tendencies in recent global citizenship education initiatives, see, for example, Abdi (2015), Abdi and Richardson (2008), Merryfield (2008), Bosio (2021), Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (2019), Oxley and Morris (2013), Stein and Andreotti (2021), Swanson and Gamal (2021) or Verma (2017)). To what extent might it indeed unite or encompass previously established areas of curriculum designed to foster a shared sense of rights and responsibilities, respect for and solidarity with others, and interconnectedness on this planet? Is there consensus on what global citizenship education actually consists of? What are its potentialities and possible pitfalls? On the epistemological level, what kinds of knowledge does it give rise to, and what kinds might it suppress? For instance, where would a people’s right (as protected by the United Nations) to collective self-determination and emancipation from imperial and (neo)colonial forces fit into the cosmopolitan scheme of things under global citizenship? Finally, what are the ontological implications of global citizenship education? Does this field of educational research and practice hold promise for generating ways of being that uphold cross-cultural social justice, inter-relationality, and interdependent coexistence in the broadest and most historically situated understandings of these terms? This synthetic review represents a critical questioning of global citizenship as a concept, its place in curricula, and its significance for today’s generations. It is intended to put into practice what the late Palestinian postcolonial theorist Edward Said referred to as “contrapuntal analysis” (1993, p. 18), that is, forging counternarratives that challenge and disrupt the hegemony of mainstream concepts,

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

347

representations, and grand narratives, not by functioning as proxies in misguided attempts to replace them with alternative grand narratives, but instead by taking inspiration from musical movements composed in counterpoint, in which two or more melodies are juxtaposed, their divergences and convergences affecting the overall composition and impact of the movement. Decolonial educational theorist A. Abdi (2015) reminds us that hegemonic constructs such as global citizenship education are just that: constructs. Even so, the concepts imbricated in educating for global citizenship – democracy, citizenship, globalization, government, development, and education, as well as the term global citizenship education itself – are often taken for granted, somehow escaping analytical radars that might throw into question their underlying definitional tenets. Based on his investigations in this camp, Abdi offers the following personal observation regarding the assumptions around such notions, which amount to a presupposed and arbitrarily construed epistemological consensus that obfuscates the oppressive aspects underpinning the term. This false consensus about what exactly global citizenship education entails, then, in the author’s own words, [. . .] has been, in its totality imposed upon me, not for my epistemic well-being, but essentially for my onto-epistemological deconstruction and perforce reconstruction into a half-educated conscript (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s demi-savant perspective) who should accept the constitutive package of these constructs and their linguistic origins and intentions. (Abdi, 2015, p. 12)

This epistemological conflict around citizenship and education reveals how both concepts are mutually, albeit arbitrarily, constitutive, interactively complex, and prone to bias favoring hegemonic forces. By extension, global citizenship education is differentially situated and apprehended across the globe, which in turn generates (and is generated by) unequal power relations, the more dominant ones controlling which assumptions and definitions of the term gain access to influential research institutions and publishers, who act as legitimizing filters or gatekeepers. Further, Swanson and Gamal (2021) point to an inherent contradiction or tension within the concept of global citizenship (GC) itself, the latter part of which (“citizenship”) is premised on belonging within the nation-state, while the former (“global”) is signified, at the current juncture in history, within the worldwide reach of neoliberal globalization: [Global citizenship] looks both inwards and outwards, and carries borders-and-bordering as Derridean spectres (Swanson, 2013a). ‘Global’ implies spillage out into the world beyond state borders, while ‘citizenship’ implies being subject to the state. [...] The latent juridical contradiction in GC points to at least two differing interpretations and experiences of the term. It could either serve as a Euro-modernist ‘flaw’ at the root of its conception, or the site of a ‘productive tension’ with which one could more usefully engage, especially in its realisations as Critical GCE (CGCE). (Swanson & Gamal, 2021, p. 2)

Some critical exploration and deconstruction of the terms global citizenship and global citizenship education are therefore in order if we are to better grasp their (un)intended effects and implications in educational settings located in both the

348

C. Teasley

One-Third World and the Two-Thirds World – to use two terms proposed by Esteva and Prakash (1998) to overcome “misleading geographical and ideological binarisms” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 227) such as East/West, North/South, Third World or First World – the One-Third World representing wealthier populations, states, and regions with colonial and imperial missions past and present, and the Two-Thirds World consisting of populations, states, and regions impoverished by de jure colonization in the past, as well as by de facto or neo-colonization in the present.

Global Citizenship in Historical and Decolonial Perspective From the standpoint of Western political philosophy, global citizenship is envisioned as a worldview founded on an understanding that all life on Earth is fundamentally interconnected, a reality that must be comprehended not only cross-culturally, in terms of understanding identity, faith, social cohesion and relations, and human rights and responsibilities as transcending geopolitical and ethno-cultural borders, but also in terms of inter-species and eco-systemic sustainability, as liberal philosopher M. Nussbaum (1997, 2002, 2006) has argued when referring to “cultivating our humanity.” Nussbaum (2002) further asserts that this notion, as well as global citizenship, can be traced back to the Stoics of the first century AD, and in particular to Seneca, whose teachings on cultivated humanity and world citizenship greatly shaped modern democratic thought. Quite a bit earlier still, Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412 B. C.), when asked about his place of origin, is reported to have replied: “I am a citizen of the world” (Diogenes Laertius, 1925, p. 65), encompassed in his referring to himself as κoσμoπoλίτης (“cosmopolites”) (see also Book VI, Chap. 2, p. 63, line 4 of the untranslated original text in the Greek, in Diogenes Laertius (1925, p. 64)), which by some accounts amounts to the first appearance in recorded history of the term cosmopolitan (see footnote [a] in Diogenes Laertius, 1925, p. 64). From those early formulations, more methodical pursuits around democratic global governance and citizenship emerged in the early modern Enlightenment period (1450–1790, prior to Napoleon), especially following the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which led to the predominance of the nation-state. Right from the start, however, proposals concerning transnational governance and cosmopolitan citizenship have been met with skepticism. According to historian F. J. Espinosa Antón (2017), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) published a positive review (Rousseau, 1761) of a detailed treatise and life’s work on “perpetual peace” written by French abbot Charles-François Saint-Pierre, an arbitrator of local conflicts who later aspired to arbitrate between states (at which time he changed his name to Charles-Irénée, in reference to the Greek word for peace, ειρήνη). His Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (Project to achieve perpetual peace in Europe) was published in three dense volumes between 1713 and 1717 (see Saint-Pierre, 1713–1717) and became a veritable bestseller in the eighteenth century because its message – unlike those of most illustrated texts and scriptures of that period – was intended to be more practical than philosophical or idealistic. In his treatise, Saint-Pierre used terms such

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

349

as “European Union” and “United Nations” to create a “world parliament” to which each state would send four representatives, the smaller states thereby equal in representation to the larger. That parliament would mediate in conflicts between states and have sufficient military power to impose its decisions on each affected state. In these volumes, Saint-Pierre proposed strategies and policies that contributed significantly to philosophical debates on peace, Europeanism, and cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, they failed to challenge extant monarchies (Espinosa Anton, 2017). For this reason, Rousseau (1782/1964) also wrote a critique: Jugement sur la paix perpétuelle (Judgement of perpetual peace) about what he perceived to be a kind of naive rationalism in Saint-Pierre’s Projet, a critique which Rousseau requested be published posthumously, to avoid controversy. The following excerpt shows how he struggled to defend Saint-Pierre’s work while simultaneously formulating his own critique in response to a growing popular dismissal of the Projet: If ever a moral truth was demonstrated, it seems to me that it is that of the general and particular utility of this project. The advantages that would result from its execution, now for each prince, now for each people, now for the whole of Europe, are immense, clear and incontestable. Nothing can be found more solid and more exact than the reasoning by which the author establishes them. Realize his European Republic only for one year and that will be enough to make it last forever: everyone could experience the benefit it would bring to the common good. Yet these same princes, who would defend it with all their might if this European Republic existed, would likewise oppose its realization and inevitably prevent its establishment, just as they would prevent it from vanishing if it existed. Thus, the work of the abbot of Saint-Pierre on perpetual peace seems useless to build peace and superfluous to preserve it. It is thus a vain speculation, any impatient reader would say. But no, it is a solid and sensible book, and it is very important that it exists. (Rousseau, in Espinosa Antón, 2017, p. 632, translated from the Spanish; original quote as cited in the Spanish in Espinosa (2017, p. 632): “Si alguna vez una verdad moral fue demostrada, me parece que es la de la utilidad general y particular de este proyecto. Las ventajas que resultarían de su ejecución, ya para cada príncipe, ya para cada pueblo, ya para Europa entera, son inmensas, claras e incontestables. No se puede encontrar nada más sólido y más exacto que los razonamientos por los que el autor las establece. Realizad su República europea sólo durante un año y eso será bastante para hacerla durar eternamente: todo el mundo podría experimentar el provecho que causaría en el bien común. Sin embargo, estos mismos príncipes que la defenderían con todas sus fuerzas si esta República europea existiera, se opondrían de la misma manera a su realización e impedirían inevitablemente su establecimiento, de la misma forma que impedirían que se desvaneciera si existiera. Así, la obra del abad de SaintPierre sobre la paz perpetua parece inútil para construir la paz y superflua para conservarla. Es, pues, una vana especulación, diría cualquier lector impaciente. ¡Pero no!, es un libro sólido y sensato, y es muy importante que exista.”)

Rousseau was further unconvinced by Hobbes’ (1588–1679) principle that combat constituted the supposed natural state of the human condition, an assumption earlier defended by Grotius (1583–1645) as well, with his premise that the state of war somehow obeys a political naturalism based on the “law of the strongest” (see Zulueta in Kant, 1795/2012). Rousseau (1762a) argued that war is not part of human nature but is instead a consequence of an unjust “social contract” built on inequality and despotism, which can be avoided by developing socially just international law. Inspired by these writings, Kant (1724–1804) continued the conversation on

350

C. Teasley

perpetual peace by elaborating his own approach (Kant, 1795/2012), but on the basis, once again, that human nature, if not properly guided, is basically violent. He thus set out to devise an international political strategy for lasting peace designed to inform European rulers of his time. Achieving “perpetual peace,” according to Kant, consisted primarily of promoting rule of law through democracy: republicanism, federalism, separation of legislative and executive branches, the right to hospitality, cosmopolitanism, and the creation of a world body that would prevent the formation of despotic rule in the respective states, and, most especially, the promotion of trade between countries, all to forge an alternative and more lasting path to peace. Despite their differences, the fact is that ambitious transnational governance projects such as these contributed to lines of political, philosophical, economic, and pedagogical thought in Europe that informed (and were informed by) Enlightenment humanism, premised on the rights of individuals regardless of their social origins. Such ideals about individual rights and liberties eventually led to a rejection of arbitrary autocratic rule imposed by ecclesiastical, monarchical, or dictatorial rulers, and a revival, reinterpretation, and re-contextualization of classic democratic political philosophy, as reflected in ground-breaking documents such as the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen) of 1789 – a product of the French Revolution. And yet, the equal rights and freedoms, security, fraternity, tolerance, presumption of innocence, resistance to oppression, and separation of religion and state (among other ideals) were conceived of in this important series of historic documents as pertaining exclusively to white males in the European context. As Abdi (2015) points out, Kant assumed that darkerskinned people beyond European borders (and only very marginally within those borders at the time) were somehow naturally inferior intellectually, this supposition “massively contributing to the processes of de-citizenization that have plagued the lives of people across the globe for the past several hundred years” (p. 15). Such racism and other forms of supremacism in European Enlightenment thought were in fact readily denounced early on by contemporaries to Rousseau and Kant. French philosopher, playwright, and abolitionist Marie Gouze – pen named Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793) – revealed an inherent contradiction in the Enlightenment ideal of equality: the total refusal by its proponents to extend such rights to women, to enslaved peoples, or to the indigenous populations of regions of the world colonized by French imperialists. Staunchly opposed to the institution of slavery, Gouges had previously written and staged in Paris in 1785 the denunciatory play l’Esclavage des Noirs (The Enslavement of Blacks), and in 1788 published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres (Reflections on black men), in which she argued that “L’homme partout eſt égal” (“Man everywhere is equal” – Gouges, 1788, p. 93). But Gouges (1791) is most famously known for her denouncement of the complete absence of equal rights for women in the Déclaration of 1789. In 1791 she published a counter-declaration: Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen), a document considered by many to mark the beginning of the feminist movement. Tragically, Gouges was guillotined two years later (in 1793) for her political views, activities, and loyalties in supporting a constitutional monarchy (in addition to more democratic forms of

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

351

government), which offered a convenient excuse to silence her voice and the challenges it represented to the revolutionaries heading the French Republic at the time (Caine & Sluga, 1999). Her cause, however, could not be silenced. Mary Wollstonecraft (1792), for instance, took issue with Rousseau’s (1762b) critique of inequality by denouncing the contradictory discourse in his oft-cited treatise on education, Émile, on women as alleged subordinates to men. Wollstonecraft’s (1792) critique – Vindication of the Rights of Women – is now considered a founding text of feminist theory which, on many levels, paved the way “from within” for laying to bare the contradictions of Enlightenment principles, while still largely failing to move beyond that Western frame (Lugones, 2010; Mohanty, 2003). In the early nineteenth century, following 15 years of bloodshed from the Napoleonic wars, as well as various wars in the Americas and elsewhere associated with European and United States (US) expansionism and the occupation of indigenous/aboriginal lands by any means possible (including genocide missions), growing sectors of world populations were becoming anxious for peace and justice. The long-awaited end to the violent institution of slavery in the USA in 1866 – thanks in large part to the transnational abolition movement, but also as a predictable result of the rise of capitalism, as anti-colonial Afro-Caribbean writer E. Williams convincingly asserted (1944) – was paralleled by other advancements such as women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And yet, the untold suffering and massive destruction caused by the two World Wars (WWI/WWII) occurring in the first half of the twentieth century marked a before-and-after in the pursuit of global forms of peaceful coexistence and just governance. The establishment of the United Nations (UN) in San Francisco in 1945, and the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris in 1948 constituted a sweeping move to institute democratic forms of internationalism in a laudable and urgent effort to preclude the development of a third world war. Although the World Socialist Movement (founded in 1904) pre-existed as an alternative approach to global (stateless, moneyless, and property-less) coexistence, it was shunned by Western leaders as a threat to liberal capitalist principles limiting state intervention where accumulating private property and wealth was concerned, and communism was shunned not only for that but for giving rise to single-party (totalitarian) governance, this preclusion leading one to imagine alternative political projects that might have been forged around the commons had East-West cooperation – rather than “the cold war” – defined the postwar period. In the global North (the One-Third World), then, capitalist democracy prevailed as the political economy that would undergird the universal aspirations upheld in initial and subsequent UN declarations, resolutions, and recommendations. These extended into political, social, economic, and cultural rights and responsibilities, including education for cross-cultural understanding, the rights of the child, women’s rights, the right of populations to sovereignty and self-determination, and – only very recently – the rights of indigenous peoples (UN General Assembly Resolution 61/295 of 13 September 2007), as well as cultural and individual rights around personal identity and expression (e.g., through UN General Assembly HRC Resolution 27/32 of 2 October 2014, related to sexual orientation and gender identity), and

352

C. Teasley

the most recent 17 Sustainable Development Goals (see the UN website “About the Sustainable Development Goals” at: https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/sustain able-development-goals/about-sustainable-development-goals). UN edicts have thus been overwhelmingly framed within modern Western principles and driven by a civilizing ethic issued from a seemingly apparent moral high-ground, cross-culturally speaking (Abdi, 2015; Santos, 2019). But this assumed moral superiority is an illusion and a projection, not a reality. It dates back to 1492, when Spain invaded and colonized the American continents in the name of Christianity and the Monarchy (Grosfoguel, 2013), centuries before the oft-cited British author R. Kipling (1899) published his imperial poem, “The white man’s burden,” written to white-wash or justify US imperialism in order to allegedly save the “uncivilized” from themselves – in this case, the objective being the re-colonization of the Philippines (formerly occupied by the Spanish Empire). Given this white-savior universalist mission, it was not until 1960 that the longoverdue Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 [XV] of 14 December 1960) was promulgated. Its ratification can arguably be understood, however, more as the result of a shift in power relations among colonizing imperial forces following World Wars I and II than of ethical considerations and indictments. Anti-colonial writer A. Césaire (2000) of the French Antilles famously observed in 1950 that only when the same methods of torture, enslavement and genocide used by European settlers against peoples of Africa, the Americas, or Asia were applied by the Nazis against the European peoples themselves did the alarms sound, which turned whiteWestern racism and supremacism into objects of condemnation and eradication. A significant part of the European population had until then tolerated these violent practices against racialized others because they had been applied exclusively to non-Europeans, that is, to human beings conceived as inferior or even as infrahuman – inhabitants of that space that Césaire’s contemporary F. Fanon (2007, p. 2) referred to in 1952 as the “zone of nonbeing.” What is more, as social geographer J. Sharp (2009) perceptively points out, by the mid twentieth century, there were virtually no peoples or places left in the world to “discover,” “conquer,” or colonize. Thus, the political and legal circumscriptions left behind by the colonists when their colonies were finally granted independence led more often than not to long-standing civil and regional conflict and war, as has been the case with the British Empire’s retreat from India and Pakistan, or from Palestine and Israel. Thus, although the military, political, and settler invasions and occupations of territories and peoples through de jure (legally and administratively legitimized) colonization came to a formal end in the 1960s, the fact remains that other more tacit neocolonial forces, such as coloniality, persist. Coloniality transcends colonialism to the extent that it embodies and propagates the multifarious (cultural, economic, and political) legacies of historic colonial rule. As defined by decolonial theorist A. Quijano, coloniality [. . .] is one of the constitutive and specific elements of the world pattern of capitalist power. It is founded on the imposition of a racial/ethnic classification of the world population as a

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

353

cornerstone of said pattern of power and operates in each of the material and subjective planes, arenas and dimensions of everyday life and on a social scale. (Quijano, 2014, p. 67) (This is a translation. The original citation reads in Spanish as follows: “[. . .] uno de los elementos constitutivos y específicos del patrón mundial de poder capitalista. Se funda en la imposición de una clasificación racial/étnica de la población del mundo como piedra angular de dicho patrón de poder y opera en cada uno de los planos, ámbitos y dimensiones, materiales y subjetivos, de la existencia cotidiana y a escala social.”)

Where global citizenship education is concerned, in the next section we will examine the research on the forms of coloniality being reproduced through this recent area of curriculum, and suggest ways to interrupt that reproduction.

On the Coloniality of Global Citizenship Education and Its Alternatives Before embarking on that task, however, and in keeping with Abdi’s (2015) observations, let us first deconstruct the alleged consensus about what global citizenship education actually entails. Drawing on Isin (2009), Abdi points to three criteria or categories that operationalize nation-state citizenship in everyday life: jus sanguinis (parental nationality), jus soli (place of birth), and jus domicili (place of residence and naturalization). Considering that “boundarying” is a central tenet of state citizenship, our perceptions of citizenship are interactively learned from the national/state contexts in which we live, among other contexts. And if we accept that where we live conditions to a significant extent how and what we learn, then citizenship conditions learning itself, or is, at least, crucially linked to the learning process. This complex intertwining of citizenship and education makes it “provisionally safe to reaffirm citizenship education as a type of learning that helps people to both conceptually and concretely ascertain and appreciate their citizenship rights and responsibilities in a given national context” (Abdi, 2015, p. 13). So what then is global citizenship education? Teaching and learning about citizenship rights and responsibilities at the transnational level becomes considerably more complex when the aforementioned unequal geopolitical and economic power dynamics come into play between and among regions, states, and polities. The disparities between the One-Third World and the Two-Thirds World are intensified by the neocolonial effects of neoliberalism as a globally operative social-ordering political economy, one such effect being gatekeeping or containment, involving public policy that allows economic incentives to override egalitarian criteria in social planning and development. While Pedroni (2011) has applied containment to urban planning that strategically but indirectly segregates populations along racialized and class lines, it was originally created and applied at the geopolitical level to impede the advance of Soviet communism (Kennan, 1947), and can thus be revisited on that same transnational plane through today’s neoliberal policies. For example, since the 1970s, numerous international trade agreements have significantly reduced the power of individual states to control regional or global transactions that greatly (and negatively) impact their respective populations, especially in the Two-Thirds

354

C. Teasley

World (Escobar, 1995; Hall, 2011). And yet, as many of the researchers addressed in this chapter attest to, this concern rarely enters into mainstream discourse on global citizenship education. Drawing primarily from One-Third World English-language scholarship, Pashby (2009) understands global citizenship education as responding to the perceived need to promote worldwide interconnectedness and responsibility through citizenship education that transcends local and national contexts and “encourages students to adopt a critical understanding of globalization, to reflect on how they and their nations are implicated in local and global problems and to engage in intercultural perspectives” (p. 10). And according to Jefferess (2009), the global citizen “is one who identifies not (only) with their local or national community but as a member of a global community” (p. 27). The global citizen ethic does not merely connote a form of belonging to the world but also a way of being in the world: making the effort to transcend the identity boundaries of nation, race, ethnicity, religion, or gender in order to help unfortunate others, this humanitarian benevolence constituting a central component. But here, Jefferess (2009) suggests that one’s location in global power relations, or geopolitical context, conditions the extent to which one can fulfill this role of global citizen. Noting that Euro-American political philosophers such as Dower, Singer, Rawls or Ignatieff have all argued in cosmopolitan terms in favor of global citizenship, that is, forms of responsibility for (as distinct from with) others, Ghanan postcolonial political philosopher K. Appiah (2006) argues in favor of cosmopolitanism itself. From this pluralist standpoint, every person has moral obligations to everyone else in the world, despite the fact that not all of the values worth living by can be lived by everyone. Cosmopolitanism thus represents more of an ethical obligation and ontological identity than a political commitment. For this reason, cosmopolitanism need not be understood in terms of citizenship because it does not involve belonging to a formal global community in the same way belonging to a national/state community does, and so requires no global system of governance. Its aim is not to supplant but to coexist with nation-state citizenship. It is a way of understanding and acting on our multi-layered situatedness in the world. This is why Jefferess (2009) finds cosmopolitanism a preferable concept because, unlike global citizenship, it does not imply universalizing certain perspectives or particular forms of human experience in order to produce ethical commitment to others. Cosmopolitan openness to historicized difference and new ideas through human affinity and solidary action is a key orientation that Jefferess considers “particularly anti-imperial” (2009, p. 32), as opposed to the ahistorical, unidirectional, universal project to “aid” and “save” others through predominantly One-Third World projections of global citizen education that elide addressing the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. For reasons related primarily to cultural diversity or pluralism, Kymlicka (2009) is also skeptical of transnational citizenship, let alone its extension into the global. Linguistic differences and disparate local histories – for instance, which “side” of colonialism is more familiar to a people or nation: the side of the colonizers or the side of the colonized – also make negotiating transnational rights and responsibilities, and arriving at a consensus about them at the global level, an exceedingly

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

355

complicated task. Kymlicka accepts Held’s (2009) proposal that the international recognition of states should be based on rules that include some reference to democratic legitimation, meaning that each state should be encouraged to respect – in the cosmopolitan sense – the most basic principles of democracy and human rights. But Kymlicka questions “the idea that transnational institutions and organizations can themselves be made democratic in any meaningful sense” (2009, p. 119). He reminds us that democracy does not merely consist of adding up votes for representatives; it is fundamentally a system of collective deliberation and legitimation. This deeper level of participatory democracy greatly depends upon people understanding each other and sharing some underlying commonalities. And while democratic fora of this kind are indeed capable of enabling deliberations across religious, ideological, and ethno-racial lines, linguistic differences represent a root challenge to this global citizenship scenario. Contrary to Held’s (2009) claim that neoliberal globalization is weakening the territorial basis of national and political identity, Kymlicka finds that in multilingual states, such as Belgium, Canada, Spain, or Switzerland, language has indeed become increasingly central to the determination of political community boundaries (once again, however, within the One-Third World). Furthermore, he notes that democratic participation within national/linguistic circumscriptions is more genuine and active than at higher, transnational levels that cut across language lines – a space where elite voices overwhelmingly predominate. “Put simply, democratic politics is politics in the vernacular. The average citizen only feels comfortable debating political issues in their own tongue” (Kymlicka, 2009, p. 121), which, the readership might be reminded, was secured in 1996 as a fundamental right through a universal declaration (see the Universal Declaration on Linguistic Rights (1996) at: https://www.barcelona.cat/bcnmetropolis/2007-2017/en/dossier/la-declaraciouniversal-de-drets-linguistics-vint-anys-despres/ (accessed 30 January 2023)). This issue, among others addressed by Kymlicka, goes beyond the obstacles to establishing formal (institutional) global citizenship; it speaks instead to the challenges to cosmopolitan democratic deliberation itself at the global level. That said, Swanson and Gamal (2021), as well as Verma (2017), point to various divisive aspects of nationalist agendas as well as the potentialities of global citizenship education (GCE), while simultaneously recognizing some of its contradictions. Despite the “inward and outward referencing” tension inherent to GCE (Swanson & Gamal, 2021, p. 3) addressed in the introduction to this chapter, these authors find promise in its contradictory tenets provided that educators know how to critically draw out the opportunities afforded by this dialectic to forge radically different awareness about coexistence on this planet, especially where the world’s eco-social future is concerned. As a means of confronting the universalizing forces of neoliberalism, “the spaces of difficulty, ambiguity and the seemingly contradictory [...] become sites of possibility for critical resistance/resilience against Euromodernism, capitalist exploitation and its colonial legacies” (p. 3). Swanson and Gamal (2021) further note that nationalist movements are not without their own contradictions. Analyzing the recent case of Scottish nationalism in school curricula, for instance, these authors detect a “triumphantilist inward-referencing” (p. 5), which

356

C. Teasley

is articulated explicitly in principles that GCE within Scottish policy enacts. One such principle anticipates that young people should ‘know, respect and care for the rights, responsibilities, values and opinions of others and understand Scotland’s role within the wider world’ (L&TS, 2011). What is significant here is not only that GCE is an extension of national citizenship, but also that there is reluctance to critically engage with the legacy of empire and coloniality (Dussel, 1995; Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 2007), which continues to selectively shape the very idea of Scottishness. The inward-referencing and the hubris it entails enables an assemblage of governing technologies that reinvent the nation for-and-to the people. Concomitantly, this also gestures towards an outward-referencing that constructs Scotland as a distinct nation from the English, a victim of English historical aggression and absent from complicity in colonial violence. (Leith, 2010, 2012)

Verma’s (2017) critique of nationalism is still broader in scope. She underscores that nation-states in general “are deeply entrenched in policies that exclude, demand assimilation, and further outright ban traditions and customs that appear ‘endangering’ to romanticized notions of what it means to belong in nation-states” (pp. 16–17). This form of exclusion disproportionately affects inhabitants with migratory backgrounds, who must constantly struggle with national identity and belonging: with inclusion or exclusion vis-à-vis the national imaginary. By contrast, Gandhi’s massive pacifist movement in India was, in fact, nationalist as well as sovereignist in demanding independence from the British Empire (Hobsbawm, 2012). And for indigenous peoples whose lands and societies were at one time invaded, looted, occupied, confiscated – numerous populations massacred – the ultimate effect of that deep violence is a long culturally situated memory that is not truly “forgotten” over time, but transforms and manifests itself in other ways. Clearly, indigenous peoples, black and brown people, a majority of women, and people living in cultural and economic marginalization or exclusion (or trying to escape from it) have every reason to fight a world-system (Wallerstein, 2012) stacked against them. In this scenario, the movement for global citizenship that Verma (2017) supports, despite its universalist aspirations, could play a role not contrary to but very possibly concomitant with movements for sovereign independence (not always or necessarily according to the model of “one state, one nation”), especially if we consider the plurality of collectives of peoples around the world and their respective “imagined communities” (Anderson, 2006) from the transmodern perspective of the pluriverse (Dussel, 2013, 2015) described below. Careful attention must be paid, in this sense, to assumptions around nationalism(s) and their relationship with GCE. If human rights and cosmopolitan democracy form the foundation upon which global citizenship education reportedly rests, then a people’s right to self-determination and independence from (neo)colonial forces necessarily implies that respect for human diversity and difference lies at the core of any such citizenship project. For this reason, those who educate for global citizenship must resist the temptation to homogenize, universalize, or “flatten out” what it means to be a global citizen, or a state citizen for that matter. They can do this by embracing people’s ethnic (linguistic, cultural, and national) particularities, perspectives, and aspirations within the cosmopolitan scheme of things, or, in other words, from the standpoint of the

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

357

pluriverse proposed by decolonial philosopher E. Dussel (2013, 2015) and elaborated upon by a growing number of decolonial scholars (Escobar, 2018; Kotari et al., 2019; Santos & Martíns, 2019). Dussel urges educators to put into practice Freire’s (1970) liberation pedagogy based on dialogism, as a transmodern method “that allows the unfree to practice their freedom” (Dussel, 2013, p. 318). The term transmodern represents the process of transcending perspectives and analyses emanating almost exclusively from modern/Western thought. As for the pluriverse, Dussel proposes this imaginary as a more realistic and inclusive alternative to universalistic pursuits, suggesting that formal educational settings are privileged sites for promoting pedagogical recognition and reaffirmation of cultural difference which universalistic standards silence and exclude and, therefore, oppress. From the pluriverse, Escobar (2018), in his Designs for the pluriverse, exhorts social agents from diverse camps to transcend conventional (modern/Western) space, time, and material referents in addressing development issues affecting varying socio-cultural settings or constituencies, and instead embrace an ontological approach – one that grapples directly with the complex assemblage of lived experiences, memories, sensibilities, and hopes of those involved – as a powerful tool for confronting some of the most pressing issues facing such populations. He notes that in the Global South (Two-Thirds World) in particular, indigenous and local populations often do not identify with One-Third World norms based on Cartesian rationality and Enlightenment individualism, which, as has been argued here, are at the root of global citizenship education. In light of the pluriverse, educators would also do well to resist the growing tendency to demonize all nationalist or sovereignty movements, which tend to be categorically associated with expressions of divisive, xenophobic supremacism and chauvinistic patriotism. It is as if moving beyond “nationalism” is the most progressive and correct option for attaining social justice worldwide. And yet, what right have those who embrace modern/Enlightenment principles around basic human rights and freedoms to discourage or criticize those who find emancipation in the quintessential Enlightenment project of establishing a state/nation/country of their own, especially if that right has long been denied them by occupying external or internal colonial forces. What kind of global citizenship education would recommend imposing a lingua franca that would relegate other-language speakers to the margins and thus contribute not only to the ongoing and tragic extinction of many varieties of humankind’s rich linguistic diversity but also to undermining an important basic right of such speakers? This is not to say that human rights, as an area of study, is not constantly evolving in Western thought itself. Domaradzki et al. (2019) have found that the more recent dichotomies around national/international, individual/collective, and positive/negative rights, as well as an increase in emphasis on collective and international rights, have conditioned attempts to classify human rights in permanent (modern) ways that tend to reify them. The problem is that, despite their assumed validity for the rest of the world, such rights have traditionally emerged from the One-Third World for the One-Third World.

358

C. Teasley

Portuguese decolonial researcher Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2019) identifies three tensions imbricated in these globalized dynamics that constitute a challenge for re-signifying human rights – as one of the cornerstones of the global citizenship education project – in light of other epistemologies from the “Global Souths.” The first is a tension between the right to development (in particular, global economic solidarity concerning alternative, sustainable development projects in the Two-Thirds World) versus the continued and intensified exploitation of the environment through neocolonial extractivism via neoliberal capitalism (primarily from the Global North, but operating in the Global South). A second tension arises from the collective aspirations of indigenous, Afro-descendant, and rural populations versus the individualism that permeates the modern origins of human rights. And a third tension stems from the non-inclusive language of human rights when it comes to recognizing the rights of other living species on the planet, and this despite human dependency on them. These three tensions together arise from a chasm between modern thought – issued as a civilizing project from the metropolitan centers of the world-system – and the colonial peripheries, which have hitherto been discouraged from questioning the universality of theories and practices thus construed and legitimized. This has created an “abysmal line” between hegemonic knowledge projected from the Western epistemological center and the delegitimized, undervalued, silenced, or ignored knowledge(s) emerging from the peripheries. Human rights, argues Santos (2019), have thus historically been designed to take effect only from the Western side of that abysmal line, or, in Fanon’s (2007) terms, from the “zone of being.” This is why Santos urges us to distinguish between “conventional” human rights and the possibility of their becoming an integral part of an “ecology of post-abysmal dignity” (2019, p. 37, translated from the Spanish). Finally, in “Global citizenship otherwise,” Stein and Andreotti (2021) invite learners to “decenter themselves, deepen their sense of responsibility, and disinvest from harmful desires so that we might learn to (co)exist differently on a shared planet” (p. 13). Paralleling the goal of Said’s (1993) contrapuntal analysis, but finding inspiration in various other researchers from decolonial, postcolonial, and indigenous studies, these authors seek to denaturalize the harmful underside of the shiny promises offered by nation-states (Byrd, 2011; Walia, 2013), global capital (Coulthard, 2014), universal knowledge (Santos, 2007; Shiva, 1993), social mobility (Donald, 2019), and separability (Silva, 2016), which we have summarized as the primary dimensions of the modern conditions of existence. We describe these dimensions using the metaphor of the “house modernity built” (Stein, Hunt, Suša, & Andreotti, 2017). [. . .] To seek within these theories, a prescriptive (re)solution would be to route them back into the same set of colonial entitlements (and accompanying affective investments) that they challenge. (Stein & Andreotti, 2021, pp. 13–14)

This is why Stein and Andreotti do not frame the house modernity built as an alternative approach to global citizenship education (GCE), but instead conceptualize it as a series of critical questions about the limits of hegemonic understandings of GCE that invite educators to practice “a pedagogy that can enable us to ‘dig deeper’ (to develop more nuanced self-implicating analyses) and to ‘relate wider’ (to expand

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

359

sensibilities and responsibilities without turning our backs to our complicity in harm)” (2021, p. 14). Their GCE pedagogy is essentially motivated by the fact that the current “system” is not sustainable, which behooves those of us in formal education to develop ways otherwise of knowing, feeling, relating, desiring, and being in the world – an orientation that might bring us closer to the pluriverse of recognizing the divergences and convergences of our coexistence in a finite world.

Concluding Remarks This study has by no means represented an exhaustive analysis of the multiple approaches to global citizenship education identified, for example, in additional research by Andreotti and Sousa (2012), Bosio (2021), McFarland (2017), Merryfield (2008), O’Sullivan and Pashby (2008), Oxley and Morris (2013), Schugurensky and Wolhuter (2020) or Swanson (2015), among many others. What it has set out to advance are post- and decolonial critiques and alternatives to hegemonic epistemes within this curricular area of research and practice. All considered, and in response to the questions posed in the introduction to this chapter, global citizenship education is, so far and overwhelmingly, a contested One-Third World conceptual space for learning, with roots dating far back into Western history, having newly emerged in the twenty-first century primarily in response to the challenges of neoliberal globalization, or to a world-system premised on global capitalism, coloniality, and patriarchy (Filigrana, 2019; Grosfoguel, 2013; Teasley & Butler, 2020). Practicing decolonial analysis of both global citizenship education and cosmopolitanism has meant, in this text, extending Said’s (1993) contrapuntal analysis into the transmodern decolonial terrain of the pluriverse (Dussel, 2013, 2015; Escobar, 2018; Santos & Martíns, 2019), in which recognition not only of the coexistence of global and national citizenship but of other forms of collective belonging and human rights, may offer humankind’s diverse realities – as individuals or as members of situated communities (citizens, residents, undocumented migrants, refugees, unregistered local inhabitants, urban youth, rural women, people residing in the Two-Thirds World, among many others) – the equitable kind of cross-cultural dignity, justice, recognition, mutual support, autonomy, and interdependence our heterogenous humanity so needs and deserves.

References Abdi, A. A. (2015). Decolonizing global citizenship education: Critical reflections on the epistemic intersections of location, knowledge, and learning. In A. A. Abdi, L. Shultz, & T. Pillay (Eds.), Decolonizing global citizenship education (pp. 11–26). Sense Publishers. Abdi, A. A., & Richardson, G. (Eds.). (2008). Decolonizing democratic education: Transdisciplinary dialogues. Sense Publishers. Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (2nd ed.). Verso.

360

C. Teasley

Andreotti, V. de O., & de Souza, L. M. T. M. (Eds.). (2012). Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education. Routledge. Appiah, K. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. W. W. Norton. Apple, M. W., Au, W., & Gandin, L. A. (Eds.). (2009). The Routledge international handbook of critical education. Routledge. Ball, S. (2012). Global education Inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. Routledge. Bosio, E. (Ed.). (2021). Conversations on global citizenship education: Perspectives on research, teaching, and learning in higher education. Routledge. Byrd, J. A. (2011). The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Caine, B., & Sluga, G. (1999). Gendering European history. Leicester University Press. Césaire, A. (2000). Discourse on colonialism. Monthly Review Press. Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Beyond the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. de Gouges, O. (1788). Réflexions sur les hommes nègres. In O. de Gouges (Ed.), Zamore et Mirza ou l’Heureux Naufrage, suivi de Réflexions sur les hommes nègres (pp. 92–99). Cailleau, Libraire-Éditeur. de Gouges, O. (1791). Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne. In O. de Gouges (Ed.), Les droits de la femme. A la Reine (pp. 5–17). Domaradzki, S., Khvostova, M., & Pupovac, D. (2019). Karel Vašák’s generations of rights and the contemporary human rights discourse. Human Rights Review, 20, 423–443. Donald, D. (2019). Homo economicus and forgetful curriculum. In H. Tomlins-Jahnke, S. Styres, S. Lilley & D. Zinga (Eds.), Indigenous education: New directions in theory and practice (pp. 103–125). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Dussel, E. (1995). Eurocentrism and modernity (introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures). In J. Beverley, J. Oviedo, & M. Aronn (Eds.), The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (pp. 65–77). Durham: Duke University Press. Dussel, E. (2013). Ethics of liberation in the age of globalization and exclusion. Duke University Press. Dussel, E. (2015). Filosofías del Sur: Descolonización y transmodernidad. Akal. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. Espinosa Antón, F. J. (2017). Proyectos de paz del siglo de la Ilustración (I. Saint-Pierre y Rousseau: planes de paz perpetua, Unión Europea y Naciones Unidas). Araucaria: Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y. Humanidades, 19(38), 619–639. Esteva, G., & Prakash, M. S. (1998). Grassroots post-modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. Zed Press. Fanon, F. (2007). Black skin, white masks. Grove Press. Filigrana García, P. (2019). El pueblo gitano contra el sistema-mundo: reflexiones desde una militancia feminista y anticapitalista. Akal. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. The Seabury Press. Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. (2019). Global citizenship otherwise study guide. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective and Musagetes Foundation. Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in westernized universities: Epistemic racism/ sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, XI(1(Fall)), 73–90. Hall, S. (2011, Summer). The Neoliberal Revolution. Soundings, 2011(48), 9–27. Held, D. (2009). The transformation of political community: Rethinking democracy in the context of globalization. In I. Shapiro & C. Hacker-Cordón (Eds.), Democracy’s edges (pp. 84–111). Cambridge University Press.

Curricular Convergences and Divergences Around Global. . .

361

Hobsbawm, E. J. (2012). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Isin, E. (2009). Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29, 367–388. Jefferess, D. (2009). Unsettling cosmopolitanism: Global citizenship and the cultural politics of benevolence. In V. de O. Andreotti & L. M. T. M. de Souza (Eds.), Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education (pp. 27–46). Routledge. Kant, I. (1795/2012). Sobre la paz perpetua (Introduction by Zulueta Fülscher, K.). Ediciones Akal. Kennan, G. F. (1947, July). The sources of Soviet conduct. Foreign Affairs, 25(4), 566–582. Kipling, R. (1899, February). The white man’s burden. McClure’s Magazine, XII(4). Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F., & Acosta, A. (Eds.). (2019). Pluriverso: un diccionario del posdesarrollo. Icaria. Kymlicka, W. (2009). Citizenship in an era of globalization: Commentary on Held. In I. Shapiro & C. Hacker-Cordón (Eds.), Democracy’s edges (pp. 112–126). Cambridge University Press. Laertius, D (1925). The Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Vol. II). Trans. R. D. Hicks. London: William Heinemann/New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons. Leith, M. S. (2010). Governance and Identity in a Devolved Scotland. Parliamentary Affairs, 63(2), 286–301. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsp032 Leith, M. S. (2012). The View from Above: Scottish National Identity as an Elite Concept. National Identities, 14(1), 39–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2012.657081 L&TS (Learning and Teaching Scotland). (2011). Developing global citizens within curriculum for excellence. https://issuu.com/ltscotland/docs/dgc_resource Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. McFarland, S. (2017, December 22). International differences in support for human rights. Societies Without Borders, 12(1), 1–21. Merryfield, M. (2008). Decolonizing social studies and global education. In A. A. Abdi & G. Richardson (Eds.), Decolonizing democratic education: Trans-disciplinary dialogues (pp. 87–95). Sense Publishers. Mignolo, W. (2007). Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of de-Coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 449–514. Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Duke University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2002). Education for citizenship in an era of global connection. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21, 289–303. Nussbaum, M. C. (2006). Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership. The Belknap Press of Harvard University. O’Sullivan, M., & Pashby, K. (Eds.) (2008). Citizenship in the era of globalization: Canadian perspectives. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Oxley, L., & Morris, P. (2013). Global citizenship: A typology for distinguishing its multiple conceptions. British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(3), 301–325. Pashby, K. (2009). Questions for global citizenship education in the context of the “new imperialism”. In V. de O. Andreotti & L. M. T. M. de Souza (Eds.), Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education (pp. 9–26). Routledge. Pedroni, T. C. (2011). Urban shrinkage as a performance of whiteness: neoliberal urban restructuring, education, and racial containment in the post-industrial, global niche city. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(2), 203–215. Peters, M. A., Paraskeva, J. M., & Besley, T. (Eds.) (2015). The global financial crisis and educational restructuring. New York: Peter Lang. Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21(2), 168–178. Quijano, A. (2014). Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. In B. D. S. Santos & M. P. Meneses (Eds.), Epistemologías del Sur (Perspectivas) (pp. 67–107). Akal. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. Routledge.

362

C. Teasley

Rousseau, J. J. (1761). Extrait du Projet de Paix Perpétuelle de M. l’abbé de Saint-Pierre. Marc Michel Rey. Rousseau, J. J. (1762a). Du contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique. Marc Michel Rey. Rousseau, J. J. (1762b). Émile, ou de l’éducation. Jean Néaulme. Rousseau, J. J. (1782/1964). Jugement sur le projet de paix perpétuelle de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre. In S. Stelling-Michaud (Ed.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Oeuvres complètes (Vol. III). Gallimard. Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Alfred Knopf. Saint-Pierre, C. I. (1713–1717). Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (Vol. 1–3). Antoine Schouten, Marchand Libraire. Santos, B. de S. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 45–89. Santos, B. de S. (2019). Derechos humanos, democracia y desarrollo. In B. de S. Santos & B. S. Martíns (Eds.), El pluriverso de los derechos humanos: La diversidad de las luchas por la dignidad (pp. 35–58). Akal. Santos, B. de S., & Martíns, B. S. (Eds.). (2019). El pluriverso de los derechos humanos: La diversidad de las luchas por la dignidad. Akal. Schugurensky, D., & Wolhuter, C. (Eds.). (2020). Global citizenship education in teacher education: Theoretical and practical issues. Routledge. Sharp, J. P. (2009). Geographies of postcolonialism. Sage. Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. Palgrave Macmillan. Silva, D. F. de (2016). On difference without separability. Retrieved 30 January 2023 from: https://issuu.com/amilcarpacker/docs/denise_ferreira_da_silva Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. de O. (2021). Global citizenship otherwise. In E. Bosio (Ed.), Conversations on global citizenship education: Research, teaching and learning (pp. 13–36). Routledge. Stein, S., Hunt, D., Suša, R., & Andreotti, V. de O. (2017). The educational challenge of unraveling the fantasies of ontological security. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 11(2), 69–79. Swanson, D. M. (2015). Ubuntu, indigeneity, and an ethic for decolonizing global citizenship. In A. A. Abdi, L. Shultz, & T. Pillay (Eds.), Decolonizing global citizenship education (pp. 27–38). Sense Publishers. Swanson, D. M. (2013a). Neoliberalism, Education and Citizenship Rights of Unemployed Youth in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Sisyphus – Journal of Education, 1(2), 194–212. Swanson, D. M., & Gamal, M. (2021). Global citizenship education/learning for sustainability: Tensions, ‘flaws’, and contradictions as critical moments of possibility and radical hope in educating for alternative futures. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 19, 456–469. Teasley, C., & Butler, A. (2020). Intersecting critical pedagogies to contest coloniality. In S. R. Steinberg & B. Down (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Critical Pedagogies (pp. 186–204). Sage. Verma, R. (2017). Critical peace education and global citizenship: Narratives from the unofficial curriculum. Routledge. Walia, H. (2013). Undoing border imperialism. New York: AK Press. Wallerstein, I. (2012). Conclusion: World-systems analysis as a knowledge movement. In S. J. Babones & C. Chase-Dunn (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis (pp. 515–521). Routledge. Williams, E. (1944). Capitalism and slavery. University of North Carolina Press. Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). Vindication of the rights of women: With strictures on political and moral subjects. Thomas and Andrews.

Part IV Curriculum as Storying

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives Eero Ropo and Sari Yrja¨na¨inen

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curricula and Grand Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bildung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pancasila . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narratives of Phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Competence-Based Curricula and Narrativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural Narratives in Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

366 367 368 370 372 376 378 380 381

Abstract

Narrativity of curricula is gaining increasing interest from curriculum researchers. We argue that narratives serve important roles in human sense-making and learning. Consequently, it is important to understand the narrative messages of curricula to teachers and young people. We discuss four types of narratives in the current curricula, namely grand narratives, such as the Bildung theory in the Finnish core curriculum and the Pancasila in the Indonesian curriculum. We also discuss narratives of phenomena, narrativity of the competence-based curricula, and cultural narratives. As an example, we describe how Sámi education is described in the Nordic curricula. It is evident that curricula are narrative in many respects. Narratives can also be restricted, based on limited scientific

E. Ropo (*) Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: eero.ropo@tuni.fi S. Yrjänäinen University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: sari.yrjanainen@utu.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_3

365

366

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

foundation, ethically limited, or unfair. It is important that those narratives are societally discussed and accepted as the basis for education. Keywords

Narrativity · Curriculum · Bildung · Pancasila · Grand narratives

Introduction Our aim in this chapter is to discuss curricula from the perspective of narratives and narrativity. Like Barthes and Duisit (1975, p. 237), reminded almost 50 years ago, narratives are present everywhere, in texts, arts, literature, drama, and movies. Human knowledge is at least partly narrative, as Bruner (1985) has pointed out in his categorization of knowledge to paradigmatic and narrative parts. Narrative is the way to simplify complexity, to present hard to interpret phenomena with understandable explanations picking up the essential, the plot, but often leaving out the details. It is situated in time and place, and meanings that are created are autobiographical, social, and contextual. We base this discussion on Abbott’s (2008) definition of narratives and narrativity. Narratives and stories are sometimes used as synonyms, but Abbott (2008) makes a clear distinction between those concepts. According to him, a story is a chronological sequence of events, and it is told through narrative discourse in which the narrative plot is verbalized in the context. Narratives can be described as representations of the story. Narrative discourse may take different forms and ways to describe the story and its plot (see Abbott, 2008, p. 237–241). Curricula as narratives have been discussed very little in educational and curriculum research. However, narrativity of curricula is gaining increasing interest from researchers (e.g., Goodson & Petrucci-Rosa, 2020; Ropo & Yrjänäinen, 2020). It is evident that curriculum history shows the dominance of fragmentary approaches, for instance, to dividing curricula into small goals related to factual or procedural knowing, values, and attitudes. Those goals may inform about a narrative behind them but not necessarily. The so-called Tylerian model is a good example of those approaches that spread everywhere into national curricula (Tyler, 1949). In those kinds of curricula, overall goals as narrative are often implicit and hidden into the introductory texts. What are the benefits of theorizing curricula from the perspectives of narratives and narrativity? We argue that narratives serve important roles in human sensemaking. Consequently, it is important that we understand what the narrative messages of curricula to teachers and young people in education are. Meretoja (2014) states that the role of narratives is either epistemological or ontological, or both (also Ropo & Yrjänäinen, 2020). Like we have written earlier, narratives are crucial in our understanding of ourselves and the outside world. The ontological perspective of narrativity relates to our identity, and more specifically, who we experience ourselves to be. This kind of identity is constructed from experiences in social and

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

367

cultural contexts. We not only construct ourselves, but we are continuously “offered” interpretations from outside regarding who we are. Those kinds of narratives stay under reconstruction along one’s life experiences. The more relations we have with the outside world, the more varied narratives we create about ourselves. (Ropo & Yrjänäinen, 2020, p. 516)

Narratives are present in education, in schools and institutions, curriculum and instruction, and sessions and lessons. This is how we position this chapter and ourselves as authors. Narratives are here and there because the human interpretations of the world and life are narrative. Narratives connect facts, meanings, beliefs, traditions, and timelines from past to future into a plot that we interpret through stories in different situations and contexts. Curriculum as a narrative is, however, not a simple conceptualization. It is aimed to be communication not only from generation to generation but, what Pinar (2012) has asserted, also among older and younger generations, informed by academic knowledge, and characterized by educational experience (Pinar, 2012). This communication is described by Pinar as conversation and characterized as complicated or complex (Pinar, 2012). Complexity is at least partly due to nature of curricula in which history, culture and traditions, knowledge, and predictions of future life are represented in varied forms. Narratives are not only simple descriptions of events as Stephens (2017) has written: Narrative also occurs at three different epistemological and theoretical levels: first, at the meta or “grand” level in which fields or traditions of enquiry are defined and legitimated; second, at the meso or intermediate level in which national or regional narratives are espoused and again legitimated; and, finally, at the micro or personal level in which individuals give a narrative account of their lives. (p. 49)

Consequently, it is easy to understand that curricula can also be considered as narratives, collected, and composed from various perspectives, such as cultural, historical, racial, gendered, political, and so on (e.g., Pinar et al., 1995). Those perspectives may also reveal the innate grand narratives which curricula may contain (Ropo & Yrjänäinen, 2020). Our point in this discussion is focused on curricula and their more or less explicit narratives of aims being often ideological, related to values and beliefs, but also appearing in pedagogical approaches, assessment and evaluation, appreciation of certain type of knowledge, competences, or skills. In the next sections, we will first focus on grand narratives. After that, we will discuss narrativity in understanding complexity and different phenomena.

Curricula and Grand Narratives The concept of grand narrative comes from Lyotard (1984). Grand narratives combine general ideas, ideologies, or trends into a narrative form. We apply this concept to describe the ideological messages that different curricula have. Lyotard

368

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

(1984) does not reflect the concept but shows how some grand narratives are replaced by others in the rewriting of the history. In his analyses of postmodernity Lyotard may seem to replace the grand narratives about the speculative spirit and emancipation with his own positive grand narrative about disagreement, paralogy, multiplicity, incommensurability, and the bliss of the little narratives. A new grand narrative is then able to legitimate science and the social. (Lyotard & Brügger, 2001, p. 85)

Grand narratives can be understood as perspectives that are prevalent and have been recognized from curricular texts. For instance, in history teaching Eurocentrism has been recognized as the dominant narrative in Western societies (Conrad, 2019). According to Conrad (2019), Eurocentric curriculum has typically five characteristics. First, it separates nature from human knowledge and identity. Conrad (2019) argues that this is seen in how people’s “reciprocal relationships to land or land-based systems of thought, belief, policy and religion as past-tense, pre-modern, backward, and/or primitive in order to promote land as property, resource, and territory available for the taking” are presented (p. 5). Second, it centers and names Europeans into key roles in history. Third, it takes European progress as the model or standard by upholding European cultures, values, and civilizations as superior. Fourth, it normalizes the West by presenting “the West as a coherent and exceptional entity in contrast to racialized, less civilized Others” (Conrad, 2019, p. 5). Fifth, it obscures violence and resistance by representing “European violences (e.g., colonialism, settler colonialism, racialization, Trans-Atlantic slavery) as necessary, inevitable, and/or past” (p. 5) (see also Ropo & Yrjänäinen, 2020, p. 518). In the following, we will discuss two examples of ideological narratives, namely the traditional German Bildung in European education, particularly German speaking, and Nordic countries. The second grand narrative we take from the South-East Asia and discuss Indonesia’s national philosophy appearing also in curricula, called Pancasila.

Bildung Bildung can be described as a theory of human beings originating from the late eighteenth century. Bildung is also described as the central theory of education in Germany. It has also influence on traditions of education in German speaking part of Europe, in Nordic countries, and South American countries, such as Brazil (e.g., Sjöström & Eilks, 2020). Bildung has had its impact on curricula through the aims and objectives expressed in the curricula. Autio (2007) argues that admiration of Antiquity plays a key role in the Bildung theory. Bildung is initially and predominantly conceived as cultivation, as a precondition for an educated public. In this sense the understanding of the Bildung of man that does not base primarily on knowledge, but equates Bildung with feeling, or sentiment. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the important figure in Bildung -tradition, in his writings from 1769–1800, believes that what actually guides man is a feeling of virtue. Herder examines

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

369

this feeling under the framework of a philosophical historical concept, the core idea of which is development towards an ultimate goal: the Bildung of humanity. (Autio, 2007, p. 1)

Bildung means educating children for humanity in which virtues have central role. Being “images of God” served also as a Christian ideal for education. However, Bildung theorists do not refer to religion but to nature and its purity in describing the human development towards inner self-cultivation. Autio’s (2007) quote is a good summary of this aim. Nature unfolds organically unspoiled, almost mystically, and certainly not rationally. This conception of nature is a hallmark of Herder’s concept of Bildung and forms the basis for the subsequent treating of Bildung theory as separate from any political context – and establishes definitely the inwardness ideology of the concept of Bildung. With this, Herder formulates a concept of Bildung that through the course of the 18th century wins out over other interpretations: Bildung is a non-political concept that focuses on the individual’s process of inner self-development, unfolding, self- cultivation – in accordance with an organic concept of nature and natural development (Horlacher, 2004, p. 421). (Autio, 2007, p. 1–2)

The Bildung concept was largely adopted to curricula in German speaking and Nordic countries in nineteenth century, for instance, when Finland decided about the general education for all, the so-called folk school in the 1850s and 1860s. Selfcultivation, moral, and spiritual orientation in the national and often patriotic societal context was the basic ideological narrative written in the curricula. Bildung itself was combined with Didaktik in which instructional contents and methods were described and presented for teachers to be followed in the schoolwork. Other than the AngloAmerican curriculum approach, Bildung/Didaktik represents two almost opposites of approaching education. Westbury (1998) has described them as “very different intellectual systems” that “seek to do very different kinds of intellectual and practical work” (p. 48). Like Hakala and Kujala (2021) state, in Bildung, one presumes a connection between an individual’s inner cultivation (an idea of individual perfectibility resulting from continuous study and other activities) and the development of a better and/or more just society (Autio, 2014, p. 18; Horlacher, 2017, pp. 2, 103–106). Hakala & Kujala (2021, p. 476)

Like many curriculum scholars have mentioned, Bildung existed in Finnish curricula the first half of twentieth century (Hakala & Kujala, 2021). After the Second World War, the German influence was reduced in education, and the focus turned into the educational and psychological theorizing from North America. Curricular concepts were largely adopted from Tylerian thinking (Tyler, 1949). However, in the educational reform in the 1970s in which the whole Finnish basic education was revised to consist mandatory 9-year education for all, ideas of Bildung can be seen to be present in curriculum texts. What are then the narrative elements of Bildung in the current Finnish curricula? According to the Finnish National Core Curriculum 2014, education is the basis from students’ growth, development, and learning (Finnish National Core

370

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

Curriculum, 2014, p. 9). Finnish legislation regulates that all students have the right to get education, counseling, and support according to their needs immediately after those needs have been found or diagnosed. These rights emphasize the basic goal of supporting the development of all children to their full potential – whatever it may be. According to Zanini (2018), the most frequently used concepts related to the aims of education in the Finnish NCC text were “the sense of belonging, followed by the self-actualization, cooperation, improving higher strengths, civic virtues, involvement, and well-being” (Zanini, 2018, p. 53). These concepts indicate that in the ideological level, the Bildung narrative has not disappeared from the curriculum but taken a form in which it is mixed with the concepts emerging from societal challenges of growing and developing towards adulthood. Although it can be easily seen that current curricula are often mixtures of differing narrative elements, Bildung, as an ideal, is still an expressed ideological basis for acknowledging every students’ rights to education and support for growth, development, and learning.

Pancasila Indonesia may seem to be a rarely mentioned example in curriculum theorizing. It is interesting because of its history and influence in Asia as a democracy having one of largest populations in the world. Indonesia became an independent state in 1949. However, a few years earlier, in 1945, the first president, Sukarno, laid the ideological basis for the country by his speech later called as the “Birth of Pancasila Address.” In that speech, he laid the basis for state philosophy that had five principles to be accepted as the foundation for independent Indonesia and basis for the constitution (Prawiranegara, 1984, p. 76). Pancasila consists of two old Javanese words, originally from Sanskrit, “pañca” meaning five, and “śīla ” meaning principles. Accordingly, Pancaśīla consists of five “corner stones” or “pillars” that are interconnected: first, the belief in one Great God; second, the belief on a just and civilized humanity; third, the national unity; fourth, the consensual and representative democracy; and fifth, the social justice for all the people. The original Pancasila that Sukarno introduced in 1945 was developed into this form after the speech by the committee working on the ideological basis of the country. Although there has been a lot of discourse on the Pancasila philosophy, it has maintained its status as the ideological basis for education. Although there has been a lot of discourse and conversation on the role of Pancasila, it is clear that Pancasila constitutes both the “Fundamental State Philosophy and Indonesian People’s Worldview” and is often invoked as the panacea for any national social illnesses. Needless to say, each time Pancasila experienced a loss of popularity as a result of its accompanying abusive practices such as at the early years of reformasi, it always found its way back to the hearts of Indonesian figures, including those who have distinguished themselves from the nationalists and, therefore, considered themselves “liberal.” (Iskandar, 2016, p. 725)

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

371

Iskandar and many others (see, e.g., Prawiranegara, 1984) describe the Pancasila as the philosophical basis for Indonesian state that has been disputed every now then by reforms or political movements. Despite of those, it has maintained its foundational status. Pancasila education is part of Indonesian general education. This education “plays an important role in transferring and nurturing values that are in line with the nation’s personality” (Kusdarini et al., 2020, p. 359). Pancasila is part of curriculum and important in every level from primary to university education (Taniredja et al., 2012; Dewantara et al., 2019; Ulfah et al., 2021). It is also mentioned as the foundation for Indonesian societal identity (Saputro, 2021). It is evident that Pancasila as the historical foundation for the postcolonial, independent Indonesia is an important expression of values for education. The five pillars do not, however, compose a logical and coherent value system since they are like separate statements related to belief in one God and ways of living. Eddyono (2018) studied Indonesianness in her dissertation titled “The representations of Indonesianness in post-new order Indonesia (1998–2016).” Using narrative analysis as a method in selected citizenship education textbooks published between 1998 and 2016 in Indonesian higher education, she found three narratives of the nation, namely state-centered, citizens-centered, and ummah-centered narratives (Eddyono, 2018). The three narratives, outlined above, redefine the meaning of the first principle of Pancasila to emphasize the piousness of the nation and Pancasila’s fourth principle to underline Indonesian new democracy. Whereas the state-centered narrative calls for the implementation of Pancasila democracy, the citizens-centered narrative emphasizes the building of democracy. In addition, the ummah-centered narrative underscores a truly Muslim society. (Eddyono, 2018, p. iv)

It is evident that in the curricula Pancasila does not appear as only one narrative but takes different forms according to the different religious, political, or societal perspectives that writers successfully reflect in the textbooks. Pancasila is not represented in the curricula or educational materials only as a philosophical or societal narrative, but it has taken other forms. In the 2013 curriculum, Pancasila has been described as one of the core competencies (Silalahi & Yuwono, 2018). Defining Pancasila in terms of competences is necessary for evaluation purposes, to assess in what extent students have learned the Pancasila values. Silalahi and Yuwono (2018, p. 58) argue that “revitalization in Indonesian education system is absolutely needed, because the values of Pancasila as one of the core competencies that must be owned by the students have not been fundamentally and appropriately implemented in education and learning process.” In this discussion on Indonesian Pancasila, it is evident that this ideological value statement is represented in the curricula as a narrative that students are supposed to learn and show in the assessments as knowledge or competence. The literature concerning Indonesian value education, however, indicates that there are political tensions and discourses between groups representing differing political views of the

372

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

prospects of the future of the country (see, e.g., Iskandar, 2016; Gellert, 2015). What forms and role Pancasila will have in the future revisions of curricula will be seen. To summarize the discussion concerning grand narratives in the curricula, it is obvious that grand narratives are seen important to enhance, for example, value education, communication of conceptions and beliefs for national or cultural identities, and societal integrity. Those grand narratives may be less explicit or hidden in the text for differing interpretations of their meaning by textbook authors and teachers.

Narratives of Phenomena Understanding natural or scientific phenomena has a major role in education and educational goals. Some of the phenomena are simple, others more complex, or a few extremely complex. Our purpose, however, is not to discuss the complexity of problems or phenomena as such but to understand how complexity can be dealt with in education and particularly in curricula. We do this by referring to two timely examples of theorizing phenomena for educational purposes. First, one deals with climate change and, second, complex phenomena overall in physics and natural sciences. We will begin by discussing climate change as an educationally challenging phenomenon. Colliver (2017) has analyzed Australian curriculum and stated that it does not make any explicit statement of climate change as a phenomenon to be taught. However, there are elements of this education spread into different subjects and topics, mostly those relating to sustainability. In Finnish National Core Curriculum (2014), climate change has been mentioned a few times typically in the context of enhancing sustainable way of living or ecosocial education. Those descriptions do not refer to any specific contents or subjects but overall goals of enhancing sustainable ways of living whatever they may be. Understanding the need for urgent responses preventing global warming has created new movements, political and social activity, and scientific research to both understand the phenomenon and find innovative solutions. How effective those are will be seen in the future. In education, the problem is how to present climate change as a phenomenon and how to educate young generation to become more responsible in relations to nature. Stickney and Skilbeck (2020) classify four theoretical approaches explaining the climate change in education. These approaches can be understood as narratives because they make a point of a plot in terms of what the phenomenon is about. The first narrative addresses climate change as a crisis. It is a critical approach explaining the reasons of the crisis, urging the education for sustainability, and seeking for more problem-solving approaches for the transformative education. The second type of narratives explains human and non-human perspectives of the environmental studies seeing humans as leading powers over the nature and describing the complex relationships between humans and non-humans, fostering more empathy towards non-humans. The third narrative is supporting ideas of

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

373

participation, agency, and activism, inviting the students to be more proactive, and nurtures the importance of self-development. Finally, the fourth narrative is a more decolonizing intersectional approach, exploring the connections to our planet through indigenous prospective, meaning it tries to seek for answers where it was not searched before. All the above types of narratives are picked from articles in which perspectives to understand and react to climate change in education are discussed. At this point, we may summarize the discussion on climate change in curricula by referring to Nelson and Brodie (2011) who have emphasized school curricula have generally reflected poorly upon a sense of urgency towards social, economic, or cultural issues, let alone to ever increasing environmental degradation and global climate change. (Nelson & Brodie, 2011)

In science education, narrativity has been investigated by several researchers. For instance, Borisenkova (2009) has pointed to three perspectives concerning the narrative basis of scientific knowledge, namely, “discipline’s biography as a narrative, narrative as a representation of social phenomena, and narrative as a kind of logic, embedded in the process of sociological explanation” (Borisenkova, 2009, p. 1). All those perspectives are relevant for teaching and instruction; however, curricula may represent those aspects only partially if at all. Fuchs et al. (2021) have done an interesting series of studies concerning complex systems and narrativity. Referring to Bruner (1990), they base their argumentation on hypothesizing that humans have narrative mind and that we prefer understanding events, facts, and phenomena by constructing narratives out of them. Narratives are natural way of communication from early age as Egan (1986, 1988) has shown. Fuchs et al. (2021) point out that narrativity enhances understanding complexity and complex phenomena. To them, complexity and complex systems are characterized by being “dynamical systems that exhibit several if not all of the following features: 1. they are not composed of the same elements over and over again; rather, they are made of elements having (strongly) different properties; 2. interactions between elements lead to feedback that is complicated in some sense (mathematically speaking, feedback leads to nonlinearities); 3. their structure and behavior are not strictly stable; their structure can change (evolve) over time; and 4. components in a system can come together by chance and for only very brief periods, maybe just for creating a single event (the components form an ephemeral mechanism” (Fuchs et al., 2021, p. 31–32). With ephemeral mechanism, they refer to Glennan (2010) who argued that instead of being stable and predictable many systems and phenomena are, for instance, in natural and human history often consequences of causal processes that are ephemeral and capricious. Even those he calls as mechanisms (Glennan, 2010).

374

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

Fuchs et al. (2021) recognized that many systems having or including different phenomena are extremely complex to model and understand by students and young people, and therefore, it is necessary to learn more in what “extent our narrative minds can help us deal scientifically with complexity” (p. 32). By examining human experience of understanding complex systems, they summarize their points as follows: In summary, we suggest that we are led to narrative understanding of (complex) systems by introducing the notion of forces imagined as agents active in possibly ephemeral mechanisms. Our mind creates story-worlds (environments populated by agents) which are excellent representations of models whose simulations work as stories told against the backdrop of the story-world. (Fuchs et al., 2021, p. 33)

Fuchs and his colleagues use the metaphor of a storyworld to refer to an imaginary representation of complex systems or phenomena. That kind of a storyworld makes possible for the students to create a narrative of the relations between the agents (e.g., forces), sequence of events, and causality of the actions of agents. Dumont and colleagues have demonstrated this model of narrativity in explaining a rather complex system of fuel cells in producing electricity, for instance, for vehicles (see Dumont et al., 2021). The above researchers argue that explaining and understanding the experience of complexity requires a narrative approach. This applies to educating young people but also to researchers as well (Fuchs et al., 2021). In discussing the use of narratives in understanding complex phenomena, Fuchs et al. (2021) refer also Wise (2011) who showed how story-like patterns arise when modeling a phenomenon with a bundle of simulations (see also Wise, 2017). The results of those simulations are understood as a story, and consequently, the simulation is understood as a narrative act. In other domains, complexity is often described similarly by narratives. For example, Morgan (2001) applied this model to economists who tell stories of economic systems. This same method has also been applied in natural sciences (Corni, 2013) and understanding natural historical phenomena (Norris et al., 2005). On the basis of their experiences in developing the narrative methodology in teaching about complex systems to both engineering and teacher students, Fuchs et al. (2021) suggest a general heuristic strategy to be used in designing education. Step 1: Observe and identify phenomena and foreground a system that is associated with these phenomena. Step 2: Identify mechanisms for the phenomena the system presents us with. Step 3: (Learn to) perform a figure ground reversal to let forces of nature appear as agents acting in these mechanisms. Step 4: Tell stories about the phenomena and use the stories to construct story-worlds; learn how to translate the story-worlds into model-worlds that represent the properties of agents and environments and their interactions. Use the models for simulations and analyze these simulations as additional stories told about phenomena the system can present us with. Step 5: Learn to recognize ephemeral mechanisms and how to create ephemeral storyworlds. Realize that the steps 1–4 in our heuristic of dealing with (complex dynamical) systems also work in the face of ephemeral mechanisms. (p. 47)

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

375

The researchers conclude the success of their work in developing the methodology by stating that our experience has told us that the often rather difficult task of creating and using models of dynamical systems can be taught rather successfully to a wide(r) range of audiences if it is treated narratively rather than as a purely formal exercise. While dynamical models are often used for dealing with relatively simple systems, the methodology is indispensable for working scientifically with complexity. (Fuchs et al., 2021, p. 48)

Stories are important in education, but they may also be problematic, like we have written before (Ropo & Yrjänäinen, 2020). For instance, Pratt (2019) has emphasized the pedagogical complexity of stories. This view was inspired by Doll’s (1993) theorizing of stories as a dialogical forum for “complicated” or “complex conversations” in which inquiry, indeterminacy, and reflection are typically present. Pratt (2019) suggested that “telling and re-telling of stories, we create, imagine, connect, and convey our thoughts and ideas” (p. 128). In this case, she is speaking of classroom activities and how to formulate the educational contents. This same idea was evident in Doll’s (1993, 2002) description of the concept of complex conversations, which referred partly to using stories in instruction (Ropo & Värri, 2019). Stories are essential to conversation, although there are certain limitations in storying the curriculum contents in instruction. Students seem to acquire knowledge, not piece by piece, but into holistic entities toward narratives that fit their ethnic, racial, ideological, or other personally important identities. For instance, Epstein (2016) found a clear difference in the learning results between African-American and European-American students. All the students were taught history by white teachers. Results indicated that students’ racial identities had a big influence on their interpretations of US history. We will now point to the last perspective in discussing narratives of phenomena in curricula. This perspective concerns degree programs at the university level. Zen et al. (2021, 2022) have studied an international teacher education program in which 30 Indonesian teachers participated a masters degree program organized by a Finnish university. Teacher identities and school practices differ between the two countries clearly, and it was found in the interviews of the students during the progress of the program. However, it was found that students seemed to create a narrative space in which they called themselves as “Birlanders” (students being originally from Bireun, Aceh, and studying with Finnish teachers, “Finlanders”). This narrative space gave them options to reposition themselves as teachers. Being no more an Indonesian teacher but not becoming a Finnish teacher either was the space that kind of emancipated the participants to seek new kinds of professional identities as a teacher (see Zen et al., 2022). This case indicates that seeing curriculum as an architecture of narrative instructional space may lead to new perspectives of understanding not only international education programs but also other programs in which professional identity or repositioning as a professional in terms of identity and practitioner is the focus.

376

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

Competence-Based Curricula and Narrativity History of competence-based curricula can be traced back to last century, for instance, to Tyler’s (1949) rationale in which defining specific learning goals was one of the four steps in designing curriculum and instruction. In this section, we do not, however, focus on the historical development in the curriculum concept but will discuss the narrativity and narratives involved in this educational perspective. Current models in competence-based approaches may be summarized with three terms, namely, key competences, sustainable development, and twenty-first century skills. All those terms have been emphasized as basic goals in many countries (see González-Salamanca et al., 2020). Young and Muller (2010) have described the current situation within education ranging between two schools of thought and practice. The first one is a pragmatic approach emphasizing market demands for cultivating students’ engagement with the information society, digitalization, and new media. Instead of focusing on discipline-based knowledge, like the traditional school curricula, students need specific competencies and skills to succeed in new kind of labor markets (see also Ellis & Loveless, 2013). According to Young and Muller (2010), “education is about enabling learners to engage with disciplinedbased ‘powerful knowledge,’ knowledge they are not likely to acquire out of school and that is important for them as future active and educated citizens” (p. 2). This “powerful knowledge” is something else than traditional subject matter studies have offered. Both the twenty-first century skills as key competences, introduced by, for instance, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) originally conceived by the United Nations, represent curricular goals that are based on globally and socially shared narratives (UN, 2015; Vavik & Salomon, 2016). Those narratives concern the expected future and life as a citizen. One is optimistic the other is more pessimistic. Digitalized societies, limitless access to data and information, and social communication are narratives that introduce future as positive with options to innovate, spend free time or work, and use different services, alone or in networks, without restrictions of time and place. The narrative concerns mostly life prospects in developed countries with rich high technology environments and solutions for people to live in. The other narrative for the future concerning the whole planet deals with sustainable development and survival of humankind. United Nations’ 17 Goals for Sustainable Development contain concerns about the uncertain future if we do not react immediately. Concern does not only relate to climate or nature but deal with many other concerns, such as equity and equality, education, and poverty. Those sustainability issues influence both nature and human life everywhere. Seventeen Goals for Sustainable Development (SDG) can be understood as 17 narratives related to the future. Like the preamble of the program states: This Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It also seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom. We recognize that eradicating poverty in all its forms and

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

377

dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan. We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path. As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets which we are announcing today demonstrate the scale and ambition of this new universal Agenda. They seek to build on the Millennium Development Goals and complete what these did not achieve. They seek to realize the human rights of all and to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. They are integrated and indivisible and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental. (UN, 2030)

Although the UN 17 Goals for Sustainability are not educational goals but political dealing with the future of the whole world, it is evident that they should serve as the foundational narrative for educating young people for the future. Having the above described two narratives, namely, positive “information society” narrative requiring skills to succeed in digitalized world and concurrently a more pessimistic narrative prospect for the sustainability, is a big challenge for education and curricula in general. Can we reach goals for sustainability with twenty-first century skills, is a question everyone in charge should be interested in. We have doubts of our success. In economic competition between developed countries, the twenty-first century skills approach in education may work by providing young people competencies to enter high tech labor market; however, same curricular strategies may not work the same in developing countries struggling with varying problems concerning, for instance, the issues raised in the SDG. Concerning the strategies various countries have adopted concerning the optional narratives of the future, there are no simple way of adjusting to both futures. According to González-Salamanca et al. (2020), most countries had adopted twenty-first century skills in the curricula at least at some level; however, SDGs were not as explicitly represented in the curricular goals. This may be due to the difficulty of translating narratives of sustainable development into competencies or skills to be acquired as part of discipline-based education. This difficulty of interpreting political goals or philosophies in terms of competences is a major deficiency in competence-based curriculum perspective. As an empirical case, we look at the Finnish national curriculum for basic education. The national curriculum is a core curriculum requiring local authorities to develop local and school-based curricula. Although the Finnish Core Curriculum (2014) (FCC) is normative, it gives options and freedom for schools and authorities to adjust education to the local context. The emphasis of goals is clearly in the competences. The 549-page document, for instance, introduces the concept of “transversal competence.” This and other competence areas such as “cultural competence, interaction, and self-expression” are largely based on twenty-first century skills (Zilliacus et al., 2017, p. 234–235). To summarize the above discussion on competence-based curricula, we may state that this types of curricula are based on narratives, but those narratives may not be

378

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

explicit in the curriculum texts. It seems that the narratives of the information society or world demanding more focus on sustainability are becoming, if not being already, competing grand narratives of the future. However, if the narratives behind the expressed competence goals are hidden or implicit, it is hard to discuss the validity of educational goals. Competing narratives concerning the future are important, but they should be open for complicated or complex conversation which curriculumrelated discourses are. What we may miss in competency-based education is developing the values and feelings of responsibility concerning the nature or other issues related to 17 SDGs. The strategies we may adopt in addressing this dilemma can be divided into three. First, we may add new scientific knowledge to curricula to be taught, learnt, and later assessed in the tests and exams. Second, we may study the traditions, practices, UN, 2030, and futures by different pedagogical approaches, such as the critical ecopedagogy (Misiaszekin, 2016). Purpose of the critical approaches is to reveal social conflicts, economic interests, political strategies, and power structures underlying the current, often unequal, practices. Many of those approaches are based on Mezirov’s concept “transformative education” (e.g., Mezirow, 1997). However, there has also been criticism about their success in environmental education (see Stickney & Skilbeck, 2020). Goodson and Petrucci-Rosa (2020) have suggested another narrative approach in which crossing cultural boundaries with stories can create meaningful experiences. Their example is a life-historical narrative of an indigenous teacher living in the Xingu Park in Brazil. The benefit of these kinds of approaches may be in offering narratives important for global and globally relevant understanding. Third, we may invest in curricular thinking in which the aim is at ontological identity transformations and positional changes in personal, social, and cultural/ global identities. This approach will require as its starting point, recognition of local, traditional narratives concerning relations between the community and oneself with the nature and environment, other people, and cultures. The goal of education is not a fragmentary collection of skills or competencies but ontological repositioning in the personal, social, and cultural relations to oneself, others, and environment whether it is near or far. Power of education in affecting the future or changing it may be limited. We know the results only in the long term, maybe after tens of years. This makes curricula even more important as a philosophically, socially, and scientifically designed document for educating young people.

Cultural Narratives in Curricula As the final perspective concerning narrativity in curricula, we will discuss the status of multicultural narratives in the national curricula. According to Rizvi (2009), multiculturalism and cultural diversity are part of policymaking in most countries. In curricula, multicultural perspective is often a normative orientation emphasizing cultural pluralism, equity and equality, social justice, human rights, and democracy

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

379

(Zilliacus et al., 2017). Amount of literature on multicultural education is huge, and we would be easily tempted to discuss the topic from the US perspective (see, e.g., Au et al., 2016). Instead, we will focus on national curricula in the countries in our own neighborhoods, Finland, and other Nordic countries. In Finland, narratives on multicultural education are mostly due to increasing migration in the last few decades. Basic narratives are constructed on human rights, equity, and equality of all children. Same education for all and minimizing social differences have been the foundational pillar for curriculum reforms since 1970 when Finland revised the mandatory basic education (Zilliacus et al., 2017). Zilliacus et al. (2017) point, however, that emphasis of multicultural education has often been in immigrant and certain ethnic minority groups. The goal is most often to get along and learn about different cultures and, particularly, to socialize immigrant population into the Finnish society and culture. This perspective is emphasizing the majority narrative in which those who represent the main national culture need to learn about differences to understand minorities and their cultures better. Issues related to power or justice are hardly ever mentioned in the curriculum texts. Like Zilliacus et al. (2017) argue The government’s educational policy . . . has a clear emphasis on Finnish cultural identity and seeing comprehensive school education as strongly rooted in a unified “Finnish civilisation”, which is tied to humanist and Christian values (Ministry of Education, 2000). (p. 239)

Zilliacus et al. (2017) have analyzed changes in the Finnish national curricula over the period of three revisions (1994–2014) concluding that the development “appears explicitly as a movement from a tolerance-oriented and a nationbound curriculum towards a pluralist and globally oriented curriculum” (p. 244). One of the most discussed and well-known minority in the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden and Finland) and the North-Western part of Russia is Sámi culture. Sámi is not only a native language having at least four dialects, but it is a cultural identity, lifestyle, and tradition and has also a specific spiritual aspect of its own. According to Balto (1997), traditional Sámi upbringing includes learning through work and play. There are certain customs through which Sámi children have been taught tolerance and sensitivity, or attention to others. Narration and stories have always been important as an educational practice to teach and share experiences and cultural traditions. According to the Finnish National Core Curriculum, Sámi education is separated from the mainstream Finnish curriculum. However, the scope is limited to their growth towards active bilingualism and multiculturalism. Sámi students have the right to have basic education by their own language that is dealt as the first language in their studies. Other than those emphases, the curriculum is the same for Sámi as well as other students in the country. In this respect, the narrative that the curriculum delivers is limited and acknowledging only partially the cultural heritage of Sámi population. Rights to use one’s own language in education as well as public services arelegislated in Finland since the 1990s and 2000.

380

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

According to the National Core Curriculum, the central aim of the education of Sámispeaking pupils is to support their growth towards active bilingualism and multiculturalism. All subjects support the development of pupils’ proficiency in the first language in education in the Sámi language. Education should support pupils’ identification with their national cultural heritage and bonding with the Sámi who lives in different countries. (Finnish National Board of Education, 2004, p. 334)

Referring to Banks’ (1997/1989) model of multicultural teaching, Hirvonen (2003/2004) has analyzed the levels of Sámi Schools in multiculturalism. Some of those schools represent the first level offering Sámi myths, holidays, and certain parts of the culture as “spices” in teaching. According to Hirvonen (2003/2004), none of the Sámi Schools have reached the top fourth or fifth level in which the school is totally multicultural. Reasons are myriad, for instance, socioeconomic or linguistic, and same problems can be found elsewhere among indigenous people’s schools (Bartels & Bartels, 1995; Keskitalo, 2003; Darnell & Hoëm, 1996; Lipka et al., 1998). From the narrative point of view, colonization of indigenous people was characterized removing the cultural narratives from education and separating indigenous people from their origins. In Nordic countries, Sámi people have to follow national regulations of the countries where they live. The curriculum narrative is Western with some additions from Sàmi culture and language. Students are not socialised into their own culture as deeply as preferred because the Sámi teaching is organised and based on the prevailing values of Western education. (Keskitalo et al., 2012, p. 336)

History of Sàmi education is based on assimilation, particularly in the early years of educational systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Eriksen, 2018). The narrative turn since then may be a symbolic one as Kemi Gjerpe (2017) has argued. Our short analyses of the literature indicates that curriculum narratives in Nordic countries concerning indigenous Sàmi education are still monocultural, Western, and based on whiteness (Eriksen, 2018; Røthing, 2017; Svendsen, 2014). The identity narratives this kind of curricula and education offer are mixed and at best mainstream oriented with a mixture of cultural scent of traditions.

Discussion We began this chapter by quoting by referring to Barthes and Duisit (1975) who claimed that narratives are everywhere. We have here discussed the nature of narrativity in curricula. Consequently, we may argue that narratives are the foundation of curricula as well. Grand narratives relating to philosophical bases, historical and cultural heritage, or predictions of the future can be found in general education and national curricula. Those narratives have the function of integrating societies under the common cultural identity. They may also deal with the future, positive or pessimistic, to influence on the futuristic scenarios of the individuals, nation-state,

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

381

industry, or technologies. Competition and comparison to others may be part of the grand narratives as well. Nature of narratives accepted as the bases for curricula is increasingly important. Narratives can be restricted, based on limited scientific foundation, ethically limited or unfair. Like Meretoja (2017) has emphasized, narratives are not inherently harmful or beneficial; their ethical value is contextual and dependent on how it is interpreted and practiced in a particular social, historical, and cultural world (p. 91–92). Mäkelä et al. (2021) add that despite their basic nature of not being ethical or unethical, certain types of narrative forms may include portable risks that “may be actualized independent of the storyteller’s intentions” (p. 5). This is particularly true with personal narratives of teachers that may or may not be related to grand narratives discussed largely in developing the national curricula. Narratives are and will continue to be needed, but they contain risks mentioned above. Concerning narrativity of different phenomena, whether they are related to nature (e.g., climate change), societies, or we as individuals here and now or in the future, we may say that narratives dominate the discussion. This argument is based on our assumption that also scientific knowledge cannot be separated from being narrative, i.e., based on facts and beliefs and plots that we created to understand complexity or complicated phenomena. Those kind of narrativity is needed from pedagogical purposes as well. Phenomenon-related narratives can also be politically controversial. For instance, multiculturalism, rights of people, questions of equality, and equity or democracy are often narrated without reference to questions of power or dominance that may make the publicly expressed narratives obsolete. We want to conclude this discussion by stating that curricula are narrative and narrative basis can be found in differing levels from grand to competences and subject matters. However, as we stated, many narratives are implicit and hidden into the aims and goals, making them less vulnerable for open public discussion. Publicity and open discourses in which the scientific complexities, alternative perspectives, and voice for all are needed to ensure that narratives on which curricula are based on are accepted as the basis of education for the future.

References Abbott, H. P. (2008). The Cambridge introduction to narrative (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Autio, T. (2007). Towards european curriculum studies. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies Vol. 3. (February 2007). https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index. php/jaaacs/article/view/187654/185757. Autio, T. (2014). The internationalization of curriculum research. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), International handbook of curriculum research (2nd ed., pp. 17–31). New York, NY: Routledge. Au, W., Brown, A. L., & Calderón, D. (2016). Reclaiming the multicultural roots of US curriculum: Communities of color and official knowledge in education. Teachers College Press. Balto, A. (1997). Sámi education in Norway, from a purely Norwegian education to an expanded Sámi curriculum. Report 1308/1997. Geneva: International Service for Human Rights, United Nations.

382

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

Banks, J. A. (1997/1989). Approaches to multicultural curriculum reform. In J. A. Banks & C. A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education. Issues and perspectives (pp. 229–250). Allyn & Bacon. Bartels, D. A., & Bartels, A. L. (1995). When the North was red: Aboriginal education in Soviet Siberia (Vol. 11). McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Barthes, R., & Duisit, L. (1975). An introduction to the structural analysis of narrative. New Literary History, 6(2), 237–272. https://doi.org/10.2307/468419 Borisenkova, A. (2009). Narrative foundations of knowing: Towards a new perspective in the sociology of knowledge. Sociological Research Online, 14(5), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro. 2011 Bruner, J. (1985). Chapter VI: Narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought. Teachers College Record, 86(6), 97–115. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Colliver, A. (2017). Education for climate change and a real-world curriculum. Curriculum Perspectives, 37(1), 73–78. Conrad, J. (2019). The Big History Project and colonizing knowledges in world history curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2018.1493143 Corni F. (ed.) (2013): Le scienze nella prima educazione. Trento: Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson, Italy. Darnell, F., & Hoëm, A. (1996). Taken to extremes: Education in the far north. Scandinavian University Press. Dewantara, J. A., Suhendar, I. F., Rosyid, R., & Atmaja, T. S. (2019). Pancasila as ideology and characteristics civic education in Indonesia. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Studies, 1(5), 400–405. Doll Jr, W. E. (1993). A post-modern perspective on curriculum. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Doll Jr, W. E. (2002). Ghosts and curriculum. In W. E. Doll Jr & N. Gough (Eds.), Curriculum visions. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Dumont, E., Fuchs, H. U., Corni, F., Contini, A., Altiero, T., Romagnoli, M., & Karwasz, G. P. (2021). FCHgo: Fuel Cells HydroGen educatiOnal model for schools, an imaginative approach to hydrogen and fuel cell technology for young students and their teachers. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1929(1), 012019. IOP Publishing. Eddyono, S. (2018) The representations of Indonesianness in post-new order Indonesia (1998– 2016). Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. Available at http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/ 34527/ Egan, K. (1986). Teaching as story telling. The University of Chicago Press. Egan, K. (1988). Primary understanding. Education in early childhood. Routledge. Ellis, V., & Loveless, A. (2013). ICT, pedagogy and the curriculum: Subject to change. Routledge. Epstein, T. (2016). The relationship between narrative construction and identity in history education: Implications for teaching and learning. Educar em Revista, 60, 161–170. https://doi.org/10. 1590/0104-4060.46024. Eriksen, K. G. (2018). The indigenous Sami citizen and Norwegian national identity: Tensions in curriculum discourses. Human Rights Education Review, 1(2), 25–45. https://doi.org/10.7577/ hrer.2852 Finnish Core Curriculum (2014). National core curriculum for basic education, Finnish National Agency for Education. Helsinki. Finnish National Board of Education (2004); Perusopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2004. (National core curriculum 2004) Vammala: Vammalan kirjapaino. Fuchs, H. U., Corni, F., & Dumont, E. (2021). Narrativity in complex systems. In Science | Environment| Health (pp. 31–50). Springer, Cham. Gellert, P. K. (2015). Optimism and education: The new ideology of development in Indonesia. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(3), 371–393.

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

383

Glennan, S. (2010). Ephemeral mechanisms and historical explanation. Erkenntnis, 72, 251–266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9203-9 González-Salamanca, J. C., Agudelo, O. L., & Salinas, J. (2020). Key competences, education for sustainable development and strategies for the development of 21st century skills. A systematic literature review. Sustainability, 12(24), 10366. Goodson, I., & Petrucci-Rosa, M. I. (2020). Curriculum as narrative: Crossing borders for a decolonized education. Trayectorias Humanas Trascontinentales, (8), 1–15. https://doi.org/10. 25965/trahs.2931 Hakala, L., & Kujala, T. (2021). A touchstone of Finnish curriculum thought and core curriculum for basic education: Reviewing the current situation and imagining the future. Prospects, 51, 1–15. Hirvonen, V. (2003/2004). Sámi culture and the Sámi school. Reflections by Sámi teachers and the realization of the Sámi school. An evaluation study of reform 97. ČálliidLágádus. Horlacher, R. (2004). Bildung–A construction of a history of philosophy of education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23(5), 409–426. Horlacher, R. (2017). The educated subject and the German concept of Bildung: A comparative cultural history. New York, NY: Routledge. Iskandar, P. (2016). The Pancasila delusion. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 46(4), 723–735. Kemi Gjerpe, K. (2017). Samisk læreplanverk–en symbolsk forpliktelse? En begrepsanalyse av det samiske innholdet i Læreplanverket Kunnskapsløftet og Kunnskapsløftet Samisk. Nordic Studies in Education, 37(3–4), 150–165. Keskitalo, J. H. (2003). “Sámi skuvlla” ovdáneapmi ja dan báikkálaš heiveheapmi – suohkaniid ja skuvllaid plánain ja oahpaheaddjiid oaiviliid mielde [”Sámi School” development and the local expiation –implementation in commune and school plans, and about teacher opinions]. In V. Hirvonen (Ed.), Sámi skuvla plánain ja praktihkas. Mo dustet O97S hástalusaid? Reforpma 97 evalueren [Sámi School in plans and practice. How to ensure the challenges of O97Sámi? The Reform 97 evaluation] (pp. 20–35). Kárášjohka: ČálliidLágádus Keskitalo, P., Määttä, K., & Uusiautti, S. (2012). Sámi education in Finland. Early Child Development and Care, 182(3–4), 329–343. Kusdarini, E., Sunarso, S., & Arpannudin, I. (2020). The implementation of pancasila education through field work learning model. Jurnal Cakrawala Pendidikan, 39(2), 359–369. Lipka, J., Mohatt, G.V., & the Ciulistet Group (Eds.) (1998). Transforming the culture of schools. Yup’ik Eskimo examples (p. 201–228). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J. F., & Brügger, N. (2001). What about the postmodern? The concept of the postmodern in the work of Lyotard. Yale French Studies, 99, 77–92. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2903244 Mäkelä, M., Björninen, S., Karttunen, L., Nurminen, M., Raipola, J., & Rantanen, T. (2021). Dangers of narrative: A critical approach to narratives of personal experience in contemporary story economy. Narrative, 29(2), 139–159. Meretoja, H. (2014). The narrative turn in fiction and theory: The crisis and return of storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier (p. 2014). Palgrave Macmillan. Meretoja, H. (2017). On the use and abuse of narrative for life: Toward an ethics of storytelling. In B. Schiff, A. E. McKim, & S. Patron (Eds.), Life and narrative: The risks and responsibilities of storying experience (pp. 75–98). Oxford University Press. Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997(74), 5–12. Ministry of Education. (2000). Education and research 1999–2004. Ministry of Education. Misiaszek, G. W. (2016). Ecopedagogy as an element of citizenship education: The dialectic of global/local spheres of citizenship and critical environmental pedagogies. International Review of Education, 62(5), 587–607. Morgan, M. S. (2001). Models, stories and the economic world. Journal of Economic Methodology, 8(3), 361–384.

384

E. Ropo and S. Yrja¨na¨inen

Nelson and Brodie (2011); Nelson, T., & Brodie, C. (2011). Chronicles from a watershed: Consideration of place and pedagogy. San Diego: University Readers Inc.. Norris, S. P., Guilbert, S. M., Smith, M. L., Hakimelahi, S., & Phillips, L. M. (2005). A theoretical framework for narrative explanation in science. Science Education, 89(4), 535–563. Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory? Routledge. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Taubman, P. M., & Slattery, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses (Vol. 17). Peter Lang. Pratt, S. S. (2019). The pedagogical complexity of story. In M. Quinn (Ed.), Complexifying curriculum studies reflections on the generative and generous gifts of William E. Doll, Jr. (pp. 128–134). New York, NY: Routledge. Prawiranegara, S. (1984). Pancasila as the Sole Foundation. Indonesia, 38, 74–83. Rizvi, F. (2009). Global mobility and the challenges of educational research and policy. Teachers College Record, 111(14), 268–289. Ropo, E., & Värri, V. M. (2019). Complex Conversations on Curriculum: Ghosts and the Five C’s Revisited. In M. Quinn (Ed.), Complexifying curriculum studies reflections on the generative and generous gifts of William E. Doll, Jr. (pp. 182–190). New York, NY: Routledge. Ropo, E., & Yrjänäinen, S. (2020). Narrativity in Instructional Communication. The Handbook of Applied Communication Research, 513–529. Wiley. Røthing, Å. (2017). Sexual orientation in Norwegian science textbooks: Heteronormativity and selective inclusion in textbooks and teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 67, 143–151. Saputro, A. (2021). Sociological Foundation of Pancasila education as the original identity of Indonesian society. Jurnal Etika Demokrasi, 6(1), 45–53. Silalahi, R., & Yuwono, U. (2018). The sustainability of Pancasila in Indonesian education system. Research in Social Sciences and Technology, 3(2), 58–78. Sjöström, J., & Eilks, I. (2020). The Bildung theory—From von Humboldt to Klafki and beyond. In B. Akpan & T. J. Kennedy (Eds.), Science education in theory and practice (Springer texts in education) (pp. 55–67). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43620-95 Stephens, D. (2017). Narrative and life history research in international education: Reconceptualization from the field. In I. Goodson, A. Antikainen, & M. Andrews, (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook on narrative and life history (pp.49–59). London: Routledge. Stickney, J., & Skilbeck, A. (2020). Problematising “transformative” environmental education in a climate crisis. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(4), 791–806. Svendsen, S. H. B. (2014). Learning racism in the absence of ‘race’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21(1), 9–24. Taniredja, T., Afandi, M., & Faridli, E. M. (2012). The appropriate Pancasila education contents to implant lofty values for Indonesian students. Educare, 5(1), 107–116. Tyler, R. W. (1949) Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Ulfah, N., Safudin, E., & Hidayah, Y. (2021). Construction of legal education in college education through Pancasila education. Lambung Mangkurat Law Journal, 6(1), 12–25. UN. (2015). Sustainable development goals. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ UN. (2030). Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. https://sdgs. un.org/2030agenda Vavik, L., & Salomon, G. (2016). Twenty first century skills vs. disciplinary studies? In Y. Rosen, S. Ferrara, & M. Mosharraf (Eds.), Handbook of research on technology tools for real-world skill development (pp. 1–12). IGI Global. Westbury, I. (1998). Didaktik and curriculum studies. Peter Lang. Wise, M. N. (2011). Science as (historical) narrative. Erkenntnis, 75(3), 349–376. Wise, M. N. (2017). On the narrative form of simulations. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 62, 74–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.03.010 Young, M., & Muller, J. (2010). Three educational scenarios for the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 11–27.

Curriculum and Narrativity: Understanding Curricula as Narratives

385

Zanini, A. (2018). The Finnish National Core Curriculum under the lens of positive psychology: viewpoint of socioemotional and cognitive learning in grades 1–2 (Master’s thesis, Itä-Suomen yliopisto). Zen, S., Ropo, E., & Kupila, P. (2021). Teacher identity under reconstruction: Positional analysis of negotiations in an international teacher education programme. Australian Journal of Teacher Education (Online), 46(4), 63–80. Zen, S., Ropo, E., & Kupila, P. (2022). International teacher education programme as a narrative space for teacher identity reconstruction. Teaching and Teacher Education, 109, 103527. Zilliacus, H., Holm, G., & Sahlström, F. (2017). Taking steps towards institutionalising multicultural education–The national curriculum of Finland. Multicultural Education Review, 9(4), 231–248.

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher in Participatory Research Susan Jagger

Abstract

In this chapter, I play with Jacques Derrida’s discussion and use of the postcard, of envois, and take up Jasper Johns’ invitation to “Take an object, do something with it, and then do something else with it” as I share reflections on a research project that engaged children as researchers. I bring together multiple texts of the research space – anecdotal postcards to J (Jacques and Jasper), reflective musings, and theoretical marginalia – that at once inform and guide each other in conversation as I meditate on the role/s of the participatory researcher, the opening (and closing) of a reciprocally respectful research space, and deconstruction at work within curricular research and the curriculum of research. Keywords

Participatory research · Deconstruction · Research with children · Role of researcher

S. Jagger (*) School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_58

387

388

S. Jagger

Drawing of Plato and Socrates by Matthew Paris of St. Albans (d. 1259). Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 304: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/5885f370-ffea-4c09-9d01-a0d4399e82af/

Dear J, In this chapter, and indeed in the research process shared in its pages, I play with your (Jacques Derrida) discussion and use of the postcard. Envois – sendings, parcels, letters, consignments, raisings, kickoffs, dispatches, missives, and transmissions – are used to share the research narrative with an audience whose extent I will never know. I write to you, J, but once the cards leave my hand, should I decide to release them, what path will they take? Will they arrive at a destination? And what will that destination be? How will they be read? How will they be understood? These very conditions of envois trace a dispersal and deferral of meaning that is already running through the research. Through the cards of “Envois” (Derrida, 1987), you describe an illustration found, one of Socrates and Plato. Plato stands behind his teacher Socrates and appears, so it would seem, to be directing Socrates’ hand, directing the hand of his teacher, reversing the role of student to that of teacher. Like the (apparent) move of Plato to direct the hand of Socrates, J, there are too reversals, upsettings, overturnings of binary oppositions throughout the reflections on participatory research with children shared in this chapter. What is is typically

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

389

what is not. Children’s voices are validated and heard above those of adults. The expert is the student. The student is the expert. Researched is researcher. Deconstruction, of course, is at work within this work, as in all works. Deconstruction resonates as well with the work and words of you too, J (Jasper Johns). I came to your work in an evening art class at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I was in the depths of the research journey, immersed in writing and wanting to have a weekly break from its all-encompassing grip. The class was called Introduction to Everything, and it included, well, a bit of everything. One week, we played with printmaking and our instructor shared with us a quote of yours to keep in mind as we worked with the materials and the process: “Take an object, do something with it, and then do something else with it” (Johns, 1963/64, p. 31). I took your invitation up in my art making in this course, and also in my art making in research: taking a research text, reviewing and rewriting it, and then reviewing and rewriting once again. That invitation can be traced through this chapter as I bring together postcards from the research space with reflective musings and theoretical marginalia1, taking a text, doing something with it, then doing something else with it, and posting it to the reader to further review and rewrite in their reading. And for me, and in this research and in this chapter, these turns were necessary and ethical movements. You see, J, I had grown, and still am, at once frustrated and saddened by the seemingly endless empirical studies of elementary school students and environmental education done by university experts coming into elementary classes for the briefest periods of time and, after a short episode of two of observation and perhaps a five point Likert-type survey, making direct and unquestioned assertions about what they see happening and what should be done to improve teaching and learning, all of which are shared in scholarly journals and academic conferences. I wanted to reverse the role that I took and also that the students took. I was not the expert – really, the students that I was able to learn with were, they were the experts. I chose to reverse the role throughout the research project – a group of students worked with me as researchers (the Cool Researchers). I tried to step back as best I could (and it was not easy – I found myself falling back into my sensible elementary school teacher shoes) and allow them to direct their research from brainstorming ideas of what to research, to planning data collection and collecting data, to analyzing data, to sharing findings with the community (both at the elementary school and at the university). This process really opened up a space in the research for difference, différance, and multiplicity of voices. While these postcards present only glimpses into the research story, they do allow for that openness to permeate the written text of this chapter and for the talk to be walked (hopefully) honestly, ethically, and humbly while embracing the impossibility of knowing and the inherence of the unknown. And so, through these postcards, I am taking small steps.

1

Different fonts in the chapter denote different yet conversing texts. Postcards are written in Times, reflective musings are bolded in Book Antiqua, and theoretical marginalia are in American Typewriter.

390

S. Jagger

Dear J, I have had a few meetings with the researchers so far to begin planning our research together. Through the eyes of some of my colleagues, I suspect that my start was overly ambitious (indeed the whole project could be viewed as overly ambitious), but even at this early point, I am really impressed with the grade six students’ ideas and contributions. And I am also feeling really positive about the small community of researchers that we are becoming. We had our first meeting during the lunch break a couple of weeks ago. Down from an initial 18 interested students, 8 joined me – Laura, Spider Dude, Orange Soda, Cherry, the Awesome One, Violet, the Cool Guy, and Purple Roses2. I began our session by asking if everyone was comfortable with me audio recording the session; I have a hard time taking notes while I am talking with people. I do not like the pauses in the flow of conversation, and it just feels unnatural. I wanted to be sure that the researchers were at ease (at least as best I could), and by not scribbling down everything they said, I thought they might be more comfortable. Also, I like to be able to listen to the conversations afterward: There is much in the pauses, the starts and stops, the hurried words, and the back and forth between speakers. Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object. (Rousseau, as cited in Derrida, 1997, p. 27) Interpretation is inherent throughout the research process and in every interaction within it. It is within every decision made related to data and data collection, in what is attended to, in what is not attended to. Here in meetings with the researchers, I chose to record our conversations so that I would not need to frantically make notes, notes of what I choose in the moment, and of what I am able to remember in their absence. But even in revisiting the conversations later, in listening to the speech again, I choose what to listen to and for, and in transcribing, I choose which points to transcribe – whether to transcribe

2

The Cool Researchers and participating students chose their own pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

391

verbatim, what I hear, whether to include pauses in speech. And in transcribing video recordings, whether to make note of gestures, movements, interactions, and if so, which of those to make note of. And while my attendance to and interpretation of the research and the research space may be thorough (or as thorough as I attempt to make it, and whatever thorough may be), there remains difference as the decisions are mine, the interpretations mine, informed by traces of what came before.

I opened myself up a little bit more to the researchers; they already knew that my research was on school garden, so I explained why I chose to do my research with and in the City community, and shared what my research questions were (this was before I let them go and really opened up the impossibility of the research to possibility). Being at a school in a city with several large colleges and universities, the researchers were used to having teacher candidates and faculty researchers in and out of their classroom and school. However, this relationship was different as it included them, grade six students, as researchers rather than subjects, teachers rather than students. I wanted to do a quick brainstorm of topics and questions that might guide our research together and to get a sense of what their interests were with respect to the garden. When I initially invited the grade six students to participate in the project as researchers, I said that the research was on the school garden but left specifics of the projects necessarily open. Cherry was keen to find out more about animals and habitats in the garden and how the garden was important to animals. Orange Soda wanted to find out how many times classes normally went down to the school garden, and Spider Dude was curious about whether or not the vegetables from the garden were actually used by the members of the school community, for example, in school lunches. And, building on and with Cherry’s wonderings about animals and habitats, Spider Dude asked how humans’ daily lives affect animals. Other students did not contribute as much to the conversation, and I thought my question to them needed more time for thinking and decided to set aside some time for a free write and share in our next meeting. Derrida has written extensively on speech and writing, writing and speech, and the opposing relation set up between the two in western metaphysical systems of thought. Following Rousseau’s words, and Aristotle’s much earlier assertion that “spoken words are symbols of the mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words”, the spoken word, speech, logos, is identified as sharing the first symbol, being the first signifier, of what is real, what is experienced, what is truth. There is a direct signification, reflection, mirroring, presence of a transcendental signified; speech is interior to other signifiers. (Derrida, 1997) Later in the project, Spider Dude changed his pseudonym to John Cena. After this session, the Awesome One and Violet chose not to participate in the project as researchers.

392

S. Jagger

The written word, on the other hand, is viewed as secondary, supplementary, a step further removed, an absence, from what is real, from the truth, from a transcendental signified. Writing is seen as exterior to speech and the other signifiers. And therefore, writing and the written word is inherently derivative of spoken word and speech prioritized over writing. (Derrida, 1997) Derrida rejects these claims, these chains, this hierarchy of speech over writing, instead reminding us of the transience, the movement, the play of the signifier and signified, rather than the transcendence sought by western thought. The play of diffe´rance, of differing and deferring, is at work within the works of writing and of speech where the signifier and signified are uncoupled, the signified becoming signifier. (Derrida, 1997) There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of signifying references that constitute language. The advent of writing is the advent of this play. (Derrida, 1997, p. 7)

Diffe´rance upsets the opposition of speech and writing, writing and speech, and the prioritizing of speech over writing; writing is at once always already interior and exterior to speech and speech always already exterior and interior to writing. And so, interiority and exteriority, exteriority and interiority, presence and absence, absence and presence, become useless as a means of ordering and opposing speech and writing, writing and speech. (Derrida, 1997) The researchers and I had a bit of a break between that meeting and today’s meeting. Only Laura, Orange Soda, and Cherry were able to attend at lunch today, but it was a very good session. Perhaps a smaller number of researchers would be a better idea? As I remembered the researchers’ difficulty in coming up with potential research questions and ideas from the last meeting, we began with an individual brainstorm of questions that I asked them to write down in their research notebooks. I encouraged them to scribble down ideas that they had of things to find out more about that were related to the garden or the environment, reminding them that this would help us to decide what we would do our research on. Laura’s question alludes to relations of power and knowledge, specifically with respect to the environment but also more broadly, Laura is suspicious that it is known how we are making the environment sick but that understanding, that knowledge, is kept secret. Knowledge, viewed poststructurally, is at once within discourse and constructed by discourse. And so, power, if power is knowledge and knowledge is power, is also shaped by and shapes, directed by and directs, is embedded within and embeds discourses

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

393

and, to Foucault (1990), is strategic and creates a strategic relation with and within societies. This is seen in Laura’s concern and suspicion. There is power/knowledge, knowledge/power, of and over the environment. And consider power/knowledge, knowledge/ power with respect to the curriculum, to schools and education, to research and the academy. Power/knowledge, knowledge/power, can be traced throughout each of these discourses and while for the most part unspoken and taken-for-granted, quietly maintaining, reproducing, controlling power/knowledge, knowledge/ power, these traces are not unknown to those from which power/ knowledge, knowledge/power is being held. This is the case for Laura; she is on to them. Laura and Orange Soda focused on specifics: Do people use the garden? How long do they visit for? What is planted? Is garden produce used by the school? Will the garden be expanded? Cherry asked a tricky, and massive, question: How do you know when you are making the environment sick? How do we know when we are making the environment sick? When will we fully acknowledge that we are making the environment sick and how will we respond? Would the researchers come closer to an answer, or begin to unpack the question through their research?

As we discussed their brainstormed questions, Laura wondered if knowing we were making the environment sick was a secret: “Is there like a secret? I kind of wonder sometimes cause like you know how some companies have secrets?” Were they on to something? What was the secret? Who knew it? And who determined who else knew it? I next asked the researchers how we might find answers to our questions: OS SJ L SJ L SJ C L SJ OS C

SJ

Ask the school Who? Students And how do we ask them? Maybe we can have an assembly or something An assembly, OK No, like you can go class to class and talk about it Yeah, that’s a better idea OK Quiz them? Hahaha If you say there is a quiz, they will get all worried so I don’t think we should do that. . . Or, we can just see them, how about we have two or three people doing questions and there’s like four or five people around it and after they ask you what do you do around the garden OK, so sort of like having a discussion group or a circle group

394

L

SJ L

S. Jagger

Yeah, maybe we could go around class to class and the first question could be what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say City PS garden and then we write them down Sort of like a brainstorm Yeah

And so, following a seemingly simple question of how we could answer our questions, and some clarification on my part, the three researchers identified (in their own words) three methods of data collection common in qualitative research: interviews, focus groups, and observations. They began to work through some practical considerations as well. Laura initially thought that an assembly might work but then reconsidered, agreeing that working on a class level might be better, and Cherry was mindful of potentially causing participants anxiety by giving them a quiz. Creswell (2007) outlined a number of considerations for data collection in qualitative research. After determining the site or individuals to study, and gaining access and building rapport, the researcher, or researchers, should choose sampling strategies – individuals or site to collect data from and how many individuals or sites to collect data from – that will best help to understand the research question. Next, methods of data collection and forms of data to be collected should be considered. These include observations, interviews, documents, and audio-visual materials (Creswell, 2007). Within participatory research the decisions made with respect to these elements of research are actively negotiated by participating researchers and the voices of all researchers heard. Cherry likened the research process of asking questions to being a physician, musing that, “We’re just like doctors,” and I agreed with her: It’s like making a diagnosis almost. You see what’s going on, right, and from that you can answer some questions but before that you have to find out some background information and you get that from people. I think we are off to a great start!

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

395

Dear J, Today, Richard and his researchers came in to work with Sidney’s class. It was really funny at the time but now, looking back, so telling; at the start of the day, when Sidney was going through the attendance list, Richard stood just inside and to the side of the classroom, wearing his sunglasses. After coming into the classroom, greeting me with our usual high five, and settling into his desk, B4, one of the students, turned around, smirking, and asked me why Richard was wearing his sunglasses inside. I started to laugh, because I had been wondering the very same thing, and I had no idea. The sunglasses made Richard visually quite separate from the rest of the class, further highlighting what I saw to be Richard’s present absence from the school community and his distance from the students, the class, and the school. Another barrier presented, built up and protected, in the space of research. The stance of Richard, his very physical place, standing while other sit, off to the side of the room rather than within, shielded by his sunglasses work inside the classroom, inside the research space, closing him off to those within the space and closing the space off to him. Like the slick and polished walls of the ivory tower, the physical stance of Richard closed the possibility of his openness with and in the research space. This closure, this present absence, presents a physical representation of the multiple relations of power at work and being re-inforced within the research space. Richard is affiliated with the university, the modern university powered (for the most part) by personal, professional, and monetary motivations (Trifonas, 2003). These incentives, these powers, both obvious and hidden, permeate the university, and permeate research; its openness to these driving assertions of power from a select few enclose it from others, perpetuating the understood exclusivity of power, and of knowledge. Richard’s stance within the research space displays this.

The range of discussions in qualitative research methods books related to issues of ethics, the role of the researcher, and the place of the researcher with and in the research space is as varied as researchers themselves and their assumed identities with and in that space. But the students are on to something. B4 questions Richard’s stance – why is he wearing those sunglasses in the classroom? B4 sees the wearing of the sunglasses, the shading, the hiding, as humorous, as ridiculous, and laughs at the glaring difference and distance in Richard’s stance and those of the others in the class. The separation is humorous; it is ridiculous how Richard postures himself in the classroom.

Richard’s research brought him to the school on a couple of occasions to do project work. His research was a great opportunity for students to participate in a unique and creative activity but was quite separate from the curriculum and instruction being done at the school. While they were happy for their students to be able to participate in Richard’s work, I sensed that the teachers at City felt stressed by yet

396

S. Jagger

another research project being done at the school. And, Richard’s time line was extremely tight. His project work was scheduled to be completed within a couple of very busy weeks in June – immediately following the grade six EQAO3 assessments. It was more work to fit into an already stretched schedule. Curricular topics had to be wrapped up and the school year brought to a close. Teachers needed to complete their assessments and reporting. There were many boxes to be ticked. Creswell (2009) noted that “researchers need to respect research sites. . ., be cognizant of their impact, and minimize their disruption of the physical setting” (p. 90). Disruptions of the research space can also impact on routines (e.g., changing of schedules to accommodate a lesson observation) and relationships (e.g., not acting respectfully as a guest in the research space) (Creswell, 2008). He further warns that issues of ethical concern can surface when the research is not reciprocally beneficially to both the researchers and participant [and I would add, the research space]. (Creswell, 2008, 2009) There were also the big changes, the transitions, that come with the end of a school year – looking forward to new classes, schools, peer groups, grade assignments, and so on loomed after the lazy days of summer holidays – big changes and, for some, very difficult adjustments to make. With the busyness of the past few weeks of testing, the teachers have not been able to spend time with their students, on their own schedules, on their own projects, in a long while. I really felt for the teachers and for the students; I knew the bittersweet feelings of June – not only the excitement of summer and the end of a school year but also the sadness and uncertainty of change and changing relationships in the coming year. I felt especially for Sidney and her grade sixes. She had been teaching many of the students for 2 and 3 years – they were her kids – and students would be going on to new schools – big changes. I wished that they could spend June together, enjoying familiarity and each other’s presence, knowing the upcoming unfamiliarity and absence. And so, Richard’s project came at a stressful time. And there was also tension leading up to his project. I think the teachers felt that their voices were not being heard. Richard asked for their input on the feasibility of the activities but then seemed to dismiss their suggestions. The teachers knew their students and knew better than quite possibly anyone else what would work for the class and what would not work for the class. But this was coming from one of the universities in the city, and those connections were good to have. It looked favorably on the school to be partnering with the university and those occupying rungs higher up on the ladder. Richard requested that teachers distribute and collect all of the signed consent packages from the students, and participation was not presented as optional; those students who had not returned their forms were told that they must be signed and

3

EQAO assessments are large-scale standardized tests that are administered to Ontario students in grades 3, 6, and 9.

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

397

returned. Gathering parental consent for Richard’s work was a difficult task because students, and their parents, had many questions that teachers were unable to answer (it was not their research). I did my best to help out and also quickly saw that students and their families were becoming frustrated with the number of consent forms going home to be signed; my work had several consent and assent forms for students and parents to sign. And of course, the consent forms were written in a way that satisfied the requirements of the relevant ethical review boards. This does not always translate into a letter that is accessible to parents, let alone students (particularly primary students). Also, in research involving children, consent forms are often given only to parents to sign; students are not always given a choice in their participation. This was case with Richard’s project. In my research, this was not an option. If I really wanted to honor the students’ participation and voice in the research, and I did, I needed, at the very least, to ask for their own permission to participate. And the posturing, a static installation with the separate pose accessorized with sunglasses, and the expression and perpetuation of power can be traced in Richard’s moving interactions with and in the research space. Richard asked for the teachers’ feedback and yet when the teachers voiced their suggestions, their voices were not heard, or were heard but not listened to. The teachers were kept down to their assigned rungs on the ladder of power. And the teachers were also requested to ensure that consent forms were completed by parents; students were not given their own consent forms.

J, Richard’s presence in, and absence from, the class community really upset me. I saw my co-learners, my partners, my peers, and my friends being treated with a lack of respect and care, a lack that I was trying so hard to reverse and upset in my own work within that community. I was seeing all that I did not want to do or be as a researcher played out in front of me. Selfishly, I thought of how Richard’s work and the negative feelings surrounding it that I perceived might influence my work. Would the students and teachers that I was working with become frustrated and tired of being a part of so many research projects and simply choose to end their participation? Would their participation be very superficial, and would they simply be putting in the time? I felt badly for even thinking this – this research was about them first and foremost – but those concerns were there and were very real. Research is inherently a relationship between those who pass through, or those who dwell, or pass through and dwell, with and in the research space. Depending on the project, those relationships might include the researchers and the researched, partners in research, and researchers and place. But what is common throughout is the relationship that is always and already there. It is one that should be treated with empathy, and with care, and with respect. And it is one where what is given exceeds what is taken.

Flick (2006) elaborates on the multiple roles of the researcher with and in the research space and their negotiated entry into that space. Situation in the research space is described along a continuum, with the researcher as a distant and objective observer at one end and the researcher as an actively participating, fully

398

S. Jagger

immersed member of the research space. When considering access to the research space – to the field, to the institution, to the community – the researcher must also consider their role within that space and what can, and what cannot, be learned through a particular research orientation. For example, the ‘stranger’ in the research space might be able to more easily recognize taken-forgranted structures and routines. On the other hand, the ‘initiate’, through becoming a participant observer, can have spaces within the research space opened to them, spaces otherwise closed to distant observation, While the role taken on by the researcher, observer, participant, some place between and within the research space, will depend on the intentions and inclinations of the researcher (or researched) and the open, or closed, casting by the researched (or researcher), “qualitative research is normally not simply interested in the exterior presentation of social groups. Rather, [the researcher] want[s] to become involved in a different world or subculture and first to understand it as far as possible from inside and from its own logic. (Flick, 2006, p. 119) My concerns echo Creswell’s (2008) noting that one researcher “act[ing] in an inappropriate way [can] reflect badly on all researchers” (p. 239) in the research space, here in the school community. In this case, my engagement, my personal involvement, my openness, with and in the school community, the research space, allowed students and teachers to come to know and to trust me, accepting me as a member of their community.

According to Patton (2002), qualitative inquiry requires getting close to the people and places being studied, “actively participating in the life of the observed [and] going where the action is, getting one’s hands dirty, participating where possible in actual. . .activities, and getting to know. . .participants on a personal level” (p. 48). This is in contrast to the objective research on the outside “purposely project[ing] an image of being cool, calm, external, and detached” (Patton, 2002, p. 49). Empathy and introspection gained through personal connections, a closeness rather than an enclosure, are needed for insights to be gained. (Patton, 2002) I spoke with Sidney on a number of occasions, leading up to Richard’s project, of the tensions that his presence and absence brought, and she assured me that my being in her class and the school was different. She told me that the time that I put in at City, the commitment that I made to the school, and the relationships that I fostered with students, teachers, and the school community meant a lot to them. I had invested in them, and so they were invested in me.

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

399

Dear J, Who am I in this space? ABPL said to me today that I always look like a different person – a park ranger, a biker, and a lounge singer – with each outfit I wear to school. How do students, teachers, and other members of the school community see me? Am I a teacher? A student? A researcher? Am I a part of them or apart from them? And do these roles, these personas, and these identities change as my outfits do? By spending the year at the school, I hoped to minimize the barriers between me and the school, to open myself to openings in the community. I recognized that I was coming to City from the university and that I would be viewed, at least to some extent initially, through the lens of difference. I was separate. And so often, and despite attempts to bring them together, I think the university is viewed as apart from rather than a part of K-12 schools – theory apart from practice rather than a part of practice, and practice apart from theory rather than a part of it. I felt this to some degree when I visited schools as a faculty advisor for teacher candidates and representing the university. There was a formality about the visits, one that I knew from my own teaching experiences and a formality that was not the norm in elementary schools – very much a keeping up of appearances, a role-play and play of roles. The students in this grade six class – the class including the Cool Researchers and the grade six participants – were used to me being with their class regularly over the course of the school year. At this point in the year, in June, the students knew me well and were comfortable talking with me about most any topic, from what happened on the weekend, to how they were feeling about starting grade seven at a new school, to which of their classmates they had a crush on. Because of the ease of our relationships, ABPL’s comments to me about my appearance were not out of the ordinary.

In my role and play in the role of faculty advisor, I visited City on a number of occasions prior to beginning my research there. And this year, I continued my work (play) in that role along with my volunteer time at City. Some teachers knew me in the role of advisor, even introducing me to other teachers and City staff members as such, and in their interactions with me would always seem to turn our discussion to my supervision of teacher candidates, of programs and people at the university, and

400

S. Jagger

of new teaching strategies that they had been thinking about and were working with – initial connections and commonalities. In early days, and even nowadays, I worried about being solely the university researcher and advisor and how this would set me apart from the community. Sidney and Rachel opened their classrooms to me from the start of the school year. Despite this, I was initially very aware of my presence in their classes – the classroom dynamic can change dramatically with the presence of another adult, another teacher, and, at first, a stranger. Both Sidney and Rachel had partnered with teacher candidates and were accustomed to sharing their classes. But I was not there as a beginning teacher, a teacher candidate. I was already an experienced teacher but wanted to step back and simply be another (an other) in the class and school community. My role in the research was dynamic, it could not be pinned down. I responded to the research space while being inherently immersed within that space. I attempted to unhinge myself from the defining bindings of expert, teacher, adult, and so on, to allow for an open and responsive casting of my role in the research space. A loosening of the bindings, the marks left by previous roles still visible, always and already within the roles to come in which I would be cast.

Participatory research asks, really it demands, the researcher, the researcher who would otherwise be cast exclusively in the role of expert in a hierarchical research scripting of expert-novice, to take on a range of roles, to embrace multiplicity of possibilities for casting oneself, and allowing oneself to be cast, within an open and dynamic research context. This call is very much in difference to the structures firmly held in place within institutions, within institutions of education. Participatory research’s casting sets the actor formerly known as researcher in the role of facilitator, co-researcher, and partner. In participatory research, the former researcher is a catalyst, there to stimulate and encourage action rather than impose views, structures, or directions. The process of doing open and inclusive research, how things are done, characterizes the work rather than an exclusive focus on the product of the research. Involvement in participatory research is very much in a supporting role in which members of the research space are enabled, encouraged, and empowered to ask questions, explore answers, and take action. And this supporting role comes not only out of its inherence in what participatory research is but also in its characteristic place in the relationships that are foundational to participatory research. These relationships are ones that are open to and respectful of the presence, voices, and feelings of all members, and are cooperative, responsive, personal, and meaningful (Stringer, 1999). And, “in order to be a good listener and [research] partner, researchers require emotional intelligence, a democratic personality, and the skills to build truly collaborative partnerships.” (Reilly, 2010, p. 660)

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

401

And so, my roles were multiple from the start. But also, I wrestled on my own with my multiple roles of researcher, particularly in doing participatory research with the Cool Researchers. In other research projects, I had taken an outside role that had moved closer to within but remained peripheral: observing interactions with and in a science center exhibition from a distance; asking participants questions following a particular learning experience; and co-planning and co-teaching a project and discussing the project and understandings with students. Never before had I intentionally, purposely, engaged participants as researchers, as research partners. I had previously kept these roles separate; at least I attempted to, though through my presence I was present in understandings and experiences of participants, and traces of whom inescapably would have lingered in the work, finding their way into all elements of the research. In this research, though, I was intentionally opening the work, explicitly inviting participants to join me in the many roles of what is, or what might be, researcher. And in doing so, my role changed. I also needed to navigate different roles. At times, I thought that I needed to act as a teacher of research. Yet how did I, could I, elevate myself to the level of expert (whatever that may be), perpetuating the very binary that I so hoped to upset? Sometimes, I felt that I needed to be a guide for the researchers – to lead them as we worked through a process of doing research that evolved through our interactions with each other and within the research space that together we worked to open. I was a facilitator, a mentor, a scribe, and a recorder. But at the same time, I was also a student, a learner, and a novice. The research space was constantly changing and renewing. The content and context were all new to me as well. I needed the Cool Researchers to guide me as much as (I thought) they needed me to guide them. And I was learning as much, if not more, from the Cool Researchers as they could have learned from me. The research necessarily opened up all roles to each of us and held us within none exclusively. Kirby (2001) discusses the potential tensions in the negotiation of roles of the participatory research within educational contexts. Teachers, and other adults in schools, typically hold a role of power that sees them directing the curriculum and instruction of students, making decisions, and maintaining the structures within the institution. On the other hand, the researcher is often an outsider, detached from the group as an impartial objective observer. The participatory researcher rests in an in-between space, another space, an other space within which there is a free dialogue with students, an open and honest partnership, an acceptance and encouragement of students’ active critiques and questionings, and a willingness to step back and allow the research to emerge. Consider the binary oppositions that can be traced in this research space, and that quietly, and not so quietly, inform the research: expert-novice or, novice-expert, teacher-student or, student-teacher,

402

S. Jagger adult-child or, child-adult, advisor-advised or, advised-advisor, university-K-12 school or, K-12 school-university, researcher-researched or, researched-researcher.

This research intended to upset these structures, to rattle the chains of signifiers and signifieds, of meanings, and in doing so, open up opportunities for difference, for différance, in research methods, in representation of research, in thinking about, and imagining and re-imagining, possibilities in environmental education and garden-based pedagogies. Did it succeed? Perhaps. But that is of course up to you the reader, you, who is now also writer, and researcher of this research text.

Dear J, This afternoon, I had a last meeting at school with the Cool Researchers. I wanted to talk with them about the possibility of extending our work together into the summer and the next school year (there is never enough time) and also share with them some opportunities for presenting their research that they might be interested in. I did not want to push them to present or share their work in any particular space, but I did want to open up opportunities for them to do so. I wondered if the researchers would like to come to the university to present their work, either to a class of graduate students – I was thinking of a qualitative research methods course – or in the spring research conference. I also thought that they might like to make a research poster that could be presented to their school community at City and then displayed at the school. In doing participatory research with children, one of the challenges is to actively include young researchers in all stages of the research, particularly in the dissemination of findings. When the research process is directed too closely by adult researchers, student researchers may not feel that the project is theirs and not have a sense of ownership of the research. With respect to dissemination of findings, opportunities should be illuminated, their access opened for young researchers to share their research with their community and to motivate and lead change. The adult researcher must not be motivated solely by personal and career gains from publication and presentation in academic circles (Kirby, 2001). The young researchers should be empowered to share their work in their words and on their terms.

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

403

We are getting better at involving children as active participants in research but we are still not very good at involving them in the dissemination of the research. We need to give more attention to how we give children genuine opportunities to disseminate their perspective with their voice and in their style, which may or may not be as polished and ‘eloquent’ as an adult dissemination but should have equal value. (Kellett, n.d., as cited in Tisdall, 2009, p. 205) This additional work together would require time, and I recognized that this was another commitment, after what I thought was (knew to be) already a considerable commitment on their part, and I did not want them to feel pressured at all to carry on with the project. I shared this with them after proposing that we meet a couple of times in the summer to work together: I want you guys to know, like if you are not interested in carrying on with the group, that’s totally OK, you don’t have to, this is extending it beyond what I originally anticipated because we’ve got a lot of different opportunities that we can take advantage of and if you’re interested in continuing to work on it, that’s awesome, if you’re not, that’s totally OK too. Everyone was excited to keep working together, and the Guy That Rocks noted that “we’re doing, like, really serious work.” The researchers’ consent to continue with the research project brings up a number of potential issues related to consent. The consent was as informed as it could be given the nature of the research – emergent and open – it was simply not possible to explicitly inform the researchers on the specific details of their participation and on the route that the research would take. At this point, the researchers’ understanding of the research project and the research process to this point served as information about participation. Of even more concern, and particularly at this point in their project, when the Cool Researchers and I had worked together for several months and become members of a tightly knit community of researchers, of partners, was the influence of the social context of our group on the researchers’ individual decisions to continue with their participation. Adults and children, children and adults, have a traditionally unequal social status – the adult voice carries over the child’s. But pressure from the peer group, especially for early adolescents, to continue, even when the individual does not wish to can be extremely powerful and coercive. And, while I tried to emphasize the voluntary nature of participation, and that their consent was an ongoing negotiation, the researchers may have felt obligated to extend their participation in the project because they felt this was what the group wanted, expected, or required.

When I let them know that this meeting was the last that we would have together at the school, there was a collective “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh. . .” As sad as I was that the year had come to an end, I was pretty happy to hear that our time together meant something to the researchers.

404

S. Jagger

In the meeting, I also wanted to do a reflective quick write with the researchers to get a feel for how they felt about being researchers and working together on the project. I asked everyone, myself included, to think back on the project and tell me what it was like. I shared my writing first: • things take longer than I expected but this is good. . . it’s important for this project to come from the students and be centred on them – they are the experts • I need to work on letting other researchers take charge – they are more than capable and very strong at this work • I really liked how the group came together and how everyone brought unique strengths to the group – made an excellent team that had most all bases covered ☺. I told the researchers that I still needed to work on really handing over the reins to them and not talking so much. Cherry agreed but noted that I had improved over our time working together. I think that the relationship that I had with the researchers was open and honest. They were comfortable to share with me, and did on several occasions, critiques of my work with them (I was most often told that I needed to stop talking so much and they were absolutely right about this). I trusted that the Cool Researchers were comfortable enough with me to openly reflect on their participation in the research project.

The researchers then shared their reflections. They spoke of the highlights of doing research together – working with others, sharing ideas, working with me, getting to interview students and teachers, gardening with other students, working with April, and meeting Major Tom. They also discussed what they found challenging in the project – doing research, interviewing some of the students, remembering many things, and finding out information about plants. For Dynamite, working together could be both interesting and confusing: meeting with each other was interesting because sometimes I wouldn’t know what it was for. Overall, it seemed that to the researchers working on the project was fun and interesting. The Cool Researchers were positive in their reflections on the research that they had done together up to this point. They enjoyed having the opportunity to talk with their peers about the garden, share their ideas, and work together; the highlight for the researchers was the social and interpersonal aspect of doing research. This is similar to the findings in the L2C project (see, for example, Barratt Hacking et al., 2007) in which students doing research also enjoyed talking with others in their community and learning about the views of others.

I wrote a note to each researcher at the end of the school year and included within each note those qualities that the researcher brought to the project:

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

405

Orange Soda. . . you were able to successfully build upon students’ responses in your own questioning. . . The Guy That Rocks. . . your questions during the [research] process – they really helped to bring the project along. . . Dynamite. . . you are particularly skilled at working from a few questions and leading a rich and meaningful discussion with participants. . . John Cena. . . you really helped students to feel comfortable being interviewed. . . The Cool Guy. . . I am really delighted with your enthusiasm toward research and the process. . . Purple Roses. . . your kind and soft-spoken manner really helped to put students who were being interviewed at ease. . . Cherry. . . your enthusiasm has been really inspiring and I really admire your dedication to the group. . . Adam. . . you used the guiding questions to easily lead discussions with participants with maturity and the research questions in mind. . . Laura. . . you really put students at ease. . . and you asked very meaningful questions of participants. . . My intention with the letters that I wrote to each researcher at the end of the school year was to recognize their contributions to the research project. Each brought something unique and valuable to the group and I wanted to share my gratefulness for their partnership and participation. Looking at the letters now, and the timing of their delivery, they may have served to perpetuate the hierarchy between adults and children, children and adults, in their context that we were working within. In June, final report cards are taken home and year end awards ceremonies are held; students are evaluated by their teachers. Perhaps I should have just spoken with the researchers and not had the written document, the reward. The elements of the research project that the Cool Researchers were challenged by were also those things that they enjoyed. I hope that it was that enjoyment, and feelings of accomplishment in their achievements, that motivated them to persevere in doing the research and working through those tensions. It is important to note that, like the Cool Researchers’ concern that some participants may have been telling the researchers what they thought was the right answer, I too wondered if the Cool Researchers may have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. It was no secret that I thought school gardening was important and that I thought participatory research was valuable – if I did not, I would not be working on this type of project.

Each of the Cool Researchers brought with them to the project a unique and important set of understandings, experiences, and interests: These differences helped to open our group and our work together to possibilities in all parts of the research.

406

S. Jagger

Drawing of Plato and Socrates by Matthew Paris of St. Albans (d. 1259). Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 304: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/5885f370-ffea-4c09-9d01-a0d4399e82af/

Dear J, My writings to you have brought me back once again to Plato and Socrates and the very reversal of roles, the turning of the binaries that allow space for the voices previously unheard to ring through the processes and products of participatory research. In curricular research, and in curriculum itself, the upsetting of binaries that historically and currently shape our discourses around learning, teaching, and research brings about difference, différance, and multiplicity in the content and contexts of our wonderings and wanderings and can better capture the knowledge, questions, and lived experiences and stories of communities and environments. The teacher becomes learner, the expert becomes novice, and the researched becomes researcher. In curricular research, and the curriculum of research, with children, this means that the adult steps back and listens, really listens, while the child steps forward and is heard. In the opening of the research, and curricular, space, there is also fluidity and movement along the casting continuum as research partners respond to the needs of the research space. On the one hand, I cast myself sometimes into a more

Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher. . .

407

instructional role, for example, when I interpreted my research partners’ struggles with making sense of data and suggested ways that we might organize and analyze all of the information collected. On the other hand, at other times I quietly listened as the researchers shared their ideas and voiced possibilities for our work together, for example, as we brainstormed questions and research paths to explore. The researcher and the researched perform double duty, displacing the logic of the binary boundaries of either/or, a double handed engagement that is at once necessary and inherent with and in the research space. Here we realize deconstruction at work in the work. And this embrace of possibilities opened through deconstruction is an ethical turn as we validate the voice and place of children, of the learner, in the co-construction of curriculum and curricular research, and follow the curriculum of research afforded to us by our shared roles in inquiry.

References Barratt Hacking, E., Scott, W., & Barratt, R. (2007). Children’s research into their local environment: Stevenson’s gap and possibilities for the curriculum. Environmental Education Research, 13(2), 225–244. Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among the five approaches (2nd ed.). Sage. Creswell, J. W. (2008). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (3rd ed.). Pearson. Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). Sage. Derrida, J. (1987). The post card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1997). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Flick, U. (2006). An introduction to qualitative research (3rd ed.). Sage. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: Vol 1 an introduction. (R. Hurley, Trans. Vintage Books. Johns, J. (1963–64/1996). Sketchbook notes. In J. Johns (Ed.), Writings, sketchbook notes, interviews (pp. 255–277). The Museum of Modern Art. Kirby, P. (2001). Participatory research in schools. Forum, 43(2), 74–77. Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative evaluation and research methods (3rd ed.). Sage. Reilly, R. C. (2010). Participatory case study. In A. J. Mills, G. Durepos, & E. Wiebe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of case study research (pp. 658–661). Sage. Stringer, E. T. (1999). Action research (2nd ed.). Sage. Tisdall, E. K. M. (2009). Dissemination – or engagement? In E. K. M. Tisdall, J. M. Davis, & M. Gallagher (Eds.), Researching with children and young people: Research design, methods, and analysis (pp. 194–220). Sage. Trifonas, P. P. (2003). The ethics of science and/as research: Deconstruction and the orientations of a new academic responsibility. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(3), 285–295.

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform Autobiographical Storytelling As Praxis Lovisa Fung

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neoliberalism’s Current and Potential Future Impact on Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preservice Teacher Reflective Practice Needs a Reform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multiple Perspectives Through Exploring Teacher Candidates’ Autobiographies . . . . . . . . . . . . Resistance to Autobiographical Narratives Despite Their Transformative Potential: Why? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Patriarchal Influence on the Structure of Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Digital Storytelling: Autobiographical Storytelling to Reform Reflective Practice in Preservice Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Five Cs Framework and Relational Encounters in Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

410 410 412 413 414 414 415 415 421 422

Abstract

Preservice teacher education often touts its curriculum comprising reflective practice. However, reflection on one’s teaching is usually limited to the techniques and methods, without connection to the selfhood of preservice teachers and its implications and influence on practice. The question of what education is for and the purposes of schooling presents opportunities for examining the larger macro-landscape of teaching, but the micro-inner landscape of teachers is often excluded. This chapter focuses on insights gained from theoretical underpinnings of reconceptualist thought combined with narrative as praxis in preservice teacher education. It examines and explores the experiences of a group of graduate students at OISE, University of Toronto, and the transformative experience they

L. Fung (*) Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_56

409

410

L. Fung

had from reflecting, creating, and sharing their autobiographical narratives in teaching through documentary making in a graduate course. The Five Cs Framework emerged from data analysis, and its potential implications for future preservice teacher curricula will be discussed. Keywords

Higher education reform · Digital storytelling · Self-study · Reflective practice · Relational teaching

Introduction This chapter focuses on the results of my doctoral research study on autobiographical narratives by educators in a graduate course and the perceptions of their experiences. Key concepts that are explored on the importance of autobiographical storytelling in preservice teacher education include a discussion of neoliberalism’s influence on the current preservice teacher education program’s curriculum and the need to dismantle the current program’s exclusive focus on the technical aspects of teaching and learning. I will discuss current reflective practices implemented in the programs and the potential for incorporating a more balanced approach by using preservice teachers’ autobiographies through digital storytelling. The transformative results from using digital storytelling on preservice teachers are organized into a framework I developed called the 5 C’s Framework from the study’s data analysis results.

Neoliberalism’s Current and Potential Future Impact on Higher Education More than ever, higher education and its purposes and practices are outwardly going through shifts in practices. Remote and hybrid learning has become an accepted norm since the pandemic began. This shift showed us that practices within higher education could change when the wider public and the institution feel it necessary. For some time, the neoliberalist agenda and its exclusive focus on education as a consumerist accoutrement have impacted postsecondary education. Neoliberalism is a political and economic model that prioritizes the private sector’s agendas and interests to gain control for personal profit through policies and actions. These policies and actions influence the public, including educational institutions (Cooper & Hughes, 2019; Di Leo, 2020; Giroux, 2002, 2019b, 2020; Rudd & Goodson, 2017; Troiani & Dutson, 2021). The neoliberal agenda includes market-driven competitiveness and individual wins over collective interest and responsibility toward one another. Money, greed, and competition trump all else in a neoliberal world.

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform

411

Higher education’s priorities as an institution of meeting the economic needs of a capitalist society currently take away from the other potential purposes that the academy is there to meet, those of self-actualization and authentic learning (Krishnamurti, 1953; Miller, 2007; Miller, 2010; Miller et al., 2014; Palmer, 1998; Palmer, 2011; Reilly, 2015). Replacing the latter is an educational model that values efficiency, standardization, and measurable outcomes in teaching and learning. This model focuses on education geared toward maximizing students’ earning potential and competitive edge in the marketplace (Di Leo, 2020). Learning and obtaining a degree are being marketed to students as their way to self-promotion, developing and marketing their “brand,” and selling themselves to corporate culture (Giroux, 2002). In an educational pursuit to brand oneself, selfimprovement or reaching one’s potential in higher education as a student is about the selfish pursuit of the self without regard for others; competition is above all else. It is about developing and selling an image desirable for others to consume. I am reminded of an experience as a field advisor in a postsecondary institution where students had a mandatory professional development workshop organized by the faculty to advise students on creating and developing their “personal brand.” During the workshop, I recalled having mixed feelings. The presenter used terms and language referring to students’ self-development as creating a caricature of themselves: to “brand,” “sell,” and be “marketable.” I understood the larger landscape of universities and their purpose as influenced mainly by neoliberal agendas, as I also caught myself nodding and agreeing with the presenter. On the other hand, I was petrified that we were all (including myself) coordinating and going along with pushing the idea that students’ worth is dependent on how “sellable” they are to others. Currently, schools, including postsecondary institutions, are there to serve the needs of the state efficiently by asserting control to develop the compliant “citizen” and not the “person” (Cooper & Hughes, 2019). The focus on standardized curriculum and measurable achievements control the interactions that can go on and what is encouraged in classrooms. These interactions are often impersonal, detached, devoid of human emotions, and more about analytical ways of thinking and knowing. The industrial revolution’s vision of standardized and mass-produced education is still entrenched in our education system as it acts as the groundwork for fueling the current neoliberal agenda. Everyone is pressured to stand out with their “individuality” to ironically achieve the same: be competitive, win, and achieve high monetary earnings above all else, reinforcing conformity and standardization (Cooper & Hughes, 2019). With the neoliberal agenda as the current dominant discourse influencing and impacting higher education, it is not easy to envision an alternative worldview and approach to teaching and learning. However, it is pertinent to recognize that shifts in practices, perspectives, and actions with informed knowledge and awareness are not unachievable. Not attempting to effect change is to suggest and accept that the current state of things is acceptable (Cooper & Hughes, 2019). There are possibilities that the neoliberal stronghold in academia could shift to a different one. The question then becomes: What could be envisioned and actualized? Giroux (2019a) suggests that we need a new approach to higher education. This approach should give

412

L. Fung

students opportunities to critically consider how the current broader societal and political structures are dominating and controlling their lives and education. Students need to be aware of their existing conditions and take informed action on alternative ways of learning and being within the influences of the broader cultural, social, political, and economic milieu. It is not only students who should consider how the neoliberal agenda influence their experiences, but educators are also accountable for the narratives they produce, claim, and disseminate to their students; they can inadvertently affect students’ ways of being, thinking, and knowing. It is urgent and crucial to examine how and what preservice teacher education programs are currently practicing to encourage and promote preservice teachers’ critical exploration of the meta-narratives and personal micro-narratives that make up their teaching identity, vision, and practices. Their teaching vision and identities could shape the future landscape of education for themselves and the students they will teach.

Preservice Teacher Reflective Practice Needs a Reform Within higher education, neoliberalism and the influence of the industrial revolution’s factory model of schooling continue to dominate. To this day, nothing much has changed in how preservice teacher education programs have addressed preservice teachers’ selfhood and the narratives they bring to their teaching practice. What has changed is that under the guise of reflective practice, preservice teachers presumably examine their selfhood and its implications on their teaching vision and approach. However, reflective practice is often focused on the methods and techniques of teaching. Seldom does the academy point to the individual preservice teacher’s inner life: their background, life experiences, memories, and relationships that impact the way they view, approach, envision, and practice their teaching (Kanu & Glor, 2006; Kottler et al., 2005; Palmer, 1998; Pinar, 1994; Smith, 1999). Scholars and teacher educators often hesitate to dialogue with preservice teachers on notions of selfhood concerning their teaching experiences even though they acknowledge its importance (Kanu & Glor, 2006; Latremouille et al., 2016). Although there is a long tradition of narrative inquiry in educational theory, including Clandini and Connelly, Nash, and Lawrence-Lightfoot, there is a hesitation in practicing these educational theories in preservice teacher education programs. This hesitation is problematic because teaching is not a technical enterprise but a human enterprise (Clark, 1995; Gatto, 2002; Kottler et al., 2005; Palmer, 1998, 2011; Smith, 1999). What is education for if preservice teachers’ experiences are ignored even though some scholars and educators advocate for its importance in humanizing the curriculum? What are the alternatives if the neoliberal education agenda is not the only way to approach and practice education? Various known schools of thought in curriculum discuss the purpose of education. Given the current acceleration of dehumanization within academia and outside its walls, I propose reengaging with

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform

413

reconceptualism’s view on education with a specific focus on autographical storytelling to humanize preservice teacher education potentially. Looking at preservice teachers’ autobiographies narratives can address their deep-seated values, beliefs, and perspectives and how that impacts their teaching vision, practice, and identity. When preservice teachers enter teacher training programs, they often try to fit their preexisting notions of teaching and learning stemming from their background knowledge and experiences into concepts taught in their courses (Beck & Kosnik, 2002). Thus, to ensure preservice teachers can effectively develop a critical reflection on their emerging teaching vision and practices, they must be given opportunities to unpack their assumptions, biases, agendas, and experiences. While the technical enterprises are essential in teacher training, such as evaluation, programming, and teaching methods, the subjective experiences of teacher candidates are just as meaningful; both realms are significant and valid. When selfhood is dismissed, one could lose track of the self and how that influences their role in curriculum (Pinar, 1994).

Multiple Perspectives Through Exploring Teacher Candidates’ Autobiographies Exploring preservice teachers’ autobiographies can provide consciousness-raising opportunities that align with the reconceptualists’ practice and perspectives in curriculum. Consciousness-raising aligning with reconceptualist thinking can provide preservice teachers with the potential to develop an awareness of their views and an understanding that there are multiple perspectives from others. Their assumed reality and ways of seeing and being are not the only way. When there is a recognition and awareness that there are various perspectives and thus possibilities that could be imagined, it can contribute to a continued transformation of shared norms (Witherell & Noddings, 1991). Greene (1990, 1995a, b) shares that narratives, including autobiographical ones, enable imagined possibilities and multiple forms of seeing and knowing. They can also inspire others to develop empathy and engender expanded vision. Typically, these narratives are presented from works of literature and films and imagined possibilities are initiated as one engages with the artistic medium. These imagined possibilities can also spark individuals to speak on their own behalf instead of dominant voices from mainstream society (Greene, 1990). The chance to explore and share our autobiographical narratives as educators reminds me of a significant experience I had teaching in a summer academic leadership program for grade 7 students. I showed my autobiographical documentary A Conversation Between Hearts to my students, which divulges the hardships I had experienced in high school and my high school teacher’s care and its impact on me (to this day). One of my students gave me a card mentioning that sharing my hardships shifted her perspective on things, and she hopes to carry this with her into grade 8 and beyond.

414

L. Fung

Resistance to Autobiographical Narratives Despite Their Transformative Potential: Why? If autobiographies are essential in preservice teacher programs, why are they often ignored and met with such resistance? My and other scholars’ observations of curriculum practice continue to show that autobiographical narrative reflections are seldom discussed in preservice education courses. Whether from teacher educators or the preservice teachers’ perspective, selfhood is often not brought to attention.

Patriarchal Influence on the Structure of Schooling One of the critical reasons for the resistance of autobiographical narratives is the feminization of teaching. The structure and nature of education, as created and reinforced by history since industrialization and today’s society, is primarily based on ensuring that the value of patriarchal standards and ways of being and living are upheld and enforced (Grumet, 1988). In schooling, this translates into dismissing feminine ways of knowing, such as our intuition, emotions, and embodied ways of knowing. Instead, there is a preference for logical-scientific, linear thinking, objectsubject divisions, and standardization of teaching as a form of control. Children’s social conditioning from schooling in the early years to their postsecondary experience reflects and continues to reinforce the dominance of rational, logical ways of thinking. This way of thinking and learning sets aside intuitive and expressive forms of thought and continues in preservice teacher development. Academia is a system of patriarchal hierarchy enveloped with paternalistic tendencies. Often the process of bringing the subjective into academia has been and continues to be difficult (Archibald, 2008; Binder et al., 2018; Cooper & Hughes, 2019; Cooper & McNab (2009); Latremouille et al., 2016; Poitras Pratt, 2020; Sykes & Gachago, 2018; Taylor & Klein, 2018; Wilson, 2008). The scholars and educators mentioned above have encountered difficulties and hesitation in introducing subjective knowledge and experiences into academic circles. These authors above discuss the current dichotomy of subjective experiences and objective experiences in the academy and how both should be seen as valid to eliminate patriarchal prioritizing. Critically engaging with personal narratives can help eliminate the dominance of patriarchal thinking in teaching and learning. When used intentionally and purposefully within the confines of academia, personal narratives can create the potential for balance between subjective and objective understanding and knowledge. Cooper and McNab (2009) provide an example of the resistance to exploring one’s selfhood in teacher education programs when Cooper describes a course that she taught, where some students were reluctant to explore their narrative as a tool to question what they value and stand for as educators. She recalls a student who was unwilling to examine his narrative at first. Still, as he began exploring his experience of bereavement and grief, he understood why and how to empathize and support his students through such experiences. The conditioning of removing oneself from the

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform

415

curriculum from childhood until postsecondary is prevalent. It has such a stronghold on students that, although exploring one’s narrative can potentially be transformative and life-changing personally and professionally, it remains a challenge in academia.

Vulnerability The hesitation in considering one’s own experiences as an influential factor in one’s teaching and knowing one’s students could also be attributed to the potential discomforts that preservice teachers might face when delving deeper to deconstruct their history (Smith, 1999). Palmer (1998) reaffirms the importance of deconstructing one’s history when he notes that a teacher’s inner life influences actions and interactions with their students. He asserts that teaching is like a mirror to one’s soul; all the complexities and layers that make up one’s teaching practice and philosophy are a reflection of the “convolutions of [one’s] inner life” (Palmer, 1998: 3). Removing one’s selfhood and narrative in a teaching and learning environment also means that relational aspects of teaching, such as the relationship between teacher and student, are discouraged. Emotions are discouraged, and vulnerabilities shared as being a human with real feelings are removed. The public and private have no place to exist in a patriarchal climate. The consequence and pitfall of rejecting one’s feelings and intuition when sharing one’s voice are that one can only share and express a fragmented version of themselves. It is vital to note that scholars are not advocating for the destruction of abstract ways of thinking. Instead, a balanced approach, connecting subject and object, is ideal because each can interact and inform one another (Greene, 1995b; Pinar, 1994). For instance, Tompkins (1996) asserts, “I am not advocating a curriculum devoted exclusively to the pursuit of self-knowledge. . .but in order to have a balanced, nonobsessive relation to the world outside yourself, some inner balance and selfunderstanding are needed” (Tompkins, 1996: 3). By supporting preservice teachers in committing to adopt both objective and subjective ways of thinking and being for a balanced approach to curriculum, they will not lose sight of the opportunity to consider and imagine multiple possibilities and meanings in curriculum.

Digital Storytelling: Autobiographical Storytelling to Reform Reflective Practice in Preservice Teacher Education Previous sections show the potential of incorporating and reflecting on one’s narratives in teaching and learning. It also shows the potential of personal narratives as an agent to bring one’s inner consciousness to their outer surroundings. There is a current method of storytelling (and sharing) called digital storytelling that nonprofessionals can use to create a short video that combines voice(s), images, and narrative to share meaningful messages of their choice (Gachago et al., 2014). Movie-making nonprofessionals, such as preservice teachers, can use digital

416

L. Fung

storytelling as a tool for reflective practice in teaching and learning to explore and foster their teaching vision and identity. Digital storytelling usage in preservice teacher education programs is an individual and collective process. Preservice teachers are typically given a prompt or curriculum content to explore and relate to their autobiography. Known studies on preservice teachers’ digital storytelling experiences include Arraiz Matute et al. (2020), Gachago and Sykes (2017), Kocaman-Karoglu (2014), and Stenhouse and Schafer (2019). These studies focused on preservice teachers’ narratives, including envisioning future career pathways, providing space for queer women educators to explore their queer identity in teaching, and an overall focus on social justice issues. Although the specific content focuses are different, they are all similar in their intention to connect preservice teachers to course content and the macro narratives, such as the social and political surrounding them and education. Within digital storytelling projects, preservice teachers engaged in an environment of collaboration with their peers with facilitation from their professor during the planning, producing, and final screening of their autobiographical documentaries. Digital storytelling generated community building, collaboration, and connections between peers. Like the above studies, my doctoral research focuses on a course I took with my colleagues in teacher education. We engaged in digital storytelling in a collaborative process while planning the content of our autobiographical documentaries and participated in a film screening of them. In the course, the professor provided the following prompt for us to create our unique autobiographical documentary: “What do you make of what you have been made of” (Cooper, personal communication, 2016). We were given the criteria to create a 4–5-minute-long autobiographical documentary about our education journey and incorporate big ideas from class discussions and course content. After being introduced to the elements of moviemaking and being shown some examples from previous students, we attended subsequent classes to plan out the content of our own documentary and work with our choice of movie-making application to create the documentary. It was an enriching opportunity to blend theory with practice and subjective and objective spheres of learning. Digital storytelling also encourages preservice teachers to reflect on themselves within the larger society’s conceptions of teaching and their own conceptions. The ability that digital storytelling has to connect the personal to the professional could potentially alleviate and address some scholars’ concerns, including Kanu and Glor (2006), Kincheloe (2003), Palmer (1998), Pinar (1994), and Smith (1999), as mentioned from the beginning of the chapter. Those scholars were concerned that preservice teacher training programs lack engagement with preservice teachers’ selfhood and urged the need for it to actualize and be implemented. My current doctoral research on digital storytelling, as experienced in a graduate education course that I took with my colleagues, affirms and commemorates the fundamental elements that should take place when expediting digital storytelling in the classroom. In that course, we created autobiographical documentaries to explore our teaching identity and vision concerning our life experiences. Since the process of creating and viewing each other’s documentaries was transformative for many

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform

417

students in the course, I decided to complete my doctoral thesis on exploring my peers’ experiences of digital storytelling in that course. Using hermeneutic phenomenology as my research methodology, I sought to explore and discover what the experience was like for my peers to be in that course. I wanted to learn about their experience creating autobiographical documentaries and sharing them. I wanted to see how this experience was transformative for them and what, if any, impact this experience has on their current teaching vision and practice. I was also a student in that course, and my experience was profoundly transformative too. As a former student in the graduate course Autobiographies in Education along with my colleagues, it was a rare opportunity in academia where I got to consider my selfhood and how it relates to my academic journey in the field of education. It also encouraged me to leave my familiar comfort zones of writing and expressing my perspectives in a typical academic essay and instead take the time to learn how to use iMovie, a movie-making application, to create my autobiographical documentary. This course pushed me out of my comfort zone in various ways; I had no knowledge or experience in creating short movies using a movie-making application. I recall going to The Apple Store every day to learn how to use iMovie with excitement and enthusiasm because the film I was creating had significant meaning to me. I had decided to focus my documentary on a former high school teacher I had who shifted my perspective about my life journey when I was going through a dark time as a teenager. Curious about how other former students of this teacher thought of her teaching, I tracked down some of her former students from various generations, gender, and ethnicity to hear their thoughts about her. I also visited my former high school teacher to seek her perspectives on teaching. She shared that, back in high school, she also had a very inspiring high school teacher who led her to her path of becoming a teacher: “On the first day of high school, I met the best teacher of my life. I remember saying to myself, ‘Not that’s what I want to be, but that’s who I want to be.’” Incorporating her former students’ voices, along with mine and my high school teacher’s, shows the long-term impact a teacher could have on their students, even years after they have left the classroom. The human relationships that this teacher fostered in her learning environment inspired her former students, including me, on our trajectories in life to live with meaning and value human relationships in our personal and professional lives. Looking back now, the experience of creating the autobiographical documentary was meaningful because I got to ponder and reflect on what experiences and people inspired my current teaching approach and practice. The journey of visiting my former high school teacher and her former students was also meaningful. That experience gave me the courage to change my thesis topic and thesis supervisor in order to focus on a research topic that I authentically relate to and have a passion for. Moreover, in the end, I was proud to share my documentary with my colleagues in the graduate course on our film-screening day. Witnessing others’ documentaries gave me more understanding, respect, empathy, and even awe for my colleagues. Through preliminary data analysis of the interviews conducted, it was apparent that digital storytelling has the potential to reform reflective practice in preservice teacher education. Data analysis led me to develop the Five Cs Framework, which

418

L. Fung

consists of care, community, creativity, choice, and conscience. Discussing the Five Cs Framework in depth is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the Five Cs Framework includes the following succinctly put, keeping in mind that all five elements often intertwine and depend on one another. Care involves the professor’s careful programming planning where students’ well-being is considered throughout the process. Participants felt safe in the environment created by the professor and the support given, including having a movie-media specialist teaching assistant to assist the documentary-making process. Sharing their autobiography and producing a documentary were challenges the participants felt fine with tackling because of the safe environment and trust in the professor’s teaching methods. Not only that, but participants noted the personal qualities of the professor as a part of the safety they felt; they pointed out her characteristics of fairness, care, and respect. The professor facilitates a caring environment that nurtures risk-taking beyond students’ comfort zones. Delia (pseudonym), a participant, gave insight into the difference in tackling challenges in a safe environment versus an unsafe one: “Your learning is being hindered because you are not engaged or you have not accepted this challenge. You did not sign up for this challenge, right? There’s a difference between challenging yourself, and being challenged.” She explains that typically students in classrooms feel like they are being challenged with classroom tasks, whether it is a lack of support with resources or from the teacher to their own lack of interest in the task. Challenging yourself, on the other hand, means that you have willingly taken up the challenge to challenge yourself while being given support and guidance throughout the process. Although the task of creating her own autobiographical documentary was challenging because it required her to share a personal aspect of who she is along with learning to use a movie-making application, she willingly and enthusiastically took up the challenge. Delia had confidence and trust in the professor’s curriculum and in the supportive classroom environment between her, the professor, the teaching assistant, and her peers. Participants noted that the professor’s willingness to share her own story before having them share theirs also contributed to creating a caring and safe space for them. Participants felt that while the task was to create an autobiographical documentary, which would require sharing their narratives and experiences, they never felt the pressure to do so. There was the feeling that they could share to the degree of their own comfort level. Having a professor, who is typically seen as an authority figure, show and conduct herself as equitable to students gave participants more ease in considering sharing their narratives with their classmates, which is not often encouraged or cultivated in an academic setting. Community, according to the participants, is an emotionally safe space created where vulnerability is allowed. Participants reported that the documentary-making process and the film screening of each other’s documentaries provided them with the experience of a community based on respect and empathy. One participant, Aishi (pseudonym), shared that being in a safe environment where everyone shared their life narratives concerning education reminded her that everyone comes into the classroom with their own story. Although we may not admit it, we sometimes

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform

419

subconsciously prejudge others when we meet them. However, watching each student’s documentary enabled her to shift her perspective about some colleagues in her class and to see them in a different light, in all their layers and complexities, with respect and empathy. She says, “Stories that you’re like, oh my God, I would have never thought this person, you know, would go through something like this in their life. You know, it must have affected them in some way or another. Now I’m going to see this person from a different light.” The classroom community was built because it functioned as a platform for voices to be shared and heard. Throughout the course, students were given time to share their perspectives in large and small groups concerning course content and their own experiences as educators. When it was time to start working on their autobiographical documentaries in class, a classroom community was already built so that students were comfortable with working alongside each other on their respective documentaries. Reflective dialogue was also prevalent in the classroom and reflects community because the conversations engaged their intellect and their personal experiences to build their sense of respect for each other, even when there are disagreements in class discussions. One participant, Sachi (pseudonym), recalls having a conversation with her colleagues in that class during a small group discussion. She recalls their exchange about children not being taught or given the opportunity to listen to each other without the intent to win or lose, and that schools essentially have conditioned students to talk for the sake of winning. She and her colleagues agreed that it is more important to dialogue for listening and learning. Thus, according to Sachi, since the professor modeled how to listen by being a listener during class discussions, she and her peers followed suit with the understanding that people can have different ideas to share and no one is superior to another. Essentially, the professor established a community built on empathy, awareness, and broadening of each other’s horizons. Choice refers to the instructor providing students with a choice on which autobiographical story they want to share and within their comfort level. Since the professor created a safe environment for the students at the beginning of the course, several students noted that when it was time to select which life experience to share, many indicated that they took the risk to share what they authentically wanted to share. They did not end up choosing a “safe” narrative or theme that they knew would be more socially acceptable in a typical academic setting. Sachi shares that her autobiographical documentary was about a comic book convention. The community she feels from being a part of that subculture led her to prioritize community building in her kindergarten classroom. She said that because the professor shared her story and had a class full of supportive peers, she chose to share a meaningful part of herself that she usually would not in an academic setting. Sharing a significant aspect of herself was risky because she feared being seen as strange or less than in her intellectual pursuits in an academic environment. Sharing an intimate and meaningful life story took courage because she risked being judged for something that is a large part of who she is as a person and as a teacher. The participants also felt they could choose and make decisions on their own learning because they got to decide how to present their documentary using artistic elements that spoke to them personally. One participant, Julius (pseudonym), recalls that the process of watching others’

420

L. Fung

documentaries sparked her interest and realization of the many ways others chose to design and produce their documentary. From drawn cartoons to the kinds of music, voice-overs, and movie effects, it showed her how much choice and individuality could be expressed artistically in an academic task. Creativity in this graduate course and the digital storytelling project includes students feeling that they had instructional support and tools to support their creative process. The digital storytelling project is expedited with open-ended prompts, and there are expectations for connecting their digital story to course content. For the participants, it was a refreshing experience compared to other courses in their teacher education program because this autobiographical documentary project provided them with a concrete way of experiencing the merging of theory with practice. To them, the expectation to connect course content to their life narratives by creating an autobiographical documentary provided a balance of structured and unstructured learning which humanizes the curriculum and who they are as students. Students felt like their stories mattered; the autobiographical documentaries gave their voices opportunities to speak. In addition, students were comfortable putting themselves into the position of the learner of a movie-making application of their choice with the guidance and support from a media specialist present in the classroom. As students constructed their movies in class alongside their peers, they were given feedback and opportunities to ask questions, fostering excitement while learning digital technology that is foreign and new to them. The open-ended prompt proposed by the professor, “What do you make of what you’ve been made of?” also gives students creative license to explore what they feel personally drawn to instead of being provided with a specific topic. One participant, Katherine (pseudonym), notes the difference between a highly structured contentdriven assignment and one that is structured but gives students opportunities to share and connect with their personal experiences. For instance, she mentions that if they were given a task to create a documentary or some other project on an educational topic, where she did not get to share her experiences, she would get the job done to receive a grade only. Thus, an autobiographical documentary provided with some structure and an open-ended prompt was both a challenging and meaningful endeavor for her and other participants. Conscience or conscientiousness was embedded and practiced by students in this graduate course because they had an opportunity to use digital technology consciously and meaningfully. They were encouraged to communicate and share authentically in an environment that promotes a lack of judgment and a focus on acceptance and respect. Conscientiousness was built because students got to reflect on their narratives and experiences and how that is significant to their current teaching practice. For example, Sachi notes that the course and the act of watching her colleagues’ documentaries at a film-screening event in class reminded her to practice listening. Since then, she has prioritized modeling attentive listening with the children through various activities in her kindergarten classroom. One notable activity she implemented with her kindergarten class was a tea party via Zoom during the pandemic. Each child sampled herbal tea and shared their differing and similar perspectives on the taste and experience of various flavored teas. As for

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform

421

Alana (pseudonym), she commits to instilling a love for learning due to her experience in this course. She currently teaches grades 7–8 students, and she hopes that her students will see her passion for learning and be inspired by that and for them to know that she cares for them. She hopes they go to school thinking and feeling, “I’m not going to school to be drilled. I’m not going to school to be a manufacturing, you know, machine! A manufacturing machine where I’m in and out, in and out, in and out.” Conscience was also linked to the desire for and development of empathy for others while in the course. Although years have gone by (since 2015), all participants mentioned that they could recall bits and pieces of their colleagues’ documentaries and how they affected them in their hearts, not just intellectually. One participant, Katherine, compares the difference between reading 20 essay papers written by her peers and watching 20 documentaries created by her peers. She asserts that the latter makes a much more significant impact and impression and potential for long-term impact on each other’s growth as teachers and people.

The Five Cs Framework and Relational Encounters in Teaching From preliminary data analysis results, it was apparent that the Five Cs Framework cannot happen on its own or be exclusive of one another. Overwhelmingly, the study participants have discussed the importance of relational encounters developed in the classroom as the critical ingredient to actualizing the elements of digital storytelling effectively and meaningfully. Aligning with Lindfors’ (1988) concept of classroom interactions on the difference between “talking together versus being together in talk” (Lindfors, 1988: 4), participants have indicated that the environment created by the professor’s planning initially and during the course helped to achieve that. Participants pointed out that the professor co-created a learning space that encourages sharing similar and differing perspectives to support students in collaborating and engaging authentically. One participant, Sachi, notes, “Even if it was a disagreement, it was because there were two different but truly held ideals. . .there was a lot of kindness and understanding from everyone else.” Moreover, another participant, Katherine, points out that for autobiographical documentary class projects to work, all the elements need to be in place, including an intentionally crafted curriculum that incorporates students’ experiences, a caring teacher, willing students, and a safe community. Hence, she wonders if it is possible to replicate the experience she had in this graduate course or was it just that “she lucked out” with the group of students and the professor she had in that class. On relating to one another in the course, participants felt they listened to each other for learning and understanding instead of to get a good grade. In addition, relating and connecting in that course felt like a space where they could be vulnerable, make mistakes, and not be judged for who they are and how they make sense of the connection between their professional and personal identity as teachers. Well-facilitated relational encounters bridge the discomfort and risk-taking that students might face when working with digital storytelling in the classroom.

422

L. Fung

Students’ discomfort and risk-taking might be due to unfamiliarity with the digital technology they are using and the expectation of expressing a personal aspect of themselves through the technology. However, the fear of learning new digital technology and sharing a part of who they are was alleviated with supportive relational encounters between the professor and the students and between students themselves. Digital storytelling provides an opportunity to disrupt the status quo on how reflective practice is expedited in preservice teacher training programs. It gives preservice teachers a meaningful experience in learning and utilizing digital technology to express their narratives within the larger landscape of education and their historical, political, and cultural surroundings. Voices of the privileged and underprivileged in teacher education programs are given an equal platform to reflect, share, understand, and express their perspectives and experiences in a classroom that encourages risk-taking to challenge their own and each other’s comfort zones for personal and professional growth. To utilize digital storytelling meaningfully, purposefully, and effectively within preservice teacher programs requires actualizing authentic relational encounters facilitated by the professor and co-created with the preservice teachers. When genuine relational encounters are created during the process of a digital storytelling project, the pillars of care, community, creativity, choice, and conscientiousness may result.

References Archibald, J. (2008). Indigenous storywork. UBC Press. Arraiz Matute, A., Da Silva, L., Pendleton Jiménez, K., & Smith, A. (2020). The sex of it all: Outness and Queer Women’s digital storytelling in teacher education. Teaching Education, 31(1), 98–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2019.1708314 Beck, C., & Kosnik, C. (2002). The importance of the university campus program in preservice teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(5), 420–432. Binder, M., Martin, J., Schwind, J., & McDonough, S. (2018). In N. Lemon (Ed.), Mindfulness in the academy (pp. 83–95). essay). Springer. Clark, C. M. (1995). Thoughtful teaching. Teachers College Press. Cooper, K., & Hughes, R. (2019). Critical issues in education: Citizen documentary in the Digital age. Life Rattle Press. Cooper, K. & McNab, S. (2009). Questioning as a pedagogical tool in teaching and research. In S. G. Kouritzin, N. A. C. Piquemal & R. Norman (Eds.), Qualitative research: Challenging the orthodoxies in standard academic discourse (pp. 199–215). Routledge. Di Leo, J. R. (2020). Introduction. In Catastrophe and Higher Education (pp. 1–29). Palgrave Macmillan. Gachago, D., & Sykes, P. (2017). Navigating ethical boundaries when adopting digital storytelling in higher education. Digital Storytelling in Higher Education, 91–106. Gachago, D., Condy, J., Ivala, E., & Chigona, A. (2014). All stories bring hope because stories bring awareness’: students’ perceptions of digital storytelling for social justice education. South African Journal of Education, 34(4), 1–12. Gatto, J. T. (2002). A different kind of teacher: Solving the crisis of American schooling. Berkeley Hills. Giroux, H. (2002). Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: The university as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review, 72(4), 425–463.

Preservice Teacher Curriculum Reform

423

Giroux, H. (2019a). Authoritarianism and the challenge of higher education in the age of Trump. Action, Criticism, and Theory in Music Education, 18(1), 6–25. Giroux, H. (2019b). In G. Yancy (Ed.), Educating for critical consciousness (1st ed., pp. 45–66). essay). Routledge. Giroux, H. (2020). Introduction. In On critical pedagogy (pp. 1–15). essay). Bloomsbury Collections. Greene, M. (1990). Multiple voices and multiple realities: A re-viewing of educational foundations. Journal of Educational Foundations, 4(2), 5–19. Greene, M. (1995a). Art and imagination: Reclaiming the sense of possibility. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(5), 378–382. Greene, M. (1995b). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. Jossey-Bass. Grumet, M. R. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. University of Massachusetts Press. Kanu, Y., & Glor, M. (2006). “Currere” to the rescue? Teachers as “amateur intellectuals” in a knowledge society. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 4(2), 101–122. Kincheloe, J. L. (2003). Critical ontology: Visions of selfhood and curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 19(1), 47–64. Kocaman-Karoglu, A. (2014). Personal voices in higher education: A digital storytelling experience for preservice teachers. Education and Information Technologies, 21(5), 1153–1168. Kottler, J., Kottler, E., & Zehm, S. J. (2005). On being a teacher: The human dimension (3rd ed.). Corwin Press. Krishnamurti, J. (1953). Education and the significance of life. HarperCollins. Latremouille, J., Bell, A., Kasamali, Z., Krahn, M., Tait, L., & Donald, D. (2016). Storying holistic understandings in education. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 14(1), 8–22. Lindfors, J. W. (1988). From “talking together” to “being together in talk”. Language Arts, 65(2), 135–141. Miller, J. P. (2007). The holistic curriculum (2nd ed.). University of Toronto. Miller, J. P. (2010). Whole child education. University of Toronto. Miller, J. P., Irwin, M., & Nigh, K. (2014). Teaching from the thinking heart: The practice of holistic education. Information Age Publishing. Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. JosseyBass. Palmer, P. J. (2011). Higher education and habits of the heart: Restoring democracy’s infrastructure. Journal of College and Character, 12(3), 1–6. Pinar, W. F. (1994). Autobiography, politics and sexuality: Essays in curriculum theory 1972–1992. Peter Lang. Poitras Pratt, Y. (2020). Digital storytelling in indigenous education. Routledge. Reilly, P. (2015). A path with heart. Irimi Horizons. Rudd, T., & Goodson, I. F. (2017). Negotiating neoliberalism: Developing alternative educational visions. Sense. Smith, D. G. (1999). Pedagon: Interdisciplinary essays in the human sciences, pedagogy, and culture. Peter Lang. Stenhouse, V. L., & Schafer, N. J. (2019). Empowering teachers through digital storytelling: A multimedia capstone project. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 35(1), 6–19. Sykes, P., & Gachago, A. (2018). Creating ‘safe-ish’ learning spaces – Attempts to practice an ethics of care. South African Journal of Higher Education, 32(6). https://doi.org/10.20853/326-2654 Taylor, M., & Klein, E. (2018). Tending to ourselves, tending to each other: Nurturing feminist friendships to manage academic lives. In N. Lemon & S. McDonough (Eds.), Mindfulness in the academy (pp. 99–111). essay). Springer.

424

L. Fung

Tompkins, J. P. (1996). A life in school: What the teacher learned. Basic Books. Troiani, I., & Dutson, C. (2021). The neoliberal university as a space to learn/think/work in higher education. Architecture and Culture, 9(1), 5–23. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing. Witherell, C., & Noddings, N. (1991). Stories lives tell: Narrative and dialogue in education. Teachers College Press.

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster Juha Suoranta, Olli Pyyhtinen, Perttu Ahoketo, Rosa Dufva, Sauli Havu, Marja Hekkala, Tuomas Ja¨rvinen, Satu Kaipainen, Saara Kontio, Ella Lepisto¨, Maija Lintunen, Reetta Matilainen, Roosa Saukkonen, and Milla Seppa¨la¨

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Personal Written Narratives as Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Testimonies of Lived Curriculum from the Covid-19 Spring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Love and Social Distancing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interdependence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reviving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Routines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Planetary Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Normality” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Privilege . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Togetherness in Homelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toward Lived Curriculum as Relational Pedagogy’s Practice of in-between . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

426 427 428 428 429 430 430 431 432 432 433 434 434 435 435 436 440

Abstract

In this chapter, we reflect on the concept of a lived curriculum from our students’ perspectives and ourselves as university teachers. The general aim of the paper is to examine the unprecedented condition surrounding our lives during the university lockdown in the Covid-19 Spring 2020. Furthermore, drawing from our J. Suoranta (*) · O. Pyyhtinen · P. Ahoketo · R. Dufva · S. Havu · M. Hekkala · T. Järvinen · S. Kaipainen · S. Kontio · E. Lepistö · M. Lintunen · R. Matilainen · R. Saukkonen · M. Seppälä Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: juha.suoranta@tuni.fi; olli.pyyhtinen@tuni.fi; perttu.ahoketo@tuni.fi; rosa.dufva@tuni.fi; sauli.havu@tuni.fi; marja.hekkala@tuni.fi; tuomas.jarvinen@tuni.fi; satu.kaipainen@tuni.fi; saara.kontio@tuni.fi; ella.lepisto@tuni.fi; maija.lintunen@tuni.fi; reetta.matilainen@tuni.fi; roosa.saukkonen@tuni.fi; milla.seppala@tuni.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_13

425

426

J. Suoranta et al.

observations and our students’ reflective testimonies (personal experience narratives), we contrast the formal strategies and visions of the university’s performance- and competence-based curriculum thinking to our daily practices as teachers and sociology students. We ponder our lived experience and coexistence, our lives as teachers and students during the corona outbreak in Spring 2020. Keywords

Lived curriculum · Covid-19 · Collective writing · Lived experience · Students’ testimonies

Introduction In this collectively authored chapter, we reflect on the concept of a lived curriculum from the perspectives of our students and ourselves as university teachers. The general aim of the paper is to examine the unprecedented condition surrounding our lives during the university lockdown in the Covid-19 Spring 2020. Furthermore, drawing from our observations and our students’ reflective testimonies (personal experience narratives), we contrast the formal strategies and visions of the university’s performance- and competence-based curriculum thinking to our daily practices as teachers and sociology students. We ponder our lived experience and coexistence, our lives as teachers and students during the corona outbreak in Spring 2020. In reflecting on our experiences, we are studying “not the curriculum as laid out in a plan, but a plan more or less lived out” (Aoki, 1993, p. 257; Ramjewan & Toukan 2018; Tilley & Taylor, 2013). Au (2018) has offered an operational definition of lived curriculum, or “the curriculum of the world,” as follows: pedagogy and curriculum are about more than just what we do in schools or classrooms. Everyday, we teach ourselves and each other, learn from ourselves and each other, and make decisions about how we approach all of our relations. The ways we live our lives, engage with communities, be with our families, do our work, and navigate our institutions also embody a kind of pedagogy of being as we experience the curriculum of the world. (Au, 2018)

Many of us teachers and students had felt isolated and alone in the corporateneoliberal university for a long time already before the global Covid-19 pandemic hit us, but what happened to us when universities closed their doors and shifted to remote learning? How did the crisis, which is not over, change our lives (if it did), and what did we become with it (cf. Jandrić et al., 2020)? Our chapter is motivated by an observation that teachers and students usually know each other only from the classroom. Irene Karpiak (2010: 13) has made the following remark from the teachers’ side: As educators we come to know our students through their participation in class, their productivity on tests and exams, and through various personal encounters. Seldom do we know them through their stories. Rarely are we privileged to read their less formal and more

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

427

personal works or witness their unique personalities and literary styles. Scarcely ever do we engage with their life struggles, their efforts to survive, or their capacities to adapt, to learn, and to change.

In this text, which we intend as a kind of sociological oratorio, we want to do precisely this, that is, collectively shed light on our students’ everyday lives, experiences, and feelings by going beyond the educational machine – the dark, Satanic mills – of classes, tests, and exams. The text collects and records their everyday emotions, thoughts, and words amid the great uncertainty caused by a large-scale pandemic and attends to what they say. Our text is experimental and experiential. We, teachers, wish to learn in dialogue with our students by practicing “thematic collective writing” (see Peters et al., 2019, 2020, 2021). Jackson defines collective writing as education and describes it as follows: Collective writing requires openness as its purposes could not be achieved if the author was uninterested or disinterested in understanding other people’s perspectives. This understanding involved is not minimal and polite, but must be much deeper and more substantial to make the process of collective writing possible. This makes collective writing different from a dialogue. This openness requires willingness to be taught by the other through processes of ordinary communication involved with the collaborative writing process. In collective writing it is a kind of a priori understanding that the other has something to contribute to one’s own understanding and knowledge, which is yet to be seen. (Peters et al., 2021)

In the spirit of this openness and “willingness to be taught by the other,” we teachers have assembled the text from our students’ testimonies. We do not treat or ‘analyze’ them as data but place their testimonies on the same level as our musings. One a performative level, it is one of the aims of this text to resist, problematize, and undo the idea of the pedagogical relation as a kind of bridge stretching between two cliffs: the teacher, on the one hand, and the student, and the student, on the other. Instead of starting from and articulating a dichotomy and a divided world, we perceive teaching and learning as entangled, liberatory, multivoiced, and transformative processes in which both the student and the teacher are transformed and become something different than before. During the learning process, all parties involved can learn, grow, change, and flourish together. We will discuss this theme at the end of our chapter by suggesting a practice of relational pedagogy.

Personal Written Narratives as Data As part of a course on public sociology organized in Spring 2020, the teacher, Juha Suoranta, gave the students an assignment to write a testimony on the subject “Student life during Covid-19.” He also told them about the possibility of contributing to an edited volume on curriculum theory, research, and practice (see Miller & Miller, 1976 on the use of the student’s sociological diary as a teaching device). In his email to the students, Juha wrote as follows:

428

J. Suoranta et al.

Spring 2020, also known as the ‘Covid-19 Spring,’ has been unprecedented for everyone globally. As Finnish sociologist Anna Rotkirch describes the situation in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (8.5.2020): ‘For most of us, this will be the biggest crisis affecting society as a whole in a lifetime. For some, it will be an experience that characterizes their generation. We know now that Generation Z is Generation K [the letter K standing for Korona in Finnish].’ Hence we invite your reflections on the ‘lived curriculum’ during the Covid-19 Spring. [...] Please share your description, for example, in a diary-like manner. Among the possible themes, you could reflect on your experience of university lockdown – emotions, possible difficulties, moments of joy, observations from the Covid-19 Spring, lessons learned, and potential changes in your thinking, goals, or dreams.

Thirteen students participated and wrote two to four-page long, personal, and thick testimonies describing their experiential Covid-19 Spring (we teachers had written our testimonies earlier, see Jandrić et al., 2020). So, what did we do to and with the students’ testimonies? To put it bluntly, we teachers acted as translators, scribes, book-keepers, or curators who facilitated, collected, read, organized the valuable material the students provided. At first, we had difficulties figuring out how to work with the texts and what to do. Still, we decided to keep the testimonies approximately intact and define them as one unit of analysis instead of analyzing the testimonies as data by, say, seeing them through a theoretical lens to identify patterns. Even though we tried to let the students speak for themselves, it was nevertheless us, the teachers, who provided the template, set the questions, organized the testimonies into a whole, and shortened them to meet the word limit. Therefore, it would be hypocritical on our part to pretend to be entirely on the same level and at one with the students (Brookfield, 1995; Brookfield & Holst, 2011). However, the ethics of collective writing demanded us to preserve the polyphony of voices and include various experiences, feelings, and thoughts. Hence, the text is a “living document” and a collaborative effort to equal all voices. There is no hierarchy between the speakers, and each story is an organic whole representing a unique lived experience.

Testimonies of Lived Curriculum from the Covid-19 Spring Transformation I have described the bizarre times following the pandemic as an “endless November” and a “frozen adventure.” The endless November parable refers to an inward-turning, cold, and depressing time (which November often is in Finland) without an end. The frozen adventure is perhaps a bit more positive metaphor. It signals the awakening of a curious child or a researcher, experiencing a bad conscience for feeling a sense of enthusiasm that follows a previously unseen social change in rapture. During the pandemic, I felt I was in a dark corner. I was locked indoors. A wet rag of November weighed down on my neck. The Spring sun didn’t seem to have the slightest rush to dry up my grief and heal my wounds. Finland was in lockdown, and the restrictions tightened day by day. The isolation of the Southern part of the

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

429

country and the violations of freedom of movement as a constitutional right were conducive to strengthening the apocalyptic atmosphere. Gradually, my energy levels recovered, and I began my old tradition of 20 min of meditation, which, I think, lowered my irritability levels. Consequently, my attitude toward myself became empathetic and wise. I could say I became friends with myself again. We were amid a crisis, which reduced my criticism of my being in the world. People were no longer measured by their performance, as every day became about survival mode. After months of fatigue and depression, I had transformed into a person who remembers to be more kind to himself. Considering my 8 years of suburban life with unprecedented intensity and registering my alcoholic neighbors’ furious shouts day and night with deep regret, I applied for an apartment closer to university. Eventually, I found an apartment and felt how a new page turned in my life. From the perspective of Paulo Freire, I think that my inner oppressor has receded a little further away, out of the shackles toward self-liberation (Freire, 2005). A small but significant change grew out from the combined effect of pausing and communal experiences instead of fighting.

Love and Social Distancing I have a partner on the other side of the world. We have had all the meaningful conversations over the phone or even more annoyingly with messages. Even everyday interaction becomes almost entirely speech conveyed, and so much is left when there is only a phone between two people and more than 7000 miles. While technology helps, it also creates obstacles for our relationship. It is quiet, slow, and sad to share life, feelings, and thoughts like this. If my partner is unhappy, I can’t shake their hand. When my partner smiles, mine comes with a delay. What will happen after the acute phase of the Covid-19 crisis, when the borders will once again be opened, and we can finally meet again? Can we be changed with time and space at the same pace? I have been calm, for there has been plenty of time to reflect on my relationship with solitude. I think it has something to do with my childhood and being born in the 1990s. I don’t imagine that this particular time would be more impressive than the others would. There have always been economic, ecological, and political crises, and sometimes I wake up thinking when it’s my turn to come to grief. We are all such temporary and fragile beings in time. The experience we have of life profoundly affects our thinking and understanding of ourselves and others. Perhaps this state of being could be described as an uncomfortable acceptance of one’s circumstances. Things are as they are, so I don’t worry about them too much. Of course, I am angry about the grievances and injustices that have deepened during the pandemic. Today, as I walk the quiet streets of the city Tampere, I wonder what I do not see and what I am missing. I have not yet decided whether awareness of all that is happening around me at the moment is reassuring or inconsolable. Now, the studies consist of online meetings. I have noticed lowered stress levels. I have fewer studies than before, but I also take less pressure from the existing ones.

430

J. Suoranta et al.

Even writing is smooth, even though I have not gotten rid of my vice, that is, the difficulty of finalizing my writing assignments. It is as if the door inside my head has opened, and the inside bursts with ideas and perceptions. Sometimes these ideas translate into words and sentences. Silence and unhurriedness have done well to me. I intend to walk through this time of crisis as Raja Shehadeh describes in Palestinian Walks (2007): often alone, sometimes together, quietly in peace, sometimes heart in my mouth, present and absent – as part of the world and the unstoppable flow of time. Or, as Shehadeh puts it: “Throughout their short lives, they had always known danger and uncertainty. They had experienced no other life.”

Interdependence Intellectual activity is always collective, not individual. If I had to name one of the teachings of the Covid-19 Spring related to academic life, it would be this. During the Spring, I noticed how my dissatisfaction with my thinking had grown and how difficult it was to put words on paper. So, I’m sure my performance level has dropped. But in this situation, it is probably human. While there is more time than ever, things don’t seem to be moving forward. In part, this is the illusion created by the stagnation of the situation: as the days recur, similarly, progress feels slower than it is. But this only explains part of this. During the Spring, the importance of informal discussion and exchange of ideas has dawned on me. From the beginning, my university studies have mainly been built around voluntary reading circles, seminars, and essay assignments. I hardly attend lectures and learn a lot by reading, so studying at home should not be a big problem. However, a relatively close group of friends has formed around the study circles. We have changed our thoughts about our readings and experiences during the lockdown. When this peer-learning among my fellow students disappeared, independent learning also seemed to become increasingly difficult. While study circles can, of course, be held online, online sessions often focus more strictly on the text than on anything else. The exchange of rumors in the bar after the study circle is gone too. The advancement of collaborative writing projects has also slowed down. The basics of life have suddenly become quite complicated! I hope that the Covid-19 pandemic will teach mercy to me. It shows that devoting more time to things does not automatically mean more efficiency. On the contrary, it shows how vital leisure and informal sociality are also for academic matters. Sociologically, it speaks volumes about people’s interdependence. Everyday conversations with half-acquaintances prove to be surprisingly substantial.

Reviving This year started strangely for me and has continued at least as strangely ever since this entire Spring. At the beginning of this year, I had been in development work for almost 2 years. Simultaneously, I was also a “remote” Ph.D. student: working full-

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

431

time at a job, part-time on my research plan and grant applications. When things get serious, many people have realized (and reported, too) how much more effective working from home is. I also feel relieved and delighted that external circumstances have accelerated the necessary change in work practices – if one can rejoice in such things now. I am thankful to the pandemic for being able to attend this sociology course. While working in the office, I wouldn’t have been able to participate in the lectures. For me, the course has had a revitalizing effect this Spring. It has helped me find the moral courage to take a step aside, observe everyday practices, and care about justice. I can no longer ignore the question of whom I want to become. I want a critical consciousness to grow inside me. Finally, I would say a few words about confusion for which I cannot find a solution. Could a global state of emergency also present an opportunity in addition to being a threat? One of my clients told me that now that society is “closed,” they feel that social pressure has been eased and find life and existence much easier now. What if the Covid-19 restrictions have brought certain families closer to each other? What if parents know now how to appreciate the work of, for example, teachers and childcare workers more than before? In the social media forums of social workers, several kinds of concerns dominate, especially over the risks of neglect and violence against children. However, does such concern-centered discourse produce an atmosphere of fear? What would constructive and risk-averse communication be like? I’m guessing that the age of asking questions will never pass.

Routines When the university went into lockdown, my social circles began to narrow. No one dared to socialize anymore for fear of getting sick. Thus, I decided to travel to my hometown to be with my parents and hike in the woods. Outdoors has become a new part of my daily routine. I walk about 4–6 miles a day with my parents. However, one thing remains constant: the coronavirus. I am rather tired of daily corona news and sensationalist headlines. It feels like the news reports repeat precisely the same issues and the same experts tell the same opinions every day. I remember the news reports almost by heart, or at least it feels like it. Mentally, this Corona Spring has been quite tricky for me because there are no other essential issues than the Covid-19 pandemic. I have tried to change the subject when the conversation has begun to tread the same circle. My study motivation has been declining for a long time, and I have been forced to prolong my studies for personal reasons. My ability to concentrate has been put to the test this spring, perhaps more than ever. Schedule pressures and an uninterrupted debate about the coronavirus have negatively influenced my study motivation. Besides, now that all the study routines are almost missing in an environment where I have been relaxed and informal, studying has not been easy. However, I have managed to cope with motivation problems reasonably well. It does not help to be overwhelmed by the current situation because the future will not become brighter

432

J. Suoranta et al.

by being passive. One thing is sure: I cannot plan my life too far, as this spring has shown at the latest how fragile our system can ultimately be.

Planetary Reflections I am in a privileged position in many ways. First, I am a healthy, young person, and coronavirus won’t probably be as fatal to me as those at risk. I have a safe and comfortable home: so I don’t have to, against my will, expose myself to the virus, for example, in a refugee camp. I am a Finnish citizen entitled to social security, so getting fired does not necessarily lead to poverty. Due to my privileged position, the coronavirus has not caused me great anxiety or dramatic difficulty in my life. Of course, I am worried about other people, but I have felt better than before. It wasn’t until everyone around me stopped that I could permit myself to stop as well. Honestly, the permission to stay home felt downright a gift from heaven, something I had longed for without realizing it. In the hectic way of life, boredom feels like an incredible luxury these days, and I think it’s also essential for awakening new ideas and inspiration. I have enjoyed slow, stretchy mornings and leisurely walks, as well as television series marathons during the corona spring. There has been more time than usual during the quarantine-like conditions to think about what I want out of life after this exceptional period ends at some point. I believe many share my experience of the importance of nature and social relations during the Covid-19 pandemic. My friends and I have played with the idea of a self-sufficient community in the countryside in the future. During the pandemic, these dreams have become even more forceful. I have spent time browsing the premises for sale, although realistically, it is not yet possible to realize the vision. In any case, the global pandemic has increased interest in a lifestyle close to nature, communal, and as effectively as possible decoupled from fossil capitalism. The Covid-19 crisis is another indication of how fragile our economic system is if it threatens to collapse as soon as people reduce their work for a few months. It makes me wonder how cranky it is that today’s Western prosperity is based on economic growth, that is, that people go to work, whatever that job is. It is clear that a large proportion of employment only benefits the economy, not people or the environment. What we have witnessed this spring in the form of the Covid-19 crisis is only a slight foretaste of what is to come if the harmful human activity continues as before. Climate change cannot be curbed quickly.

Coping The state of the world, my mental condition, and the future of my loved ones have haunted me a lot since Covid-19 spread to Finland. At first, I tried to create an experience of managing the situation by reading the news diligently. Soon, however, this began to haunt me. So far, my anxiety due to a changed daily life, an uncertain future, a possible illness, and the health of loved ones, and how the pandemic will

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

433

affect humanity have mixed in my head into a mess. I often find myself projecting my everyday worries, such as study pressures, to worry about the state of the world. Often it is difficult to identify where the anxiety and fear associated with the pandemic are coming from. In the Corona Spring, I was in the same situation I had been in for the past couple of years: the future seemed uncertain, meeting people was scary, and a significant part of my mental resources went to scheduling everyday life and making small decisions. When the day’s rhythm is not maintained by an external institution, such as a university, nothing forces me to get out of bed in the morning. I must make a considerable number of small decisions in my daily life about what things to do that day and when to do them. I also easily slip through my own choices, which in turn sometimes leads to paralysis. The key difference compared with the past was that now many others were in pain with similar problems. I created an experience of controlling myself by acting on behalf of others and focusing on the situation’s community aspects. We thought a lot with my roommate about organizing and came up with ideas on strengthening our closest during the Covid-19 pandemic. I picked up food for my sick friend from the store and shared phone numbers with my other roommate to organize food distribution in our apartment building. I shared the online mental health services’ contact information to all the possible channels that came to my mind. All of this brought me joy, hope, and an experience of control. However, my main focus soon returned to managing my own life, even though I have also tried to support my loved ones.

Adaptation Overall, the times of exception have not changed my daily life in any dramatic way. Anyway, I spend quite a lot of time at home, and I haven’t managed to be as social and see friends as I might have ever before. I live with my partner, so I haven’t had to be completely alone, either. We also adopted a rescue dog from Serbia in January with my partner, and we have spent time going out and tinkering with a new family member. Similarly, we took my grandmother’s dog into our care because my grandmother could not care for the dog due to her health condition. The most significant change in my daily life has been that I went to train roller derby three times a week in the past, but now there has been a break for training. Instead, the club has been hosting workouts twice a week online, which has been excellent. When the state of emergency started, I was more in touch with friends with messages, and we set up a message group because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I enjoyed that my apartment had a bathtub in cold weather when the condominium’s weekly ‘jogging sauna’ was off. It is almost summer now. I rejoice that the apartment also has a balcony to grow various flowers and herbs and other edible plants such as broccoli, tomatoes, kale, zucchini, and cucumbers. I dream of my yard, cottage, detached house, own pottery workshop, and several dogs; stable livelihood in general. The uncertainty of the current situation and the unpredictability of the epidemic are thought provoking. Still, in the end, nothing in life is entirely foolproof, and

434

J. Suoranta et al.

everything is continuously changing, so it is best to try to adapt and live your little life as well as you can.

“Normality” On a personal level, the coronavirus has ultimately had only reasonably little effect on my life. I have been able to live and study in a relatively normal way. A couple of days ago, I exchanged messages with fellow students about unusually peaceful the corona situation. However, for myself, the rest of the Spring has been one of my studies’ busiest periods. Yet, I have also managed to have some time off from studies by binge-watching TV shows, gaming, and reading books. I’ve always loved casual reading, but I just haven’t had the time for it, as I’ve had to read so much anyway in my studies. Due to corona, I’ve given myself time to read books that I find pleasant, and it has been fantastic! I’m an introvert, and I get on well by myself, so the restrictions on meeting people did not bother me. The only person I’ve seen during the Spring has been my boyfriend; I have hardly seen any of my friends. However, I have made some video calls and talked over the phone with a couple of friends more frequently than usual. It is natural to me not to need much face-to-face interaction, but during this time, I have noticed that I now miss it more than before. I haven’t seen my family this entire Spring, which makes me sad, but we’ve kept in contact by making calls and via messages.

Privilege At the end of the day, the corona crisis has not felt like that big of a thing compared to what it must have been for many others. I think that in many respects, I am in a privileged position: I have the opportunity for remote learning, I haven’t lost my income due to the crisis, I have a comfortable and safe home where to isolate myself, and I have a family who has helped me out when I have been short of money. And something as self-evident to us as the opportunity to wash our hands is not equally possible for everyone. Nor am I worried about getting sick myself because I am physically very healthy. I’m pretty much worried about my grandmother, who is at risk. I’ve always seen Grandma in the summer, but I suppose I will not be able to visit her this summer. I am also concerned about my mother, as she, too, belongs to a risk group. The Spring’s happiest coincidence has been my move to a new apartment at the beginning of March, just before the corona epidemic got worse in Finland. The old flat would have been a distressing place for seclusion. My new apartment is cozy, beautiful, spacious for a studio apartment, and well-located, too; it has brought a lot of joy to my days! Besides my home and friends, other things that have brought joy to my life have been my houseplants, social media (corona) memes, and my friend’s cats, even though they keep me awake at night while I stay over at my friend’s place. Besides, I hope and believe that something positive can come out of this situation.

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

435

Perhaps people have found out that a more climate-friendly lifestyle is possible, and maybe they have learned to appreciate low-wage workers more.

Togetherness in Homelessness During home quarantine, some plumbing work started in our home. As a result, my daughter and I were forced to move away from home for three months. We stayed in various homes during the quarantine, and I also worked as a home teacher for my daughter. Jumping into this new role unprepared was as exciting as it was terrifying. We lived for five weeks in my boyfriend’s one-bedroom flat. My daughter was in home school, and I studied remotely, and also my boyfriend worked from home. I would say that the coronavirus really brought us together. During the Covid-19 Spring, I kept in touch with friends and family via phone only. I spent my days mostly with my daughter. Studying and my daughter’s home school gave a sense of purpose to everyday life and something to do. In a way, my daughter and I both lived student life at home. The thought of this still makes me laugh. My emotions ranged from one extreme to the other, from immense gratitude to grief and crying. I followed the news, but at some point, I had to take a break. I read several books, but I also needed some silence and just lied still on the floor. I was thinking of homeless people. One day I came across an intoxicated young man at the central market who said he had no home or money. The encounter made me feel my responsibility in the life course of the homeless man. What is society’s role in helping homeless people during this international crisis, as people are instructed to stay home? I met the homeless man who did not want to go to the city’s housing emergency unit and had no help from any organizations. For a moment, I thought whether I should accommodate him myself, but then remembered that I had had to evacuate from my own home. The situation felt absurd. The troublesome condition of the homeless is difficult to comprehend. When instructed to keep a safe distance and stay at home, how must it feel if one has no support network or home? Our conversation ended, and we parted ways.

Being I would like to remember this spring from the feeling that, for once, I feel that the world around me is not trying to force me to be productive. I have not thought I ought to be doing something effective, functional, and compliant this spring. This spring, I have not had pressure to believe that maybe I should do something meaningful after all when I have not done anything. There have simply been no tasks. There have been no events to go. On the other hand, there have been no jobs that I should have considered applying for. I have had the feeling that I have released an enormous amount of energy to focus on what I want to do or not to do. That’s why

436

J. Suoranta et al.

this spring has felt joyfully liberating. I wish I could remember this feeling of lack of pressure when external demands strengthen again. However, the most important thing, in my opinion, is to take care of one’s well-being and the well-being of those close to one, and after that, assess whether it is necessary to react to external pressures or not. I have followed the spring’s progress entirely differently this spring: the birds’ return and plants’ growth. The last time I remember following the spring and summer’s arrival with such intensity as a child. I am waiting to see the return of wagtails and swallows in the coming Spring as well.

Toward Lived Curriculum as Relational Pedagogy’s Practice of in-between The unprecedented global Covid-19 pandemic halted the world for a moment, except that nothing seemed to stop the university machine and its academic proletariat – teachers and students – from working perhaps more demanding than ever. In 2020, researchers in Western countries published more than ever. However, there was a noticeable gender gap: while men’s publishing rate rose, female academics, taking up increased childcare responsibilities, seemed to fall behind their male colleagues in terms of work. As for the students who mainly studied online, but that did not prevent them from performing in record terms. The students’ testimonies reveal, at least, that the lived curriculum of the Covid19 Spring consisted of uncertainty. The students have carried on with their lives despite all the uncertainty. The capitalist world did not stop, nor did the students. The pandemic somewhat disrupted our everyday, “normal” ways of living and going about our lives, work, and relationships with others. The students experienced stress and hardship, and for many, the usual support networks were cut off. Yet, the testimonies also show that the students are aware of their privilege: they acknowledge that others do not benefit from staying at home. This was apparent, for example, in the chance encounter – a moment of togetherness – with a student and a homeless person depicted above. While the student was forced to leave their home, they nevertheless had a place where to stay. Their newly experienced homelessness enabled them to form even stronger triadic ties with their child and partner than had previously been the case. The homelessness of the person they encountered was of a very different kind. This example already suggests that while the pandemic certainly touches each of us, all our actions, and all that happens to us, it does not affect us the same way. We are not in it together. At the same time, many of the testimonies expressed a politics of hope and a belief that notwithstanding its human cost, the crisis could nevertheless lead to a new dawn. We might learn to live more peacefully with nature and among ourselves. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has suggested that the pandemic’s successive waves (we have written this text during the second, third, and fourth waves; not riding them, but almost like drowning in them) have different logics, emotional responses, and economic-political and socio-psychological effects. When the first wave hit us in Spring 2020, the primary socio-psychological outcome was fear, at least in the

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

437

wealthy West. During the second wave, because the future horizon continues to be hasty, “there is something deeper than fear at work: we have passed from fear to depression. We feel fear when there is a clear threat, and we feel frustration when obstacles emerge again and again, which prevents us from reaching what we strive for. But depression signals that our desire itself is vanishing.” (Žižek, 2020.) During the third and fourth waves, a certain battlefront, even rage, emerged between the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated. The former group was often interpreted in public as pro-medicine and pro-science, and the latter as anti-medicine and anti-science. The students wrote their testimonies during the first wave, so we cannot know how they live through and interpret the consecutive waves based on their texts. Žižek (ibid.) claims that in COVID-19, at stake is nothing less than our ontology as human beings and stance toward human life in general. Are our students and we, the teachers, as Žižek asks, libertarians who want to protect our freedoms at any cost? Or utilitarians ready to kill the elderly, who lose their lives for the sake of the economic well-being of others? Or are we perhaps authoritarians believing in strict state control and regulations to save us? Or New Age spiritualists thinking that the COVID-19 pandemic is a warning sign straight from mother nature, if not a penalty for our exploitation of nature? Or religious believers of sorts, who trust that God is testing us and will eventually somehow show us a way out? (In answering these questions, states Žižek, we are all philosophers.) We would supplement Žižek’s typology with a rationalist who believes in science, learns from their experiences and mistakes, and ultimate capability to overcome pandemics and other threats and disasters. In addition, we also acknowledge that there are people (perhaps a proper word for them would be denialists) who show a certain indifference to official instructions and restrictions and seem to experience a sort of apathy (or rage), disregarding the threat and perhaps even lacking any cherished values. The university machine itself is not attentive to the students’ experiences as it tries to guarantee its smooth operation. Our own university’s information on the Covid-19 pandemic contains the following statement: “The goal is to ensure the continuity of operations and students’ ability to graduate.” What the statement does not explain is the need to keep the diploma mill’s engine running. It is as if there were no alternatives, for example, to stop the engine from burning oil, even when the locomotive is on fire, or that the only “rational” thing was to first wait for the vaccine and then return to the “old normal” (if there ever was one). As sociology teachers, what should we think about this logic of continuity that assumes and assures that everything will go back to normal? As Zadie Smith aptly points out in her essay collection Intimations, written in Spring 2020 during the early months of lockdown, the wish to “have our old life back” sounds like a proper “‘wartime’ wish’” (she is alluding to the former president of the United States, who had declared war on Covid-19), apart from the fact that “no one in 1945,” for example, “wished to return to the ‘old life,’ to return to 1939 – except to resurrect the dead” (Smith, 2020, p. 11). As teachers, we are often expected to teach our students to cultivate a critical attitude toward social reality and understand how phenomena are constructed, not eternal, natural, fixed, and invariable. From the teacher’s perspective, this push to sapere aude – to think beyond “comfort zones” by questioning uncertainties,

438

J. Suoranta et al.

unsettling final truths, and embracing the complexity and ambiguity of things – could be described as practicing what Zembylas and Boler (2002) have called a “pedagogy of discomfort.” In their definition, “a pedagogy of discomfort invites students to leave behind learned beliefs and habits and enter the risky areas of contradictory and ambiguous ethical and moral differences” and force them to “step outside of their comfort zones and recognize what and how one has been taught to see (or not to see).” In the light of the students’ testimonies, is this the right direction to go in the Covid-19 pandemic and the coming post-pandemic era? Of course, we need to practice critical social thought, but a heightened awareness was required from us by climate change and other global threats already before the pandemic. Is it not so without pedagogical efforts that the students, like us, have entered a critical era per se, forced to step outside their comfort zones and learn the world anew? All in all, in developing a lived curriculum or the curriculum of the post-pandemic world, we think that it is crucial to look for teaching and learning models that recognize both our strengths and vulnerabilities as humans and inspire us to move toward the Freirian pedagogy of love, mercifulness, and reciprocities, which we connect with relationality and relational pedagogy. We regard relational pedagogy as an effective and fruitful way of engaging with our students’ everyday struggles and strivings to adapt, learn, and change – a challenge expressed at the beginning of this text. We are thinking of pedagogy as relational praxis. It means rejecting and dissolving the dichotomy between teaching and learning. As Freire (2016, p. 4) puts it, “If the dichotomy between teaching and learning results in the refusal of the one who teaches to learn from the one being taught, it grows out of an ideology of domination. Those called to teach must first learn how to continue learning when they begin to teach.” Relational pedagogy considers teaching and learning as two closely intertwined processes, akin to a double helix, through and along which both parties, the teacher and the student, are transformed together. We conceive relational pedagogy in dialectical or dialogical terms in that, to quote Michael Burawoy (2004, p. 9), “education becomes a series of dialogues on the terrain of sociology that we foster – a dialogue between ourselves and students, between students and their own experiences, among students themselves, and finally a dialogue of students with publics beyond the university.” Relational pedagogy as a dialectical process means that the teacher cannot but change along with the student. And even more: the relation in-between is a process through and along which both parties are transformed and from which they thus come out in a different state from the one in which they entered it. (See Ingold, 2011: 147–153 of the notion of the “inbetween” and its difference from that of the “between”.) It is on that terrain of the in-between that teaching and learning happen, and mutual growing and reflective development occur. What is needed is an openness to alterity and readiness to welcome the Other, even though this Other may not match our desires, but may contradict and question what we know and believe in. In other words, we must dare to be vulnerable, imperfect, and erring, and learn “the productive commerce with alterity” (Innerarity, 2017, p. 4).

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

439

On a more practical note, to take our lived curriculum, or “the curriculum of the world,” into account, we would need a more open, undesigned, and undecided curriculum. That would include collaborative course planning, open-platform courses without ready-made plans (except for an exciting topic), writing Wikipedia, study circles, field trips and fieldwork, and collective writing – all these forms of studying and teaching with the students and teachers. A Marxist political theorist Bertell Ollman (1985), once envisioned activist universities that would put “mass scholarship into action” and suggested that students and teachers should “produce a wind, a hurricane, that would shake the whole university.” This collective hurricane would be a joint educational project and, as Ollman put it, “a positive education experience for everyone involved.” We would very much like to see our collective writing endeavor on the lived curriculum as a small, modest gesture toward imagining an activist and collaborative university in the manner Ollman specified and anticipated. Unfortunately, the current situation points in the opposite direction. Universities are closing their doors as public institutions. They apply and beg for funding from military and corporate sources and subject individual researchers and research groups to the publish or perish “tyranny” (Paglia, 1992). In turn, students are subjugated to individualistic survival games for credits and study points to meet – as they are told – the competencies and needs of a constantly changing work life. Besides, universities control their studies increasingly by pre-designed curricula, learning analytics, and personalized learning algorithms (see Teräs et al., 2020). The business-oriented and managerial changes in the corporate university are so rapid that it is almost impossible to pause and evaluate them critically. We all need to run fast just to stay still, a condition that does not do good for reflective thinking and transformative learning. Relational pedagogy does not thrive well in these dire circumstances. Still, it presupposes a desire to resist the temptation to protect oneself (i.e., to defend oneself under the protection of an academic armor); a willingness to give up certainties as well as pretensions to superior knowledge and authority; the ability to take necessary conflicts, misunderstandings, and breaks and stay with them until they are resolved. The teacher should not see what one presents as absolute truth but as an interpretation or a preliminary idea, which is then worked together in teaching. We take this idea from relational psychoanalysis: according to it, what is healing about therapy is when we figure things out in the middle, in the in-between. Relational pedagogy means relative autonomy to be along with each other, and that in pedagogical relationships, both parties, teachers, and students, learn. Moreover, we would do well in joining forces with the curriculum theorists who argue for “itinerant curriculum theory” and define researchers as “epistemological radicals” belonging to “epistemological pariahs.” They are theorists living in praxis always “challenging and challenged by a theoretical path that is inexact yet rigorous,” prepared and willing to provoke “an abstinence of theoretical uniformity and stabilization” and search for “a constant lack of equilibrium.” (Paraskeva, 2011; 2019.) For us, as teachers and students, this would mean that we have mutual respect, recognition, and solidarity in the first instance. Only together as teacher-students and

440

J. Suoranta et al.

student-teachers, we may hope to escape the military-industrial-academic complex’s intellectual diaspora (Giroux, 2007). Although challenging and impossible at times, we would like to learn to cherish the moment, which Martin Buber defines as that exceptional twinkling when a teacher and a student turn to each other as “particular others” (Aspelin, 2020). Then, perhaps, it is possible to bridge the gap between teaching and learning, even in harsh times, and realize that for a moment, at least, we inhabited the same lifeworld, shared our lives and the lived curricula.

References Aoki, T. (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3), 255–268. Aspelin, J. (2020). Teaching as a way of bonding: A contribution to the relational theory of teaching. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020. 1798758 Au, W. (2018). A marxist education. Learning to change the word. Haymarket Books. Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Jossey-Bass. Brookfield, S., & Holst, J. (2011). Radicalizing learning. Adult education for a just world. JosseyBass. Burawoy, M. (2004). For public sociology. American Sociological Review, 70(2005), 4–28. Freire, P. (2005). Sorrettujen pedagogiikka (The Finnish translation of pedagogy of the oppressed). Vastapaino. Freire, P. (2016). Pedagogy in process. Bloomsbury. Giroux, H. (2007). University in Chains: Confronting the military-industrial-academic complex. Paradigm Publishers. Ingold, T. (2011). The life of lines. Routledge. Innerarity, D. (2017). Ethics of hospitality. Routledge. Jandrić, P., et al. (2020). Teaching in the age of covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2, 1069–1230. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00169-6 Karpiak, I. E. (2010). Summoning the past: Autobiography as a ‘movement toward possibility’. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 126, 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.368 Miller, R., & Miller, R. S. (1976). The student’s sociological diary. Teaching Sociology, 4(1), 67–82. Ollman, B. (1985). Project for an activist University. Retrieved from https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ ollman/docs/letter_to_murphy.php. January 27, 2021. Paglia, C. (1992). Sex, art and American culture: New essays. Vintage Books. Paraskeva, J. (2011). Conflicts curriculum theory. Challenging hegemonic epistemologies. Palgrave. Paraskeva, J. (2019). What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? The need to go above and beyond neoliberal rage without avoiding it. In T. Autio, L. Hakala, & T. Kujala (Eds.), Siirtymiä ja ajan merkkejä koulutuksessa. Opetussuunnitelmatutkimuksen näkökulmia (pp. 145–186). Tampere University Press. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-359-008-3 Peters, M., Besley, T., & Arndt, S. (2019). Experimenting with academic subjectivity: collective writing, peer production and collective intelligence. Open Review of Educational Research, 6(1), 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2018.1557072 Peters, M., Arndt, S., Tesar, M., Jackson, L., Hung, R., Mika, C., Ozolins, J., Teschers, C. Orchard, J., Buchanan, R., Madjar, A., Novak, R., Besley, T., Sturm, S., (open reviewer), Roberts, P. (open reviewer), & Gibbons, A. (open reviewer). (2020). Philosophy of education in a new key. Educational Philosophy and Theory https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1759194

Sociological Diaries of Students: Lived Curriculum in the Time of Disaster

441

Peters, M., Marek, T., Jackson, L., Tina Besley, T., Jandrić, P., Arndt, S., & Sturm, S. (2021). Exploring the philosophy and practice of collective writing. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1854731 Ramjewan, N., & Toukan, E. (2018). Multiple resonances of curriculum as lived. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(4), 407–414. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1533073 Shehadeh, R. (2007). Palestinian walks. Notes on a vanishing landscape. Profile. Smith, Z. (2020). Intimations. Six essays. Penguin Books. Teräs, M., Suoranta, J., Teräs, H., & Curcher, M. (2020). Post-Covid-19 education and education technology ‘Solutionism’: A seller’s market. Postdigital Science and Education, 2, 863–878. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00164-x Tilley, S., & Taylor, L. (2013). Understanding curriculum as lived: Teaching for social justice and equity goals. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(3), 406–429. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324. 2011.645565 Zembylas, M., & Boler, M. (2002). On the spirit of patriotism: Challenges of a “Pedagogy of Discomfort.” Teachers College Record. Retrieved from http://www.tcrecord.org January 16, 2021. Žižek, S. (2020). There will be no return to normality after Covid. We are entering a post-human era & will have to invent a new way of life. Retrieved from https://www.rt.com/op-ed/508940normality-covid-pandemic-return/.

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) Bringing Autobiographical Mad Subjectivities and Promoting Curiosity Adam W. J. Davies

Contents Piaget Is Not a Friend of Mine: Discontents with Developmentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pre-Service ECEC: Contextualizing Its Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mad Studies: Defining the Debates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coming Out Mad: Critiquing ECEC from Inside Through Mad Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Addressing Sanism and Incorporating Mad Epistemologies, Pedagogies, and Subjectivities into Pre-Service ECEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

445 448 452 454 457 461 462

Abstract

Pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) post-secondary education – both historically and currently – is dominated by an emphasis on child development theories and the training of future practitioners to work with and care for young children by applying developmental theories to “understand” and assess young children. Within child development theorizations, the practitioner – or early childhood educator (ECE) – is predominately considered only through their ability to assist children in ascertaining “normative” developmental milestones. For ECEs with lived experiences with mental distress and “mental illness” – or Mad ECEs – this often means the denial of their experiences with madness or mental distress in workplace settings and the regulation of their diverse emotions, feelings, and experiences to be considered “capable” of working with and caring for young children. Drawing from Mad Studies frameworks that deconstruct binaries between the private and public and mental health and “illness,” this chapter calls for the explicit incorporation of Mad autobiographical narratives in pre-service ECEC to dismantle exclusionary norms promulgated within both pre-service training and A. W. J. Davies (*) Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_55

443

444

A. W. J. Davies

ECEC widely. Placing Mad Studies in conversation with curriculum studies work around the “autobiographical self” and teaching with madness in higher education, this chapter forwards the absolute necessity of centralizing Mad epistemologies, pedagogies, and promoting wonder and curiosity through autobiography to dismantle unrealistic ideals of ECE identity and “development” within pre-service ECEC. Keywords

Mad Studies · Pre-service ECEC · Higher education · Madness · Subjectivity · Curriculum studies · Autobiography

Only as the subjective and the social are acknowledged as embedded in and constitutive of the other, can the ‘I’ – alone and in solidarity with others – undertake political action in the world (Pinar, 2009, p. 193)

I start with this quote by Pinar to illustrate how embedded my own subjectivity and histories are within this piece of writing as an advocate of Mad Studies scholarship and activism and a pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) educator and researcher (Davies, 2022). Pinar (2009) believed that curriculum studies entails the incorporation of subjectivity and autobiography within critique and that bringing forward the “unaddressed ‘I’” (Pinar, 2009) within critical scholarship unpacks how individuals in education – whether educators or students – are constituted within power relations that they also both participate in and simultaneously critique. Autobiographical work regarding the “self” or subjectivity is a necessary starting point for beginning to challenge hegemonic structures through an immanent critique (Pinar, 1994, 2009). I start with this to situate my own subjectivity as immanently embedded within the following chapter. Such forms of self-reflexivity and the incorporation of an “autobiographical self” (Pinar, 1994, 2009) are relevant for ECEC practice and curricula – in particular, pre-service programs and training, where I am currently situated as a faculty (Davies, 2021, 2022). Yet, despite the emphasis on self-reflexivity within pre-service training programs, pre-service ECEC training predominately focuses on scientized ideas of child development whereby educators are mostly only acknowledged through their ability to apply developmental theories within professional practice (Agbenyega, 2012). Within this chapter, I argue that the explicit incorporation of Mad Studies (LeFrançois et al., 2013) is a beginning place for the incorporation of educator subjectivity – or the autobiographical self – into pre-service ECEC, the forwarding of critical politics within ECEC pre-service training programs, and the challenging of the hegemony of developmentalism (Davies, Karmiris, & Berman, 2022) within pre-service ECEC training (see also Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). I weave my Mad subjectivity and histories into this chapter as I write about both my experiences in pre-service training programs as a student and educator and how madness is infused within my teaching to disrupt the hegemony of developmentalism and

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

445

developmentalist and neoliberal ideas of children and educators in pre-service ECEC. As a Mad pre-service ECEC faculty, I bring forward my own autobiographical self and experiences with madness within my pre-service ECEC teaching and courses, despite the continued pathologization of madness within ECEC widely and erasure of Mad early childhood educators (ECEs) or ECEs with experiences with mental “illness” (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Mad is an identity term that varies depending on the context and individual – some prefer terms such as “psychiatric survivor” or “mental health service user”; however, the political aim of these identities is to indicate one’s experience with institutionalization and psychiatric “care” and to critique the “psy” sciences, such as psychiatry and/or psychology and the medicalization of mental “illness” (Beresford, 2020). As described by Beresford (2019), Mad Studies centralizes “including all of ourselves centre stage and being true to our experience and the knowledge that comes from it” (p. 33). This emphasis on lived experience and subjectivity is vital for Mad Studies, pre-service ECEC, and curriculum studies (Davies, 2022). I bring forward my lived experiences and subjectivity into my teachings to encourage pre-service students to analyze cultural constructions of madness and how such constructions are used within discourses of inclusion/exclusion (i.e., the exclusion of Mad ECEs and the systemic pathologization of madness) (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Within ECEC, madness is constructed through tropes of pathology, danger, or incapacity, which further perpetuate the stigmatization of Mad ECEs and the naturalization of unrealistic images of ECEs associated with constant nurturance, maternalism, and care (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). I will describe how the incorporation of the autobiographical self into pre-service ECEC programs can challenge the medicalization of “mental illness,” the erasure of madness and Mad pedagogies (Castrodale, 2017) in pre-service ECEC teaching and curricula, as well as the normative images of ECEs themselves that are associated with White hegemonic femininity and Victorian-era ideas of “care” and “nurturance” (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Ultimately, this chapter will argue that teaching with madness in pre-service ECEC can provide an autobiographical frame for the incorporation of Mad subjectivity and Mad Studies (LeFrançois et al., 2013) into pre-service teaching, curricula, and training (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022; Snyder et al., 2019) to provide students with a sense of curiosity and wonder (Titchkosky, 2011) about a world beyond or outside of developmentalism. To begin, I will describe my own experiences learning within pre-service programs alongside my experiences with madness.

Piaget Is Not a Friend of Mine: Discontents with Developmentalism Ever since my first introduction to Piaget, Erikson, or Vygotsky, I’ve found developmental psychology incredibly dry. Yet, I’ve always enjoyed working with children and have found this disjuncture between my enjoyment of working with children but

446

A. W. J. Davies

my distaste for learning about developmentalist theories quite challenging to navigate. Could I be passionate about caring for and working with children while disengaging with developmentalist theorizations? My experiences within pre-service training would inform me that “no” might be the answer, with research even indicating that pre-service ECEC students associate developmental knowledge of children with being a “good” ECE (Langford, 2008, cited in Davies et al., 2022). I certainly felt like I was a “bad” ECE or educator if I was not invested in developmental psychology (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). I received my Registered Early Childhood Education status after graduating my master’s degree in Child Studies and Education, where I also received my Ontario College of Teachers certification. Within my early exposure to developmental psychology, I noticed how developmentalism is deployed as a means to “treat” children or to ensure their “typical” development. Ideas of “typically developing children” percolate within special education – one of the areas I was trained in within my teacher education program – as children are marked as abnormal or “exceptional” if they are deemed in need of developmental interventions (Hutchinson & Specht, 2020; see also Davies, 2022). Burman (2017) describes how the effects of developmentalism in the shaping of constituting of subjectivities means that “its effects are such that they are often almost imperceptible, taken-for-granted features about our expectations of ourselves, others, parents, children, and families, informing the structure of popular and consumer cultures as well as explicit technical, official policies” (p. 2). As I engaged with learning about Piaget, Erikson, and other developmentalists, I realized how entrenched these ideas are in ECEC and elementary education. Moreover, as a queer, nonbinary, neurodiverse, and chronically mentally ill individual, I was (and had been) experiencing my own encounters with therapeutic interventions. Receiving several diagnoses for mental illnesses and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder throughout my university education, I continued to imagine how individuals are classified “in need” of developmental interventions and how, without such interventions, their bodies and minds are considered without hope (see Davies, 2022; Zaman & Anderson-Nathe, 2021). Engaging with these theories in courses while experiencing the gaze of the psysciences (psychiatry and psychology) myself as I navigated postsecondary education left me with no hope for my own future as an educator in early childhood education or elementary education (Davies, 2022). As others around me were concerned about the future of children who were deemed in need of assistance or care, I felt that there must be something inherently wrong with me that I did not seem to share the same concern or interests. Despite my enjoyment of teaching and working with young children, the same drive to intervene and learn about the inner workings of the psyche of the child did not appeal to me. As described by Robinson and Jones Diaz (2013), developmental theories universalize ideas of White cisgender heterosexual and Western understandings of “ages and stages” that early childhood educators then employ to assess the developmental trajectories of children in their care. Receiving psychiatric assessments, pharmaceutical interventions, and behavioral interventions to assist in managing my behaviors, emotions, and feelings became an everyday component of my educational trajectory while I was exposed to knowledges that

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

447

encouraged the regulation of children’s diverse behaviors, emotions, and ways of knowing and being. Madness was only considered an impediment to my teaching and learning as I struggled to regulate my own madness so that I could maintain my focus, attention, and care for children. In what proceeds, I will describe an example of such a situation within my own educational and teaching history. I recall experiencing a great deal of anxiety during a practicum placement in a junior kindergarten classroom at an inquiry-based private school. Upon first entering the classroom, the environment overwhelmed my body and senses as children were running around the classroom while I was informed to intervene as little as possible. Granted, not always intervening in a teacher-directed fashion holds merit, of course, due to the nature of not wishing to treat children as docile beings to be managed; however, I remember finding the environment overwhelming, yet feeling a pressure to maintain a happy and positive disposition within the classroom despite my rising feelings of anxiety. I felt a desire to intervene in the behaviors of the children to manage my own anxiety and even reverted back to my behavioral management techniques I used when I worked with children in day camps where I’d put my hands on my head and count backwards from 5 to 1 and ask the children to settle down. Whether trying to manage my own anxiety or the “madness” of the environment around me, madness was omnipresent as something that required intervention (see also Karmiris & Davies, submitted). After using the “hands on head” classroom and behavior management technique a few times in the classroom, I recollect a specific conversation I had with my practicum supervisor after she watched a lesson I taught. This was a particularly disastrous lesson where I was attempting to read a book about embracing differences to the children and many were asking questions in the middle of my reading and getting up and moving around. I had a very poor sleep the night before due to ongoing worries about my future career trajectory and was feeling particularly disheartened about working with young children and certainly was not in a “sunny” or “cheery” teaching disposition. In short, I was feeling quite “dysregulated,” myself. As I read the book, more and more children started getting up and moving around, showing their disinterest in my story. The more I attempted to “manage” the children’s behaviors and redirect back to the story, the more disinterested the children seemed. As I was teaching, I saw my supervisor scribbling down notes continually while scrutinizing my teaching. After my lesson, she asked to see me later that day. I began sweating profusely and started deep breathing to keep my own anxiety down as I felt anxious about what my practicum supervisor was writing about me in her observations. Gorman and LeFrançois (2017) articulate how madness and irrationally have always been considered “the major threat to human survival” (p. 117). The management of madness is a goal of psychiatric treatment whereby individuals are assessed by their ability to comply with norms and medical practitioners describe behaviors that are deemed abnormal. LeFrançois and Diamond (2014) describe how children who are being assessed by medical practitioners, including psychiatrists, are assessed based on “the extent to which they listened to practitioners, followed written and unwritten rules and complied with treatment” (p. 50). I believe that this is still largely true within

448

A. W. J. Davies

the field of education and even ECEC, which also puts constraints and normative expectations on how both ECEs and children are “supposed” to act and behave (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Experiencing the observation notes of my practicum supervisor – jotting down my behaviors and her observations just as a medical practitioner might jot down observations and notes regarding the behaviors of a patient – I felt the gaze and expectation to be a “normal” – or at least not Mad – educator and to hide any visible signs of distress. I recollect this history with ECEC and madness to follow Pinar (2015) in theorizing “subjectivity as a passage to (as well as a retreat from) the world” (p. 6) as a “reconstruction of the reality in which we are embedded” (p. 7). As such, I turn to where I am currently situated to begin such a reconstruction.

Pre-Service ECEC: Contextualizing Its Foundation Currently, after completing my PhD in Education, I am a tenure-track faculty member in an undergraduate pre-service early childhood education program. Despite my experiences in the field as a student, I began teaching sessionally in higher education pre-service ECEC programs and was eventually hired as a tenure-track faculty in an undergraduate pre-service ECEC program and established an ECEC research program. Being trained in critical theory and cultural studies throughout my doctorate – particularly in poststructural feminism, queer theory, and critical disability studies – I experienced quite a shock when I started teaching within a pre-service ECEC program with an applied and developmental focus. Pre-service ECEC is predominately developmental in its orientation and focuses on training students to work through checklists and standardized assessments of children’s behaviors, emotions, and thoughts while monitoring their own interactions with children (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022; Johnston, 2019). Discourses, such as “developmentally appropriate practice” within ECEC, reinforce the hegemony of developmentalism and centralize positivist ideas of children and educators (Davies et al., 2021; Zaman & Anderson-Nathe, 2021). ECE professional identity is still highly connected to developmentalist ideas, particularly in pre-service training where students report believing that their behaviors and interactions with children are directly responsible for the brain and neurological development of children, tying ECE subjectivity to children’s futurity (Langford, 2008, cited and described in Davies et al., 2022; see also Davies, 2022; Walkerdine, 1984). This link between developmentalism, children’s future, and ECE subjectivity is embedded within pre-service ECE training whereby faculty and instructors might work within and against developmentalist discourses and feel constraint by ongoing demands for quality assurance and professionalization (Gibson, 2013; Gibson et al., 2018). Even as I teach in pre-service classes, I feel the pressure to be happy, content, effervescent, and cheerful with my undergraduate students, illustrating my love of children, my job, and ultimately the field of ECEC. Madness – or identifying with madness – is often considered as antithetical to joy, happiness, and being a “good” ECE (Davies et al., 2022; Davies, 2022).

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

449

I became aware of the regulatory gaze of accreditation standards (e.g., Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, & Universities, 2018) and ideas of professional practice and applied work in ECEC that seek to discredit or regulate critical perspectives that are deemed outside of the scope of “professional practice” (see Davies, 2022; Rogers, 2021). Burman (2017) articulates how “the well-intended rush to intervene can be less than helpful. But, of course, we must remember that theory is also a practice” (p. xii). However, this “rush to intervene” is highly forwarded in pre-service ECEC programs whereby the educator is trained to identify and assess children in their care and ensure that students can meet developmental milestones (Davies, 2022). Textbooks encouraging educators to document children’s behaviors in an “objective” and “neutral” manner illustrate the desire to train educators to detail every piece of information about children in their care. For example, Brewer’s (2007) introductory text to ECEC encourages future ECEs to “know the child – where he [sic] is developmentally and what his [sic] individual talents and interests are” (p. 4). Texts, such as Brewer’s (2007), for example, further encourage students to document and describe behaviors that are considered “aggressive,” or “concerning,” illustrating how normative images of both educators and children through developmentalism are enshrined in pre-service ECEC training (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022; Gibson, 2013). These ideas are within pre-service ECEC programs and training where many programs promote notions of shaping and molding children’s developing minds, reinforcing the influence of the educator on the psyche of the child and the interconnected dynamics between ECE and child subjectivity (Davies, 2022; Walkerdine, 1984). ECEC – and any work with young children – is traditionally known as “women’s work” and considered feminized care labor (Davies & Hoskin, 2021). Historically and currently, women are presumed to be “natural” caregivers through biologically essentialist discourses that place caring as a core element of women’s biological being (Davies & Hoskin, 2021). Atkin (2001) historicizes ECEC in a Canadian context by describing how the emergence of childcare and private day nurseries between 1920 and 1940 coincided with an increased demand for women to enter the workforce with both World Wars, as well as the promotion of developmental theories on childhood. Simultaneously with the need for childcare workers for employed women, women saw childcare as an appropriate avenue to develop a career. Institutes for child studies emerged, such as the University of Toronto Institute of Child Study, where theories of mental hygiene and child development were taught alongside recapitulation and Lamarckian theories (Varga, 2020; Volpe, 2010). Child studies and the observation of children centralized itself with securing the normative development of the child to reinforce racialized and gendered colonial hierarchies that positioned White male heterosexual rationality as the ideal state of development (Noon, 2005; Wong, 2016; Varga, 2020). The mental hygiene movement emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century within a North American context as a way of reinforcing White middle class heterosexual Western values as the social norm and ethic that was expected to promote the “healthiest” form of living (Rashed, 2019). This was often done through the observation and measurement of children’s

450

A. W. J. Davies

development. Such approaches pathologized any form of social behavior that was deemed outside of this mythic norm, such as extramarital sex, for example (Rashed, 2019). White unmarried women were considered crucial to the development of children’s mental health within the mental hygiene movement by both entering the workforce as teachers and day care workers and passing on such values to new mothers through training programs (Atkin, 2001). Critical to the mental hygiene movement was the promotion of child development knowledge and research to incoming female educators due to how child development was noted as especially influential knowledge in preventing future mental illness or “abnormalities” and for measuring and assessing children’s development (Kelly et al., 2021; Rashed, 2019; Wong, 2016). This history is important to situate in relationship to how child development knowledges have been utilized within ECEC to normalize children and intervene in “the best interests” of children’s development and preserve normativity as the ideal goal (Davies, 2022). My own department that I currently teach in – Family Relations and Applied Nutrition – at the Macdonald Institute at the University of Guelph has historical connection with the Eugenics Society of Canada (Kelly et al., 2021). The Macdonald Institute was historically a teaching training and home economics institute that was connected to state and quasi-state interventions and processes “designed to shape the lives and ideas of rural women in early twentieth-century Canada” (Snell, 2003, p. 12). This history of shaping the subjectivities and minds of women is connected to pre-service ECEC training as ECEC forwards idealized images of educators and children that are designed to link both women and children together and to obfuscate any visible signs of distress to reproduce happiness, joy, and care as the ideal affective states of the early years (Davies et al., 2022; Davies, 2022; Monrad, 2017). “Normal Schools” – or specific schools for the training of women to teach young children – emerged within Canada in the 1800s as centers to ensure that women would be inculcated with “feminine” values that provide women with an opportunity for higher education while still promoting the domestic trades and values and principles of child development (Gestwicki & Bertrand, 2015; Snell, 2003; Macdonald, 2021). An example of such a school can be found in the McGill Normal School, founded in 1857, which became a space for teaching women who desired to work with young children within a professionalized institution (Prochner, 2009). The Macdonald Institute opened in 1903 in Guelph, Canada, as a school for training rural women in the home sciences and child development connected to the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) (Falconer, 2016). Such “normal schools” provided spaces for women to enter higher education – even contribute to nationalist efforts, such as caring for refugee children, ensuring the nutrition and health of soldiers, and educating children whose fathers were away at war (Falconer, 2016). These ideas contributed to the connection between the subjectivities of young women in caring professions, their own “health” and “well-being” as caring professionals, and their responsibilities for the care and health of others (see Davies, Watson, et al., 2022). The Jackman Institute for Child Study at the University of Toronto – where I received my master’s degree – was known for training women and future mothers on

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

451

child rearing and for furthering the field of Child Study in Canada, even having a requirement for parents who enroll their children at the laboratory school to take mandatory courses on parenting (Varga, 1997; Volpe, 2010). William Blatz, a founding figure of the Jackman Institute, is known for bringing the principles of child study – an emerging field under the banner of child development – to Canada and for believing that training mothers and female educators in the principles of child development was a necessary intervention to ensure the “appropriate” upbringing for all children, particularly those from socially disadvantaged and lower socioeconomic status positions (Varga, 1997; Gestwicki & Bertrand, 2015). The emergence of both the mental hygiene movement and its imbrication within the fields of child studies and developmental psychology promoted what Dickinson (1993) terms the “scientization of parenthood” in Canada whereby both children and their parents were observed, researched, and trained in principles of “good habits” and “healthy living,” which held eugenics underpinnings in their emphasis on normalization and the superiority of White, upper-middle-class, heterosexual ways of living and being (Varga, 2011). The mental health and well-being of children became the ultimate focus of the Child Studies program and embedded within the professional training and practices of ECEs (Gestwicki & Bertrand, 2015). During my master’s in child studies, as well as within the pre-service ECEC program I teach in – also a Child Studies degree program – students are trained to observe and assess children based on developmental principles to create “developmentally appropriate” programming and gauge their “natural curiosities” and interests. These ideas are not neutral and objective – despite developmental psychology’s common claim to objectivity and neutrality/universality – and apply theories and frameworks from White able-bodied neurotypical heterosexual and cisgender norms to pathologize children who are outside of these White and Western norms. Varga (2011) articulates how the “colonization of childhood through developmental science is the application of a belief system characterized by a desire to know everything about children to improve their lives” (p. 138). This notion of “improving life” is imbued within the drive to observe and assess children in early childhood education as well as also being the logo for my respective university of employment, The University of Guelph. As described by Karmiris (2021), “[i]mplicit in the act of observing and monitoring through any number of checklists and criteria that link milestones, such as sitting, walking, talking, and self-feeding, to age-appropriate development are the subsequent relationships to mechanisms of diagnosis, categorization, and pathologization” (pp. 149–150). Possessing knowledge of child development to ensure the “healthy” brain development of children is considered a marker of a high-quality ECE who is able to understand the developmental needs of children in their care (Beisly & Lake, 2021; Davies et al., 2022; Langford, 2008). However, the form of care that takes place through ECEs’ observations and assessment of children is still not often problematized in pre-service training. Care is commonly a taken-for-granted discourse in pre-service ECEC; however, care has many tensions and contradictions within it and is far from neutral (Langford, 2019). For example, Mad individuals’ experiences with care through the medical professions often involve epistemic, physical, and psychological distress, harm, and

452

A. W. J. Davies

abuse (Eales & Peers, 2021; LeFrançois et al., 2013). As noted by Langford (2007, 2008, 2010), the gendering of the workforce of ECEC places pressures on educators to assume complete responsibility for the nurturance and (normative) development of children. Even the guiding ECEC frameworks here in Ontario advocate for the idea that educators are “competent and capable, curious and rich in experience. . . knowledgeable, caring, reflective, and resourceful professionals” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014, p. 7; see also Davies et al., 2022; Davies, 2023; Davies, 2022). This pressure on educators to perform care through normative tropes of “capability” and “responsiveness” places immense demands on educators (Davies et al., 2022). In the context of ECEC, care certainly reinforces gendered and racialized hierarchies through the devaluation of RECEs’ work and the feminized care work demands from working in the field (Davies & Hoskin, 2021; Halfon & Langford, 2015). In this sense, as noted by Halfon and Langford (2015), care work is seen as “domestic servitude,” particularly in situations of government live-in care programs, where women and immigrants are underpaid and overworked to care for children on a continual basis. I situate all these knowledges and histories to illustrate how my own academic journey and subjectivity is embedded within my Mad teachings and what I bring to my pre-service teachings. Certainly, within these histories and knowledges, madness is only known through pathology and deviance from the norm of “health.” This is where Mad Studies enters my teachings.

Mad Studies: Defining the Debates Mad Studies is an interdisciplinary line of scholarship that dismantles binaries between theory and praxis by focusing on theorizing madness and the lived experiences, scholarship, and activism of Mad people and psychiatric survivors (Beresford & Russo, 2021; LeFrançois et al., 2013). Mad Studies interrupts medical, developmental, and therapeutical-based discourses that centralize intervention and instead conceptualizes madness as a place of epistemological and ontological interruption. Madness is theorized through an intersectional framework for addressing how notions of “mental illness” and “mental health” are imbricated within colonial and neoliberal capitalist hierarchies based in race, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, and other hierarchical markers (Foucault, 2003; Gorman & LeFrançois, 2017; LeFrançois, 2020). In particular, Mad Studies seeks to value the knowledge and lived experiences of those who have encountered psychiatric violence (LeFrançois et al., 2013). Mad Studies cultivates communities of activists and scholars who critique psychiatric institutions and knowledges and employ Mad analyses by incorporating their subjectivity and lived experiences within their scholarship, teaching, research, and activism (Castrodale, 2017; de Bie, 2022; LeFrançois et al., 2013). Moreover, Mad Studies dismantles binaries between mental health and illness, mind and body, social and medical models, and pro- and anti-psychiatry (Gorman & LeFrançois, 2017; Reaume, 2021; Spandler & Poursanidou, 2019). According to Gorman and LeFrançois (2017), Mad Studies was first coined in 2008 by Mad activist and scholar, Richard Ingram; however, much Mad writing and

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

453

anti-psychiatry scholarship has been written throughout the late twentieth century and early twentieth-first century. Reaume (2021) describes the genealogy of the constitution of “Mad Studies” as a field of inquiry, as well as the distinctions and overlaps between Mad Studies, anti-psychiatry, and critical psychiatry as disciplinary and activist areas. Anti-psychiatry emerged in the 1960s from scholars, such as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, who critiqued the institution of psychiatry and called for its abolition, whereas critical psychiatry developed from a sense of seeking to work within psychiatry while amplifying more critical voices (Reaume, 2021). Mad Studies emerged within the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as a line of scholarship that specifically prioritizes the voices and experiences of those who have been psychiatrized and/or experienced violence through psychiatry (LeFrançois et al., 2013; Reaume, 2021). Importantly, Mad Studies is not necessarily always anti-psychiatry – although it is critical of DSM diagnoses and the medical model for mental health and ideas of “illness” (Reaume, 2021; Spandler & Poursanidou, 2019). Critical scholarship in conversation with Mad Studies brings to light the lack of scientific evidence of a biochemical origin to “mental illness” (Harrington, 2019; Szasz, 1974). Mad Studies rejects the biologization of mental illness, as well as the pathologizing connotations of “illness” to begin with and pharmaceutical interventions for psychiatric “disorders” (LeFrançois et al., 2013; LeFrançois, 2020). Beresford (2020) describes how Mad Studies “originated from consumer/survivor movements. It rejects a bio-medical approach to the domain widely known as ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental health’ and substitutes instead a framework of ‘madness’” (p. 1337). There are divergences within various factions of Mad Studies scholarship regarding the place of medical treatment and care, with Cresswell and Spandler (2016) asking “Are all mental health services ‘biological’ in orientation? What about social psychiatry, ‘talking treatments’ and social care? Is biology as a science and general medicine as an ethical practice irrelevant to Mad people?” (p. 8). While there is not agreement among Mad Studies – and other critical approaches to psychiatry, such as critical and anti-psychiatry – regarding the place of medical interventions, all these approaches take an onto-epistemological perspective that challenges the hegemony of the medical model (Reaume, 2021) and also problematizes ideas of psychiatric “care” by discussing the harm that can take place through institutionalization (Eales & Peers, 2021). Mad Studies has started to enter the field of education (Castrodale, 2017; Snyder et al., 2019); however, there is still much work to be done to bring Mad Studies into the field of ECEC (Davies, 2022; Davies, 2023; Davies et al., 2022). LeFrançois’ (2020) critique of the interconnections between psychiatry and the school system importantly brings sanism into the conversation, describing it as “a form of oppression that includes stereotyping, low expectations, discrimination, and other forms of violence directed towards mad people” (p. 180). LeFrançois notes how child and adolescent psychiatry engage in biological reductionism in their diagnoses of children through criteria set by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual in their reduction of diverse behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and sensations to biological explanations (p. 182). Mad Studies also writes in conversation with other fields of critical

454

A. W. J. Davies

scholarship that critique developmental psychology, such as sociology of child and youth, to advocate for psychiatrized children’s rights (Coppock & LeFrancois, 2014), including critiquing inhumane forms of treatment, such as electroshock interventions (van Daalen-Smith et al., 2014). Importantly, particularly in the context of ECEC and pre-service training is Mad Studies’ searing critique of developmentalism and “the classic child development project of understanding children as in the process of developing rational adult male qualities” (Coppock & LeFrancois, 2014, p. 3). Mad Studies connects sanism with child development and conceptualizes developmental psychology as a White Eurocentric sanist masculinist and heteronormative/cisnormative project that propagates “a single developmental story about children and those deemed child-like” (Mills & LeFrançiois, 2018, p. 507). This, of course, has epistemological and ontological implications for pre-service ECEC, a realm that is still dominated by developmentalism. Pinar (2015) describes “the porous boundaries of curriculum studies” (p. 37), indicating that what is considered under the purview of curriculum studies or even what is important to research for curriculum studies scholars is under constant ebb and flow. Reflecting on my own educational trajectory as a Mad scholar and academic – particularly in ECEC – provides an opportunity to consider curricula through lived experience (Pinar, 1994) and how my Mad subjectivity and lived experiences inform my critiques of the status quo in ECEC. Due to my experiences with(in) psychiatrization, I eventually encountered Mad Studies and critiques of the psy-sciences by reading accounts of other psychiatric survivors. As well, through the distress I felt when working with children, I became curious about how educators with mental illness navigate issues of potential pathologization in ECEC and education and navigate sanist norms that exclude madness and Mad educators. As such, I took madness not as “an institutional problem to be solved, but, rather, a provocative phenomenon to be understood” (Pinar, 2015, p. 4), specifically within ECEC. As such, this entire chapter and my critique comes from my subjectivity, or “unaddressed ‘I’” (Pinar, 2009), meaning that it is situated within an autobiographical approach to educational writing (Pinar, 1994).

Coming Out Mad: Critiquing ECEC from Inside Through Mad Narratives Key to ideological critique is self-reflexively grasping the reciprocal relations between one’s own ideological interpellation, social positioning, and historical conjuncture. Such an autobiographical undertaking animates as it structures the specificity of subjective and social reconstruction (Pinar, 2009, p. 196)

As I’ve written about previously (e.g., Davies, 2022), I signed myself into an in-patient psychiatric treatment hospital in April 2021 for treatment of chronic mental illnesses and high experiences of mental distress that impacted my daily functioning throughout that Winter. I have experienced psychiatrization for mental illnesses throughout my adult life, receiving diagnoses for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), depression, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

455

(ADHD) during my undergraduate and graduate studies. I list these diagnoses not to objectify myself through diagnostic discourses, but to contextualize my experiences with(in) psychiatrization (see Davies, 2022). While I always struggled with my mental health and focusing on schoolwork, it was throughout my experience in higher education that I started being unable to manage heavy workloads and focusing for long periods of time and required diagnoses in order to access the on-campus student accessibility services center during my undergraduate studies. Having extensive experiences meeting psychiatrists and being examined for “abnormalities,” I became quite used to having my behaviors, thoughts, and feelings examined to find forms of appropriate “treatment.” Throughout these treatments, I would commonly engage in forms of behavioral therapy that would challenge the legitimacy of my thoughts or sensations and strive to find ways to manage my thoughts so I could appear less distressed (as described in Davies, 2023). Throughout my first few years of teaching as a pre-tenure faculty in a pre-service ECEC program, I chose when to “come out” as Mad and to whom I would discuss my experiences of psychiatrization with. I eventually incorporated my experiences with mental distress into my courses on disability and discussed openly with students my history with psychiatric encounters, particularly upon getting more connected with research in Mad Studies (see Shanouda, 2021; Davies, 2022). As described by Kafai (2021), “If we do disclose our disabilities, our madness within the institution, then we are edging our bodyminds closer and closer toward substantial risk” (p. 187). My students are often unfamiliar with Mad as an identity and have yet to learn about either Mad Studies or Mad politics and activism. In this sense, I have to “come out” to them as Mad and describe and explain such an identity to them since madness is typically only associated with pathology and “irrationality” by pre-service students. This “risk” is an ever-going uncertainty regarding how students will understand our madness or if we will be constructed as “irrational” or overly emotional (Davies, 2022). Mad Studies explicitly critiques developmentalist logics and interventions based on normalizing Mad peoples’ (and children’s) subjectivities (LeFrançois, 2020). Mad Studies critiques the paternalism embedded within developmentalism, including the infantilization that occurs through developmental logics toward Mad people (Mills & LeFrançois, 2018). During my time working in pre-service ECEC, I have continually felt the normalizing gaze of necessary accreditation expectations (of what knowledge to teach), and experienced pushback against my critical theory and cultural studies teachings (Davies, 2022). Ironically, the pressure to teach developmentalism to meet accreditation standards despite my resistance to developmental frameworks highly impacted my mental health, indicating the epistemological and psychosocial violence that enforcing developmentalism as the prima facie can enact on critical scholars in pre-service ECEC (Davies, 2022, 2023). Moreover, I felt as though perhaps I did not belong in pre-service ECEC and was feeling that I should look into other career avenues or areas to teach and research. Receiving pushback to my teaching of critical theory eventually impacted my well-being and left an imprint that I did not belong to in my workplace or pre-service ECEC. Following Pinar (2009), I situate my autobiographical work and writing in pre-service ECEC as a Mad critique from inside, positioning my subjectivity within

456

A. W. J. Davies

my own educational histories and current teachings in ECEC. Considering the primacy of developmentalism in pre-service ECEC as the hegemonic form of “applied” knowledge, I contextualize bringing Mad autobiographies and subjectivities into pre-service ECEC in a fashion where I make clear that my stories are not about recovery, resilience, or the importance of psychiatric interventions or “care.” Following Voronka (2019), it is necessary to acknowledge the risks and tensions with Mad people sharing their lived experiences with mental distress, as “an audience of helping professionals are enabled to reconstitute themselves as rational, compassionate citizens” (p. 22). It is easy for the audience – my students, colleagues, and other academics – to absorb my narratives with mental distress as one regarding the importance of “seeking help,” “taking time for yourself,” or “self-care during difficult times.” While I cannot control how others interpret my narratives and stories when I share them, my subjectivity is produced within terms of recognition that constitute who a “normative” ECE is (and is not) (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Butler (2001) describes in their work on account of the self how we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other-in its singularity [. . .] but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening (Butler, 2001, p. 22)

The “Other” can be considered through the binary of mad/sane or abnormal/ normal in how Mad ECEs might choose to regulate their behaviors and actions by performing normalcy, or otherwise might “come out” in a manner that indicates a path away from madness and toward normalcy (de Bie, 2022). Therefore, how our (Mad) stories are interpreted are retold is always beyond our control and within terms of recognition that might strive to reconstitute recovery and normality as the end goal, or otherwise be deemed excludable from the fabrics of ECEC. One common feedback I receive from students when I share my own encounters with psychiatric violence and discuss Mad Studies and activism is that I am providing a sense of “authenticity” in the classroom for them to share their own experiences and histories within the field of ECEC. However, authenticity is a tenuous discourse (Bialystok, 2011). Can the Mad subject “come out” or is there a Mad “essence” to be “authentic” to? Gorman and LeFrançois (2017) articulate how “[n]or can we understand cultural ideologies of mad ‘essences’, or their social movement refractions, in the absence of psy-complexes and white supremacist sanism” (p. 110). When I share my experiences with madness with my pre-service students, what does my narrative do? I argue that Mad Studies can assist in bringing pre-service ECEC educators’ subjectivities into their classroom teachings – including their narratives, histories, and identities – and dismantle the image of the educator as the objective scaffolder who observes, takes notes of children’s play and interactions, and who uses developmentalism to design activities and play situations for children’s development (e.g., Brewer, 2007; see Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Instead, Mad Studies can incorporate unknowing and the unknown (LeFrançois et al., 2013, cited and described in Davies et al., 2022) into pre-service teachings and interrupt the

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

457

foundational basis of pre-service teaching in “applied” and “objective” teachings. Snyder et al. (2019) describe how “Mad Studies also provides a major conceptual shift, in part due to the recognition that their fields, and by extension their professional futures, are implicated in sanist systemic oppressions” (p. 494). For my own students, upon introducing them to Mad Studies and my own experiences as Mad, many seem confused about how to assist children in their care if they do not refer them for diagnoses or even struggle to see the connections between their future work as early childhood educators and Mad Studies. This idea of “what to do” (Snyder et al., 2019) is entrenched in pre-service learning that is imagined through developmentalism and utilitarianism. Echoing this, Johnston et al. (2020) describe how ECEC in Canada is still highly entrenched within developmentalist paradigms in terms of how children are conceptualized and also within educators’ interpretations of children’s respective experiences and behaviors. Using developmentalist logic to interpret children’s behaviors to identify areas of “need” and then program plan accordingly is a common area of program development, even involved in mandatory program development and planning courses in pre-service program curricula (Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, & Universities, 2018) Instead of encouraging objectivity, a Mad Studies perspective asks individuals who are doing the describing to consider their own subjectivities, experiences, and feelings, as well as those of the individuals who theorized the frameworks they draw from. bell hooks (1994) describes this in the context of teaching theories in higher education by articulating how we must “deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and according it to others. By recognizing subjectivity and the limits of identity, we disrupt that objectification that is so necessary in a culture of domination.” (hooks, 1994, p. 139).

Importantly, Pinar (2011) describes how curriculum studies has invested its energies throughout the twentieth century in “improving” the school curriculum to benefit the imagined normative student that it has all but erased the subjectivities of educators widely. Pinar (2009) further asks “Is the knowledge that needs to be brought back in self-knowledge?” (p. 196). It is this question of Mad subjectivity in relationship to knowledge production and pre-service ECEC that I address in the last part of this chapter.

Addressing Sanism and Incorporating Mad Epistemologies, Pedagogies, and Subjectivities into Pre-Service ECEC Is the failure of resistance due to its dissociation from subjectivity? (Pinar, 2009, p. 193)

Sanism (LeBlanc & Kinsella, 2016) operates through the “stories” of ECEC (Moss, 2018) that narrate and position Mad educators as incapable, less professional, and stigmatized (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Yet, common discourses in ECEC – particularly in pre-service programs – position the “good educator” through tropes of

458

A. W. J. Davies

White womanhood and its associations with innocence, purity, and love (Langford, 2007, cited and described in Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Educators with mental illnesses are highly stigmatized in the field of education (i.e., constructed as potentially “dangerous”), with recent research illustrating how pre-service educators commonly hold stigmatizing attitudes, beliefs, and feelings toward individuals with mental illness (Losinski et al., 2015). I incorporate Mad Studies into my pre-service training program to contextualize the knowledges of diagnostic tools and to provide students with a frame to value the knowledge of those with lived experiences with madness and show how social inequalities are intricately connected to the kinds of knowledges that are privileged within helping professions (Snyder et al., 2019). Diagnostic tools – such as the DSM – have disproportionate effects on racialized learners, with higher numbers of diagnoses of African American and Hispanic youth with disruptive behavioral disorders (Fadus et al., 2020). Fadus et al. (2020) describe how structural racism, individual biases of clinicians, and childhood trauma and systemic violence can even impact the developing brains of African American and Hispanic youth, illustrating how the diagnostic categories within the DSM are far from neutral or objective. Moreover, the DSM categories have been deployed as a tool to psychiatrize Indigenous populations’ experiences of continual settler colonial violence, in particular used through children’s services and social work institutions (LeFrançois, 2013). As noted by LeFrançois (2013), the seemingly universal notions of “good mental health” present within the DSM diagnoses pathologize the behaviors of children from racialized and low-income families – who already experience structural disenfranchisement – and construct children and youth within these demographics as more “at risk.” In the education system, children whose bodies and minds are considered outside of normalcy or a disruption to the daily operations of classroom cultures are diagnosed and classified to ensure the docility of the overall structures of the education system and its goal of producing regulated learners (LeFrançois & Diamond, 2014; LeFrançois, 2020). These “stories” of development (Moss, 2018) haunt ECEC pre-service curricula and continue the perpetuation of norms-based ideologies and are further perpetuated through ideas of early intervention (Davies, 2023; Davies, 2022). I discuss my experiences with psychiatrization openly with my students to note mental illness “not as an individual medicalized experience, but as one that is deeply connected to systemic violence, abuse, neglect, classism, racism, ageism, sexism, sanism, and other intersectional forms of oppression” (Castrodale, 2017, p. 51). Castrodale (2017) describes how Mad pedagogies involve the centralization of firstperson Mad narratives and experiences, critical conversations that challenge the boundaries of fields and disciplines, an attention to issues of power and institutional/bureaucratic control, as well as intersecting structural oppressions. For example, Snyder et al. (2019) theorize how a Mad Studies metacurriculum in the helping and caring professions can bring forward different ways of knowing and subjugated knowledges to trouble the dominant frameworks and perspectives that are employed in the helping professions. Moreover, Snyder et al. elaborate on how a Mad Studies metacurriculum historicizes knowledges, connects events and knowledges

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

459

seemingly disconnected, and provides space for students to analyze the taken for granted in their own professions and fields of study. Within my own teaching, I centralize such an approach by bringing into my child studies and ECEC courses histories that are often subjugated in these fields, even in relationship with my own institution. As I mentioned, the Macdonald Institute at the University of Guelph and the Child Studies program specifically has a history of teaching eugenics and connections with local residential schools and the Canadian eugenics movement, where academics who propagated eugenicist ideas were also faculty within the program that I currently teach in (see Kelly et al., 2021). The child studies movement, which evolved in the late 1800s, was focused on observing the growth and development of young children in a “scientific” manner and was heavily influenced by the growth of developmental psychology as a discipline (Gestwicki & Bertrand, 2015). As detailed by Varga (2020), the societal obsession with the growth and development of children and their observation was informed by the eugenicist ideas of developmental psychologists, Ernst Haeckel and G. Stanley Hall, and their Lamarkian evolutionary ideas that also placed White male heterosexuality and “rationality” at the top of societal hierarchies. Remnants of these ideas are still palpable in child studies and ECEC today in ideas of “developmental milestones” and the “ages and stages” approach that many pre-service ECE students are trained in. The desire to “know” children’s inner workings and cognitions is emphasized through a developmentalist approach to ECEC that seeks to scaffold and assist children’s “typical” development and views the educator as the facilitator of the child’s growth. As described in Brewer (2007) in relationship with the planning of a “developmentally appropriate curriculum”: Planning a developmentally appropriate curriculum means that teachers need to know each child – where he [sic] is developmentally and what his [sic] individual talents and interests are. DAP also requires that teachers think about children’s basic needs for play and rest, that they focus on children’s development in all areas, that they plan an inclusive program that honors the cultural differences each child brings to school, and that they work to support parents and families (Brewer, 2007, p. 4)

The emphases on “the child” – or the neurotypical, rational, White able-bodied, cisgender, and heterosexual male child – and his development is a large focus of the epistemological and ontological foundations of ECEC and developmental work within the field. Educators are encouraged to continually consider themselves only in relationship with the children they work with and to ensure that their focus and attention is always on fostering the child’s “growth” and “potential.” What is left unexamined is what exactly is imagined as the “ideal” developmental states, where these theories get their ideas from, or the idea that the educator needs to take the “expert stance” and “know” all the inner workings and psychologies of the child in order to act accordingly. Bringing Mad Studies into my courses often leaves my students with uncertainty of how they are “supposed” to act as professionals or “intervene” since they begin to question the knowledge foundations they have taken for granted for the entirety of their undergraduate career. As articulated by Menzies et al. (2013), Mad Studies

460

A. W. J. Davies

“subsumed a loose assemblage of perspectives that resist compression into an irreducible dogma or singular approach to theory or practice” (p. 13). As such, how my students take up Mad Studies (or if they do) is not my aim as the various lines of inquiry in Mad Studies are diverse, yet united in their challenge to the psy-disciplines. Within my courses, I aim to connect ideas of “mental health” and “mental hygiene” to social eugenics (euthenics) beliefs to provide students a frame to interrogate “normal development” and ideas of “optimizing” children’s development. Ultimately, I aim to connect my experiences with psychiatrization to ideas of normalization and encourage students to think about how such ideas apply to children in their care and the knowledges learned in their pre-service career. Developmental psychology was and is shrouded in normalizing ideas as described in Winestock’s (2010) writing on the growth of developmental psychology as a field and ideas of “mental hygiene”: Their [developmental psychologists’] emphasis was on a social definition of mental disorder; attention to the childhood period, prevention rather than cure, and normal development. The aim was to assure the conditions for the development of mental health and eliminate the factors interfering with such development. The point of entry for prevention was childhood and the education system since mental hygienists believed that adjustment problems had their roots in childhood. The premise was that society could be perfected through the socialization of children based on scientific principles. Happy, mentally health children, it was argued, would assure a rational and productive adult population (Winestock, 2010, pp. 72–73).

Discourses of “mental hygiene” and the training and domestication of young mothers and parents can easily be connected to the development of the nation-state and eugenicist ideas of “fitness” and the cultivation of a White nation-body that holds Eurocentric values (Wong, 2016). It is impossible to disentangle the development of the mental hygiene movement and developmental psychology and the emergence of ideas of “proper” parenting and child upbringing that pathologized immigrants, madness, disability, and reinforced gendered and colonial violence (Wong, 2016). The assessment of parenting practices, children’s mental states, and ideas of how ECEs are “supposed” to interact with children are far from neutral and “objective” endeavors, which indicates the importance of pre-service ECEC grappling with these histories. Colonial and gendered hierarchies are reinforced in the knowledges disseminated within pre-service ECEC and sociocultural norms that regulate both pre-service students and ECEs themselves (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Bringing Mad pedagogies, epistemologies, and subjectivities in pre-service training programs is one avenue to do this work (Snyder et al., 2019; Davies, 2022). By bringing my own autobiographical histories and education together with my experiences with madness, I invite pre-service ECEC to engage with madness to encourage a politic of curiosity and wonder (Titchkosky, 2011). ECEC focuses on the “natural curiosity” of children and engaging with children’s curiosities and musings and allowing them to take the lead in their own interests (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014). How Mad Studies disrupts (Snyder et al., 2019) taken-forgranted understandings of “mental health” provides an avenue to engage with pre-service students in rethinking their own ideas of the world around them and

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

461

questioning developmental ideas that seek to explain children’s behaviors (Davies, 2022). Titchkosky (2011) describes how a politics of wonder “is the political engagement with our own politics” (p. 129) and the movement from “why” questions to “how.” I draw from Titchkosky’s work as a provocation for bringing “wonder” and “curiosity” into pre-service training, moving away from conceptualizing educators through utilitarian and technical means (Johnston, 2019). My curiosities regarding my personal experiences – both with ECEC and madness – brought me to wonder “what else” could be possible about ECEC beyond current discussions (Moss, 2006, 2018). How did my own positioning as a Mad ECEC provide an avenue to consider how madness is imagined (or not imagined) as an everyday part of ECEC? (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). Titchkosky (2011) writes how a politics of wonder necessitates “the need for a restless reflexive return to the way people are already situated” (p. 130). For ECEs, how we construct both ourselves and the children in our care – or how we, the pre-service faculty members construct ourselves and the students we teach – is important to continually reflect upon and wonder about how we came to know what we know and how we came to understand both ourselves and those in our purview. This wondering might be able to bring a greater attention to analyzing our everyday practices and knowledges as ECEs and mentors of future ECEs to encourage a greater critical reflexivity on how some ways of knowing and being – such as madness – are imagined as unimaginable (Davies et al., 2022; Davies, 2022) within ECEC spaces (Davies et al., 2022). As Snyder et al. (2019) articulate in the context of teaching Mad Studies in pre-service programs, such a “productive tension” can provide an opportunity for pre-service students to reexamine taken-for-granted ideas of Mad people constructed through pathology and regulation (p. 496). With this, I argue for the reevaluation of the continued pathologization and subjugation of madness within ECEC widely (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022).

Conclusion Pinar (2015) beautifully articulates how “understanding curriculum allegorically self-consciously incorporates the past into the present, threaded through one’s subjectivity,” (p. 27) indicating the importance of self-reflexivity, subjectivity, and the layers of past and present throughout one’s own understandings of their lived experiences, both in and outside of the classroom. Somehow, within my own educational trajectory – both as a student and now a pre-service faculty member – eugenics, euthenics, and discourses of “mental hygiene” are connected to the various academic institutions I participate in. As a Mad academic in ECEC, eugenics has haunted the histories various institutions I have learned and taught under and continues to inform the knowledges being taught in programs that would ask for the erasure of madness and the subjugation of Mad ways of knowing through therapeutic intervention (Davies, 2022). By promoting Mad visibility and Mad knowledges, I aim to encourage students to rethink the very knowledge foundations they are trained in.

462

A. W. J. Davies

However, disclosing madness or “coming out” as Mad as a faculty member – particularly in a pre-service training program – is a complicated experience that defies simplistic binaries of visible/invisible, in/out, or present/absent (Davies, 2022). Incorporating subjectivity into pre-service training, curricula, and pedagogies – particularly Mad subjectivity – might seem like a very maddening notion to some who are still invested in the rationalist and scientized norms of developmental psychology (Davies, 2022; Davies et al., 2022). However, it is important for pre-service students to have opportunities to wonder (Titchkosky, 2011) and reflect about who they are, the knowledge they are learning, and how they come to understand and interpret the world around them. Providing students opportunities to reflect on notions of care and be interrupted in their own preconceived ideas of helping professions is necessary to begin to imagine new ways of caring for and about children without development. I argue that madness – and autobiographical approaches – are a place to start with this and that through my incorporation of my Mad subjectivity into my pre-service teachings and curricula, I have begun the work of disrupting the hegemonic status quo in pre-service ECEC and started cultivating space for madness and imagining a world where madness in ECEC might not seem so Mad after all (Davies, 2023; Davies et al., 2022; Davies, 2022).

References Agbenyega, J. (2012). How we view our theoretical competency: Early childhood pre-service teachers’ self-evaluation of a professional placement experience. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 37(2), 141–147. Atkin, W. J. (2001). “Playing together as Canadians” historical lessons from the West End Creche. In S. Prentice (Ed.), Changing child care: Five decades of child care advocacy and policy in Canada (pp. 27–38). Fernwood Publishing. Beisly, A. H., & Lake, V. E. (2021). Knowledge of child development: Associations among pre-service teachers’ level of education and work experience. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 19(2), 195–210. Beresford, P. (2019). Including our self in struggle: Challenging the neo-liberal psycho-system’s subversion of us, our ideas and action. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 8(4), 31–59. Beresford, P. (2020). ‘Mad’, Mad studies and advancing inclusive resistance. Disability & society, 35(8), 1337–1342. Beresford, P., & Russo, J. (Eds.). (2021). The Routledge international handbook of mad studies. London: Routledge. Bialystok, L. (2011). Refuting polonius: Sincerity, authenticity, and ‘Shtick’. Philosophical Papers, 40(2), 207–231. Brewer, J. A. (2007). Introduction to early childhood education: Preschool through primary grades. Allyn and Bacon. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology. Routledge. Chicago Butler, J. (2001). Giving an account of oneself. Diacritics, 31(4), 22–40. Castrodale, M. A. (2017). Critical disability studies and mad studies: Enabling new pedagogies in practice. Canadian Journal for the study of Adult Education, 29(1), 49–66. Coppock, V., & LeFrancois, B. (2014). Psychiatrised children and their rights: Starting the conversation. Children and Society, 28(3), 165–171. Cresswell, M., & Spandler, H. (2016). Solidarities and tensions in mental health politics: Mad Studies and Psychopolitics. Critical and Radical Social Work, 4(3), 357–373.

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

463

Davies, A. W. (2021). Queering masculinity in early childhood and higher education classrooms: Gendered regulation and the ‘double-bind’ of queer masculinities. In S. Hillock (Ed.), Let’s teach about sexuality(ies) & higher education (pp. 148–163). University of Toronto Press. Davies, A. (2022). Professional ruptures in pre-service ECEC: Maddening early childhood education & care, 52(5), 571-592. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2022.2149027 Davies, A. W. (2023). Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 0(0), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231155555 Davies, A., & Hoskin, R. A. (2021). Using femme theory to foster a feminine-inclusive early childhood education and care practice. Equity as Praxis in Early Childhood Education and Care, 1, 107–123. Davies, A. W., Simone-Balter, A., & van Rhijn, T. (2021). Sexuality education and early childhood educators in Ontario, Canada: A Foucauldian exploration of constraints and possibilities. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14639491211060787, 146394912110607. Davies, A., Brewer, K., & Shay, B. (2022). Sanism in early childhood education and care: Cultivating space for educators with “mental illness” and mental distress. eceLink. de Bie, A. (2022). Teaching with madness/‘mental illness’ autobiographies in postsecondary education: Ethical and epistemological implications. Medical Humanities, 48(1), 37–50. Dickinson, H. D. (1993). Scientific parenthood: The mental hygiene movement and the reform of Canadian families. 1925–1950. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 24(3), 387–402. Eales, L., & Peers, D. (2021). Care haunts, hurts, heals: The promiscuous poetics of queer crip Mad care. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 25(3), 163–181. Fadus, M. C., Ginsburg, K. R., Sobowale, K., Halliday-Boykins, C. A., Bryant, B. E., Gray, K. M., & Squeglia, L. M. (2020). Unconscious bias and the diagnosis of disruptive behavior disorders and ADHD in African American and Hispanic youth. Academic Psychiatry, 44(1), 95–102. Falconer, T. (2016). Mac at war: Women’s work and education at the Macdonald Institute during the First and Second World Wars. SURG Journal, 9(1), 40–47. Foucault, M. (2003). Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (Vol. 2). Macmillan. Gestwicki, C., & Bertrand, J. (2015). Essentials of early childhood education. Cengage Learning Canada. Gibson, M. (2013). ‘I want to educate school-age children’: Producing early childhood teacher professional identities. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(2), 127–137. Gibson, M., McFadden, A., & Zollo, L. (2018). Discursive considerations of child care professional experience in early childhood teacher education: Contingencies and tensions from teacher educators. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 39(4), 293–311. Gorman, R., & LeFrançois, B. A. (2017). Mad studies. In Routledge international handbook of critical mental health (pp. 107–114). Routledge. Halfon, S. H. A. N. I., & Langford, R. (2015). Developing and supporting a high quality child care workforce in Canada. Our Schools/Our Selves, 24(4), 131–144. Harrington, A. (2019). Mind fixers: Psychiatry’s troubled search for the biology of mental illness. WW Norton & Company. Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Hutchinson, N. L., & Specht, J. (2020). Inclusion of learners with exceptionalities in Canadian schools: A practical handbook for teachers. Pearson. Johnston, L. (2019). The (not) good educator: Reconceptualizing the image of the educator. ECELink, 3(2), 40–54. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aeceo/mailings/1631/attach ments/original/eceLINK_Fall2019_Finalweb.pdf?1570820616 Johnston, L., Shoemaker, L., Land, N., Di Santo, A., & Jagger, S. (2020). Early childhood education and care in Canada. In Oxford research encyclopedia of education. Oxford University Press. Kafai, S. (2021). The politics of mad femme disclosure. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 25(3), 182–194. Karmiris, M. (2021). Failure and loss as a methodological, relational, and ethical necessity in teaching and learning in the early years. In Equity as praxis in early childhood education and care (pp. 147–164). Canadian Scholars Press.

464

A. W. J. Davies

Karmiris, M., & Davies, A.W. (submitted). Cripping the story of overcoming: An analysis of the discourses and practices of self-regulation in ECEC. Kelly, E., Manning, D. T. A., Boye, S., Rice, C., Owen, D., Stonefish, S., & Stonefish, M. (2021). Elements of a counter-exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 57(1), 12–33. Langford, R. (2007). Who is a good early childhood educator? A critical study of differences within a universal professional identity in early childhood education preparation programs. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 28(4), 333–352. Langford, R. (2008). Making a difference in the lives of young children: A critical analysis of a pedagogical discourse for motivating young women to become early childhood educators. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’éducation, 78–101. https://doi.org/10. 2307/20466689 Langford, R. (2010). Critiquing child-centred pedagogy to bring children and early childhood educators into the centre of a democratic pedagogy. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 11(1), 113–127. Langford, R. (Ed.). (2019). Theorizing feminist ethics of care in early childhood practice: Possibilities and dangers. Bloomsbury Publishing. LeBlanc, S., & Kinsella, E. A. (2016). Toward epistemic justice: A critically reflexive examination of ‘sanism’ and implications for knowledge generation. Studies in Social Justice, 10(1), 59–78. LeFrançois, B. A. (2013). The psychiatrization of our children, or, an autoethnographic narrative of perpetuating First Nations genocide through ‘benevolent’institutions. Decolonization: Indigeneity. Education & Society, 2(1). LeFrançois, B. A. (2020). Psychiatrising children. In Exploring childhood and youth (pp. 177–190). Routledge. LeFrançois, B. A., & Diamond, S. (2014). Queering the sociology of diagnosis: Children and the constituting of ‘mentally ill’subjects. Journal of Critical Anti-Oppressive Social Inquiry, 1(1), 39–61. LeFrançois, B. A., Menzies, R., & Reaume, G. (Eds.). (2013). Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian mad studies. Canadian Scholars’ Press. Losinski, M., Maag, J. W., & Katsiyannis, A. (2015). Characteristics and attitudes of pre-service teachers toward individuals with mental illness. Journal of Education and Practice, 6(3), 11–16. MacDonald, S. Z. (2021). University women: A history of women and higher education in Canada (Vol. 257). McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Menzies, R., Reaume, G., & LeFrançois, B. (2013). Introducing mad studies. In B. LeFrançois, R. Menzies, & G. Reaume (Eds.), Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian Mad Studies (pp. 1–26). Canadian Scholars Press Inc. Mills, C., & Lefrançois, B. A. (2018). Child as metaphor: Colonialism, psy-governance, and epistemicide. World Futures, 74(7–8), 503–524. Monrad, M. (2017). Emotional labour and governmentality: Productive power in childcare. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 18(3), 281–293. Moss, P. (2006). Structures, understandings and discourses: Possibilities for re-envisioning the early childhood worker. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7(1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10. 2304/ciec.2006.7.1.30 Moss, P. (2018). Alternative narratives in early childhood: An introduction for students and practitioners. Routledge. Noon, D. H. (2005). The evolution of beasts and babies: Recapitulation, instinct, and the early discourse on child development. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 41(4), 367–386. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2014). How does learning happen? Ontario’s pedagogy for the early years. https://files.ontario.ca/edu-how-does-learning-happen-en-2021-03-23.pdf. Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities. (2018). Early Childhood Education Program Standard. https://files.ontario.ca/mcu-early-childhood-edu-2018-51211-en-2022-0208.pdf

Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

465

Pinar, W. F. (1994). Notes on the curriculum field (1978). Counterpoints, 2, 77–99. Pinar, W. F. (2009). The unaddressed ‘I’ of ideology critique. Power and Education, 1(2), 189–200. Pinar, W. (2011). The character of curriculum studies: Bildung, currere, and the recurring question of the subject. Springer. Pinar, W. F. (2015). Educational experience as lived: Knowledge, history, alterity: The selected works of William F. Routledge. Prochner, L. (2009). A history of early childhood education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. UBC Press. Rashed, M. A. (2019). Madness and the demand for recognition: A philosophical inquiry into identity and mental health activism. Oxford University Press. Reaume, G. (2021). How is mad studies different from anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry? In The Routledge international handbook of Mad studies (pp. 98–107). Routledge. Robinson, K., & Jones Diaz, C. (2013). Diversity and difference in early childhood education: Issues for theory and practice. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). Rogers, M. (2021). Contextualised, not neoliberalised professionalism in early childhood education and care: Effects of prescribed notions of quality on educator confidence in Australia: Effects of prescribed notions of quality on educator confidence. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 13(4), 549. Shanouda, F. (2021, October 4). Dr. Adam Davies. Disability Saves the World with Dr. Fady Shanouda. Retreived from https://disabilitysavestheworld.podbean.com/e/dr-adam-davies/ Snell, J. (2003). Macdonald Institute: Remembering the past, embracing the future. Dundurn. Snyder, S. N., Pitt, K. A., Shanouda, F., Voronka, J., Reid, J., & Landry, D. (2019). Unlearning through Mad studies: Disruptive pedagogical praxis. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(4), 485–502. Spandler, H., & Poursanidou, D. (2019). Who is included in the Mad Studies project? The Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, 10. http://www.jemh.ca Szasz, T. S. (1974). The myth of mental illness: Foundations of a theory of personal conduct (Rev. ed.). Harper & Row. Titchkosky, T. (2011). The question of access: Disability, space, meaning. University of Toronto Press. van Daalen-Smith, C., Adam, S., Breggin, P., & LeFrançois, B. A. (2014). The utmost discretion: How presumed prudence leaves children susceptible to electroshock. Children & Society, 28(3), 205–217. Varga, D. (1997). Constructing the child: A history of Canadian day care. James Lorimer & Company. Varga, D. (2011). Look–normal: The colonized child of developmental science. History of Psychology, 14(2), 137. Varga, D. (2020). The legacy of recapitulation theory in the history of developmental psychology. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. Oxford University Press. Volpe, R. (Ed.). (2010). The secure child: Timeless lessons in parenting. IAP. Voronka, J. (2019). Storytelling beyond the psychiatric gaze: Resisting resilience and recovery narratives. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 8(4), 8–30. Walkerdine, V. (1984). Developmental psychology and the childcentered pedogogy. In J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, V. Louze, & V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject (pp. 153–202). Methuen. Winestock, S. L. (2010). Security theory and the history of developmental psychology. In R. Volpe (Ed.), The secure child: Timeless lessons in parenting and childhood education (pp. 69–96). IAP. Wong, E. H.-S. (2016). “The brains of a nation”: The eugenicist roots of Canada’s mental health field and the building of a white non-disabled nation. Canadian Review of Social Policy, 75, 1–29. Zaman, B. A., & Anderson-Nathe, B. (2021). Toward queer potentialities in child and youth care. International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, 12(3–4), 104–128.

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club Paige Carper and Susan Jagger

Contents A Brief History of Book Clubs and Social Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conversations of Reading and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity and Listening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity and Strength . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity and Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity and Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re-Reading and Re-Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

468 470 471 474 478 481 484 484

Abstract

When we speak of curriculum, we often think of the curriculum that is prescribed. But when we look more broadly, and etymologically, at curriculum we see the openness of possibilities for learning content and contexts. Curriculum, meaning a running, a course, a career, stems from currere to run and this action is certainly felt by most if not all educators at some point. When we pause the race and linger a little longer with curriculum and with currere, we can meditate on Pinar’s recognition of currere as not simply course objectives and markers of the race but also the selfreflective and retelling process of considering one’s own educational and life experiences. Through the steps of regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis, the learner meditates on the past, looks forward to the future, and celebrates the present lived experience as they embrace pedagogical moments and unique opportunities for teaching and learning. It is this process that our small but dedicated book club, unknowingly at first, engaged in as we read and responded to texts P. Carper Independent Researcher, Wilmington, NC, USA S. Jagger (*) School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_57

467

468

P. Carper and S. Jagger

reflective of the lived personal experiences, social changes, and pandemic-related tensions that we navigated during a one-year period from Spring 2020 to Summer 2021. This chapter revisits, through the curricular readings and conversational writing of two book club members, eight of the books read and shares the dialogue of identity and listening, strength, loss, and possibilities that unfolded. Keywords

Book club · Reading · Social reading · Dialogue · Curriculum · Currere

When we speak of curriculum, we often think of the curriculum that is prescribed. It is the neatly bound document, or PDF file, provided to educators by the Ministry of Education or other governing body that optimistically maps out a terrain to be explored with learners and less so a seemingly endless series of prescribed learning objectives to somehow burn through until June so that all boxes are ticked, and students are prepared and ready for the next grade (and list of objectives). But when we look more broadly, and etymologically, at curriculum, we see the openness of possibilities for learning content and contexts. Curriculum, meaning a running, a course, a career, stems from currere to run and this action is certainly felt by most if not all educators at some point. When we pause the race and linger a little longer with curriculum and with currere, we can meditate on Pinar’s (1975) recognition of currere as not simply course objectives and markers of the race but also the selfreflective and retelling process of considering one’s own educational and life experiences. Through the steps of regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis, the learner meditates on the past, looks forward to the future, and celebrates the present lived experience as they embrace pedagogical moments and unique opportunities for teaching and learning. It is this process that our small but dedicated book club, unknowingly at first, engaged in as we read and responded to texts reflective of the lived personal experiences, social changes, and pandemic-related tensions that we navigated during a one-year period from Spring 2020 to Summer 2021.

A Brief History of Book Clubs and Social Reading Historically, book clubs and earlier literary societies have served a range of purposes for the readers and reading communities more broadly. The earliest reading collectives can be traced to monasteries where monks carefully transcribed manuscripts and in doing so, shared their readings of texts in discussion with each other (Martins, 2022). Following the creation of the printing press in the fifteenth century, society now had, according to McLuhan (1962), an affordable tool for teaching. However, early print texts were not accessible to many due to their expense and rarity and thus reading was an exclusive and elite activity. This is evident in early reading groups that were established in the late eighteenth century; these reading societies, book clubs, and literary societies gathered to indulge in the richness of literature and each other’s company (Martins, 2022). The intention of many of these early gatherings

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

469

was to share newly learned information following the Enlightenment, a period of significant changes in science and our understandings of the world. Reading, serious reading, was at the time the activity of the male scholar, something done in isolation and solitary contemplation, and in partnership with writing, and we can see this exclusivity captured in the arts (Long, 1992). In contrast, when depicted reading, women’s engagement consisted of passive consumption of texts that allowed them to escape from the tedium of the everyday of the bourgeois female (Long, 1992). In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, women’s identity as readers and their inclusion in reading groups grew. Previously excluded from these intellectual social gatherings, reading groups were quietly held in homes and bookstores as a way for women to further their education. In addition to being a space for female readers motivated to learn from and express their ideas about texts, the book club was also a space for community building and service and political activism (Martins, 2022). For women, especially in North America, the book club was inextricably linked to women’s rights. The gatherings were centres for assembly and activism from which social reform, political action, and cultural change began (Farr, 2005). Women’s collective voices demanded, for example, the establishment of public schools, laws and legislation to protect women and children, and the founding of libraries (Long, 1992). The book club was a site of women’s empowerment and of social and cultural evolution. The book club and its reach changed significantly in September 1996 with the launch of Oprah’s Book Club (Farr, 2005). Oprah Winfrey invited her predominantly female audience to read with her Jacquelyn Mitchard’s Deep End of the Ocean and then discuss it together in a show the following month. Not only did the call to read catapult the novel to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and maintain a position on the list for 29 weeks, it also opened a forum for readers to discuss the content of the book and make connections to their own lives, experiences, and understandings. With its subsequent selections and discussions, the book club encouraged readers to talk with each other, recall their own stories, relate to and empathize with characters and other readers, and consider different ideas, perspectives, and possibilities (Farr & Farr, 2008). In doing so, Oprah’s Book Club picked up and wove the historical threads of literacy, class mobility, and social and democratic engagement of reading groups themselves in a contemporary context (Farr & Farr, 2008). To date, there are a myriad of book clubs led by celebrity readers, for example, Reese Witherspoon and Emma Watson, focused on a particular genre (e.g., mystery and romance book clubs) or setting (e.g., the Toronto in Literature Book Club), and geared toward different community audiences, for example, 2SLGBTQ+ and children’s reading groups. What has become very clear over time and across iterations of the book club has been the definite movement of the perception of reading from a solitary to collective and social activity. In its earliest engagements, reading is inherently social as adults read aloud to babies and young children and beginning readers read aloud and discuss together books and stories with their teachers in primary classrooms. And even in these early reading collectives we can identify that “reading in groups not only offers occasions for explicitly collective textual interpretation but encourages new forms of

470

P. Carper and S. Jagger

association and nurtures new ideas that are developed in conversation as well as with books” (Long as cited in Farr, 2005, p. 54). Counter to Bloom’s (2000) assertion that “you cannot improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply” (p. 22) and Shulevitz’s (2002) declaration that “literature does not make society better,” we see that in fact shared readings of books can motivate club members to think differently and critically, and to connect, relate, and build community (Farr, 2005).

Conversations of Reading and Writing Our book club was created with the initial goals of keeping our community connected and strong and talking and thinking together about social and community issues and topics. We launched the book club in July 2020 when our city, Toronto, Ontario, had been in almost 4 months of COVID-19 related lockdown and when Black Lives Matter was calling for all of us to re-examine and interrogate our own prejudices and actions. Our membership is made up of instructors and members of a local small business fitness studio in Toronto and our monthly meetings would typically have four to seven members attending. With COVID-19 public health restrictions in place in the first 21 months of our book club, we held our first monthly discussions online via Zoom and, when the weather was favorable, outdoors and physically distanced at a city park near to the fitness studio. We rotate through book club members and a different member chooses what we will read and discuss each month. We have also chosen to highlight in our book selections the work of authors who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, women, and local writers. Our selections have spanned genres and immersed us in content and contexts that are at once timely and timeless: the experience of Indigenous children and families in Canada, the loss of a parent and enacted grief, the wonderings of what if and resultant possibilities of decisions made, the stresses of trying to meet the expectations of another, and the courage to identify and be guided by your own. The books that we read and discussed led us along curricular paths and inherently invited our engagement in our own meandering and intersecting courses of currere. This chapter shares the continued conversations and curricular openings afforded from our participation in the book club as we, Paige and Susan1, continue to consider our individual and shared past and future as we live in the present. We take note from a duoethnographic approach to research and representation as we exchange our own understandings and personal histories that connect to book club readings and resultant interpretations of both the selections themselves and related issues and topics that we were living with and in (Norris et al., 2012). By allowing our own stories to converse with each other and with our individual readings of the narratives of the books, we have created a permeable and enriching space for thinking about and working with ideas, issues, and questions that persist in our lived curricula of the 1

In our dialogic writing, Paige’s voice is presented in Courier New and Susan’s is in Book Antiqua.

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

471

self, community, and environment. This mode of reflection and representation not only closely mirrors our conversational participation in book club meetings, but it also invites the reader to write with us, and engage with our reading group, in their own reading and reflecting on the chapter. Common across our book club selections, and like so many texts, was a theme of identity: identity of the self, of the family, of the community. We reviewed all the book club selections to date and chose for further, and written, dialogue eight titles that when paired together, presented us with opportunities to revisit the characters and connections from our meeting conversations. Here, we delved further into our own and shared histories, engaged with textual content and contexts, and explored who we are, and who we might become, through our written dialogues around identity and listening, strength, loss, and possibilities. As we share and invite you to join in our conversation, it is important to situate ourselves and note that Paige and Susan are both white settlers reading, writing, and living on the traditional lands of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewas, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, and originally called Tkaronto by the Mohawk. ***

Identity and Listening Gutter Child by Jael Richardson Richardson’s Gutter Child reveals one young woman’s journey through a fractured world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking injustices. Elimina is a modern heroine in an altered but all-too-recognizable reality who must find the strength within herself to forge her future and defy a system that tries to shape her destiny. (Richardson, 2021)

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good Taken from their families as small children and confined at a remote, Church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released, with no money or support, after years of detention. . . With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the bonds of friendship between this group of survivors as they help each other to reinvent their lives and, ultimately, find a way forward. (Good, 2020)

*** Susan While we didn’t read these two books together, we paired them in this discussion because they both highlight through fiction the very real injustices experienced by Indigenous and marginalized peoples. Paige And both authors are award winning Canadian writers. Michelle Good is of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red

472

P. Carper and S. Jagger

Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan and Jael Richardson is from Brampton, Ontario and is a diversity activist. The strength of their voices is so clear in their writing. While the books are both fictional, and Gutter Child is even set in an imagined world, they share with us truths that are very real and that intersect with the lived histories of so many people. So much truth in fiction if we only listen to its words. With the recent identification of 93 burial sites on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School in Williams Lake, British Columbia, I am quickly taken back to our reading and discussion of Five Little Indians. Residential schools were attended by more than 150,000 Indigenous children between the 1830s when the first school opened until 1997 when the last school was closed. In the time since the media and the Canadian public began to pay attention with the initial recovery of the remains of 215 children buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School and following recoveries on former residential school sites across the country and in the United States, there have been 1000s of children’s graves identified. How have we only just come to know this is in the past few years? That’s just it. These atrocities have been known but hidden. The recovery and return of children who are buried on residential school grounds to their families and communities is called for in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (2015) Calls to Action. Decades earlier still Peter Bryce, an Ontario physician and Chief Medical Officer of the Department of Indian Affairs, submitted his 1907 report – almost 100 years before Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology on behalf of the federal government for the treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools – that detailed the unthinkable disease and death rates of children who were residential school students. Not surprisingly, the Department of Indian Affairs did not publish this document but in 1922, Bryce published The Story of a National Crime (Defining Moments Canada, 2022). His work had been intentionally hidden in plain sight. The children’s deaths were known but ignored. As a Canadian born, dual citizen, I have spent exactly half of my life in Canada and half my life in the United States. One of the disadvantages of this upbringing was that I missed learning about “key” events in history, only learning early Canadian history before immigrating to the United States and then only learning US history beyond the Vietnam war in high school. I can’t say that I would have learned more about residential schools had I finished my schooling in Canada.

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

473

I don’t know if you would have either. Residential schools weren’t part of the curriculum when I was in elementary and secondary school and weren’t implicitly included when I was an elementary teacher either. Perhaps as well I might have learned more about the civil rights movement if I had completed all my schooling in the USA. What I can say for certain is that our discussions during book club have often spilled over to dinner table discussions at home with my two school-aged children. I’m proud to say they go to a progressive school and that they are learning a totally different way of looking at the world. Extending the curriculum to conversations at home is music to my educator ears! Hahahahaha. . . but I often wondered if it’s enough though. They still attend a school with children much like themselves; despite being in such a multicultural city, there is somewhat limited diversity in the student population. Parents are very involved and supportive of teachers and staff at their school. My children are definitely already at an advantage due to attending this school and also in growing up in a loving household with two parents. They don’t face the injustices and hardships that so many other children do. The playing field is certainly not even for all children. It is so important that we challenge each generation to not only to learn from the past, but also identify how history continues to repeat itself. And, how we contribute to its perpetuation. It is a huge task, but one we all need to work together to accomplish. The perpetuation and carry over of injustices are underlying in Gutter Child. In my reading, I found myself connecting the events and contexts of the imagined lands of the Mainland and Gutter with those that are easily recognized in our real world and histories. The disciplinarian academy that Elimina is sent to as a young child recalls the residential schools. The division between those from the Mainland and those from the Gutter mirrors the separation between white settlers and people of color, one that is actively policed and reinforced by those in power. And the laws, rules, and regulations that monitor and hold down those from the Gutter evoke the Jim Crow Laws of the American South that perpetuated racial apartheid despite the ratification of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery in the USA. I also think of the Indian Act which forced assimilation of First Nations people in

474

P. Carper and S. Jagger

Canada and erased Indigenous identity through prohibition of their culture activities and self-governance. I felt that Gutter Child described our society as it is today. The haves and the have nots. While the have nots might not “owe” a large sum to the haves, they are born at a disadvantage. If no one in your family has ever attended secondary education, how likely are you to? The poor seem to mostly stay poor, and the rich seem to mostly stay rich or get richer. The problem is, to even the playing field the haves would need to “support” the have nots and generally speaking you don’t see that happen enough. I’m saddened by the fact that our society still allows children to go hungry when some people have more money than they could ever spend. What really stuck with me was Elimina’s courage and resilience throughout. She found the strength to learn and navigate the structures of the academy. She found and connected with those who supported her despite so many and so much working against her at the Home for Troubled Girls. And she worked hard to care for her son on her own. Her voice and determination only seemed to grow over the course of her lived experiences and the journey that we followed in our reading. Her story was heard in her letters leaked to the press and published. This is when those in power on the Hill – a metaphor in itself – began to listen. I wonder what the next chapters might hold for Elimina? The optimist in me wants to believe that Elimina breaks the cycle and change happens, maybe not in her lifetime, improving the quality of life for everyone in the Gutter. The optimist in me also wants to believe that the children of today will improve our world with open minds and a constant questioning of why things are the way they are and how they can change them. ***

Identity and Strength Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown A timely and important book that challenges everything we think we know about cultivating true belonging in our communities, organizations, and culture. (Brown, 2017)

Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

475

What’s expected of women and what it’s really like to exist as a woman in today’s world are two different things – and we exhaust ourselves trying to close the gap. Sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, are here to help end the all-too familiar cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. They compassionately explain the obstacles and societal pressure we face – and how we can fight back. (Nagoski & Nagoski, 2019)

*** Paige What I thought was interesting during our book club meeting discussion of Braving the Wilderness is that each member described some sense of not belonging being a theme in their life. Many of us had made big moves either during childhood or as adults and with every move there is an inherent need to find where you belong. Susan Yes, yes, and yes! Belonging seems to have been a goal throughout my life. I guess it is really that way for everybody. When I was young, we moved a few times across the country, and I started at new schools and in new communities in grades three and six. I was awkward and lacked confidence and self-esteem – I was overweight and wore glasses (this was the mid 1980s, think large 1970s carryover glasses that for some ungodly reason are trendy again). I was already a target for teasing and being new was just another circle on my back. Fitting in and belonging was hard. What I thought was even more interesting, is that each member “belongs” to my fitness studio. Most of us would never have met each other if we didn’t all belong to the same fitness studio and I have to say during the pandemic it was moments like these that gave me the will to go on and push through months of lockdown to keep not only the studio going, but our little book club that could be going as well, with the help of the other members of course. I know when I look back at my life, one of my great achievements will have been giving so many people a place where they belonged. That has been so important to me over the past few years. Our community has been a place where I have felt like I fit in without having to be someone else, for someone else. Working toward and starting to work within the academy has felt very much about conforming to the ideals and expectations of an other and in my cases, the expectations of my peers, my colleagues, and various review committees. All measuring up – publishing enough, serving on enough committees, being liked and recognized by the right people. I got tenure a couple of years ago and am finally feeling that weight of the

476

P. Carper and S. Jagger

expectations of others lifting. I am finding the courage to let go of should dos and really starting to focus on what I want to do, what I want to explore, and who I want to be. And these choices are bringing me back to me and I am, probably for the first time in my life, getting to know myself. I hope as a mom of a young daughter I can help her navigate the true meaning of belonging so she gets there just a little quicker than I did. I chose Burnout as one of our monthly book club selections and I actually learned of the book from Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast. I already bought the book, and then suggested that we read it together. I made the suggestion from a point of exhaustion and sadness and perhaps a little (a lot) desperation. COVID-19 made work challenging with a shift to online teaching and in the administration role I had, I worked with a colleague to plan for and revise in-person practicum courses into virtual learning classes that would still engage students in field education. Understandably, though not easily, there was a lot of push back from students and resistance from instructors. I was also struggling with grief and grieving; my partner had very recently lost his son and basically the world felt like it had fallen to pieces. I was trying to keep everything together for everybody – for my partner, for my students, for my colleagues – and I was exhausted. I know this is a feeling shared by so many in the past couple of years. I was so burnt out, I didn’t even manage to read this pick! However, I did find the discussion of this book to be a minitherapy session and it gave me the courage to take a break (like on a Caribbean beach type of break) when popular opinion may have been to dig in and work harder. Book club for the win! You recognized that you had nothing left in the tank – and how often do we actually allow ourselves to put on the brakes – and took the break that you needed. This brings to mind Human Giver Syndrome, something that really resonated with me from the book. This is the tendency of women (though I’d argue of not all women and of not exclusively women) to without question take up the qualities of the loving and attentive subordinate (Nagoski & Nagoski, 2019). These include being at all times (or striving to be at all times) happy, pretty, generous, and aware and responsive to the needs of others. This attention is often at the expense of their own needs and wants and those givers who do not give all of themselves are shamed or punished, explicitly or implicitly, externally or internally. The endless giving inherently leads to stress and burnout – how could it not? While I don’t have my own children, I do have children through my

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

477

work in a caring profession as an educator. Student experience is paramount now in universities and colleges and most professors, instructors, and staff tirelessly give to ensure that their students actively engage in meaningful and enriching learning environments and curricular content. This mirrors the expectations of the K-12 educator. In addition, educators from early years to post-secondary must be aware of and responsive to students’ emotional and mental health and well-being; this is a heavy weight on the shoulders of educators who most likely are not trained in counselling. Educators give and give and give some more. And, especially now, they burnout. As a mom of two school-aged children that are as social as their mom, the transition to online school was a hard one for all of us. I found myself questioning what my children were getting out of virtual school on a regular basis and I felt for the educators trying to deliver a superior online experience as I was doing the same for my fitness studio. I think we all failed at times and succeeded at others. It was such a quick pivot to online. I remember things closing down on Friday March 13, 2020, and then moving all instruction to online for Monday. Our university had a week of transition, but I just wanted to have something normal and routine right away for my students and myself when everything else was upside down and unsettling. I just got it done. What was interesting to me was that it brought to light both in my children’s education and work what is so important about the in-person experience and how outside the box you need to think to recreate it online. I think if everyone knew just how long it would go on, how long schools and gyms would be closed, we would have all pushed outside that box a little further. I hope that is the silver lining of an online world: learning to think outside the box. Yes, we had to learn to be OK with uncertainty. I think the distances also made us sit with ourselves, we really had no choice. We reentered on ourselves and tried to prioritize what was necessary for our own wellness and strength and the wellness and strength of those also in our bubbles. All of the rest just didn’t seem to matter as much anymore. I hope that if we learned anything from the pandemic, we learned to focus on the present and try to enjoy the ride a little more. Especially since you’re never sure when the ride is going to flip you over and make you want to throw up! ***

478

P. Carper and S. Jagger

Identity and Loss Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner This is Zauner’s searingly candid coming-of-age story: of growing apart from, and then back together with, her Korean identity and of forging her own path in the wake of a devastating loss. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up Asian American, straining to meet her mother’s expectations, moving across the country, and returning home to reckon with grief. (Zauner, 2021)

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth When Cameron Posts’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first though is relief. Relief that they’ll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn’t last, and Cam is forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her wellintentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. . . Then Coley Taylor moves to town. . . She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship, one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, ultrareligious Aunt Ruth take drastic action to “fix” her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with cost of denying her true self – even if she’s not quite sure who that is. (Danforth, 2012)

*** Paige These two selections tell stories of identity and loss, and how loss can shape identity, and really, perhaps how identity can shape our experience of loss. Susan At so many points in my reading of Crying in H Mart, I thought of my own mother and my relationship with her – how it has changed through the years and how it has also impacted me and my perceptions of my physical, academic, and career selves. I connected immediately with Michelle’s sharing of her mother’s comments on and critique of her appearance. I, like all children to some extent, explicitly or implicitly, have been on the receiving end of my mother’s critical eye. Why wouldn’t I try a little harder to look nice? The suggestion to me when I was 10 years old to perhaps join Weight Watchers like the neighbours’ daughter had. The more recent remarks that “you would look nice if you brushed your hair” yet also that “not everyone can be pretty.” In school, I usually had really good grades – lots of As and some Bs – but when I did well, it never seemed to be quite enough. If I got 95% on a test, great. . . . but what did you miss? I guess I just kept going, trying to be enough. Twenty-eight years of school later (stick with what you are good at, right?), I still often feel that I am not enough, that I should be doing more. The career path that I am now in is a comfortable space to park and nurture perfectionism and add in some unspoken (and

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

479

very outspoken) competition. The thing is, I don’t even think that my mother realized, and realizes even now, that the words she says linger and repeat themselves in my head and in my actions. I, like many members of the club, have a complicated relationship with my mother and my immediate thought when writing that out is, how can I break that cycle with my own daughter? I wonder as a mother if you think it’s your job to be critical of your daughter because you know others will be and you want them to develop a thick skin? Is it like practice critique from a place of love and concern, building up our armor in a safe place? Yes. It’s not our job of course, our job is to give the unconditional love that all children deserve. Our job is to not project where our life has fallen short onto our daughters as we try to ensure that the same doesn’t happen to them. If we can break the cycle and truly raise the daughters of today to rise by lifting others, maybe we truly can help them shatter the glass ceiling for good? In my reading, I was also reminded of the rawness of those first few days of loss and grief following my dad’s passing. The shock, the numbness, the sadness, and the anger too. I had been away too, teaching in the UK for a few years. I remember flying back to Vancouver on March 1, 2006, and Dad died just two weeks later on March 16. There just wasn’t enough time to say everything that should have been said and do everything that should have been done. And like Michelle, there are foods that I cook and eat that remind me of dad, of his cooking and of the foods that he loved. Hamburger mix up, Fried rice, Planter’s Cocktail Peanuts. Old Dutch Rip-L Chips in the box with two bags because according to Dad, the box with three bags was all broken chips. I’m fortunate to have not lost either of my parents yet. Ironically, when we read Crying in H-Mart, I wasn’t speaking to either of my parents after a falling out over the behavior of one of my children. I can’t say that the book was the turning point, but it definitely made me re-examine how I would feel if the last few months of one of their lives were the months that had just preceded? Loss, and even thinking about loss, can really bring people together but also highlight how separated we can be, for better or for worse. Loss was a

480

P. Carper and S. Jagger

significant theme in Cameron Post as well. And here the loss of her parents was only the first trauma experienced by Cam. When we were reading Cameron Post, it was summer, and I was working through my copy at the local pool. One of the lifeguards shared that it was their favorite book growing up. This was also the first summer that at the pool and at my kids’ camps preferred pronouns were shared. That is awesome! The kids at the school that I work with are similarly open minded and accepting. They are happy to identity their peers as they, she, he – however those children wish to be identified. I think of the resistance of another academic from our city to using gender neutral and preferred pronouns. It is an active negation of one’s identity, an erasure of themselves and who they are. While I understand that not everyone is open to using preferred pronouns, it gave me a little bit of pride (no pun intended) for the city that we are living and raising our children in. City life, especially during a pandemic, can be hard, but the world our children are growing up in is so much more accepting than the world Cameron grew up in. Yes, it feels like a much more inclusive space. I am hopeful that we can continue to further open it up for all to know they are respected not just for who they are but also because of who they are. It’s hard to believe there are still people that believe who you love is a choice and that there is a right or wrong choice. Of course, this is coming from someone who’s daughter’s godfather is a gay man from Texas that, still to this day, must explain to family and friends how supporting a conservative party means not supporting gay rights. Cameron Post took me back to the innocence and the butterflies of a teenage crush. The mix tapes of the Cure and New Order and trying to hide your feelings and act cool when you are hanging out together in a group of friends. I thought of my 2SLGBTQIA+ friends and family members, how the purity and beauty of those emotions may have been clouded by feelings of guilt, shame, and confusion because of the imposition of ideas and ideals on others. I also imagined what a world where we trust each other to know ourselves and support each other as we be ourselves. ***

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

481

Identity and Possibilities The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett Weaving together multiple strands and generations, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, The Vanishing Half is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of race, gender, and identity, and the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s desires and expectations. (Bennett, 2020)

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. but things aren’t always what she’d imagined them to be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: What is the best way to live? (Haig, 2020)

*** Paige The Vanishing Half was the first book that we read together in our book club. Susan I remember that I had a really hard time sourcing it; it was sold out in so many places and back ordered in others. This was in Spring of 2020 when we were all at home and really uncertain about COVID-19 and how long it would last – 2 weeks of shutdown and we’ll be back to normal, right? It was also when the Black Lives Matter movement was really gaining momentum, and necessarily so, following the deaths (murders) of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by members of the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis Police, respectively. 2020 felt like the year that everything came to a head. This was the first book I had purchased in a long time. I’m a big fan of the library, so I rarely buy books, but it was important to me to directly support this author by purchasing her book. At the time, all the statistics were front and center: how much harder it is for authors of color to get published, how much harder it is for entrepreneurs of color to launch a business, the list goes on. I’m not sure I ever really thought about how the color of my skin had made my life easier. I don’t come from money, I put myself through university, I worked hard to make myself successful, opened by own business, but still my path was (and is) easier than any person of color, especially women of color.

482

P. Carper and S. Jagger

Right, and the contexts that we are living with and in inform who we are and who we can become. The twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, in The Vanishing Half, are women of color living in the American South in the mid twentieth century. Their dreams of seeing the world, like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, were just that – dreams. When they left home, they kept those roles already established. They experienced the killing of their father by members of a mob of white men. Their leaving Mallard made sense. They were escaping the histories that inextricably bound them to roles that they hadn’t chosen. And who wouldn’t change the trajectory of their life, if it made their life easier? Stella took that chance and while, like most choices, the grass wasn’t always greener, in general her life was “easier”. She didn’t worry about her own or her child’s safety on a daily basis and she wasn’t denied opportunities solely based on the color of her skin. Stella was calm and methodical, and studied the opportunities presented to her while Desiree was more impulsive and restless. While we can look with shame on Stella’s decision to pass as white, I think it came from knowing very well the opportunities that would become open to her as a white woman. For Stella, it made sense to take on that identity and create a life for herself around it. Interestingly though, I think Desiree was happier in the long run. Desiree wasn’t living in constant fear of being found out and once she came to terms with the advantages of returning home, she found a life that suited her. Our histories are inescapable, but we can, for the most part, choose how we want them to shape us and our future selves. Do we take up the roles predefined for us? Do we reject those identities and forge something new, a different us? I do recognize that this is coming from a place of privilege. I am a white cisgender female living in Canada. The paths available for my exploration are numerous compared to those of so many others. What I can do though is authentically empower others as they choose and live their journeys. Probably the biggest life change I’ve ever made was diving into entrepreneurship with no business experience. Not sure I recommend it, but it was a passion so deep I just knew I had to try to make it work. I never even entertained becoming a fitness instructor until I found Pure Barre and becoming a teacher and later an owner remains one of the leaps of faith that I’m most proud of. I left a financially stable career, moved my family

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

483

internationally, and spent years trying to instill that passion for the technique that I felt in others. I didn’t always get it right and I still have a feeling of what could have been, but I know the experience has shaped me in ways I never could have imagined. I think one of the life changers for me was when I applied for and then took a job teaching English in Italy for a summer. I’d been teaching for a couple of years in British Columbia and had a 0.3 Grade 6 teaching position that I supplemented with day-to-day supply teaching. It was fine, I liked my job, and I loved my students but I had that feeling – “Is this it?” It was a safe position to be in and I kind of wanted to take some risks, to scare myself a bit. So, I went to Tuscany. The job was a lot – 8 am to midnight with summer campers, 7 days a week, for 6 weeks, and the pay was minimal, but it got me there. And it showed me that I could be away from home and away from familiar and be OK and thrive even. After that summer, I went back to parttime Grade 6 and the rest of the time supply teaching. I stuck with that for a couple of months and then quit and moved to London, UK, and taught there for a few years. Then I moved back to BC, taught for a year, and then went back to school for my MA, then my PhD across the country in Toronto. Without that summer job application, I don’t think I would have come to where I am now and followed the route that got me here. I’m truly a believer in no regrets. I’m not sure I would change any decision I have made, because I know every decision led to something great in my life. If I hadn’t moved halfway across the country to go to university at the beach, I wouldn’t have met my husband and had my two amazing children. If I hadn’t jumped into entrepreneurship, I wouldn’t have met all the amazing women and men who have attended my studio and our book club. If I could change anything, I would speak up more. I find it a lot easier to find my voice and allow my voice to be heard in writing. In speaking, not so much. I am a lot less confident. Who am I? Why would my ideas and thoughts matter? It is funny, but not really, that when I do speak, I literally am often not heard, and I have to repeat myself. And when I speak louder, it seems like I am shouting. Maybe that perceived shouting is just my voice being heard loud and clear. Anyways, as I focus on myself and knowing that who I am is enough, I think that I will build the confidence to raise my voice always. Sorry, I just read that line about having to repeat yourself and that is the story of my life! I challenge you, and everyone who feels that way, to examine if you weren’t heard because of what you said and how you said it or if the problem was actually

484

P. Carper and S. Jagger

with the listener. Everyone’s ideas and thoughts matter, as long as they are said with kindness (even if there’s an eye roll). Hahahaha. . . and my eye rolls speak volumes! ***

Re-Reading and Re-Writing While a global pandemic necessitated our physical isolation, our book club allowed us to travel widely together through the stories of both fictional characters and contexts and real people and places. The curriculum of the book club emerged through our dialogues of content, context, connections, and considerations as we explored literary paths and paths of lived experience. We listened to and learned about histories and injustices that persist and perpetuate today. We recognized similarities across difference. We realized and reflected on our own narratives and how they brought us to our current positions. We were inspired by the strength of voices read and voices heard in our shared textual conversations and grew from connecting to and sharing our own challenges. And through our readings and meetings, we built a supportive community of learning and of friendship, one that was and continues to be a safe space for us to be vulnerable and curious, and to consider our own growing and changing identities. Looking back at the historical and more contemporary goals of book clubs and social reading groups, we certainly took up earlier motivations to share knowledge and respond to calls for social action and change. But what also underpinned and drove our congregation was the need to come together during a time of distance. Returning back to currere, and the race to be run, the course to be followed, we recognize the book club and its selections to be the walking group and terrain to be explored. Each step taken in our navigation of the curricular space opened up by the texts necessitates our regression and reflection on our own experiences and understandings. The possibilities opened along the paths explored invite us to look ahead, to progress and imagine a future of care, respect, and community. They also required our confrontation with the present and with the moments and tensions that shaped us and our relationships with others. By looking back, forward, and around, and allowing ourselves to sit within those spaces, we have been able to learn about and with ourselves and others. We embraced the curriculum inherent in book clubs and social reading and meditated on the importance of listening, of emotional and personal strength, of lessons learned through loss, and of the optimism of possibilities, and synthesized these curricular situations in our own identities.

References Bennett, B. (2020). The vanishing half. Riverbend Books. Bloom, H. (2000). How to read and why. Scribner.

Curricular Readings, Conversational Writings: Dialogue on a Book Club

485

Brown, B. (2017). Braving the wilderness. Random House. Danforth, E. M. (2012). The miseducation of Cameron Post. Balzer + Bray. Defining Moments Canada. (2022). The Bryce Report@100: Reconciling with a national crime. Retrieved from https://definingmomentscanada.ca/the-bryce-report100/#:~:text¼Bryce's% 201907%20report%20highlighted%20the,after%20%E2%80%94%20almost%20all%20from %20tuberculosis Farr, C. K. (2005). Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club changed the way America reads. SUNY Press. Farr, C., & Farr, K. (2008). Talking readers. In C. K. Farr & J. Harker (Eds.), The Oprah affect: Critical essays on Oprah’s Book Club. SUNY Press. Good, M. (2020). Five little indians. Harper Perennial. Haig, M. (2020). The midnight library. Harper Avenue. Long, E. (1992). Textual interpretation as collective action. Discourse, 14(3), 104–130. Martins, V. (2022). A history of book clubs. New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2(2), 111–120. McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of a typographic man. University of Toronto Press. Nagoski, E., & Nagoski, A. (2019). Burnout: The secret of unlocking the stress cycle. Ballantine Books. Norris, J., Sawyer, R., & Lund, D. E. (2012). Duoethnography: Dialogic methods for social, health, and educational research. Left Coast Press. Pinar, W. F. (1975). The method of “currere.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://files. eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED104766.pdf Richardson, J. (2021). Gutter child. Harper Avenue. Shulevitz, J. (2002, May 19). You read your book and I’ll read mine. New York Times Book Review. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Calls to action. Retrieved from https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-ourgovernments/indigenous-people/aboriginal-peoples-documents/calls_to_action_english2.pdf Zauner, M. (2021). Crying in H Mart. Knopf.

Part V Curriculum as Changing

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes Christina Niemi Mølstad

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norwegian Curriculum in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Does Curriculum Speak to Us? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Entering the Data of Curriculum Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finding Bildung and Didaktik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Can Be Said About the Shift from the Bildung and Didaktik Tradition to Output-Based Curriculum Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

490 491 496 499 500 501 502

Abstract

Education policy development internationally as well as in Norway has come to reflect a widespread expansion of learning outcome orientation in policy, curricula, and assessment. For instance, this can be seen in recent research showing that curriculum reforms worldwide seem to follow common general ideas emphasizing learning outcomes and assessment (Meyer, School knowledge in comparative and historical perspective: changing curricula in primary and secondary education. Springer, Dordrecht, 2007). However, institutional differences and distinctive national cultures result in varying frames of reference in the field of curriculum making. In this chapter, I will follow how contemporary Norwegian curriculum making takes place in between these two traditions – in between the Bildung tradition and the inflow of more outcome-oriented ideas on curriculum and assessment. It becomes evident that some of the language in the current curriculum reform is connected to a more output-oriented curriculum. This is evident in the description of competence aims for the different levels of compulsory education. Thus, the curriculum documents have explicit “language” from C. N. Mølstad (*) Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_16

489

490

C. N. Mølstad

outcome-oriented education with these aims. In a way, these aims can be interpreted as important historically when it comes to how Didaktik and Bildung have been perceived within the Norwegian context. These are more broader scopes of the results of education than specific detailed skills that often are related to an outcome-oriented curriculum. Therefore, one might argue that the Norwegian curriculum has found a way to keep Bildung and Didaktik within an outcome-oriented reform. Keywords

Curriculum · Norway · Didaktik · Bildung · Reform · Policy

Introduction Just like in the children book Where’s Waldo, within Norwegian education the concept of Bildung has transformed from being at the center into being something you must search for among several other competing phenomena and concepts. The reason for this is that education policy development internationally as well as in Norway has come to reflect a widespread expansion of learning outcome orientation in policy, curricula, and assessment (Kellaghan & Greaney, 2001; Shepard, 2000, 2007). Particularly in Anglophone countries, learning outcome-oriented education systems has dominated, with a stronger focus on curriculum and assessment traditions. Today, this stronger focus on learning outcomes has spread to the Nordic countries and continental Europe, challenging longstanding didactic and Bildung traditions in education (Hopmann, 2008; Mølstad, 2019; Prøitz & Nordin, 2020). For instance, this can be seen in recent research showing that curriculum reforms worldwide seem to follow common general ideas emphasizing learning outcomes and assessment (Meyer, 2007). However, institutional differences and distinctive national cultures result in varying frames of reference in the field of curriculum making. In this text, I will follow how contemporary Norwegian curriculum making takes place in between these two traditions – in between the Bildung tradition and the inflow of more outcome-oriented ideas on curriculum and assessment. Gerrard and Farrell (2013) argue that when a national curriculum is reformed and renegotiated, it is important to acknowledge that teachers’ work is also repositioned because teachers’ professional autonomy is constrained and defined through the curriculum. This repositioning of teachers’ work within the curriculum affects how teachers understand their work and their autonomy; therefore, new curriculum reforms require new professional practices (Gerrard & Farrell, 2013). In 2006, there was a new national curriculum in Norway (knowledge promotion) that introduced learning outcomes. A renewal of this reform came in 2020, where the curriculum was negotiated with teachers and academics after criticism that the content of the curriculum was lacking the traditional concept of Bildung and that there was too much conditioning of subject-specific content. Therefore, this study highlights the new Norwegian curriculum as a “place” in which negotiation and

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

491

adaptations happened, trying to navigate between the traditional ideas concerning Bildung and the renewed inflow of more outspoken outcome orientation. To that end, the study includes a content analysis (Bowen, 2009; Cohen et al., 2011) of some of the key documents concerning the renewal of the Norwegian curriculum in 2020. The purpose is to illuminate changes in how learning outcomes have been applied and reasoned in the current reform and how these changes correspond to the criticism that the concept of Bildung is made invisible. The preliminarily findings indicate that the concept of “word competences” is now used to describe and portray an aspect of personal development that Bildung was previously used for. This indicates that the Norwegian curriculum was renegotiated away from a solely outcome-based interpretation of schooling towards a more didactic tradition. Thus, it can be said that Bildung and Didaktik have not disappeared from Norwegian education, but it has become harder to locate “Waldo among all the peers.”

Norwegian Curriculum in Context State-based curriculum making is obviously part of educational politics and policies. This implies that state-based curriculum is an element in systems or structures to steer and control education. This section presents research on how education policy is intended to steer and control education within the Norwegian context. The evaluation of the quality of education in Norway by Granheim et al. (1990) had a major impact on both policy research and educational practices in the country. Based on an evaluation conducted by the OECD, the Norwegian government initiated this evaluation to develop models to assess Norwegian schools and to define the roles and responsibilities of the different national education levels (Granheim, 1990). Based on this project, Lundgren (1990) reanalyzes the governing of Norwegian education using two different dimensions – a continuum from the political to the professional and from the centralized to the decentralized. Thus, he offers a lens through which to interpret different premises on how governing is constructed in the educational system (Lundgren, 1990). The theoretical dimensions highlight the governing of education with an emphasis on where the “power” is situated within the education system, defining who is mandated to speak and act. The dimensions thus explain the different ways power is distributed in the steering and controlling of education and how this establishes specific interpretations of ideas on centralization and decentralization and how they interact with the political and professional nexus. The focus on the centralization/decentralization and the political/professional nexus is interesting in relation to the fact that the Nordic countries traditionally have a strong state presence in terms of educational control. It, therefore, becomes interesting to investigate how new modes of governing have been established. In investigating governance, Hudson (2010) notes that “in the Nordic countries, the state is clearly maintaining government in the governance of education” (Hudson, 2010, p. 67). Hudson illuminates the “presence of the government” by employing the European Commission’s database Eurybase (now called Eurypedia, part of the larger Euridice database). By examining official policy

492

C. N. Mølstad

documents, statements, and information regarding compulsory education in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, Hudson states that in the Nordic countries, the state is highly present in the governing of education, despite introducing new and more subtle forms of governance. In relation to how the governing of education is considered, Gundem and Hopmann (1998a) and Westbury et al. (2000) investigate curriculum reforms in Anglo-Saxon countries compared to continental and Northern European countries. It is stated that there are differences between Anglo-Saxon traditions of curriculum research and continental and Northern European traditions of curriculum research normally performed under the theoretical umbrella of Didaktik (also argued by Kansanen, 1995). These differences also have implications for curriculum planning and implementation, as well as for the central–periphery relationships demonstrated in the discussions on centralization and decentralization of the perceived educational “power.” Along these lines, it is also said that Anglo-Saxon countries more often have locally initiated and controlled curriculum development, whereas the continental and Northern Europe tradition builds more on ideas of a centralized education system with state control over curriculum development (Gundem & Hopmann, 1998b; Hopmann & Riquarts, 2000). A major contribution of these studies is that they highlight how the Didaktik approach in the continental and Northern European curriculum tradition enables another kind of licensing of the teaching profession than in Anglo-Saxon countries. Consequently, the teaching profession is perceived as having different roles and mandates in the two traditions. Further, the two traditions are also to some extent mirrored by the different state levels that prevail with the different techniques for steering and controlling education. For instance, as shown by Sivesind (2008) in a comparative study of Norway and Finland, curricula documents in the Didaktik tradition are normally framed by formal boundaries rather than having a focus on output measurement. Following a historical, qualitative investigation of curriculum documents, Sivesind argues that in this tradition, the curriculum is formulated based on the aims and content of schooling in order to secure public legitimacy for what is taught. Therefore, Sivesind concludes that curriculum texts as policy in Norway (and Finland) have not traditionally been framed by or formulated based on a strong idea of output measures. Comparative research ventures of curriculum-making processes seem to be productive in illuminating central aspects of how curriculum making takes form in different countries. Rosenmund et al. (2002) present some of these central aspects in the book Comparing curriculum-making processes. In the last chapter of the book, Hutmacher (2002) summarizes some main trends across the studied countries. In relation to how curricula are a part of steering and controlling education, the study more or less indicates there is a “paradigm shift” within curriculum making from input to output. For instance, this is linguistically expressed in terms of a stronger emphasis on accountability, quality, and effectiveness. This leads to a shift from expectations of teaching to a more outspoken expectation of the learning offered by the curricula and as such mirrors the change in curriculum making from input to output. Further, concerning the change of curriculum, Hutmacher (2002) also identifies an increasing interest in cross-disciplinary competencies.

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

493

These internationally observed changes in the processes of curriculum making have challenged several researchers to conduct investigations to evaluate the Norwegian curriculum reform of 2006 entitled the “Knowledge Promotion.” The two most relevant evaluations are those conducted by the Department of Educational Research at the University of Oslo (PFI) and the joint evaluation by the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Education (NIFU) and the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo (ILS). In the first evaluation, called Analysis of the preconditions of the Knowledge Promotion reform (Norwegian title: Analyse av Reformen Kunnskapsløftets forutsetninger) (abbreviated as ARK) (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2011), PFI investigates the reform of the Knowledge Promotion as a combined education and curriculum reform. The second evaluation is an analysis of the reform’s intentions regarding the topic “governing levels and institutional roles in reform implementation” (Norwegian title: Forvaltningsnivåenes og institusjonenes rolle i reformimplementeringen) (abbreviated as FIRE) (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2011). This latter evaluation examines the implementation of the curriculum reform over a period of 5 years to investigate if steering and the different administrative levels function and operate according to the intentions of the reform. The first evaluation with the acronym ARK points to an inconsistency within the curriculum reform offering different premises for the local development of the curriculum. The evaluation identifies a lack of guidelines for how to deal with what is called a new type of curriculum reform focusing more on competence aims. The argument is that the competence aims are unclear, making them challenging to use as a point of departure for local curriculum work. The evaluation concludes that clearer guidance is needed to initiate local curriculum work, a sentiment that is also expressed by the local actors that are given a voice in the evaluation. Further, the investigated curriculum reform is said to challenge traditional positions in the education system, and some actors receive a more central position than previously, creating a perceived imbalance between the professionals and the political steering (Dale et al., 2011). The second evaluation with the acronym FIRE elaborates on the balance/imbalance between the professionals and the political steering. This is done by identifying that the follow-ups at the political level of the reform and the implementation of the reform have strengthened and centralized the governing of basic education. This has happened through more strict regulations, more outspoken results-based management, and the support of guidelines. Thereby, the role of national political governing in the form of “power” has increased throughout the implementation of the reform, despite the intention of decentralization and an emphasis on local responsibility and accountability. Consequently, the reform has resulted in increased centralization, demonstrated by an increased tension between the juxtapositioning of centralized and decentralized governance and between political and professional control (Aasen et al., 2012). Prøitz (2014) offers valuable insights into how this increased centralized steering has been established within the Norwegian context. In an analysis of 14 years of policies from the Norwegian national budget that formed the basis for the “Knowledge Promotion,” she finds two contrasting approaches to govern education.

494

C. N. Mølstad

The first government in this period initiated the reform with the reasoning of giving the responsible actors clear goals, freedom, and responsibility. Then, a new government came to power that instead emphasized the importance of more steering and more monitoring (Prøitz, 2014). However, taken together, the current research and evaluations of the recent Norwegian curriculum reforms highlight a need for more guidance on the local level and an increased degree of centralized steering. The dilemmas visualized above concerning the nexus of centralization/decentralization and between the professionals and the politicians are in no way new tensions within Norwegian curriculum making. Already when the Norwegian 7-year compulsory school was established before the Second World War, this kind of tension was visible. It was also visible when resolutions in the Norwegian Parliament in 1959 and 1969 extended compulsory education to 9 years (Telhaug et al., 2006). The same nexus was also a topic for debate in 1997 when the definition of school was broadened to include 6-year-olds, thereby extending compulsory education to 10 years (Det kongelige kirke- utdsannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1996). Evidentially, the governing of the curriculum has varied over time. For instance, the national curriculum from 1974, known as Mønsterplan 74, was mainly written for individual teachers and recognized teachers’ expertise in making judgements concerning the teaching content. Traditionally, the teacher determined the instructional methods. However, the idea of the teacher deciding which content to emphasize was new. The next curriculum, called Mønsterplan 87, emphasized the responsibility of local-level educators/policymakers, elevating the importance of the local school level (Engelsen, 2008; Åvik, 1988). From 1990 to 1995, the educational experts’ influence was reduced in favor of a stronger political center, resulting in a shift of “power” from the professionals to the political arena. This change was part of the establishment of the idea of a strong state combining central management with social democratic confidence in the state (Telhaug et al., 2006). During the 1990s, the educational system was also changed through several other educational reforms affecting the education system both horizontally and vertically. The reforms continued through the 2000s with the important reform of the Knowledge Promotion in 2006. Its intention was mainly to transfer “power” to the local level with a significant share of possibilities for action and responsibilities allocated to local school authorities and schools (Engelsen, 2008). Parallel to the reforms of the early 2000s, the international perspective in the form of comparisons with other nations gained importance within the educational sector. For instance, Hopmann (2008) argues that different constitutional mindsets affected how accountability efforts, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), are experienced in a nation. Several researchers (see, e.g., Biesta & Priestley, 2013; Grek, 2009, 2013) have argued that an international large-scale assessment such as PISA influences national systems and curriculum (see also Pettersson, 2008). It then becomes interesting to question if an international assessment such as PISA influences the loss of trust in professional expertise, which according to Künzli (2002) can explain why countries with an increasing use objective as systems of control. If so, the changes within curriculum from input to output may be the result of an internationally spread accountability movement, and

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

495

the role PISA plays in the Norwegian discourse on schooling. Another example of this shift is that the later Norwegian curriculum reform is highly centered on learning outcomes through its competence aims (Mølstad & Karseth, 2016). In line with this growing emphasis on outcomes, national testing of basic skills was introduced in 2004. While the authorities do not publish league tables, the media announce their national rankings of schools on an annual basis (Tveit, 2014). This introduces a new way of reasoning on educational quality more concerned with concurrence and comparisons to achieve quality improvements. Consequently, in recent years, the trust and autonomy of teachers have been challenged by policies based on this new understanding of what quality is, leading to an increased emphasis on student outcomes and sharpened external control of teachers’ work (Mausethagen, 2013b). In relation to this new educational terrain, Lennert Da Silva and Parish (2020) argue that national curriculum policy is informed by the international context but becomes translated within the national contexts. It is also said that the logic of accountability and comparisons encompasses multiple aspects that reinforce each other to create a cohesive policy focusing more on output than input. As stated above, the recent developments in Norway challenge the trust and autonomy of teachers. The question of trust and autonomy is in no way a new discourse within education. This discourse is often combined with the discussion of whether the teaching profession is based on research or praxis. Historically, Norwegian teacher education has not been associated with research institutions such as universities (Skagen, 2006). Instead, the content of teacher education has been heavily controlled by the government and has been criticized for its lack of research-based teaching. Therefore, it is often said that the Norwegian teaching profession is controlled by the government and not constructed or controlled by a heavy research base. In a comparative case study of Norwegian and Swedish teachers’ autonomy, Helgøy and Homme (2007) point out that Norwegian teachers are characterized by an old professionalism and that the historically strong input regulations in Norway limit individual teachers’ autonomy. Further, the authors conclude that at the collective level, teachers are still autonomous even though recent reforms have limited room for maneuvering and that national standards and control in education are only accepted as tools for securing professional knowledge and status (Helgøy & Homme, 2007). Mausethagen (2013a) investigates how teachers construct and negotiate professionalism under increasing accountability and finds that Norwegian teachers’ work is influenced by accountability policies such as national testing despite the historical low-stakes context of the country. As a result, it can be stated that the Norwegian teaching profession is today affected by an accountability movement but at the same time is framed by the old interpretation of professionalism and autonomy at the collective level. Lennert Da Silva and Mølstad (2020) find that Norwegian teachers today are forced to navigate across policies in order to meet the needs of their students. As such, the individual autonomy of Norwegian teachers is constrained by an extension of state control over curriculum and testing. However, the practice of collective work allows for the exercise of agency because of the possibility of reflection and collective construction of teaching plans and strategies that frame and legitimize teaching work (Lennert Da Silva &

496

C. N. Mølstad

Mølstad, 2020). By extension, Mølstad et al. (2020) argue that Norwegian teachers are, therefore, finding ways to negotiate and adjust to the language in the policies and reforms.

How Does Curriculum Speak to Us? The way curriculum is conceptualized and defined by researchers depends on the theories they employ and the context of their analysis (Gundem & Hopmann, 1998b; Sivesind, 2008, 2013). Therefore, the distinctiveness of a national educational system and the geographical identity of the researchers are important in understanding the reasoning behind a curriculum and what it includes and excludes. However, as pointed out in the introduction, recent research has shown that curriculum reform worldwide seems to follow common general paths (Meyer, 2007). In this, it becomes evident that institutional differences and distinctive national cultures create different frames of reference in the curriculum field. As mentioned, several studies have identified an international shift from content-oriented models of education to models emphasizing learning outcomes as statements of competence (James, 2005). The continental and Northern European curriculum-making traditions have been dominated by a core reference to the concept of Didaktik, defined as the art or study of teaching (Gundem & Hopmann, 1998a). Because of the importance of the concept of Didaktik within the Norwegian educational discourse, we must look into that concept a bit more in order to understand the shift that has taken place within the Norwegian context of curriculum making. Let us start with a quote by Hopmann and Riquarts (2000), who state that: [. . .] since the days of Comenius and Ratke, Didaktik has been the most important tool for planning, enacting, and thinking about teaching in most of northern and central Europe. Indeed, it is impossible to understand German, Nordic and central European schooling without appreciating the role and impact of Didaktik (Hopmann & Riquarts, 2000, p. 3).

This statement takes us closer to one of the central models on how education and Didaktik are positioned within this specific line of thinking. The Didaktik triangle is presented in Fig. 1. An important aspect of Didaktik is the primacy of the content, illustrated by its position at the top of the well-known Didaktik triangle shown above (Fig. 1), with the teacher at the bottom left and the learner at the bottom right (Hopmann, 2007; Content

Fig. 1 Didaktik triangle

Teacher

Learner

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

497

Künzli, 1998, 2000). Simply stated, the Didaktik model deals with the following three questions: 1) What is to be taught? 2) How is content to be taught and learned? 3) Why is the content to be taught and learned? While Didaktik addresses all these questions, the first and third questions dominate within the model (Künzli, 2000). Further, the position of content is underpinned by the way a didactician looks for a prospective object for learning and asks himself what this object can and should signify to the student and how the student can experience this significance (Künzli, 1998, pp. 39–40). This position implies that learning content is the most important aspect in education. Künzli has argued that all other questions and problems, such as class management or individual and social learning, are subordinated. However, content is not defined as a fixed body of knowledge to be learned but as a range of possibilities to be explored through reasoning and interactions (Karseth & Sivesind, 2010). Moreover, the curricula based on the concept of Didaktik have been oriented towards overall purposes and subject content, as opposed to curricula that are oriented towards a more objective-driven model. This latter model is designed to develop specific capabilities directly connected to the needs of society (Hopmann, 2003; Ross, 2000; Westbury, 1998). Contrary to the Didaktik tradition, we have, as stated above, a more objectivedriven curriculum model. Content and purpose are the priorities in the Didaktik model, while objectives and expected learning outcomes are the cornerstones in an objective-driven curriculum model (Ross, 2000). Outcomes can be defined as learning results the students are to demonstrate at the end of significant learning experiences. Moreover, statements about desired outcomes of learning are expressed in terms that clearly point to how students’ achievement can be measured. By putting outcome descriptions or behavioral objectives to the fore, content is primarily seen as a means to achieve the outcomes (Andrich, 2002). This approach assumes a direct and often linear relationship between objectives on one hand and learning activities and performance on the other. This model directly contrasts the fundamental understanding of Didaktik and the educative difference between matter and meaning and the autonomy of teaching and learning (Hopmann, 2007, p. 109). Within this approach, the distinction between content as such and its “educative substance” is essential. Hopmann (2007) suggests that as any given matter (Inhalt) can represent many different meanings (Gehalt), any given meaning (Gehalt) can be opened up by many different matters (Inhalt). But there is no matter without meaning, and no meaning without matter (p. 116). Therefore, to orchestrate teaching in line with Didaktik implies a considerable amount of teacher autonomy. Curriculum, Didaktik, and the role of education in the Norwegian context are tightly connected to the concept of licensing. Licensing is based on an explicit differentiation between the responsibilities of content and methods. In this view, a teacher is considered to have the methodological abilities to handle whatever content is required. In this case, the outcomes of the instruction are not measured because it does not make sense within this line of thinking (Hopmann, 1991). As Gundem (1993) states, licensing represents an administrative mechanism where the responsibility for planning and control is separated from the responsibility for practice. When a system of licensing provides professional autonomy of teachers, tracking the

498

C. N. Mølstad

impact of new curricula does not make much sense because the curricula are realized in a diversity of local activities and outcomes. Within this licensing system, the common core of professionalism, Didaktik, can relate the institutional frame (the curriculum) with local activities and outcomes through pedagogical arguments. Such a system involves weak control and evaluation of the processes and almost no external control of the outcomes of education. This model stands in contrast to the product-centered system of external controls as established in, for example, the USA (Hopmann, 2003). So far, the discussion is limited to two main curriculum models. This approach may seem too simple to capture the complexity of the field of curriculum, and education specialists have offered different overviews (Pinar et al., 1995; Ross, 2000; Young, 2008). In comparison to the Norwegian case, the study by Sundberg and Wahlström (2012) of the Swedish curriculum context illustrate how different curriculum models come into play at the same time. Wahlström and Sundberg analyze curriculum development in Swedish compulsory education from 1962 to 2011 and illustrate how different models come into play. They state that: a denationalised and instrumental conception of education is characterised, at a general societal level, by a shift in the direction of internationalisation and privatisation, and, in the more concrete arena of governance and curriculum, by a shift towards management by requirements and control (Sundberg & Wahlström, 2012, p. 353).

Sundberg and Wahlström (2012) further state that a combination of two basically contradictory concepts of knowledge is used, the technical–instrumental form of curriculum and a neo-conservative view of curriculum content. Engelsen and Karseth (2007) describe how different types of models are visible in various parts of the current curriculum in Norway, illustrating that several models can be applied at the same time. Despite the contested approaches, some fundamental differences (described through the distinction between Didaktik and learning outcomes) exist that are relevant to the analysis of recent curriculum reforms in Norway. One of the most important aspects is how the two approaches place various degrees of emphasis on content and objectives as distinctly separate elements. Therefore, these two concepts – Didaktik and learning outcomes – are essential in the analysis of subject curricula that will be performed later in the text. Mølstad (2015) argues that the 2006 curriculum in Norway where learning outcomes are presented as competence aims and where licensing is not shaped according to Didaktik moves away from curriculum-centered steering. Considering the two traditions of curriculum control, it seems that the Norwegian curriculum is taking steps towards utilizing tools from the tradition of product control, as learning outcomes as competence aims are used to control the results of education. This movement stands in contrast to Sivesind’s (2008) description of curriculum development in Norway, traditionally not being formed by output measurement. Therefore, the distribution of responsibility in Norway seems to be in line with management by expectations. Norway has thus moved further away from the traditional principles of licensing based on Didaktik. As such, Norwegian curriculum

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

499

making today relies on management by expectations through centrally prescribed interpretations and competence aims. At the same time, the Norwegian government has an extensive set of curriculum expectations to fulfil (Mølstad, 2015). This makes it interesting to further investigate the complexity of Norwegian curriculum documents.

Entering the Data of Curriculum Making A major premise for the study presented below is an assumption that reality is socially constructed, forming institutions and thereby systems (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009). Methodologically, the study is further based on the assumption that this research topic can be investigated by interpreting qualitative empirical data. Research on policy discourse reveals that policy words are not mere rhetoric but instead policies that are textual interventions in practice (Ball, 1993). Hence, the curriculum as a text sets important boundaries for professional and public discourse. Because of this boundary-setting function, educational reforms carry with them ways of conceptualizing education that affect what teachers do and how teachers perceive themselves (Ball, 2003). It can also be argued that the educational structures expose young people to cultural-specific knowledge and viable values, attitudes, and normative behavior patterns through curricula policies (Benavot, 2002). As a result, the educational policy for governing provides structures, in the arena of formulation, that again provide boundaries for the education system. These structures and their semantics are investigated in this study through an examination of both the construction and to some extent the language of educational policies. Interpreting text using content analysis can be described as searching for underlying themes in the material being analyzed (Bryman, 2012). In interpreting text, the study was inspired by hermeneutics, which can be described as a discipline that is concerned with theory and the method of interpreting human action (Bryman, 2012), with an emphasis on how prior understanding and prejudice shape the interpretive process (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Ricoeur (1981) defines hermeneutics as concerning the rules required for the interpretation of written documents of our culture (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 197). The study is based on comprehensive content analysis (Bowen, 2009; Cohen et al., 2011) of the curriculum reform in Norway called “Knowledge Promotion 2020” with a focus on the subjects of Norwegian and science conducted as part of the larger research project Tracing Learning Outcomes Across Policy and Practice (LOaPP) (Prøitz et al., 2016). The document mapped and analyzed is The Knowledge Promotion 2020: Overordnet del (The Core curriculum), Norwegian subject and the Science subjects. The document is analyzed by investigating how the following words are incorporated in the curricula reforms: Bildung (danning), competence/competence aims and learning. These are the key words for investigating how the emphasis on learning outcomes has appeared in the last and current Norwegian reforms. Based on previous research in the field, these concepts can be seen as indicators of different forms of curricula reforms. Therefore, the

500

C. N. Mølstad

analysis is conducted by thoroughly reading how the words are integrated and used in the curricula texts.

Finding Bildung and Didaktik The concept of Bildung is included in some of the curriculum documents. In the introduction part of the reformed curriculum, “Overordnet del,” there is a chapter explicitly addressing Bildung together with the concepts of learning and development. In this part, it is explicit in the statement that schools have responsibility for issues of Bildung and the development of the competences of all participants in basic education (p. 1). Further, it is stated that creative learning processes are a prerequisite for pupils’ Bildung and identity development (p. 7). Moreover, it is stated that education is responsible for both the purpose of Bildung and the mission of educating. In the text, it is described when Bildung appears and through which activities. For instance, this is expressed in the following: Bildung happens when the students gain knowledge and insight to nature and environment, language and history, society and work, art and culture and religion and (livssyn). Bildung happens also through experiences and practical challenges in teaching and everyday school life (p. 9).

This is also further expressed in the statement Bildung happens when they (students) work on their own and when they cooperate with others (p. 9). Moreover, it is stated that Bildung happens when the students have to cope with theoretical challenges and when they apply applications to master practical challenges. In the same document, the word competence is defined as follows: Competence is to be able to acquire and apply knowledge and skills to master challenges and solve assignments in known and unknown contexts and situations. Competence involves understanding and the ability to reflect and use critical thinking (p 10). Additionally, it is stated that the concept of competence shall be used as a basis for working with curriculum and the assessment of students’ competences in the different subjects. The competence aims of different subjects must as such be seen in relation to each other and across subjects. It is further stated that the competence aims need to be seen in the light of regulating education and all parts of the curriculum. When learning is described, it is connected to describing and defining the principles of learning and how it connects to development and Bildung. However, it is not explicitly defined in this context. Moreover, it is used in connection to describe schools’ responsibility for supporting and contributing to the students’ social learning and development: Social learning takes place both in classes and in other actives in school. Learning in content of subjects cannot be isolated from social learning. Hence, learning in the content of the subjects and social learning are interconnected in the students’ daily work (p. 9).

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

501

When it comes to the descriptions of the subject of Norwegian within the new curriculum, Bildung is mentioned in the following quote: The Norwegian subject is central for understanding of culture, communication, Bildung and development of identity (p. 2). Further, it is stated that: The Norwegian subject shall prepare the student to participate in democratic processes and shall prepare for employment that demands varied competences in reading, writing and oral communication (p. 2). These varied competences are described in relation to what the students are to have learned at specific ages. For example: Formative assessment shall contribute to promote learning and develop competences in the subject. Students show and develop competences in Norwegian at 5. 6. and 7th grade when they read short and longer texts in different genre and converse about form and context of the texts. They, also, portray and develop competences when they converse about and presents subject topics, use references critical and argument oral and written (p 8).

This paragraph of text is consistently used throughout the Norwegian subject curriculum to describe formative assessment at all grade levels described in the Norwegian subject curriculum. The last excerpt that is analyzed relates to how Bildung is described within the curriculum in relation to the subject of science. A bit surprisingly, the concept of Bildung is not used to describe either the content or the aim of the subject of science. However, the concept of competence is used to describe the content of science: The Science subject shall, also, contribute so that students develop competences to take care of their own and others health (p. 2). This is further elaborated in the following passage: [. . .] provide the student competences to understand their own body and preserve their physical and mental health. The students shall be able to be critical to and use health related information for being capable to make responsible choices concerning health, safety and environment both in everyday live and working life (p. 3).

Another example for this subject is the statement that competence in the Science subject provides the bases for understanding and being critical to argumentation in societal debates and is important so that students shall be able to be active citizens and provide to technological and sustainable development (p. 4).

What Can Be Said About the Shift from the Bildung and Didaktik Tradition to Output-Based Curriculum Making When summing up, it becomes evident that some of the language in the current curriculum reform is connected to a more output-oriented curriculum. This is evident in the description of competence aims for the different levels of compulsory education. Thus, the curriculum documents have explicit “language” from outcomeoriented education with these aims. This was new in the Norwegian context in 2006. The argument made for this change was that it was necessary for more

502

C. N. Mølstad

focus on students’ learning and that many researchers have investigated the curriculum texts and found they are highly outcome-oriented due to the competence aims. At the same time, when looking more closely at the use of concepts such as Bildung, competences and learning the picture become more complex. These concepts are used to describe how students are intended to develop both social skills and gain knowledge from the subjects in such a way as to become members of the larger society and participate in democratic processes. In a way, these aims can be interpreted as important historically when it comes to how Didaktik and Bildung have been perceived within the Norwegian context. These are broader scopes of the results of education than specific detailed skills that often are related to an outcomeoriented curriculum. Therefore, one might argue that the Norwegian curriculum has found a way to keep Bildung and Didaktik within an outcome-oriented reform.

References Aasen, P., Møller, J., Rye, E., Ottesen, E., Prøitz, T. S., & Hertzberg, F. (2012). Kunnskapsløftet som styringsreform – Et løft eller et løfte? Forvaltningsnivåenes og institusjonenes rolle i implementeringen av reformen [The knowledge promotion as governing reform – A boost or a promise? Administrative levels and the role of the institutions in the implementation of the reform]. Nordisk Institutt for Studier av Innovasjon, Forskning og Utdanning. Alvesson, M., & Sköldberg, K. (2009). Reflexive methodology: New vistas for qualitative research. Sage. Andrich, D. (2002). A framework relating outcomes based education and the taxonomy of educational objectives. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 28, 35–59. Åvik, T. (1988). Hva er lokalt læreplanarbeid, og hvorfor blir dette ansett som så viktig i vår tid? [What is local curriculum work, and why is it important in our time?]. In F. D. Raaen & T. Ålvik (Eds.), Håndbok i lokalt læreplanarbeid (pp. 9–26). Gyldendal. Ball, S. J. (1993). What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 13(2), 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630930130203 Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093022000043065 Benavot, A. (2002). A critical analysis of comparative research. Prospects, 32(1), 51–73. Biesta, G., & Priestley, M. (2013). A curriculum for the twenty-first century? In M. Priestley & G. Biesta (Eds.), Reinventing the curriculum: New trends in curriculum policy and practice (pp. 229–236). Bloomsbury Pub. Bowen, G. A. (2009). Document analysis as a qualitative research method. Qualitative Research Journal, 9(2), 27–40. https://doi.org/10.3316/QRJ0902027 Bryman, A. (2012). Social research methods (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. Cohen, L., Manion, L., Morrison, K., & Bell, R. C. (2011). Research methods in education. Routledge. Dale, E. L., Engelsen, B. U., & Karseth, B. (2011). Kunnskapsløftets intensjoner, forutsetninger og operasjonaliseringer: En analyse av en læreplanform [The knowledge promotions intentions, preconditions and operationalizations: An analysis of a curriculum reform]. Pedagogisk forskningsinstitutt, Universitetet i Oslo. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 1–32). Sage Publications. Det kongelige kirke- utdsannings- og forskningsdepartement. (1996). Læreplanverket for den 10-årige grunnskolen. Nasjonalt læremiddelsenter.

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

503

Engelsen, B. U. (2008). Kunnskapsløftet sentrale styringssignaler og lokale strategidokumenter [The knowledge promotion’s central governing signals and local strategy documents]. Universitet i Oslo, Pedagogisk forskningsinsitutt. http://www.udir.no/Upload/Rapporter/ EvaKL/5/Delrapport1_reformens_forutsetninger.pdf?epslanguage¼no Engelsen, B. U., & Karseth, B. (2007). Læreplan for Kunnskapsløftet – Et endret kunnskapssyn? Norsk Pedagogisk Tidskrift, 91(5), 404–414. Gerrard, J., & Farrell, L. (2013). Remaking the professional teacher: Authority and curriculum reform. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(5), 634–655. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272. 2013.854410 Granheim, M. (1990). Bakgrunnen for EMIL-prosjektet [Background for the EMIL-project]. In M. Granheim, U. P. Lundgren, & T. Tiller (Eds.), Utdanningskvalitet – Styrbar eller ustyrlig?: Om målstyring og kvalitetsvurdering av norsk skole (pp. 13–22). TANO. Granheim, M., Lundgren, U. P., & Tiller, T. (1990). Utdanningskvalitet – Styrbar eller ustyrlig?: Om målstyring og kvalitetsvurdering av norsk skole. TANO. http://www.nb.no/utlevering/ contentview.jsf?&urn¼URN:NBN:no-nb_digibok_2010110808227 Grek, S. (2009). Governing by numbers: The PISA ‘effect’ in Europe. Journal of Education Policy, 24(1), 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930802412669 Grek, S. (2013). International organisations and the shared construction of policy ‘problems’: Problematisation and change in education governance in Europe. European Educational Research Journal, 9(3), 396–406. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2010.9.3.396 Gundem, B. B. (1993). Rise, development and changing conceptions of curriculum administration and curriculum guidelines in Norway: The national–local dilemma. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 25(3), 251–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027930250304 Gundem, B. B., & Hopmann, S. (Eds.). (1998a). Didaktik and/or curriculum: An international dialogue. P. Lang. Gundem, B. B., & Hopmann, S. (1998b). Introduction. Didaktick meets curriculum. In B. B. Gundem & S. Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik and/or curriculum: An international dialogue (pp. 1–8). P. Lang. Helgøy, I., & Homme, A. (2007). Towards a new professionalism in school? A comparative study of teacher autonomy in Norway and Sweden. European Educational Research Journal, 6(3), 232–249. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2007.6.3.232 Hopmann, S. (1991). Retracing curriculum history: Curriculum administration as symbolic action. In B. B. Gundem, B. U. Engelsen, & B. Karseth (Eds.), Curriculum work and curriculum content: Theory and practice: Contemporary and historical perspectives: Conference papers: University of Oslo, Institute for Educational Research, 10–12 October 1990 (Vol. 5/91, pp. 49–98). Institute for Educational Research. Hopmann, S. (2003). On the evaluation of curriculum reforms. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35(4), 459–478. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220270305520 Hopmann, S. (2007). Restrained teaching: The common core of Didaktik. European Educational Research Journal, 6(2), 109–124. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2007.6.2.109 Hopmann, S. (2008). No child, no school, no state left behind: Schooling in the age of accountability. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 40(4), 417–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00220270801989818 Hopmann, S., & Riquarts, K. (2000). Introduction. In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice. The German didaktik tradition (pp. 3–11). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hudson, C. (2010). Transforming the educative state in Noric countries? In A. P. Jakobi, K. Martens, & K. D. Wolf (Eds.), Education in political science. Discovering a neglected field (pp. 56–70). Routledge. Hutmacher, W. (2002). Some concluding remarks. Changing perspective. In M. Rosenmund, A.-V. Fries, & W. Heller (Eds.), Comparing curriculum-making processes (pp. 333–350). P. Lang. James, D. (2005). Importance and impotence? Learning, outcomes and research in further education. The Curriculum Journal, 16(1), 83–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/0958517042000336827

504

C. N. Mølstad

Kansanen, P. (1995). The Deutsche didaktik. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 27(4), 347–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027950270401 Karseth, B., & Sivesind, K. (2010). Conceptualizing curriculum knowledge within and beyond the national context. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 103–120. Kellaghan, T., & Greaney, V. (2001). Using assessment to improve the quality of education. Unesco, International Institute for Educational Planning. Künzli, R. (1998). The common frame and the places of didaktik. In B. B. Gundem (Ed.), Didaktik and/or curriculum: An international dialogue (pp. 29–45). P. Lang. Künzli, R. (2000). German didaktik: Models of re-presentation, of intercourse, and experience. In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice: The German didaktik tradition (pp. 41–57). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Künzli, R. (2002). Curriculum policy in Switzerland. In M. Rosenmund, A.-V. Fries, & W. Heller (Eds.), Comparing curriculum-making processes (pp. 213–230). Peter Lang. Lennert Da Silva, A. L., & Mølstad, C. E. (2020). Teacher autonomy and teacher agency: A comparative study in Brazilian and Norwegian lower secondary education. https://doi.org/10. 1002/curj.3 Lennert Da Silva, A. L., & Parish, K. (2020). National curriculum policy in Norway and Brazil: Translations of the global accountability logic. https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.3 Lundgren, U. P. (1990). OECD-rapporten – En bakgrunn [The OECD report – A background]. In M. Granheim, U. P. Lundgren, & T. Tiller (Eds.), Utdanningskvalitet – Styrbar eller ustyrlig?: Om målstyring og kvalitetsvurdering av norsk skole (pp. 25–46). Tano. Mausethagen, S. (2013a). Governance through concepts: The OECD and the construction of “competence” in Norwegian education policy. Berkeley Review of Education, 4(1). http:// www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8db1z97g Mausethagen, S. (2013b). Reshaping teacher professionalism. An analysis of how teachers construct and negotiate professionalism under increasing accountability. Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Meyer, J. (2007). World models, national curricula, and the centrality of the individual. In A. Benavot & C. Braslavsky (Eds.), School knowledge in comparative and historical perspective: Changing curricula in primary and secondary education (pp. 259–271). Springer. Mølstad, C. E. (2015). State-based curriculum-making – A study of curriculum in Norway and Finland. University of Oslo. Mølstad, C. E. (2019). Teacher-chameleons: The glue in the alignment of teacher practices and learning in policy. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(3), 403–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00220272.2018.1504120 Mølstad, C. E., & Karseth, B. (2016). National curricula in Norway and Finland: The role of learning outcomes. European Educational Research Journal, 15(3), 329–344. Mølstad, C. E., Prøitz, T. S., & Dieudè, A. (2020). When assessment defines the content— Understanding goals in between teachers and policy. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.74 Pettersson, D. (2008). Internationell kunskapsbedömning som inslag i nationell styrning av skolan. Uppsala University. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum. An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. Peter Lang. Prøitz, T. S. (2014). Learning outcomes as a key concept in policy documents throughout policy changes. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00313831.2014.904418 Prøitz, T. S., & Nordin, A. (2020). Learning outcomes in Scandinavian education through the lens of Elliot Eisner. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 64(5), 645–660. https://doi. org/10.1080/00313831.2019.1595717 Prøitz, T. S., Hontvedt, M., Mølstad, C., & Silseth, K. (2016). Tracing learning outcomes across policy and practice. Poster presentation at the Norwegian research council annual conference 2016. Oslo.

The Return to Bildung in the Shape of Learning Outcomes

505

Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language, action and interpretation (J. B. Thompson, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Rosenmund, M., Fries, A.-V., & Heller, W. (2002). Comparing curriculum-making processes. P. Lang. Ross, A. (2000). Curriculum: Construction and critique. Falmer Press. Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X029007004 Shepard, L. A. (2007). Classroom assessment. In R. L. Brennan (Ed.), Educational measurment. Routledge. Sivesind, K. (2008). Reformulating reform: Curriculum history revisited. Unipub forl. Sivesind, K. (2013). Mixed images and merging semantics in European curricula. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(1), 52–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2012.757807 Skagen, K. (2006). Norsk allmenn-lærerutdannelse i forandring. In K. Skagen (Ed.), Læreruddannelsen i Norden (pp. 71–90). HøyskoleForlaget. Sundberg, D., & Wahlström, N. (2012). Standards-based curricula in a denationalised conception of education: The case of Sweden. European Educational Research Journal, 11(3), 342–356. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.3.342 Telhaug, A. O., Medias, O. A., & Aasen, P. (2006). The Nordic model in education: Education as part of the political system in the last 50 years. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 50(3), 245–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313830600743274 Tveit, S. (2014). Educational assessment in Norway. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 21(2), 221–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/069594X.2013.830079 Utdanningsdirektoratet. (2011). Publiserte rapporter fra evalueringen. http://www.udir.no/ Tilstand/Evaluering-av-Kunnskapsloftet/Prosjektene-i-Evalueringen-av-Kunnskapsloftet/ Westbury, I. (1998). Didaktik and curriculum studies. In B. B. Gundem & S. Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik and/or curriculum: An international dialogue (pp. 47–77). Peter Lang. Westbury, I., Hopmann, S., & Riquarts, K. (2000). Teaching as a reflective practice: The German didaktik tradition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Young, M. (2008). Bringing knowledge back in. Routledge.

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations Anja Giudici

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developments and Debates in the Study of Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ideal Norm Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Typological Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Claim-Based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

508 510 512 515 519 522 523

Abstract

Historically, nationalism and the curriculum are closely connected. The affirmation of the principle that each state should represent a national collective in the nineteenth century, turned schools into powerful means to legitimate institutional power by disseminating national identities and crafting national collectives. Since then, nationalism has re-shaped the curriculum across the globe. An accurate understanding of this phenomenon is therefore crucial for curriculum scholars. The understanding of the concept of nation and all its related terms is the object of a dedicated field of research characterized by lively debate. This chapter aims to provide a map for curriculum researchers to identify the most useful concepts, as well as to reflect on their methodological and theoretical consequences, benefits, and risks. Drawing on an extensive literature review, it identifies three approaches to nationalism in curriculum research: the ideal norm approach, the typological approach, and the claim-based approach. The chapter argues that elite-based approaches building on nationalism as a global norm or ideal type risk over-emphasizing the extent and homogeneity of A. Giudici (*) School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_50

507

508

A. Giudici

the impact of nationalism on the curriculum. By putting the process of curriculum-making at the center of the analysis, and focusing on its protagonists’ own understanding and prioritization of nationalism, claim-based approaches take into account recent critiques of the methodological statism and nationalism advanced in both nationalism and curriculum research. They therefore can significantly advance our theorizing of the relationship between nationalism and the curriculum, and help us to identify how, when, and under which conditions nationalism contributes to shaping the curriculum – and when it does not. Keywords

Curriculum · Nationalism · Nation-building · Language education · State education

Introduction It is almost a truism to say that nationalism and the curriculum are connected. Luminaries in the field of nationalism studies have called schools nationalism’s “most conscious champion” (Hobsbawm, 1962, p.135) and “the nation’s institution par excellence” (Schnapper, 1994, p.131). For Gellner (1983, p.33–4), the advent of nationalism meant that, for states, “the monopoly of legitimate education” became “more important, more central than the monopoly of legitimate violence.” Thiesse (2006, p.195) attributes the diffusion of national identities to “a gigantic pedagogic work” largely carried out by schools. The relationship is generally considered to be bidirectional. Nationalism is a key determinant of curriculum policy, whereas in turn, curricula contribute to molding nationals and national identities. This makes nationalism a highly relevant phenomenon for curriculum research and theory. The scholarly study of nationalism emerged in the 1960s. The definition and analytical understanding of nationalism and its related terms has remained contested ever since (Anderson, 1991; Billig, 1995; Gellner, 1996; Smith, 1995; Triandafyllidou, 2021). One of the less contested understandings of nationalism equates it to the principle of national self-determination. In this definition, nationalism is the principle or ideology that contends that states – i.e., the institutions governing a given territory and population – must represent a territorially concentrated people sharing a common “national” identity, i.e., a “nation” (Anderson, 1991; Breuilly, 2013; Hobsbawm, 1990). The principle of national self-determination acquired the status of a global norm during the nineteenth century. As the aforementioned historians recount, the nation state increasingly became the sole form of statehood recognized as legitimate. To settle territorial disputes in their favor and benefit from the protection of the international community, therefore, (emerging) state elites had to demonstrate that they represented more than an assemblage of individuals. They had to prove that they represented a nation. The criteria for such proof have remained vague. Indeed, no established consensus exists on how to discern nations analytically, or politically, from non-national

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

509

collectives of people. Are nations characterized by a common heritage that can be traced back to single families, tribes, or local communities? Must they share a language or specific cultural traits? Or does being a nation simply imply members’ will to participate in a shared political project? While the idea that nations are objective entities produced by cultural and geographic circumstances finds few scholarly supporters today, researchers continue to disagree on the extent to which culture and history limit the social construction and (re-)definition of nations (Cederman, 2001; Coakley, 2018; Gellner, 1996). The question of which collective represents a nation in practice is even more contentious. Indeed, since the principle of national self-determination argues that state borders must mirror national boundaries, its answers come with momentous political implications they determine whether state borders and governments are to be considered legitimate. Consequently, the boundaries between political and analytical arguments are often blurred. The often-quoted definition of nations as “daily plebiscites,” united by members’ political commitment to the collective, rather than by their shared ethnic or cultural features, was famously advanced by French scholar Ernest Renan who, in 1882, used it to justify the need to return the Alsatian territories conquered by Germany in 1871 to France, despite their largely German-speaking population. Contemporary movements that struggle for autonomy or independence based on the claim that they represent a nation, as in Catalonia or Québec, as well as efforts by existing states to annex territories they claim to be inhabited by fellow nationals, as in Ukraine, provide ample evidence of the high stakes and violent potential involved in the practical definition of nations. Scholars label this process of trying to define and establish national boundaries and identities “nationalism as a project” or “claim,” as opposed to the general principle of national selfdetermination (Calhoun, 2002). Education systems, whose institutionalization paralleled the ascent of nationalism, constitute a potentially powerful tool to provide (or create) proof of existing or aspiring states’ “nationness.” Curricula can be used to popularize specific national identities and features across the population, and to marginalize competing identities and features (Benavot et al., 1991; Brubaker, 1992; Hechter, 1975; Weber, 1976). The close and historic relationship between nationalism and schooling has inspired countless studies. Drawing on varying methods and cases, this literature – examples of which are discussed in the following sections – largely confirms the insight of the early luminaries, in that it first, argues that curricula have been a key object of nationalist politics, and second, that the knowledge curricula include has been shaped by both nationalism as a principle and project. Presumably, curricula across the world would look very different, had nationalism not become a key organizing principle of the modern world (Benavot et al., 1991). Indeed curricula looked different, and were much more varied before nationalism took hold (Giudici, 2019; Graff, 1991). The ostensible consensus on the shaping power of nationalism, however, masks major differences in how scholars conceptualize nationalism and its influence on the curriculum. This variation is not surprising. Nationalism studies are a thriving field characterized by a lively internal debate on the origins, nature, and precise conception of nation-related terms. Depending on the concept we decide to rely on, our

510

A. Giudici

research and findings might end up looking very different. This means that, even if curriculum scholars interested in nationalism might not want to engage with this debate themselves, they must recognize its main cleavages and positions to be able to make informed conceptual choices and reflect on their methodological and theoretical implications. This is where this chapter steps in. It aims to provide curriculum scholars with a tool to structure nationalism studies. Drawing on an extensive review of scholarship in nationalism and curriculum studies, it distinguishes three approaches to nationalism relevant to curriculum research, which are labeled ideal norm approach (section “The Ideal Norm Approach”), typological approach (section “The Typological Approach”), and claim-based approach (section “The Claim-Based Approach”). The chapter identifies the specific assumptions associated with each approach, and discusses their theoretical and methodological implications for curriculum research. As argued in the conclusion, a more informed and precise definition of nationalism in curriculum studies is crucial if we are to develop a theoretically grounded understanding of the relationship between nationalism and curriculum that goes beyond the statement that “nationalism matters” for curriculum-building. Only in this way can we identify and theorize under which circumstances, through which actors and mechanisms, and with which effects, nationalism shapes curriculum politics, policy, and practice – and when it does not.

Developments and Debates in the Study of Nationalism Nationalism, understood as the principle of national self-determination, is a modern political ideology (Breuilly, 2013). Historical and anthropological evidence indicates that individuals identified with ethnically or culturally defined groups before nationalism became an international norm (Barth, 1969; Smith, 1995). The idea that such identification provides legitimacy to state institutions, however, is inherently modern. Historical studies show that the relationship between political authorities and the populations living on their territories tended to be looser and more varied in the past. Agrarian states not only included diverse populations but also attributed different rights and duties to people depending on their class, culture, or location. This diversity was accepted because state authorities did not feel the need to legitimize their rule based on the alleged similarities between themselves and their subjects. Central authorities often did not even speak the languages of their population, relying on intermediaries to communicate with their publics when needed (Gellner, 1983; de Swaan, 2001). This situation began to change in the mid-nineteenth century. As highlighted by cultural scholars of nationalism, this period saw an increasing number of intellectuals digging into communities’ history and folklore, trying to delineate their specific cultural and ethnic heritages (Kedourie, 1993). Politicians and activists transferred this cultural logic into the political realm. States such as Italy (1861) and Germany (1871) were founded with the explicit claim of endowing culturally defined nations

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

511

with a shared independent government. The Treaty of Versailles further globalized the norm that nations have a principle right to decide over their own fate. As US President Wilson commented in 1919, the breakup of central Europe into “nation-states” would end the practice of empires “dominating alien peoples over whom they had no natural right to rule” (Wilson, 1919). In a nation-state, or at least in its liberal version, individuals deemed part of the nation were supposed to hold equal rights and co-determine their representatives. The international community, scholars, and colonists, later worked to disseminate this model across the world (Benavot et al., 1991; Gellner, 1983). The affirmation of the principle of national self-determination tied political representation and autonomy to the presence of a nation. Consequently, to be recognized as legitimate, existing state elites wanting to assert their rule over a specific territory as well as movements aiming to establish their own states found themselves needing to prove that they represented a nation (Breuilly, 2013; Gellner, 1983; Germann & Mendez, 2016; Waldron, 1985). In the past, nations were often considered the result of self-unfolding natural properties. Specific geographical circumstances (e.g., mountains or rivers) and ethnic-cultural traits were considered to translate directly into political identities, which in turn, provided the objective foundation of a nation. In the last few decades, however, scholars have converged towards a constructivist understanding of nationbuilding. The extent to which nations need “navels” (Gellner, 1996), and the degree to which nation-building might be culturally, anthropologically, or geographically predetermined continues to be the object of intense debate (Cederman, 2001; Coakley, 2018; Gellner, 1996). However, it is generally recognized that national boundaries and identities are at least partially constructed. Nations do not selfunfold. The establishment, popularization, and modification of national boundaries and identities require the presence of dedicated political and cultural activists. Indeed all over the world, the necessity to provide proof of nationness has motivated attempts by existing and aspiring state elites to draw boundaries for and define the characteristics of the national communities they allege to represent. As shown by historical research, despite the principle of national self-determination often being couched in liberal terms, as a means to grant individuals equality and voice within their national collectives, actual nationalist projects have often led to the violent marginalization of alternative identities within the claimed territories and populations (Hechter, 2000; Wimmer, 2002). Michael Mann famously called this dynamic The Dark Side of Democracy (Mann, 2005), as practiced in modern nationstates. Calhoun (2002) coined the concept of “nationalism as a project” to distinguish concrete nation-building claims and policies from the more general principle of national self-determination. Scholars of politics and conflict largely adopt narrow definitions of nationalist projects. From their perspective, only projects aimed at acquiring or maintaining political self-determination, i.e., efforts to shift state borders and strengthen or weaken political autonomy, should qualify as nationalist (Breuilly, 2013; Hechter, 2000). The curriculum plays no relevant role in this type of politics. Curriculum scholars might therefore prefer a broader definition of

512

A. Giudici

nationalist projects that includes all claims and policies aimed at either stabilizing or modifying an alleged nation’s identity or boundaries (Calhoun, 2002; Billig, 1995; Brubaker, 2004) – including curricula designed to this aim (Giudici, 2019). This definition excludes activities targeting other types of “groupness” – e.g., gender, class, race – with the adjective national referring to territorially based collective identities (Thompson, 2001). However, it does not preclude the possibility of nationalist projects defining national identities in gendered, racist, or classist terms – which they typically do (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992). The distinction between nationalism as a principle and as a project is not always explicit in the literature. However, implicitly, curriculum studies largely build on the latter, aiming to analyze how the curriculum is affected by specific nationalist projects. Still, different understandings of nationalism can be found in the curriculum literature. They can be condensed into three conceptual approaches, each corresponding to a specific theoretical understanding of the logics underlying the legitimation and dissemination of nationalism. I call them the ideal norm approach, the typological approach, and the claim-based approach. As the following sections argue, they come with different implications in terms of the actors involved in nationalist projects, their motives and claims, as well as the mechanisms by which their projects affect the curriculum. They therefore require different types of analysis and data, and involve different theoretical challenges and methodological concerns.

The Ideal Norm Approach The most common approach used to study nationalism in curriculum research is what I call the ideal norm approach. This approach builds on the observation that, while nationalist projects must demonstrate their nation’s uniqueness to underscore their political claims, from a comparative perspective, nations tend to show a strong “family resemblance” (Calhoun, 2002, p.5). This apparent paradox, scholars argue, is the result of a logic of appropriateness (March & Olson, 1998). While no clear-cut criteria of nationness exist, the principle of self-determination has established an abstract ideal norm that allows us to discern nations from other types of collective entities such as families, or local communities. If a national project wants its claim to constituting a nation to be recognized as legitimate, and profit from the international protection such recognition entails, its advocates must prove it conforms with this ideal norm – meaning that they will frame it in internationally recognized terms (Benavot et al., 1991; Breuilly, 2013; Calhoun, 2002). Different definitions of the ideal nation have been advanced in the literature. For Hechter (2000), all nations have a certain size, a territory, and a shared idea of their history. Calhoun’s (2002) “features of the rhetoric of a nation” include ten elements: indivisibility, boundaries, direct membership, sovereignty, a government supported by popular will, popular participation in public matters, culture, temporal depth, common descent, and a special historical or sacred relationship to a territory. For Thiesse (2006, p.196), every nation must conform to a “national identity check-list” including features such as a founding ancestor, a national history, national heroes, a

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

513

language, typical landscapes, or folklore. These definitions are not meant to be used as tools to discern nations from non-nations. They are analytical roadmaps since, in practice, entities might lack one or the other feature and still be considered legitimate nations, as long as they conform to the general ideal (Calhoun, 2002; Thiesse, 2006). The ideal norm approach typically understands nationalism as an elite-driven project. From this perspective, it is mainly (aspiring) political elites, who have an instrumental interest in their definition of the nation – and related political claims – being considered norm appropriate (Anderson, 1991; Gellner, 1983). In this line of work, therefore, the analytical focus lies on cultural and political elites’ efforts to forge and disseminate their interpretation of the “national identity check-list” among the population. Curriculum research drawing on this approach typically starts by identifying a list of core features characterizing specific national projects as defined by leading politicians or historians. It then examines whether and how these features are portrayed in the written, taught, or tested curriculum (Cuban, 1998). Accordingly, curriculum policy is shaped by nationalism if official documents include (some of) the constitutive features of an ideal nation, or local declinations thereof. As it comes with a set of national features, whose presence, absence, and variation in the curriculum can be systematically analyzed across time and place, the ideal norm approach has proven particularly useful for comparative curriculum research. Most famously, this is the approach championed by proponents of the world culture theory in education. According to Meyer and Rowan (1977, p.343), nations are defined based on a global norm standing “beyond the discretion of any individual participant or organisation” and including features such as a national language and interpretation of history. They argue that the fact that we can observe an increase in the share of curriculum time dedicated to national languages (Cha, 1991), or a gradual separation of national and world history in textbooks and syllabi (Benavot et al., 1991) serve as evidence that curricula were shaped by universal norms rather than local actors’ interests and ideas. Single-case studies drawing on the ideal norm approach proceed in a similar fashion. However, diving deeper into specific cases, they reveal some interesting inconsistencies between the ideal of the nation and its realization in curriculum policy. The following paragraphs discuss three examples of such studies. One example is Durrani and Dunne’s (2010) study of curriculum policy in Pakistan. The authors draw on Anderson’s (1991) definition of the nation as an “imagined community” forged by cultural and political elites, and then popularized through the press and schools. Curricula, Durrani and Dunne argue, are a “key site where states engage in identity-construction work” (Durrani & Dunne, 2010, p.218). Curriculum documents therefore provide an authoritative source for researchers to examine the national project state elites are trying to promote. The authors argue that the emphasis on religion in Pakistan’s curriculum is revelatory of the elites’ attempt to highlight this particular feature of an ideal nation to unite a linguistically and ethnically diverse population. Using ethnographic methods, they also pinpoint some unintended consequences of this strategy, showing that students sometimes identify with a supranational Muslim community rather than with Pakistan itself.

514

A. Giudici

Furrer (2004) applies the ideal norm approach to a historical study. His analysis of the development of Swiss history curricula builds on the observation that “different nationalisms, even if they are in competition with each other, show parallels in the sense of common features” (p.23). Furrer draws up a nine-point list of features characterizing the ideal nation, including items varying from wars as catalysts for national unification, to historical myths. He then adapts each list-item for Switzerland based on the narratives produced by the country’s most prominent historians, and then analyzes the items’ presence and presentation in history textbooks. Like most states, Switzerland has a culturally heterogenous population, and Furrer recognizes that, across constituencies, Swiss history curricula include diverging accounts of some of the items of the ideal nation checklist. Until recently, for instance, Protestant and Catholic textbooks painted a very different picture of the role the Reformation in the formation of the Swiss nation. Still, Furrer interprets the presence of these items as evidence that elites “have squeezed Swiss history into a schema” (Furrer, 2004, p.123) in order to craft a narrative uniting the population. Similarly, in a multiple case study, Wilschut (2010) interprets the presence of national heroes and accomplishments in historic Dutch, English, and German history curricula as evidence that these countries’ elites aimed to establish a “national spirit” (Wilschut, 2010, p.702). At the same time, Wilschut also finds that the emphasis on national symbols varies across countries and types of schooling. In a comparative perspective, Dutch history curricula include fewer references to the features of an ideal nation, as do the curricula of more elite and academic types of schooling. The prominence of specific features has also changed over time, shifting from narratives highlighting shared cultural and ethnic traits, to more source-based understandings of history in the 1970s, back to more narrative approaches emphasizing multiple cultures and identities in the 1980s. These and other studies drawing on the ideal norm approach provide powerful evidence of the role of nationalism – as a principle and project – as determinant of curriculum policy. Across the world, geography curricula partition the world into nation-states, focus children’s attention on their own national community, and then present them with images of these communities’ past, achievements, and constitutive features that show striking resemblances. However, these studies also highlight some interesting incongruities between the singular ideal norm and its plural enactments. How nations are taught not only varies across states, but also over time periods, types of schooling, regions within a given state, as well as between written, taught, and learned curricula. Why do pupils attending elite education tracks receive a less nation-focused curriculum than their peers (Wilschut, 2010)? Why do girls sometimes receive different (or less) instruction in subjects more explicitly dedicated to nation-building such as history or geography (Giudici & Manz, 2018)? Additional variation emerges if we examine the presence of single items of the ideal norm checklist in curricula. Why is it customary to sing the national anthem in schools in Pakistan, but not in Portugal or Italy? Why did national history become a school subject, whereas other items on the “national identity checklist,” such as national gastronomy or folklore (Thiesse, 2006), did not?

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

515

The explanation for these and other types of variation might be found in specific adaptations of the ideal norm. It might be the case, as Durrani and Dunne (2010) argue for the case of Pakistan, that state elites strategically highlight specific ideal features to reinforce curricula’s unifying effects. Other determinants might also be at play, however. Researchers of state-led curriculum-making emphasize the multifaceted nature of curriculum politics. Accordingly, curriculum-making takes place at the interface between politics and practice. It can therefore be informed by various political priorities, including for instance the promotion of health or vocational skills, as well as by pedagogical concerns (Connelly & Connelly, 2013; Giudici, 2021; Goodson, 1985; Sivesind & Westbury, 2016). These priorities and concerns are not related to nationalism if they are not intended to reinforce collective boundaries or identities. Still, depending on the context and the actors involved, they might still be a considered a priority when drafting curricula. On its own, the ideal norm approach does not provide the theoretical or methodological means to untangle curriculum variation stemming from curriculum-makers’ own interpretation of the ideal norm from variation due to these actors prioritizing other political or educational concerns. Equipped only with a rather static theoretical understanding of the nation, studies drawing on the ideal norm approach alone therefore risk over-emphasizing the role of nationalism in curriculum-making.

The Typological Approach To address the mismatch between the single national ideal and heterogenous empirics, some scholars have turned to more flexible understandings of the nation. What I call the typological approach assumes that, instead of being oriented towards the same ideal, national projects can draw on multiple models or types of legitimate nations. The most prominent typology in the field of nationalism is the distinction between ethnic/cultural and political/civic models of nationalism (Brubaker, 1992; Schnapper, 1994). Accordingly, ethnic nationalism is more likely to emerge when stateless communities strive for self-determination. Lacking political institutions, these communities pinpoint their allegedly common ethnic or cultural heritage as proof that they constitute a nation. In the Western world, this type is often associated with Germany and Eastern Europe. In contrast, civic nationalism arises where a community already disposes of political institutions (a state), but wishes to increase the population’s commitment to the polity. In these cases, elites tend to emphasize the unifying role of state institutions themselves, thus defining membership of the nation based on people’s willingness to participate in a shared political project, rather than on common ethnic or cultural features. France, the USA, and Switzerland are often-quoted examples of this type. According to proponents of the typological approach, whether a community adheres to the civic or ethnic model matters. This is because national projects based on these two models require different policies. Per definition, in civic nations membership is acquired, whereas in ethnic nations, it is inherited. Therefore,

516

A. Giudici

different (educational) policies are needed to socialize individuals into the nation and separate those who belong from those who do not (Brubaker, 1992; Greenfeld, 1992; Schnapper, 1994). In his landmark comparison of (civic) France and (ethnic) Germany, Brubaker (1992) finds that French elites attribute a more important role to schooling in forging future nationals, since this means conveying to them the skills and mindset to participate in public life. In “Volk-centered and differentialist” Germany (Brubaker, 1992, p.13), where membership is inherited rather than taught, more regional curriculum variation has historically been allowed. In the last few decades, the distinction between ethnic and civic nations has come under criticism within the field of nationalism studies. One main point of concern is that the distinction is often used in normative terms. Renan (1882) coined the typology to argue that civic nations such as his home-state France were superior to German-like ethnic nations. The typology has been used in similar terms ever since (Habermas, 2003). Being associated with the ethnic model has become unattractive for national projects, and there is evidence of actors adapting their rhetoric accordingly (Brubaker, 2004). Some authors argue that this undermines the analytical value of the typology. Typologies are meant to analyze, rather than reflect political arguments. They therefore suggest abandoning the distinction entirely (Brubaker, 2004; Yack, 1996). Other authors are not as radical. They agree that, in practice, it is difficult to attribute specific national features to one of the two types. Language, for instance, can be seen both as an ethnic marker and as a symbol of people’s will to participate in a shared political project (Anderson, 1991; Brubaker, 2004). These authors also accept that no nation embodies one type alone. However, in their view, this and related typologies can be analytically useful if researchers acknowledge that every national project presents a mixture of civic and ethnic features and understand these as “contextual expressions” (Brubaker, 1992, p.2) of nationalist projects rather than essentialist identities (O. Zimmer, 2003). The civic-ethnic typology is sometimes mentioned in curriculum studies, but it is seldom used as an explanation for curriculum policy. Considering the aforementioned criticism, a careful handling of this and related distinctions is warranted, especially when applied to political discourses (Hung, 2014; Ozga, 2017). Several studies, however, have relied on variants of the typological approach to interpret curriculum variation across states. One example is Gardin et al.’s (2015) comparison of language curricula in officially monolingual and multilingual states. According to the authors, multilingual states represent “a different type of nation-state” (Gardin et al., 2015 p.53). Elites in countries such as Luxemburg or Switzerland were not able to rely on traditional monolingual models of nation-building, and therefore crafted an alternative that praised the populations’ multilingualism and commitment to living together despite their linguistic diversity. These two models, the authors argue, are associated with different curriculum policies. Where the state elites highlighted their countries’ linguistic homogeneity, they implemented curricula aimed at forming a monolingual citizenry, whereas multilingual nations introduced their citizens to multiple languages. It must be noted, however, that this typology has little explanatory power.

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

517

Languages can be introduced in curricula for different reasons (e.g., to facilitate trade), which is why monolingual Norway began teaching multiple languages to a broader sector of its population earlier than most constituencies in officially multilingual Switzerland (Giudici, 2019). In her comparison of Russian and Finnish curricula, Piattoeva (2009) introduces yet another variant of the civic-ethnic typology. The author distinguishes nationstates, characterized by overlapping cultural and political boundaries, from empire states lacking such congruence. Piattoeva applies this typology in contextual terms. She uses it to typify the contrasting political developments undergone by Russia and Finland since the 1980s, and to analyze these developments’ effects on citizenship education. Her study finds that for the nation-state of Finland, joining the supranational European Union challenged traditional curriculum narratives that linked Finland’s political sovereignty to its separateness as a cultural nation. This political shift therefore resulted in a de-coupling of discussions about political institutions and nationhood in Finnish curricula, as well as an embrace of multi-layered conceptions of citizenship. In contrast, when Russia left the supra-national empire of the Soviet Union, this led to the reinforcement of the link between nation and state in the country’s official curricula. Like those relying on the ideal norm approach, studies adopting a typological approach largely subscribe to a rather elitist understanding of the state (Evans, 2006). They assume curricula, and written curricula in particular, to reflect national projects promoted by state elites orienting themselves towards global norms. Piattoeva’s (2009) study demonstrates the analytical advantages of such an approach. If typologies are treated as contextual expressions, rather than essentialist identities, and are confronted with empirical data and sources that go beyond elites’ political rhetoric, they can serve to identify and interpret, maybe even explain, cross-national curriculum variation. Typologies can also be used to link curriculum reforms to changes in a country’s political landscape and elites. However, recent theoretical developments in nationalism and curriculum studies have challenged some of the core assumptions underlying elitist understandings of the state – and of nationalism. First, authors in both fields have questioned the accuracy of conceptions characterizing the state as a cohesive and collective actor (Binder, 2009; Dale & Robertson, 2009; Rockwell & Vera, 2013). They argue that states are not actors. They are organizations whose policy is driven largely by the individuals, and groups holding positions of power within state institutions. These individuals’ and groups’ political leanings, interests, and ideas typically vary, meaning that they are likely to pursue different projects within and through state institutions. A similar view of state institutions has been advanced by scholars of curriculummaking. Several scholars in this field have criticized the tendency to understand curriculum documents as expressions of supposedly homogenous ideologies that “serve the dominant group in a mechanical and unmediated manner” (Wong & Apple, 2002, p.185). This literature argues that the curriculum should be understood as the result of “a series of negotiations and compromises between different interests” (Scott, 2006, p.32), rather than the expression of coherent ideologies and

518

A. Giudici

interests. Even in centralized systems, varying parties, departments, and offices representing different views and interests (e.g., administrators or parliamentary committees) typically intervene in the making of official curricula (Gingrich & Giudici, 2023; Sivesind & Westbury, 2016). If we consider the different curriculum layers, it becomes evident that even more actors are involved. While state authorities might dominate the making of official curricula, the production of textbooks and assessments is often outsourced to private agencies, while teachers have at least some degree of autonomy over the taught curriculum (Cuban, 1998; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). Each of these actors brings other ideas and interests – and policy is not always crafted top-down (Giudici, 2021). Actors involved in curriculum-making might also pursue different nationalist projects. Indeed, the assumption that each state has a unified national project and identity has also been criticized as empirically inaccurate. Like states, nations can hardly be described as “internally homogenous, externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actors with common purposes” (Brubaker, 2004, p.8). Firstly, the affirmation of the principle that each state must represent a nation, and the consequent embracing of nationalist projects by state elites, has often led to the marginalization of the individuals and groups who do not identify with dominant nation-building projects. Rather than rejecting nationalism as such, minorities have often themselves started framing their claims for representation and selfdetermination in nationalist terms (Waldron, 1985). Whose national project state institutions should represent, then, remains contested – as shown by the numerous self-determination conflicts currently raging across the world (Breuilly, 2013; Hechter, 2000; Hutchinson, 2005; Germann & Mendez, 2016). Secondly, ethnic minorities are typically not the only group pushing for their idea of the nation to be represented in state policy. Within seemingly cohesive majorities who agree that they together constitute a nation, individuals and groups can still hold diverging ideas about the identity and boundaries that should characterize their nation (Brubaker, 2004; O. Zimmer, 2003). Ideologies – like nationalism – are broad ideal constructs, which are compatible with multiple ideas and preferences (Tannenwald, 2005). Therefore, even if the principle of nationalism may have established an abstract norm defining an ideal nation, in practice, this allows for multiple interpretations. The nation imagined by left-wing parties, for instance, might look very different in terms of defining features and identity than the nation imagined by the right. Furthermore, nationalism does not come with an instruction manual. Even if actors did agree on the same idea of the nation, they could still hold competing preferences about how to convey this idea in schools (Kennedy, 1989). Taken together, the criticism against “methodological statism” and against “methodological nationalism,” highlights that potentially, actors holding different ideas about the nation and its pedagogic dissemination can influence curriculum-making. In specific contexts, it might be warranted to treat nationalism as a unitary project pursued by “the state.” However, authors might want to consider whether, and to what extent this particular choice might overstate the homogeneity and pervasiveness of nationalism on curriculum the curriculum.

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

519

The Claim-Based Approach Alternatives to the norm- and type-based approaches to nationalism can be subsumed under the label of claim-based approach. Drawing on the aforementioned criticism of methodological statism and nationalism, this approach emphasizes the need to analytically separate the study of nationalism from the study of statebuilding. This choice comes with two main implications. First, it requires abandoning fixed understandings of nations relying on ideal norms or types. As argued by Brubaker (2004), nations are not actual entities that can be objectively defined. Treating them as such risks conflating actors’ political arguments with our analytical categories. Rather, nations should be analyzed as claims, as constructs actors use “to change the world, to change the way people see themselves, to mobilize loyalties, kindle energies, and articulate demands” (Brubaker, 2004, p.116). Nations are “practical categories” (Brubaker, 2004, p.12), shaped and used by actors, either unconsciously (Billig, 1995) or to achieve particular goals (Brubaker, 2004; Calhoun, 2002; Thompson, 2001; Waldron, 1985). Actors’ definitions of their nation, even if they are referring to the same group of people, might be very different, depending on the ideas, political goals, or interests they are pursuing. The definition of national identities and boundaries therefore becomes “a contest in which various players at different levels of society participate” (O. Zimmer, 2003, p.14). Second, if we accept that nationalist projects or claims can be advanced by different actors, it becomes necessary to “put people back into nations” (Thompson, 2001). Our analytical focus should shift from central cultural and political elites to the actors involved in curriculum-making. This approach suggests focusing on the nationalist (or other) projects pursued by those actually drafting (curriculum) policy, since their views and interests potentially differ from those of the grand national historians and heads of states whose narratives of the nation are often taken as starting points by the typological and ideal norm approaches. The claim-based approach, therefore, suggests putting national projects, as well as their relationship with the curriculum, under empirical scrutiny. Analysis should focus on identifying the definition of the nation invoked by actors drafting the curriculum, on understanding whether and how this definition informs their policy preferences, and on tracing how these preferences shape curriculum-making (Giudici, 2019). As the studies discussed in the following paragraphs show, this agenda promises a more accurate theorization of the impact of nationalism on the curriculum. In particular, it allows us to analyse, how different understandings of the nation can inform curriculum-making. It also enables us to capture when these understandings interact with, and may be considered less important than other concerns, and therefore to recognize that nationalist rhetoric is not always the result of nationalist intentions. Studies building on variants of the claim-based approach provide powerful evidence of the contentiousness of nationalism in curriculum-making. One example is Hofman’s (2007) study of the Israeli curriculum. Through detailed historical analysis, Hofman shows that the individuals tasked with drafting the official Israeli

520

A. Giudici

history curriculum between 1956 and 1995 embraced different understandings of the Israeli nation and of the role history lessons should play in delivering it. These understandings are reflected in curriculum regulations, which show a changing balance between pedagogical and nationalist concerns, and repeatedly re-define the latter. For instance, while most regulations highlight religion as a core feature of the nation, in the 1990s they leaned into an almost “anti-Jewish orientation” (Hofman, 2007, p.455) that reflected the particular views of the more secular camp in an increasingly religiously polarized society. Hofman shows that these re-definitions were accompanied by heated debates and contrasting decisions by different representatives of official curriculum policy – culminating in parliament forbidding the use of a specific schoolbook in 2001, because of its depiction of Zionist settlements. Such disagreements are not specific to Israel. Moreau’s (2003) study shows how representatives of different communities in the USA, from German immigrants to Catholics to the South, have worked to inscribe their vision of the US nation into history curricula – sometimes successfully. Moreau contends that these debates are revealing, as “articulating one idea of the nation has generally meant subordinating or rejecting another” (Moreau, 2003, p.18; see also Nash, 2009). Similarly, my analysis of Swiss language curricula shows that the meaning of Switzerland’s official multilingualism for the country’s national identity has often been disputed (Giudici, 2019). Swiss voters officially recognized three languages as “national languages” in the 1848 constitution. A fourth national language, Romansh, was added to the list in 1938. Against the background of World War I, which increased existing divisions between the official language groups, German-speaking intellectuals and liberal politicians intensified their calls for a more integrated understanding of the Swiss nation as a “nationally mixed state” (Huber, 1916, p.25). Especially schools, they argued, should contribute to Switzerland becoming a unified nation by integrating its diverse cultural components and forging an original and inclusive identity for the country. This meant, for instance, that they must teach citizens multiple languages. As argued by a contemporary author, “the teaching of the three national languages is the real foundation on which the sentiment of a confederate community of culture can be awakened” (Falke, 1914, p.23). However, the idea of a nationally mixed Switzerland was not shared by conservative activists and intellectuals associated with language protection groups. For them, the idea that the state should foster the mixing of cultures, languages, and people, was outright appalling. From their perspective, what characterized the Swiss nation was the willingness to accept and protect the diversity of cultures and languages existing on the Swiss territory. Thus schools should not teach children multiple languages, because the ideal citizen was “a Swiss citizen of one language, of one’s own language and not a sort of hybrid individual” (de Reynold, 1927, p.110). To reinforce its national community, Switzerland therefore needed curricula to foster local identities and languages – not to undermine them. Actors might also attribute different priorities to national projects vis-à-vis other concerns at various stages of curriculum-making. For instance, Nash’s (2009) study of curriculum-making in the early US Republic finds that, despite the elites’ militant rhetoric about schools’ obligation to contribute to unifying the nation, curricula

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

521

varied from constituency to constituency, and often “did not emphasize Americanism, nationalism, or American authors” (Nash, 2009, p.425). Nash argues that this shows that, while nation-building represented a priority for national elites, actual curriculum-makers prioritized pragmatic and pedagogic concerns. In her analysis of southern German curricula, Kennedy (1989) reaches a similar conclusion. Kennedy’s finding of the continued prominence of regional topics in curricula after the 1871 unification casts doubt on the widely held assumption that German schools “had as their aim an uniform manipulation of attitudes” (Kennedy, 1989, p.11). The author argues that the presence of regional issues reflects both different understandings of nationalism and varying pedagogical ideas about what could be conveyed to young pupils. For instance, at the turn to the twentieth century, many experts involved in curriculum-making embraced child-centered pedagogies. They adapted curriculum regulations accordingly, replacing German history and geography with activities allowing children to discover local events and places. These activities were also meant to strengthen pupils’ attachment to the national collective, with the expectation being that children would automatically transfer their love for the home and region to the nation. Curricula therefore varied, because local curriculum-makers held different understandings of the nation, as well as of whether and how it should be conveyed to pupils than those articulated by central authorities. The heated dispute on Swiss language teaching mentioned earlier did not translate into direct curriculum change either. Despite their political dominance in the mid-twentieth century, liberal politicians’ calls for increasing the role of language teaching in curricula found their most determined (and influential) opponent in teacher organizations and local administrators, both of whom rejected the idea of adding a new costly subject many considered too difficult for young children (and were themselves unable to teach) to the curriculum. Patriotism, they argued, could be fostered by less invasive and more child-friendly means (Giudici, 2019). One Swiss constituency, Italian-speaking Ticino, did introduce a mandatory second national language into the curriculum in this period. The analysis of the process behind this decision shows that it preceded the debate on the nationalist value of Swiss multilingualism, and was dominated by economic concerns. With cross-regional mobility increasing, in 1905, Ticino politicians and experts introduced, at first experimentally, a new type of secondary schools tailored towards increasing pupils’ employability. Along with mathematics and manual skills, these schools’ curriculum included foreign languages, without which, the authorities argued, an Italian-speaking Swiss pupil would “never be a highly valued worker” and would always be defeated in “the inevitable fight with their comrades from constituencies on the other side of the Alps” (Dipartimento della Pubblica Educazione Ticino, 1902, p.24). The reform was then extended to all schools in the 1920s. While politicians, in hindsight, often framed this reform as proof of Ticino’s nationalist spirit, its story highlights how important it is to methodologically separate rhetoric and post-hoc legitimations from the reasons behind decisionmaking (Giudici, 2019). Finally, studies drawing on the claim-based approach reveal the different motives that can inform nationalist projects. Nationalism scholarship has connected

522

A. Giudici

nationalism to different social processes. Gellner (1983) describes nationalism as a by-product of economic dynamics, whereas Tilly (1992) famously cast it as the result of states engaging in permanent warfare, and needing committed soldiers. Laitin (1998) and de Swaan (2001) connect nationalism to political actors’ selfinterest, showing that central elites advanced nationalist projects to disempower regional elites whose leverage resided in their exclusive knowledge of existing localized identities and languages. This logic can also apply to the curriculum, as shown by Hasko Zimmer’s (1990) detailed historical analysis of German curricula. The author finds that nineteenth-century German-teachers in Germany used nationalist arguments strategically, in order to improve their status and payroll. By linking their subject to the establishment of a unified and committed German nation, they (rightly) hoped to increase its importance and status in the curriculum, and consequently, their own importance and status.

Conclusion Nationalism has re-shaped the modern world, including the modern curriculum. Therefore, theorizing how this happened, and to what effect lies at the heart of curriculum-research. This chapter divides research connecting nationalism to the curriculum based on whether its authors analyze nationalism as general norm, typology, or claim. Each of these categorizations comes with a series of benefits and drawbacks. Offering a more static understanding of nationalism, norm- and typology-based approaches lend themselves particularly well to comparative research. They allow researchers to focus on a fixed set of features, and to study how their presentation and prominence changed over time, or varied across places. In contrast, these approaches risk over-emphasizing the role of nationalism as pushed by central-elites. As shown by research drawing on claim-based approaches, actors involved in curriculum-making might or might not share central elites’ nationalist projects. Sometimes they might use national rhetoric to pursue their own agenda, as in the case of Germany’s German-teachers, and sometimes they might prioritize economic or pedagogic concerns over nationalist projects when drafting curricula. While methodologically challenging, claim-based approaches therefore promise to shed light on several currently under-theorized issues in the relationship between nationalism and the curriculum. We know that nationalism matters for curriculummaking. However, we still know little about the mechanisms through which this impact unfolds, their consequences, or the conditions facilitating or hindering nationalist projects from shaping curricula. Does the inclusion of specific actors (e.g., policy-makers or historians) in curriculum-making tend to produce curricula with stronger nationalist content? How does actors’ thinking about stages of development, gender, or student abilities influence their consideration of nationalism as an educational goal, and how they might implement it in practice? Are there specific external conditions or shocks, such as wars or economic crises, that increase the perceived priority of nationalism vis-à-vis other educational goals? How does

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

523

teachers’ and pupils’ appropriation and reinterpretation of nationalist content on the ground affect the impact of curricula, and do they perhaps trigger feedback loops that reshape the official curriculum (Giudici, 2021; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996)? By embracing a research agenda that pays closer attention to people’s actual understandings of nationalism and how they set priorities in light of such understandings when engaged in curriculum-making, we can improve our theorization of the relationship between nationalism and the curriculum. Not only does this approach allow us to learn more about how and when nationalism affects the curriculum, but also how and when it does not. This brings us a step closer to identifying the “incongruities, conflicts, and contradictions between education development and the project of state building” (Wong & Apple, 2002, p.183) – and, we might add, of nation building.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso. Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (1992). Racialized boundaries. Race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist struggle. Routledge. Barth, F. (Ed.). (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries. Universitets Forlaget. Benavot, A., et al. (1991). Knowledge for the masses: World models and national curricula, 1920–1986. American Sociological Review, 56(1), 85–100. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. Sage. Binder, A. J. (2009). Contentious curricula. Princeton University Press. Breuilly, J. (2013). Introduction: Concepts, approaches, theories. In J. Breuilly (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the history of nationalism (pp. 1–16). Oxford University Press. Brubaker, R. (1992). Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany. Harvard University Press. Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Harvard University Press. Calhoun, C. (2002). Nationalism (2nd ed.). Open University Press. Cha, Y.-K. (1991). Effects of the global system on language instruction, 1850–1986. Sociology of Education, 64(1), 19–32. Cederman, L.-E. (2001). Nationalism and bounded integration: What it would take to create a European demos. European Journal of International Relations, 7(2), 139–174. Coakley, J. (2018). ‘Primordialism’ in nationalism studies: Theory or ideology? Nations and Nationalism, 24(2), 327–347. Connelly, F. M., & Connelly, G. (2013). Curriculum policy guidelines: Context, structures and functions. In A. Luke, A. Woods, & K. Weir (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity (pp. 54–72). Routledge. Cuban, L. (1998). The integration of sciences into the American secondary school curriculum. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 38, 89–113. de Reynold, G. (1927). Sur Le Bilinguisme. Bieler Jahrbuch/Annales Biennoises, 2, 101–116. Dale, R., & Robertson, S. (2009). Beyond mehodological ‘isms’ in comparative education in an era of globalisation. In R. Cowen & A. M. Kazamias (Eds.), International handbook in comparative education (pp. 1113–1127). Springer. Dipartimento della Pubblica Educazione Ticino. (1902). Conto-reso del Dipartimento della Pubblica Educazione, Gestione 1901. Tipografia e Litografia cantonale. Durrani, N., & Dunne, M. (2010). Curriculum and national identity: Exploring the links between religion and nation in Pakistan. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 42(2), 215–240.

524

A. Giudici

Evans, M. (2006). Elitism. In C. Hay, M. Lister, & D. Marsh (Eds.), The state. Theories and issues (pp. 39–59). Palgrave. Falke, K. (1914). Der schweizerische Kulturwille. Rascher & Cie. Furrer, M. (2004). Die Nation im Schulbuch. Verlag Hanhsche Buchhandlung. Gardin, M., Barbu, R., & Rothmüller, B. (2015). Educating future citizens in between Mischkultur nationalism and authorities: Trace from teachers’ journals. History of Education, 44(5), 537–552. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism (2nd ed.). Blackwell Publishing. Gellner, E. (1996). Do nations have navels? Nations and Nationalism, 2(3), 366–370. Germann, M., & Mendez, F. (2016). Contested sovereignty: Mapping referendums on sovereignty over time and space. British Journal of Political Science, 48(1), 141–165. Giudici, A. (2019). Explaining Swiss language education policy. PhD Dissertation, University of Zurich. Retrieved from https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/166199/ Giudici, A. (2021). Teacher politics bottom-up: Theorising the impact of micro-politics on policy generation. Journal of Education Policy, 36(6), 801–821. Giudici, A., & Manz, K. (2018). Knabenlernzeiten – Mädchenlernzeiten: Gleich, Gleicher, Ungleich? Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Bildungswissenschaften, 40(3), 603–620. Giudici, A., et al. (forthcoming). Wer bestimmt die schulische Wissensordnung? Zur Veränderung von Akteurskonstellationen und Wissenspolitiken. In A. Giudici et al. (Eds.), Die Schulische Wissensordnung im Wandel. Chronos. Goodson, I. F. (1985). The making of the curriculum. Routledge. Graff, H. J. (1991). The literacy myth. Transaction Publishers. Greenfeld, L. (1992). Nationalism. Five roads to modernity. Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (2003). Citizenship and national identity: Some reflections on the future of Europe. In R. Robertson & K. E. White (Eds.), Globalisation (Global membership and participation) (Vol. III, pp. 155–174). Routledge. Hechter, M. (1975). Internal colonialism: The Celtic fringe in British national development, 1536–1966. Routledge. Hechter, M. (2000). Containing nationalism. Basil Blackwell. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1962). The age of revolution: Europe 1789–1848. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. Cambridge University Press. Hofman, A. (2007). The politics of national education: Values and aims of Israeli history curricula, 1956–1995. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 39(4), 441–470. Huber, M. (1916). Der Schweizerische Staatsgedanke. Rascher & Cie. Hutchinson, J. (2005). Nations as zones of conflict. Sage. Hung, C.-Y. (2014). Teachers’ perception of national identity in the English and Taiwanese citizenship curricula: Civic or ethnic nationalism? Research in Comparative and International Education, 9(1), 197–212. Jane, G., & Giudici, A. (2023). Education as a Tool of Social Equality?. Social Policy and Administration 57(1), 172–88 Kedourie, E. (1993). Nationalism (4th ed.). Wiley. Kennedy, K. (1989). Regionalism and nationalism in South German history lessons, 1871–1914. German Studies Review, 12(1), 11–33. Laitin, D. D. (1998). Identity in formation: The Russian-speaking populations in the near abroad. Cambridge University Press. Mann, M. (2005). The dark side of democracy. Cambridge University Press. March, J. G., & Olson, J. P. (1998). The institutional dynamics of international political orders. International Organization, 52(4), 943–969. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutional organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363. Moreau, J. (2003). School book nation. Conflicts over American history textbooks from the Civil War to the present. University of Michigan Press.

Nationalism and the Curriculum: Analytical and Methodological Considerations

525

Nash, M. A. (2009). Contested identities: Nationalism, regionalism, and patriotism in early American textbooks. History of Education Quarterly, 49(4), 417–441. Ozga, J. (2017). Education and nationalism in Scotland: Nationalism as a governing resource. In K. Kantsalami & G. Holm (Eds.), The state, schooling and identity (pp. 25–40). Palgrave Macmillan. Piattoeva, N. (2009). Citizenship and nationality in changing Europe: A comparative study of the aims of citizenship education in Russian and Finnish national education policy texts. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 41(6), 723–744. Renan, E. (1882). Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Presses Pockets. Ricento, T., & Hornberger, N. H. (1996). Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly, 30(3), 401–428. Rockwell, E., & Vera, E. R. (2013). State governance and civil society in education: Revisiting the relationship. Paedagogica Historica, 49(1), 1–16. Schnapper, D. (1994). La communauté des citoyens. Sur l’idée moderne de nation. Gallimard. Scott, D. (2006). Six curriculum discourses. Contestation and edification. In A. Moore (Ed.), Schooling, society and curriculum (pp. 31–41). Routledge. Sivesind, K., & Westbury, I. (2016). State-based curriculum-making, part I. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 48(6), 744–756. Smith, A. D. (1995). Nations and nationalism in a global era. Polity. de Swaan, A. (2001). Words of the world. Polity. Tannenwald, N. (2005). Ideas and explanation: Advancing the theoretical agenda. Journal of Cold War Studies, 7(2), 13–42. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital and European states, A.D. 990–1990 (27th ed.). WileyBlackwell. Thiesse, A.-M. (2006). Les identités nationales, un paradigme transnational. In A. Dieckhoff & C. Jaffrelot (Eds.), Repenser le nationalisme (pp. 193–226). Sciences Po. Thompson, A. (2001). Nations, national identities and human agency: Putting people back into nations. The Sociological Review, 49(1), 18–32. Triandafyllidou, A. (2021). Nationalism in the 21th century: Neo-tribal or plural? Nations and Nationalism, 26(4), 792–806. Waldron, A. N. (1985). Theories of nationalism and historical explanation. World Politics, 37(3), 416–433. Weber, E. (1976). Peasants into Frenchmen. The modernization of rural France 1870–1914. Stanford University Press. Wilschut, A. H. J. (2010). History at the mercy of politicians and ideologies: Germany, England, and The Netherlands in the 19th and 20th centuries. Journal of the Curriculum Studies, 42(5), 693–723. Wilson, W. (1919). Address to the senate on the versailles peace treaty. The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. Wimmer, A. (2002). Nationalist exclusion and ethnic conflict. Shadows of modernity. Cambridge University Press. Wong, T.-H., & Apple, M. W. (2002). Rethinking the education/state formation connection: Pedagogic reform in Singapore 1945–1965. Comparative Education Review, 46(2), 182–210. Yack, B. (1996). The myth of the civic nation. Critical Review, 10(2), 193–211. Zimmer, H. (1990). ‘Deutsche Bildung’ – Rudolf Hildebrand und die Deutschlehrer im Kaiserreich. In U. Bracht, D. Kleiner, & H. Zimmer (Eds.), Intelligenz und Allgemeinbildung 1848–1918 (pp. 53–79). Waxmann. Zimmer, O. (2003). Boundary mechanisms and symbolic resources: Toward a process oriented approach to national identity. Nations and Nationalism, 9(2), 173–183.

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned from Finnish Core Curriculum Reform Jenni Sullanmaa, Lotta Tikkanen, Tiina Soini, Janne Pietarinen, and Kirsi Pyha¨lto¨

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Systemic Curriculum-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shared and Coherent Theory of Change in Curriculum Reform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Core Curriculum Reform in Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Example of Building the Theory of Change in Finnish Core Curriculum Reform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shared Sense-Making as a Means to Enhance Shared and Coherent Theories of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practical Implications Based on the Synthesis and the Proposed Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

528 529 531 533 534 536 538 539

J. Sullanmaa · T. Soini Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: jenni.sullanmaa@tuni.fi; tiina.soini-ikonen@tuni.fi L. Tikkanen (*) School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: lotta.tikkanen@uef.fi; lotta.tikkanen@helsinki.fi J. Pietarinen School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland e-mail: janne.pietarinen@uef.fi K. Pyhältö Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Centre for Higher and Adult Education, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa e-mail: kirsi.pyhalto@helsinki.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_20

527

528

J. Sullanmaa et al.

Abstract

Large-scale curriculum reforms are a central tool for developing education. A precondition for achieving reform goals is that those who are involved and affected by them, that is, the reform stakeholders, have sufficiently coherent and shared understanding of what needs to be changed and the direction in which the change should be steered. In this chapter, we propose a theoretical model of a shared and coherent theory of change in terms of curriculum and synthetize the results of a multimethod longitudinal systemic research project on the construction of the theory of change in the national core curriculum reform at state, district, and school levels in Finland. Results concerning the educational stakeholders’ theories of change as well as strategies they used to shape it are discussed in the light of the proposed model. Finally, we will conclude with providing a set of practical implications based on the synthesis and the proposed model. Keywords

Curriculum reform · Curriculum-making · Large-scale curriculum reform · Shared sense-making · Theory of change

Introduction Large-scale curriculum reforms are a central tool for developing education and a response to societal challenges (e.g., Kelly, 2009). A precondition for achieving reform goals is that those who are involved and affected by them, that is, the reform stakeholders, have a sufficiently coherent and shared understanding of what needs to be changed and the direction in which the change should be steered (Datnow & Stringfield, 2000; Fullan, 2007; Lasky et al., 2005; Pietarinen et al., 2017). This theory of change is not an automatic result of curriculum reform and needs to be intentionally and systemically cultivated during the reform process. In fact, previous studies have shown that educational stakeholders at different levels of the educational system, for example, school administrators, principals, and teachers, often have strikingly different understandings of reform aims and the ways in which they are reached (e.g., Desimone, 2006; Ng, 2009; Spillane, 1998; Timperley & Parr, 2005; Wong & Cheung, 2009). Building a shared and coherent theory of change requires constant efforts of shared sense-making throughout the educational system. In this chapter, we explore the anatomy and construction of a shared and coherent theory of change in a large-scale national curriculum reform. We start by defining our approach to the curriculum reform as a multilayered process of curriculummaking and continue with proposing a theoretical model for building a shared and coherent theory of change in a large-scale curriculum reform. We elaborate on the different characteristics of the theory of change, in this regard including curriculum coherence, the shared understanding of the purpose and aims of the reform, and the

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned. . .

529

means to enhance them. This is followed by a short introduction of the most recent national core curriculum reform in Finland. After this, we will synthesize the results of a multimethod longitudinal systemic research project on the construction of the theory of change in the national core curriculum reform at state (macro), district (meso), and school (micro) levels of the educational system in Finland. Results concerning the educational stakeholders’ theories of change and strategies they utilized to shape it will be summarized and discussed in the light of the proposed model. Finally, we will conclude with providing a set of practical implications based on the synthesis and the proposed model.

Systemic Curriculum-Making Curriculum can be considered as a multilevel and nested entity and, hence, explored from, for example, societal, institutional, programmatic, instructional, classroom, and personal perspectives (Deng, 2012; Doyle, 1992; Goodlad, 1979). It may also be viewed as comprising what have been termed the supra, macro, meso, micro, and nano levels of curriculum (e.g., Thijs & van den Akker, 2009). The curriculum levels may easily be understood as hierarchical or separated. However, the reality of curriculum-making is complex, and the levels are better described as layers that are interconnected and porous, forming a dynamic entity in which they influence each other (Priestley et al., 2020). The levels or layers, even though not meant to imply hierarchy, do reflect existing discourses of top-down and bottom-up curriculum-making where institutional curriculum is often a starting point or a framework for curriculum-making in schools and classrooms. However, to capture the curriculum-making in real educational contexts, it is important to pay attention to the two-way flow of influence, information, and activity between the various levels. A precondition for building a shared and coherent theory of change through the layers of curriculum-making regarding the aims of the curriculum is an overall negotiation on what should be changed and why. This requires analyzing the required change, i.e., negotiations about what needs to be developed and which strengths are to be preserved (see Fullan, 2007; Salonen-Hakomäki et al., 2016; Timperley & Parr, 2005). A number of factors affect this negotiation, such as the history of the educational system, societal power relations, and different interest groups and individual and collective skills and aspirations. In national curriculum reforms, this analysis of the needed change is usually done at the macro level, and national contexts vary tremendously in terms of who is allowed to be heard in this initial stage of the reform and from where and how directly or uncritically the trends are adopted. Increasing influence on national curricula is also coming from supra levels, including actors such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the European Union (EU) (Lingard, 2021). This puts extra pressure on the macro-level sense-making, especially when the aim is to build curriculum that reflects not only supra-level trends but also national needs as well as knowledge and know-how coming from local stakeholders. In this chapter, we

530

J. Sullanmaa et al.

focus on the shared and coherent theory of change in terms of curriculum and its aims. Curriculum-making can be viewed as happening at sites of social activity across levels of curriculum (Priestley et al., 2021), that is, made and realized in social practice. It is an ongoing process, taking place at the macro level of state policymaking, the meso level of districts and school administration and at the micro (or nano) level of every classroom. Actors in different levels of the educational system see different landscapes when looking at the educational reality and curriculum reform. Therefore, the things that are perceived as meaningful, and hence are at the center stage of sense-making, may differ between the levels of educational system. For example, macro-level administrators typically focus on evaluating national and international drivers of educational policies, interpreting policy documents, and constructing guidelines to steer national educational development. Meanwhile the meso level of a district or municipality often has the role of mediating and translating the ideas into development work at the micro level, the schools. Thus, the ideas and principles constructed at the macro level are typically rather abstract and do not provide clear guidelines for how to implement them at the meso and micro levels. This might lead to a situation in which things appear clear and functional at the top levels, but may actually create chaos at the bottom level (Fullan, 1996). A gap can also appear between meso and micro levels, and teachers might not recognize the object of development work or view the objectives as not fitting in their work. Curriculum-making involves dynamic processes of interpretation, mediation, negotiation, and translation, across multiple sites of the education system. Rather than being linear or a top-down process, it involves cycles of interpretation and re-interpretation where the actors in different sites of activity seek to make sense of the curriculum. This kind of transactional process takes place at a certain place and time, under both individual and social conditions such as the beliefs, values, and professional knowledge of the stakeholders involved and practices shared by them. Allowing various voices and viewpoints in constructing the curriculum is important, because it facilitates the agency of the educational practitioners and supports ownership in terms of the curriculum – and hence the chance that the reform is implying. However, allowing the wide-ranging discussions and negotiation concerning the curriculum also increases the risk of ending up with an inefficient and fragmented curriculum. This can further lead to inadequate support for pedagogical practices at the grassroots level where the curriculum is enacted – and in fact realized. Therefore, the reform’s goals have to be subjected to transforming, modifying, and even resistance while simultaneously keeping the big picture and direction of the changes clear. This requires a top-down–bottom-up implementation strategy when planning the reform and shared sense-making of the reform goals at every level, at all the sites of activities where the curriculum is made and re-made, and across the levels. Against this backdrop, we propose a theoretical model of a shared and coherent theory of change in terms of curriculum.

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned. . .

531

Shared and Coherent Theory of Change in Curriculum Reform The theory of change refers to the curriculum reform stakeholders’ understanding of the purpose and aims of the reform. By stakeholders we mean those actors who are involved in or affected by the changes in the curriculum. The model of building a shared and coherent theory of change consists of three distinct, but complementary elements (Fig. 1): (1) understanding the aims of the reform; (2) understanding how the aims are connected to each other, i.e., internal coherence of the curriculum; and (3) shared understanding, i.e., agreement on the aims. We will now discuss these elements more closely in relation to curriculum. Firstly, in building a shared and coherent theory of change regarding the curriculum, the reform stakeholders need to define and understand the aims of the reform. This requires negotiation and interpretation of what is to be changed. At the macro level, the state-level stakeholders negotiate and construct the reform’s aims based on their analysis of what needs to be developed and which strengths are to be maintained (see Fullan, 2007; Salonen-Hakomäki et al., 2016; Timperley & Parr, 2005). In this negotiation, triggers of change, for example, challenges to well-being in schools, are transformed into aims and objectives. An example of this would be more support measures, which are closer to the actual activities that should take place during the reform. At the meso and micro levels, the understanding of the aims of the reform involves interpreting the general reform aims and transforming them into alignment with school-level needs and practices. Secondly, to create a sufficiently coherent theory of change, the interrelations between the aims need to be intentionally built. The coherent understanding of the

Fig. 1 Elements of shared and coherent theory of change

532

J. Sullanmaa et al.

relations between the aims of the curriculum includes, for example, the stakeholders’ interpretations of the consequences of the changes for teaching and learning and alignment between the objectives, content, and assessment within the curriculum (Sullanmaa et al., 2019a). Reforms usually have multiple aims which are the result of negotiation or compromise or have been constructed in separate sense-making processes and, hence, are not automatically fully aligned. This might be the case even though the stakeholders have agreed on specific aims. If the interrelations between the aims are not negotiated and built, the consistency of the intended direction can be undermined. This occurs, for example, if the new assessment methods are not aligned with other pedagogical solutions and teaching materials. This may further induce uncertainty among schools and teachers and superficial or unintended changes in practice (see, e.g., Allen & Penuel, 2015; Russell & Bray, 2013). Thirdly, in order to promote school-level realization of the aims, the theory of change also needs to be sufficiently shared among the reform stakeholders (see also Timperley & Parr, 2005). The extent to which the theory of change is shared among the educational stakeholders is reflected in how the curriculum reform is interpreted and mediated further on other levels of the educational system and how it is finally transformed into school practice. Therefore, to ensure sufficient coherence, shared understanding of the aims of the reform within levels of the educational system is important. In addition, in order for the educational system as a whole to develop in line with the aims, the theory of change needs to be sufficiently shared between the levels. For example, reaching wide consensus on the reform’s purpose at the macro level is likely to be manifested in a coherent core curriculum that further promotes shared interpretations by local stakeholders attempting to translate it into local curriculum and development work. It is often easier to build a shared understanding of the direction on an abstract level than to find an agreed plan on how to proceed. For example, different stakeholders and actors in the educational system might agree about the general importance of increasing student agency in learning, but they may in practice disagree about the amount of freedom that students should have in deciding how they proceed in their studies. Building sufficiently shared aims is crucial in order for any change to actually happen. Shared sense-making, referring to intentionally constructing shared meaning for the curriculum reform (e.g. Coburn, 2005; Spillane et al., 2002; Timperley & Parr, 2005; Weick et al., 2005), is the primary strategy for building a shared and coherent theory of change in curriculum reform. The ways in which the reform is interpreted and further presented by administrators, districts, and schools shape the possible knowledge, interpretations, and attitudes of the stakeholders at various levels, resulting either in frictions or coherence depending on the curriculum-making strategy (see, e.g., Coburn, 2005; Darling-Hammond et al., 2006; Lasky et al., 2005). The sense-making processes within the levels may result in different interpretations, influenced by the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders – different landscapes – at each level (Soini et al., 2021). Different kinds of sense-making processes and resulting interpretations might lead to negotiating different aims, purposes, and meanings for the reformed curriculum and to a theory of change

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned. . .

533

that is not shared between the levels of the educational system. Accordingly, intentional sense-making both within and between the levels of the educational system is crucial; negotiating and justifying what should be developed, in which direction and why, supports the building of a shared and coherent theory of change throughout the system.

National Core Curriculum Reform in Finland In Finland, the core curriculum acts as a national framework for school practice. It is reformed approximately every 10 years. Curriculum reform is considered a central means for promoting continuous school development work. Stakeholders from all levels of the educational system are involved in the reform. At the national level, the Council of State provides the general goals for education and the frame for time allocations for various school subjects. The Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) is responsible for coordinating the reforming of the national core curriculum based on these documents. Agency officials usually have long-term experience in education, most of them have pedagogical training and have worked as teachers or principals before. However, the EDUFI officials do not construct the core curriculum alone and involve educational experts and practitioners in the process. The Finnish national core curriculum is a normative document that guides school practice and development, yet the core curriculum leaves space for local curriculum development. The local education providers are responsible for constructing new local curricula within the framework of the reformed national core curriculum. Thus, the local stakeholders play a central role in interpreting, integrating, and transforming the broad aims of the core curriculum into a local curriculum that emphasizes the aims, content, and values from a local perspective (Niemi, 2015; Soini et al., 2017). These district-level stakeholders usually represent municipality administration and school leaders. There may also be other professionals working in schools such as school psychologists or youth workers. Moreover, teachers in Finland are curriculum makers not only in the class and school but also at the district and even at the national level of the school system. Compared to the previous curriculum reforms in Finland, the schools have typically not engaged in constructing school-based curricula; however, the role of teachers in curriculummaking has been emphasized by involving them in district-level curriculum work (Palomäki et al., 2019). Teachers also have pedagogical autonomy to make decisions about teaching methods and materials. The implementation of the core curriculum is not measured by external accountability, and local interpretations and understandings of the core curriculum and the orchestration of the reform process may vary (see Soini et al., 2017; Tian & Risku, 2019). In this kind of curriculum development work, the construction of a shared and coherent theory of change throughout the levels of the educational system is particularly crucial in order for the core curriculum as a guiding framework to be realized in a sufficiently unified way in schools in practice. Therefore, collaboration and shared goals among various stakeholders are emphasized in the curriculum

534

J. Sullanmaa et al.

reform process (Salonen-Hakomäki et al., 2016; Tikkanen et al., 2017; Vitikka et al., 2016). The most recent core curriculum reform in Finland was organized as an interactive and participatory process (Soini et al., 2021). A network of stakeholders, including administrators, researchers, teacher educators, municipal education providers, representatives from associations, principals, teachers, and other educational experts, were invited to participate in working groups working on different parts and content of the core curriculum (Halinen & Holappa, 2013; Vitikka et al., 2016). Together the working groups were responsible for writing the new core curriculum document. Drafts of the core curriculum were available for the public to comment on for specific periods. The document was finished at the end of 2014. The organization of the local curriculum development varied: some municipalities constructed their own curriculums, whereas others collaborated. The district-level working groups, consisting of municipal actors and school staff, constructed a local curriculum emphasizing the core curriculum content from a local perspective, taking into account contextual factors such as local needs and traditions (Finnish National Board of Education, 2014), finished by 2016.

Example of Building the Theory of Change in Finnish Core Curriculum Reform In this chapter, we draw on the results of our research project on the recent national curriculum reform in Finland to reflect on the construction of the theory of change in a curriculum reform. The project employed multimethod systemic longitudinal designs following the reform process from the macro to micro level of the school system. Here we draw on and summarize results to build empirically grounded examples for building the theory of change in the context of national large-scale curriculum reform (individual original studies published are also referred to). Those curriculum aims that were closely related to the actual pedagogical work of teachers were identified as targets of intensive sense-making by the stakeholders at all levels of school system. These included strengthening pupil agency, subject integration, increase in both pupil and teacher collaboration, and new principles of assessment (Palomäki et al., 2020; Kivioja et al., 2018; Salonen-Hakomäki et al., 2016). We chose subject integration as an example of how it was translated and understood by actors at different levels, thus forming the theory of change in this reform. Finnish curriculum planning is firmly grounded in educational research relying on the socio-constructive conceptions of learning. The idea of subject integration has a long history of being a response to challenges of fragmented content and strict division between subjects that does not reflect real-life phenomena and allows learning based on problem-solving and knowledge creation (see Cantell, 2016; Lähdemäki, 2019). In the Finnish national core curriculum, the integration is paired with the idea of transversal skills. Both themes included in the curriculum reflect the discussion in the supra level of education, especially drawing on the twenty-first century skills models (see OECD, 2005; Voogt & Roblin, 2012).

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned. . .

535

Agreement on Aims and Curriculum Coherence: Case Subject Integration The need to develop coherence of content taught in comprehensive school was identified as a central object of change in macro-level curriculum-making, and the importance of this aim was rather widely shared among EDUFI officials (SalonenHakomäki et al., 2016). The change was translated into a principle of integrating the content of different subjects in the form of multidisciplinary learning units. There was no direct reference or guidance for schools on how to create these units. The implementation of this principle, i.e., the content, width, and schedule, was left to districts and schools to decide. The requirement for developing a more integrative approach to teaching was also identified in meso-level curriculum-making in terms of holistic learning content to promote meaningful learning (Palomäki et al., 2020). The district-level stakeholders recognized that the objectives of learning, ways of working, and teachers’ pedagogical practice needed to be developed in order to restructure learning content and thus to promote holistic teaching and learning (Palomäki et al., 2020). New forms of collaboration between subject teachers were also seen as essential (Palomäki et al., 2020) to develop more integrative school practices. Such need for collaboration was also acknowledged and embraced by teachers. The extent to which the aim of developing subject integration and holistic learning content was shared among the state-level administrators and in the district-level curriculum development was interrelated with their perceptions of coherence in the core curriculum document. Accordingly, the integrative approach to teaching and learning was identified as a central element in the core curriculum by the state- and district-level stakeholders and teachers (Sullanmaa et al., 2019b, c). The results imply that the strong consensus regarding this aim at the state level had become manifested in the final core curriculum product as well. However, although the aim of developing integrative approaches in teaching was widely shared, the state-level administrators also identified an aim to preserve and further develop strong discipline-based individual subjects. The aim was neither strongly agreed upon among the state-level stakeholders, nor emphasized by districtlevel stakeholders, implying that it was shared to a lesser extent between the macro and meso levels compared to the aim of developing subject integration. However, the district-level stakeholders recognized the contradiction in terms of expectations to develop a holistic learning culture while, for example, lesson hours and textbooks were still based on subjects (Palomäki et al., 2020). Thus, at the district level of curriculum development, the contradictory aims were translated into practical challenges and development needs. At the school level, many schools ended up solving the challenge by implementing the multidisciplinary learning units in the form of project weeks around some theme, while most of the teaching still followed division into traditional subjects (see Venäläinen et al., 2020). Based on our findings, it seems that perceived connections between the goals of the reforms were rather clear for stakeholders at all layers of curriculum-making and the core aims of the reform. For example, regarding the development of learning

536

J. Sullanmaa et al.

content, assessment and ways of working formed a coherent whole and were shared to some extent throughout the system. However, the perceived alignment slightly declined from the state to district and school levels (Sullanmaa et al., 2019a, b, c). Moreover, the case of subject integration shows that experienced consistency in terms of “big ideas” of the reform and the direction of change clearly decreased when proceeding from state-level to the district-level curriculum development and finally to schools (Soini et al., 2021; Sullanmaa et al., 2019a, b, c). This implies that the tensions in the theory of change were mediated through the state and district levels and finally challenged schools and teachers in constructing a coherent understanding regarding the curriculum as a tool for change in their everyday pedagogical work.

Shared Sense-Making as a Means to Enhance Shared and Coherent Theories of Change Drawing on the socio-cognitive approach to policy implementation (Coburn, 2005; Spillane et al., 2002), shared sense-making refers to negotiation and dialogue directed at constructing a collective meaning for curriculum reform and its consequences in schools (März & Kelchtermans, 2013; Pietarinen et al., 2016, 2017). It involves interpreting and processing the reform jointly and constructing a shared understanding on what the changes mean and how they direct the development work in a way that is meaningful for those involved (Hargreaves et al., 2009; Weick et al., 2005). Interpreting and transforming the reform in relation to existing beliefs, experiences, and the context are central means for building a shared and coherent theory of change, both within and across the levels of the educational system. In shared sense-making within curriculum reform, all elements of the shared and coherent theory of change should be covered. We have suggested here that these elements include (1) the aims of the reform; (2) an understanding of how the aims are connected to each other, i.e., internal coherence of the curriculum; and (3) agreement on the aims and their relations within and between the levels of the educational system. To understand how the sense-making in large-scale curriculum reform happens, we interviewed Finnish district-level steering groups responsible for orchestrating the local curriculum development two times (2015, 2016) during the latest curriculum-making process. We identified three shared sense-making strategies they used throughout the process. The strategies entailed comparing the aims of the reform to current practices and prior reforms, standardizing by formulating an understanding on what needs to be changed and can be changed taking into account local needs and resources, and finally transforming the broader principles of the curriculum into practices of school development (Soini et al., 2017). As a strategy, comparison provides a fundamental basis for learning together, by making the existing beliefs and understandings of school development explicit and by situating the reform in the context of previous reforms and broader changes in society (Soini et al., 2017). Thus, by comparing the aims of the reform to current practices and prior

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned. . .

537

reforms, the reform stakeholders can identify what the reform is about and how the current practices should be changed. Through comparison, the reform stakeholders can also reflect on the interrelations between the aims. Standardization, on the other hand, involves negotiating the requirements and aims in relation to the needs and resources of the local context. Thus, standardization is about balancing the internal and external determinants of school development (see Luttenberg et al., 2013). Transformation, in turn, serves the function of constructing additional value for the development work (Soini et al., 2017). By transformation, the educational stakeholders can at best reach an understanding of not only what they need to develop but also what they can learn by utilizing the reform as an opportunity for locally functional and meaningful development (Soini et al., 2017). Thus, the results of this form of sense-making can also go beyond the reform’s aims and help to create a culture of collaborative learning at the district level. By these shared and intentional sense-making strategies, the theory of change is interpreted and constructed within and across the levels of the educational system. For example, by intentional and shared sense-making, educational stakeholders at the local level interpret the alignment within the core curriculum and further translate it into aligned teaching and learning practices in schools. Hence, facilitating the use of these hands-on strategies in the curriculum development work and in the professional communities at the different levels can promote a coherent and shared theory of change. In turn, lack of shared sense-making processes might undermine the construction of coherence and could lead to differing views on what should be developed and how (see Timperley & Parr, 2005). Our studies showed that in the Finnish curriculum reform process, the districtlevel stakeholders were committed to constructing a collective understanding of the reform and facilitated the curriculum reform by identifying the meaning of the reform for the local stakeholders, linking ideas with practice and orchestrating development work at their districts (Pyhältö et al., 2018). Hence, they used the shared sense-making strategies intentionally to create coherence and bridge the different levels of the educational system (Pyhältö et al., 2018). Although the district-level coordinating groups used similar strategies of shared sense-making, facilitating coherent and dynamic curriculum development in the district seemed to be supported by higher levels of analytical and transformative shared sense-making (Pyhältö et al., 2018). Our longitudinal study showed that use of comparison strategies decreased while the use of transformation strategies increased over time (Pyhältö et al., 2018). Hence, the results imply a hierarchy between the shared sensemaking strategies. While transformation as a strategy for shared sense-making was directed at meaningful learning at the local level, comparison and standardization may act as important preconditions for setting the foundations for learning and for transforming the curriculum’s aims into locally functional and feasible objectives (Soini et al., 2017). A precondition for the success of shared sense-making is skillful use of knowledge-sharing practices. Knowledge-sharing refers to participatory development work in which different opinions, experiences, and competences of various participant groups are welcomed and utilized as a resource for learning. For example,

538

J. Sullanmaa et al.

knowledge-sharing practices in state-level curriculum development were shown to support curriculum coherence when they were anchored to the school-level impact of the decisions (Pietarinen et al., 2017). Building coherence between the aims and different interpretations of stakeholders is possible only by taking the experiences of the actors seriously and building new knowledge based on these. This can be illustrated by considering the role of knowledge-sharing as the core of shared sense-making strategies. In the comparison strategy, reform aims are considered in the light of existing practices and what has been done before. Here knowledge-sharing is a way to collect the relevant experiences of people involved and, hence, often making tacit knowledge visible. For example, teachers’ personal work histories may affect the interpretations of the reform aims and their consequences for the existing practices. This may remain implicit unless the knowledge is shared and recognized as a basis for change that needs to be considered in standardizing the aims of the reform. If there is no sufficient knowledge of the experienced local conditions that the reform aimed at, the aims will not take root in practices of teaching and learning. Knowledge-sharing as a precondition for transformation means mapping the ideas and possible solutions and implications of stakeholders to construct functional, context-sensitive applications of reform goals. Sharing knowledge between stakeholders both within and across the levels of the system enables building connections between the reform aims. Shared sense-making requires an intentional effort and a focus on the big ideas of the curriculum, and hence, the balance of the top-down–bottom-up implementation strategy is a crucial question in shared sense-making about the curriculum aims.

Practical Implications Based on the Synthesis and the Proposed Model When building the theory of change, i.e., an understanding of what is to be changed in schools, attaining the coherence of and agreement on the aims of the reform is crucial. We have suggested that a shared and coherent theory of change is a precondition for achieving the aims of curriculum reform. Both coherence and agreement on the theory of change are needed, and they are connected to each other. Building a shared theory of change, in terms of the aims and purpose of the reform, within and between levels of the educational system, supports achieving coherent interpretations of the curriculum document locally. A coherent curriculum document will further facilitate the stakeholders at the meso and micro levels in interpreting the change and constructing their theory of change that is more likely to be shared across the levels and locally. In other words, coherent understanding of the curriculum at the local level may further help in achieving a shared theory of change through creating a common framework for the construction of locally shared visions and goals. On the other hand, challenges in agreeing on the theory of change, for instance in the form of contradictory aims and directions, can undermine the consistency of the curriculum.

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned. . .

539

Constructing the theory of change within and between the macro, meso, and micro levels of the educational system should involve intentional and collective sense-making, which aims towards building the kind of theory for the change that will support coherence and promote the development of meaningful practices and applications locally. Therefore, sense-making in every phase of the curriculum reform and at every level of the system is required to achieve coherence and ownership of the aims. For example, to construct a sufficiently coherent curriculum, the understanding of the theory of change needs to be consistent and shared at the macro level. This requires versatile sense-making already in the beginning of the curriculum development, including sense-making between the levels of the educational system, for instance by involving stakeholders from all levels of the system in constructing a shared direction. The presented model implies that in a large-scale curriculum reform, considering the educational system as a whole and developing the system is important in building a shared and coherent theory of change. Such a systemic approach cannot be led only from the top-down (Fullan, 1996). Involving stakeholders and practitioners from all the levels of the system and their engagement in all phases of the curriculum development work can support creating a systemic and open approach to shared sense-making. Hence, the shared sense-making processes at all levels of the system should entail a systemic orientation, considering not only the interpretations at that level, but also aiming to understand the viewpoints of other levels and anticipating the consequences of actions for the other levels. To support sense-making, the core curriculum should communicate the big picture clearly, but simultaneously the goals set in the state layer have to be adjustable and flexible to allow reconstruction to happen (Soini et al., 2021). This poses a great challenge to leading these kinds of change processes.

References Cantell, H. (2016). Sanotaanko oppiaineille hyvästit? Näkökulmia monialaisesta oppimisesta ja opetuksesta. In H. Cantell & A. Kallioniemi (Eds.), Kansankynttilä keinulaudalla (pp. 153–169). PS-kustannus. Coburn, C. E. (2005). Shaping teacher sense-making: School leaders and the enactment of reading policy. Educational Policy, 19(3), 476–509. Darling-Hammond, L., Hightower, A. M., Husbands, J. L., LaFors, J. R., Young, V. M., & Christopher, C. (2006). Building instructional quality: “Inside-out” and “outside-in” perspectives on San Diego’s school reform. In A. Harris & J. H. Chrispeels (Eds.), Improving schools and educational systems (pp. 129–185). Routledge. Datnow, A., & Stringfield, S. (2000). Working together for reliable school reform. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 5(1–2), 183–204. Deng, Z. (2012). School subjects and academic disciplines: The differences. In A. Luke, K. Weir, A. Woods, & M. Moroney (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity: A primer and model (pp. 40–73). Routledge. Desimone, L. (2006). Consider the source response differences among teachers, principals, and districts on survey questions about their education policy environment. Educational Policy, 20(4), 640–676.

540

J. Sullanmaa et al.

Doyle, W. (1992). Curriculum and pedagogy. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 486–516). Macmillan. Finnish National Board of Education. (2014). National core curriculum for basic education 2014. Publications 2016:5. Finnish National Board of Education. Fullan, M. G. (1996). Turning systemic thinking on its head. Phi Delta Kappan, 77(6), 420–423. Fullan, M. G. (2007). The new meaning of educational change (4th ed.). Teachers College Press. Goodlad, J. I. (1979). Curriculum inquiry: The study of curriculum practice. McGraw Hill. Hargreaves, A., Lieberman, A., Fullan, M., & Hopkins, D. (Eds.). (2009). Second international handbook of educational change. Springer. Kelly, A. V. (2009). The curriculum: Theory and practice (6th ed.). SAGE. Kivioja, A., Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., & Pyhältö, K. (2018). Mikä on keskeistä hyvässä opetussuunnitelmaprosessissa? Kasvatus, 49(4), 310–325. Lähdemäki, J. (2019). Case study: The Finnish national curriculum 2016—A co-created national education policy. In J. Cook (Ed.), Sustainability, human well-being, and the future of education. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78580-6_13 Lasky, S., Datnow, A., & Stringfield, S. (2005). Linkages between federal, state and local levels in educational reform. In N. Bascia, A. Cumming, A. Datnow, K. Leithwood, & D. Livingstone (Eds.), International handbook of educational policy (pp. 239–259). Springer. Lingard, B. (2021). National curriculum making as more or less expressions of and responses to globalization. In M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou, & T. Soini (Eds.), Curriculum making in Europe: Policy and practice within and across diverse contexts (pp. 29–52). Emerald. Ng, S. W. (2009). Why did principals and teachers respond differently to curriculum reform? Teacher Development, 13(3), 187–203. Niemi, H. (2015). Teacher effectiveness in the European context with a special reference to Finland. In O. Tan & W. Liu (Eds.), Teacher effectiveness: Capacity building in a complex learning era (pp. 51–78). Cengage Learning. OECD. (2005). The definition and selection of key competencies. Executive summary. Paris: OECD. Retrieved from: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/35070367.pdf Palomäki, A., Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., & Pyhältö, K. (2019). Reaching for a new culture of learning in schools – District-level work on the curriculum reform in Finland. European Journal of Curriculum Studies, 5(2), 916–935. Pietarinen, J., Pyhältö, K., & Soini, T. (2017). Large-scale curriculum reform in Finland – Exploring the interrelation between implementation strategy, the function of the reform, and curriculum coherence. The Curriculum Journal, 28(1), 22–40. Priestley, M., Philippou, S., Alvunger, D., & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making: A conceptual framing. In M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou, & T. Soini (Eds.), Curriculum making in Europe: Policy and practice within and across diverse contexts (pp. 1–28). Emerald. Pyhältö, K., Pietarinen, J., & Soini, T. (2018). Dynamic and shared sense-making in large-scale curriculum reform in school districts. The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 181–200. Salonen-Hakomäki, S., Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., & Pyhältö, K. (2016). The way ahead for Finnish comprehensive school? Examining state-level school administrators’ theory of change. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 48(5), 671–691. Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., & Pyhältö, K. (2017). Shared sense making strategies in curriculum reform: District level perspective. Improving Schools, 21(2), 111–126. Soini, T., Pyhältö, K., & Pietarinen, J. (2021). Shared sense-making as key for large scale curriculum reform in Finland. In M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou, & T. Soini (Eds.), Curriculum making in Europe. Policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Emerald. Spillane, J. P. (1998). State policy and the non-monolithic nature of the local school district: Organizational and professional considerations. American Educational Research Journal, 35(1), 33–63. Spillane, J. P., Reiser, B. J., & Reimer, T. (2002). Policy implementation and cognition: Reframing and refocusing implementation research. Review of Educational Research, 72(3), 387–431.

Building Shared and Coherent Theory of Change: Lessons Learned. . .

541

Sullanmaa, J., Pyhältö, K., Pietarinen, J., & Soini, T. (2019a). Curriculum coherence as perceived by district-level stakeholders in large-scale national curriculum reform in Finland. The Curriculum Journal, 30(3), 244–263. Sullanmaa, J., Pyhältö, K., Pietarinen, J., & Soini, T. (2019b). Differences in state- and district-level stakeholders’ perceptions of curriculum coherence and school impact in national curriculum reform. Journal of Educational Administration, 57(3), 210–226. Sullanmaa, J., Pyhältö, K., Soini, T., & Pietarinen, J. (2019c). Trajectories of teachers’ perceived curriculum coherence in the context of Finnish core curriculum reform. Curriculum and Teaching, 34(2), 27–49. Thijs, A., & van den Akker, J. (2009). Curriculum in development. SLO. Tian, M., & Risku, M. (2019). A distributed leadership perspective on the Finnish curriculum reform 2014. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(2), 229–244. Timperley, H., & Parr, J. (2005). Theory competition and the process of change. Journal of Educational Change, 6(3), 227–251. Venäläinen, S., Saarinen, J., Johnson, P., Cantell, H., Jakobsson, G., Koivisto, P., Routti, M., Väänänen, J., Huhtanen, M., Kauppinen, L., & Viitala, M. (2020). Näkymiä OPS-matkan varrelta: Esi- ja perusopetuksen opetussuunnitelmien perusteiden 2014 toimeenpanon arviointi. Publications No. 5:2020. Finnish Education Evaluation Centre. Retrieved from: https://karvi.fi/ publication/nakymia-ops-matkan-varrelta-esi-ja-perusopetuksen-opetussuunnitelmienperusteiden-2014-toimeenpanon-arviointi/ Voogt, J., & Roblin, N. P. (2012). A comparative analysis of international frameworks for 21st century competences: Implications for national curriculum policies. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44(3), 299–321. Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sense-making. Organization Science, 16, 409–421.

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and Curriculum Development in Ireland: Tensions, Debates, and Future Directions Thomas Walsh

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Policy and Curriculum Alignment and Coherence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Policy and Curriculum Alignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Policy and Curriculum Coherence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Policy Landscape in Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum Policy Development Structures in Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supranational Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regional Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . School Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

544 546 546 547 550 550 552 553 556 557 558 561

Abstract

Alignment and coherence between vision, content, pedagogy, and assessment are critical components of successful curriculum design. Equally important is an alignment and coherence between the curriculum and wider education policies. “Crafting” such coherence in a time of policy change is an ongoing, dynamic, and intricate process for all actors and sectors in the education system as they adapt to make connections with and integrate reforms within their professional practice. In the Irish context, education policy development is centralized relative to many jurisdictions. Policy development responsibility has been devolved to a wide range of educational agencies, with varying levels of autonomy, under the aegis of the Department of Education. This has led to a messy and fluid diffusion of policy responsibility at the center, where there is often an insufficient awareness of how various policies relate to and cohere with one another. T. Walsh (*) Department of Education, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_10

543

544

T. Walsh

This chapter explores the complex and diffuse education policy landscape in Ireland with a particular focus on primary schooling and its implications for curriculum development and enactment in schools. Framed at the interface between the curriculum and wider education policy, the chapter critically analyzes the multiple and dynamic influences on curriculum development within the wider policy ecosystem and the power dynamics inherent in these relationships. The chapter concludes with key messages and implications for the Irish context that will resonate with international experiences. Keywords

Curriculum alignment · Curriculum coherence · Curriculum reform · Ireland · Policy landscape · Primary school

Introduction The curriculum occupies a pivotal space within increasingly complex, dynamic and multilayered national education policy landscapes. The ideological and structural configuration of the education landscape in each jurisdiction is distinct, informed by a unique set of historical, cultural, political, economic, religious, linguistic, and international influences and discourses. As Sellar and Lingard (2013, p. 722) state, “context and history matter deeply and cannot be borrowed.” Policy sharing, collaboration, and consultation among international, national, and local actors, and the emphasis on research-informed policy development, have all contributed to the complexity of achieving policy alignment and coherence. Teachers and school leaders increasingly refer to “initiative fatigue” as they attempt to navigate competing demands from diverse constituencies and integrate them into their professional practices. The totality of these demands, while often individually worthwhile and coherent, can be overwhelming and lead to a sense of fragmentation for schools and teachers. The convergence of multiple demands on schools is a common and likely unavoidable consequence of public policy making in complex societies. Such a challenge is something that schools and systems need to manage rather than conceptualize as a problem to be solved. Redeveloping any aspect of the education policy landscape has a knock-on effect on other dimensions, both outwardly in terms of wider public social policy and inwardly as it relates to schools. As Hatch (2002, p. 634) states, new initiatives “have to be carefully examined in the same way that we have to consider how new species and new developments will affect the ecosystems into which they are introduced.” Curriculum reform and review represent sites and battle grounds for contestation given the disputed and varying views of interested educational stakeholders on the values, vision, cultural norms, and content of the “plan for learning” (Van den Akker 2018, p. 4) in schools. Curriculum reform is contextual, complex, and nonlinear,

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

545

introducing new ideas into existing practices that require complex processes of sense-making to integrate the reform into sustainable beliefs and practices. While curriculum design is critically important in providing a context for alignment and coherence both within the curriculum and between the curriculum and wider education policy, cognizance must also be taken of the positioning of the curriculum within the wider policy ecosystem. Translating the vision and goals of the national curriculum, and infusing them in the beliefs and practices of wider educational policy and practice at a local level, requires a careful process of translation and transformation across various levels of the education system. There is a need for ongoing negotiation and interpretation to ensure the vision of the curriculum becomes embedded in values, beliefs, and practices of the various actors across the education system, particularly teachers. Ultimately curriculum reform is a change management process that requires a process of support to ensure ownership, sensemaking, and integration (Fullan, 2018; Shirley, 2016). Traditionally in Ireland, education policy has been highly centralized and curriculum policy largely prescriptive in nature (Coolahan, 2017). Arguably this resulted in generally high levels of policy alignment and coherence, in text if not in discourse (Ball, 1993), across various levels of the education system. In recent decades, there has been a diffusion of policy-making responsibility at a national level within a range of agencies and in consultation with educational stakeholders. In curriculum terms, there has also been a shift in emphasis away from prescribed curricula toward curriculum frameworks, prioritizing schools and teachers as agents of curriculum development and making. So while many jurisdictions worldwide attempt to “reassemble previously more disparate subnational systems into new national policy assemblages” (Savage & O’Connor, 2019, p. 820), the direction of travel in Ireland focuses on attempts to decentralize many aspects of education policy, including curriculum policy. Such developments align to Priestley and Biesta’s (2013) identification of common trends in curriculum developments at the micro level with an increased emphasis on teacher agency. However, this shift conflicts with existing cultures and practices in Ireland, posing a challenge for the traditional role of teachers and school leaders as enactors of national policy rather than curriculum developers. Moreover, the interface between the curriculum and the wider diffused education policy landscape in Ireland has added complexity to the role of schools and teachers to navigate and make sense of their ever-evolving policy and practice landscapes. The first half of this chapter presents in turn a review of the literature on policy alignment and coherence, unpacking both concepts with a particular focus on their relevance to the curriculum. It then moves to delineate the broad parameters of the education policy landscape in Ireland from the supranational to the school level, with a particular focus on primary school education. This section identifies sites of interface and tension between the varying levels and actors. The chapter concludes with some key implications for the policy and curriculum development process in Ireland.

546

T. Walsh

Understanding Policy and Curriculum Alignment and Coherence Policy and Curriculum Alignment The origins of the term “alignment” rest with “lining up” or arranging component parts in “proper relative positions.” In educational terms, policy alignment is a technical issue, a one-off event that is most critically addressed at the outset of policy development processes. Alignment can relate to diverse elements of policy and governance such as processes and procedures, alignment between policy instruments and mixes, and alignment concerning the form and content of policies (Looney, 2011). However, focusing on the technical aspects of alignment is a poor fit for governing complex systems (Ansell & Geyer, 2017) as complex systems are naturally resistant to ordering. Savage and O’Connor (2019, p. 822) warn against the focus in many jurisdictions on “favouring forms of technical rationality that treat the components of policy and governance as akin to puzzle pieces or cogs of a machine that need to be properly re-arranged to allow ‘the whole’ to function in more streamlined and effective ways.” Looney (2011) favors a focus on social alignment, a softer form of technical alignment that refers to the social capital in systems, including shared values, motives, and efforts. In socially aligned systems, institutions and actors work together to define challenges and to consider alternative courses of action. Such social alignment is vital for system learning and improvement. Moving to alignment within the curriculum, Anderson (2002) argues that curriculum alignment takes place at three levels: between objectives and assessment, objectives and instructional activities and materials, and between assessment and instructional activities and materials. Efforts at curriculum alignment provide for both internal consistency within a curriculum (e.g., between purpose, vision, decision-making, content, pedagogy, and assessment in a curriculum), as well as external alignment with the broader policy landscape. Van den Akker (2018) contends that such internal curriculum alignment is critical to avoid inconsistencies, blind spots, and neglected issues. Van den Akker’s (2003) curricular spider’s web is a useful tool to visualize better the 10 planning components in a curriculum, placing the rationale or “why” at the center. All elements of the web are equally important, and the curriculum is only as strong as its weakest link. Savage and O’Connor (2019) argue that while misalignment is considered to be an issue, alignment is not always the solution to the problem. Such efforts to impose a rational and technical order on what is a messy and complex social world are often resisted. They assert that policy alignment “privilege similarity over difference, sharing over contestation, and smoothness over disjuncture” (Savage & O’Connor, 2019, p. 813). They argue for the benefits of messier policy systems or misalignment, allowing for the potential for experimentation, variety, and productive disorder in policy making.

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

547

Policy and Curriculum Coherence Policy coherence is a more dynamic, interactive, social, and subjective concept (Looney, 2011). It is an ongoing process of participation and negotiation engaged in by stakeholders to reconcile a new policy vision with their existing beliefs and practices. As Honig and Hatch (2004, p. 18) state: coherence as a state of affairs is not a technical matter but a social construction produced through continual interactions among teachers, students, organisational structures, curriculum and other tools of schooling.

Rather than focusing on the technical and objective aspects of alignment, coherence relates to the interface of values, subjectivities, and motives not only within the new policy but also in its interface with existing policies. The key aim is to continually “craft” or negotiate the fit between the school’s goals and strategies and external demands. In the past, policy incoherence was understood as a consequence of poor policy design. However, the achievement of coherence is an ongoing iterative dynamic process by stakeholders at all levels of the education system. Moreover, there are multiple other layers and stakeholders (educational and noneducational) beyond the school level involved on the education policy landscape that can assist or complexify policy enactment at the school level (Baker, 2004; Hargreaves, 2003; O’Day, 2002; Savage & O’Connor, 2019). Fusarelli (2002, p. 565) argues that “[E]xternal forces exert a major impact on education,” often being the driving force of education reform. Reformulating education policy development requires the reconstruction and renegotiation of institutional power relationships between stakeholders and actors. Each school operates in a specific context that impacts on its receptivity to external policy demands. In the US context, Fusarelli (2002, p. 561) observed the creation of “fragmented centralisation” in the attempts to move to a more tightly coupled system at a state and federal level. The interaction between the various levels depends on the way in which the system is configured. Building on Weick’s (1976) understandings of loosely coupled systems, Looney (2011) argues that systems with loose links across the various levels reinforce isolation and limit opportunities for learning and interaction. Tighter coupling across levels, allied to strong instructional leadership (Sykes et al., 2009), has the potential to strengthen coherence. Stosich (2018, p. 203) argues that for principals juggling multiple demands, “external support providers can assist their efforts by creating opportunities for professional learning about the connections among multiple policies and their implications for practice.” This supports schools to negotiate connections between their own beliefs and practices (both individually and collaboratively) and the policy reform. Fullan (2016, p. 28) also asserts that the really important variable rests at the individual interpretation of the change:

548

T. Walsh

The real crunch comes in the relationships between these new ideas and the thousands of subjective realities embedded in people’s individual and organisational contexts and their personal histories. How these subjective realities are addressed or ignored is crucial for whether potential changes become meaningful at the level of individual use and effectiveness. It is worth repeating that changes in actual practice along the three dimensions – in materials, pedagogy and beliefs, in what people do and think – are essential if the intended outcome is to be achieved.

A consequence of policy incoherence is that teachers and other stakeholders interpret policy reforms in light of their professional experiences and identities, often losing the intent of the policy makers. Coburn et al. (2016, p. 245), summarizing scholarship in the area, argue that stakeholders (teachers and educationalists at all levels of the education system) draw “on prior knowledge and practices to interpret the reforms, leading them to construct policy messages in ways that either reinforced preexisting practices or focused on surface-level forms of the reform proposals.” They note that policies that relied on inducement and force for implementation led to considerable teacher resistance, symbolic or superficial responses, less engagement with professional development opportunities, and an increase in gaming the system. The achievement of policy coherence depends both on policy design and the response of educators in schools. As Stosich (2018, p. 204) states, “policy incoherence can impede school improvement by dividing educators’ attention among multiple initiatives, resulting in a diluted, hybrid of multiple ideas that are layered on top of old practices and have little if any effect on student learning.” Even when policies are complementary, they increase the complexity of policy enactment which requires increased and coordinated support for successful integration into practice. For coherence, the impact at all levels of the education system must be examined and explored, focusing on the interaction, regulation, and flow of ideas between these, with the curriculum “as something constructed in interrelations between levels” (Pietarinen et al., 2017, p. 36). As (Honig & Hatch, 2004, p. 18) state: Coherence depends on how implementers make sense of policy demands and on the extent to which external demands fit a particular school’s culture, political interests, aspirations, conceptions of professionalism, and ongoing operations.

This implies a need to invest in the institutional capacity of schools and of personnel at all levels of the education system as the crafters of coherence. At the school level, Honig and Hatch (2004) conceptualize policy coherence as a dynamic process that involves stakeholders continuously “crafting” or negotiating the fit between external school demands and the internal goals or strategies of the school. They argue that it is a fallacy to believe all these factors can be addressed at the point of policy formation in a complex, dynamic, and fluid policy landscape. If policy coherence is addressed from a top-down approach only, it “treats policy coherence as a technical problem of aligning the components of schooling and largely ignores the subjective reality of coherence – that regardless of standards, curricula and assessments may be organised, the same arrangements may be experienced differently by principals, teachers, and other implementers” (Honig & Hatch, 2004, p. 17).

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

549

Moving now to focus on curriculum coherence, Kelly (2009) argues that a key component of achieving coherence is building a shared understanding or vision of the goal of a reform to serve as the binding element between all of the various components of the curriculum. In terms of the curriculum, schools may either buffer or bridge themselves in relation to external policy changes. Buffering involves not the blind dismissal of external demands but strategically deciding to engage external demands in limited ways (Honig & Hatch, 2004, p. 23) or adopting surface-level features. Symbolic adoption involves a superficial adoption of external policy but not allowing those demands to influence the core activities of the organization, leading to peripheral or first-order change and an absence of impact on actual pedagogical practices. There has been much debate about the importance of the origins and locus for curriculum reform. There are issues with both top-down (as coherence is largely understood as the objective alignment of external demands rather than a continual process of negotiating the fit between schools’ variable external demands and internal circumstances) and bottom-up approaches to policy development. A top-down approach conceptualizes teachers as the “implementers” or “consumers” of reforms developed centrally (Fullan, 2016). There is more convincing evidence of the effectiveness of a bottom-up approach as it impacts on how teachers perceive reform and on their practices, enables sense-making, ownership, and thus sustainability. Pietarinen et al. (2017, p. 25) argue the need for both a steering (top-down) and participative (bottom-up) element as part of curriculum reform, where the crossfertilization of ideas across all levels of the system extends the “zone of proximal development” of all stakeholders. As they state: The top-down-bottom-up strategy, utilising both the state-level capacity to provide framework and direction, resources, and bring together broad networks, and the local-level stakeholders’ capacity to learn, create, respond to, and feed into overall directions, is more likely to contribute overall coherence to the curriculum reform.

Such a strategy provides opportunity for all stakeholders to play a central role in interpreting, integrating, and transforming the general goals of the curriculum, through open collaboration and communication within and between schools. Similarly, Van den Akker (2018, p. 17) argues that while school-based curriculum development is slow, it ultimately leads to sustainable changes in school practices. Acknowledging the tension that emerges in the drive for large-scale reform and system accountability with the need for local variation and ownership, he calls for a process of “mutual adaptation” of curriculum policy by all partners rather than a “fidelity” to curriculum materials. In this interaction, changes occur to both the curriculum and its users in a mutually beneficial process (Sullanmaa et al. 2019, p. 258), taking the school as the center of curriculum renewal. Schmidt and Prawat (2006), in the US context, argue that the key variable for the achievement of curriculum coherence is the credibility of the policy reform as interpreted by stakeholders, rather than origins or locus of the reform at a national or devolved level. At the school level, teachers belong to multiple networks, including professional, public, and epistemic communities, from which they draw scripts for decision-

550

T. Walsh

making. These “multiple scripts can lead to confusion about how to make sense of specific external demands and create rifts among teachers and other school staff that impede collective sense making” (Honig and Hatch 2004, p. 23). It is important to acknowledge that achieving curriculum coherence is a collective and simultaneous process, wherein policy makers and teachers are engaged in meaning making, often transforming their subjective realities, but from their own unique perspectives. As Ball (2012, p. 3) states, curriculum development can be “unscientific and irrational,” involving a process of learning and meaning making across the system. Curriculum is created and enacted by a multitude of actors and stakeholders, often with competing values and interests at stake. As Van den Akker (2018, p. 6) states: . . .every proposal for curriculum renewal will challenge or even disturb the existing interrelations between the various representations. It is not hard to understand that it is quite challenging to restore balance and create a new sort of harmony between all those representations.

Successful curriculum reform is influenced by the curriculum’s coherence with teacher’s personal beliefs, local school context, and the time and support afforded for collective learning and classroom implementation. Opportunities for joint sense-making and the construction of shared goals to support active engagement and participation are required so that those directly affected by a curriculum reform can “work through the effects, imagine the consequences, and experiment on how this is going to affect the reality in their work” (Pietarinen et al., 2017, p. 36). According to Pietarinen et al. (2017, p. 26), sense-making has both cognitive and emotional dimensions and is a “dynamic and interactive process through which both individuals and groups of people construct meaning.” The level of sense-making determines if the reform is adopted, rejected, or resisted in terms of the person or group’s existing knowledge and beliefs. Collective sense-making at all levels of the education system allows for shared interpretation of the reform and provides a tool for building curriculum coherence (Pietarinen et al., 2017). As Van den Akker (2018, p. 9) states: Even within centralised systems/jurisdictions (with oftentimes a high-fidelity tendency), it has become clear that real and sustainable implementation can only succeed when teachers have a prominent role in changing their own practice. That trend puts even more emphasis on teachers as key people in curriculum change. Both individual and team learning is essential, in particular when school-wide change is aspired. Thus, teachers need to get out of their customary isolation.

Policy Landscape in Ireland Curriculum Policy Development Structures in Ireland This section details the structures and processes for education policy development in the Irish context, with a particular focus on the curriculum for primary schools. These, in turn, are influenced by and interface with a broad array of other structures

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

551

within the education ecosystem, most notably at early childhood and postprimary levels. It is also crucial to remember that there is both a chronological and temporal aspect to these structures and processes, wherein relationships and interactions change over time. Governance structures in schools in Ireland bear the stamp of its colonial history and its nineteenth-century educational origins, resulting in both high levels of centralization alongside much school autonomy prompted by the private (largely religious denominational) ownership and management of most ‘public’ schools. The changing policy landscape over the past two decades has reshaped the roles and responsibilities of policy actors in national departments and agencies, and how they interface with other stakeholders. This is explored in turn below using the supranational, national, regional, and school levels as orienting structures. The totality of the landscape is captured in Fig. 1, moving from the supranational in the outer rim to the local in the inner circle. This landscape is unpacked, level by level, in the sections below.

B1

PISA

Department of Education

Education and Training Boards Wider Education Stakeholders

A1

- Boards of Management - Principals - Teachers - Special Needs Assistants - Parents - Pupils

Wider State Departments and Agencies

EU

18 Agencies of the Department of Education

Education Centres Partners in Education - Unions - Management Bodies - Principal organisations - Parent associations

B2

Fig. 1 Educational policy landscape in Ireland – supranational to school levels

A2

552

T. Walsh

Supranational Level Educational reform and improvement agendas, including curriculum reform, have become ubiquitous features of education systems across the world. These are stimulated and in turn influenced by a web of complex supranational policy relations that exert influence on national policy (Grek, 2009). Such influences promoting the internationalization and globalization of the educational vernacular are met with efforts to ensure contextual identities are integral to national policies, creating tensions within education policies and national curricula. Sellar and Lingard (2013, p. 722) assert that the strength of international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been fortified by the contemporary focus on evidence-based policy development, exerting both infrastructural and epistemological governance over individual countries. Given Ireland’s unique geopolitical and linguistic context, these international influences on education are varied and complex. Ireland was the first country to invite an OECD review of its education system in the 1960s, and a very strong link to OECD thinking remains within current policy and curriculum developments. Sugrue (2006) and O’Doherty (2014) argue that OECD membership has influenced ideological and structural reforms in Irish education. Conway and Murphy (2013) trace the impact of the OECD on a range of educational policy initiatives, especially the impact of the influential Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The growing desire of the European Union to harmonize education policy across member states by creating a “European Education Area” (European Commission, 2020) has impacted on the direction of education policy. Influential policies such as “Education and Training 2020” have led to increasing commonality in education policy and curriculum content across Europe (Klatt & Milana, 2020), promoting a focus on digital skills and key competences for lifelong learning. Moreover, the management of educational data by agencies such as Eurostat and Eurydice has increased the European Union’s soft governance of education policy across members states (Grek & Lawn, 2009), including Ireland. Membership of EU agencies such as the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education has impacted on the direction and shape of inclusive education policy in the Irish context, thus impacting on curriculum provisions. Ireland’s historical relationship with the UK has also been an influence on our education system. Skerritt (2019) argues that the promotion of more “autonomous” schools (Department of Education and Skills [DES], 2015), similar to trends in the UK, provides evidence of UK influence on our education system in recent times. This thesis follows that of Limond (2010), who argues that Ireland’s education policy has been greatly influenced by that of Britain given their long and complex history. While this argument has been convincingly contested (O’Donoghue & Harford, 2012), it is inevitable that Ireland’s education policy is influenced somewhat by its closest neighbor that shares its island territory. Anglo-American linkages (Lynch et al., 2012) have also been identified as influential in a transnational world of policy borrowing and brokering.

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

553

National Level At a national level, the Irish Constitution (Government of Ireland, 1937) provides the overall framework of principles and the relative roles and responsibilities of the key protagonists in Irish education. More recently, the Education Act 1998 (Government of Ireland, 1998) provides a legislative basis for the key features of the education system and is the primary legislation underpinning the governance and administration of the education system, setting out the functions and responsibilities of all key partners in the schooling system (Glendenning, 2018). Since the 1990s, policy development in Ireland, including education policy, has been underpinned by social partnership and a consultative public discourse on education (Coolahan et al., 2017, p. 109). Consultation is a legislative requirement and integral to the spirit of social partnership that permeates social policy development in Ireland (Farry, 2006). As described by the DES, “[E]ducation is delivered in a spirit of partnership with other key stakeholders” (DES, 2016, p. 6), most notably local patrons and managers of schools. Consultation with stakeholders on key policy decisions, including curriculum and assessment developments, is central to practice and underpinned by the Education Act 1998 (Government of Ireland, 1998). The religious patronage system underpinning the ownership and management of almost all primary schools in Ireland has been enshrined within the Education Act 1998, conferring high levels of autonomy to schools’ Boards of Management. A DES (2015) paper acknowledged that while schools enjoy high levels of autonomy in relation to pedagogy, the system provides for limited autonomy in relation to curriculum content and assessment. The infrastructure of education policy development at the national level (see Fig. 1) is delineated across five key areas below, with a particular focus on the structures for curriculum policy development at primary school level. The Department of Education, headed by the Minister for Education, has specific responsibility for education policy, funding, and legislation. It is led by a Secretary General who acts as the Chief Executive Officer and “has overall responsibility for managing the Department, implementing and monitoring policy and delivering outputs (The Department of Education was previously named the Department of Education and Skills (DES) from 2011 to July 2020.)” (DES, 2016, p. 8). Within the Department of Education, a number of sections and units have been created to advance particular aspects of education policy (DES, 2016), the most salient of which for this focus on curriculum are: • The Curriculum and Assessment Policy Unit plays a coordinating role in maintaining the integrity and momentum of curricular reforms in partnership with the Inspectorate, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), the State Examinations Commission, and other stakeholders. It has oversight of the governance, staffing, funding, and monitoring of wider agencies with responsibility for curriculum and assessment. • The Central Policy and Public Sector Reform units of the Department have a remit to drive public service reform within the Department by improving its

554

• •

• • •

T. Walsh

capacity in terms of policy making, research and evaluation capacity, data usage, and data and knowledge management. The Inspectorate contributes to the overall policy making of the Department, drawing on its expertise in school-based inspections, as well as the pedagogical and research expertise of inspectors. The Teacher Education section promotes the quality of teacher education across the continuum from initial teacher education to ongoing professional learning. It oversees the work of a range of affiliated bodies that advance particular policy initiatives, including the Professional Development Service for Teachers (PDST), the National Induction Programme for Teachers, and the Centre for School Leadership. The Special Education Section is responsible for policy development for children with special education needs. The Gaeltacht Education Unit has responsibility for overseeing and supporting Irish-medium education in schools in Irish-speaking regions of Ireland. An international cooperation unit and a north/south cooperation unit have been established to manage relationships and engagements with educational agencies and organizations beyond the jurisdiction, including the EU, the OECD, and the Council of Europe.

These sections and units of the Department of Education individually and collectively develop a range of education policy documents (e.g., action plans, strategies, toolkits, guidelines, and circulars) that impact on the work of schools. In the past two decades, a range of national agencies under the aegis of the Department of Education were created to advance specialized areas and remits of education policy. At present, there are 18 agencies under the aegis of the Department of Education with specific policy and administrative responsibilities. The most pertinent of these relating to curriculum is the NCCA, but other agencies such as the State Examinations Commission, the Teaching Council, and the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) impact significantly on curriculum and assessment policy. Each of these 18 agencies has a “section responsible” for them within the governance structure of the Department of Education (DES, 2016, pp. 490–491). The term “under the aegis” is an interesting one as it implies that the various agencies are “sponsored by” or “under the protection” of the Department. In reality, there are varying levels of control over and autonomy for the agencies created by the Department of Education to devolve its functions, and this is generally set out in legislation. Each of these agencies publishes educational policies relevant to their remit, often engaging and consulting stakeholders in the policy development process. The diffusion of policy responsibility across national agencies, motivated by the quest for less centralization and greater policy coherence, may indeed have resulted in new policy misalignments and a sense of initiative overload (King et al., 2019). Given the focus of this chapter on curriculum, it is worth focusing in-depth on the work of the NCCA. The role of the NCCA is to advise the Minister for Education on

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

555

all matters relating to curriculum and assessment from early childhood to postprimary education, and it is funded by a grant from the Department of Education. The Minister for Education appoints all 25 members of the Council (including the Chairperson) of the NCCA on the basis of nominations forwarded by the various representative groupings, and the Council is accountable to the Minister. Lines of governance are formalized through “[A]n oversight and Performance Delivery Agreement is in place between the Department of Education and Skills and the NCCA covering governance, operational, funding and reporting relationships” (NCCA, 2020, p. 43). The composition and structure of the NCCA Council is enshrined in legislation and is representative of the various stakeholders, striving for coherence across domains and sectors of the education system. Beyond the Department of Education and its 18 agencies, there are 17 recognized partners in education as listed in the 2016 Minister’s Brief (DES, 2016). These partners have legislative rights under the Education Act 1998 (Government of Ireland, 1998) to be involved in and consulted on education policy development. The partners can be grouped into four broad categories as follows: • There are 10 school management bodies, representing both religious and nonreligious interests, that have managerial responsibility for schools. • Three Teacher Unions, one at primary school level and two at postprimary level, represent the views of their members in terms of education policy development. • There is a principal organization for the primary and postprimary sectors, the Irish Primary Principals’ Network and the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, respectively. • The National Parents’ Council Primary and the National Parents’ Council Postprimary represent the views of parents in their respective sectors. The rights of the partners in education are mobilized by their representation on a wide range of educational bodies and agencies. Again, many of these partners regularly publish and disseminate policy documents to fulfill their remits or to support their constituencies in the interpretation and enactment of wider educational policy. Education policy is also impacted by a wide range of State departments and agencies that impact both directly and indirectly on education. In recent times, dedicated State departments have been established or reconfigured to lead policy development for the early childhood education sector (the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth) and the higher education sector (the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science). TUSLA, the Child and Family Agency, also has a broad remit for education especially in terms of child protection and welfare. At a macro level, the resourcing of education, like all other public services, is determined by the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. As well as the named education partners and agencies under the aegis of the Department of Education, the educational landscape is populated by a very wide array of wider educational stakeholders. These organizations, groups, bodies, and

556

T. Walsh

institutions occupy a pivotal role in both policy and curriculum development as they are often representative of wider constituencies with which they engage and consult. In many instances, no more than the education partners, they are often the conduit between the national and the local level in the virtual absence of regional structures in the Irish context. An exhaustive listing is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the following are among the most important: • The Office of the Ombudsman for Children was established in 2004 to promote the rights and welfare of children and plays a role in investigating complaints made by or on behalf of children. • Given the decline in religious vocations, a number of patronage and trustee bodies have been established to oversee the managerial responsibilities of the schools under the auspices of the various denominations. One of the core functions of these patron and trustee bodies is to ensure the ethos or characteristic spirit of the schools’ founders is maintained and promoted. The Association of Trustees of Catholic Schools represents 64 such trustee bodies with specific interest and remit for Catholic schools. • The Irish Episcopal Conference is the assembly of the Catholic Bishops of Ireland, and it has established a Council for Education to articulate a policy and vision for Catholic Education in Ireland. • A wide range of Irish language organizations, including Gaeloideachas and Foras na Gaeilge, support and promote Irish language education and policy. • The growth of the early childhood sector, and its interface with primary education, has seen the growth of a number of early childhood education voluntary and advocacy groups, including Early Childhood Ireland, the Federation of Early Childhood Providers, and Plé (the national association of Higher Education Institutions offering undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in early childhood education and care). • The Irish Second-level Students’ Union (ISSU) has become increasingly vocal and central in articulating student voice in terms of education policy, particularly in light of the disruption to education with the Covid-19 pandemic. • There is also a range of teacher subject associations as well as the Irish Association of Teachers in Special Education (IATSE). • Higher education institutions offering education along the teacher education continuum are also key stakeholders in terms of education policy. Moreover, depending on policy issue, other stakeholders such as business organizations and a range of nongovernmental advocacy bodies can be included in the policy development and consultative process.

Regional Level There is a virtual absence of an educational infrastructure at the regional level in Ireland, resulting in a general direct relationship between schools and national

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

557

departments, agencies, and partners. In a country of less than five million people, a policy option of national executive agencies “under the aegis” of the Department of Education rather than regional structures was taken in the 1990s and enshrined into legislation (Coolahan, 2017; Walshe, 1999). This has resulted in virtually no regional structures to act as a mediator or buffer between national policies and individual schools apart from two notable exceptions: • The Education and Training Boards (ETBs), of which there are 16 regionally located, represent the main regional structure for education in Ireland. These provide a governance structure for approximately 35% of postprimary schools and less than 1% of primary schools. • The Education Centre network, under the umbrella of Education Support Centres Ireland (ESCI), is also regionally based and provides a space and context for teachers to come together for professional and personal learning. The impact of the absence of regional structures in Ireland is well captured by the OECD which reports that 50% of decisions for lower secondary schools in Ireland were taken at the school level and 50% at the national level in 2010 (OECD, 2012). This is unlike the OECD average where 23% of decisions are taken at a local or regional/subregional level. In the absence of a regional infrastructure, the partners in education and wider stakeholders at the national level represent a key conduit of communication with individual schools.

School Level State primary schools in Ireland are publicly funded, but the vast majority are privately owned and managed, primarily by religious and denominational interests. Moreover, many of the management bodies, particularly the religious bodies, have substantial property ownership rights as well as legislative rights in relation to the promotion of the ethos or characteristic spirit of schools arising from the patronage system. Each recognized school has a voluntary and representative Board of Management, answerable primarily to the patron (Government of Ireland, 1998), which is responsible for authorizing school-based decision-making. Boards of management often delegate key functions to the school principal. At primary level, there are approx. 3,100 schools, while 44% these have four teachers or fewer (DES, 2020a, p. 9). Consequently, most schools have a principal who also teaches a class of pupils, splitting their leadership, management, and teaching functions. In line with the State’s policy of inclusion, there are currently approximately 16,000 Special Needs Assistants (SNAs) across primary and postprimary schools supporting the care needs of children with special educational needs. Many schools have parent associations which engage in a wide array of activities, including policy development, while parents are also formally represented on school boards of management. Another contextual factor at the school level hindering teachers’ engagement with increasingly complex policy documents emanating from a range of departments,

558

T. Walsh

agencies, and organizations is the nature of their school day. As the OECD Education at a Glance 2018 Indicators elucidate, the “teaching contract for Irish teachers focuses primarily (if not exclusively) on teaching time” (DES, 2018, p. 16). The intensity of teacher-student contact hours throughout the school day and school year leaves minimal time for engagement with external policy or curricular documentation or ideas, either at an individual or collective/collaborative level. Moreover, average class sizes are high in Ireland (the seventh highest of 34 in 2018) relative to other OECD countries (DES, 2020b, p. 11). Collectively this represents a very diffused picture of the interface between the various levels of the education system from the supranational to individual schools. The busyness of the national landscape is not balanced by a regional or school-based infrastructure to effectively mediate, interpret, make sense of, or feed into national policy making. While it is relatively straightforward to delineate the various departments, agencies, organizations, and actors at the various levels of the education system, what is less easy to map or comprehend is the interface and fluidity within and between these levels. Clear relationships, representatives, and reporting lines are evident between the various national agencies and the Department of Education, yet there is less clarity regarding the interface and interaction among these agencies and, beyond this, with recognized partners at the national level. One initiative at the national level in this regard was the establishment of the Primary Education Forum in 2018 to facilitate exchange between various departments, agencies, teachers, school leaders, and managers in an effort to bring greater alignment and coherence to policy development for primary schools (White, 2020). This is an important development given the range of possibilities for the interpretation, refraction, distortion, or enactment of intentions within and across the various levels.

Discussion and Conclusion It is evident from the case study of Ireland that policy and curriculum development processes involve a complex and ever-evolving network of relationships among interrelated actors and organizations, a multifaceted “ecology of reform” as termed by Savage and O’Connor (2019, p. 821). This is an inevitability considering the multiple actors, stakeholders, values, interests, and levels at stake. When there is a revision to an education policy, particularly curriculum policy, it triggers a multiplicity of emotions and responses at the collective and individual levels that can range from the very positive to the very negative. The tensions, uncertainties, senses of loss, or gain can be assuaged through carefully written and oral communications, but it is ultimately in the refraction through all the various levels and networks of the education policy landscape that the messaging arrives at the school level, where it is ultimately interpreted and mediated by teachers. In the context of a global pandemic and the curtailment of the normal networking opportunities, achieving shared understandings and coherence becomes a more substantial challenge. Achieving alignment and coherence is more a matter of degrees rather than absolutes. However, there is a greater prospect of alignment and coherence in

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

559

systems that favor more evolutionary policy and curriculum development processes, a characteristic not present in historical curriculum developments in Ireland (Walsh, 2012). It is through ongoing and mutually respectful interactions within the spirit of a “learning system” (Hayward et al., 2021) that a vision and its enactment can be conceptualized and developed in a sustainable way. Such a system is characterized by a process of gradual progression where the specifics of the curriculum, its nuts and bolts, are continuously coconstructed by a community of partners. It also provides for a symbiotic sharing of knowledge and expertise across all levels of the system, creating social alignment as well as a sense of shared understanding and ownership of policy. The complexity of the education policy landscape emphasizes the importance of a competent system as opposed to a focus on any particular level, grouping, or individual. Urban et al. (2011) explored the characteristics of a competent system at four levels in the context of early childhood education, emphasizing the need to focus on the institutional and governance levels as well as the individual domains. Too often in education, blame is apportioned for the perceived failure of a policy initiative at the individual level (e.g., school leaders and teachers) without sufficient interrogation of the institutional factors that impact on policy enactment. This accentuates the importance of coherence at the national level of the policy landscape in Ireland in order to create the conducive conditions for curriculum development. Given the wide range of stakeholders at the national level and the loose coupling of the various levels across the system, the risks associated with a model of centralized diffusion of policy making must be managed. It also emphasizes the importance of regional support structures to support mediation of policy, to ensure two-way policy flow, and to create the conditions necessary for meaningful engagement with policy development and enactment. But as the literature clearly communicates, it is ultimately at the level of the individual teacher that the curriculum is coconstructed and mediated. This is a level in the Irish education system that warrants additional support and resourcing to ensure teachers have the opportunity and capacity to fulfill their role as curriculum developers. So what is needed is a focus on alignment and coherence at both a national level using extensive knowledge-sharing mechanisms to support sensemaking and the integration of new information into existing knowledge and beliefs, and at a local level to ensure the purpose and shared vision can be integrated with existing practices in a way that promotes consistency and stability of decisionmaking (Pietarinen et al., 2017). Coherence will only emerge at the interface between the provisions of the new policy and the existing practices and beliefs, both iteratively informing one another in a reciprocal relationship of learning. The challenge in curriculum reform lies in the ownership and sense-making of aims and values more than the content to be taught (Fullan, 2018; Shirley, 2016). A key strength of the Irish policy development infrastructure is the focus on partnership and consultation. However, a key challenge in achieving a competent system is the imbalance of stakeholders and organizations at the national and school levels. Given the structure, there are many voices and policies emanating from the national level but few structures to feed upward or to mediate and support enactment

560

T. Walsh

at the local level. This infrastructure promotes an emphasis on top-down approaches to policy and curriculum development rather than fostering opportunities for bottomup movements. The absence of regional or local structures that could support mediation for specific circumstances and contexts in Ireland need to be factored into policy design and enactment processes. The multiplicity of departments, department sections and units, agencies, partners, and associated stakeholders, while all working earnestly in the policy development space, cause much complexity in the interpretation and refraction of key messaging as policies travel within the educational ecosystem. Moreover, there can be contradictions, tensions, and inconsistencies within policies, causing much frustration for teachers and schools responding to multiple policy-development agencies. Van den Akker argues that “bridges” between the various levels and actors must be part of curriculum design to ensure ownership and actives support, asserting that: A general pattern is that the worlds of policy, practice and research are often diffuse and widely separated. A crucial challenge for more successful innovations in education is to build bridges between many levels, factors and actors.” (Van den Akker, 2018, p. 8)

Viewing education and curriculum policy development and enactment as a shared enterprise from the supranational to the school level, it is critical that there are two-way lines of communications between policy and curriculum architects and all stakeholders in the education ecosystem. While there may be robust systems of communication within the Department of Education and perhaps between the Department of Education and its agencies, there is less provision for interaction and engagement among and between the various national agencies and the national partners. This can lead to a sense of ad hoc and uncontrolled policy development, impacting negatively on the possibility of successful enactment. From the other perspective, the absence of structures can cause a disconnect between national policy makers and individual schools, both in terms of hearing the voice of teachers and of mediating curriculum policy. The Irish context would benefit from enhanced regional structures for the engagement of the multiplicity of actors at the national level as well as the provision of further supports to mediate and interpret policy at the school level in terms of guidelines and supports for individual schools to adopt and adapt national policy. In order for this level of familiarity, sense-making, and ownership over curriculum policy to emerge, time is a critical factor for teachers to engage with curriculum thinking at a school and wider level, both individually and collaboratively. In the context of small schools, clustering structures for governance and administration could enhance schools’ capacities to engage with core elements of school work (Coolahan et al., 2017, p. 108), namely, curriculum and assessment. Leadership capacities must be leveraged to build capacity within and among school communities to promote sense-making. It is only with deep engagement that a shift from policy adoption to policy integration can be achieved, assimilating the vision into the fabric of teachers’ beliefs and practices (Stosich, 2018, p. 205). Curriculum coherence remains elusive until there is shared understanding across all levels of the education system, most particularly sense-making and ownership at the school level.

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

561

References Anderson, L. (2002). Curricular alignment: A re-examination. Theory Into Practice, 41(4), 255–260. Ansell, C., & Geyer, R. (2017). “Pragmatic complexity” a new foundation for moving beyond “evidence-based policy making”. Policy Studies, 38(2), 149–167. Baker, E. (2004). Aligning curriculum, standards, and assessments: Fulfilling the promise of school reform. University of California, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). Ball, S. (1993). What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 13(2), 10–17. Ball, S. (2012). Politics and policy making in education. Routledge. Coburn, C., Hill, H., & Spillane, J. (2016). Alignment and accountability in policy design and implementation: The common core state standards and implementation research. Educational Researcher, 45(4), 243–251. Conway, P., & Murphy, R. (2013). A rising tide meets a perfect storm: New accountabilities in teacher and teacher education in Ireland. Irish Educational Studies, 32(1), 11–36. Coolahan, J. (2017). Towards the era of lifelong learning: A history of Irish education 1800–2016. Institute of Public Administration. Coolahan, J., Drudy, S., Hogan, P., Hyland, A., & McGuinness, S. (2017). Towards a better future: A review of the Irish school system. IPPN and NAPD. DES. (2015). Advancing school autonomy in the Irish school system: Consultation paper. DES. Retrieved from https://www.education.ie/en/Schools-Colleges/Information/Advancing-SchoolAutonomy-in-Ireland/School-Autonomy-Consultation-Paper.pdf DES. (2016). Organisation and current issues: A brief for the information of the minister for education and skills. DES. DES. (2018). Education at a glance 2018: OECD indicators. DES. Retrieved from https://www. education.ie/en/Publications/Statistics/International-Statistical-Reports/eag-2018-briefingnote.pdf DES. (2020a). Statistical bulletin – July 2020 overview of education 1999–2019. DES. Retrieved from https://www.education.ie/en/Publications/Statistics/Statistical-Reports/statistical-bulletin2020-overview-of-education-1999-2019.pdf DES. (2020b). National briefing note on education at a glance 2020 OECD indicators: A country profile for Ireland. DES. Retrieved from https://www.education.ie/en/Publications/Statistics/ International-Statistical-Reports/national-briefing-note-on-education-at-a-glance-2020-oecdindicators.pdf European Commission. (2020). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on achieving the European Education Area by 2025. European Commission. Retrieved from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri¼CELEX:52020DC0625&from¼EN Farry, M. (2006). Education and the constitution. Roundhall Sweet and Maxwell. Fullan, M. (2016). The new meaning of educational change (5th ed.). Teachers College Press. Fullan, M. (2018). Surreal change: The real life of transforming public education. Routledge. Fusarelli, L. (2002). Tightly coupled policy in loosely coupled systems: Institutional capacity and organizational change. Journal of Educational Administration, 40(6), 561–575. Glendenning, D. (2018). Education and the law. Bloomsbury Professional. Government of Ireland. (1937). Constitution of Ireland. Government of Ireland. Government of Ireland. (1998). Education Act 1998. Government of Ireland. Grek, S. (2009). Governing by numbers: The PISA ‘effect’ in Europe. Journal of Education Policy, 24(1), 23–37. Grek, S., & Lawn, M. (2009). A short history of Europeanizing education. European Education, 41(1), 32–54.

562

T. Walsh

Hargreaves, D. H. (2003). Education epidemic: Transforming schools through innovation networks. Demos. Hatch, T. (2002). When improvement programs collide. The Phi Delta Kappa International, 83(8), 626–634. Hayward, L., Spillane, J., Walsh, T., & Wyse, D. (2021). From purpose to practice: Primary curriculum developments in Ireland. NCCA. Honig, M., & Hatch, T. (2004). Crafting coherence: How schools strategically manage multiple external demands. Educational Researcher, 33(8), 16–30. Kelly, A. (2009). The curriculum: Theory and practice (6th ed.). Sage. King, F., Forde, C., Razzaq, J., & Torrance, D. (2019). Systems of education governance and cultures of justice in Ireland, Scotland and Pakistan. In P. Angelle & D. Torrance (Eds.), Cultures of social justice leadership: An intercultural context of schools (pp. 67–92). Palgrave Macmillan. Klatt, G., & Milana, M. (2020). Education and training 2020. In M. Milana, G. Klatt, & S. Vatrella (Eds.), Europe’s lifelong learning markets, governance and policy (pp. 23–48). Palgrave. Limond, D. (2010). [An] historic culture. . .rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored? British influence on Irish education since 1922. Comparative Education, 46(4), 449–462. Looney, J. (2011). Alignment in complex education systems: Achieving balance and coherence (OECD working papers no. 64). OECD. Lynch, K., Grummell, B., & Devine, D. (2012). New managerialism in education: Commercialization, carelessness and gender. Palgrave Macmillan. NCCA. (2020). National Council for Curriculum and Assessment annual report 2019. NCCA. Retrieved from https://ncca.ie/media/4634/ncca_annualreport2019_0620.pdf OECD. (2012). Education at a glance 2012: OECD indicators. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/ eag2012-en O’Day, J. (2002). Complexity, accountability and school improvement. Harvard Educational Review, 72(3), 293–329. O’Doherty, T. (2014). Defining moments in policy developments, direction, and implementation in Irish initial teacher education policy. CEPS Journal, 4(4), 29–49. O’Donoghue, T., & Harford, J. (2012). Contesting the Limond thesis on British influence in Irish education since 1922: A comparative perspective. Comparative Education, 48(3), 337–346. Pietarinen, J., Pyhalto, K., & Soini, T. (2017). Large-scale curriculum reform in Finland – Exploring the interrelation between implementation strategy, the function of the reform, and curriculum coherence. The Curriculum Journal, 28(1), 22–40. Priestley, M., & Biesta, G. (2013). A curriculum for the twenty-first century? In M. Priestley & G. Biesta (Eds.), Reinventing the curriculum: New trends in curriculum policy and practice (pp. 229–236). Bloomsbury. Savage, G., & O’Connor, K. (2019). What’s the problem with ‘policy alignment’? The complexities of national reform in Australia’s federal system. Journal of Education Policy, 34(6), 812–835. Schmidt, W., & Prawat, R. (2006). Curriculum coherence and national control of education: Issue or non-issue? Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38(6), 641–658. Sellar, S., & Lingard, B. (2013). The OECD and global governance in education. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 710–725. Shirley, D. (2016). The new imperatives of educational change. Routledge. Skerritt, C. (2019). Privatization and ‘destatization’: School autonomy as the ‘Anglo neoliberalization’ of Irish education policy. Irish Educational Studies, 38(2), 263–279. Stosich, E. (2018). Principals and teachers “craft coherence” among accountability policies. Journal of Educational Administration, 56(2), 203–219. Sugrue, C. (2006). A critical appraisal of the impact of international agencies on educational reforms and teachers’ lives and work: The case of Ireland? European Educational Research Journal, 5(3–4), 181–195. Sullanmaa, J., Pyhalto, K., Pietarinen, J., & Soini, T. (2019). Curriculum coherence as perceived by district-level stakeholders in large-scale national curriculum reform in Finland. The Curriculum Journal, 30(3), 244–263.

Alignment and Coherence in the Context of Policy and. . .

563

Sykes, G., O’Day, J., & Ford, T. (2009). The district role in instructional improvement. In G. Sykes, B. Schneider, & D. Plank (Eds.), Handbook of education policy research (pp. 767–784). AERA. Urban, M., Vandenbroeck, M., Lazzari, A., Van Laere, K., & Peeters, J. (2011). Competence requirements in early childhood education and care. European Commission, DirectorateGeneral for Education and Culture. Retrieved from https://www.earlychildhoodireland.ie/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/CoRe-report-Competencies.pdf Van den Akker, J. (2003). Curriculum perspectives: An introduction. In J. Van den Akker, U. Hameyer, & W. Kuiper (Eds.), Curriculum landscapes and trends (pp. 1–10). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Van den Akker, J. (2018). Future of education and skills 2030 curriculum analysis: Bridging curriculum design and implementation. OECD. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/ education/2030-project/contact/Bridging_curriculum_redesign_and_implementation.pdf Walsh, T. (2012). Primary education in Ireland 1897–1990: Curriculum and context. Peter Lang. Walshe, J. (1999). A new partnership in education: From consultation to legislation in the nineties. Institute of Public Administration. Weick, K. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 1–19. White, D. (2020). Before Covid (BC) and altered direction (AD): Primary education reacts to a changed world. In B. Mooney (Ed.), Ireland’s education yearbook 2020 (pp. 69–75). Education Matters.

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study of Four Cohorts of Elementary Teachers’ Life Hi/stories in the Republic of Cyprus (Late 1970s–2010s) Stavroula Philippou

and Stavroula Kontovourki

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teacher Knowledge, Professionalism, and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Theory-Practice Debate and Conceptualizations of Teacher Professionalism . . . . . . . . . Teacher Education Curricula: International and Local(ized) Discourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disciplinarity of Knowledge and (Non)academization of Lived Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Theory-Practice Debate in the Construction of Curricula and the Professionalization of Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

566 567 567 569 571 573 573 578 581 584

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine the connections of teacher professionalism and teacher education curricula across four cohorts of Greek-Cypriot elementary school teachers, which correspond to different periods during the last 40 years in the Republic of Cyprus. We do so through a dual move: focusing on the middle-ground, we approach teacher education curricula as emergent in teachers’ life hi/stories, and looking across generations, we explore these stories as contingent to changing sociohistorical and institutional contexts. Data collection involved multiple interviews with 28 study participants to construct their life histories, providing the basis for cross-case analyses within and across teacher cohorts. Teachers’ life histories brought forth notable differences in the ways in

S. Philippou (*) · S. Kontovourki University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_14

565

566

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

which teacher education and the profession were construed across and within cohorts. These differences concerned the types of knowledge that emerged in teachers’ constructions of teacher education curricula as biographical text/s, which enabled a view of the curriculum as lived and hence as a complex nexus of personal, institutional, and sociohistorical forces. This is explored through two key themes: the disciplinarity of knowledge and the (non)academization of experience in lived teacher education curricula; and the emergence of the theory-practice debate as central to teachers’ education and constitution as professionals. The chapter calls for attention to the production of local meanings as a means for understanding the historicity and topology of teacher education and professionalism, as these narrations suggest a changing landscape of teacher education as permeated by and simultaneously contributing to changing circumstances of higher education and the teaching profession. Keywords

Teacher education · Curricula · Life histories · Biographical text · Lived curriculum · Theory-practice debate · Teacher knowledge · Teacher professionalism · Teaching profession · Cyprus

Introduction In this chapter, we employ a biographical approach to problematize assumptions of a linear/structural connection between teacher education and particular notions of professionalism and to rather understand teacher education as occurring in historicized contexts/institutions, which shape teacher professionalism through their changing entanglements over space-time. Research on curriculum as biographical text further opens up possibilities to explore those entanglements not only as intended or formal, but also as lived/experienced (Pinar, 2012; Pinar & Irwin, 2012). To account for changing notions of professionalism, we draw on sociological studies of professions, especially ones historicizing those (e.g., Larson, 1977/2013; Lieberman, 1956; Welker, 1992). We thus examine the connections of teacher professionalism and teacher education curricula across four cohorts of GreekCypriot elementary school teachers, which correspond to different periods during the last 40 years in the Republic of Cyprus. We do so through a dual move: focusing on the middle-ground, we approach teacher education curricula as emergent in teachers’ life hi/stories, and looking across generations, we explore these stories as contingent to changing sociohistorical and institutional contexts, imbued with continuities and discontinuities over time. We thus argue that a focus on teachers’ hi/stories of their teacher education studies brings forth the interconnections of the personal, the institutional, and the social, which hold significance for understanding teacher professionalism over time.

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

567

Teacher Knowledge, Professionalism, and Education As a recurring theme in teacher education research, the relationship between theory and practice has been central in conceptualizations of teacher education curricula (e.g., Livingston & Assunção Flores, 2017; Loughran & Hamilton, 2016), at the same time that it has become a discursive means for teachers’ constitution as professionals (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2000; Wood, 2007). To explore connections among these areas and also introduce the context of our study, we refer briefly below to the theory-practice debate as linked, first, to conceptualizations of teacher professionalism and then, to teacher education.

The Theory-Practice Debate and Conceptualizations of Teacher Professionalism Traditionally, social theory has associated formal, context-independent knowledge, or the scientific understandings of a situation or problem to theory, while associating practice with procedural and context-dependent knowledge as well as situational and tacit learning (see, e.g., Muller, 2006), often (re)constructing a dichotomy, a binary of theory and practice. This may be seen, for instance, in Gibbons et al.’s (1994) Mode 1 and Mode 2, with the former referring to formal, academic-scientific knowledge that has value for the production of generic, public knowledge, and the latter constituting context-dependent and practice-based knowledge which is defined in terms of its practical value. This binary has been critiqued in differential ways. For instance, Lambert (2010) suggests that the binary constitutes one among other conceptions of practice, which further include the consideration of teaching as a set of practices, understandings of learning to teach through practice and rehearsal, and the practice of teaching as learning the profession. Cochran-Smith’s differing conceptions of teacher learning (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2000; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) also work toward expanding this relationship: “knowledge-for-practice” suggests that formal knowledge and theory is generated by “experts” like university professors, with teachers being expected to use this in order to improve practice; “knowledge-in-practice” is produced by expert teachers who deepen their knowledge and expertise as curriculum makers and designers of learning in the classroom; and “knowledge-of-practice” assumes that worthwhile knowledge is produced when teachers generate local knowledge of practice treating “expert” knowledge as material to interrogate, interpret, and transform as they connect it to broader social, cultural, and political issues. Aligned with this is the idea that practicalizing theoretical knowledge and theorizing practical knowledge is part of what expert teachers do (Cheng et al., 2012), which is in contrast to notions like theory application, that has been critiqued as resting upon a straightforward theory-practice relationship and reinforcing technical-rational models of learning to teach (Deng, 2004; see also, Hughes, 2006). Further traversing the notions of theory and practice, researchers like Deng (2004) have suggested that theory and practice are inextricably linked and

568

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

dialectically shaped. As Deng (2004) argued, theory may be seen as both formal and informal, while classroom practice is necessarily theory-laden since teachers form practice drawing on their perceptions of schooling, curriculum, teaching, and learning, as those are built from their professional histories and classroom experiences. Consequently, teachers do not receive or consume theory, but rather merge, synthesize, critique, and transform it in practice. This idea is encapsulated in understandings of teachers as researchers, scholars, and theorizers (Wood, 2007) or in the notion of praxis, which integrates theoretically informed reflection, dialogue, and action (Gade, 2014; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). From a poststructuralist perspective, theory is rooted in practice: in teachers’ own school biographies, in values they enact, in social contexts of practice, and in the social relationships that make up teaching and learning (Britzman, 2003, 63–64). Building on this, Mathewson Mitchell and Reid (2017) talked of “practice theory” (44) that foregrounds the idea of practice as a historic and collective achievement, produced and structured over time-space, and lived in teachers’ bodies as they constantly engage in reflection-inaction and in the co-production of learning with students. The theory-practice debate has been played out in differential conceptualizations of teacher professionalism, including in Hoyle’s concept of teacher professionality in the 1970s as composed of two models, each occupying an end of a continuum: that of “restricted professionality,” which relied upon intuition and experience guided by a narrow, classroom-based knowledge that derives from the day-by-day practicalities of teaching, and that of “extended professionality,” which relies on the conception of a teacher as valuing theory to underpin pedagogy and adopting a generally intellectual and rationally based approach to teaching (Evans, 2008). Hargreaves and Goodson’s (1996) classical professionalism has privileged academic knowledge while practical professionalism recognizes teachers’ experience and personal practical knowledge as central to their expertise and as a source of valid theory. Other types of teacher professionalism that the particular scholars propose place differential importance to practical and academic knowledge and link these, like postmodern notions of professionalism (e.g., Mockler, 2005), to teachers’ capacity to exercise discretionary judgment over issues of teaching, learning, and curriculum, mostly within but also beyond the classroom (e.g., Hargreaves and Goodson’s (1996) extended professionalism as a case of the latter). The division and hierarchization of practical and of academic knowledge has produced particular positions for teachers as professionals, whose knowledge has been seen by researchers as increasingly pushed to the margins and replaced by that of other “experts” who have been granted political control over curriculum policymaking (Goodson, 2007; Leaton Gray & Whitty, 2010). This view is especially pertinent in neoliberal contexts where teacher professionalism is perceived as under threat (e.g., Hargreaves, 2010; Helsby & McCulloch, 1996). As Assunção Flores (2016) suggests, increased accountability and public scrutiny, as well as the intensification and bureaucratization of teachers’ work and the increase of managerialism, have gradually reinforced not only restricted views of teacher professionalism, but also technical views of teacher education curricula: a matter explored below.

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

569

Teacher Education Curricula: International and Local(ized) Discourses Like teacher professionalism, teacher education curricula are viewed in this study as a political enterprise, both influencing and influenced by social, cultural, and political transformations (Assunção Flores, 2016) as well as by prevailing views of schools and schooling (Cochran-Smith, 2000). These include more specific-toteachers processes, such as recruitment, preparation, certification, licensure accreditation, induction, ongoing professional development, collective improvement of practice (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2010, 2017), but also broader processes in higher education, including the university as a changing institution itself. One such notable change, for example, has been a shift from a Bernsteinian traditional understanding of universities as the field of knowledge production to a contemporary understanding where “the university is positioned differently and is often responding to policy initiatives driven by societal change and political imperatives” (Krieg, 2010, 146, author’s emphasis). We understand different paradigms, types, models, or approaches to teacher education as “discourses,” emerging amid such broader sociopolitical discourses on schooling and higher education, further theorizing teacher preparation research as a historically situated social practice itself (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015). This is evident, for example, in Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1999) influential categorization into three approaches to “teacher learning” referred to earlier (each construing knowledge as for, in, or of practice), since questions of differential images of teachers and roles in educational change (with related differential assumptions for academic/teacher education researchers or other traditional experts) are taken into account to “distinguish” between those, thus rendering possible particular types of both teacher-subjects and academics/ researchers-subjects. Debates over teacher education raise questions about who should provide it, where, and with what content (Cochran-Smith, 2000; Darling-Hammond, 2006). Approaches to teacher education traversing the theory-practice dichotomy discussed above have gradually become a dominant discourse, at least in academia, since the 1970s, aspiring to prepare teachers-as-researchers/reflective practitioners or envision teacher education as research-based. Some argued that this has been more intense in Western countries, at least when compared to certain Asian counties, tracing it as an emphasis to practice-oriented courses rather than academic content and technicalrationality courses in teacher education curricula (e.g., Cheng et al., 2012; Deng, 2004). However, this is not uniform; for instance, Alvunger and Wahlström (2018) conclude that in some teacher education curricula in Sweden “subject courses with strong classification and disciplinary framing get a hierarchal(sic) precedence over the common professionally oriented courses in the ‘educational sciences core’” (345–346). Similarly, Darling-Hammond (2010) considered as “strong programs” those that require “learning to practice in practice, with expert guidance” (40) and pointed toward the need for teacher educators, as a professional collective, to develop strong models of teacher preparation and resist pressures for weaker ones (Darling-Hammond, 2006) as a resolve (long-established in other professions) “to

570

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

end the practice of allowing untrained individuals to practice” (312) in the context of certification debates in the USA. While there are contextual differences to be considered when tracing the components which usually comprise teacher education curricula (general education; subject-matter studies, taught concurrently or consecutively with other studies; foundation of education studies; methods studies; and field experience), what seems to remain constant is that the first four components take place in higher education, whereas field experience in schools (Cheng et al., 2012). This further fuels the fragmentation and lack of articulation between such key components in teacher education curricula (Assunção Flores, 2016; Loughran & Hamilton, 2016) as well as a disconnect between what is learned on campus and in field experiences (Zeichner, 2010). Such spatial arrangements seem to emerge from, as well as reinforce, this theory-practice divide, as analyzed earlier, which has been a frequent concern in teacher education curricula discussions, despite a shift over the last 40 years in language from “teacher training” to “teacher education” and from training colleges to universities (Livingston & Assunção Flores, 2017). Such shifts in teacher education discourses are thus indicative of how the study of teacher education needs to account for broader trends expanding beyond localized/ historicized contexts. In the Republic of Cyprus, the first public university was founded in 1989 (enrolling its first students in 1992) with education being one of its largest departments from the beginning. The Department of Education Sciences (Epistimon tis Agogis), as tellingly named, was to replace the Pedagogical Academy (PA), a higher education institution preparing elementary teachers between 1959 and 1993 (Maratheftis & Ioannidou-Koutselini, 2000). In comparing their curricula, Koutselini (2007) argued that this reflected a shift from positivist/technical to technical/reflective models of teacher preparation. However, there is relatively little research on teacher education and notions of professionalism in Cyprus. Such research rests upon a historical understanding of elementary teachers’ position in the Cypriot society as undeniably marked by their positioning as public servants (as opposed to secondary education teachers who remained largely under the control of the Greek Orthodox Church)—as far back as 1929, long before the country’s independence in 1960. They were at the time recognized as experts of some sort (teaching all grades and subjects in elementary education for children between 6 and 12 years old) and simultaneously becoming accountable to a centralized British colonial government (Persianis, 2010), which also gradually governed teacher education in centrally formed teacher colleges. This historicity is also marked by transitions between, or rather amalgamations of, the “teacher role” to include spiritual and moral, national/political anti-colonial, economic, and typical professional/public servant dimensions (cf. Constantinou, 2020; Persianis, 2006). Despite changes over the years, both before and after independence, teachers’ positioning as public servants, rather than as autonomous professionals, has been reiterated through official measures in a highly centralized system, the Ministry of Education being the state’s sole policy-making, administrative, and (educational) law-enforcing body (e.g., prescribing curricula and textbooks; regulating teacher appointments, secondments, transfers, inspections, evaluations, and promotions; see, for instance,

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

571

Koutselini-Ioannidou, 1997; Pashiardis, 2004; Persianis, 2010). Nevertheless, our research revealed diverse and often contradictory understandings of professionalism, which mirrored such previous conceptualizations with restricted curricular autonomy and guided professional development (e.g., Kontovourki et al., 2015; Philippou et al., 2016). Yet present were also possibilities of diversifying and destabilizing those with different kinds of professionalism narrated and/or enacted in classrooms when, for example, to implement new official curricula, teachers drew and acted upon their own biographies, as well as on their school, institutional, and broader sociohistorical contexts (Philippou et al., 2014; Kontovourki et al., 2018; Philippou, 2020), including shifting notions of schooling and curricula over time and across spaces (Kontovourki & Philippou, 2021).

Methodology The analysis presented in this chapter draws on data from the Storying the teaching profession project (please see Acknowledgements for details of the project), which was grounded in the understanding that teachers’ personal and professional lives are closely intertwined and that teachers experience educational/institutional and broader societal change in complex ways. Attention to teachers’ life histories recognizes that the individual’s experience is highly contextualized and politicized and challenges researchers to consider issues like teacher professionalism and teaching as a profession through the connection of the (inter)subjective and the (inter)contextual (e.g., Goodson, 2008; Goodson & Choi, 2008). Thus, focusing on teachers’ life stories as histories constituted a way to theorize teacher professionalism from the middle ground, which complicates top-down and bottom-up approaches to the study of the profession. We engaged in this inquiry elementary teachers who entered the profession at different phases of the recent history in the Republic of Cyprus (late 1970s–early 2010s). All participating teachers had received their initial teacher education in Cyprus and fell into the following four distinct cohorts and periods, which were generated on the basis of teachers’ tertiary education and the assumed position of the teaching profession in the public sphere: 1. Late 1970s–early 1980s graduates from the Pedagogical Academy (PA) with over 33 years of experience who had retired within 5 years prior to the initiation of the study (Note: All years of experience refer to the number estimated/defined at the onset of the project in 2017). Graduates of this time period were characterized by high academic scores, were quickly appointed, and were relatively highly regarded as professionals. 2. Late 1980s–early 1990s graduates who were among the last graduates of the PA. They typically had 25–30 years of experience, and many currently hold managing positions. Graduates of this time period were characterized by high academic scores, were quickly appointed, and were relatively highly regarded as professionals.

572

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

3. 1996–2003 graduates who comprise the cohort of the first graduates of the then newly established University of Cyprus. Graduates of this time period were still characterized by high academic scores, were quickly appointed, were relatively highly regarded as professionals, and had 15–20 years of experience, but due to the post-2013 economic situation, they faced almost no prospects for career advancement (i.e., promotions to administrative posts as school principals and vice-principals). 4. Early 2010s graduates of the University of Cyprus, who pursued the profession at a time of an unstable professional context of scarce appointments and of the profession not enjoying its earlier status or respect in the public sphere. Eventually, the research involved 28 elementary teachers with varied identity markers (including gender, age, status in the profession, and place of residence) to reflect the demographics relevant to the history of the teaching profession in Cyprus. In the Findings section we use participant numbers to indicate first the cohort in which a participant belongs and then the code number given to each based on the overall number of interviewees (i.e., Participant 3.6 denotes Interviewee 6, who is part of Cohort 3). Each of the participating teachers shared stories from their professional and personal lives in two individual semi-structured interviews, followed by a third unstructured one to reflect on and finalize transcripts. Following a biographical research approach, participants were first invited to speak broadly about their lives, starting from their school years and gradually extending to their decision to enter the profession, their experiences in tertiary/teacher education, during their first years of teaching, and across schools over the years. Second interviews were conducted with customized protocols, where critical incidents were identified for each of the participants, but also included questions to invoke teachers’ stories on issues that might have framed education and the teaching profession at the time of data collection. Documents that emerged as relevant in teachers’ stories (e.g., official announcements, circulars, yearly goals, guidelines, and regulations) were also collected in order to interpret teachers’ sense of professionalism against the broader institutional and social context. Data analysis partially coincided with data collection, given that during the collection and transcription of the interviews, we developed analytical memos to facilitate the customization of the interview process and initiate the construction of individual teachers’ life histories. Toward these ends, we utilized Goodson’s (2008) “immersion” in the data to thematically analyze individual interviews in combination with archival data. Further analysis focused on cross-case comparison to identify similarities and differences among teachers’ life histories, within and across cohorts, and against the background of institutional and broader societal change. For the purpose of the analysis presented in this chapter, we draw on the codes of “studies-initial education and other studies” and “expertise.” We returned to these etic codes drawing on two poststructural notions: Pinar’s notion of “currere” and the Foucauldian notion of power. The former dismantles the notion of curriculum as stable and officially foreclosed institutional text and rather opens it up as

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

573

biographical text, as the discursive formation of subjects throughout life, thus also enabling the inquiry of teacher education curricula as lived (Pinar, 2012; Pinar & Irwin, 2012). The Foucauldian notion of power as concurrently regulatory and productive allows seeing how power is linked to the production of knowledge and the constitution of subjectivities through and in power relations (Foucault, 1982, 1990). Taken together, these theoretical lenses allowed seeing how, in teachers’ stories of their studies and of the profession, expert knowledge was structured and hierarchized in particular ways that concurrently shaped teachers’ constitution as professional subjects.

Findings Our analysis of teachers’ life histories brought forth notable differences in the ways in which teacher education and the profession were construed across and within cohorts. These differences concerned the types of knowledge that emerged in teachers’ constructions of teacher education curricula as biographical text/s, which enabled a view of the curriculum as lived and, hence, as a complex nexus of personal, institutional, and sociohistorical forces. In the subsections below, we expand on this notion by attending to two key themes: the disciplinarity of knowledge and the (non)academization of experience in lived teacher education curricula; and the emergence of the theory-practice debate as central to teachers’ education and constitution as professionals. We examine and present these themes looking across and within teacher cohorts to highlight continuities and discontinuities, as well as variance, in the construction of teacher professionalism.

Disciplinarity of Knowledge and (Non)academization of Lived Curricula Teacher education curricula in teachers’ narrations across cohorts were permeated by discourses of disciplinarity and studentship in academic institutions. Disciplinarity adhered to the ways in which education was both construed and destabilized as a field of study with the mission of preparing, and thus professionalizing, teachers. In this sense, teachers’ stories constituted a discursive means whereby official curricula were constructed as combining the types of courses often seen in teacher education literature (e.g., Alvunger & Wahlström, 2018; Cheng et al., 2012): general education; subject-matter studies; foundation of education studies; methods studies; and field experience/school practicum. Across cohorts, teachers commented on foundation courses, like theory, philosophy and sociology of education, and psychology (e.g., Participants 3.6, 3.8, 3.25), or subject-matter courses like Linguistics. They often rendered those “theoretical” to distinguish them from the didactics of elementary school subjects (e.g., English language didactics “In English, they didn’t teach us, let’s say, the theory, how to learn English; they instructed us the English didactics, how to prepare lessons” – Participant 2.18), or even, for cohorts attending

574

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

the PA, “practical” courses like craftsmanship and gardening (e.g., Participants 2.3, 2.12). In general, when it came to accounts of how the formal curriculum composed of different types of courses, a constant source of making those memorable or not was their perceived relevance with the school practicum and/or the profession. Beyond taxonomies of courses, teachers’ stories were replete with the recognition that their studies in education actually consisted of a mélange of disciplinarities, each connected to a subject-area as well as to a set of learning practices that were attributed to the discipline and to different instructors’ teaching styles (e.g., Participants 2.12, 2.18, 2.19). This notion of disciplinarity was particularly evident in teachers’ commentaries that they had to master different skills and content, which, in the case of courses like Music, translated to learning “the theory” and also being able to play an instrument to use and instruct in their classrooms. The following excerpt summarizes both the range of courses/disciplines and the ways teachers valued those: In the third year, we had specializations and this somehow smoothened things out, because we chose. Let’s say, I chose English, Home Economics, Children’s Literature that I liked; but the first two years, we had to [take] biology, we had to [take] music, we had to [take] this and that. I mean we had to be, to be know-alls [pantognwstes], while let’s say, this can’t be. (Participant 2.3)

Excerpts like the above reveal a rather fragmented curriculum, which appeared to destabilize the understanding of education as a discipline itself. Across generations, “specializations” were a key mechanism for such destabilization even though there were shifts and discontinuities across cohorts: from a “theoretical” and a “practical” one (often referring to psychology and physical education, respectively, e.g., Participants 1.20, 1.22) for Cohort 1; to choosing among courses corresponding to elementary school subjects mostly but with Psychology and to a lesser degree Special/Inclusive Education still mentioned in Cohort 2; to specializing in one of the “basic” elementary school subjects (Greek, Mathematics, Physical Sciences) or Psychology in Cohort 3; to choosing a specialization from each of two sets of courses (Language Arts/Literacy, Math, or Physical Sciences and Special/Inclusive Education, Music, Physical Education, or Arts) that largely correspond to “basic/ main” and “technical/practical” school subjects in Cohort 4. While for Cohort 1 specializations crafted a sense of balance between theory and practice, the emphasis on specializations in later cohorts created hierarchies within teacher education curricula that reflected debates and discourses permeating elementary education and thus teacher professionalism in the Greek-Cypriot context over time. We specifically see the centrality of elementary school subjects as in conversation with policies anticipating a “polydynamos daskalos” [all-mighty teacher], which comprised an ideal professional as expert in generic education and in all school subject-areas’ didactics, but who would in addition be “specialized” in certain subjects. This policy was mobilized by both governments and teacher unions to claim particular types of teachers in relation to elementary teacher shortages or secondary teacher surpluses at different periods, while concurrently created certain

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

575

expectations by the only department in the country (until 2007) preparing teachers; hence the review of its formal curriculum to require the selection of two, rather than one, specializations in special didactics for Cohort 4. In teachers’ narrations, this ideal professional became a means of fulfillment over pursuing personal preferences (e.g., Participants 2.3, 4.26). It was yet subverted both in older and mostly in the younger cohorts, e.g., feeling that “the teacher cannot do it all, the polydynamos daskalos we used to have [. . .] I don’t think it should apply, [but] I am not for Physical Education [secondary school] teachers to enter [elementary schools]” (Participant 4.2); that the ideal was hard to enact in practice, “perhaps not doing justice to some subject areas” (Participant 2.19); or that, in comparison to other university students, they were “doing a degree of a little bit of everything thus amounting to nothing”(Participant 3.24). This “genericness” of the education degree often felt as overwhelming and reinforced a sense of need for practical knowledge in teachers’ construction of professionalism (which we discuss in later sections), while it was turned on its head as an advantage for at least some Cohort 4 teachers (e.g., Participants 4.1, 4.28) for whom the perceived general life and professional skills developed during the degree seemed useful overall or in their search for work outside the profession, when they were faced with unemployment after graduation. Beyond “specializations,” disciplinarity in formal teacher education curricula also entailed different kinds of experiences with other fields of study, which were also sources for the destabilization of education as discipline. This was less visible among Cohorts 1 and 2, since the PA offered solely diplomas in education, but was stressed by Cohorts 3 and 4 participants, whose studies occurred at a university offering bachelor degrees in a number of disciplines. As part of the degree requirements, teachers were expected to take four free electives (general education courses required to be selected from at least two different schools within the first 2 years of the degree), which were often narrated as memorable for being mind/horizon opening, despite being theoretical. However, it was also mainly in these others schools’ auditoriums (as well as in other university social spaces) that a condescending view of them as not really studying a scientific field was reinforced. Similar instances of destabilization of education as a discipline were narrated as experienced also from within the department, often by psychology professors (the education and psychology departments became distinct in 2003), whose courses were usually very popular among narrators for the new perspectives on childhood and schooling they were providing (e.g., Participants 3.8, 4.9, 4.26). These views were tested when participants were positioned by psychology professors as not studying a discipline, but merely preparing for serving in an existing school system in “secure” jobs (which was still applicable for Cohort 3) (e.g., Participant 3.17). Such instances produced varied narrated actions: from engaging in dialogue to defend the field on various grounds to simply dismissing those holding such views as unable to understand (e.g., Participant 4.1), or enjoying the surprise of her psychology professor that she would be doing a masters abroad rather pursue the secure job upon graduation (Participant 3.17). Paradoxically, narrations of pursuing a master’s degree also destabilized the discipline from within, when construed not as a continuation, but rather an opportunity to refine, specialize, or deepen in a subfield,

576

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

construing the education degree as too broad. Such destabilization presupposed the field of education as a discipline at the same time that it subverted it (e.g., Participant 4.2). Beyond lived formal curricula, equally important to teachers’ narrations of their studies were stories of becoming in an academic institution, with gradual shifts toward the academization of experience. In particular, teacher education in the PA and for Cohorts 1 and 2 was mostly construed as continuation of high school education, with timetables, assignments, studying, and even professors being seen as “gymnasium-style” (Participant 1.20). This referred mostly to teacher-centered teaching (e.g., Participants 2.10, 2.11, 2.12, 2.19), even if variance emerged especially in relation to practices like discussions and projects as key learning devices (e.g., Participants 1.20, 2.11, 2.19). In later Cohorts and as teacher education was integrated into the university, some parallels were still drawn between university and high school (roster, mandatory attendance, teacher-centered teaching, some professors’ strictness). However, teachers in Cohorts 3 and 4 were more frequently emphasizing the differences from school as a “shocking” informal curriculum of how the university “works” that often took most of the first year to get used to, always described as a stressful period (e.g., Participants 3.24, 4.26). This entailed how grading and semesters worked, taking notes from lectures, preparing essays and assignments and not just taking exams, working in groups, utilizing library recourses, pursuing topics in depth, out of those encountered in courses, on own interest and perseverance; choosing free elective courses; and engaging in education foundations with knowledge that changed how they thought about schooling (including their own) and went beyond just knowing the “elementary school subject-matters” (e.g., Participants 3.17, 3.21, 3.24, 4.5, 4.9, 4.26). Key to these experiences were notions of time and space, with narrations focusing on having a “messy” timetable of lectures (Participants 3.24, 4.26), using the bus or car across multiple campuses (e.g., Participants 3.23, 3.24, 4.27, 4.28), and an overall new-found autonomy in moving in time and space which saturated their lived teacher education curricula as well. Across generations, lived curricula incorporated also teachers’ participation in clubs, which further diversified what each were doing at different spaces and times and with varying degrees of recognition as part of the official teacher education curricula. Specifically, Cohort 1 teachers shared, most often enthusiastically, how membership in special interest clubs was institutionalized and connected to subject areas (e.g., Science Club) or social life sectors (e.g., Religion, Hospitality, Folklore, Dance Clubs), while also a source of the (re)construction of social relations among peers (e.g., Participants 1.16, 1.20, 1.22). The organization of and participation in club happenings and other events constituted spaces for teachers’ subjectivation as community members (e.g., Participants 1.16, 1.20), activist volunteers (e.g., Participants 3.6, 3.17), and, perhaps to a lesser degree, citizens (Participants 2.11, 3.7). Nevertheless, these appeared to gradually give way to more structured and less communal practices, since Cohort 4 participants narrated their club experiences mostly as attending classes individually to learn something (e.g., dance, yoga, etc. 4.1, 4.2, 4.5, 4.9, 4.26, 4.27).

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

577

Relatedly, participants’ lived curricula composed of a multiplicity of other stories as important in teachers’ processes of becoming, which were rarely distinct from the academization of their experience. Across cohorts, these narrated curricula were permeated by discourses of “autonomy-independence” and “social relationsrelationality,” denoting a diversification or multiplication of how space and time were experienced, the kinds of connections among different people these produced, as well as a sense of relative control (and responsibility) over that. Across cohorts, a sense of autonomy involved geographically moving to the capital Nicosia to live alone or share apartments (e.g., Participants 1.16, 2.10, 2.19, 3.21, 3.23, 4.2, 4.26) and/or owning a car. Independence of movement was narrated as a shaping experience for its socializing implications as well: across cohorts, socialization/networking was treasured, in its forms of meeting new people and from different cities (and degrees for Cohorts 3 and 4), some of whom were also roommates, which created friendships still present in their lives. For Cohorts 1 and 2, such flexibility and multiplication was mostly captured in descriptions of student life as “pareistiki” [friendly-like] or familial (Participant 2.19; also Participants 1.20, 1.22, 2.18). This extended to their relations with professors/academic staff and was attributed to the smallness of the institution, given that the PA only admitted the number of students required to cover public education school needs. Being friendly and in a family was also mediated in teachers/students’ traversions of space-time: laying on the Academy’s lawn and spontaneously singing at nights, playing cards and backgammon in between courses and with instructors, or even walking across the city to get to places or buy their food, because, as Participant 1.22 remembered, “[they] had no money to eat out at expensive/fancy restaurants; we had a peer who owned a car, and she would get us all in, she would pile us up all, all who could fit, and we would go and grab some souvlaki, let’s say, and eat it on our way or sit there and eat.” In later cohorts, such traversions of space-time continued to be at times construed as a pragmatic, yet pleasant, necessity. The familiarly structured time of the school and the PA gave way to the non-continuous timetable and thus different time and temporality of the university for Cohorts 3 and 4, who narrated this difference with a sense of power over scheduling a flexible timetable during the day; a “cycle” of the working week climaxing with social events on Thursday evenings since Friday afternoon meant for many “returning” to their family homes in other cities (e.g., Participants 4.9, 4.27); and, a year-cycle with a lot of pressure during semesters, but with long breaks for Christmas and summer holidays (e.g., Participant 4.2). Despite increased responsibility for managing their own time and space (within the limits of institutional and local/social contexts), an overall sense of gradual independence from school/family to academic life emerged in teachers’ narrations, as student years were recollected (and missed) as being “care free” (e.g., Participants 1.20, 2.18, 3.23, 4.5, 4.26, 4.27. 4.28), especially in comparison to the school year which preceded their studies or, in hindsight, to the professional and personal work which followed them. Similar traversions in space-time were construed in teachers’ narrations of their post-graduate studies. This was particularly evident in teachers’ (from across cohorts) decisions to pursue masters’ degrees in Open Universities, as this enabled

578

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

studying despite family/personal obligations (e.g., Participants 2.11, 2.12, 2.13). This often meant not creating new friendships, but rather studying at the same time with existing friends for mutual support (e.g., Participants 3.8, 3.7). For the three older cohorts pursuing a masters right after graduation was a rarity, as narrations conditioned this to the temporality of the public sector: obtaining an educational leave of absence to do a master’s full time (and at the time necessarily abroad) could be set in motion only until tenure in the public sector was reached about 2 (or 5 for older cohorts) years after their first appointment. Academic pursuits were thus in competition with state notions of time and expectations from graduates, eventually often resulting to additional competition with family/personal lives launched in the meantime (e.g., Participants 2.3, 2.11). Immediate employment as secured by the state was thus related to the rarity of an immediate post-graduation path for the first three cohorts, producing notions of time and space which were in stark contrast to Cohort 4, for whom master’s degrees were locally available (also in distance form but in Greek) but especially for whom pursuing a masters was expected as a “natural,” if not necessary, path as a way of “filling time” until, and improving chances for, employment. Finally, it is notable that, when masters were pursued abroad, narrators across cohorts stressed how the “international” or “intercultural” dimension saturated their academic experience, narrating an informal curriculum of engaging with international academic staff, fellow students, and experiences in other countries in general and in relation to education (systems, policies etc.). Singling it out as an experience differentiating their masters from studying locally, this was also construed as “practical preparation” for a diversity that they “later” encountered in the profession in Cyprus, thus further complicating notions of space and time, but also setting in motion the theory-practice debate, discussed below.

The Theory-Practice Debate in the Construction of Curricula and the Professionalization of Teachers Implied in the previous section was that teacher education curricula, formal ones in particular, were replete with references to courses or even teachers’ overall student experience as theoretical or practical. In this section, we look more closely at how the theory-practice debate emerged as a discursive means for constructing both teacher education curricula and teacher professionalism. Even though it acquired different meanings within and across participants and cohorts, this was not just a binary/ juxtaposition of theoretical vs practical knowledge, but a hierarchy valuing the latter. This was seen, first, in narrations of school practicum as a central force that shaped teachers’ construction of their studies and the profession and, second, in the constitution (and to a lesser degree, destabilization) of a teacher professional as relying on practical, classroom-based knowledge. When asked by interviewers on recollections of the school practicum, participating teachers often narrated it as the opportunity to experience the profession firsthand. For some commented as a “first” (e.g., “the first vaftisma” [baptism], as Participant 2.19 put it), the transition to the practicum was narrated with strong

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

579

affective terms across cohorts, including a sense of feeling shocked or a “loss” of the carefree character of their student life up to that point, as space and time were again structured along school rationalities and “filled” with professionalization experiences. At times, this even led to questioning their choice of degree/profession (e.g., Participant 4.5), but mostly confirmed it as valid once practicum was completed. Interestingly, participants in Cohorts 1 and 2 were less possible to describe such transition as abrupt and this, we argue, is a product of narrated institutionalized practices and the space school practicum occupied therein: being in school classrooms from the first year of their studies (excluding only their first semester) and gradually transitioning from classroom observations to a small number of teaching periods to taking full responsibility of teaching a class; ensuring that they taught across schools, school types (small and larger ones), geographical locations (city and rural schools), and grade levels, as well as at different points of the school year (e.g., beginning and end of the school year). Even the physical proximity of the PA to an “exemplary”/experimental public elementary school was a resource for prospective teachers to flexibly move in and out of school classrooms, “with or without notice, [. . .], in a more organized/structured way, accompanied by a professor as part of a course; or [. . .] by ourselves; or, in groups of two or three” (Participant 1.22). Some of these practices, like gradually proceeding from observation to longer periods of teaching and being posted at different schools, were maintained across cohorts, suggesting a continued, yet varied, emphasis on practice. For participating teachers, this was seen as opportunity to regularly practice academic knowledge by constantly negotiating institutional and school rationalities. As Participant 1.22 put it, “there was much work to be done and many things to consider: what you heard at the [Pedagogical] Academy, what the classroom teacher told you based on his [sic] own experience.” This hierarchy [and gap] between university/academic knowledge and school/practice was confirmed across cohorts: e.g., older participants valued PA for providing practical experiences early in their studies (e.g., Participants 1.22, 2.12) while younger ones posited that the practicum came too late at the university (e.g., Participants 3.17, 3.21, 4.1). Similarly, they critiqued it as performative: connected primarily to evaluation (Participants 1.22, 2.12, 2.18) and, increasingly, consisting of submitting in advance numerous lesson plans per subject area and adhering to those rather than allowing substantial experimentation with teaching and eventually personal connections to children and parents as communities (Participants 3.6, 3.7, 4.1, 4.5, 4.9, 4.26). The “practical” gained additional meanings once narrations got into the details of the practicum, ranging from instances of asking direct guidance (e.g., Participants 2.10, 2.19, 4.9, 3.7, 3.17), to requests of showing theory through practice (rather than vice versa) before or during practicum (Participant 4.9), to completely dismissing the university’s formally planned scaffolding experiences (e.g., Participant 3.7). What seemed to pull together all these instantiations of valued knowledge before/ during/for practicum was the prioritization of practical knowledge (of general or special didactic practices as materialized in classrooms) as more important than any other knowledge experienced in university courses not directly relevant to schooling (Participants 3.7, 4.2). This entailed theorizations of learning as “learning by doing/

580

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

experience” (Participant 4.28), “only once you get in a classroom” (Participant 3.23), or “understanding only by doing” (Participant 3.8), all rendering practicum necessary even if stressful and exhausting. However, the hierarchization of practicalacademic knowledge was complicated in teachers’ narratives across cohorts as there seemed to be a general sense of the school practicum as the space to try out new methods, even if these did not work because of children’s unfamiliarity with them (such as in drama education – Participant 3.25 – or cooperative learning, Participants 4.5, 4.9), or as highly dependent on the mentor, class, or school (e.g., Participants 2.18, 3.24, 3.25, 4.2, 4.5). Exceptions of valuing academic/theoretical knowledge emerged primarily in teachers’ stories of subsequent masters studies, for providing analytical/interpretative rather than practical-as-technical tools; that is, as lenses through which schooling was “analyzed” (e.g., Participant 1.16), producing combined feelings of desperation (when contrasted to school realities) (Participant 3.24), but also a sense of empowerment through “seeing things differently” which included “critiquing” or being in the position to provide PD (even) to their administratively superiors or other teachers (e.g., Participant 4.2) or to participate in curriculum review processes when launched by the ministry of education (Participant 3.7). What seemed to emerge from these stories alluded to a broadened sense of professionalism beyond classroom, albeit toward the very different directions of the different master’s studies narrated. However, valuing what was referred to as “academic knowledge” was not a certainty, as some participants expressed their disappointment from their masters studies (and even from state-sponsored programs to upgrade PA diplomas to university degrees for Cohorts 1 and 2) when “not being practical” (e.g., Participant 1.16). This prioritization of practical over academic knowledge was particularly evident in older cohorts’ (PA graduates) commentary on younger teachers as needing more practical training and pedagogical knowledge, especially as compared to them who were better equipped to enter the classroom (e.g., Participants 1.16, 2.3, 2.18). As Participant 2.12 suggested, “[university] graduates are more of scientists, if you wish, but the pedagogical part of the classroom, we [PA graduates] have it—we have more practical experience, we exited [the PA] and were ready-made teachers.” Across cohorts, this was coupled with the expectation that they “renew” the profession, which intensified at different points in time, as teachers’ stories suggest. PA graduates spoke of a clear institutional vision of teachers as those who, as knowledgeable of their field, were expected to pave new ways and to transmit to others new knowledge and innovation (e.g., Participants 1.20, 2.3, 2.18, 2.19). While this might have been playfully mocked (e.g., Participant 2.19 jokingly referring to the ideal of “all-mighty” [polydynamos] teacher as being “Bob the builder”), teachers took up this expansive professional role, resisting, for instance, metaphors of them serving to pupils the knowledge that was decided upon in official policies and seeing themselves as those who would transform and adapt knowledge (Participant 1.22). Even though Cohorts 3 and 4 agreed that there was not one single or coherent “ideal” of a teacher explicitly articulated by the department, expectations referred to using innovative teaching methods, moving away from teacher-centered to student-

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

581

centered methodologies (naming in particular cooperative learning, inquiry, creativity, constructivism, critical thinking, differentiation, critical literacy, drama education), teaching for all and not just “excellent” pupils, and using technology (e.g., Participants 3.24, 4.26). Taken together, this discourse of renewal through teaching methods amounts, however, to a teacher professionalism envisioned mostly within classroom walls and in interaction, primarily, with children and perhaps peers.

Discussion Accounting for teachers’ constitution as professionals, we argue in this chapter that this should be examined as a complex process of becoming shaped, but not determined, by their teacher education curricula, both formal and lived, which we theorize as always-already replete with tensions rather than as straightforward structural forces of professionalization. Focusing on teacher education curricula in public institutions over a period of 40 years in the Republic of Cyprus, we explored continuities and discontinuities across as well as variance within cohorts on how these were constructed in teachers’ storying and traced broader debates in the fields of teacher education and teacher professionalism as shaped in space-time. This builds on previous examinations of teachers’ subjectivation as professionals in and across nested contexts, including teachers’ personal biographies, immediate school contexts, schooling and education as institutions, and broader sociopolitical contexts (Kontovourki & Philippou, 2021; Kontovourki et al., 2018; Philippou, 2020). Narrations of teachers’ lived experience of their first and graduate studies thus served as an analytical kaleidoscope, enabling us to account for simultaneously entangled notions of higher education, teacher education, and teacher professionalism. Participants’ lived experience was articulated as complex processes of becomings, entangled with differential temporal, spatial, and social/relational resources which multiplied teacher education curricula as lived and reminded us of the early, in teachers’ lives, entanglement of the personal with the professional and of the contextual with both. Despite a motif of perceived autonomy/responsibility over time, space, and social networks enveloped in (non)academized experiences, these gradually formed a less structured or predictable (e.g., clubs) and more academized informal curriculum from the first two to the latter two cohorts. Moreover, teachers’ stories allowed us to see the official teacher education curricula as fragmented, as longitudinally consisting of a “mélange” of disciplinarities which necessitated different kinds of knowledge within and between different types of courses. Even though an ideal of a “teacher-scientist” was mobilized by Cohort 3 to contrast themselves, as the first university graduates (and despite being questioned as such by/through other disciplines within the university) to PA graduates as practitioners, there was a discernible discursive theory-practice binary as influential in how teacher professionalism was constituted by all four cohorts: centering on (classroom) practice and occurring at a personal/individual level within classroom walls through innovative teaching methods. Hence, the professionalization of teachers has rested upon the anticipation that, on the whole, teachers had/acquired practical-classroom

582

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

knowledge as much as they were expected to “re-new” the profession, during (practicum) and after their studies. A renewal of the profession and schooling was thus articulated as individual responsibility and effort of changing one’s teaching practice, as there were no signs of acknowledging or expecting collegiality or institutional structures to facilitate that. Similarly to how teacher professionalism was construed as an individual, almost private, responsibility in the classroom, mobility within the profession, as conditioned by master’s degrees for promotion (for Cohort 3) or for employment (for Cohort 4), were narrated as an individual, yet for contextual reasons (lack of promotion or appointment posts) impossible, responsibility. For Cohort 3, this re-instated classroom teaching as the only possible path within the profession; for Cohort 4 this often meant seeking employment not just outside the classroom, but outside education overall. Such differential across cohorts instantiations of the intersection of the personal-institutional/social have also been traced in relation to narrated reasons for choosing the profession and relationally claimed/earned status (Kontovourki & Philippou, 2021); it was particularly visible also in this analysis when participants explained the details of pursuing and completing master’s degrees in different education subfields and forms. The common theme of significance ascribed to the practicum, already familiar in teacher education literature (e.g., Britzman, 2003; Loughran & Hamilton, 2016), was another instantiation of the theory-practice binary, or rather hierarchy, as central to teachers’ education and constitution as professionals across all cohorts. However, different ways and degrees of creativity or requests for guidance were articulated within cohorts, a complexity resonating with studies showing, for example, that student teachers practicalize theoretical knowledge in varied ways, with one extreme as the “testing out of teaching approaches mainly to find out their practicality in the school context” to the other extreme whereby they work out a schema or personal theory (Cheng et al., 2012). The practicum did emerge differently across cohorts, since PA graduates narrated it as timely, gradual, and inclusive of as many school and grade contexts as possible, whereas university graduates reported practicum as a more abrupt experience. Similarly, “specializations” emerged as differing across cohorts: by adding further layers of fragmentation to the formal teacher education curricula, they seemed to both fuel and subvert the disciplinarity of education as a field, especially as they became attached to the changing notion of “polydynamos daskalos.” Such processes of simultaneous sustenance and subversion were also discernible when narrating master’s degrees as “specialization” into practical matters of classroom or subject-didactics. Moreover, this classroom vision of professionalism subjectivated teachers and the professional body overall with particular notions of the “practical.” With the rare exception of participants positioning themselves as innovators or creative or scientific in adapting to complex situations (of, still, schools and classrooms), there were no signs of including a social mission, inquiry or sense of community with others, the public sphere, or their own professional body. Thus, even though the practical was not only construed as “technical,” it did not extend to notions of extended, or even postmodern, professionalism (e.g., Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996; Mockler, 2005),

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

583

while these were only hinted at through knowledge developed with master’s degrees. This resonates with previous analyses highlighting how practicing teachers anticipated PD that would “practically” support them in the classroom (Philippou et al., 2016), a focus also of PD policies and practices surrounding a recent curriculum review (Kontovourki et al., 2015), and of academics and ministry technocrats in curriculum review committees who mainly positioned teachers as experts of the classroom (Theodorou et al., 2017). That a theory-practice binary and responsibilization of renewing the profession from within classroom walls are already present in teachers’ narrations of their formal and informal lived curricula of teacher education are indicative of the historicity and power of such discourses. Tracing this in teachers’ stories and locating stories at the center of this inquiry counters a tendency in research studies “to leave teachers ‘in the shadows,’” to construe them as either victims or victimizers (Goodson, 2008, 6), or to view them as the “absent presence” and the object of discourses of education policy (Ball, 1994, 50). This type of research is highly important at times – such as now – of increasing external control of the profession and the takeover of the curriculum by “experts” outside the classroom and the school in a number of contexts around the world (e.g., Leaton Gray & Whitty, 2010; Mockler, 2005). This is especially timely in the context of Cyprus, as it finds itself under great local tensions, international influence, and economic constrictions, with specific ramifications for (public) education and teachers (Klerides & Philippou, 2015; Theodorou et al., 2017). Against a background of presentist demands for “urgent” educational change and innovation toward unproblematized directions rather for inquiring the educational significance of school and teacher education curricula, this chapter seeks to address presentism by understanding how deep-seated, yet changing, and entangled notions of teacher professionalism and the profession, the university and education as a discipline, as well as epistemological assumptions over theory-practice as formal and as lived are always-already complicating attendant conversations. This might inspire reflexive teacher education curricula that educate prospective teachers to contribute to the work of curriculum theory as an interdisciplinary field where teacher education operates as space for “the professionalization of intellectual freedom, forefronting teachers’ [. . .] creativity, protecting their opportunities to dissent, engaged in ongoing if complicated conversation informed by a self-reflexive, interdisciplinary erudition” (Pinar, 2012, 183). Acknowledgments We would like to thank the 28 elementary teachers who willingly shared their hi/stories with us; the A.G. Leventis Foundation-University of Cyprus for funding the research project entitled “Storying the teaching profession ‘from below’ and amidst change: A study of four cohorts of elementary teachers’ life histories in the Republic of Cyprus (late 1970s–2010s)” (2017– 2019); and Rafaella Maroulleti and Rafaella Alexandrou, who worked as research assistants for this project.

584

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

References Alvunger, D., & Wahlström, N. (2018). Research-based teacher education? Exploring the meaning potentials of Swedish teacher education. Teachers and Teaching, 24(4), 332–349. https://doi. org/10.1080/13540602.2017.1403315 Assunção Flores, M. (2016). Teacher education curriculum. In J. Loughran & M. A. Hamilton (Eds.), International handbook of teacher education (Vol. I, pp. 187–230). Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-981-10-0366-0_5 Ball, S. J. (1994). Education reform: A critical and post-structural approach. Open University Press. Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach (2nd ed.). State University of New York Press. Cheng, M. M. H., Tang, S. Y. F., & Cheng, A. Y. N. (2012). Practicalising theoretical knowledge in student teacher’s professional learning in initial teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28, 781–790. Cochran-Smith, M. (2000). The future of teacher education: Framing the questions that matter. Teaching Education, 11(1), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210050020327 Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning community. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249–305. Cochran-Smith, M., & Villegas, A. M. (2015). Framing teacher preparation research: An overview of the field, Part I. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(1), 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0022487114549072 Constantinou, C. (2020). Η Γενεαλoγία τoυ ηθικoύ ρóλoυ τoυ Ελληνoκύπριoυ δασκάλoυ (1878–1937) [A genealogy of the moral role of the Greekcypriot teacher (1878–1937)] (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Cyprus. Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Constructing 21-st century teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 57(3), 300–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487105285962 Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). Teacher education and the American future. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1), 35–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487109348024 Darling-Hammond, L. (2017). Teacher education around the world: What can we learn from international practice? Journal of Teacher Education, 40(3), 291–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02619768.2017.1315399 Deng, Z. (2004). The role of theory in teacher preparation: An analysis of the concept of theory application. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 32(2), 143–157. https://doi.org/10. 1080/1359866042000234232 Evans, L. (2008). Professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals. British Journal of Educational Studies, 56(1), 20–38. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction (2nd ed.). Vintage. Gade, S. (2014). Praxis and phronesis as units of analysis: Realising a social science that matters in practitioner inquiry. Reflective Practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 15(6), 718–728. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2014.944129 Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. Sage. Goodson, I. (2007). Socio-historical processes of curriculum change. In A. Benavot & C. Braslavsky (Eds., in collaboration with N. Truong), School knowledge in comparative and historical perspective; changing curricula in primary and secondary education. CERC studies in comparative education (Vol. 18, pp. 211–220). Springer. Goodson, I. (2008). Investigating the teacher’s life and work. Sense Publishers. Goodson, I., & Choi, P. L. (2008). Life history and collective memory as methodological strategies: Studying teacher professionalism. Teacher Education Quarterly, 35(2), 5–28. Hargreaves, A. (2010). Four ages of professionalism and professional learning. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 6(2), 151–182.

Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study. . .

585

Hargreaves, A., & Goodson, I. (1996). Teachers’ professional lives: Aspirations and actualities. In I. Goodson & A. Hargreaves (Eds.), Teachers’ professional lives (pp. 1–27). Falmer Press. Helsby, G., & McCulloch, G. (1996). Teacher professionalism and curriculum control. In I. F. Goodson & A. Hargreaves (Eds.), Teachers’ professional lives (pp. 56–74). Falmer Press. Hughes, J. A. (2006). Bridging the theory-practice divide: A creative approach to effective teacher preparation. Journal of Scholarship and Teaching, 6(1), 110–117. Klerides, E., & Philippou, S. (2015). Cyprus: Exploring educational reform 2004-2014. In T. Corner (Ed.), Education in the European Union: Post-2003 member states (pp. 51–73). Bloomsbury. Kontovourki, S., & Philippou, S. (2021). Storying the teaching profession ‘from below’ and amidst change: A study of four cohorts of elementary teachers’ life histories in the Republic of Cyprus. In University of Cyprus Research Committee (Ed.), The A.G. Leventis Research Projects 2000–2020: 20 years of research at the University of Cyprus (pp. 193–212). University of Cyprus. Kontovourki, S., Theodorou, E., & Philippou, S. (2015). Governing teachers: Professional development and curriculum reform in Cyprus. In H.-G. Kothoff & E. Klerides (Eds.), Governing educational spaces: Knowledge, teaching, and learning in transition (pp. 107–126). Sense Publishers. Kontovourki, S., Philippou, S., & Theodorou, E. (2018). Curriculum making as professionalism-incontext: The cases of two elementary school teachers amidst curriculum change in Cyprus. The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 257–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2018.1447308 Koutselini, M. (2007). Moντeλα Ανάπτυξης Εκπαιδευτικω ν και τα ΑΠ Ανω τατης Εκπαίδευσης. Η περίπτωση της Κύπρoυ [Models of teacher development and higher education curricula: The case of Cyprus]. In Proceedings of the 4th international history of education conference, historical archive of modern Greek and International Education Laboratory, University of Patras. Retrieved 13 August, 2021. Available at: http://www.eriande.elemedu.upatras.gr/ eriande/synedria/synedrio4/praktika1/koutselini.htm Koutselini-Ioannidou, M. (1997). Curriculum as political text: The case of Cyprus. History of Education, 26(4), 395–407. Krieg, S. (2010). The professional knowledge that counts in Australian contemporary early childhood education teacher education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 11(2), 144–155. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2010.11.2.144 Lambert, M. (2010). Learning teaching in, from, and for practice: What do we mean? Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1–2), 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487109347321 Larson, M. S. (1977/2013). The rise of professionalism: Monopolies of competence and sheltered markets. Transaction Publishers. Leaton Gray, S., & Whitty, G. (2010). Social trajectories or disrupted identities? Changing and competing models of teacher professionalism under New Labour. Cambridge Journal of Education, 40(1), 5–23. Lieberman, M. (1956). Education as a profession. Prentice-Hall, Inc. Livingston, K., & Assunção Flores, M. (2017). Trends in teacher education: A review of papers published in the European Journal of Teacher Education over 40 years. European Journal of Teacher Education, 40(5), 551–560. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2017.1387970 Loughran, J., & Hamilton, M. A. (2016). Developing an understanding of teacher education. In J. Loughran & M. A. Hamilton (Eds.), International handbook of teacher education (Vol. I, pp. 3–22). Springer. Maratheftis, M. I., & Ioannidou-Koutselini, M. (2000). Η λειτoυργία και τα πρoγράμματα της Παιδαγωγικής Ακαδημίας Κύπρoυ (1959–1993) [The function and programmes of the Cyprus Pedagogical Academy (1959–1993)]. Authors’ Publication. Mathewson Mitchell, D., & Reid, J. A. (2017). (Re)turning to practice in teacher education: Embodied knowledge in learning to teach. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 23(1), 42–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2016.1203775

586

S. Philippou and S. Kontovourki

Mockler, N. (2005). Trans/forming teachers: New professional learning and transformative teacher professionalism. Journal of In-service Education, 31(4), 733–746. Muller, J. (2006). On the shoulders of giants: Verticality of knowledge and the school curriculum. In R. Moore, M. Arnot, J. Beck, & H. Daniels (Eds.), Knowledge, power and educational reform. Applying the sociology of Basil Bernstein (2nd ed., pp. 11–27). Routledge. Pashiardis, P. (2004). Democracy and leadership in the educational system of Cyprus. Journal of Educational Administration, 42(6), 656–668. Persianis, P. (2006). Συγκριτική ιστoρίας της εκπαίδευσης στην Κύπρo [Comparative history of education in Cyprus]. Gutenberg. Persianis, P. K. (2010). Τα πoλιτικά της εκπαίδευσης στην Κύπρo κατά τoυς δύo τελευταίoυς αιω νες (1812–2009) [Τhe politics of education in Cyprus over the last two centuries (1812–2009)]. University of Nicosia Publications. Philippou, S. (2020). Tracing disciplinarity in the history classroom: The cases of two elementary school teachers amidst curriculum change in Cyprus. In C. Berg & T. Christou (Eds.), Historical thinking in the 21st century: Reimagining history education. The Palgrave handbook of history and social studies education (pp. 95–114). Palgrave. Philippou, S., Kontovourki, S., & Theodorou, E. (2014). Can autonomy be imposed? Examining teacher (re)positioning during the ongoing curriculum change in Cyprus. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(5), 611–633. Philippou, S., Kontovourki, S., & Theodorou, E. (2016). Professional development for ‘professional pedagogues’: Contradictions and tensions in re-professionalizing teachers in Cyprus. In J. Rahatzad, H. Dockrill, S. Sharma, & J. Phillion (Eds.), Internationalizing teaching and teacher education for equity: Engaging alternative knowledges across ideological borders (pp. 159–179). Information Age. Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed.). Routledge. Pinar, W. F., & Irwin, R. L. (Eds.). (2012). Curriculum in a new key; the collected works of Ted T. Aoki. Routledge. Theodorou, E., Philippou, S., & Kontovourki, S. (2017). Caught between worlds of expertise: Primary teachers amidst official curriculum development processes in Cyprus. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(2), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2017.1283591 Welker, R. (1992). The teacher as expert, a theoretical and historical examination. State University of New York Press. Wood, D. R. (2007). Professional learning communities: Teachers, knowledge, and knowing. Theory Into Practice, 46(4), 281–290. Zeichner, K. (2010). Rethinking the connections between campus courses and field experiences in college- and university-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1–2), 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487109347671

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid and the Liquid Elsa Estrela

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as the Fluid for Unsure Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methodological Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum Policies in Portugal Over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teachers’ Voices Through Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Final Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

588 589 592 594 598 602 604

Abstract

Given that Portugal made its political democratization in 1974, educational policies began an orientation toward inclusion, equality, and equity after that time. Curriculum has been at the center of all educational reforms, and trends for flexibility, interdisciplinarity, and cooperation can be identified, namely, in the Curriculum Reorganization for Basic Education, of 2001, and the curriculum definition for basic and secondary education, of 2018. This chapter will look into Portuguese curriculum history after the democratic revolution to see how it has been adapted to the needs and conditions created by the present liquid times. Based on the context of the present pandemic crisis, the argument is that curriculum needs to be inscribed in a narrative paradigm where its properties allow both contextual adaption and resistance. Considering this fluid condition, curriculum will be analyzed in a way that will allow the finding of critical elements and external conditions for teaching and learning processes that enable it to be assumed in a viscous state. Assuming that one of the visible effects of the various processes of globalization has been that society has become more individualistic, the concept of E. Estrela (*) Lusofona University, CeiED, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_2

587

588

E. Estrela

refraction will be used to understand how curriculum policies have been developed at different levels of their construction. In this context, teachers’ narratives will be key to identifying the dialectic relation between internal curriculum elements, external conditions, and results. Keywords

Curriculum policies · Communication · Refraction · Teachers’ narratives

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has been the driver for a faster and deeper change in teaching and learning, challenging teachers and schools all over the world in several ways. Perhaps one of the most relevant challenges is understanding how students learn, what is crucial for them to be learned, and how that should be organized. These questions point to the core of the school, the curriculum, which is under pressure to combat inequalities and to pursue cognitive justice, relevance, and culture. However, curriculum is itself marked by an exclusionary nature (Goodson, 2006), given its prescriptive character, invented for the control and management of the teacher’s work and to be a powerful ally of social relationships of power that are reproduced in it. For the author, some national policies, despite being built on a broader distribution of elite educational categories, will provoke more exclusion, rather than social inclusion, because the educational strategies used are elaborated on very well-defined bases of exclusion, such as the traditional subjects or academic exams, part of an exclusionary “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). Indeed, as one of the elements of this grammar that defines schooling, the curriculum can still be taken as a pre-adaptation to “a new world—a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock” (Toffler, 1970, p. 362). Although the world has changed and the spaces of work do not fit this description anymore, the pillar of labor market has overcome the pillar of citizenship in education (Santos, 1991), and the world is even more regulated by capitalism and production of goods and services. Furthermore, social relations, including professions, are being dissolved into competences that need permanent updating and adaption due to these fluid times (Bauman, 2007) with effects on the whole society, namely, on democracy. The argument is that to overcome this exclusionary nature, and prepare future citizens to live in times of unsureness, the curriculum needs to be understood not as solid as it was in the past, but also not as a liquid that no structure is present and it can be transformed every day, not ensuring a common culture for citizens. Narrative learning can be the concept to shape this curriculum under a communication paradigm (Trindade & Cosme, 2016). The analysis will consider curriculum policies in Portugal for a period of almost 40 years to uncover how these proposals have responded to the changes in the world,

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

589

namely, to this fluidity. Curriculum proposals will be analyzed taking cognitive justice, relevance, and culture as the categories that allow the identification of the relationship between critical internal elements of curricula and external conditions shaping teaching and learning processes. Moreover, the concepts of refraction (Goodson, 2010) and teachers’ narratives will be used to understand how curriculum policies have been developed at different levels of their construction.

Curriculum as the Fluid for Unsure Times In a time of institutionalization of a new way of knowing, but also a time of new ways of living and thinking on these very experiences, Santos (1989) defines this emerging paradigm as “the paradigm of a cautious knowledge for decent living” (p. 37), aiming to demonstrate that the nature of the scientific revolution which we now experiencing is structurally different from the one that took place in the sixteenth century, since the scientific paradigm must also be a social paradigm. By articulating “the theory of the object and the theory of knowledge justification” (Santos, 1989: 72), the emerging paradigm steers the discourse on scientific knowledge to a post-modern condition, since the absence of founding narratives relocates the discussion of truth to its happening in the practice of its own construction, which is the social sphere. The debates on the changes in the social and economic structures began at the end of the 1960s, and a variety of terms can be found in the literature to refer to the society under transformation, ranging from information society to network society or knowledge-based society, to post-industrial society and risk society. As Nassehi et al. (2007) point out, social changes did not occur by chance; rather they are fostered and funded by national governments, by international organizations dreaming of a social and economic revolution brought about by information and by knowledge, which have become structuring factors of social life. No consensus has been reached regarding the concepts presented, and Drucker (1993) goes as far as arguing that it is merely possible to speak of knowledge-based economy, also based on the centrality of knowledge as a means of production that generates added value, caused by structural changes in the labor market or in new technologies. The immateriality of this resource gives it an intangible, limitless, and non-exclusive nature (Toffler, 1991: 78), shifting the main problem to the skills of the involved players (Caraça, 1993, 2003). More recently, the Knowledge Capital Theory emerged that supports the movement of evidence-based policies, by setting a correlation between the population’s cognitive development and the growth of the gross national product per capita of a given population (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2015). This new era brings about the internalization of knowledge in the economic process itself, but it also increases competitivity among the workers who seek to invest in their own education to become more “employable” (Brown, 1997; Ozga, 2008). Moreover, as knowledge gains centrality as production factor and becomes itself a commodity (Lyotard, 1989), the competencies which knowledge enables

590

E. Estrela

access to are reshaped and replaced by an “archetype (...) adapted to the demands of the labour market” (Magalhães & Stoer, 2009: 48). In this context, a new mode of producing knowledge emerges derived from the social changes that have given rise to new mechanisms and places of producing and disseminating knowledge, as well as the advent of new players. Indeed, what Dale (2008) describes as learning done today “anywhere, anytime, by any provider” will be based on the coexistence of two knowledge-producing modes – Mode 1 and Mode 2 – which, being distinct and contemporary, see today that the conditions have been created for new developments of Mode 2 of knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994). In Mode 1, issues are proposed and solved by a specific community and are related to traditional, disciplinary, homogenous, and mainly cognitive knowledge, with a hierarchical and permanent organization, controlled by peers. Conversely, the knowledge produced in Mode 2 has its problems proposed and solved in the context of application, it is transdisciplinary and heterogeneous, with a hierarchical and transitory organization, controlled by different actors, which makes it more social, responsible, and reflexive. These conditions have led to what Bauman (2007) calls an age of uncertainty characterized by a liquid condition – social forms have a short life expectancy; the decoupling between power and politics; the decrease in collective action and blurring of the social foundations of social solidarity, meaning the emptying of community and society as network; the fragmentation of life as a consequence of the downfall of long-term thinking, planning, and acting; and individuals have to solve the dilemmas generated by volatility and permanent change and, so, flexibility is the most important virtue. According to Paraskeva (2001), society, ideology, education, and curriculum emerge as deeply complicit realities, with very tenuous borders, with the first element desperately needing the others as foundations for its perpetuation. Considering the curriculum as the defining core of the school, it becomes relevant to reconceptualize it so that the school can successfully respond to the new social contract represented here or, equally successfully, resist the onslaughts of the neoliberal ideology and the consequent dematerialization of the individual and society. In this sense, the three critical elements internal to the curriculum – knowledge, pedagogy, and assessment – must be addressed dialogically, avoiding the place of dead. In other words, the three elements that constitute the curriculum must be understood in constant interaction, where no one upstages the remainder or the relation between two becomes stronger, removing the third from the equation. Going from the proposal of the communication paradigm, which focuses on the management of relation between students and the common cultural heritage (Trindade & Cosme, 2016), it might be said the constituting elements of the curriculum must be understood from a relational and communicational perspective, thus precluding oppositions and weakening. On the other hand, the communication paradigm gains relevance if the curriculum is understood as the locus of confluence of the times – past, present, and future – and,

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

591

in this sense, assumes greater fluidity, not only to enable the time dialogue, but also so that it does not remain trapped in the past and may respond to the challenges of the present, envisaging the future. In this context, the notion of curriculum as narration takes on special relevance, in which the personal dimension intersects the social one, the public intersects the private (Ball & Goodson, 1985; Goodson, 1983, 1991, 2013; Pinar, 1975, 2007). To put it differently, a curriculum that drifts away from the pole of prescription and moves toward the pole of the learner, of the one who narrates it and who develops that narrative in tandem with their own life narrative. Contrary to the concept of curriculum as a previously defined set of knowledge compartmentalized in disciplines, a concept of curriculum emerges as a set of knowledge that are being constructed through the elaboration of a narrative that is simultaneously an identity narrative. This may mean that as a student constructs narratives through which he processes relevant curriculum concepts, he also constructs his own life narrative and creates a narrative capital that can supersede the social capital. Goodson (2008) argues that the capital that is currently most relevant to face the present fast and compressed world is the narrative capital, because it corresponds to the ability to persuade the other through a narration. This type of capital implies that the I is structured and knows exactly what it wants, while conferring the ability to become more flexible according to the situations it must respond to, through a narrative. It may ultimately mean the ability to reinvent itself, which implies not a fragmentation of the I, but rather a clear structuring. In this context, and understanding the curriculum not only as an attribute of education, but also as a learning resource, Goodson (2008) argues that schools and teachers need to question the very validity of curriculum prescriptions in order to abandon the prescriptive conception of curriculum and adopt a narrative conception, which intersects with the management and construction of the narrative of life itself. Bauman (2001) goes as far as to argue that the standards of development and curriculum study that are still hegemonic are totally inappropriate for the new society of risk, instability, and rapid changes in which we live today, because they remain grounded in basic education and prescription. This author defines tertiary teaching as learning, “how to break regularity, how to readjust fragmentary experiences in thus far unfamiliar patterns” (Bauman, 2001, p. 125), about living without habits and without routine learning, breaking with the pre-digested prescriptions of the curriculum, and moving toward the definition, appropriation, and continuous narration of the curriculum of each individual. Indeed, in the face of a more flexible economic organization subject to rapid and constant change, the contextual inertia of a content-based prescription curriculum will not last and “educational philosophy and theory are facing the unfamiliar task of theorizing a formative process that is not guided from the outset by the form of a goal elaborated in advance” (Bauman, 2001: 139). According to this thinker, the qualities that are needed are “strengthening critical and self-critical faculties” that develop people’s abilities to define and narrate the objectives and missions of their life in a rapidly changing environment (p. 138). Thus, Goodson (2008) argues that in the future the curriculum can be involved in each individual’s missions, dreams, and life searches in order to transfer power to the

592

E. Estrela

people and transform educational institutions, which could fulfill previous promises and effectively contribute to bring about changes in their students’ social future. In this new social contract for education, and based on the foundation of interdependence, it is up to the curriculum to focus on principles of cooperation, collaboration, and solidarity and to assume both teachers and students as producers of a type of knowledge that is integrative and interdisciplinary, focusing on the pillar of education “learning to become” (International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021). In this context, the curriculum will take on several forms, all of them bound with inclusion, equity, and co-creation, since internally its elements present the characteristics of continuity, community, participation, and democracy, definitively leaving the pole of prescription. This viscous shape it has, with a gelatinous consistency, allows it to maintain a structure – its internal elements – that is relevant in fluid times and gives it, at the same time, characteristics of communicability with the external conditions that influence and condition it. In short, this curriculum design will enable the fulfillment of the untested feasibility (Freire, 1968, 1992, 2000) since the educational act is always untested, each individual is unique, and his emancipation is wanted.

Methodological Approach This research will look into curriculum policies in Portugal since 1986 – when Educational Law was established – until the latest curriculum changes (2019), organized in political cycles (Bowe et al., 1992). This analysis will identify the dialectic relation between the curriculum’s internal elements – knowledge, pedagogy, and assessment – and external conditions, namely, historical and social ones. Operative concepts will be used in the three dimensions under analysis, as shown in Table 1. These concepts vary in their relative strength, being more open or more closed (Bernstein, 1971). They are not treated in a dichotomous way, rather they are seen as a continuum, which may or may not coexist in the same cycle, varying in terms of their predominance. Table 1 Concepts to operationalize analytical dimensions Cognitive justice Epistemic diversity Epistemic uniformity Academic excellence (contents, results, products) Pedagogy (participatory, emancipation)

Curriculum relevance Equality of access Equality of success Flexibility Social bond

Curriculum culture Reconfiguring/transformative (inclusive) Performative (consumer, executing, selective) Instrumental (knowledge and competences) Expressive (conduct and character)

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

593

These three dimensions are considered as being the components of inclusion, equality, and equity. Cognitive justice is based on what Santos (2003, 2004) calls the ecology of knowledge, corresponding to a new balance, a new relationship between scientific knowledge and popular knowledge, grounded on a permanent dialogue. According to Santos (2007), there is no social justice without cognitive justice, which is to say that, for an effective social distribution, there must be a dialogue between scientific knowledge and knowledge inscribed in social practices. In the context of an information or knowledge society, this orientation becomes more pressing since what is at stake is the control of the means of knowledge production. Regarding the concept of curriculum relevance, it can be taken from two perspectives: what should be taught and to whom it should be taught, without forgetting who owns the knowledge that should be taught. What is relevant is always relevant to someone according to what shapes him. This means that relevant curricular knowledge has been selected according to two main objectives, the weight of which varies at different times: to respond to the world of work, on the one hand, and to build citizenship, on the other. The chosen knowledge is, therefore, mostly specialized, scientific knowledge, which has sought to respond to the two purposes that shape both education, in general, and the curriculum. As for the recipients of this knowledge, we know that in Portugal they have changed, and the school public is currently quite diverse and different from 50 years ago. Bernstein (1977) identifies the middle class as the one that assumes knowledge as a vehicle for social mobility, being, therefore, the social class to whom education is most interesting and who has dominated educational decisions, namely, curricular ones. Educational relevance includes the dimension of social responsibility in education that is related to the production of socially significant knowledge, the training of professionals with civic awareness, as well as the contribution to culture and the transformation of reality (López et al., 2014). On the other hand, the dimension of social bond can also be considered, in the sense of expanding and consolidating the reciprocal relations between the school and the local environment, both at the curricular and at the institutional level. According to Bernstein (1971), culture can distinguish two behavioral sets of traits: the expressive order, referring to conduct and character, and the instrumental order, referring to skills and knowledge. Depending on their relative strength, they will lead to the development of more differentiated or more stratified school cultures, respectively. Together with the concepts of reconfiguring and transformative culture (Freire, 1985) and performative culture, it seems relevant to use this framework for the analysis of curriculum proposals and teachers’ narratives, since it enables us to bring to light the relationship between the internal elements of the curriculum and external conditions. The approach assumes that national curriculum policies are spaces of refraction (Goodson, 2010) of regional and global educational policies, bearing in mind that curricular knowledge and curriculum policies are considered a process, a continuum, produced by multiple actors operating in different fields, within an economic, political, and social context that must take on an analytical body. On the other

594

E. Estrela

hand, educational change, and the curriculum, must be understood in light of patterns and forces of change that provide different paths according to the historical and cultural reality of each region, country, or even professional context. This means that all curriculum policies are refracted whenever there is a change in level or players, accepting that this refraction occurs even at the level of the classroom with each of the professionals who work in it. Therefore, we pay attention not only to national trajectories, but also to the individual trajectories of each educational actor under analysis. In this way, the methodological approach is completed with teachers’ narratives, relevant in this context of individualized society, and a fundamental tool for understanding educational change, as these narratives are assumed as a refraction of the curriculum’s history, as well as for grasping social, political, and economic changes. Nóvoa (1995) argues that the professional and the personal cannot be separated, since the process of training a teacher is part of their life path, which also becomes a training path. According to Goodson (2008), it is not possible to understand the social dimension without first getting to know the personal and the biographical. In this context, Lopes and Macedo (2011) argue Paulo Freire’s ideas point to “an alternative to the curriculum’s technical concepts, proposing procedures for preparing types of curricula that are able to try and integrate the real world of individuals to the curriculum decisions” (pp. 34–35). Indeed, Freire develops the adult learning framework for reading and writing based on each student’s individual culture, building the curriculum at the same time that individuals rewrite their life (Freire, 1968).

Curriculum Policies in Portugal Over Time The analysis of curriculum policies over nearly 40 years is justified by the relevance of the concept of refraction assumed here, which reveals the need to analyze the contexts and identify the factors that determine curriculum options, precisely through the juxtaposition of historical movements with national and personal trajectories, contributing to a more complete and complex perspective of curricular changes in Portugal in the period in question. In this sense, the theoretical-methodological framework of the policy cycle approach (Bowe et al., 1992) was used, identifying the political agenda of curriculum policies for each cycle characterized by keywords, as presented in Table 2. Assuming that it is not watertight, and contemplates different and sometimes contradictory processes, curriculum knowledge has not undergone in Portugal, in legal and formal terms and over 50 years of study, a structural change, since its grammar remains unchanged: segmented, hierarchical, and organized into disciplines. In fact, curriculum proposals remain centralized, with schools having a very limited autonomy, although in the latest policy cycle analyzed (2015–2019), the progressive autonomy of schools could be noted, namely, at pedagogic level, grounded on innovation processes.

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

595

Table 2 Curriculum policy cycles in Portugal Policy cycle Exogenous modernization cycle 1986–1995

Incrementalism cycle 1995–2002

Measurement cycle 2002–2011

Meritocracy cycle 2011–2015

Citizenship cycle 2015–2019

Agenda keywords Modernization Equal opportunities Values Negotiation Inclusion Innovation Evaluation Authority Rationalization Rationalization Meritocracy Authority Territorialization Inclusion Innovation

Adapted from Teodoro and Aníbal (2008)

In terms of curriculum content, contradictory movements can be observed throughout this period. The exogenous modernization policy cycle (1986–1995) is guided by the democratization of education, focusing its commitment on democratizing not only access, but also success. It seems that the policies developed maintain a diversification character, albeit with a hybrid trend, as the diversity of curriculum offer was formalized and assumed as a priority, and common training allowed them to enjoy a school and social status identical to academic paths. However, this cycle emphasizes the principle that the market is the best vehicle for promoting equal opportunities, reinforcing the link between education and economic development. This can be seen in the insistence on vocational education, the reinforcement of technological areas in the curriculum, as well as the need to build a fully integrated citizen in Europe, which the formation of values, including productivity and competitiveness, contributed to. Following the Portuguese Educational Act (the Portuguese acronym for the Education System Framework Law), a curriculum reform is carried out at the same time that reforms of other educational dimensions are being implemented, standardizing, in this policy cycle, a curricular structure based on subjects. Nevertheless, some epistemological diversity has been introduced in formal curriculum proposals, i.e., the subject of Personal and Social Development or such non-disciplinary curriculum area as Area-School. In fact, official knowledge was based on scientific and technical knowledge, with a predominance of epistemological uniformity. Diversity was addressed not only via the School Area, but also via the various school clubs that operated in extracurricular format. This means that pedagogical concerns, curriculum flexibility, and expressive and reconfiguring culture that might contribute to the equal success was thrown out of the curriculum. In the incrementalism policy cycle (1995–2002), a conceptual change was introduced with the definition of a competence-based curriculum, alongside with flexible management and curricular autonomy, with implications in pedagogy and

596

E. Estrela

knowledge organization. In pedagogical terms, the project work enables the competence-based approach to be complemented, underlining epistemological diversity and the creation of conditions for the consecration of equal success. However, this is a policy cycle characterized by hybridism as it focuses simultaneously on curriculum diversification as a response to educational failure and on the introduction of low-stakes assessment. This seems to be a prescriptive framework within which inequalities intensify, as alternative paths are reinforced so that students complete the 9 years of compulsory schooling in a framework of profound differentiation from regular academic paths, a situation which may call into question the assurance of a basic education of equal value for all. In the measurement policy cycle (2002–2011), it can be said that the trend previously observed is accentuated, since curriculum diversity is preserved only at the level of supply which, combined with the reintroduction of national exams at the end of basic education in the subjects of Portuguese and Mathematics, leads to growing inequality since the emphasis on results is increasingly apparent. This is a policy cycle marked by several independent curriculum measures with implications in official knowledge, such as the Mathematical Action Plan or the National Program for the Teaching of Portuguese Language, which, together with changes in the syllabuses of the disciplines, brought epistemological diversity to official knowledge with a view to achieving equal success and where pedagogy was the protagonist. Still, and in the sense that the formal structure definitively took over the reins of curriculum policies, with a profound imbalance in the intervention of the different players. In this context, schools increasingly conducted their work according to the external assessments that emerged, pushing the student as an individual into the background. Regarding the meritocracy policy cycle, the rationalization of the educational system was both a goal and evidence, taking into account the financial control measures visible in the drop in the number of teachers or in the definition of a core curriculum, centered mainly on the subjects of Portuguese and mathematics. This process is not new in Portuguese educational policies (see Teodoro & Aníbal, 2008) and is also related to the defense of a meritocratic education, in which external evaluation mechanisms are increased and valued, with the introduction of national exams in the 4th and 6th grades and intermediate tests at the end of the 3rd cycle and secondary education, the latter as a way of ensuring compliance with subjects’ syllabuses. The results of these standardized tests serve as regulatory element not only of learning, but also of the funding to be allocated to each public school. Moreover, these evaluation mechanisms also serve the purpose of improving the levels of school and teacher authority, which, in the light of political discourse, needed to be upheld. In this context, it constitutes a set of policies that strengthens not only curriculum control, but also control over teachers’ work, and it complements, for Marôco (2021), international tests such as PISA. This control is accompanied by the reintroduction of a content-based curriculum, organized in curriculum goals, accompanied by a new curriculum organization that assigned more hours to the subjects of mathematics, Portuguese, and sciences.

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

597

The citizenship policy cycle (2015–2019) brought back a competence-based curriculum, presenting a student profile for compulsory schooling (in Portugal, 12 years) and a set of essential learning item for each discipline/school grade, centered on pedagogical approaches that promote spaces of organizational and professional innovation. National examinations in the 4th and 6th grades were eliminated, and low-stakes assessment was reintroduced, now in non-terminal years of basic education. Curriculum policies were reoriented to the focus on the school as a territory that must assume the search for responses to their publics’ needs, involving all its stakeholders. This centralization in territorial policies leads to the implementation of the process of municipalizing schools that had been ongoing, and the scope of contracts for the transfer of competences to the municipalities was expanded. This dimension is accompanied both by measures to promote school success and by measures for curriculum flexibility, since it is up to each context, understood as a school inserted in a territory and in a community, to develop innovation processes which, once the needs have been identified, will foster its students’ capabilities and enable their weaknesses to be overcome. This is also the rationale present both in the project of curriculum autonomy and flexibility, and in the articles that follow it, in which the principles of inclusion, differentiation, and autonomy are proclaimed, with emphasis on the pedagogical dimension and on the competence-based profile of the student. There were also other attempts to fight the segmentation and disciplinarization of knowledge with the introduction of Non-Disciplinary Curriculum Areas as tools for the development of inter- and transdisciplinary work, which were definitively removed from basic and secondary education in the meritocracy policy cycle, having had a rather ephemeral existence. In fact, these non-disciplinary areas constituted moments of possibility of moving from what is called mode 1 of knowledge to mode 2, which would have to be continued and sustained with other changes in the grammar of schooling, namely, in terms of the organization of students, which did not happen. In the last cycle of policies under analysis (2015–2019), this interdisciplinarity was transferred to the interior of the relationship among disciplines which, through innovation processes, could assume different organizational formats, with implications at the level of student distribution. This more structured agenda replaced more fragmented ones in the sense that they were limited to the introduction of independent measures (plans and syllabuses) or disciplines, which did not even have the time to produce permanent effects on the education of young people or on the training and work of teachers. Thus, the proposed curriculum culture oscillated between a more consuming, transmissive, and homogeneous culture in the exogenous modernization, measurement and meritocracy policy cycles, and a more inclusive culture in the incrementalism and citizenship policy cycles, although the performative bias has just been mitigated. However, the policies developed in the exogenous modernization, incrementalism, and citizenship policy cycles reveal an attempt to balance the instrumental order and the expressive order, as well as the promotion of interdisciplinarity, contextualization, and integration, which were secondary in the measurement and

598

E. Estrela

meritocracy policy cycles with the progressive relevance of scientific knowledge, considering their measurability as well as their economic value. Assuming that social justice is only achieved with the inclusion of knowledge inscribed in social practices in a balanced dialogue with scientific knowledge, the construction of curriculum knowledge in Portugal still has a long way to go. In fact, the almost 50 years of curriculum policies show that, despite some attempts, some of them successful, most of them clearly unsuccessful, the curriculum, from the proposals to what the schools offer, has not come close to this premise, which may partly explain the existing inequalities and exclusions. It is in effect the political proposals that may or may not favor the development of instruments and processes that promote cognitive justice, which does not prevent school institutions from trying to follow this path themselves, as has happened in some cases. Despite some epistemological diversity that has been introduced in formal curricular proposals, uniformity clearly predominates, as schools have little scope and autonomy to formally introduce curriculum components. On the other hand, the academic excellence/pedagogy binomial is preserved, emphasizing one of the binomials in some cycles more than in others. This can be observed in the incrementalism cycle, from which an advancement of pedagogy is inferred, in the sense of promoting active, effective, and emancipatory participation of all actors, although the other binomial was concurrently engaged, through, for example, the introduction of national testing benchmarks. However, curriculum policies have led to the increase of a technicist and economics-based curriculum culture, based on prescription, performativity, and accountability, which is accompanied by the growing professionalization and specialization of knowledge. Furthermore, these movements have caused interesting paradoxes, since the encouragement of collaborative and cooperative work, of networking, is simultaneous with the need for individualization.

Teachers’ Voices Through Narratives To understand and analyze how the internal critical elements of the curriculum interact with external conditions, there were collected 21 narratives of primary and secondary school teachers in Portugal. These narratives were prepared between November and December 2021, using virtual tools. The characterization of the teachers can be summarized in Table 3. It is important to emphasize that most of these teachers entered teaching due to a love of the profession or a love of children, which is interrelated with the interest in and willingness to share and transform the young ones that some also mention. We also identified what can be considered the mission of teachers, not only of those who work with children, but also of those who contribute to the training of young adolescents. Because I’ve always wanted to work with children. I like to be part of their conquests, evolutions, see them grow. (Teacher_6)

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

599

Table 3 Characterization of the teachers

Gender Female Male

17

Age 36–45

11

4

46–54

9

Years of service Up to 14 15–24

>55

1

25–34

6

>35

1

5 9

Subject group 110 – 1st Cycle BE Special Education 120 – English 1st Cycle 510 – Physics and Chemistry 500 – Mathematics 600 – Visual Arts

14 2

Professional situation Permanent Nonpermanent

18 3

1 1 1 2

I’ve always seen teachers as respectable people who enable the transmission of knowledge and ways to develop it, and for this reason I’ve always wanted to play that part in the life of others and contribute to their education. (Teacher_20)

And in this context, teachers establish a strong relationship between professional and personal life, conditioning the latter to the former, which denotes a blurring of the boundaries between private and public spheres and even a blending of both worlds. Those around me call me “workaholic”, due not only to the number of hours dedicated to work but also to the extreme difficulty in separating work from personal life, namely through the places to visit on holiday or when travelling, the type of products purchased in any simple shopping expedition, in the motifs for some pieces of clothing, conversations with friends or when addressing friends’ children and in the interest in extreme or leisure activities associated with work. (Teacher_20)

What is also apparent is the complementarity between both from the point of view of the construction of professional knowledge, since there is an integration of social knowledge in professional knowledge, which can also contribute to the narrativity of the curriculum. the parallel development of my activity, visual language, and teaching activity are of mutual enrichment. Other activities apparently not directly related to professional activities have had my deep recognition in personal development and in the growth of my professional activities. (Teacher_19)

With regard to the construction of teacher professionality, training gains enormous relevance, not only as a source of personal achievement, but also as an instrument of professional updating. On the other hand, these teachers say they are present in the governance structures of the schools where they work, which is related to the horizontality of the Portuguese education system, in the sense that management positions are not professional in nature. Their years of teaching experience can

600

E. Estrela

also explain why they hold these multiple functions. Teachers view relationships with their peers in quite a positive way, in a spirit of cooperation and sharing, which may reveal the importance of and need for a collective construction. It is also relevant to identify what teachers favor in the practice of their profession by the concept of teacher this information can provide. And, in this sense, teachers highlight the relationship they establish with their students as a priority and of greater relevance, both in the pedagogical and didactic sense, and in the sense of the well-being of those who are in the process of learning. It should be noted that some teachers focus their priorities on themselves since they take responsibility for this collective construction of knowledge that encompasses values for transforming society. The possibility\utopia of transforming the world by educating people. (Teacher_1) Scientific and didactical updating and creating a good pedagogic relationship with the students. (Teacher_18) As teacher I favor the relationship. I think the construction of knowledge is a collective act which depends on the ability to understand, to establish communication, to find ways to interact constructively. (Teacher_19)

Most teachers identify a change in the concept of teacher that results from factors related to their experience of the profession and to factors external to teaching. In relation to the former, experience and knowledge stand out, related to the professional cultures in which they were immersed, as drivers of changes in their conceptions and practices. There is a particularly important aspect that relates to the reflexivity of the teacher, when he/she states that “As time went by I realized that if there is a closer relation with the students, they find the subject more enjoyable” (Teacher_21). As for the second level of factors, they can be separated into educational policies and social changes. In fact, teachers identify the change in educational policies, including the lack of investment in education, related to professional devaluation, its bureaucratization, and the increasing unaccountability of parents/guardians. On the other hand, factors related to social changes or technological evolution, which forced them to adapt, not only in the way of living the profession, but also in the approaches to the development of their students’ learning, are pointed out as those that have triggered conceptual changes. From the latter derives a permanent capacity for innovation, since “we compete with Technologies” (Teacher_6). The narratives record a notion of school that is based on the integral formation of the individual, with a special focus on the dimension of citizenship for the shaping of a better future. However, teachers also insist on highlighting what can be called “curriculum overflow” since they believe that the school has gone beyond its scope, and sometimes their “business” – “learning and the development of competences and tools for knowledge and self-knowledge” (Teacher_13 and Teacher_1) – can be called into question.

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

601

Educating people to be and construct knowledge. (Teacher_4) The role of the school is to teach students and provide experiences that prepare them for their integration in society. (Teacher_14)

Linking the concepts of school and learning seems to be positive for deepening the knowledge of teachers’ professionality and what they narrate about the way they design and prepare their classes may partly point to a more technical conception than before. In fact, some teachers identify the school textbooks, mandatory in Portugal, not only as a resource for the development of the classes, but also as a core element in the design of the class itself: “I do the planning following the order of the textbooks” (Teacher_3). Their narratives also reveal a weekly and daily frequency of class preparation, in collaboration with colleagues or students, seeking to develop different moments that may promote, above all, students’ involvement and development. In addition to textbooks, teachers identify digital resources as the primordial in defining pedagogical strategies. Some note that they resort to all resources that promote their students’ development. These notions of school and classroom may also reveal a notion of student which, in the case of these teachers, is somewhat ambiguous in the sense that they alternate between an active perspective and a passive perspective of the student. Although some teachers identify students as the lead players, as knowledge builders in collaboration with their peers, others clearly identify students as deposits, pointing to a banking education (Freire, 1985). In fact, even when they assign some functions to students, they are only instrumental and not related to design or decision-making at curriculum level. However, the focus on autonomy and responsibility, two competencies included in the student profile, should be highlighted (Martins et al., 2017). They help in the distribution of handouts, in attendance taking (specially-designed form). (Teacher_16) They alternate between a more active/participative role and the role of a listener and receiver. (Teacher_17) Students are responsible for driving the design and materialization of their work in a cooperative way with their peers. Students can play different roles depending on their characteristic, and they involve choosing the topic or technique, chairing a group/activity/ class, responsible for cleaning and tidying up, for researching a topic, for organizing a campaign or bring recycled materials. (Teacher_20) I could students are moderators of their learning, I have the scientific and pedagogic knowledge, as well as that of learning. (Teacher_21)

Teachers have also mentioned the pandemic situation in which they have been working in the last three school years, identifying positive and negative consequences for schools. The positive effects of the pandemic are found at the level of the introduction of interactive digital resources in the development of learning

602

E. Estrela

brought about by the “need to make classes more dynamic” (teacher_15) and which allowed “greater sharing of experiences” (teacher_8) “and interactivity” (teacher_11). Paradoxically, the pandemic is pointed out as a factor “inhibiting sharing and cooperation” (teacher_19), as well as limiting “the freedom to express feelings” (teacher_18) and resulting in “less interaction” (teacher_13). Therefore, it seems appropriate to highlight this ambiguity in that it can reveal a contradiction which concerns the digital resources themselves and the design of remote education. What seems relevant to underline is the fact that educational resources have now become the class itself, which has profound implications not only in what teachers make of their classes, but also at the level of students’ relationships and learning. Moreover, the negative aspects identified are numerous, especially the limitations of times, spaces, movements, and interaction, which cause greater isolation and affect work and interpersonal relationships; the greater bureaucratization of the processes and, consequently, an increase in the time devoted to work; at pedagogical level, the decrease in students’ pace of work of and in group work, in practical and playful activities, with consequences for the “need to give greater coherence for equal opportunities” (Teacher_10). When teachers project the teaching profession in time, they speak of expectations with a great degree of uncertainty based above all on the profession’s lack of attractiveness and the professional decline. In other words, teachers think that the conditions for the practice of the profession will not only cause more strain to those who already do it, but will not make for a profession that can be attractive to young people either, which may jeopardize its very existence. However, and despite the negative outlook for the teaching profession in the future, some teachers see their role as decisive in the creation of structure in students in the face of the loneliness and insecurity that the pandemic has strengthened, while others assume a capacity for adaptation, characteristic of this professional, which has not been exhausted in this time.

Final Remarks The curriculum changes introduced in the various policy cycles analyzed show nonlinear trends related to each historical and political time. In fact, it cannot be argued that the curriculum proposals in Portugal have followed a sequential and similar path. Movements can be identified that pointed to a greater intervention at the level of the relationship between knowledge and pedagogy, in the incrementalism policy cycle, or at the level of the relationship between knowledge and assessment, in the meritocracy policy cycle, or, again of the relationship between knowledge and pedagogy, in the citizenship policy cycle. Toward the end of the twentieth in and two first decades of the twenty-first century, contradictory movements and setbacks are seen, also identified in the teachers’ narratives. The critical internal elements of the curriculum, and the design and central role that each one is assigned in different policy cycles, reveal sometimes contradictory and even paradoxical trends, within each policy cycle. These

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

603

discontinuities are noticeable at the level of the relationship between knowledge and pedagogy, based on the search for epistemological diversity and a participatory pedagogy, with a view to emancipation, in a flexible curriculum management, which seeks equal success and goes from a more reconfiguring and expressive curricular culture in the incrementalism and citizenship policy cycles – with a different emphasis in either of them. However, within each one a contradictory movement around the assessment can be made out, which, in the case of the former cycle, translated in the introduction of national low-stakes assessment and, in the case of the latter, by maintaining an external evaluation system based on a rationale that is contrary to that which was identified for the two other elements. When considering the measurement and meritocracy policy cycles, a trend toward epistemological uniformity is manifested, especially in the latter, as well as a notion of academic excellence based on results, products, and content, complemented by a lower predominance of social linkage of the curriculum or its flexibility, and a greater concern for equal access, since success depends predominantly on the individual. The constructed curriculum culture presents a more performative and instrumental orientation. It is, however, in the measurement policy cycle that guided policies are developed promoting equal success or that review curriculum proposals with a more inclusive and democratic orientation, as is the case of the revision of the Portuguese or Mathematics syllabuses. The identified guidelines relate to external conditions taking into account that it is possible to correlate social and historical conditions more adverse to the care of social justice with the closing-up of the curriculum and a focus on curriculum uniformity, as well as in academic excellence as opposed to pedagogy. This reality is visible, for instance, in the meritocracy policy cycle, led by a government of alliances between conservatives and neoliberals, in a national context of the Troika’s international intervention. It should be noted, however, that, despite being part of seemingly favorable policy cycles, socially and historically, the incrementalism and measurement policy cycles show more or less paradoxical policies with regard to the curriculum. With regard to the initial question that prompted this study, it is admissible to say that the curriculum in Portugal can only be seen from a more “gelatinous” perspective if we consider one of its critical internal elements: pedagogy. As for knowledge, it has suffered fluctuations throughout the policy cycles, although in the last 6 years, we can speak of a tendency toward knowledge fluidity. Moreover, what is visible in the teachers’ narratives is the claim to this knowledge with diluted borders, based on narratives and on teacher professionality, in question already in a near future. Teachers’ narratives seem to demonstrate the need for a narrative-based conception of education, and consequently of the curriculum, at the moment when we bear witnessing the blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private spheres. The most resistant internal element of the curriculum seems to be assessment, which, despite the reinforcement in the last policy cycle of a formative evaluation, maintains its selective and ranking-forming nature, both of students and of schools. This can probably be related to the implementation of large international statistical surveys that contribute to strengthening standardized assessment. In addition, this

604

E. Estrela

resistance may also be connected to the notion of performance, both at political and pedagogical levels, reinforced by assessment as a political-pedagogical measure that will lead the educational system to an effective performance as educator. In this context, the measures of the latest policy cycle are relevant in order to overcome the pedagogy/ academic excellence dichotomy since the latter may contain the former (Magalhães & Stoer, 2002) when performance is understood as “where the fields of knowledge, the I and the world are appropriated by critical thinking skills as a process to reach a ‘critical dialogue’” (Barnett, 1997: 66–68). Indeed, the teaching narratives reveal the need to develop professional learning processes that will contribute to the focus of teacher professionality in pedagogical processes and not, as they bear witness, in the digital resources that imprison teachers and limit innovation processes that can respond to students’ needs. Additionally, teachers’ voices denote a tendency toward the performativity of students and teachers, which they reject. A narrative conception of the curriculum will allow not only communication and dialogue among all its critical elements, and between them and external conditions, but also communication between these elements and teachers’ missions and dreams in order to resist the instrumentalization of pedagogical practices, which lead to a managerial conception of the classroom and, consequently, to an impoverishment of learning.

References Ball, S., & Goodson, I. (1985). Teachers’ lives and careers. Falmer Press. Barnett, R. (1997). Higher education: A critical business. Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (2001). The individualized society. Polity Cambridge Press. Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid times. Living in an age of uncertainty. Polity Cambridge Press. Bernstein, B. (1971). On the classification and framing of educational knowledge. In M. Young (Ed.), Knowledge and control (pp. 47–69). Collier-Macmillan. Bernstein, B. (1977). Class, codes and control. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bowe, R., Ball, S., & Gold, A. (1992). Reforming education & changing schools: Case studies in policy sociology. Routledge. Brown, P. (1997). Cultural capital and social exclusion: Some observations on recent trends in education, employment and the labour market. In P. Brown, A. Stuart Wells, A. H. Halsey, & H. Lauder (Eds.), Education. Culture, economy, society (pp. 736–759). Oxford University Press. Caraça, J. (1993). Do saber ao fazer: Porquê organizar a ciência? Gradiva. Caraça, J. (2003). À Procura do Portugal Moderno. Campo das Letras. Dale, R. (2008). A Globalização e o Desenho do Terreno Curricular. Revista Eletrónica Espaço Do Currículo, 1, 10.15687/rec.v1i1.3640. Drucker, P. (1993). Post-capitalist society. Harper Collins. Freire, P. (1968). Educação como prática da liberdade. Paz e Terra. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. Bergin and Garvey. Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogia da Esperança: um reencontro com a Pedagogia do Oprimido. Paz e Terra. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogia da Indignação: cartas pedagógicas e outros escritos. Editora UNESP. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. Sage.

Curriculum as the Fluid for Times of Unsureness: In Between the Solid. . .

605

Goodson, I. (1983). Life histories and teaching. In M. Hammersley (Ed.), The ethnography of schooling (pp. 129–154). Nafferton Books. Goodson, I. (1991). Sponsoring teacher’s voice. Cambridge Journal of Education, 21(1), 35–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764910210104 Goodson, I. (2006). The rise of life narrative. Teacher Education Quarterly, 33(4), 7–21. Goodson, I. (2008). As Políticas de Currículo e de Escolarização. Abordagens Históricas. Editora Vozes. Goodson, I. (2010). Times of educational change: Towards an understanding of patterns of historical and cultural refraction. Journal of Education Policy, 25(6), 767–775. Goodson, I. (2013). Developing narrative theory: Life histories and personal representation. Routledge. Hanushek, E., & Woessmann, L. (2015). Universal basic skills: What countries stand to gain. OECD. International Commission on the Futures of Education. (2021). Reimagining our futures together — A new social contract for education. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Lopes, A. C., & Macedo, E. (2011). Teorias de currículo. Cortez Editora. López, A. M., Naidorf, J., & Teodoro, A. (2014). Social and cognitive justice: The social relevance of the higher education in Latin America. In I. Bogotch & C. M. Shields (Eds.), International handbook of educational leadership and social (in)justice (pp. 81–96). Springer Netherlands. Lyotard, J. (1989). A Condição Pós-Moderna. Gradiva. Magalhães, A., & Stoer, S. (2002). A Escola para Todos e a Excelência Académica. Profedições. Magalhães, A., & Stoer, S. (2009). Education, knowledge and network society. In R. Dale & S. Robertson (Eds.), Globalisation & europeanisation in education (pp. 45–63). Symposium Books. Marôco, J. (2021). Portugal: The PISA effects on education. In N. Crato (Ed.), Improving a country’s education, PISA 2018 results in 10 countries (pp. 159–174). Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4 Martins, G., Gomes, C., Brocardo, J., Pedroso, J. V., Carrilho, J., Silva, L. U., & Encarnação, M. M. (2017). Perfil Dos Alunos à Saída Da Escolaridade Obrigatória. Ministério da Educação/ Direção Geral da Educação. Nassehi, A., Hagen-Demszky, A., & Mayr, K. (2007). The structures of knowledge and of knowledge production. Know&Pol Project. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/KatharinaMayr-2/publication/265031760_The_Structures_of_Knowledge_and_of_Knowledge_Produc tion/links/56cacba208aee3cee5402c10/The-Structures-of-Knowledge-and-of-KnowledgeProduction.pdf Nóvoa, A. (1995). Modèles D’analyse en Education Comparée: Le Champ et la Carte. Les Sciences de L’Education – Pour L’Ére Nouvelle, 2(3), 9–61. Ozga, J. (2008). Governing knowledge: Research steering and research quality. European Educational Research Journal, 62(3), 307–332. Paraskeva, J. (2001). A Dinâmica dos conflitos Ideológicas e Culturais na Fundamentação do Currículo. Edições Asa. Pinar, W. (1975). Curriculum studies. The reconceptualization. McCutchan Publishing Company. Pinar, W. (2007). O que é a Teoria do Currículo? Porto Editora. Santos, B. S. (1989). Introdução a uma Ciência Pós-Moderna. Afrontamento. Santos, B. S. (1991). A Transição Paradigmática: da Regulação à Emancipação. In M. M. Carrilho (Ed.), Dicionário do Pensamento Contemporâneo (pp. 23–43). Dom Quixote. Santos, B. S. (2003). Conhecimento prudente para uma vida decente: um discurso sobre as ciências revisitado. Afrontamento. Santos, B. S. (2004). Fórum Social Mundial: Manual de uso. Afrontamento. Santos, B. S. (2007). Another knowledge is possible. Verso.

606

E. Estrela

Teodoro, A., & Aníbal, G. (2008). Education in times of globalisation: Modernization and hybridism in the educational policies in Portugal. International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 45(2), 103–118. Toffler, A. (1970). Future shock. Random House. Toffler, A. (1991). Powershift: As mudanças do poder (7th ed.). Record. Trindade, R., & Cosme, A. (2016). Instruir, aprender ou comunicar: Reflexão sobre os fundamentos das opções pedagógicas perspetivadas a partir do ato de ensinar. Revista Diálogo Educacional, 16(50), 1031–1051. https://doi.org/10.7213/1981-416X.16.050.AO01 Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994). The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453–479.

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and Learning Landscape in the New Normal (The Case of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) Catherine K. K. Chan and Adrian M. H. Lam

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changing the Curriculum System and Ecology of the Learning Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emergence of More Resourceful, Versatile, and Creative Learning at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expanded Life-Wide Learning and Community Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Increasing Emphasis of Self-management Among Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maintaining the Social-Emotional Well-Being and Motivation of Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shifting Public and Nonpublic Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Igniting the Collaborative and Resilient Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Complementary Roles in Accelerating Paradigm Changes Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Levering Community Strength in Managing Mental Health Conditions Among Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collaborative Partnership Between Universities, Government, and Schools Yielding Timely Evidence-Based Research Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Boosting Policy and Initiatives Bridging the Digital Divide Among the Underprivileged Families and Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hybridity of the East and the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managing the Tensions Between Individuals and Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rejuvenating Emphasis of Home Support in Student Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Continuous Public Support in Enhancing Student Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contingent School Curriculum Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Increasing Imperatives for Comprehensive Scenarios Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grasping the COVID-19 Pandemic as Aspirations for Future School Development . . . . . . Emergence of New Learning Borderscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction of Cross-Border Learning Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction of Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Learning Landscape with Emphasis on Interface and Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preparation for the Future Education as the “New Normal” Curriculum System and Learning Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

608 611 612 613 613 614 614 615 615 616 617 617 618 619 619 620 620 621 622 623 623 624 625

C. K. K. Chan (*) · A. M. H. Lam Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_33

607

608

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

Curriculum and Learning Design Responsive to the Five Dynamicities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mapping Against OECD’s Four Scenarios for the Future of Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion and Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

625 626 626 628

Abstract

It is a worldwide concern on the bearings of the unprecedented and prolonged outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic on school education, curriculum, as well as student learning and well-being under the “new normal” where technologization is increasingly relied on and likely becomes the priority of future development all over the world. With special reference to the situation of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as one of the high-performing learning systems throughout the years, this chapter aims to make visible those emerging phenomena and dynamic interactions among schools, the community, and private sectors, which are shaping or accentuating resilient and innovative curriculum system as well as learning landscape where glocalization (including but not merely limited to technologization) prevails. All these evidence-based perspectives mainly include (1) changing the curriculum system and ecology of the learning landscape; (2) shifting public and nonpublic relationships; (3) hybridity of the East and the West; (4) contingent school curriculum leadership; as well as (5) emergence of new cross-borderscape. This chapter would conclude with the wider implications for curriculum inquiries and strong resonances with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Four Scenarios for the Future of Schooling, which helps policymakers and educators around the world to better prepare for the series of educational challenges and opportunities ahead of them. Meanwhile, all these elements help transform various curriculum systems and learning landscapes to become more responsive and resilient under the “new normal.” Keywords

COVID-19 pandemic · New normal · Hong Kong · Learning landscape · Publicnonpublic relationships · East-West hybridity · Curriculum leadership · Crossborderscape · Educational future

Introduction The notion “new normal” is now widely coined as the current situation of education responding to the sudden and unprecedented outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020 (d’Orville, 2020). This global pandemic has disrupted and reshaped a wide range of aspects of human lives, including normal schooling, and transformed the way curriculum concepts and practices conceived and delivered in most educational systems (Teräs et al., 2020). While some academics have recently written about the initial impact (e.g., Pacheco, 2021; Sahlberg, 2020) and paradoxes

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

609

(e.g., Yang, 2020), a number of international organizations have responded to some of the emergent issues and crises and advised various policies and practices at regular intervals that would enable students to continue to learn based on available information and sound practices (e.g., Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2020b; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2020; World Bank, 2020). Since the pandemic outbreak with disruptive schooling, various stakeholders have been formulating a series of urgent and consequential decisions, choices, and adaptations in response to students’ learning expectations and needs, as well as the larger ever-evolving environment, while balancing conflicting priorities and viewpoints. All of them are contributing under the goal of sustaining and deepening the provision of quality education for all students at this challenging time (Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021). The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (HKSAR) was one of the first places around the world to close schools in February 2020 responding to the confirmed outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in late January 2020 (Wong et al., 2020). Table 1 shows how different levels of normal schooling have been variously adjusted by the HKSAR government in response to the situations or resurgence of the pandemic by the Education Bureau (EDB), which has also publicly typified the “new normal.” Throughout various successive “waves” of the pandemic, there have been prolonged and periodic school closure and resumption in both the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 school years. All these have brought significant consequences and implications of how policymakers and educators have adjusted and accelerated the paradigm shifts originally promulgated in the “Learning to Learn 2+” curriculum reform since 2017, which emphasizes offering all students a broad and balanced as well as open and flexible curriculum that nurtures life-long and selfdirected learning capacities and fosters whole-person development, toward the “new normal” here broadly described as the curriculum system and learning landscape (Curriculum Development Council, 2017). Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the educational changes have taken place gradually and progressively. The stages of change across Hong Kong schools observed at the beginning of the pandemic have set the pretexts of emerging innovative learning and teaching practices. As shared by Professor Cheng Kai-ming in various global forums of education and schooling under the pandemic, he observed four stages of changes at the very beginning, which include (1) reluctance as necessary nuisance; (2) acceptance as long-term adaptation; (3) experimenting new ideas and approaches; as well as (4) preparing for class resumption. The first stage is those schools having diverse entries with some with a fixed mindset remaining wait-and-see or reluctant, while the second stage is for those merely adopting central portals and videos. Some have received the fast and intensified pandemic situation with acceptance of long-term adaptation and adjustment with synchronous and nonsynchronous learning and teaching taking place at the same time. Meanwhile, a minority of schools getting mature quickly have acceleration of e-professionalism, e-leadership, and partnership. Basically speaking, almost all teachers have to try out new approaches and ideas with constant reflections and improvements (Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021). By the second semester of the 2020/2021

610

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

Table 1 Impacts of the four consecutive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and disruptive schooling in the HKSAR throughout 2020 to 2021 Kindergarten Primary schools First wave – complete school closure (SC) January SC 2020 (January 29 to mid-May 2020) (around 17 weeks) Second wave – partial class resumption (CR) by stages or levels May 2020 June CR for upper CR for Primary 4–6 2020 kindergarten (June 8 onward) (June 15 onward) CR for Primary 1–3 (June 15 onward) Third wave – early commencement of summer vacation July to SC August (July 10 onward) 2020 September CR CR 2020 (September 29 onward) (September 29 onward)

November 2020

Secondary schools

CR for Secondary 3–5 (May 27 onward) CR for Secondary 1–2 (June 8 onward)

CR for Secondary 1, 5, and 6 (September 23 onward) CR for Secondary 2–4 (September 29 onward)

SC (November 14 onward)

SC for Primary 1–3 (November 23 onward) Fourth wave – discretionary partial school resumption December SC 2020 (December 2 onward) February CR with not more than one-third of total students 2021 (after the Chinese New Year holiday) March CR with not more than two-thirds of total students 2021 (after the Easter holiday) May Whole-school CR 2021 (May 24 onward) a

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the uncertainties and complexities of containing it, there were several delays in announcing school resumption, while toward the latter waves, announcement of resumption could be made several weeks before school resumption. https://www.otandp.com/covid-19-timeline b All the face-to-face class resumption at all school levels is on a half-day basis, so as to minimize social interaction and prevent virus spread if students have meals together. https://www.info.gov.hk/ gia/general/202105/11/P2021051100620p.htm c Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, cross-boundary students cannot come to their respective schools in Hong Kong due to the imposition of 14-day mandatory quarantine requirement. It was not until June 15, 2020, when Secondary 3–5 students are allowed to return to resume classes without undergoing the quarantine under the selective easing of border restrictions. https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202006/09/P2020060900525.htm

school year, they regarded that the first and second stages did not exist anymore. By then, since the pandemic has been accompanying them for more than a year, many of the schools and teachers are already get used to this state of the “new normal” and

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

611

realized that they still need to coexist with the pandemic for quite a while. Therefore, they have been attempting to strike “new balance,” for instance, between what students to learn at school and at home, dependence on teachers and independence of students, what to assess and what not to assess, and the teaching and pastoral roles of teachers, as well as where to seek support to both schools and home. Most importantly, some teachers would derive and come up with guiding principles, empirical evidence, professional capacity, and flexible planning and harness external support. Despite Hong Kong’s former experiences with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic, it is still challenging for Hong Kong to be continuously improved and constantly revamped for the sake of coping with the series of novel situations ahead brought by such far more extensive and prolonged global COVID19 pandemic. Nonetheless, crises can be turned into opportunities, which help promote innovation and transformation. This chapter, instead of showing how technology-enhanced learning and teaching has transformed the curriculum and learning landscape which are recently researched and widely published (e.g., Dhawan, 2020; Ferri et al., 2020; Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021), aims to make visible a wide range of COVID-19-related evolving or novel phenomena and practices that are consequences of technologies having the potential of transforming the curriculum system and learning landscape in the “new normal” even when schooling is back to “normal” when the pandemic could be largely contained or eliminated. All these are conceptualized into five categories, which include (1) changing the curriculum system and ecology of the learning landscape; (2) shifting public and nonpublic relationships; (3) hybridity of the East and the West; (4) contingent school curriculum leadership; as well as (5) emergence of new cross-borderscape. Meanwhile, these five evidence-based perspectives are based on the information contributed by intensive communication and continuous sharing of practices among schools; public information, including empirical research findings; as well as both writers’ professional experiences and recent involvement in relevant initiatives.

Changing the Curriculum System and Ecology of the Learning Landscape Unleashing students’ potentials is never a new concept to many Hong Kong students. This is initiated through promoting information technology for interactive learning as one of the four key tasks and one of the nine generic skills advocated in Hong Kong’s centralized curriculum framework that emphasizes the totality of students’ learning experiences (Curriculum Development Council, 2001). Since the early 1998/1999 school year, the EDB has launched different strategies on information technology in education and other e-learning initiatives through a consecutive series of four 5-year planning approaches in step with other educational developments (Yuen & Hew, 2018). With the constant efforts devoted by the government and schools, e-learning has gradually become an integral part of learning and teaching (Kong et al., 2014). At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic,

612

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

many educators still worried that such a sudden crisis would undermine active and creative learning and teaching, especially when most of them were forced to be taking place via online or home settings (Wong & Moorhouse, 2020). Nonetheless, with the facilitation of information technology, the pandemic has unintentionally presented a wide range of flexible, authentic, and personalized opportunities for students to unleash their unique strengths in both the cognitive and their psychosocial development and well-being in an effort to sustain learning. Such effects have been due to adjusted new annual school plans and daily practices achieving both expected and unexpected impacts or when students have overcome the limitations and uncertainties themselves independently throughout their learning trajectory.

Emergence of More Resourceful, Versatile, and Creative Learning at Home During complete or partial school closure in the COVID-19 pandemic, most Hong Kong schools have tried to provide a broad and balanced learning experiences of students according to the central curriculum guidelines, while a smaller number of schools have reduced learning time on physical education, music, and visual arts education which often require significant on-site demonstration of physical and technical skills of teachers, as well as abundant access to supplies and equipment. Nonetheless, according to Chan (2020), some of the typical examples in physical education that include doing stretching and running on the spot could still be realized by students at their home settings. Moreover, with the affordance of various readily accessible online tools, teachers could monitor and evaluate the progress and performance of their students and offer them with immediate feedback, further instructions, and even new challenges. Although students are staying at home for these classes, they remain highly engaged and energetic under a holistic learning experience which goes beyond traditional academic subjects. As shared by Mr. Kwong Kai-tak, who is the visual arts panel head of Po On Commercial Association Wong Siu Ching Secondary School, his students are exhibiting more creativity when they are free to use whatever available resources at home kitchen like raw food and scrap paper instead of materials originally prepared by teachers. The inaccessibility of teacher-prepared materials was originally regarded as rigid constraints which is now turned into abundant opportunities that go beyond teachers’ imagination before. This freely interpretive art learning approach has inspired and empowered students to arrive at a more expanded and personalized outcome, such that students of varying strengths and abilities could arrive at outcomes that match well with their levels of understanding and learning (Bondie et al., 2019). Another example of breaking the conventional myth that students tend to learn better at school with the support of well-trained and experienced teachers was to develop a creative art by simply displaying a portrait at home and producing a photo art.

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

613

Expanded Life-Wide Learning and Community Contribution Life-wide learning (LWL) is the notion where students are expected to learn in a continuum of learning environment from classroom/school to out of classroom/ school and in real contexts and authentic settings, which is highly emphasized in the part of five essential learning experiences within Hong Kong’s centralized curriculum framework (Curriculum Development Council, 2001). Instead of posing barriers to learn in limited social interaction and diversified environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students are given alternative diversified, enlivened, and enriched opportunities that connect them with outside stakeholders through constant interactions and conversations. All these are made more abundant and accessible online through reducing the friction of physical distance that has allowed only limited capacity in on-site settings. This is the result of the concerted effort of school to sustain and even expand such learning by engaging community partners more easily than before and adopting practices not thought of before the pandemic. All these decentered, distributed, and dispersed learning networks remain important for students to cultivate a stronger sense of community and human contact when isolation and disconnection prevail throughout the pandemic. For instance, according to Mr. Chui Ka-cheung, who is the school principal of Aldrich Bay Government Primary School, in close alignment with the school characteristics and curriculum, their school has engaged more than 50 partners and alumni renowned in their respected specialized fields, such as media, sports stars, and singers.

Increasing Emphasis of Self-management Among Students Self-management is one of the nine generic skills but less attended by schools when compared with those like communication, critical thinking, and creativity as their significance and impacts on students are more immediate and visible (Curriculum Development Council, 2001). Nonetheless, the emergence of flexible blended learning and home-schooling throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the need for students to be metacognitive and self-regulated as it brings along extensive disruption over formally structured routines, though the extent of change has varied among schools (Karatas & Arpaci, 2021). Since the release of the research findings of the action-focused and COVID-19-related project titled “eCitizen 360” of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), the recognition of the importance of self-regulation has been expressed on various public sharing seminars. It was widely reported that students could not manage scheduling their self-study and doing assignments during the long stay at home (e-Citizen Education, n.d.-a). While self-management remains complicated and abstract to many students, according to Mr. So Ping-fai, who is the school principal of Tin Shui Wai Methodist College, their school has conceptualized four fundamental and simple steps in transforming their primary school students’ learning modes. The first step is plan,

614

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

which requires arousing students’ learning motivation. Students need to be serious with their learning and set up their own goals for the learning content. The second step is do, which requires establishing self-learning habits. Students need to establish their own timetable for self-learning and corresponding learning modes. The third step is act, which needs learning skills and thinking trainings. Students need to be better supported by various learning tools, such as taking notes. The last step is check, which involves self-reflection and self-improvement.

Maintaining the Social-Emotional Well-Being and Motivation of Students The prolonged school closure brought by the COVID-19 pandemic has deprived students of social interaction and life inside and outside schools. Some schools have alerted to pay more attention to the social-emotional well-being at home, which is also an important source of continuous learning motivation (Di Pietro et al., 2020). According to Mr Ho Ying-hon, who is the principal of Caritas Fanling Chan Chun Ha Secondary School, their school is one of the very early adopters of student mentoring and positive education projects in promoting the all-round well-being of students. In anticipation of social isolation and disengagement due to prolonged school closure, the Career Guidance Team has employed the concept of “flow” and launched a 20-hour project for students, which requires everyone learning a new matter at home. This aims to enhance students’ efficacy and confidence in setting up goals and monitoring their own progress and strengthen their senses of hope and self-learning, which could transfer their learning motivation from nonacademic to academic dimensions. The goals selected by students are diverse, which includes arts, language, sports, household, and science and technology. Based on the individual preferences of students, schools assigned them a mentor who is either a school teacher or external teacher with relevant strength and experience. Besides regular discussion with their mentors, students also need to update their daily learning progress on the online Padlet platform.

Shifting Public and Nonpublic Relationships Currently, there are still limited studies on public-nonpublic relationships in the school sector (e.g., Lam & Perry, 2000), despite the historical contribution of School Sponsoring Bodies (SSBs) who operated the large majority of public-funded schools in Hong Kong. They are largely nongovernmental organizations, religious bodies, philanthropic charities, and commercial enterprises who have made quality education far more affordable and accessible by students in need. These mainly include but not only limited to resources, infrastructures, and services (Chan, 2005). The COVID-19 pandemic experience demonstrates how Hong Kong citizens employ collective effort, responsibility, innovation, and intelligence. With the dynamic interplay of the public and nonpublic support, they are utilizing the strengths of

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

615

one another to respond to the social needs and expectations timely and thoroughly. Their aligned efforts as shown further below help support learning at all levels and co-invent the “new normal” together.

Igniting the Collaborative and Resilient Spirit Hong Kong’s experience with the SARS epidemic in 2003 had once exacerbated the utmost united action and steadfast resilience. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 had quickly ignited the collaborative and resilient spirit as reflected by the educational community. While the government bureaucracy has continued to use its official platform to provide additional guidance and online courses to meet general needs for all schools, those from the nonpublic sector such as teachers’ professional association, networks, and universities are regarded as more responsive to school-based needs and could be more immediate and pragmatic in assisting and supporting the underprivileged needy and minority groups. Moreover, while the government is still maintaining her roles of leadership and coordination of key resources with dedicated website as discussed in the next section, the nonpublic sector is filling her gaps in policies and services, injecting emergency funding, offering sponsorship to those students affected by social and digital divide, conducting quick research, as well as foreseeing new needs and spearheading innovative practices as parts of the larger philanthropic portfolio. In the future, it is worth to conduct studies regarding the quality, amount, and impact brought by such public and nonpublic self-regulatory relationships on Hong Kong’s learning system in the “new normal.”

Complementary Roles in Accelerating Paradigm Changes Together Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hong Kong has been upholding the principle of “suspending classes without suspending learning.” Nearly all schools and teachers have been proactively designing a wide range of resources for their students to undergo asynchronous and synchronous online learning and teaching. The EDB has been offering support and assistance in terms of deepening teachers’ online learning and teaching capabilities and competencies in using online tools and resources. A detailed list of curriculum resources about COVID-19-related themes and topics across different key learning areas and key stages is also systematically provided and regularly updated by the EDB for references among teachers (Information Services Department, 2020a). Meanwhile, a dedicated webpage “Online Learning 360
” is launched to consolidate and categorize different existing e-learning resources and propose online learning schedules. Furthermore, there is a series of continuous professional development programs like training and sharing webinars and online self-learning courses, as well as on-site structural support services like regular hotline services and mobile communication applications (Information Services Department, 2020b). Nonetheless, teachers are encouraged to

616

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

organize and offer learning experiences for their students at different paces, adjust the breadth and depth of learning content, and flexibly adopt various learning and teaching modes and strategies. Apart from the top-down government support like the Information Technology in Education Centre of Excellence Scheme, some bottom-up initiatives through emerging and revitalized professional associations as well as new professional networks, such as the Hong Kong Association for Computer Education and the Hong Kong FlippEducators, have been mobilizing and gathering like-minded educators through a series of workshops, talks, and competitions, not to include hundreds of WhatsApp teacher groups for timely updates and ongoing communication (Ng et al., 2020). All these professional learning communities within and across schools allow teachers to constantly articulate and reflect insights and offer mutual support on the planning and implementation of online learning and teaching, which includes both the generic teaching level and the subject-specific levels.

Levering Community Strength in Managing Mental Health Conditions Among Students The earnestness to maintain the well-being of students is witnessed in a rapid and responsive leveraging on the strengths of community organization throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Hong Kong students have become frustrated and stressed due to the series of risks brought along by the pandemic and after the prolonged period of learning from home (Chan & Yip, 2021). Meanwhile, some have become increasingly withdrawn from society and become hidden youth, which has a high tendency toward mental health problems and suicidal thoughts (Sun, 2020). The situation is worrying especially when many of the behavioral and emotional changes are not easily and immediately noticeable in the online learning environment. Some schools have also noticed deterioration in student responses to the Assessment Program for Affective and Social Outcomes (Second Version) (APASO-II), an annual school self-evaluation tool provided by the EDB, showing that students are becoming far more vulnerable. While the Hong Kong government has devoted more resources and encouraged schools to strengthen counseling and rehabilitation services as remedial support, some community organizations go much further and deeper by focusing more on preventive care and personalized support for students throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The sizes of these have ranged from various big philanthropists spending a huge sum of money every year to some medium- or smaller-size organizations like the Bei Shan Tang Foundation and Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association of Hong Kong. A nongovernmental organization like Just Feel has deployed “compassionate communication” strategy as the solution for enabling students to learn how to identify and express their feelings and needs to their parents and peers, which can be the initial point for describing what they are experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. The lower primary classes will learn about basic emotions, while the more

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

617

senior counterparts will have classes on various positive values and attitudes embedded in their everyday life (Chan, 2021). Another example is Coolminds as a joint project between Mind HK and KELY Support Group which aims to encourage students to write personal stories to staff as a way to better recognize and manage their emotions and foster positive mental health and resilience throughout the pandemic (Wong, 2020). Without the timely intervention of these organizations, many vulnerable students may easily overestimate the badness and likelihood of adverse events associated with the pandemic and subsequently perceive themselves as highly vulnerable under a vicious cycle (Choi et al., 2020).

Collaborative Partnership Between Universities, Government, and Schools Yielding Timely Evidence-Based Research Findings All along, there has long been a mutually beneficial collaborative relationship cultivated among universities, government, and schools in Hong Kong, which helps enhance capacity building and develop all-round quality education as evident in a wide range of partnership projects, such as University-School Support Program (USSP), Education Development Fund (EDF), Quality Education Fund (QEF), and Research Grants Council (RGC). All these projects have dual aims, which are to offer schools and teachers the support that enables them to put relevant theories and principles and to provide new practical experiences and reference for other schools as well as for refining the curriculum in the long run. The “eCitizen 360” project is an illustrative example when its emergence coincided the time when need for understanding the impact of COVID-19 on schooling and anticipated government actions was most heightened. Its primary focus is on learning and teaching during school closure between February and June 2020 riding on similar research and personnel resources, supported by school councils and professional associations ensuring reliable data collection. By focusing on school leaders, ICT coordinators, teachers, students, and their parents, the action-oriented study focuses on investigating the changes in schooling support at home before, during, and after the first school suspension in primary and secondary schools with a view to recommend actions for the government and different stakeholders. Their evidence-based research findings analyzed and reported in five stages have confirmed some important observations in this chapter as well as shedding light on the discussion of facilitating learning and teaching. Each stage is also complemented by seminars organized by community groups on good practices and strategies to operationalize the recommendations, which are also included in this chapter as some illustrative examples (e-Citizen Education, n.d.-b).

Boosting Policy and Initiatives Bridging the Digital Divide Among the Underprivileged Families and Students The research findings reported in the first bulletin of the “e-Citizen Education 360” study, titled “From outcomes and challenges of online learning to enhanced digital

618

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

preparedness for the New Normal,” have exacerbated the concerns that the longstanding digital divide problem in Hong Kong is undermining equal learning opportunities among students (Law et al., 2020). Many underprivileged students coming from low-income families are still in lack of appropriate learning devices and technologies for their online classes, whereas they are often progressing slower, or even falling behind when compared to their counterparts coming from better-off families. The project has given the government much stronger justifications to call for school-wide implementation of the “Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)” policy launched since the 2015/2016 academic year, while some schools in Hong Kong still have some hesitations before due to considerations of learning effectiveness and resources allocation. Meanwhile, there is a new circular issued by the Jockey Club to giving additional boost aiming at 100% implementation of the “BYOD” policy in schools (Hong Kong Jockey Club, 2020a). It is hoped that not only is the current digital divide be further narrowed, but also learning throughout the pandemic can become more personalized and mobile with the support of mobile computer devices. Despite certain Hong Kong government schemes like the Community Care Fund and Subsidy Scheme for Internet Access Charges, in reality, there could be small loopholes where a small number of students do not have access to these due to sudden change in family conditions or sandwiched between two sets of requirements. While it takes a relatively longer period of time for the government to take administrative steps to fill the gaps, there have been immediate responsive actions from different charity organizations. For instance, Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust’s Bandwidth Support for E-learning at Home Scheme is launched for students living in subdivided units, old buildings, remote areas, and outlying islands who might not have access to high-speed and stable Internet services at home for online learning. This has fully achieved meeting the imperative needs of local primary and secondary students to have ready access to hundreds of hours of real-time online classroom learning as the pandemic prolongs for a period of 4 months (Hong Kong Jockey Club, 2020b). Meanwhile, the social corporate spirit is strongly reflected in the example of commercial companies like Microsoft Hong Kong which partnered with various corporate groups, computer refurbishers, and education associations, such as Crossroads Foundation and Caritas Computer Workshop, to provide more than 1000 computers, which were once used in offices, to students who are in need of computers for attending remote lessons and completing homework online (Microsoft Hong Kong News Centre, 2020).

Hybridity of the East and the West As one of the most international Asian cities, Hong Kong has shown how Eastern and Western cultures that are often perceived to be polarized could seamlessly and harmoniously coexist in different arenas, such as art, music, fashion, and food. As Hong Kong is still rapidly developing, the Chinese Confucian core values have not been overshadowed and replaced by the Western ones as they are transcended through the family system and Chinese identities that are well embedded and

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

619

internalized among individuals. Throughout the years, the educational community has been continuing to draw reference from both the East and the West and contextualizing and incorporating these ideas and practices into the learning system (Lo, 2020). This allows Hong Kong to keep up with global standards while harnessing the distinctively local strengths like resilience and adaptability. Hong Kong manages to capitalize and synthesize the strengths of both cultures, especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic with many educational norms and practices which require a series of modifications and changes.

Managing the Tensions Between Individuals and Groups One frequently asked question is whether “Westernization” is necessarily desirable and vice versa for traditional Chinese values in specific matter, such as parenting beliefs and practices that are deemed to be influencing the personal development of children (Chan et al., 2013). The COVID-19 pandemic experience again shows how the diversity of cultures is at work in the education-related dimensions. While the previous section has described schools catering to individual choices as manifested in the “flow” project as a “Western” concept, the revelation below has also shown sustaining culture of parental involvement and differential impact when learning takes place in an overwhelmingly digital environment at home throughout the pandemic, which are the emphases of traditional Chinese families.

Rejuvenating Emphasis of Home Support in Student Learning The research findings reported in the fifth bulletin of the “e-Citizen Education 360” study, titled “Parent-Child Communication and Relationship are Key to Students’ Wellbeing at Home and in School,” are the most revealing. According to Law et al. (2021b), it is found that good parent-child relationship is the single most important supportive and protective factor for the well-being of children. Meanwhile, parental participation in school activities predicts children’s participation in online learning and perceived usefulness of online learning tools. These could be explained by the Confucianist culture where traditionally studying is something parents have respected (Lam et al., 2002). As students have to stay at home for most of the time throughout the pandemic, parents would become a reliable source of comfort in easing pain and anxiety. They can always offer emotional support and timely intervention for them at times of uncertainty. Meanwhile, as the core people who accompany their children as they grow up, parents have the unique knowledge of and affection with their own children, whereas such detailed understanding and intimate trust help facilitate student learning. Some parents would tend to believe in their own children in taking control of their learning at early stage of schooling. Therefore, according to Law et al. (2021b), various types of parenting are identified in both primary and secondary schools showing a diversified control or management of such relationships, which include

620

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

having very low engagement in all kinds of interactions, maintaining primarily child-focused communication, providing above average levels of child-centered support, and offering comprehensive support. Nonetheless, parents coming from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds are more likely to engage in school activities and interact with teachers. Such enhanced involvement is not without tensions, whereas the findings have also shown a negative relationship between the two. Although many Hong Kong parents still tend to make schools and the government fully accountable for student learning, the COVID-19 experience reminds or rejuvenates educators and parents themselves of the unique parental roles and responsibilities as well as family learning environment.

Continuous Public Support in Enhancing Student Learning Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, some parents of primary school students have dropped their jobs to stay with them at home. There has been a resurgence of more intensive home-school activities and information responding to immediate and new needs. The official government website in early 2020 has provided a six-page homelearning strategy guide for kindergarten parents, which allows them to employ the tips and principles for designing individualized learning activities for their young children who are mostly confined at home throughout the year as they are one of the most vulnerable groups of the pandemic (Education Bureau, 2021). Similarly, the Smart Parent Net is the one-stop governmental website, allowing parents with children from kindergarten to primary and secondary school levels easy access to crucial and useful information on supporting the holistic well-being of their children that promote harmonious parent-child relationship and encouraging children to adopt positive life skills (Information Services Department, 2021a). The sudden upsurge of local cases as the COVID-19 pandemic’s third wave since July 2020 coinciding with the summer vacation is responded quickly with different practices of promoting inclusiveness and equity. The “Catering for Students with Special Educational Needs: Joyful Online Learning at Home” helped parents who have children with special educational needs to make the most of the holiday and pick up more skills in academic learning and social adaptation. These mainly include a set of infographics introducing effective evidence-based strategies, as well as self-learning materials, video clips, and related online games (Education Bureau, 2020). Since many parents at home are not capable of catering to these students’ unique learning needs, all these are important in guiding and supporting parents to facilitate the learning of this group of learners.

Contingent School Curriculum Leadership Many studies on school and curriculum leadership (e.g., Law et al., 2007, 2016; Cheung & Yuen, 2017) have focused on well-prepared contexts over a period of years. In Hong Kong, the professional leadership and autonomy of teachers operate

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

621

under a stable and coherent learning system with central directions of curriculum development, school-based management, as well as school development and accountability (Yu & Yu, 2012). The work of school is planned on the basis of a 3-year school development planning cycle and an annual school plan. Meanwhile, there is a wide range of regular and systematic assessments, such as formative feedback in class, tests and examinations, as well as territory-wide system assessment (TSA) providing feedback to teachers to plan for their learning and teaching. Since the systematic school plan and timetable are upset in the “new normal,” contingent planning has characterized the ways school and curriculum leaders are coping with the COVID-19 pandemic when never before they have to anticipate the possible scenarios and work out creative contingent planning in advance of any official announcements, for instance, some of the students have to sit for the highstake public graduation examination, namely, the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE), in late April. The emergency and urgency of flexible planning has unleashed the wisdom of almost crisis management that involved a mixture of theoretical bases or principled considerations, analysis of school contexts, as well as understanding and reflections of learning shown below. Coping with the chaotic pandemic is a mutual challenge among many school leaders and teachers, whereas the stream of problems to be addressed remains overwhelming while the effectiveness of the available solutions is also uneasy to predict (Beauchamp et al., 2021).

Increasing Imperatives for Comprehensive Scenarios Planning Being highly uncertain of when face-to-face classes can resume in August 2020 for the 2020/2021 school year, based on Mr. Kan Wai-hung, who is the school principal of Hong Kong Taoist Association The Yuen Yuen Institute No. 1 Secondary School, their school prepared five scenarios of schooling before the commencement of the new academic year in September 2020. These scenarios comprise of the following: (1) all students have whole-day schooling; (2) all students have half-day schooling; (3) senior students have whole-day schooling, while junior students have no face-toface schooling; (4) senior students have half-day schooling, while junior students have no face-to-face schooling; as well as (5) all students have no face-to-face schooling. Throughout the thinking process among the management team, there are constant struggles between collective actions and individual actions. The considerations ranged from complying with the requirements or sheer considerations in the interest of students. Nonetheless, the school has also come up with four crucial implications to resolve all these tensions: (1) plan for the best and prepare for the worst; (2) cultivate a learning community with cultures of collaboration and sharing; (3) allow those young and energetic teachers bring about changes, while aligning and cooperating with the older and experienced teachers; and (4) respond to normal conditions with flexible ability, harmonious adaptation, and concessions in adversity. Without remaining rooted a set of fundamental principles at every decision juncture,

622

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

the recognition and positioning of the school could be easily loosened and affected at times of crises. With these principles articulated by the entire school, all relevant parties can also work out the strategies to realize the mutual visions and goals. As the COVID-19 pandemic is entirely new, there are no existing standards, preparation or development programs, inspection frameworks, key performance indicators, as well as benchmarks to guide them navigating their ways. With the knock-on effects on all layers of the school structure, all the responses offered require one exhausting as many potential perspectives and guiding criteria as possible, while acknowledging the varying degree of constraints, conflicts, and trade-offs in reality. This goes beyond the conventional perception where there are fixed roles and positions within schools, followed by clear and rigid responsibilities and authorities. Nonetheless, there is one consensus about coping with the pandemic, that is, schools and teachers realize the necessity and importance of coming together to draw upon each other’s expertise and experience. According to Law et al. (2021a), the fourth bulletin of the “e-Citizen Education 360” project, titled “Multilevel School Leadership for online learning preparedness,” has confirmed such effort, whereas distributed leadership at all levels of the school becomes a necessity more than a choice, meaning that all parties within the school are connecting, sharing, learning, and networking their way throughout various issues. Meanwhile, teachers in charge of students’ nonacademic development at middle management level has shown higher competence in online setting than those charged with academic responsibilities.

Grasping the COVID-19 Pandemic as Aspirations for Future School Development A primary school has strengthened her curriculum leadership in coping with the series of impacts associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Mr. Chui Ka-cheung, who is the school principal of Aldrich Bay Government Primary School, with meeting student needs as the overarching focus, the school is combining both targeted prompt actions and long-term developmental work arrangement. There is a crisis management team coordinating the arrangement during class suspension, a curriculum leader leading all subject panel heads to design online learning and teaching materials, an ICT group offering technical support for teachers and parents, class teachers and subject teachers managing the well-being of students, as well as vice principals conducting regular online surveys and making relevant modifications. Their close connection and communication ensure that all responses offered by the school are holistic and coherent, and none of the areas overlap or even contradict with one another, while some of them remain unattended and unaddressed. The opportunities for formulating choices, planning directions, and overcoming optimal challenges support leaders and teachers to cultivate their sense of autonomy and perceived self-efficacy (Barni et al., 2019).

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

623

Emergence of New Learning Borderscape The borderscape is a relatively new concept applied in artistic or symbolic practices around the border areas (Krichker, 2021). A central notion is the geographical concept of space, whereas sociospatial borders can and should be studied as spaces of possibility, adaptation, and accommodation (Scott, 2021). It could be readily applied to show how a new borderscape has emerged as positive responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in education. The pandemic has shown how the traditional borders are redrawn as digitally borderless. In Hong Kong schools, a portion of cross-boundary students (CBS) are residing in Shenzhen in mainland China, which is merely across Hong Kong’s border, but commuting to schools everyday spending more than an hour or so. Those students have the right of residences in Hong Kong largely due to the local citizenship of their parents. The emergent immigration regulations of imposing quarantine for a range of 7–14 days have imposed barriers on them even when schools are partially opened. Due to the uncertainty of how long the periodicity of quarantine measure since 2020, some students have refrained from going to schools even when quarantine restriction is uplifted by the HKSAR government. Nonetheless, the student places could be kept so long as the students do not quit the school. There are substantial concerns regarding their learning adaptation and progress.

Construction of Cross-Border Learning Landscape Since the COVID-19 pandemic has been lingering both mainland China and Hong Kong for a long period of time, there are an increasing number of public and private organizations in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen which contribute to the development of borderless digital classroom with the employment of dual mode and timetable. This is unattainable without the facilitation and coordination of some local groups like International Social Service Hong Kong Branch and New Territories School Heads Association as well as individual actions of schools. For instance, some of them offer physical delivery of learning and teaching materials, while some of them provide SIM card for cross-border Internet access to the realtime online lessons. Another example is moving the physical center of learning scape across the border, whereas there are examinations in Shenzhen conducted simultaneously with those in Hong Kong, while printed examination papers were delivered to Shenzhen in advance and scanned attempted versions were sent back to Hong Kong after the examinations. Throughout the examinations, Hong Kong teachers joined Shenzhen employees at the examination centers to monitor the students remotely and offer guidance timely. There are some newly emerged learning centers which aim to design face-to-face classes for these stranded students as alternatives of their original Hong Kong classes (Li, 2021). To further strengthen the learning and emotional support for CBS, the EDB has commissioned a service provider to deliver programs on both learning and psychosocial support in Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan districts in Shenzhen from May to July

624

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

in 2021 for primary and secondary CBS residing in Shenzhen. These programs support CBS through offering face-to-face sessions in small groups beyond learning at home. In tandem, several service providers have also been commissioned to set up general service points in the aforementioned districts in Shenzhen from June to August 2021, so as to provide CBS and their parents with different useful information, learning and emotional support materials, as well as free-of-charge services for borrowing of books, as well as recreation equipment and facilities. Apart from that, a series of networking activities and sharing sessions were organized to facilitate their timely and interactive communication with one another (Information Services Department, 2021b). The COVID-19 pandemic has become a starting point for Hong Kong and Shenzhen to have collaboration in supporting student learning and growth which goes beyond the borders.

Construction of Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Learning Landscape with Emphasis on Interface and Transition A similar learning concern that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic is also found among many non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) students coming from culturally diverse groups whose home countries may still be in other parts of Asia outside mainland China and Hong Kong, or even in Europe. Throughout the pandemic, the challenges for schools and teachers for NCS students are how to continue foster meaningful and pleasurable learning and teaching and cultivate a culturally responsive and interactive environment as effective as before the outbreak of the pandemic when more resources and effort have to be simultaneously invested into a large number of local students already. Based on past experiences, the preparation of NCS students at the interfaces of kindergarten and primary education as well as primary and secondary education would be the most acute as the NCS need to adapt to an unfamiliar school environment in Primary 1 and Secondary 1. This occurred in the summer of 2020 when limited school resumption (at Primary 1 and Secondary 1) is only announced by the HKSAR government in very late August 2020. All these arrangements for NCS students had benefited from other evidence-based research studies on transition. With regard to NCS students who are moving to Primary 1, according to Mr. Lai Chun-wing, the school principal of Hong Kong Taoist Association Wun Tsuen School, their school has prepared some programs for these newly entered students to get familiar with the new school learning environment with different learning modes, academic expectations, as well as rules and regulations. There is a 2-week online summer school before the commencement of the new academic year. Meanwhile, the first week of the new academic year is specifically designated as the transition week, whereas many class introductions, parental orientation, and family visits are conducted to facilitate students integrating into the school. After the transition week, there is a weekly online session named “Little Eyes Travel the World” at the regular class time throughout the entire September 2020, whereas students are offered with the opportunities to share and appreciate a wide range of

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

625

intercultural themes, such as famous spots, spoken languages around the world, as well as arts and culture. With regard to transition to secondary schools, Hong Kong Taoist Association The Yuen Yuen Institute No. 3 Secondary School has introduced an internationally borderless online learning landscape starting with its opening ceremony when NCS students of more than ten nationalities were still staying outside Hong Kong. The originally thought undesirable circumstances have ultimately unleashed an innovative cultural response where the students could be enjoying an almost a digital world tour when the NCS students were invited to introduce their home countries and places to others. All these help students cultivate positive self-esteem and remain highly motivated toward their learning.

Preparation for the Future Education as the “New Normal” Curriculum System and Learning Landscape Curriculum and Learning Design Responsive to the Five Dynamicities The five dynamicities or phenomena described in the aforementioned sections are basically experienced in schools to a different extent since none of the schools in Hong Kong could afford to wait for normal schooling to resume, given the prolonged disruptive schooling brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, all these have induced schools to start rethinking and reimagining whether the forgoing experiences could be sustained, modified, or even discarded in one way or another to perpetuate a new “new normal” with pleasant surprises and unexpected success instead of “back to normal” for everything before the outbreak of the pandemic. With obviously enhanced but still inadequate digital literacy in anticipation of possibly another fifth or even more wave of the pandemic in Hong Kong, the considerations have covered whether what are the essentials that ought to be taught by teachers and what could be self-learned based on latest experiences. Meanwhile, more diversified and flexible alternative learning experiences outside classrooms and schools could be offered to enrich students’ learning. All these imply the imperative need to reshuffle the curriculum to be more comprehensive yet less packed; the importance and repertoire of teachers creating diverse learning opportunities and conducive learning environments to cultivate student agency, facilitate knowledge building, and maintain student overall well-being; and further assessment transformation that focuses on creating and applying their own learning. It is crucial to equip all students with the agility and flexibility, as well as readiness and confidence to embrace all the ambiguities, complexities, and even tensions and confusions ahead of them, as well as to maintain an all-round well-being. All these are already resonated in the OECD’s Learning Compass 2030 as an important source of reference for Hong Kong’s curriculum reform in the future, whereas the HKSAR took part in its series of consultative and developmental meetings (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic forces policymakers and educators at different levels of the learning system to take up the ownership of enacting, reflecting, examining,

626

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

and changing their underlying beliefs as change agents and innovation designers (Fullan, 1993; Severino et al., 2021). Throughout the process, they should dynamically and reflectively shift between principle-based pedagogical thoughts and practical means with the goal of improving both in relation to the matters raised in the previous paragraph (Law, 2014). Although the term “new normal” is already generally employed to portray the future educational landscape, it remains important for one to further consider the fundamental questions in curriculum studies, especially in terms of (1) what is worth learning; (2) how to learn; (3) what are the roles of stakeholders; and (4) what are the forms of schooling. The pandemic experience has expanded the boundaries and possibilities in answering all these four questions. Since curriculum development is a continuous improvement process with no fast track, and in which quality matters more than quantity, more evidence-based research studies should be conducted to support the process.

Mapping Against OECD’s Four Scenarios for the Future of Schooling The five distinctive yet interrelated dimensions seem to have fall into the four scenarios of future schooling presented by OECD in September 2020 which shed light on some global educational trends, as follows: information and technology would intervene education substantially and powerfully, autonomous learning would become the mainstream trend, school borders are gradually collapsing, and wider community engagement in school. These four scenarios include schooling extended, education outsourced, schools as learning hubs, and learn-as-you-go (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2020a). Through imagining alternative futures for education based on these four plausible outcomes, educators can develop agile and responsive systems and plan ahead for future shocks and crises. The series of emerging learning and teaching practices in Hong Kong reflecting these scenarios are shown in Table 2. The abundant experience of how Hong Kong’s educational community is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic shows how the four scenarios are co-existing with one another.

Conclusion and Epilogue This chapter offers a broad discussion reflective of the overall portrait of the curriculum system and learning landscape of the HKSAR throughout the COVID19 pandemic attempting to strike a balance among three pathways, namely: (1) building on the existing foundations and unleashing the unique strengths; (2) removing the limitations and resolving the tensions; as well as (3) exploring new possibilities and transformative directions ahead. Nonetheless, such snapshot analysis could be comprehended through taking the wider dynamics and evolving contextual realities into account. Although learning systems around the world are different in terms of their traditions, conditions, and contexts, which lead to specific choices and contexts in responding to the pandemic, they could be common in attempting to maintain and

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

627

Table 2 Comparisons of OECD’s four scenarios for the future of schooling with the series of emerging learning and teaching practices in the HKSAR Schooling extended

OECD description Participation in formal education continues to expand International collaboration and technological advances support more individualized learning

The structures and process of schooling remain

Education outsourced

Traditional schooling breaks down as society becomes more directly involved in educating its citizens Learning takes place through more diverse privatized and flexible arrangements, followed by digital technology acting as a key driver

Schools as learning hubs

Schools remain, but diversity and experimentation have become the prevalent norm

Learning as you go

Opening the school walls connects schools to their communities, favoring ever-changing forms of learning, civic engagement, and social innovation Education takes place everywhere and anytime Distinction between formal and informal learning is no longer valid as society turns itself entirely to the power of the machine

Hong Kong learning landscape Adoption of centralized curriculum with professional flexibilities in wholeschool development Systematic enhancement of various learning management systems in schools supported by government services, funding, and commercial vendors School as an institutional unit with no changes in overall school management, development, and accountability policies Schools delegate opportunities for the community to deliver authentic education for students Partial outsourcing with increasing amount of government funding to purchase a wide range of learning resources and services from the nonpublic sector for students Teachers experiment a wide range of innovative student-oriented approaches in facilitating the learning and teaching experience Gradual cultivation of seamless schoolcommunity partnership with rapid adjustment and new complementary functions Rapid emergence of borderscape with both mainland China and the international world Accelerated expansion of life-wide learning in fuller fledge including in the virtual environment

strengthen learning among students. Therefore, this chapter aims to illuminate a wide range of possibilities, which allows policymakers and educators to integrate and adapt some of these elements and strategies into their daily practices under the “new normal.” While the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong is largely under control at the time of writing, the pandemic is unlikely to be eliminated in the immediate future, and all the innovations introduced throughout the period are also unlikely to disappear even when the pandemic is gone. Following a series of successful multi-pronged pandemic control measures, especially the increasing number of school students receiving vaccination, the government is intending to resume the normal whole-day

628

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

schooling for both primary and secondary schools in the upcoming 2021/2022 academic year. Although teachers and students at first are simply forced to change due to the pandemic, which bring along much inconvenience and hesitation, they started to realize that regular routines and rigid arrangements may not be as desirable as they anticipate. There are unanticipated positive changes, for instance, in-home learning brought about by partial or half-day schooling and enhanced technology, and challenges partially related to the pandemic, such as students’ well-being. This chapter would end with the translated quote of Mr. Chui Ka-cheung, who is the school principal of Aldrich Bay Government Primary School, in the fourth seminar under the “e-Citizen Education 360” study: “Disrupting the status quo, reshaping the future, are you ready?”, which sheds light on the HKSAR’s future curriculum system and learning landscape.

References Barni, D., Danioni, F., & Benevene, P. (2019). Teachers’ self-efficacy: The role of personal values and motivations for teaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1645. Beauchamp, G., Hulme, M., Clarke, L., Hamilton, L., & Harvey, J. A. (2021). ‘People miss people’: A study of school leadership and management in the four nations of the United Kingdom in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 49(3), 375–392. Bondie, R. S., Dahnke, C., & Zusho, A. (2019). How does changing “one-size-fits-all” to differentiated instruction affect teaching? Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 336–362. Chan, C. (2005). Study on the third sector landscape in Hong Kong. Central Policy Unit, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. https://www.pico.gov.hk/doc/en/research_reports/3rd_ ch01.pdf Chan, H. H. (2020). Coronavirus: Hong Kong students adapt to online learning amid class suspension over pandemic. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/news/hongkong/education/article/3075280/coronavirus-hong-kong-students-adapt-online-learning-amid Chan, H. M. (2021). Stuck at home through coronavirus pandemic, Hong Kong students get help to open up about feelings, needs. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/news/hongkong/education/article/3121714/stuck-home-through-coronavirus-pandemic-hong-kongstudents Chan, A., & Yip, P. (2021). Hong Kong students, parents and teachers in dire need of mental health support to prevent tragic outcomes. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/ comment/opinion/article/3116362/hong-kong-students-parents-and-teachers-dire-need-mentalhealth Chan, D. W., Chan, L. K., & Chan, A. C. Y. (2013). Parenting gifted children among Hong Kong Chinese parents: What differences does westernization make? Roeper Review, 35(3), 177–186. Cheung, A. C., & Yuen, T. W. (2017). Examining the perceptions of curriculum leaders on primary school reform: A case study of Hong Kong. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 45(6), 1020–1039. Choi, E. P. H., Hui, B. P. H., & Wan, E. Y. F. (2020). Depression and anxiety in Hong Kong during COVID-19. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(10), 3740. Curriculum Development Council. (2001). Learning to learn—The way forward in curriculum development. Curriculum Development Council. https://www.edb.gov.hk/en/curriculum-devel opment/cs-curriculum-doc-report/wf-in-cur/index.html

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

629

Curriculum Development Council. (2017). Secondary education curriculum guide, booklet 1: Ongoing renewal of the school curriculum. https://www.edb.gov.hk/attachment/en/ curriculum-development/renewal/Guides/SECG%20booklet%201_en_20180831.pdf d’Orville, H. (2020). COVID-19 causes unprecedented educational disruption: Is there a road towards a new normal? Prospects, 49, 11–15. Dhawan, S. (2020). Online learning: A panacea in the time of COVID-19 crisis. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 49(1), 5–22. Di Pietro, G., Biagi, F., Costa, P., Karpiński, Z., & Mazza, J. (2020). The likely impact of COVID-19 on education: Reflections based on the existing literature and recent international datasets (Vol. 30275). Publications Office of the European Union. e-Citizen Education. (n.d.-a). Learning and assessment for digital citizenship: e-Citizen education 360. https://ecitizen.hk/360/ e-Citizen Education. (n.d.-b). Study design: e-Citizen education 360. https://ecitizen.hk/360/ study#study-design Education Bureau. (2020). Summer tips for special educational needs coordinators. https://www. edb.gov.hk/tc/edu-system/special/support/wsa/pro-support/senco/summer_tips.html Education Bureau. (2021). Kindergarten education. https://www.edb.gov.hk/en/edu-system/ preprimary-kindergarten/about-preprimary-kindergarten/index.html Ferri, F., Grifoni, P., & Guzzo, T. (2020). Online learning and emergency remote teaching: Opportunities and challenges in emergency situations. Societies, 10(4), 86. Fullan, M. G. (1993). Why teachers must become change agents. Educational Leadership, 50, 12–12. Hong Kong Jockey Club. (2020a). Jockey Club launches further initiatives to combat COVID-19. https://corporate.hkjc.com/corporate/corporate-news/english/2020-03/news_2020030601930. aspx Hong Kong Jockey Club. (2020b). Extension and enhancement of Jockey Club’s bandwidth support for E-learning at home scheme. https://corporate.hkjc.com/corporate/corporate-news/english/ 2020-03/news_2020031801737.aspx Information Services Department. (2020a). LCQ4: Online teaching and learning. The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202005/ 13/P2020051300266.htm Information Services Department. (2020b). LCQ9: Electronic teaching materials. The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202012/ 09/P2020120900214.htm Information Services Department. (2021a). EDB launches new parent education activity information hub on smart parent net website. The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202106/07/P2021060700496.htm Information Services Department. (2021b). LCQ18: Cross-boundary students. The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202106/ 23/P2021062300304.htm?fontSize¼1 Karatas, K., & Arpaci, I. (2021). The role of self-directed learning, metacognition, and 21st century skills predicting the readiness for online learning. Contemporary. Educational Technology, 13(3), ep300. Kong, S. C., Chan, T. W., Huang, R., & Cheah, H. M. (2014). A review of e-Learning policy in school education in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Beijing: Implications to future policy planning. Journal of Computers in Education, 1(2), 187–212. Krichker, D. (2021). Making sense of borderscapes: Space, imagination and experience. Geopolitics, 26(4), 1224–1242. Lam, W. F., & Perry, J. L. (2000). The role of the nonprofit sector in Hong Kong’s development. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 11(4), 355–373. Lam, C. C., Ho, E. S. C., & Wong, N. Y. (2002). Parents’ beliefs and practices in education in Confucian heritage cultures: The Hong Kong case. Journal of Southeast Asian Education, 3(1), 99–114. Law, N. (2014). Knowledge building pedagogy and teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge. In Knowledge creation in education (pp. 227–247). Springer.

630

C. K. K. Chan and A. M. H. Lam

Law, E. H. F., Galton, M., & Wan, S. W. Y. (2007). Developing curriculum leadership in schools: Hong Kong perspectives. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 35(2), 143–159. Law, E. H. F., Galton, M., Kennedy, K., & Lee, J. C. (2016). Developing curriculum leadership among teachers for school-based curriculum innovations in Hong Kong: A distributed and problem-solving approach. In Everyday knowledge, education and sustainable futures (pp. 177–193). Springer. Law, N., Tan, C. Y., Lan, M., & Pan, Q. (2020). eCitizen Education 360 Project – Bulletin 1: From outcomes and challenges of online learning to enhanced digital preparedness for the NEW NORMAL. Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. https://360-cms.ecitizen.hk/ uploads/bulletin01_v9_en_0868d8d54b.pdf Law, N., Tan, C. Y., Lan, M., & Pan, Q. (2021a). eCitizen Education 360 Project – Bulletin 4: Multilevel school leadership for online learning preparedness. Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. https://360-cms.ecitizen.hk/uploads/bulletin04_en_ac768f3e5b.pdf Law, N., Tan, C. Y., Lan, M., & Pan, Q. (2021b). eCitizen Education 360 Project – Bulletin 5: Parent-child communication and relationship are key to students’ wellbeing at home and in school. Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. https://360-cms.ecitizen.hk/ uploads/bulletin05_en_a1e4363001.pdf Li, B. (2021). Studying so far and yet so near. China Daily. https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/ 162634#Studying-so-far-and-yet-so-near Lo, W. Y. W. (2020). A year of change for Hong Kong: From east-meets-west to east-clashes-withwest. Higher Education Research & Development, 39(7), 1362–1366. Microsoft Hong Kong News Centre (2020). https://news.microsoft.com/en-hk/2020/08/05/newlife-for-old-corporate-computers-so-students-can-learn-fromhome/ Ng, T., Chu, S., Li, X., Reynolds, R., & Chan, M. (2020). Business (teaching) as usual amid the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study of online teaching practice in Hong Kong. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 19(1), 775–802. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2019). Learning Compass 2030. https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/learning-com pass-2030/ Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2020a). Back to the future of education: Four OECD scenarios for schooling. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/back-to-thefuture-of-education_7c2c1be9-en Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2020b). The impact of COVID-19 on education insights from education at a glance 2020. https://www.oecd.org/education/theimpact-of-covid-19-on-education-insights-education-at-a-glance-2020.pdf Pacheco, J. A. (2021). The “new normal” in education. Prospects, 51(1), 3–14. Pokhrel, S., & Chhetri, R. (2021). A literature review on impact of COVID-19 pandemic on teaching and learning. Higher Education for the Future, 8(1), 133–141. Sahlberg, P. (2020). Will the pandemic change schools? Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 5, 359. Scott, J. W. (2021). Bordering, ordering and everyday cognitive geographies. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 112(1), 26–33. Severino, L., Petrovich, M., Mercanti-Anthony, S., & Fischer, S. (2021). Using a design thinking approach for an asynchronous learning platform during COVID-19. IAFOR Journal of Education, 9(2), 145–162. Sun, Fiona. (2020). So hard to get Hong Kong’s ‘hidden youth’ to leave home, now pandemic drives them into isolation again. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/ society/article/3086617/so-hard-get-hong-kongs-hidden-youth-leave-home-now-pandemic Teräs, M., Suoranta, J., Teräs, H., & Curcher, M. (2020). Post-Covid-19 education and education technology ‘solutionism’: A seller’s market. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 863–878. United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2020). Education in a post-Covid world: Nine ideas for public action. International Commission on the Futures of Education. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/education_in_a_post-covid_world-nine_ideas_for_pub lic_action.pdf

Making Visible the Dynamicity Shaping the Curriculum and. . .

631

Wong, W. (2020). Coolminds initiative aims to teach young Hongkongers how to better manage their mental health. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/ society/article/3110446/coolminds-initiative-aims-teach-young-hongkongers-how-better Wong, K. M., & Moorhouse, B. L. (2020). The impact of social uncertainty, protests, and COVID19 on Hong Kong teachers. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 25(8), 649–655. Wong, S. Y., Kwok, K. O., & Chan, F. K. (2020). What can countries learn from Hong Kong’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic? CMAJ, 192(19), E511–E515. World Bank. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic: Shocks to education and policy responses. https:// openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/33696/148198.pdf?sequence¼4& isAllowed¼y Yang, K. (2020). Unprecedented challenges, familiar paradoxes: COVID-19 and governance in a new normal state of risks. Public Administration Review, 80(4), 657–664. Yu, H., & Yu, W. M. (2012). School leadership, accountability, and assessment reform in Hong Kong. In School leadership in the context of standards-based reform (pp. 197–228). Springer. Yuen, A. H., & Hew, T. K. F. (2018). Information and communication technology in educational policies in the Asian region. In J. Voogt, G. Knezek, R. Christensen, & K. W. Lai (Eds.), Handbook of information technology in primary and secondary education (pp. 1–20). Springer.

Part VI Curriculum as Liberating

Race and Curriculum Nathalia E. Jaramillo and Erik Malewski

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multiculturalism: Origins and Aspirations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black and Brown Curriculum Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Functionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Accommodation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Liberal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Nationalist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Afrocentric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Reconstructionist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Curriculum Orientations Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Raced Currere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

636 637 640 641 641 642 642 643 643 644 647 650 651

Abstract

In this chapter, we articulate a historical understanding of race in the curriculum and pay particular attention to multicultural efforts, Black curriculum orientations, and currere. We provide a social context for better understanding the onset of multiculturalism and examine some of the main tenets and contradictions that have evolved within the multicultural tradition. Multiculturalism created various spaces for more progressive and radical forms of race in the curriculum. Specially, we look at the work of William Watkins on Black curriculum orientations. From there, we revisit the tradition of currere in curriculum theorizing with a focus on the race, gender, and sexuality intersections that have been advanced by various theorists in curriculum studies. We end with an examination of the full-frontal assault on Critical Race Theory in the USA and abroad. N. E. Jaramillo (*) · E. Malewski Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_42

635

636

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

Keywords

Race · Curriculum · Critical Race Theory · Black curriculum orientations · Currere

Introduction In this chapter, we chronicle the emergence and evolution of race in the curriculum, its main proponents and adherents, and discuss its relevance to the growing discord around the inclusion of race in K-18 curricula, evident primarily in the USA but also extending to its European allies, France, and Great Britain. Since its inception, race in the curriculum has been a contested terrain. In fact, as various curriculum scholars attest, race in curriculum theory emerged due to the absence of questions on race and by its corollary, an educational experience rooted in Eurocentric modes of thought (McCarthy, 1990). In essence, the historical absence of race in curriculum exemplifies, in our view, the definition of color-blind racism as proposed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2021). Bonilla-Silva frames color blindness as a functioning and everevolving ideology that naturalizes racial matters as “the outcomes of nonracial dynamics” (2020, p. 28). In other words, racial difference and differentiated racial outcomes are attributed to a biological determinism that suggests that racial associations are due to “likeness” within racial groups (2020, p. 28). Extended to the study of race in curriculum, such color blindness translates into the evolution of a Eurocentric curriculum because put simply, European Whites were considered the architects of traditional schooling in the USA. Such a framework occludes the fact of dominance that has shaped relations between racial groups in the USA, and the complex history of conquest, colonization, and territorial and social control that was a founding principle of racial oppression and domination. Similar issues are the ones brought to the fore by scholars who have contested color blindness and the absence of race in curriculum. Additionally, Bonilla-Silva outlines the complex and central frameworks that support color-blind racism as an ideology. These include abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism. For the purposes of our analysis in this chapter, we focus on and extend the definition of minimization of racism. In Bonilla-Silva’s words, the minimization of racism “suggests discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities in life chances” (2017, p. 29). We see this especially in relation to targeted efforts across the USA to undo any progress on including race in the curriculum that provides students with the space to develop a sense of self and a critical understanding of history and social relations that have (mis)shaped opportunities for communities of color for centuries. Specifically, the main target of such efforts is Critical Race Theory (CRT) which we will discuss in our concluding remarks. As we will note, the minimization of racism functions to maintain the dominant social order, to protect extant class hierarchies, to ensure that the prevailing nomenclature remains uncontested, and to solidify what it means to be “American.” Louis Castnell and William Pinar put it thusly, “Curriculum is one highly significant form of

Race and Curriculum

637

representation, and arguments over the curriculum are also arguments over who we are as Americans, including how we want to represent ourselves to our children” (1993, p. 2). Therefore, we see the conflation of various identity forms when examining curriculum as a racial text. Additionally, there is another element to the mosaic of race in curriculum and that is ethnicity. As we articulate in the sections that follow, ethnicity has often been subsumed in race, and what we see is how the dominant group racializes minority groups by emphasized their ethnic (read, cultural) differences (Suzuki, 1984). All of this is mired in the structures of racialization that extend into a colonial past and whose legacy can be identified in the fabric of the social present. Our analysis begins with a historical account of multiculturalism in curriculum theory, often cast as the pinnacle of the beginnings of including race in the curriculum. We provide a social context for better understanding the onset of multiculturalism and examine some of the main tenets and contradictions that have evolved within the multicultural tradition. As we note, multiculturalism created various spaces for more progressive and radical forms of race in the curriculum. Specially, we look at the work of William Watkins on Black curriculum orientations. From there, we revisit the tradition of currere in curriculum theorizing with a focus on the race, gender, and sexuality intersections that have been advanced by various theorists in curriculum studies. We end with an examination of the full-frontal assault on CRT in the USA and abroad.

Multiculturalism: Origins and Aspirations As curriculum scholars have noted, the racialization of curriculum in the USA intensified following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling which dismantled segregated schooling and exposed the underlying pathology of the forced separation of children on the basis of race (Gutierrez & Jaramillo, year; Pinar, 1995; Brown & Brown, 2015). Without a doubt, the Brown ruling ushered a new era in curriculum theorizing as schools were forced to contend with bringing racially, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse groups together under a common educational model. Integration was not a seamless process, and it would take decades and various court-ordered mandates to fully integrate school settings due to White opposition. Few recall, however, that desegregated schooling was adjudicated two decades prior to the Brown ruling, during the landmark Robert Alvarez vs. Board of Trustees of the Lemon School District case (1934). Otherwise referred to as the “Lemon Grove Incident” (Madrid, 2015), the case provides another optic to examine the interplay between race and culture and breaks the Black/White binary in curriculum theorizing. Located east of the sun-draped waters of San Diego and north of the industrial marketplace of factories and street vendors in Tijuana, Lemon Grove quickly became a symbol of the ideological forces at play that reproduced deficit-oriented thinking about Mexican and Mexican-American culture. Put succinctly, the administration of the Lemon Grove school denied entry to 70 Mexican and

638

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

Mexican-American children and ordered them to attend school in a barn, located in the “Mexican side of town” (Madrid, 2015). Seemingly, the premise for sending children to a barn was squarely due to a perceived cultural abyss. Deemed “halfbreeds” and representing agricultural and mining industries, the children were considered unfit for attending school with their White counterparts (Madrid, 2015). The subtext of excluding Mexican descent children was clearly the result of abject cultural racism, where whites perceived them as “half-breeds” and lacking the cultural and linguistic competence to classify as American. As noted by Ariel Gross (2007), Mexican Americans occupy a unique position in the history of race in the United States, shaped heavily by formal, positive law. When Texas and California became part of the United States as a result of the Mexican-American War, thousands of people already living there, who had been Mexican, became U.S. citizens by the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This Treaty guaranteed U.S. citizenship as well as rights to property, unless they declared their intent to remain Mexican citizens within the year. Nevertheless, while a small elite of Mexican-American landholders who could prove that they were “Spanish” maintained white status, the majority of “Mexicans” were viewed and treated by Anglos as a separate race. (340–341)

Here, we can see how property status conflated with racial/ethnic status, further solidifying a hierarchical structure between “owners” and “workers” in terms of their preconceived racial identity (Jaramillo, 2012). The politics of whiteness that comes to bear as social and legal policy in the USA States for much of the early twentieth century resorted to physiognomic classifications to both marginalize and incorporate peoples of Mexican descent into the formal arrangements of society (Gross, 2007). Miscegenation rulings, the segregation of students in schools, and the constitution of juries to hear cases involving Mexican peoples relied on the arbitrary and delusive judgments of the “naked” eye: kinks in the hair, the angular facial markings of “Indian” blood, or darkness in the skin (Gross, 2007). For the most part, if “Indianness” or “negro-ness” could not be established, authorities classified Mexicans as white. From a social standpoint this was a limited arrangement, to the extent that public institutions relied on “other” information/characteristics to separate Mexican-Americans and adjudicate on behalf of the socially dominant whites. For Gross, these precedents established “cultural racism,” the veiling of racial thinking in cultural terms (2007). In her words, “State officials in Texas and California – county attorneys, sheriffs, school board presidents – who clearly viewed Mexican Americans as an inferior race and treated them that way, learned over the course of the mid-twentieth century to explain their exclusion of Mexican Americans on the basis of language and culture rather than race” (2007, pp. 341–342). Thus, race in curriculum theory carries a sordid past. It is shaped by the experiences of Mexican Americans, Black Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and all social groups that have been impacted by the assimilationist tactics of dominant schooling. To fully understand multiculturalist movements in curriculum, it is useful to recall the racial/ethnic apparatus from which multiculturalism emerged. Here, we are reminded of David Theo Goldberg’s (1994) analysis of monoculturalism as the way

Race and Curriculum

639

immigrants of the early twentieth century were incorporated into the mainstream fabric of the USA. In Goldberg’s words, “Blending into the mainstream melting pot meant renouncing – often in clearly public ways – one’s subjectivity, who one literally was: in name, in culture, and, as far as possible, in color” (p. 5). Our point here is to highlight how the interests of the status quo may yield toward the calls for racial/ethnic inclusion in the curricula, only insofar as it remains palatable and unthreatening to the prescribed core values of society (read: individualism, merit, acquiescence). Multiculturalist scholar, James Banks, has been particularly insightful in his demonstrations of the ways in which race/ethnicity are incorporated in curriculum so far as the sentiment remains one of “celebration” or “inquiry” into the exotic other (see Banks, 1989). These imposed limits are not only applied to racial minorities but are also evident in the representation of American Indians in the US history/social studies contents (Anderson, 2012). The valorization of “resistance leaders,” whether in the civil rights movement or the conquest of the Americas, is made possible by the appropriation of leadership tropes, the “symbols of tragic nobility” (Anderson, 2012, p. 498). Multiculturalism, to a significant extent, sanitizes the efforts of civil, labor, indigenous, antiracist, and anti-capitalist leaders so that they are allowed into the mainstream curriculum establishment. The result is that teachers and students alike are again presented with a scenario where a deeper engagement with the historical context of these eras is erased by particular multicultural-epistemological frameworks, and where radical efforts to challenge dominant ways of knowing are blocked from knowability. The prevalence of monoculturalism paraded as multiculturalism maintains the current interests of the powerful elite, who advance Whiteness as the main ideology. Education has historically been about assimilation (lest we revisit the tragic boarding experiences of Native American children) and mainstream multiculturalism serves to sustain the status quo. For the most part, school curriculum will bend to diversity of thought but only insofar as Whiteness ideology remains intact and uncontaminated by Black and Brown epistemologies of resistance. The struggles and accomplishments of civil rights leaders are tokenized, and their transformative potential washed out, as one of the only means to offer them any presence of thought at all. Other multicultural scholars have presciently drawn attention to the minimization of race in mainstream multiculturalism. Cameron McCarthy advanced the notion of “critical emancipatory multiculturalism” which he defines as including a “systemic critique of the construction of school knowledge and the privileging of Eurocentrism and Westernness in the American school curriculum” (1990). Similarly, Stephen May and Christine Sleeter (2010) advance a notion of critical multiculturalism that does not prioritize cultural difference as the central principle of multiculturalist efforts but rather gives priority to the structural conditions that advance unequal power relations and, therefore, unequal outcomes for diverse economic and racial communities. Peter McLaren (1997) in his noteworthy work on revolutionary multiculturalism takes critical multiculturalism one step further and proposes a restructuring of the social order beyond the confines of capitalist society to transform society based on an ethos of well-being as opposed to exploitation. Together, we see how multiculturalism vacillates as a tool for assimilationist intention, critical knowledge production that creates spaces for other worldviews and knowledge to enter the

640

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

curricular cannon, structural critique, and social transformation. We now move our attention to the advances of Black and Brown curriculum studies and currere as counterpoints and embodiments of the multicultural tradition, which bring together notions of the self, the body, knowledge construction, and resistance into a dynamic and multifarious constellation that sheds understanding on the advancements of race in the curriculum.

Black and Brown Curriculum Studies It is not possible to narrate a discussion of Black and Brown curriculum orientations without reference to the work of William H. Watkins. While there is much groundbreaking from his body of scholarship on Blackness and curriculum, Watkins asserts as foundational that Black curriculum studies is markedly different from American curriculum (read white) because the latter “evolved in an environment free of physical and intellectual duress and tyranny” (p. 322). What is profound about this assertion by Watkins, one that might seem a given to those of us who have worked in curriculum studies for some time, is that notions of objectives, content, goals, activities, evaluation, and even personality, might seem natural and organic when one’s socio-educational development is thought of as free, true, liberated, advanced, and apolitical. But what if one’s educational experiences and intellectual capacities are erased, distorted, coopted, and reframed as unnatural and, accordingly, one is forced to respond to such subjugation and erasure with subservience, forced accommodation, or outright resistance and defiance. In light of curricula that historically was predicated on not seeing one’s humanity, intellect, feeling, and experience, to focus on curriculum development would necessarily be to be complicit in further epistemic violence. Watkins notes that Black curriculum orientations must account for colonialism, systemic exclusion, and US Apartheid. They must also account for curricular and schooling approaches that accommodate white racial attitudes and resulted in liberalintellectual-abstract education for elite whites and utilitarian education for African Americans, what Watkins referred to as “the Hampton-Tuskegee philosophy” (p. 322). Watkins brilliantly noted that American curriculum history has been characterized by academic debates toward intellectual advancement and disciplinarity that continues the liberal-intellectual-abstraction project, one that is made possible by a series of intersecting historical forces that made some curriculum histories possible for some and impossible for others. Noting that Black curriculum orientations has always been defiance of, accommodation of, or reaction to the “White architects of Black education” in the USA and around the globe, Watkins developed six lenses for curricular analysis and deeper understanding. One cannot understand efforts to ban critical race theory and black lives matter outside of such histories, from cultural deprivation and cultural of poverty models (see Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, 2018) and concurrent efforts toward abolitionist education.

Race and Curriculum

641

Functionalism One can imagine efforts toward human interaction and skill building under the harshest conditions of slavery. Watkins noted that functionalist orientations often involved forms of defiance and law breaking, including studying by candlelight behind closed doors. Functionalist curriculum was often constituted by life-risking activities focused on reading, writing, and record keeping, ones made possible at times by religious altruism or benevolent whites who sometimes helped or looked the other way. While the cracks in the plantation era south were too few and far between, functional education that focused on folklore and practical skills allowed the exchange of goods and formations of community where cultures did develop and knowledge could be produced, shared, and passed along as worthy understandings. Watkins notes that under plantation life, and the fissures produced, a slave aristocracy developed, one grounded in who shared what stories, had record-keeping skills, and enabled the exchange and transfer of goods.

Accommodation While functionalism clearly, as an orientation, illustrates Black resistance and colonial subjugation, Watkins noted that accommodation was primarily promoted by northern corporatists who saw advantages in curricular approaches that ordered the South in ways advantageous to private enterprise. Hence, accommodationist approaches to curriculum focused on character education, vocational training, and manual labor that might be characterized as working-class subservience. Insightful, Watkins describes a form of interest convergence between white northern corporatists and scholars who included Franklin W. Giddings and Thomas Jesse Jones, both located at Columbia University in the early 1900s. Together they developed racist curricula that assumed “people of color had not evolved to the levels of the AngloSaxon and Nordic peoples” (p. 325). Jones developed curricula grounded in such racial hierarchies, that negated systemic issues, cultural issues, and situated knowledge, and focused on western socialization and vocational training. This accommodation to westernized knowledge was rationalized as a way to deal with presumed immorality and child-like behaviors of African Americans. From there, Jones believed, African Americans could be prepared for cognitive training and academic curricula. Jones curricula emphasized teaching health and sanitation; the value of home, heritage, and environment; and spiritual, mental, and physical development. Jones’ racial curricula was an easy extension of the teachings of Booker T. Washington, as Watkins notes, and fit well with efforts to bring a corporate ordering to the South. Watkins reminds readers that Washington’s famous speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895 was aimed at a ensuring a predominantly white audience of black subservience. Washington focused on the importance of engendering in the Black community a strong work ethic, the importance of character-building education, and the role of vocational training in supporting corporate growth. His emphasis on dispositions of subservience and political avoidance fit well with a new corporate order and a

642

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

curricula that literally and figuratively erased systemic issues related to subjugation. Watkins provides detailed insights into the ways that Jones joined with General Samuel Armstrong to develop the Hampton Studies Curriculum for the Hampton Institute in Virginia. After days focused on manual labor, Hampton students took courses in civics, political economy, general history, and Bible study, all focused on acculturation of what Jones described as the primitive race. Politicians and scholars of an accommodationist bent believed that African American adaptation of white values and attributes would eliminate African American repression and subjugation.

Liberal Watkins notes that while some late nineteenth white philanthropists were concerned with cheap labor and favorable business environments, missionary philanthropists were focused on advancing human potential with roots in Christian abolitionism and awareness of systemic systems of oppression. Accordingly, a liberal orientation accounted for slavery in the status of African Americans and not inherent racial inferiority. Whereas the accommodationist curriculum was focused on a misguided notion of the uncivil, the liberal curriculum was not racially distinct and was grounded in humanism, free expression, and advancing the intellectual development of the individual. Even as the concepts and frameworks were grounded in western civilization, Watkins notes that liberal orientations fed the intellectual hunger of African Americans in the U.S. south and around the globe. Watkins describes the African Free School, which operated in New York City with a curriculum that offered literature, religion, African history, and political philosophy. With the focus on advancing liberal democratic culture, the curriculum emphasized leadership opportunities and participation in public life, as well as the importance of critical thinking and reflection on oneself, one’s experience, and society.

Black Nationalist The liberal ethos of advancement through intellectual study and humanism thought contrasts with a Black Nationalist orientation focused on cultural revitalization through ethnic awareness raising and separation. Watkins notes that Black Nationalism emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and was prominent in the twentieth century with scholars who include Marcus Garvey, Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammed, and Malcolm X. While Black separatist thinking shared in the commitment to develop parallel societies, there was a divergence as to where to build and the kinds of interactions that might take place between them. DuBois imagined distinct economic, political, and religious systems that, while distinct, might exist alongside each other in peace, with a shared commitment to build a prosperous nation. Marcus Garvey, in contrast, wrote about a return to Africa, one that he even joined the KKK to discuss and promote. Even though Garvey had not visited Africa, he believed the Black diaspora needed a Black continent to engender prosperity; for Garvey parallel peaceful societies would not be possible.

Race and Curriculum

643

For Black Nationalist, then, curriculum questions of what knowledge is of most worth have to do with imparting historical knowledge of Black intellect and skills toward building future Black societies. Watkins describes such curricula as interdisciplinary and diverse, from “the mundane to the exotic” (p. 331). Freedom, in this orientation, acknowledges property and intellectual domination where White consumption and distortion of Black intellectual capacities can only be thwarted in absolute racial separation.

Afrocentric Whereas a separatist orientation surfaced questions of society and geography, an Afrocentric orientation was primarily an intellectual and spiritual endeavor focused on reclaiming African knowledge and culture and situating such concepts and ideas at the center of the curricula. Watkins notes that Kemetic/Egyptian functions as a point of origin for knowledge, which is given volition through remembering and regeneration – to put together again for the prosperity of future generations. Here the diaspora creates an opportunity to study African brilliance, abilities, skills, and struggles toward a mosaic – fractured but whole – global community. Watkins reminds readers that Afrocentric curricula renders suspect Western knowledge and concepts of progress, manifest destiny, and abstraction, including CartesianNewtonian logic, universalization, and control. African epistemologies are less focused on verification and linearity than circles of interpretation, expression, and understanding whereby what is known emerges in the cycles themselves. Here empiricism and positivism – with their focus on extraction, decontextualization, and dominance – are evidence of global colonization by the West. African epistemologies offer a different curricular logic, ones where “feeling, myth-making, and emotion are acceptable modes of inquiry” (p. 332). Afrocentric curricula examine understudied and unstudied histories with an emphasis on the cultures and technologies of African nations prior to slavery. The African diaspora is taught not only as a juxtaposition to Western European colonization, but as diversity and difference without assimilation. In contrast to acculturation, the forms of resistance to colonization, apartheid, genocide, and cooptation are curricular content, they become sites of knowledge production. Watkins notes that Afrocentric curricula validate African ways of knowing prior slavery but also as throughout the diaspora. Afrocentric curricula envelope African American scholars who include W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, as well African focused political, sociological, and historical thinkers: Walter Rodney, Asa Hilliard, Molefi Kete Asante, Jacob Carruthers, among others.

Social Reconstructionist Whereas Afrocentric orientations find better futures through reconceptualized study, social reconstructionists seek reconceptualized curricula that engender questioning and actual transformation of existing economic arrangements. Watkins noted that

644

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

lead social reconstructionists viewed schools and school curricula as the vehicles to challenge unjust economic, political, and social arrangements, ones that would improve the culture and economic conditions of African Americans. While such perspectives were a break from the white supremist, eugenics views of accomodationists, explicit connections between Black curriculum orientations and social reconstructionists were few. Watkins offers a lone exception, that of Harold Rugg, a social reconstructionist curriculum scholar who wrote on issues of racial equality and public schooling. For Watkins, then, it becomes important to turn to the Black socialists and communists of the 1930s/40s and the implications of their work for curriculum and education. While Watkins notes that Alaine Locke, an influential Black scholar of the time, published in Social Frontier, a journal of the social reconstructionists, it was DuBois who was the key Black social reconstructionist whose work had significant implications for schooling and curriculum. While commonly known as an advocate for the Black intelligentsia that would leave to social transformation, DuBois envisioned “a curriculum that would criticize capitalism, promote democracy, propagate common schooling, foster emancipatory thinking, support social transformation, and seek higher civilization” (p. 332). DuBois was a vocal critic of curricula that reproduced Black subjugation and envisioned study that led to informed critique and action. DuBois viewed knowledge gained from studies of race, class, and colonization as informing the very tools necessary to remake society.

Black Curriculum Orientations Conclusions Watkins work on Black curriculum orientations is filled with reminders that Black education has been shaped by economic and cultural interests aimed at containing and controlling minority populations. Unequivocally, one cannot study Black curriculum orientations without examining colonial educational practices that result in Black resistance and subjugation. Under the guise of self and community development, Watkins noted that the promotion of a Black educated class has resulted in socioeconomic differences that have fractured Black communities and lessened the possibility for Black solidarity. Watkins reminds curriculum scholars that such an educated class served the needs of accomodationists, provided buffers to social upheaval, offered role models for what might possible even if rare, and leaders who could guide social reconciliation in the interests of elites. While Black liberal orientations have characterized higher education curricula, including a focus on intellectual advancement and planned, procedural, and methodically slow political progression, it has given rise to a Black political and economic elite. More than other orientations, Watkins explains that Black Social Reconstructionism remains unexplored. It remains timely that little work has been done on the implementation of DuBoisian curriculum in Black communities; examined Black curriculum scholars influenced by Social Reconstructionist like George C. Counts; Ruggs influence on Black school and community reforms; and Black educators who resisted the reforms of Jones and Washington, among others. Watkins noted, at the

Race and Curriculum

645

time of his work, Black Nationalist and Afrocentricism continued to evolve. As if to predict the future, Watkins asserted that the future of Black curriculum orientations would be its continuation as a distinct line of work that would also be compared and contrasted with broader curriculum movements and efforts to map the American curriculum. More recent black and brown curriculum orientations have focused on understudied and unstudied histories as ways to rethink curriculum studies. Specifically, efforts have been made to rethink the meaning of black and brown curriculum orientations given the preponderance of white male story lines that shaped its history. Whereas Watkins sets the terms for black curriculum orientations, documenting the history of curriculum work in communities of color and setting up frameworks for further study, Anthony Brown and Wayne Au (2014) draw on critical race theory and cultural memory toward revisionist narratives on the founding of curriculum studies. This work joins the scholarship of other curriculum scholars who name those who have been replaced, forgotten, or imagined as external to curriculum studies. Such work reads as an extension of Watkin’s work into contemporary times. After a review of 33 texts with specific foci on curriculum history, the authors found that scholars and communities of color are nearly non-existent in narratives and research into the foundations of curriculum studies. What’s compelling about their study are the examples of curriculum scholars who have written about the limitations of a near exclusive focus on White European histories while continuing to reproduce those histories. In other words, curriculum studies have named the dangers of continuing majoritarian historical narratives but has done little to expand upon the work of established by Watkins, now some 30 years ago, particularly, what “should have been a part of the background of contemporary curriculum studies” (2014, p. 13). Brown and Au then go on to “recover” curriculum history with what we understand as reimagining and expansion of Watkin’s work. In the category of Early African American Curriculum Discourse, Au and Brown describe the importance of Carter G. Woodson for curriculum history and development. In their explorations of Woodson’s contributions, they note four decades of work on K-12 curricula and explain clear connections to social reconstructionist work in curriculum history. Such assertions not only call for a reexamination of Watkin’s focus on DuBois as a key social reconstructionist scholar who remained understudied, it also begs the question of how Woodson’s work could remain understudied in curriculum history (for a notable exception, see Lavada Brandon’s essay, 2010). In a second category, Early Mexican American Curriculum Discourse, Brown, and Au follow a similar line of thought. They note that education historian Guadalupe San Miguel offers well-documented efforts toward curricula that preserve Mexican American cultures and histories as well as challenge stereotypes and misinformation found in official school curricula. They note that George I. Sanchez’s work is important to curriculum history for the focus on challenging deficit thinking and identifying and describing examples of human agency in the face of racism. Such historical understanding gives context to contemporary racial curriculum projects, they teach us, and offer as an example, the Mexican American

646

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

Studies in Tuscon, which we have written on elsewhere (Malewski & Jaramillo, in press). A third category, East Asian American Curriculum Discourse, offers a description of Chinese scholar Kim-Fong Tom, who documented the power of Chinese language schools and corresponding curricula for challenging derogatory stereotypes and helping with cultural negotiations between Chinese and US American cultures. Brown and Au note the powerful role of the Thursday Club in debates over knowledge of most worth, particularly what’s valuable enough to pass along to the next generation. Here a great concern was the Americanization of generations of Japanese Americans and the best curricula for cultural preservation and adaptation to US American cultural contexts. Finally, in a fourth category, Early Native American Curriculum Discourse, Brown and Au note that extant curriculum history focused on colonization of First Nation’s people of the Americas and efforts through boarding schools to eradicate their stories, languages, and spiritualities. They note that such a boarding school focus suggests that indigenous knowledge beyond sites of colonization is less worthy of study. Rightfully so, they implore curriculum scholars to examine Native American knowledge in ways that center such knowledge and histories at the founding of curriculum studies. While there is other work in-between Watkin’s and Brown and Au, the issue remains that little work has been done on understudied and unstudied histories of the curriculum field. Watkins, Brown, and Au similarly address Black and Brown Curriculum Orientations as both a unique line of work, the expansive study of communities of color and their unique work in areas of curriculum and pedagogy, and as knowledge production that must be viewed as foundational to curriculum history. It might be that we need both. Curriculum Studies must imagine again its roots in ways that account the curriculum histories of black and brown peoples with particular attention to the struggles that shaped knowledge production and teaching and learning. Black and Brown Curriculum Orientations must continue to account for knowledge production in relation to whiteness but not be subsumed by it. A unique strand of curriculum studies should remain committed to academic study that is not merely accounts of and reactions to colonization. At the same time, it cannot be, nor should it have ever been, acceptable to map the history of the curriculum field as if only White male academic in elite colleges and universities were the people whose knowledge productions are worth knowing and passing on to the next generation. Reimagining the foundations of curriculum history will require explorations of knowledge production, and teaching and learning, as well as systematic study, outside of elite colleges and universities, and even within actual communities. Here we are reminded of the work of Omari Dyson and his study of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia. His findings were that the Philadelphia Black Panthers had a host of curricular approaches to educating now just each other, but the youth of Philadelphia. Stepping into communities for an examination of academic study, from folklore to science and history, must be a part of the future of curriculum studies. By making understudied and unstudied histories central to the field, the field becomes less about mapping and re-mapping what is already known in the academy (while

Race and Curriculum

647

important that it has been done), and more about the urgent need to systematic study in various communities, inclusive of but not limited to schools. Here what’s possible are new forms of curriculum history, ones that transform what’s thought of as worthy knowledge. It also functions as a form of disruption, that what’s most important to know about study in the past is not always what took place inside the academy. Curriculum history, when we account for understudied and unstudied histories, maps community study and intergenerational understanding of important ideas and concepts.

Raced Currere Since the mid-1970s, currere has evolved from an experimental or tentative method for examining one’s educational experience to a central concept and associated body of work in curriculum studies. In this section, we explore some of the initial ideas and frameworks for currere. We then explore contemporary iterations of currere, ones that account for intersectionality and cross-disciplinarity toward a raced and gendered iteration of currere. In this work, the evolution of currere, we note that lived experience becomes a data source and that self-study deepens one’s understanding of their academic study and educational pursuits. What becomes an issue in the field of curriculum studies is that, for some, particularly those who identify as white, heterosexual, Christian, male, self-study of the experience of intellectual engagement becomes one of alignment, enlightenment, and a fuller understanding of self-embodied in intellectual exploration and history. For others, particularly those who identify as black and brown, queer, non-Christian, female, self-study of intellectual engagement involves distortions, erasures, and forms of intellectual and epistemic trauma. The denials of race and ethnicity (as well as gender and sexuality, dealt with less in this essay, but just as crucial) that explicitly account for the tensions between self-study and intellectual fields of study that render one non-existent or distorted. Here what does it mean to one’s lived experiences with education when those fields of study have operated under erasure. There are many ways to measure this shift or evolution of currere and what we offer here is not a holistic accounting of currere in curriculum studies. Rather, we examine the specificity of an evolution toward a raced and gendered currere, as messy and incomplete such a map might be. But first, what is currere? As a method, currere is comprised of four orientations toward the Latin root of curriculum, where the focus is on both the track (the context and place of life’s journey) and the experience of such a track (self-understanding of the educational journey). In the first moment, the regressive, one documents and examines one’s intellectual history or educational past. Give this past, what has been described, in the second moment, the progressive, one describes what one imagines is the future in light of one’s educational past. The analytic, which is the third moment, one initiates an examination. That is, one studies what was described in one’s past and one’s future. The final moment, that of synthesis, places this examination and newfound individual understanding of experience – past and future – into political, economic, and cultural

648

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

contexts. That is, the subject, the self, is brought into relationship with the social. Through a dialectical weaving of the two, a new sense of self and society becomes possible in the present moment, a new here and now. Historically, currere develops as an examination of the inner self and educational experiences as a pretext to social reconstruction. The writings and methods were, for the most part, universalized in that a queer educator, Black or Brown educator, working class educator, female educator, and so on, would engage the same four moments to examine one’s self and experiences with curricula. For excellent examples of this work, see Britzman (2017), Miller (2005), Wang (2020), and Whitlock (2007). In these examples, we find what is revealed with currere is engaged by queerness and multiculturalism. See also, Bill Pinar’s excellent example, What Is Curriculum Theory? (2011). Much of the work we note where is about putting currere to work in cultural ways, ones that account for race, gender, and sexuality as integral to the study of lived experiences. While one might argue that queer and multicultural engagements can’t help but transform conceptions of currere, it is our take that currere retains an evolving character in the ways it is put to work until the scholarship of Denise Taliaferro Baszile (2015). That is, Taliaferro Baszile brings intersectionality to currere by crossing it with critical race theory and black feminist thought in ways that reimagine a curricular method in significant ways. Kimberlé Crenshaw (2017) explains that intersectionality allows for an examination of race and gender as combined social and political identities that allow for modes of advantage and disadvantage. Taliaferro Baszile mobilizes intersectionality to ask questions about distortions, erasures, and misalignments at the heart of currere. What if lived experiences with curricula is one that denies one’s existence as an intellectual subject? Taliaferro Baszile recounts, “...what if the process of this complicated conversation with herself, the woman of color realizes her own absence; that is, her conversation is taking shape around ideas, concepts, and texts that emerge primarily from the male psyche, from the White psyche, from the White male psyche” (2015, p. 119). These experiences of searching and finding erasure, unstudied, and understudied subjects are reiterated as concerns throughout the curriculum studies. The struggle to engage in the moments of currere are wholly different when the experience is not enlightenment and enrichment but erasure and non-existence and an inability to see the self more fully or to see the self at all. Taliaferro Baszile, then, goes on to reinvent currere as critical race feminist currere, a raced and gendered currere that places central the struggle that comes from studying curricula that renders one unthinkable. Similarly, Daniel Tröhler (2016) asks what it means if, through the process of critical reflection and internal dialogue, engendered by currere, what is realized is one’s absence as a subject. If complicated conversations take place around the ideas, concepts, and discourse of white heterosexual males who ground their thinking in Western European thought, how might others come to self-understanding and personal agency as women of color (or other multiple marginalized groups)? What is one to make of these detours through the works of those for whom she is not a subject as the expected process of becoming? In this reconceptualization of currere, self-study and study of one’s

Race and Curriculum

649

contact with curricula, and what to make of one’s lived experiences, leads not necessarily to emancipation or heightened awareness. It is this inability to think as the colonized that might lead the study of ways to understand and shake off oppressive ways of thinking and knowing. Of course, for those who identify with White male European ways of knowing, such ways of thinking and knowing might be thought of as the pathways to freedom and intellectual advancement. Taliaferro Baszile terms this “the dilemma of the colonized mind” (2015, p. 120) and speaks to the impossibility of reflecting on one’s lived educational experience when “educational systems [are] designed to keep the dominated believing in the superiority of European and male ways of knowing and being and the inferiority of others” (2015, p. 120). With Critical Race/Feminist Currere, part of the process of self-reflection toward a self that is capable of social reflection involves decoupling form the forms of study that being one to domination and race and gender hierarchies. This decoupling process that is integral to Critical Race/Feminist Currere requires a shift in the types of intellectual engagement undertaken. Taliaferro Baszile offers the study of stereotypes, their origins and perpetuation, as well as the ways they impact the psyches and popular culture as central. Drawing from the work of Susan Edgerton, who set the terms for a currere that might grapple with marginality, Taliaferro Baszile extends the notion that Critical Race/Feminist Currere must grapple with efforts by marginalized peoples to study and define one’s self and group affiliations and, at the same time, challenge reification and dominant groups definitions and distortions of what was said and portrayals of what was intended. The study of this double bind is central to Taliaferro Baszile’s conception, that of the study of knowledge production, essentialization, stereotyping, and being able to identify characteristics of who you are and the groups to which you belong. And, yet, simultaneously, to avoid universalization, leave room open for contingency and complexity, to not allow synthesis to dominate without attention to difference. Self-understanding, of the lived experience of education, is moved into relations of race, gender, and knowledge production in Critical Race/Feminist Currere. Here knowledge production in law, education, policy, humanities, and the sciences is studied for how it shapes thoughts and behaviors of domination and relations that center White heterosexual male ways of knowing and being in the world. Taliaferro Baszile notes that Critical Race Theory invigorates studies in race with concepts such as white property, interest conversion, and counter storytelling act as a means toward curricula where communities of color are represented in the disciplines that form and inform curricula. Critical Race/Feminist Currere draws form Black feminist studies focused on subjectivities at the intersection of femaleness and Blackness. The work of challenging invisibility, distortion, and oppressive hierarchies cultivates Black female subjectivity where the very work of marking contributions and naming struggles is the body of work. Currere, then, becomes informed by these bodies of work that document the perpetuation of domination in the disciplinary sense while simultaneously they document internal dialogues and collective struggles around a multitude of Black female subjectivities. Critical Race/Feminist Currere acts as a reminder that self-actualization requires one study their histories, origins, ancestors, places, and all the associated knowledge

650

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

that come with such studies. These studies cannot stop at trivial explorations of the best a culture has to offer. They must also involve what’s been characterized as troublesome knowledge or thoughts deemed unworthy of examination. And, because this is currere, such work is not separate from the self, from the question central to all educational pursuits, who am I? And, as Taliaferro Baszile notes, the more difficult question to answer in the academy, who am I as a black person, a woman, a Black woman. Critical Race/Feminist Currere retains the importance, then, of autobiographical explorations but involves disciplines that work to decolonize thought and engender subjectivities where they have been absent. As always, currere has been about a method of self-understanding toward the possibility of social reconstruction that doesn’t reproduce forms of domination and subjugation despite our best efforts.

Conclusion So, where does race in the curriculum stand now and more importantly, where will it go? Race in the curriculum has always contested with outside pressures to limit its scope and transformational potential. Power and domination do not shed their essence with ease, but inherently trapped within the dialectic, counternarratives emerge to contest and resist their various machinations. Curriculum is embedded with social structures, supported by discourses that justify which knowledge counts as official knowledge, and encompasses political processes to advance or limit racial understanding as part of the educational experience (Yosso, 2002). It is no surprise, therefore that race in the curriculum and CRT in particular have come under vicious vitriol and attack from the most reactionary and political conservative elements of society who deem any and all efforts to address the structures and discourses of race in education a bold defiance to the status quo and an offensive position against the principles of Eurocentric Americanization. To understand why race in the curriculum and CRT specifically have become the targets of political mobilization it is useful to revisit its central tenants. As noted by Tara Yosso (2002), five themes inform the extension of CRT to education. These are: the intersectionality of race and racism with gender, class, and sexuality; the challenge to dominant ideology; the commitment to social justice; the centrality of experiential knowledge, and the utilization of interdisciplinary approaches in knowledge production. In response, the most stalwart opponents who inform political legislation designed to erase race in the curriculum suggest that “a straight line connects critical race theory to modern progressivism to the riots in the streets” (Rufo, 2020). The argument so follows, that when educational curriculum includes an examination of systemic racial oppression in history and/or the country’s formal institutions (i.e., judicial) that the very fabric of American idealism is being threatened. For those who promote a “color-blind” curriculum, the study of race/ethnicity is seen as a threat to the foundation of American exceptionalism – individual rights, equality, and meritocracy. In other words, they see it as replacing the American system with a system of identity-based distribution of power (Rufo, 2020). Key here, is the perceived

Race and Curriculum

651

threat to historical systems that lean into the power of White male elites in the USA and their international compatriots. It bears mention that since January 2021, 37 US states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching CRT or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism (Education Week, 2021). In closing, we return to the prescient words of Bonilla-Silva who has stridently exposed the impact of the minimization of racism frame on justifying color-blind ideology in education and society writ large. “Precisely because they (whites) use these frames the way children use building blocks, whites can say things such as “I am all for equal opportunity, that’s why I oppose affirmative action” and also say “Everyone has almost the same opportunities to succeed in this country because discrimination and racism are all but gone.” And if anyone dares to point out that in this land of milk and honey there is a tremendous level of racial inequality-a fact that could deflate the balloon of color blindness-they can argue this is due to minorities’ schools, lack of education, family disorganization, or lack of proper values and work ethic.” (p. 47)

References Anderson, C. B. (2012). Misplaced multiculturalism: Representations of American Indians in U.S. history academic content standards. Curriculum Inquiry, 42(4), 497–509. Banks, J. (1989). Approaches to multicultural curriculum reform. Trotter Review, 3(3), 5. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2021). Racism without racists. Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham, MD. Brandon, L. (2010). Remembering Carter Goodwin Woodson (1875-1950). In Curriculum studies handbook. Routledge. Brown, A., & Au, W. (2014). Race, memory, and master narratives: A critical essay on U.S. curriculum history. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), 358–389. Brown, A., & Brown, K., (2015). The more things change, the more they stay the same: Excavating race and the endurng racisms in U.S. curriculum. National Society for the Study of Education. 114(2), 103–130. Britzman, D. (2017). Mrs. Klein and Paulo Freire: Coda for the pain of symbolization in the lifeworld of the mind. Educational Theory. 67(1), 83–95. Castnell, L. A., & Pinar, W. F. (1993). Understanding curriculum as a racial text. State University of New York Press. Crenshaw, K. (2017). On intersectionality. The New Press. Education Week. (2021). Map: Where critical race theory is under attack. Retrieved from http:// www.edweek.org/leadership/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06 Goldberg, T. D. (1994). Multiculturalism. Blackwell Publishers. Gross, A. (2007). The Caucasian cloak: Mexican Americans and the politics of whiteness in the twentieth-century southwest. Georgetown Law Journal, 95(2), 337–392. Gutiérrez, K. D., & Jaramillo, N. E. (2006). Looking for educational equity: The consequences of relying on Brown. Teachers College Record. 108(4), 173–189. Jaramillo, N. (2012). Immigration and the challenge of education: A social drama analysis in South Central Los Angeles. New York. Madrid, M. (2015). The lemon grove desegregation case: A matter of neglected history. In A. Colon-Muniz & M. Lavadenz (Eds.), Latino civil rights in education: La Lucha Sigue. Routledge. Malewski, E., & Jaramillo, N. (in press). International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. May, S., & Sleeter, C. (2010). Critical multiculturalism: Theory and praxis. Taylor and Francis Group.

652

N. E. Jaramillo and E. Malewski

McCarthy, C. (1990). Multicultural education, minority identities, textbooks and the challenge of curriculum reform. Journal of Education, 172(2), 118–129. McLaren, P. (1997). Unthinking whiteness, rethinking democracy: Or farewell to the blonde beast; towards a revolutionary multiculturalism. Educational Foundations, 11(2), 5–39. Miller, J. (2005). Sounds of silence breaking: Women, autobiography, curriculum. Peter Lang. Payne, R. (2018). A framework for understanding poverty. 6th revised edition. Aha! Process Inc. Pinar, W. (1995). Understanding curriculum as a racial text. Pinar, B. (2011). The character of curriculum studies. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan. Rufo, C. (2020). Defending American Values, and History. City Journal. (September 18). Found at: https://www.city-journal.org/trump-war-against-critical-race-theory Suzuki, B. H. (1984). Curriculum transformation for multicultural education. Education and Urban Society, 16(3), 294–322. Taliaferro Baszile, D. (2015). Critical race/feminist currere. In M. F. He, B. D. Schultz, & W. H. Schubert (Eds.), The SAGE guide to curriculum education. SAGE. Tröhler, D. (2016). Curriculum history or the educational construction of Europe in the long nineteenth century. European Educational Research Journal, 15(3), 279–297. Wang, W. (2020). Chinese currere, subjective reconstruction, and attunement. Palgrave Macmillan. Whitlock, U. R. (2007). This corner of Canaan: Curriculum studies of place and the reconstruction of the south. Peter Lang. Yosso, T. (2002). Toward a critical race curriculum. Equity & Excellence in Education, 35(2), 93–107.

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American, Normative Physics and Astronomy Post-Secondary Curriculum Thelma Akyea

Contents An Opportunity to Realize Something Missing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toward a Critical Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thinking Like a Physicist and Astronomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Being a Physicist and Astronomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Working Like a Physicist and Astronomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Counterspaces, Positioning, and Self-Authoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Women’s Experiences Inform Physics and Astronomy Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

654 655 661 661 663 664 664 666 667

Abstract

In this chapter, I engage with critical research about women’s educational experiences in physics and astronomy. I developed a way to understand what North American normative physics and astronomy curriculum entails as I explore how to describe normative post-secondary physics and astronomy curriculum. I believe that mobilizing the experiences of women in education and research can provide a critical starting point for such an endeavor. To start, I discuss what it means to problematize how educators and researchers think about what is taught in classrooms, particularly in post-secondary institutions. I use findings of critical curricularists to scaffold the assertion that we must consider lived curriculum as a lynchpin in curricular theorizing. I then narrow my focus to critical curriculum in science education research and present literature that connects both lived experiences and curriculum to learning. Next, I use perspectives of Black women, women of color, and White women to describe normative physics and astronomy curriculum. Finally, I outline the areas of normative physics and T. Akyea (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_59

653

654

T. Akyea

astronomy curriculum, detail the normative curricular components, and connect normative physics and astronomy curriculum to critical perspectives on thinking and learning in science education. Within this final segment, I build on personal, post-secondary educational experiences to illuminate how physics and astronomy curriculum is lived and identify work that takes place when actively living curriculum.

An Opportunity to Realize Something Missing One of the most instructive moments in my teaching career was when I was expected to re-enact the role of an 1860s schoolteacher. Imagine Little House on the Prairie meets the young millennials; I was ready to recreate a settler-colonial school day. As a class, we descended upon Canada’s living museum, in the north end of the city. We wore homemade costumes and carried our lunches in tin pails as we walked toward the one-room schoolhouse, an artificially aged wooden building nestled within the grounds. Dust particles floated lazily through streams of light jetting from the timestained windows when we entered. The desks were arranged in rows, and a lonely lectern stood at the front of the classroom. The early morning humidity had me questioning my choice of costume; I would surely sweat through the sheer yellow blouse before noon. My class eagerly filed in and chose their seats. They sat on wooden chairs, popped open the desk-covers, and marveled at the chalk, slates, and English primers. The kids buzzed with excitement. Sounds of chairs screeching across the floor, chalk scraping on boards, and student chattering filled the room. Although the day started as expected – with curiosity about the artifacts and the enthusiasm to learn like a revered pioneer-child – conversations quickly turned to something else. The children began a relentless demand for punishment. “Pin my pigtails to the chalk board!” “Make me stick my nose in the corner!” “Throw the chalk at me!” “Make me wear a dunce cap!”

These bizarre requests tumbled from their mouths, bouncing off the hardwood surfaces and colliding with my eardrums. I was shocked at their endless requests for corrective action and wondered, How am I going to make it through this ridiculously hot day, while I pretend to be European, as they ask me to dole out punishments? This is too much! As I stood in front of my students, I reflected on the punishment-envy that swept through the classroom, and I realized punishments were one way that my students imagined settler-colonial schooling. Acting out these trauma-inducing events made the past come alive for the children. For me, on the other hand, it was antagonizing. How did I, a dark-skinned Black woman, fit into this colonial fantasy? Would a Black woman fit? Could a Black woman fit?

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

655

In that moment, determined to learn from the social environment before me, I decided that students could deepen their understanding by empathizing with a child who lived centuries ago. In journals, they reflected on their feelings about punishments and how children their age possibly endured this treatment. The Akan proverb written in Twi, “Obi nnim a, obi kyerε” translated as if someone does not know, someone teaches, guided my thinking. This saying suggests that in every situation, there is always a teacher. We learn both from what is noticed and what goes unnoticed. The students’ reactions convinced me to look beyond my discomfort and toward their fascination with the reenactment. Similarly in this chapter, I use the same principle of reflection that I used many years ago while I stood in that sweltering pioneer classroom. The following literature review is not only an overview of what exists but a preview of what could be if women were centered in conversations about North American physics and astronomy curriculum. “Obi nnim a:” I address what we don’t know. I consider the inaction, the omissions in research. As I review literature with absentee voices of women in physics and astronomy, I interrogate what these omissions indicate about where there is room for a Black woman’s voice, from a Canadian perspective, to emerge, “obi kyerε.” The purpose of this chapter is to think critically about physics and astronomy curriculum. I think about both, how normative physics and astronomy postsecondary curriculum might be described and how my educational experiences might inform such a description. I also want to explore how women’s voices can inform our understanding of what learning physics and astronomy entails. To do this, I review the bodies of literature relevant to the experiences of White women, women of color (WOC), and Black women in post-secondary physics and astronomy. This chapter includes a detailed description of normative physics and astronomy curriculum. I use science equity literature to describe what physics and astronomy curriculum looks like from a critical standpoint. I draw on my own personal and educational experiences as a Black woman who studied physics in post-secondary school to inform theorizing about curriculum, identity, and physics and astronomy. I close this chapter with a summary of the main ideas and propose future directions for research to center Black women’s voices in Canadian post-secondary physics and astronomy curriculum studies.

Toward a Critical Curriculum A critical view of curriculum requires educators to transform the curriculum documents, policies, and practices to establish opportunities for liberation (Collins, 1998; Hooks, 2014). This is done when threads of oppression within the curriculum are rooted out and problematized (Freire, 1972). Critical curriculum is the interrogation of the social contexts in education whereby social hierarchies are constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed in society as well as in the classroom (Giroux, 1994). In critical curriculum studies, schooling is contextualized within society (Apple & King, 1977).

656

T. Akyea

The process of re/de/constructions is cultural, political, and historical and mediates identities (Arnot, 2002). Intersecting elements of identity such as gender, race, and class regulate access to the curriculum; curriculum should be changed so that the perpetual exclusion of racialized people discontinues (Barton, 1997). Critical scholars see opportunities for change to create curriculum that dismantles racism, sexism, and classism. Research that takes on cultural, social, and political issues in science curriculum, including physics and astronomy curriculum, can address wider issues of inclusion in predominantly White institutions. Science is an overarching designation that encompasses both natural and applied sciences. This includes physics and astronomy; both are natural sciences, with discipline-specific applied characteristics. For example, physicists’ and astronomer’s approach to solving problems often considers relationships between matter, light, time, and energy. Exploring science education provides a good starting point for this literature review because there is a growing foundation of equity research in the field as many scholars endeavor to show how inequity in science curriculum can be dismantled through diverse perspectives. In critical science curriculum research, educators and students illustrate how personal experiences influence learning. When learners engage with curricular content, educators become better equipped to address student needs, especially if educators acknowledge the importance of students’ lived experiences (Foster & Peele, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Curriculum can be changed based on personal connections that diverse learners make to the curricular content (Peele-Eady & Moje, 2020). For instance, creativity experienced every day can influence the learner’s understanding of vectors in linear algebra. In one study, WOC successfully use analogies to learn how to deconstruct or assemble vectors as they draw on gender, cultural, racial, and religious identities (Adiredja & Andrews-Larson, 2017). In other words, the women in this study combine personal experiences from their communities with curricular expectations to address their coursework. Similarly in the sciences, students use the curriculum to bridge classroom and community experiences and develop an understanding across varying subjects. In one study of science curriculum, the students and teachers reflected on meteorological phenomena while interpreting data and predicting events (Price & McNeill, 2013). Here students used the curriculum as an artifact of learning and problematize curricular content as a point of departure for deeper exploration. In both equity and science education study, curriculum is framed as an artifact of learning, about which students navigate and develop their own meanings. Most of the research that addresses gender inequity and physics and astronomy post-secondary education focuses on the lived experiences of all women in a way that erases the experiences of Black women and instead addresses the needs of White women while calling for more research about intersections between racism, sexism, and classism (e.g., see Bug, 2003; Francis et al., 2017; Haraway, 1988; Traxler et al., 2001). While these studies contribute to essential discourse in the field and provide an invaluable starting point for complicating the definition of physics and astronomy curriculum, they also introduce the need for a more in-depth inquiry into the experiences of Black women in physics and astronomy. Because the body of

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

657

literature that addresses physics and astronomy curriculum and Black women is limited, I include literature about physics and astronomy curriculum, White women, and WOC in my description process of normative curriculum. The description of normative physics and astronomy curriculum presented in this study is assembled around the experiences of women in science. When available, I focus on experiences from WOC and Black women. Physics and astronomy education equity research that takes up the lived experiences of Black women helps uncover and dismantle the inequities hidden in the physics and astronomy curriculum. Such a critical analysis, which includes race, gender, and other aspects of identity, can lead to more meaningful learning in the sciences (Bang et al., 2013). In this description of normative physics and astronomy, I discuss the social, cultural, and political undertones of curriculum within which identity and learning are considered intertwined. It is necessary to interrogate social, cultural, and political contexts of learning in science to work toward and achieve equity (Barton & Tan, 2010; Barton & Yang, 2000; Gutiérrez, 2013). Unpacking power and knowledge constructs are required in conversations about learning in science (Barton, 1998; Basu et al., 2009). Also, power is implicated in how identities develop in science (Barton & Tan, 2010). An examination of Canadian physics and astronomy curriculum necessitates an approach that centers the voices of those in the margins while addressing hidden components of the curriculum, including how individuals learn together, are influenced by cultural contexts, and impacted by politics (Collins, 2003; Giroux & Penna, 1979). Feminist theorizing provides me with the grounds and theoretical tools to define key terms, like physics and astronomy curriculum, through the lived experiences of women in science. I use scholarship from gender studies in science education to derive facets of normative physics and astronomy curriculum. I mobilize scholarship with feminist perspectives to highlight women’s experiences in physics and astronomy. Research that uses feminist objectivity to root out white dominance in the sciences is my starting point. This research explains how White male privilege is perpetrated through experiences shared in women’s narratives about their lives in physical science (Harding, 1992; Keller, 2013; Longino, 1987). Feminist critique of patriarchy in physics and astronomy education and research presents an opportunity to consider the many forms of resistance in which women engage. On its own, however, feminist critique offers a view that is often limited to the perspectives of White women. With critical feminist perspectives that include issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality, to name a few, I embed nuanced lived experiences to give shave to normative physics and astronomy curriculum. Because equity scholarship about Western physics and astronomy primarily centers on the experiences of White women, I purposefully insert missing voices. Based on the premise that WOC and Black women often face multiple systems of oppression due to their race, assumed class, and gender, I argue they are well situated to identify limits that restrict access to opportunities in post-secondary education (Collins, 1986). WOC and Black women also inform the well-known theorizing about science identity that offered inroads toward understanding how to describe normative physics and astronomy curriculum (see Table 1).

658

T. Akyea

Table 1 Normative physics curriculum. An overview of the lived experiences shared in the literature about physics Normative Physics Curriculum: Drawn from the lived experiences of White women, women of color, and Black women Lived Experiences of Women in Physics and Physics and Astronomy Astronomy Curriculum-as-Lived Rationale Thinking - Women must - Physicists and - Thinking like a demonstrate that they can astronomers must be physicist and astronomer complete physics tasks to smart; therefore men involves showing be considered competent make the best physicists understanding in ways in physics in ways well - Physicists and that adapt stereotypical beyond the expectations astronomers focus on White masculine placed upon men in individual achievement characteristics physics (Francis et al., - Black women must 2017) learn in isolation or - Women find that they do infiltrate study groups not receive recognition for their work as readily as men (Traxler et al., 2016) - White and Asian students are preferred peer collaborators in graduate study groups, whereby Asian students are considered honorary Whites (Rosa & Mensah, 2016) Being - Men are smart (Francis - Women must prove they - Being a physicist and et al., 2017) are smart, like men astronomer entails that - It is common to use - Genders are binary WOC ascribe to these male/female and There is a gender gap notions of what it is to be man/woman analogies Identities are static a White man and metaphors - Masculine roles - Interest in physics omits (interchangeably) to accepted in and around equity and inclusion explain concepts in physics directed at oppression physics (Traxler et al., - White men are 2016) mainstream and enjoy - Women feel like they fellowship with other don’t belong in physics White men in physics (Francis et al., 2017) - To be a successful -It is unusual for WOC to physicist, WOC must be present in classrooms strip away parts of their and labs identities that are not seen - WOC face isolation, as White and/or microagressions, racism, masculine sexism (Francis et al., - Liberation talk is 2017; Ong et al., 2018) associated with - Black women in physics immaturity in physics are positioned as the “other” (continued)

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

659

Table 1 (continued) Normative Physics Curriculum: Drawn from the lived experiences of White women, women of color, and Black women Lived Experiences of Women in Physics and Physics and Astronomy Astronomy Curriculum-as-Lived Rationale

Working

(Prescod-Weinstein, 2020) - WOC are questioned, suspected, or are a threat in physics communities (Fries-Britt & Holmes, 2012) - Femininity gets in the way of being of physicist (Francis et al., 2017) - Conversations about liberation in physics become less important as physicists become more senior in the field (Bug, 2003) - Physical and mental work is performed in specific ways that are regulated by the mostly male majority (Clancy et al., 2017) - There is a myth of meritocracy in physics (Traxler et al., 2016) - Physics is portrayed an objective (Bug, 2003; Traxler et al., 2016) - Professors and instructors offer direct and indirect support to White students (Burnette, 2013)

- Women’s physical and mental ability to work is given discretionary approval via informal remarks of dis/approval from men in the physics workplace - Femininity is superficial - Personal beliefs are irrelevant, physics and astronomy is fact-based, physicists and astronomer do not contaminate research with personal/social/ political/cultural views - Black women and women of color must advocate for their support

- Working like a physicist and astronomer involved developing a “thick skin” to remarks and maltreatment to assimilate with a group of physicists and astronomers who are mostly men

The lived experiences of WOC characterize science identities, or the characteristics that many successful scientists have (Carlone & Johnson, 2007). Studies suggest that learning in science is beyond content retention; it is about identity constructions in specific ways that include race, class, and gender (Parsons & Mensah, 2010). Carlone and Johnson (2007) define science identities as understanding science content, having the ability to carry out scientific tasks, and gaining recognition from other scientists. Other scholars draw on lived experiences to highlight curricular practices in need of transformation in science education (Barton & Tan, 2010; Hazari et al., 2010). As such, equity studies in science that draw upon

660

T. Akyea

the experiences of White women and WOC are good starting points to tease out the normative in post-secondary physics and astronomy curriculum. Physics and astronomy address the study of matter and energy through space and time. But physics and astronomy curriculum, like overarching science curriculum, is more nuanced than this basic definition. All curricula are a way to participate in the common practices (especially in traditional places of learning, like a classroom, a laboratory, or an observatory) and places where knowledge is constructed and deconstructed (Collins, 1991). For a critical definition of curriculum, I turn to Aoki’s (2004) bifurcation between planned and lived curriculum. In Aoki’s (2004) definition of curriculum, there is “curriculum-as-plan” and “curriculum-as-lived” (p. 417). Curriculum-as-plan is curriculum designed by teaching and administrative bodies (Aoki, 2004). In physics and astronomy, for example, traditional physics curriculum is an example of curriculum-as-plan because traditional physics and astronomy curriculum includes labs, research, lectures, textbooks, and a variety of assessment practices (Brickhouse et al., 2006; Carlone, 2004). On the other hand, curriculum-as-lived is a focus beyond teaching resources and administrative direction; curriculum-as-lived moves the notion of curriculum toward the contexts through which curriculum is addressed. Curriculum-as-lived is influenced by the histories that teachers and learners bring to the classroom. With this definition of curriculum, Aoki (2004) carves out a space for theorizing about the role of social, cultural, and political influences in curriculum constructions. In Western sciences, this looks like infusing traditional physics and astronomy curriculum with critical perspectives, as seen in the research and scholarship of scholars in the field. Critical physicists and astronomers teach and theorize about the connection between passion for research and being accepted as a legitimate scientist, the link between race and scientific validity, and Black identity construction as problematizes fundamental theory development in astronomy (e.g., see Eisenhart & Finkel, 1998; Subramaniam, 2000; Prescod-Weinstein, 2020, respectively). A description of curriculum that makes space for the lived experiences shared by Black women in the sciences is most useful in this study as it invokes the meaning of curricular contexts. Curriculum-as-plan coupled with curriculum-as-lived makes room for discussing if and how social contexts intersect with traditional curriculum (Aoki, 2004). Focusing on curriculum-as-lived invites experiences of White women, WOC, and Black women in post-secondary science to inform normative curriculum. I use women’s experiences in physics and astronomy to describe normative curriculum. These experiences include inroads and obstacles to learning in their education and research. Below I divide the literature on learning science curriculum into three areas to show how normative physics and astronomy curriculum might be described. Utilizing Aoki’s (2004) description of curriculum as anything that is lived and experienced, Table 1 shows how the lived experiences of White women and WOC in physics and astronomy help elucidate the normative physics and astronomy curriculum. The three areas come from Carlone and Johnson’s (2007) definition of science identity, demonstrated by conceptual understanding, performance, and recognition by other scientists (Carlone & Johnson, 2007). I align these areas to

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

661

(a) thinking like a physicist and astronomer, (b) being a physicist and astronomer and, (c) working like a physicist and astronomer. There is some overlap between these areas, but for the purpose of this chapter, delineating and exploring prevalent findings with these orientations can give the normative in physics and astronomy a more tangible form.

Thinking Like a Physicist and Astronomer White women, WOC, and Black women must navigate how to think like a physicist or astronomer. People of color often have to overachieve academically to be considered competent in post-secondary studies (Ong et al., 2011; Whitten et al., 2003), and WOC are typically considered not smart and out-of-place in science (Archer et al., 2010; Francis et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2015). Often model minorities, like Asian students, are considered more apt for physics and astronomy than other WOC (Mensah, 2016). Because WOC encounter discrimination about their capabilities to think like a physicist and astronomer, the curriculum requires thinking in specific ways. Women are expected to show academic and research acumen in ways that outshine masculine counterparts (Francis et al., 2017). For example, participants in Carlone and Johnson’s (2007) study detail strategies WOC used to outperform and overachieve to be selected as useful group members by other students and to prove they belong in post-secondary physics study – this includes announcing test scores that outrank their male counterparts to be considered competent. For women, thinking like a physicist and astronomer means constantly negotiating identities that are imposed by the mostly White male population. White and Asian women are more seamlessly accepted into physics and astronomy learning communities, whereas Black women tend to face isolation (Rosa & Mensah, 2016). Black women are often positioned to work in isolation as their peers and colleagues question their abilities and belonging in physics and astronomy programs (Beckford et al., 2020). To illustrate, as an undergraduate, my peers and professors questioned my belonging in physics by rewriting my solutions and demonstrating surprise when I could identify missing variables, respectively. I felt alienated in my physics labs and courses and had ongoing difficulty finding a lab partner and being accepted into their study group.

Being a Physicist and Astronomer Being a physicist and astronomer requires women to strive to take the characteristics of White men’s bodies (Ong, 2005). In physics, there is the understanding that there is a gap that separates genders (Traxler et al., 2016), and this gap also positions men as expert physicists. The notion that White men are experts in physics seems to permeate teaching practices (Ong et al., 2018). In teaching and learning practice, the idea that masculinity is preferred is perpetuated in common gendered metaphors that

662

T. Akyea

are used to help make sense of challenging concepts (Bug, 2003). A useful example is affinity. When I was in university, affinity between particles was always likened to attraction between genders. The corollary was that like repelled like. While positive and negative charges were attracted to each other, two positive charges and two negative charges repel. This notion applies to both small atomic interactions and large planetary phenomena. Also built into mechanisms in laboratory environment are de facto rules about the body types required to complete investigations. Day-today duties that require great physical strength and or technical demands like lifting or opening devices build to be handled by individuals with large physical frames or larger hands (Gonsalves, 2010). In normative physics curriculum, gender binaries are a pervasive instructional tool, often used to distinguish characteristics or behavior of matter and energy. To attain expert status, it is assumed that women should be more like men (Barton, 1997; Keller, 2013). In normative physics and astronomy, genders are binary (Traxler et al., 2016). This is a way of understanding the relationships associated with physics and astronomy curriculum that require an acceptance of hierarchy within gender binaries (Rasmussen et al., 2019). As such, physics and astronomy curriculum also necessitate the agreement that gender identities are static and regulated by normative constructions of gender, just like the unchanging theories and laws regulating the behavior of light, matter, and energy. Lived curriculum for women indicate that being a physicist and astronomer requires life altering encounters with Western social norms. In physics and astronomy, femininity is superficial, something that can and should be stripped away so that women can become very much like White men, presented under the guise of sound logic and objectivity (Francis et al., 2017). Femininity gets in the way of becoming a physicist (Francis et al., 2017). Ong (2005) reports that being a physicist is very much a body process, whereby WOC must contend with embodying White, masculine characteristics to be considered physicists. White men are mainstream (Ong et al., 2018). Normative curriculum entails individuals should be stripped of femininity, cultural, or ethnic identifiers to fit in with physicists and astronomers. As masculine roles are more widely accepted in and around physics and astronomy, another physics curricular norm is that femininity gets in the way of gaining mastery in physics (Francis et al., 2017). This is demonstrated in the highly toxic, oppressive, and sexist climates of many post-secondary physics classrooms and research labs (Dabney & Tai, 2013; De Welde & Laursen, 2011; Modeste Knowles & Hammer, 2018). The learning climate for White men includes both formal and inform fellowship with each other, a sense of belonging, and the implicit notion that men are smart (Francis et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2015; Ong et al., 2018). The is an expectation that personal beliefs are held secret (Bug, 2003). White empiricism is pervasive in physics (Prescod-Weinstein, 2020). According to Aoki’s (2004) description of curriculum, these lived experiences where White men belong in physics and astronomy while women, especially WOC and Black women, are out of place describe the normative physics and astronomy curriculum.

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

663

Being interested in physics is a curricular norm for physicists (Hazari et al., 2010). Another norm is that physicists have common extracurricular interests, such as playing classical music (Pitney, 2015). Often only men receive offers to attend after-work social events (Whitten et al., 2003; Dabney & Tai, 2013). Participation in sexist conversations or exposure to sexist media is expected to be accepted without challenge (Burnette, 2013; Ong, 2005). Initiatives to liberate and decolonize physics and astronomy are associated with junior roles, and it is expected that equity work in physics is abandoned once a student or researcher becomes more senior (Traxler et al., 2016).

Working Like a Physicist and Astronomer Working like a physicist means wrestling with values, especially the value that “good” work is rewarded when deserved. When working like a physicist, women are expected to accept that meritocracy extends to their work (Traxler et al., 2016). Research projects taken seriously are objective, quantitative, single-cause explanations that are stripped of social contexts and are commonly used (Bug, 2003; Traxler et al., 2016). Good physicists and astronomers state explicit assumptions, ensure diversity in participant selection, and see the intricacies of natural environment (Bug, 2003). This shows the willingness of physicists to be transparent prior to showing findings. Yet, physicists and astronomers also expect research to be conducted in traditional ways, which means that often certain assumptions, participant selection, and natural environments are expected for “good” research (Traxler et al., 2016). Therefore, women confront the boundaries of expectations while both striving to challenge the normal routine and working as physicists and astronomers. In practice, working like a physicist and astronomer might look like going with the mainstream assumptions and values that peers and colleagues have in order to achieve a desired goal, even if the desired goal is contrary to what the woman desires. As an undergraduate student, I worked with a group of women on a physics problem set. With three questions to complete and a short turn-around time, each group member was tasked to complete one question prior to our next class. We completed our problems, shared the solutions, and submitted our work. When we received our grade, I was surprised to see my section lost marks. I reviewed our package and realized that the group member who submitted our work changed my calculations. When asked for an explanation, she, a White woman, explained that at the last minute, she suspected my solution was incorrect and redid the question on her own. I was furious and responded by pointing out that my work was indeed correct. I was aware that as the only Black woman in the group, my work was targeted and changed. Yet, when I raised my concerns, I was gently admonished by the other group member, a WOC and model minority, who explained the change was made with our team’s best intentions in mind. In this experience,

664

T. Akyea

I was expected to work as a team-player, despite being positioned as the lessintelligent Black woman.

Discussion Normative physics and astronomy curriculum takes up being, thinking, and working like a physicist and astronomer. These characteristics ask women to confront White male interpretations of physics and astronomy curriculum. White women, WOC, and Black women navigate their identities in ways that correspond to how the White male bodies are represented, demonstrate their understanding of physics in ways that are recognized by the White male majority, and perform physics tasks in ways that are received well by the White male majority. In response to normative physics and astronomy curriculum, White women and WOC construct identities. Some of these identities align with social norms, others contravene norms, while others negotiate more than one social norm at a time. Women report losing parts of their identities as they faced the norms of physics. The willingness to speak out against sexism in public is grappled with, the love of one’s own skin color and first language diminishes, and the dreams of completing graduate studies in physics are thwarted after encounters with White male normative expectations in physics (Keller, 2013; Smith, 2016: Subramaniam, 2000). From a curriculum-as-lived perspective, normative physics and astronomy curriculum is largely imbued by White male beliefs, values, and learning expectations. White women, WOC, and Black women respond to normative physics and astronomy curriculum with their whole selves as they think, become, and work as physicists and astronomers. Theoretical foundations about science identity along with empirical studies about physics and astronomy identity show how White women, WOC, and Black women respond to masculinities embedded within physics curriculum (Basu & Barton, 2009; Gonsalves et al., 2016; Ko et al., 2013; PrescodWeinstein, 2020). When confronted with normative physics and astronomy curriculum, White women, WOC, and Black women respond with shifts in identity that create multiple sites and ways for educational experiences to develop, and these sites and approaches to learning go beyond physics curriculum-as-plan.

Counterspaces, Positioning, and Self-Authoring There is a connection between normative physics and astronomy curriculum and women’s identity construction. The connection is that when women confront normative physics and astronomy curriculum, they respond. Similarly, empirical studies about women who confront normative masculinities in science show varying responses. These responses include women’s engagement in counterspaces, positioning, and authoring identities when studying science. Counterspaces are safe places of commiserating and learning for minoritized students, and examples of counterspaces in post-secondary institutions include student mentors, professors that

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

665

mentor, conferences, student groups both on and off campus, and departmental supports (Ong et al., 2018). Self-authoring describes shifts in identity in response to different contexts (Holland et al., 1998). In science, self-authoring includes WOC’s responses of resistance to oppressive peers in science or extracurricular events (Johnson et al., 2011). When self-authoring occurs, women’s responses denote a shift in identity, whereby the women negotiate their educational experience about a part of the normative curriculum that does not fit their self-concept. I use a personal example to illustrate how counterspaces, positioning, and authoring identities can look when a student confronts an issue in education. When I was an undergraduate student, I was stumped by a problem set of calculus derivatives. I brought about three different solutions to the calculus professor during his office hours. I explained my approaches, shared my pages of calculations, and asked which solution showed the best reasoning. In response, the professor stared at me and said nothing. He did not speak a word. I repeated my question, showed my work, and waited. He said nothing. After five unsuccessful minutes of trying to get a response, I left his office. I told my roommates about the bizarre encounter, and they offered support by acknowledging the oddity of the encounter and shared my claim that it was most likely a racist encounter. Together, my roommates and I chose the most appropriate solutions to the derivatives. I later confirmed each approach to the problem set was correct, as both my exam score and final marks in the course were more than 85%. In this example, when I entered the calculus professor’s office, I had some understanding and needed guidance to make choices in calculus. After the encounter, I doubted my ability to solve calculus problems, but I was also aware that racism influenced how the professor responded to me. In response to the incident, I joined my roommates, two Black women, at our off-campus home to lament about the racism at our school and figure out the problem set on our own. My roommates and our home formed a counterspace, a place where I felt safe to talk about the racism that I felt and to build my understanding of calculus, a course that was important to me. My professor did not speak to me and did not help me find the correct solution. Therefore, I was positioned as a student who was not worth teaching during a oneon-one session with the professor. In response, I pivoted about that imposed identity and turned my attention toward the pervasive racism at my university. As well, I focused on solving the math problem and worked on solutions that made sense to other knowledgeable math students. With these responses, my identity shifted away from an unknowledgeable student toward a knowledgeable student who could explore more than one approach to solving a problem. As part of the self-authoring process, I repositioned myself to achieve my goal of solving derivatives. I used the consensus my roommates and I formed and my overall calculus score to shift from a calculus student who was not worth her professor’s candor to a calculus student who overcame racism with the help of friends. In my experience as a Black woman in a post-secondary physics and astronomy program, I found counterspaces and partook in self-authoring. Black women can indeed exact agency in post-secondary settings to combat discrimination (Benn-John, 2019). However, it is not always the case that Black women receive the conditions required to be agentic.

666

T. Akyea

In graduate physics and astronomy study, learning expectations established by course instructors and graduate supervisors influence the overall educational experiences of the students (Traweek, 1992). Without an acceptable demonstration of knowledge and skills, physics and astronomy students progress with difficulty (Hwang & Roth, 2013; Tobin & Roth, 2005). Therefore, knowledge and skills mediate physics and astronomy student success in school (Gonsalves & Seiler, 2012; Jackson & Seiler, 2017). Mediation is a way to understand identity shifts in individuals (Vygotsky, 1978; Nasir, 2002; Holland et al., 2007). To expand, for a student to complete a graduate course, they must demonstrate sound understanding of the curriculum and pass examinations. Without a passing grade, they will not complete their graduate course. Therefore, the curriculum mediates student success in graduate physics and astronomy studies. As shared above, lived curriculum of physics and astronomy requires women to think, be, and work in a normative way. When reframed as an identity project (i.e., how women navigate physics and astronomy curricular norms), we see that the normative physics and astronomy curriculum mediates women’s progress in physics and astronomy. Theoretical foundations about science identities along with research on physics identities show how learning takes place for White women, WOC, and Black folks in physics and astronomy (Barthelemy et al., 2020; Carlone & Johnson, 2007; Hazari et al., 2010; Hyater-Adams, 2019; Gonsalves & Chestnutt, 2020; McCormick et al., 2014). The evidence shows that for women, White women, WOC, and other racialized people, learning physics and astronomy curriculum is identity work. Yet there is more to understand about the educational experiences of Black women, especially in Canada. In the following section, I demonstrate how critical research about Black women’s lived experiences in Canada ground this study.

Black Women’s Experiences Inform Physics and Astronomy Curriculum Critical sociocultural theorists understand that there are multiple ways to think about cognition and identity construction (Muller et al., 2017). With the consideration of colonial legacies and histories and interlocking systems of power, a Black woman’s status is contradictory in different spaces (Sharpe, 2014). For example, Black women’s status as authentic scholars in post-secondary school is taken for granted; many Black women are left out, not counted, and ignored in predominantly White Canadian universities (Bramble, 1999; Davis, 2018; Hardial, 2020; James & HaigBrown, 2001). As observed during my experience with the calculus professor, Black women who actively seek to deepen their understanding in particular subject areas, and thus influence cognitive development in a specific way, often meet an impasse – especially when facing a White gatekeeper. I was able to turn to my roommates, unpack the discrimination, and learn the content required for the exam. There was an opportunity to exact some agency, or find a small window of power, within the interlocking systems of racism, sexism, and classism at the hands of my professor who had knowledge of how to navigate the mathematical content.

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

667

A discussion about Black women in physics and astronomy is incomplete without an interrogation of how Black women encounter normative physics and astronomy curriculum, for it is the very lived experiences of Black women that inform curriculum-as-lived, and thus lived experiences demonstrate how Black women adapt identity beyond understanding scientific content (Carlone & Johnson, 2007). In many areas of education, there is an iterative relationship between identity and curriculum, yet sometimes the influence of Black women is in response to the limitations of curriculum (Coleman, 2021; Collins, 1991). To make sense of the opportunities and limits, post-secondary physics and astronomy curriculum benefits from a critical interrogation, especially from Black women’s theoretical perspectives. Opportunities for further research exist, whereby lived experiences of Black women in physics and astronomy could deepen our understanding of post-secondary physics and astronomy curriculum in Canada.

References Adiredja, A. P., & Andrews-Larson, C. (2017). Taking the sociopolitical turn in postsecondary mathematics education research. International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, 3(3), 444–465. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1007/s40753017-0054-5 Aoki, T. T. (2004). Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki. Routledge. Apple, M. W., & King, N. R. (1977). What do schools teach? Curriculum Inquiry, 6(4), 341–358. https://doi.org/10.2307/1179656 Archer, L., DeWitt, J., Osborne, J., Dillon, J., Willis, B., & Wong, B. (2010). Doing science versus “being” a scientist: Examining 10/11-year-old schoolchildren’s constructions of science through the lens of identity. Science Education, 94(4), 617–639. Arnot, M. (2002). Reproducing gender: Critical essays on educational theory and feminist politics. Routledge. Bang, M., Warren, B., Rosebery, A. S., & Medin, D. (2013). Desettling expectations in science education. Human Development, 55(5–6), 302–318. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto. ca/10.1159/000345322 Barthelemy, R. S., McCormick, M., Henderson, C. R., & Knaub, A. (2020). Educational supports and career goals of five women in a graduate astronomy program. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 16(1), 1–13. Barton, A. C. (1997). Liberatory science education: Weaving connections between feminist theory and science education. Curriculum Inquiry, 27(2), 141–163. Barton, A. C. (1998). Feminist science education. Teachers College Press. Barton, A. C., & Tan, E. (2010). We be burnin’! Agency, identity, and science learning. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 19(2), 187–229. Barton, A. C., & Yang, K. (2000). The culture of power and science education: Learning from Miguel. Journal of Research in Science Teaching: The Official Journal of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, 37(8), 871–889. Basu, S. J., Calabrese Barton, A., Clairmont, N., & Locke, D. (2009). Developing a framework for critical science agency through case study in a conceptual physics context. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 4(2), 345–371. Beckford, B., Bertschinger, E., Mary, J., Tabbetha, D., Sharon, F. B., James, G., Isler, J., Ong, M., Richardson, A., Williams, Q., Hammer, P. W., & Modeste Knowles, A. (2020). The time is now: Systemic changes to increase African Americans with bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy. American Institute of Physics.

668

T. Akyea

Bramble, M. (1999). “That really wasn’t me”: A black, immigrant, Caribbean woman’s attempt to be/long in the academy. Canadian Woman Studies, 19(3), 134–140. Brickhouse, N. W., Eisenhart, M. A., & Tonso, K. L. (2006). Forum identity politics in science and science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 1(2), 309–324. Bug, A. (2003). Has feminism changed physics? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 881–899. https://doi.org/10.1086/345323 Burnette, S. F. (2013). Resiliency in physics: The lived experiences of African-American women who completed doctoral physics programs. North Carolina State University. Carlone, H. B. (2004). The cultural production of science in reform-based physics: Girls’ access, participation, and resistance. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(4), 392–414. Carlone, H. B., & Johnson, A. (2007). Understanding the science experiences of successful women of color: Science identity as an analytic lens. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44(8), 1187–1218. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea Coleman, N. D. (2021). The work of their hands: Black women and critical visionary pragmatism (28549440.) Doctoral dissertation, Rowan University. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33(6), S14–S32. Collins, P. H. (1991). On our own terms: Self-defined standpoints and curriculum transformation. NWSA Journal, 3(3), 367–381. Collins, P. H. (1998). Fighting words: Black women and the search for justice (Vol. 7). University of Minnesota Press. Collins, P. H. (2003). Perspectivity and the activist potential of the sociology classroom. Humanity and Society, 27(3), 358–375. Dabney, K. P., & Tai, R. H. (2013). Female physicist doctoral experiences. Physical Review Special Topics-Physics Education Research, 9(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.9.010115 Davis, A. A. (2018). The black woman native speaking subject: Reflections of a black female professor in Canada. Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, 39(1), 70–78. De Welde, K., & Laursen, S. (2011). The glass obstacle course: Informal and formal barriers for women Ph. D. students in STEM fields. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 3(3), 571–595. Retrieved from http://genderandset.open.ac.uk/index.php/genderandset/ article/view/205 Eisenhart, M. A., & Finkel, E. (1998). Women’s science: Learning and succeeding from the margins. University of Chicago Press. Foster, M., & Peele, T. (2001). Ring my bell: Contextualizing home and school in an African American community. In E. McIntyre, A. S. Rosebery, & N. González (Eds.), Classroom diversity: Connecting curriculum to students’ lives (pp. 27–36). Heinemann. Francis, B., Archer, L., Moote, J., DeWitt, J., MacLeod, E., & Yeomans, L. (2017). The construction of physics as a quintessentially masculine subject: Young people’s perceptions of gender issues in access to physics. Sex Roles, 76(3–4), 156–174. http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto. ca/10.1007/s11199-0160669z Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. 1968 (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Herder. Giroux, H. A. (1994). Toward a pedagogy of critical thinking. In K. S. Walters (Ed.), Re-thinking reason: New perspectives in critical thinking (pp. 199–201). State University of New York Press. Giroux, H. A., & Penna, A. N. (1979). Social education in the classroom: The dynamics of the hidden curriculum. Theory & Research in Social Education, 7(1), 21–42. Gonsalves, A. J. (2010). Discourses and gender in doctoral physics: A hard look inside a hard science. Ph.D. McGill University, Montreal, Ottawa. Gonsalves, A. J., & Chestnutt, H. R. (2020). Networks of support: Investigating a counterspace that provides identity resources for minoritized students in post-secondary physics. The Physics Teacher, 58(5), 324–327.

Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American,. . .

669

Gonsalves, A. J., & Seiler, G. (2012). Recognizing “smart super-physicists”: Gendering competence in doctoral physics. In M. Varelas (Ed.), Identity construction and science education research (pp. 157–172) Brill Sense. Gonsalves, A. J., Danielsson, A., & Pettersson, H. (2016). Masculinities and experimental practices in physics: The view from three case studies. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2), 020120. Gutiérrez, R. (2013). The sociopolitical turn in mathematics education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(1), 37–68. https://doi.org/10.5951/jresematheduc.44.1.0037 Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hardial, S. M. K. (2020). Wi Hab Cum Ah Lang Way, An Wi Still Hab Fur Fi Guh: The Experiences of Black Jamaican Women With Pre-and Post-Migration Post-Secondary Education in the Academy. Doctoral dissertation, York University, Yorkspace. http://hdl.handle.net/10315/37954 Harding, S. (1992). After the neutrality ideal: Science, politics, and “strong objectivity”. Social Research, 59, 567–587. Hazari, Z., Sonnert, G., Sadler, P. M., & Shanahan, M. C. (2010). Connecting high school physics experiences, outcome expectations, physics identity, and physics career choice: A gender study. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(8), 978–1003. Holland, D. L., Lachicotte, J. W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press. Hooks, B. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Hwang, S., & Roth, W. M. (2013). The work of lecturing in high school chemistry. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 8(3), 683–708. Hyater-Adams, S. (2019). Performances of black physics identity: Exploring the connections between identity, race, physics, and performance art (13860802). Doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Jackson, P. A., & Seiler, G. (2017). Identity work in the college science classroom: The cases of two successful latecomers to science. Science Education, 101(5), 716–740. James, C. E., & Haig-Brown, C. (2001). “Returning the dues” community and the personal in a university-school partnership. Urban Education, 36(2), 226–255. Johnson, A., Brown, J., Carlone, H., & Cuevas, A. K. (2011). Authoring identity amidst the treacherous terrain of science: A multiracial feminist examination of the journeys of three women of color in science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 48(4), 339–366. Jones, B., Hwang, E., & Bustamante, R. M. (2015). African American female professors’ strategies for successful attainment of tenure and promotion at predominately White institutions: It can happen. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 10(2), 133–151. Keller, E. F. (2013). The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics. In M. Wyer, M. Barbercheck, D. Cookmeyer, H. Ozturk, & M. Wayne (Eds.), Women, science, and technology: A reader in feminist science studies (pp. 9–16). Routledge. Ko, L. T., Kachchaf, R. R., Ong, M., & Hodari, A. K. (2013, January). Narratives of the double bind: Intersectionality in life stories of women of color in physics, astrophysics and astronomy. In AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 1513, No. 1, pp. 222–225). American Institute of Physics. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Longino, H. E. (1987). Can there be a feminist science? Hypatia, 2(3), 51–64. McCormick, M., Barthelemy, R., & Henderson, C. (2014). Women’s persistence into graduate astronomy programs: The roles of support, interest, and capital. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 20(4), 317. Mensah, F. M. (2016). Positional identity as a framework to studying science teacher identity. In L. Avraamidou (Ed.), Studying science teacher identity (pp. 49–69). Sense Publishers. Modeste Knowles, A., & Hammer, B. (2018). AIP Task Force to Eliminate African American underrepresentation in undergraduate physics and astronomy – TEAM-UP. Bulletin of the American Physical Society, 63.

670

T. Akyea

Muller, M., Buchheister, K. E., & Boutte, G. (2017). Multiple perspectives on cognitive development: Radical constructivism, cognitive constructivism, sociocultural theory, and critical theory. Faculty Publications, Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies 261. https:// digitalcommons.unl.edu/famconfacpub/261 Nasir, N. I. S. (2002). Identity, goals, and learning: Mathematics in cultural practice. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 4(2–3), 213–247. Ong, M. (2005). Body projects of young women of color in physics: Intersections of gender, race, and science. Social Problems, 52(4), 593–617. Ong, M., Wright, C., Espinosa, L., & Orfield, G. (2011). Inside the double bind: A synthesis of empirical research on undergraduate and graduate women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Harvard Educational Review, 81(2), 172–209. Retrieved from http:// myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url¼http://search.proquest.com/docview/914767404? accountid¼14771 Ong, M., Smith, J. M., & Ko, L. T. (2018). Counterspaces for women of color in STEM higher education: Marginal and central spaces for persistence and success. Journal of Research, 55, 206. Parsons, E. C., & Mensah, F. M. (2010). Black feminist thought: The lived experiences of two black female science educators. In Re-visioning science education from feminist perspectives (pp. 13–24). Brill Sense. Peele-Eady, T. B., & Moje, E. B. (2020). Communities as contexts for learning. In N. N. Suad, C. D. Lee, R. D. Pea, & M. M. de Royston (Eds.), Handbook of the cultural foundations of learning (pp. 230–246). Routledge. Pitney, N. (2015, June 24). Meet the 63rd Black woman in American history with a physics Ph.D. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/chanda-prescod-weinstein_n_ 7574020.html Prescod-Weinstein, C. (2020). Making Black women scientists under white empiricism: The racialization of epistemology in physics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45(2), 421–447. Price, J. F., & McNeill, K. L. (2013). Toward a lived science curriculum in intersecting figured worlds: An exploration of individual meanings in science education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50(5), 501–529. Rasmussen, K. C., Maier, E., Strauss, B. E., Durbin, M., Riesbeck, L., Wallach, A., & Erena, A. (2019). The nonbinary fraction: Looking towards the future of gender equity in astronomy. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.04893. Rosa, K., & Mensah, F. M. (2016). Educational pathways of Black women physicists: Stories of experiencing and overcoming obstacles in life. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2), 020113-1–020113-15. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.12.020113 Sharpe, C. (2014). Black studies: In the wake. The Black Scholar, 44(2), 59–69. Smith, M. R. (2016). Black Pearls: Examining the science identity development of African American Girls in a culturally relevant STEM Counterspace. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Subramaniam, B. (2000). Snow brown and the seven detergents: A metanarrative on science and the scientific method. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 28(1/2), 296–304. Retrieved from http://www. jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/40004461 Tobin, K., & Roth, W. M. (2005). Implementing coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing in urban science education. School Science and Mathematics, 105(6), 313–322. Traxler, A. L., Cid, X. C., Blue, J., & Barthelemy, R. (2016). Enriching gender in physics education research: A binary past and a complex future. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2), 020114-1–020114-15. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1103/PhysRevPhy sEducRes.12.020114 Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. Whitten, B. L., Foster, S. R., & Ducombe, M. L. (2003). What works for women in undergraduate physics? Physics Today, 56(9). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1620834

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological Experiences of International Students in Canada Adeela Arshad-Ayaz

Contents Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Internationalization of Higher Education in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceptual Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Internationalization of Curricula (IoC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Internationalization” of the Student Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

672 673 675 678 682 684 685

Abstract

This chapter investigates the colonizing aspect of the internationalization of higher education. It does so by analyzing if international students in Canadian higher education institutions are merely seen and treated as financial beings (cash cows) or if their ways of knowing (epistemology), being (ontology), and values (axiology) also become a part of the Canadian tertiary education discourses. The overarching objective of the chapter is to investigate if internationalization of higher education (IHE) in Canadian universities results in epistemological pluralism? A related objective is to find out the impact of education from a single dominant epistemological framework on knowledge formation (epistemology), being (ontology), and the value system (axiology) of international and Canadian students. In other words, do the marginalized knowledge, value systems, and ways of being of international students from the Global South get included in the higher education systems in Canada to create a diverse knowledge system or not? The chapter investigates two crucial dimensions of IHE, namely, the internationalization of curricula (IoC) and the epistemological, ontological, and axiological inclusion/exclusion of international students. Conceptually, the chapter draws on insights from decolonial, poststructuralist, and postcolonial perspectives to A. Arshad-Ayaz (*) Department of Education, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_27

671

672

A. Arshad-Ayaz

contend that it is essential to disrupt the global imaginary, which projects a singular knowledge system (Western) as the most valid, legitimate, and authoritative way of knowing. Keywords

Decolonization · Decoloniality · Internationalization of higher education · International student mobility · Internationalization of curricula

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education According to recent reports, universities in the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia have become “addicted to one source of income,” i.e., the international students (Yuen, 2020). The ongoing pandemic has revealed the one-sidedness of the IHE process where the universities in the Global North are at risk of blowing huge financial and budgetary holes due to restrictions on international travel of students, among other travelers. Many universities, especially in the USA, are on the verge of scaling down or even winding up completely. The situation in Canada, though different from the USA in magnitude, is also worrying university administrators. Both the provincial governments and the universities have moved to ensure that the restrictions in connection with the pandemic do not hamper intake and retention of international students. International students and the monies they bring in are important for the financial health of the universities in light of the steep cuts in educational financing since 2009 (Yuen, 2020). This has led scholars to question the ethics of the internationalization of higher education. While some see IHE as a part of the pattern of Western economic and epistemological hegemony (Johnston & Lee, 2014), others (Guo & Guo, 2017) see Canadian universities’ fixation with the financial aspects of IHE as a main cause for failing to create culturally and ethically responsive environments for international students. Some of the early research in the field dealt with the issue of defining the field. One of the most widely used definitions of internationalization was coined by Jane Knight in 2004. According to Knight, internationalization can be understood as “the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of post-secondary education” (2004; p. 11). According to Altbach (2004), “[i]nternationalisation includes specific policies and programmes undertaken by governments, academic systems and institutions, and even individual departments or institutions to cope with or exploit globalization” (p. 6). Scholars working with critical traditions also point out that internationalization, both as policy and process, is not as innocent as it seems. As the critical analyses started gaining traction, even Knight revisited her understanding and suggested that internationalization was “losing its way” (p. 76) and advocated for a re-examination of its guiding principles and values (Knight, 2014, p. 76). A study commissioned by the European Parliament heeded the critical scholarship and expanded the Knight definition to make it more inclusive and seemingly less benign.

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

673

The European Parliament Study defines internationalization as “the intentional process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions, and delivery of post-secondary education, in order to enhance the quality of education and research for all students and staff and to make a meaningful contribution to society” (cited in de Wit et al., 2013; emphasis added). While there is now a sizable body of knowledge on the internationalization of higher education (IHE), the primary focus of research has been on the economic, prestige-related, institutional, and credentials associated issues and the impact of these on the finances of and diversity at host institutions. Less attention has gone into investigating international and domestic students’ knowledge production, curricular issues, and identity dynamics. Little research investigates questions such as: Do the host institutions make an effort to make curricula more inclusive by bringing in content from other knowledge systems to make them more relevant to international students and improve possibilities of global mindedness for the domestic students? Do international students, especially from the Global South (GS), benefit from studying in Canada other than the credentials? Does IHE result in epistemological pluralism? The overarching objective of this chapter is to investigate if IHE in Canadian universities results in onto-epistemological pluralism. A related objective is to examine the impact of education from a single dominant epistemological framework on knowledge formation (epistemology), being (ontology), and the value system (axiology) of international and domestic students. The guiding questions that underpin the proposed research are as follows: (1) Does IHE in its current form result in epistemological pluralism; (2) Are international students merely cash cows for the cash-strapped GN universities? What benefits, other than international tuition fees, do the international students bring to Canada?; (3) Apart from the credentials, what do international students get in return from Canada?

Internationalization of Higher Education in Canada Although IHE is mostly conceptualized and analyzed in the context of globalization, IHE is not new to Canada. Since the end of World War II, IHE in Canadian postsecondary institutions has evolved through a number of phases. From 1945 through the Cold War period, the Canadian policy on IHE was largely guided by developmentalist thinking. The international students were considered temporary visitors from the developing world who were worthy of Canadian aid, both in terms of financial aid as well as credentials. They were considered temporary visitors who will, on completion, return to their countries and with them take home the Canadian/ Western values of democracy and capitalism (McCartney, 2016). Student protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially the international students-led demonstrations combined with the changes in Canadian immigration’s shift from European to non-European sources, led to international students being seen as “politically and economically dangerous” (McCartney, 2016). The 1970s and 1980s saw the IHE policy guided by the internationalist orientation of the Canadian foreign policy abroad and multiculturalism at home. The former saw the launch of a robust

674

A. Arshad-Ayaz

“study abroad program while at home, international students were largely understood in terms of cultural (and not necessarily epistemological) diversity.” With the onset of neoliberalism in the wake of the Regan-Thatcher-led global policy shift toward free trade in relation to global economic markets, international students were now primarily viewed in terms of economic benefits they will bring to the nation. This period saw a policy repositioning of international students as a major source of revenue that could offset the budgetary cuts in the operating grants to the postsecondary institutions. The universities reacted by revising tuition fee regulations and introducing enhanced fees for international students (Jones, 2009). At the federal level, $2 million were allocated to DFAIT (now Global Affairs Canada) in 2007 to develop an Education Brand for Canada (Trilokekar, 2010). The turn of the millennium saw the Canadian post-secondary institutions enthusiastically adopting “internationalization” as a policy measure and integrating it in mission statements and key strategic articulations. Canadian universities as a whole started competing with their counterparts in the USA, the UK, Australia, and France in attracting international students. By 2015–2016, the number of international students in Canadian universities had risen to 220,000 from around 400,000 15 years ago (Usher, 2018). The number of international students skyrocketed to 640,000 by 2019 (CICNEWS.ca). In the first quarter of 2020 alone, Canada recruited 67,000 international students from 156 countries (cicnews.ca). Twelve of the top 15 countries from where Canadian universities recruited students are in the Global South. While Canada does not have an integrated framework comparable to the European Bologna process or the Lisbon Strategy, at the federal level, the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development (DFATD) is responsible for international education (de Wit et al., 2019, p. 205). The federal government’s interest in internationalization resulted in the 2014 International Education Strategy that set the target to recruit 450,000 international students by 2022 – majority of them from the Global South (de Wit et al., 2019; p. 208). Furthermore, the federal and provincial governments, such as Quebec, have launched immigration programs linked to international students where the students can apply to become permanent residents upon the completion of their programs. This clearly indicates that the internationalization of higher education is framed primarily as an economic activity with potential benefits for the labor pool in the country. The shift from aid to trade that started in the late 1990s has fully culminated. The Accord on the internationalization of education by the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (hereafter ACDE Accord) is one of the guiding documents that inform the process of IHE. However, ACDE Accord realizes that internationalization is not a neutral, innocent, and benevolent process. The ACDE Accord particularly expresses concerns in three areas. First, the rapid internationalization has challenged the capacity of Canadian universities to impart services in a socially accountable manner. Second, curricula in Canadian institutions might not have the capacity to deal with challenges of diversity and inequality resulting from the global dynamics of globalization. Third, possibilities of exploitation of international students, in this respect the ACDE Accord voices concerns that “the drive towards profit-seeking, standardizing, and potentially exploitative internationalization activities (p. 4) does not always consider the “vulnerability of marginalized communities” (p. 4). The Accord

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

675

calls for “principled international educational practices” and guidelines that may “influence universities and institutional partners in establishing standards for ethical practices” (ACDE, 2014; p. 4). However, despite its best intentions the ACDE Accord is framed in the idealist approach (Steir, 2004) and grounded in a “global imaginary premised on a single, Western-led story of progress, development, and human evolution” (Andreotti et al., 2018; p. 2; also see Stein & Andreotti, 2016). Without disrupting this global imaginary (Taylor, 2002) through a deep ethical rethink, it is likely that unjust and unequal relationships with people and communities in and from the Global South will continue to be reproduced, thus undermining the notion of “principled international educational practices” espoused by the ACDE Accord (Andreotti, 2014, Andreotti et al., 2018). Since the 1990s, there has been a quantitative surge in research on IHE. While the earlier research concentrated mainly on demarcating (Teichler, 2005, Kehm & Teichler, 2007) and defining the field (Knight, 2004, Altbach, 2004), since the turn of the millennium, it includes more investigations targeted at practitioners and policymakers (Kehm & Teichler, 2007). Consequently, research on IHE is now more tied to contextual factors such as international student mobility (ISM), funding, management, recruitment, etc. (Gümüs et al., 2020). Research on IHE in this phase can be characterized as “highly normative with strong political undercurrents” (Kehm & Teichler, 2007). Scholars such as Kehm and Teichler (2007) identify seven major areas of research in the field of IHE. These are: • • • • • • • •

Mobility of students and academic staff Mutual influences of higher education systems on each other Internationalisation of the substance of teaching, learning, and research Institutional strategies of internationalization Knowledge transfer Cooperation and competition National and supranational policies regarding the international dimension of higher education. (Kehm & Teichler, 2007, p. 264; Also see Gümüs et al., 2020).

This chapter adds a qualitative focus on two of the areas and includes a third one on which there is little or no research in the field. • Nature and direction of student mobility from the Global South to Global North • Internationalization of curricula • Nature of knowledge production in the context of IHE

Conceptual Framework This paper locates its conceptual framework at the intersection of decolonial and post-foundational theories (especially poststructuralism and postcolonialism). It contends that in order to start thinking about ethical IHE, there is a need to disrupt

676

A. Arshad-Ayaz

the global imaginary (Taylor, 2002) that “naturalizes certain architectures of existence as if they were neutral, and thereby circumscribe what appears possible and desirable to know, desire, and create” (Stein et al., 2016a; 26). The universalism of the global (Western) imaginary projects a singular way of knowing as the only legitimate and valuable one. The global imaginary also presumes the neutrality and universalism of the nation-state, primacy of capitalism, and the authority of the Western ways of knowing (Stein et al., 2016a). Importantly, the global imaginary not only works to the detriment of the people of GS but also reduces possibilities for the marginalized populations within Western nations such as Canada. Universalization and naturalization of singular ways of knowing results in cognitive injustice for those whose knowledge is excluded (Santos, 2007). It also reproduces and perpetuates epistemic and civilizational hierarchies (Nandy, 2000; Kelly, 2000; Spivak, 2004; Stein et al., 2016b). Finally, understanding IHE in the narrow context of the global (Western) imaginary results in simplistic and instrumentalist rationalizations of both the process and the content of the Internationalization of Higher Education. Steir (2004) identifies three competing ideologies of IHE. These ideologies articulate different modes of association between the Global South and the Global North. Idealist articulations, for example, are predicated on the “aid” perspective and thus view Global South as the recipient of financial and epistemological help from the Global North. On the other hand, educationalism views IHE as a source of selfactualization for the students from the Global North as they attempt to understand the “other.” Finally, the instrumentalist ideology articulates Global South as the market to be tapped for students and the accompanying finances to compensate for the reduced funding from the government. All three ideological articulations identified by Steir (2004) can also be seen as various phases of the global imaginary roughly corresponding to the phases in the post-WWII era, i.e., aid, trade, and neoliberalism. The above articulations have come under scrutiny from multiple critical perspectives. On the one hand, some scholars while being critical of the current universalist tendencies still believe in the potential of universities as viable spaces for creating and spreading global civic-mindedness. For them, this could best be achieved if the universities in the Global North are reclaimed for democratization. The knowledge is then exported to the Global South or imported to the students from the Global South via the Internationalization of Higher Education (Altbach, 2004; Knight, 2004; Shaker & Plater, 2016). It is not difficult to see that these critiques still see Western education as superior as they see the Western economic system. Critiques emerging from a critical theory perspective (Tikly, 2004; Roy, 2006), on the other hand, are predicated on the argument that universities in the Global North are an integral part of neoliberal capitalism and actively contribute to the global reproduction of economic and cognitive injustice and inequality (Shahjahan, 2013). In the former, students from the GS are viewed as raw materials (Naseem & ArshadAyaz, 2016) or financial resources over which the nations in the Global North compete (Rhee & Sagaria, 2004), while in the latter, universities in the Global North contribute to the devaluation of the knowledges from the GS and also from the colonized communities in Settler colonial states (Santos, 2007; Andreotti, 2014; Shahjahan 2013).

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

677

The third strand of critique is from what Stein calls liminal (2017) or the “otherwise” perspective (Stein & Andreotti, 2018; Stein, 2019). The liminal perspective predicated on the de-anti-post-colonial theories challenges the assumption that “it is possible and desirable to universally extend the promise of western liberal democracy (and education) to the whole world, given that the white West’s prosperity, power, and stability are understood to largely to be a product of subjugation” (Stein, 2017, p. 17). Thus, the export of Western models of education, exploitation of non-Western international students, and hierarchization of knowledges with Western education at the top are not circumstantial but rather are “normalized within the ongoing condition of colonial modernity (Stein, 2017, p. 17).” Internationalization of higher education in this sense is complicit in perpetuating colonial and capitalist modes of knowledge production and dissemination as it is in maintaining the social, political, and economic inequalities internationally and at home in settler-colonial states. It upholds and preserves the global imaginary that excludes any knowledge that does not adhere to this imaginary. The liminal perspective views universities as colonial institutions that are active in producing knowledge whose purport is to control the world. They contribute to a singular narrative of history and development and create subjects that are centered on economic interest and affluence (Andreotti, 2014; Stein, 2017). The liminal perspective recognizes both the location of those who critique from this position (within the system) itself and also the prowess of accumulated architectures of power. Thus, while recognizing the difficulties in rethinking the internationalization of higher education, the liminal perspective asks to imagine an alternative ecology of knowledges as a starting point in envisioning a more ethical future of internationalization of higher education (Andreotti et al., 2015). As Stein (2017) states “this approach explores the edges and paradoxical limit of what is imaginable and what appears as impossible—hence—liminal” (2017, p. 17). Possible changes to and interventions in the current practice of the internationalization of higher education regime can be located at three levels. First, what Stein (2019) calls the methodological level, but which could more aptly be termed as the organizational or institutional level where change can be brought about by rethinking the “inherited forms of practice and policymaking and implementation” (Stein, 2019, p. 10). Interventions could include visa policies, admissions, etc. The second level of intervention is epistemological. Here the practices of knowledge production need to be revisited and investigated. Questions such as what is considered valid knowledge, how to include other ways of knowing, etc., need to be asked. The focus of interventions at the ontological level is on the nature of being, time, and space. These interventions are aimed less at making changes in the existing system – the goal is total system change. This chapter focuses on the epistemological level, in conjunction with the ontological level. Specifically, as mentioned above, it first examines the current state of curricula at the university level with an aim to understand if curricula are complicit in reproducing and perpetuating the Western global imaginary by means of what is included in the content and what is excluded. Then, it investigates the impact of curricula on onto-epistemology of both the international as well as domestic students within the context of IHE. This will help in locating where curricular interventions need to be made.

678

A. Arshad-Ayaz

Internationalization of Curricula (IoC) Internationalization of the curriculum, according to Leask (2015), calls for recognition and inclusion of intercultural and international dimensions into curricular contents, “learning outcomes, assessment tasks, teaching methods, and support services. . .” (p. 9). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines the internationalization of curricula as an “international orientation in content, aimed at preparing students for performing (professionally, socially) in an international and multicultural context, and designed for domestic students as well as foreign students” (1996, p. x, as cited in Rizvi, 2011). According to the OECD, such an orientation is mandated by the demands of the global labor market and a socially and culturally global-minded labor market (Rizvi, 2011, p. 338). It is clear that the OECD definition and orientation are framed by the Western global imaginary and economic instrumentalism. As Robson, Almeida, and Schartner (2018) demonstrate, many universities understand internationalization of curricula as means to advance their university’s standing in the global rankings rather than improving the inclusivity of curricula, pedagogical practices, and experiences of international students. Additionally, OECD neither defines “international orientation” nor does it provide any details of what might be included in the curriculum and from what bodies of knowledge? In Canada, the internationalization of higher education is guided by the Accord on Internationalization of Education reached by the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (2014, hereafter referred to as ACDE Accord). The ACDE Accord recognizes the importance of “the internationalization of Canadian Curricula” (p. 4) and places a high emphasis on it. Following the ACDE Accord recommendations, almost all Canadian universities declare internationalization of curricula as a desired goal. Generally, they embark on internationalization by means of study abroad and exchange programs (Harrison, 2015) and teaching languages other than the host language (Rizvi, 2011; Clifford & Montgomery, 2015). However, IoC resulting from such an understanding is mostly cosmetic as it assumes that study abroad and exchange programs will automatically result in an understanding of the “other.” Furthermore, these programs cater only to the students from the Global North and are rarely reciprocal and sustainable especially in respect to students from the Global South. Consequently, what the potential of such IoC efforts in reproducing asymmetrical relations of power is ignored and overlooked (Stein, 2017; Stein & Andreotti, 2016; Rizvi, 2011). Finally, such IoC endeavors have not been adequately analyzed as curriculum issues. This body of research is firmly grounded in the global imaginary (Rizvi, 2011, p. 344), which upholds the superiority of Western knowledge, the neo-liberal economic rationality and instrumentalist, and the maintenance of asymmetrical power relations between the Global North and the Global South with an aim to constitute subjectivities that can fit and work better in the global labor pool. Using a decolonial perspective, Coloma (2017) argues that immigrants are virtually invisible in the US and Canadian history syllabi. Such invisibility imposes an unjust marginality and inferiority, leading to what de Sousa Santos (2014) terms as an epistemicide (pp. 98–99). Following Foucault (1980), Coloma (2017) calls for an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges, the first step of

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

679

which is an examination of the curricula and syllabi to map the inclusions, exclusions, presences, and absences.” These findings are reflected in the experiences of international students studying in Canada. For example, Guo and Guo’s research with international students at a university in Western Canada shows the inadequacy of the internationalization of the curricula when plotted against the experiences of international students. According to Guo and Guo (2017, p. 12): At the policy level, the university emphasized the internationalization of the curriculum and enhanced “teaching and learning resources to optimize the educational experiences of international students” (Forest University, 2013, p. 8). In practice, however, international teacher candidates reported that they felt there were few teaching and learning resources that were related to their experiences.

All respondents in the Guo and Guo (2017) study described the curricula at their university to be extremely Eurocentric, with little or no content that they found relevant to their experience. According to one student-teacher interviewed for the study, “Everything else is very North American-centered, very androcentric . . .X courses kind of focus heavily on X program of studies which I believe is also very Canadian-centered. And by Canadian-centered, I mean European-white-societycentered” (Guo & Guo, 2017, p. 12). Another respondent echoed similar sentiments according to who, “The curriculum teaches Canadian history, but only Canadian history that is seen by the victors, the British . . . But when you talk about other cultures in Canada, there has been many cultures, but they don’t name them. They are not part of them in the history books” (Guo & Guo, 2017, p. 12). Similar insight can be gleaned from Ali’s research on Ontario curricula (2009) which largely focuses on white and androcentric contributions and leaves out the contributions of Chinese and other immigrants in the development of Canada’s physical and intellectual infrastructure. Similar findings are evident in research on Filipino-Canadian students’ invisibility in Ontarian curricula (Kelly, 2015). According to Ali, Ontarian social studies curricula seem to be designed with an aim to “ensure youth loyalties” as a defense against challenges to the “multicultural state.” The curriculum is “focused primarily on providing them information about Canada’s Euro-centric past and its contributions to and perspectives on world affairs. In doing so, however, they largely neglected bodies of knowledge and perspectives that immigrants and children of immigrants bring with them. Students who do not see themselves included in the curriculum are more likely to disengage from it” (p. 252). The objective of education, in this sense, is to create a consciousness that allows the dominant knowledge to be considered as the “only” form of legitimate knowledge for all students, thus permitting power and control over students’ minds and bodies without the express exercise of power (Kanu 2003; Bickmore, 2014; Montgomery, 2005). “Power and control, then, are exercised through a formal corpus of knowledge which the school distributes through curriculum, rules, and regulations” (Kanu, 2003, p. 71). The exclusion of other perspectives has a direct bearing on the onto-epistemic and identity dynamics of international students. The exclusion discourages international students from engaging with the texts, fellow

680

A. Arshad-Ayaz

students, and the current social and political issues that need to be tackled collectively. Conversely, the promotion of the dominant knowledge system as the only valid and legitimate knowledge system way of knowing also has a significant negative impact on the white Canadian students. To begin with, the mono-focal knowledge base creates and nurtures a sense of exceptionalism among the Canadian students (Thobani, 2007), which does not allow them to problematize either their own positionality in the complex networks of hierarchical and exploitative relations (Susa, 2016) or how they benefit from their position in the society and the world. According to Susa (2016), “such processes only seem to increase the gap constructed between the permanently unworthy and insufficient Other and the ever improving, ever growing, ever developing exalted national subject, whose (benevolent) superiority is constantly affirmed and elevated through the processes of commodification, circumscription and consumption of the Other’s difference. These processes are dangerous not just for the Other, but also for the exalted subject. . .” (p. 295) as it does not allow them to question their (misplaced) sense of openness and benevolence (exceptionalism). Working with the Canadian dataset of the Ethical Internationalization in Higher Education (EIHE) research project, Susa (2016) demonstrates these effects on Canadian students. Statements gleaned from the interview of Canadian students for the Ethical Internationalization in Higher Education (EIHE) research project show that the local students hardly ever question their role in a failed attempt at integrating. Respondent after respondent interviewed for the Ethical Internationalization in Higher Education (EIHE) project blamed the international students for not wanting to integrate with the larger university/academic community and their peers. See for examples excerpts from interview data with Canadian students on the issue sociality and integration of/by international students (all responses are from the Canadian dataset of the Ethical Internationalization in Higher Education (EIHE) research project as reported by Susa 2016, pp. 285–86): Some students are not willing to socialize and step out of their comfort level, leaving them to stick with only other international students. (5SS075) F, B, OP Most of the international students that I have met do not attempt to make conversation despite the efforts of myself and my friends. We try to get to know them, but they don’t make the effort to know us. (5SS054) F, B, BP

The Chinese kids in my dorm practically stay in their dorms 24/7 only leaving to pee and get water for their rice cookers. People like their homes, so encouraging them to go overseas can only do so much. They remain apart from everyone else still. (20SC110) F, B, BP Some may not be ready to have a positive world view and they won’t change. (16ED067) M, B, NP I live on residence and I feel like all the international students stick together and do not make an effort to find new friends. (14SC007) M, B, NP

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

681

Many tend to depend on each other and rarely mix outside their circle of friends; they miss out on diversity and multiculturalism. (14EA009) F, PR, NP Some [face] many [challenges] because they don’t know how to communicate with people. (14EA002) F, NPR, NP

It is clear from these responses that the Canadian students attribute the responsibility for asocial behavior, failure to integrate, refusal to step out of their comfort zones, and non-communication entirely on the international students (in this case, Chinese students). White Canadian students see themselves as open, welcoming, accepting, and willing to learn about others, while the international students hamper these efforts. Nowhere in these responses is the acknowledgment that there is or might be structural, social, academic reasons. The international students feel excluded, racialized, and thus reluctant to engage. Since the fulcrum of Canadian understanding of multiculturalism is grounded in cultural differences, it is difficult for the Canadian students to see how “culturalization of politics” could lead to “cultural drowning-out” (Žižek, 1998: 1002, cited by Susa, 2016). The onus of integration is on international students. On the other hand, when asked about the internationalization of the curriculum, international students expressed feelings of exclusion. According to one international student who had come to Canada from Argentina, the Canadian narrative of inclusion is definitely absent from the curricular selections that professors make at her chosen department (name withheld) at a central Canadian University (name withheld). According to her: While I did not have any expectations as such when I was accepted into this program, I later started to feel that there is more lip service to critical and inclusive education. The curricula in most of the curses [sic] that I took at the department is Western dominated. Except one or two professors who are also from the Global South, all professors included reading materials from the western sources. I had background in postcolonial gender studies, and at my previous university in my home country, I had studied many non-western scholars. . .but here majority of sources are from the western perspective. Also, in the class discussions, the perspectives of foreign students are not really valued as much as the opinions of Canadian students. Professors also don’t realize that students from different parts of the world have different ways of responding to professors. The Chinese and Indian students in our class were considered not participating because they did not volunteer to answer unless asked directly. Those whose first language is not English were often ignored. The Canadian students took most of the discussion time.

Another international student pointed to the absence of people of color and members of Canadian First Nations in the educational realm. According to him (name withheld): At the department of (name withheld), there are few professors of color, and none of them are in a higher leadership position. Usually, colored students tend to work with these professors because they understand us and are more sympathetic to our needs. Finally, I was very surprised that in a country like Canada there are no students or professors at my department from the First Nations. . .or who are Black. Canada is considered an inclusive country, and yet they exclude their minorities from education.

682

A. Arshad-Ayaz

“Internationalization” of the Student Body Located within cultural politics, majority of literature on students in the context of internationalization of higher education is framed by the international student mobility (ISM) paradigm, which focuses on factors such as student mobility flows (Knight, 2011; de Wit et al., 2013; Bedenlier et al., 2017); migration/push and pull factors such as prestige attached to studying in the Western educational institutions, desire to settle down in the West, political and/or economic instability at home (King & Raghuram, 2012; Madge et al., 2009), student circulation (de Wit, 2008; Knight, 2011), sociology of higher education, integration challenges/problems such as factors that help or hinder international students’ success in GN universities (Guo & Guo, 2017; Hail, 2015, Scott et al., 2015; Lee & Rice, 2007; Bolsmann & Miller, 2008; Guo, 2009), university support for international students (Cho & Yu, 2015), acculturation (Smith & Khawaja, 2011; Safdar et al., 2003), and cultural adjustment (Nicolescu & Galalae, 2013). Decolonial/liminal perspective (Stein & Andreotti, 2016; Khawaja & Stallman, 2011) argues that there are three dominant racialized tropes through which international students are understood in the context of IHE. These are international students “as sources of income and intellectual capital (i.e., cash) . . . as unworthy or inferior participants in the contest for social mobility (i.e., competition) . . .[and] as objects of development and recipients of the West’s universal knowledge (i.e., charity)” (Stein, Andreotti, Cash, 2017; 226). While the current studies attempt to theorize various abovementioned dimensions of ISM and IoC in IHE, there is virtually no research that investigates the epistemological (what type of knowledge is produced and gained), ontological (the impact of that knowledge on students’ identity/being), and axiological dimensions (impact of that knowledge on values systems) of international students’ experiences. Decolonial/liminal perspective (Stein, Andreotti, Cash, 2017; Khawaja & Stallman, 2011) suggests a subtle confluence of two imaginaries – the liberal imaginary with emphasis on culture as the framing trope and the neoliberal imaginary grounded in commodification of higher education and an emphasis on exchange-value as the justification for the existence and operation of higher education. The cultural framing articulates race, ethnicity, culture, gender, etc., as predetermined, biological categories that are fixed, stable, and unproblematic (Montgomery, 2005). Social divisions and hierarchies are either considered issues from the past or problems that can be solved within the workings of the institutions of the liberal state (courts, schools, legislature) (Naseem, 2011). The liberal/cultural imaginary negatively impacts both the local and the international students. By obscuring the structural and systemic dynamics and their determining role in the international mobility of students (including push and pull factors, issues related to the prestige of studying abroad, etc.), the mono focus on culture affects the capacity of students to think critically about the interlinkages beyond the national borders and intercultural encounters. For the international students, liberal/cultural obscurantism positions the dominant knowledge system as sacrosanct while problematizing their transnational identities and multiple geo-social affections. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that students from the host countries have an “exceptional” self-image of

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

683

benevolence, tolerance, and openness to difference and diversity. Such a self-image also prohibits them from problematizing their positionality and complicity in globally linked structures and relations of exploitation and injustice. They expect international students to adapt to the local culture and blame them for not being able to integrate. The following excerpts from my interviews with Canadian students (for a project on hate speech) corroborate the above arguments. For example, in response to a set of questions about the dynamics of integration of international students, the majority of Canadian students interviewed for the project squarely laid the blame on international students for not making an effort to integrate. International students need to realize. . .they are the ones coming to another country. They should learn the language and respect the local culture and gender norms. When I went to Japan, I respected the Japanese culture. . . (Respondent interview for the hate speech project). . . . look nobody asked them to come here. . .they come here because education is better here. . . If foreign students want the comfort. . .umm. . .like if they feel comfortable with each other, they should not complain about not being accepted. . . I think it will take three generations for the immigrants to settle down. After that, there will be no problems. . .just look at the Italians and the Greeks. . .they are now one of us! Chinese want to work hard, so we don’t have any problems with them, do we? Muslims want us to accept their customs and culture. Why can’t they be like Chinese?

The international student-respondents for the same project had another story to tell. Almost all respondents reported that their initial euphoria of studying in Canada has been replaced by a sense of exclusion. As one respondent wrote in her narrative: I came to Canada with a lot of hope. I am not from a very well to do to family. My family is spending a lot of money on my education in Canada. Initially, I was full of hope. I kept thinking that once they [the local students and teachers] get to know me, I will be able to make friends. I was also excited about living in a democratic society that prides itself on inclusion and acceptance. I was also excited to study in an educational system that has a reputation of being open and critical. However, after a year or so, I started to realize that that initial high hopes were a mistake. The inclusion and acceptance are only surface level. My ideas in the class were not valued because I could not express them in fluent English. My accent was also a problem for them. Many times, I felt that my papers were graded not on my arguments but on my appearance as a foreigner. I kept getting Bs and Cs no matter how hard I worked. Every time, my paper came back with English corrections and nothing about the ideas in the paper. Also, I was never chosen as a research or teaching assistance because of the way I spoke English. One time, a staff member told me that I should focus on finishing and not bother applying for teaching assistant as undergrad students will not be able to follow what I say. I was quite heartbroken. I think Canada thinks of foreign students as bringing in money and nothing else. Also, they think that we have come here for immigration and not for studying. Some of my class fellows actually asked me if I have applied for immigration? To be honest, Canada has a good education system as compared to my home country, but they need to change their attitude towards foreign students. We have a lot to

684

A. Arshad-Ayaz

learn from them, and they can also learn a lot from us. Not only about food and things but about ideas (Respondent written narrative for the hate speech project).

The above narrative by an international student corroborates both the cultural framing and the neoliberal imaginary highlighted by critical literature on the internationalization of higher education. The liberal/cultural imaginary constructs international students as the “other,” lacking in motivation, desire, and ability to change and integrate into the Canadian society. Conversely, it shortchanges the Canadian students by instilling or perpetuating the sense of exceptionalism in them, thus robbing them of the critical ability to understand the global interlinkages and relations at the heart of educational mobilities and connections. By replacing the use-value of education with exchange-value (monetary value compared to other market products) (Andreotti et al., 2016), the neoliberal imaginary looks at international students as commodities that only add financial value to the Canadian educational system. Such an understanding obscures any need for an epistemic exchange between the self (Canadian) and the other (international students). Such arrangement works to a detriment for both the Canadian and the international students. It minimizes the possibilities of a healthy exchange of ideas and understanding of each other in the overall context of a globalized world. It perpetuates epistemic blindness (de Sousa Santos, 2001) and contributes to epistemic injustice (see various contributions in Kidd et al., 2017).

Conclusions Canada is exalted as one of the leaders in multiculturalism, managing diversity, and inclusion (Kymlicka, 1995, 1998). Canada is also one of the main destinations when it comes to international student mobility, especially from the Global South. It is also among those countries where the governments (provincial and federal) and universities are on the same page with respect to planning for and investing in the internationalization of higher education. The government-academia consensus on the importance of attracting international students can be attributed to the Government of Canada’s desire to bolster its reputation and soft power and as a peacemaker middle power. For the universities, internationalization offers the chance to make up for the lost revenue due to severe budget cuts imposed by the (provincial) governments in recent years. For Canada and the universities, the internationalization of higher education is also a lucrative source of revenue. According to one source, “in 2010 international students spent in excess of $7.7 billion on tuition, accommodation, and discretionary spending; created over 81,000 jobs, and generated $445 million in governmental revenue. . .” (Kunin, 2012). By 2018, the contribution of international students (including their visiting families and friends) had reached a colossal sum of $22.3 billion. According to the 2020 report commissioned by Global Affairs Canada and carried out by Canmac Economics Limited, “[T]he amount of international students’ overall annual spending translates to 180,041 jobs supported in the Canadian economy in 2017. The comparable value in 2018 was 218,577 jobs

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

685

supported. International students’ annual spending, directly and indirectly, contributed $3.1 billion in tax revenue in 2017. The comparable value in 2018 was $3.7 billion” (Canmac, 2020, p. 2). According to the Canmac report, “because international students’ expenditures represent revenue for goods and services from overseas, they are Canadian export of education services (p. 2).” The value of export of education services accounted for 17.4% of Canada’s total service exports (Canmac, 2020, p. 2). This representation of international students clearly suggests that the internationalization of higher education in Canada is viewed through the neoliberal imaginary which commodifies education in terms of its exchange-value. While the 2012 Kunin Report recommended that the Government of Canada “ensure that international students are recognized and supported commensurate to their importance to Canada relative to other similar sized exports of goods and services” (p. iii), the 2020 Canmac report omits to make any such recommendations. These trends in the internationalization of higher education in Canada demonstrate that international students are largely seen as cash cows (Stein, Andreotti, Cash, 2017; 226) with little or no regard for their onto-epistemological development through internationalization/pluralizing of curricula or ethical inclusion and integration. Narratives of international students at a central Canadian university presented above corroborate the findings of existing research and show that international students are treated as the unworthy other, and the educational policymakers and universities only pay lip service to the ethical dimension of internationalization of curricula. Such epistemic blindness perpetuates the Western imaginary where the dominant (Western) knowledge remains the only valid and legitimate way of knowing. Similarly, in the context of international student mobility, the narratives of Canadian and international students reported above demonstrate the sense of exceptionalism of Canadian students, which bars them from understanding the onto-epistemological dynamics of international students. International students continue to be seen as “sources of income and intellectual capital (i.e., cash) . . . as unworthy or inferior participants in the contest for social mobility (i.e., competition) . . .[and] as objects of development and recipients of the West’s universal knowledge (i.e., charity)” (Stein, Andreotti, Cash, 2017; 226). This Western imaginary needs to be disrupted for an ethical internationalization of (higher education) that can result in ecology of knowledges from where to see, understand, and address the problems afflicting our globalized world.

References Accord on the Internationalization of Education. (2014). Association of Canadian Deans of Education (BMs). https://csse-scee.ca/acde/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/08/Accord-onthe-Internationalization-of-Education.pdf Ali, M. A. (2009). Preparing citizens for a globalized world: The role of the social studies curriculum. InterAmerican Journal of Education for Democracy, 2(2), 238–256. Altbach, P. (2004). Globalisation and the university: Myths and realities in an unequal world. Tertiary Education and Management, 10(1), 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:TEAM. 0000012239.55136.4b

686

A. Arshad-Ayaz

Andreotti, V. (2014). Conflicting epistemic demands in poststructuralist and postcolonial engagements with questions of complicity in systemic harm. Educational Studies, 50(4), 378–397. Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., & Hunt, D. (2015). Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(1), 21–40. Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Pashby, K., & Nicolson, M. (2016). Social cartographies as performative devices in research on higher education. Higher Education Research & Development, 35(1), 84–99. Andreotti, V., Thiago, E. S., & Stein, S. (2018). Reflections on symmetries and asymmetries in the internationalization of higher education in Brazil and Canada. Comparative and International Education/Éducation Comparée et Internationale, 47(1), 1–17. Bedenlier, S., Kondakci, Y., & Zawacki-Richter, O. (2017). Two decades of research into the internationalization of higher education: Major themes in the Journal of Studies in International Education (1997–2016). Journal of Studies in International Education., 22(2), 108–135. Bickmore, K. (2014). Citizenship education in Canada: ‘Democratic’ engagement with differences, conflicts and equity issues? Citizenship Teaching & Learning, 9(3), 257–278. Bolsmann, C., & Miller, H. (2008). International student recruitment to universities in England: Discourse, rationales and globalisation. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 6(1), 75–88. Canmac Economics Limited. (2020). Economic impact of international education in Canada – 2020 update. Available at: https://www.international.gc.ca/education/report-rapport/impact2018/index.aspx?lang¼eng Cho, J., & Yu, H. (2015). Roles of university support for international students in the United States: Analysis of a systematic model of university identification, university support, and psychological well-being. Journal of Studies in International Education, 19, 11–27. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1028315314533606 Clifford, V., & Montgomery, C. (2015). Transformative learning through internationalization of the curriculum in higher education. Journal of Transformative Education, 13(1), 46–64. https://doi. org/10.1177/1541344614560909 Coloma, R. (2017). “We are here because you were there”: On curriculum, empire, and global migration. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 92–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2016. 1254505 de Sousa Santos, B. (2001). Toward an epistemology of blindness why the new forms of ‘ceremonial adequacy’ neither regulate nor emancipate. European Journal of Social Theory, 4(3), 251–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310122225109 de Wit, H. (2008). International student circulation in the context of the bologna process and the lisbon strategy. In H. de Wit, P. Agarwal, M. E. Said, M. T. Sehoole & M. Sirozi (Eds.), The dynamics of international student circulation in a global context (pp. 167–198). https://doi.org/ 10.1163/9789460911460_008 de Wit, H., Ferencz, I., & Rumbley, L. (2013). International student mobility. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 17(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2012.679752 de Wit, H., Rumbley, L., Craciun, D., Mihut, G., & Woldegiyorgis, A. (2019). International mapping of national tertiary education internationalization strategies and plans (NTEISPs). CIHE perspectives no. 12. Chestnut Hill: World Bank/Center for International Higher Education, Boston College. de Wit, H. (2013). Rethinking the concept of internationalisation. In M. Stiasny & T. Gore (Eds.), Going global: Identifying trends and drivers of international education (pp. 213–218). Emerald Group Publishing. Forest University. (2013). Pseudonym given to a Western Canada university by Guo and Guo (2017). Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon. Gümüş, S., Gök, E., & Esen, M. (2020). A review of research on international student mobility: Science mapping the existing knowledge base. Journal of Studies in International Education, 24(5), 495–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315319893651

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

687

Guo, Y. (2009). Racializing immigrant professionals in an employment preparation ESL program. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 1(1), 40–54. Guo, Y., & Guo, S. (2017). Internationalization of Canadian higher education: Discrepancies between policies and international student experiences. Studies in Higher Education, 42(5), 851–868. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2017.1293874 Hail, H. (2015). Patriotism abroad: Overseas Chinese students’ encounters with criticisms of China. Journal of Studies in International Education, 19(4), 311–326. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1028315314567175 Harrison, N. (2015). Practice, problems and power in “internationalisation at home”: Critical reflections on recent research evidence. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 412–430. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1022147 Johnstone, M., & Lee, E. (2014). Branded: International education and 21st-century Canadian immigration, education policy, and the welfare state. International Social Work, 57(3), 209–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872813508572 Jones, G. A. (2009). Internationalization and higher education policy in Canada: Three challenges. In R. D. Trilokekar, G. A. Jones, & A. Shubert (Eds.), Canada’s universities go global (pp. 355–369). James Lorimer and Company (CAUT Series). Kanu, Y. (2003). Curriculum as cultural practice: Postcolonial imagination. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(1), 67–81. Kehm, B. M., & Teichler, U. (2007). Research on internationalisation in higher education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 11, 260–273. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315307303534 Kelly, P. (2000). Internationalizing the curriculum: For profit or planet. In S. Inayatullah & J. Gidley (Eds.), The university in transformation: Global perspectives on the futures of the university (pp. 161–172). Bergin and Harvey. Kelly, P. F. (2015). Transnationalism, emotion and second generation social mobility in the FilipinoCanadian diaspora. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 36, 280–299. Khawaja, N. G., & Stallman, H. M. (2011). Understanding the coping strategies of international students: A qualitative approach. Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 21(02), 203–224. Kidd, I., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G. (2017). The Routledge handbook of epistemic justice. Routledge. King, R., & Raghuram, P. (2012). International student migration: Mapping the field and new research agendas. Population, Space, and Place, 19(2), 127–137. Knight, J. (2004). Internationalization remodeled: Definition, approaches, and rationales. Journal of Studies in International Education, 8(1), 5–31. Knight, J. (2011). Five myths about internationalisation. International Higher Education, 2011(62), 14–15. Knight, J. (2014). Is internationalisation of higher education having an identity crisis? In A. Maldonado-Maldonado & M. R. Bassett (Eds.), The forefront of international higher education: A festschrift in honor of Philip G. Altbach (pp. 75–87). Springer Netherlands. Kunin, R. (2012). Economic impact of international education in Canada-An update. Available at: https://www.international.gc.ca/education/report-rapport/economic-impact-economique/index. aspx?lang¼eng Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1998). Finding our way: Rethinking ethnocultural relations in Canada. Oxford University Press Canada. Leask, B. (2015). Internationalizing the curriculum. Routledge. Lee, J., & Rice, C. (2007). Welcome to America? International student perceptions of discrimination. Higher Education, 53(3), 381–409. Madge, C., Raghuram, P., & Noxolo, P. (2009). Engaged pedagogy and responsibility: A postcolonial analysis of international students. Geoforum, 40(1), 34–45.

688

A. Arshad-Ayaz

McCartney, D. M. (2016). Inventing international students: Exploring discourses in international student policy talk, 1945–75. Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation, 28(2). https://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rhe/article/view/4457 Montgomery, K. (2005). Banal race thinking: Ties of blood, Canadian history textbooks and ethnic nationalism. Paedagogica Historica, 41(3), 313–336. Nandy, A. (2000). Recovery of indigenous knowledge and dissenting futures of the university. In S. Inayatullah & J. Gidley (Eds.), The university in transformation: Global perspectives on the futures of the university (pp. 115–123). Bergin and Harvey. Naseem, M. A. (2011). Conceptual thinking on multiculturalism and diversity in Canada: A survey. In Diversity and education for liberation: Realities, possibilities and problems. Canadian Issues: A Publication of the Association for Canadian Studies, Special Edition, 9–15. Naseem, M. A., & Arshad-Ayaz, A. (2016). Knowledge imperialism: Education and domination in the neo-liberal era. In K. Gray & H. Bashir (Eds.), Eastward bound: The politics, economics, and pedagogy of Western higher education in Asia and the Middle East. Lexington/Rowman and Littlefield. Nicolescu, L., & Galalae, C. (2013). A systematic literature review on students’ international mobility and cultural adjustment. Management and Marketing, 8, 261. Rhee, J. E., & Sagaria, M. (2004). International students: Constructions of imperialism in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Review of Higher Education, 28(1), 77–96. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/rhe.2004.0031 Rizvi, F. (2011). Theorizing student mobility in an era of globalization. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 17(6), 6. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2011.625145 Robson, S., Almeida, J., & Schartner, A. (2018). Internationalization at home: Time for review and development? European Journal of Higher Education, 8(1), 19–35. Roy, A. (2006). Praxis in the time of empire. Planning Theory, 5(1), 7–29. Safdar, S., Lay, C., & Struthers, W. (2003). The process of acculturation and basic goals: Testing a multidimensional individual difference acculturation model with Iranian immigrants in Canada. Applied Psychology, 52(4), 555–579. Santos, B. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges (pp. 45–89). Review (Fernand Braudel Center). Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. Paradigm. Scott, C., Safdar, S., Trilokekar, R. D., & El Masri, A. (2015). International students as “ideal immigrants” in Canada: A disconnect between policy makers’ assumptions and the lived experiences of international students. Comparative and International Education/Éducation Comparée et Internationale, 43(3), 5. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cie-eci/vol43/iss3/5/ Shahjahan, R. A. (2013). Coloniality and a global testing regime in higher education: Unpacking the OECD’s AHELO initiative. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 676–694. Shaker, G. G., & Plater, W. M. (2016). The global public good: Students, higher education, and communities of good. Higher Learning Research Communications, 6(2), 1–10. Smith, R. A., & Khawaja, N. G. (2011). A review of the acculturation experiences of international students. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 35(6), 699–713. Spivak, G. (2004). Righting wrongs. South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2–3), 523–581. https://doi.org/ 10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-523 Stein, S. (2017). Internationalization for an uncertain future: Tensions, paradoxes, and possibilities. Review of Higher Education; Baltimore, 41(1), 3–32. Stein, S. (2019). Critical internationalization studies at an impasse: Making space for complexity, uncertainty, and complicity in a time of global challenges. Studies in Higher Education, 46(2), 1–14. Stein, S., & de Andreotti, V. O. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: International students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72, 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9949-8 Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2018). What does theory matter? Conceptualizing race critical research. In G. Vass, J. Maxwell, S. Rudolph, & K. Gulson (Eds.), The relationality of race in education research (pp. 156–169). Routledge.

Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education: Onto-epistemological. . .

689

Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Bruce, J., & Suša, R. (2016a). Towards different conversations about the internationalization of higher education. Comparative and International Education, 45(1), 1–18. Stein, S., Andreotti, V. D. O., & Suša, R. (2016b). “Beyond 2015”: Within the modern/colonial global imaginary? Global development and higher education. Critical Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1247737. Advanced online publication. Stein, S., Hunt, D., Suša, R., & Andreotti, V. D. O. (2017). The educational challenge of unraveling the fantasies of ontological security. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 11(2), 6979. https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2017.1291501 Stein, S., Andreotti, V., & Suša, R. (2019). Pluralizing frameworks for global ethics in the internationalization of higher education in Canada. Canadian Journal of Higher Education/ Revue canadienne d’enseignement supérieur, 49(1), 22–46. https://doi.org/10.7202/1060822ar Stier, J. (2004). Taking a critical stance toward internationalization ideologies in higher education: Idealism, instrumentalism and educationalism. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2(1), 1–28. Suša, R. (2016). Social cartographies of internationalization of higher education in Canada. A study of exceptionalist tendencies and articulations. University of Oulu Graduate School; University of Oulu, Faculty of Education Finland. Taylor, C. (2002). Modern social imaginaries. Public Culture, 14(1), 91–124. Teichler, U. (2005). Research on higher education in Europe. European Journal of Education Research, Development, and Policy, 40(4), 447–469. Thobani, S. (2007). Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. University of Toronto Press. Tikly, L. P. (2004). Education and the new imperialism. Comparative Education, 40(2), 173–198. Trilokekar, R. D. (2010). International education as soft power? The contributions and challenges of Canadian foreign policy to the internationalization of higher education. Higher Education, 59(2), 131–147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9240-y Usher, A. (2018). The state of post-secondary education in Canada, 2018. Higher Educations Strategy Associates. Yuen, V. (2020). Mounting peril for public higher education during the Coronavirus pandemic. Centre for American progress. Available at: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/ education-postsecondary/reports/2020/06/11/485963/mounting-peril-public-higher-educationcoronavirus-pandemic/. Accessed 2 Nov 2020.

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been Harmful and About Carlo Ricci

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schooling Is Harmful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Aim of This Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brief History of Mainstream Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Closer Look at Prussian Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Horace Mann and Schooling in the USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Egerton Ryerson and Schooling in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Punishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More Recent Examples of Punishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enrollment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Higher Education and Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mainstream Schooling Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Canada and the USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Better Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

692 692 693 694 694 696 697 698 699 700 702 703 703 704 706 706 708

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to expose the dark side of mainstream schooling and to share how we can learn in gentler ways. It is also meant to start a conversation about how mainstream schooling is, among other things, dangerous and unhealthy; and it is a tool used to benefit some over others. Throughout this chapter the history of mainstream schooling will be examined. The more time that passes, the more evidence we have showing how dangerous, frightfully controlling, and harmful mainstream schooling is. For example, during the school year, C. Ricci (*) Nipissing University, North Bay, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Crown 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_34

691

692

C. Ricci

more students take prescription medications, check themselves into hospitals, commit suicide, and report being stressed, incidence of child abuse go up when report cards are handed out, doctors are still trying to figure out why young people get more headaches during back-to-school season, and so on. As well, more recent examples of what mainstream schooling looks like in other places will be explored. The hope is that looking at the past and other places where schooling is used to control and benefit some over others will provide a better understanding of how schools function. This chapter sheds light on the following: Who benefits and who gets left out? Who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged? Does anyone escape unscathed? Is there a better way to learn and be educated? Are there more loving, caring, compassionate, gentle, peaceful, genuine, authentic, fairer, less harmful possibilities? Are there examples that we can look to and learn from? Are there people who are already doing mainstream schooling and learning and educating better? Keywords

Horace Mann · Egerton Ryerson · History of schooling · Willed learning · Unschooling

Introduction Writing a comprehensive history of schooling is impossible. For example, even deciding what is a school is a controversial and arbitrary decision that would have to be made. Is what Socrates had a school? Was Plato’s Academy a school? Was Aristotle’s Lyceum a school? Was The Agoge in Sparta a school? Or is schooling only something that started in Prussia in the 1700s and then was adopted in the USA and Canada and other places throughout the world? What other parts of the world would we look at? And what other eras? Clearly the task would be colossal and the information always partial and incomplete.

Schooling Is Harmful Even if writing a comprehensive history of schooling were possible, any attempt would require volumes and volumes and would be beyond the scope and aims of a book chapter. Fortunately, sharing a story of schooling is not meant to do the impossible by writing a comprehensive history of schooling, but it is meant to do the possible: start a conversation about how mainstream schooling is, among other things, dangerous, and unhealthy and is a tool used to benefit some over others. We can and must do better. Throughout this chapter, the history of mainstream schooling will be examined, and the ultimate focus will be on contemporary mainstream schooling because of its ubiquity. Ultimately, the suffering and the injustices caused by mainstream schooling needs to end. Contemporary mainstream schooling as we know it is a bad idea now

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

693

and was a bad idea when it was first conceived in the 1700s in Prussia. The more time that passes, the more evidence supports how dangerous, frightfully controlling, and harmful mainstream schooling is. For example, during the school year, more students take prescription medications, check themselves into hospitals, commit suicide, and report being stressed, incidence of child abuse go up when report cards are handed out, doctors are still trying to figure out why young people get more headaches during back-to-school season, and so on. Gray (2020, May 16) writes: The harm that forced schooling can do has been documented in many research studies. Such research has, for example, shown that: (a) children are less happy—more anxious, angry, and bored—in school than in any other setting in which they regularly find themselves; (b) when adults are asked about traumatic experiences in their childhood the most commonly reported instances are abuse that occurred in school, primarily from teachers; (c) hair cortisol level (a measure of chronic stress) was significantly higher in children two months after they started kindergarten compared to two months before they started; (d) school-aged teenagers are the most stressed-out people in America and 83% of them cited school as a major source of their stress if not the major source; and (e) the rates of emergency mental health visits, suicide threats, and actual suicides for school-aged children are roughly twice as high during months when school is in session as during periods of vacation from school.

And in a podcast interview hosted by Cheung (2020, August 12) titled, “Schools are the best place for kids’ mental health? Not so fast,” Dr. Tyler Black, child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia says: My Job is easier during summer and non-school days because kids are less in crisis. I see less kids and my primary research interest being suicide we know for certain that the highest rates of suicide are during school months and school days for kids.

Clearly, mainstream schooling is harmful and we all need to press hard to stop this shameful approach to learning that is a part of so many people’s lives. Furthermore, mainstream schools do not create opportunities but limit them, in part, by acting as a gate-keeping mechanism. Shamefully and unethically, those who are marginalized are often the ones that continue to be wounded and held back. The system does a very poor job of dealing with equity and equality. By design, it is racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, classist, and so on. Certain people are advantaged and other are not. The curriculum is arbitrary and biased against certain groups and skills. It is designed to favor and benefit certain people over others. In the name of fairness, it is systemically unfair.

The Aim of This Chapter In what follows, the history of mainstream schooling will briefly be explored, along with more recent examples of what mainstream schooling looks like in other places, with the goal of exposing how people’s lived experiences were and are impacted

694

C. Ricci

daily. The hope is that looking at the past and other places where schooling is used to control and benefit some over others would provide a better understanding of how schools function closer to home. Whether we look at China today, or Prussia in the past, or Canada, or the USA, schooling functions in a way that is consistent with hegemony, biopower, or ideological state apparatuses. Hopefully, this chapter will shed light on the following: Who benefits and who gets left out? Who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged? Does anyone escape unscathed? Is there a better way to learn and be educated? Are there more loving, caring, compassionate, gentle, peaceful, genuine, authentic, fairer, less harmful approaches? Are there examples that we can look to and learn from? Are there people who are already doing mainstream schooling and learning and educating better? And so on.

A Brief History of Mainstream Schooling Briefly, Prussia needed a way to control the population and create social order. Frederick the Great was interested in absolute power and control. In his book Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria, James van Horn Melton (2003) writes: Whether seeking to commute labor services, restrict pilgrimages, foster industry, ban burlesques, or build schools, absolutist social policy in Prussia and Austria sought to strengthen moral pillars of authority by refining its exercise. Central to this refinement was a shift in the technology of social discipline, whereby the locus of coercion was to be transferred from outside to inside the individual. (p. xix)

To facilitate this transfer of coercion from the outside to the inside, schooling was adopted. Of course, schooling is not the only tool that people in power use to control a population in ways that they believe benefits them, but it clearly is a central tool.

A Closer Look at Prussian Schooling In Prussia, schooling was transformed in that it became systemized and deliberate. For example, in part, in Prussia schooling was now free and compulsory; classrooms locally and nationally were supervised to ensure “quality” instruction, which essentially means that supervisors were dispatched to ensure compliance; teachers were trained so that they could better deliver and indoctrinate a clear message; books were used; and so on. Melton (2003) writes: Visit any public school classroom and you will find visible evidence of the Pietist legacy. The teachers will have certificates attesting to their pedagogical competence. Pietist schools were the first to require formal training for elementary schoolmasters, and this gave rise to the first normal schools. The pupils you observe use only textbooks that have been approved

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

695

by the state board of education. Pietist reformers, again, were pioneers in the standardization of elementary school textbooks. Pupils raise their hands when they have questions, another Pietist innovation. Most pupils are taught collectively rather than individually, a method uncommon in German elementary education until the Pietist pedagogue Johann Hecker helped popularize the practice in the 1740s. (p. xiv)

These technologies, far from being neutral, are meant to exert control. Melton (2003) continues, “In the eighteenth century, as I hope to demonstrate, schools became a central target of state policy precisely because they offered an instrument for exacting obedience in a less coercive fashion” (p. xxii). Of supervision Mann (1868) writes, “The extraordinary system of measures by which the Prussian schools have been elevated, and are now sustained, would not be understood without taking into view the office and character of the school-inspectors” (p. 364). Of compulsory schooling, Mann (1868) writes: One of the most significant features of the school-system of Prussia and of many of the neighboring States is the universality of the children’s attendance. After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school, whether he be the child of noble or of peasant, the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death. (pp. 365–366)

Having the control of the instruction and supervising it, training the teachers, and making sure students attend are all tools for controlling and designing a system that exacts obedience. In addition, rather than one teacher teaching all ages in a single room as was the practice in the USA with one room schoolhouses, in Prussia students were separated by age. In his report in 1843, Mann (1868) writes, “In all places where the numbers are sufficiently large to allow it, the children are divided according to ages and attainments; and a single teacher has the charge only of a single class, or of as small a number of classes as is practicable” (p. 303). Mann (1868) goes on to share that, “The Prussian and Saxon schools are all conducted substantially upon the same plan, and taught in the same manner” (p. 303). In addition, “Indeed, I never saw a Prussian or Saxon school, above an infant school, in which any child was unprovided with a slate and pencil” (p. 305). The process was standardized and the young people were given the supplies they needed to ensure that such a militarily precise battle for the control of the minds, bodies, spirits, and emotions of those within their borders would be accomplished. Schooling was so engrained in Prussia that Mann (1868) writes, “One schoolofficer, of whom I inquired whether this enforced school-attendance were acceptable and popular, replied, that the people did not know any other way, and that all the children were born with an innate idea of going to school” (p. 367). Mann was clearly impressed with how powerfully schools were able to shape and condition people. Mann clearly knew and was enthralled by how influential schooling could be. Mann (1868) writes, “The above view of the condition of the Prussian schools, and of the degree of influence they exert upon the national character. . . ,” (p. 374).

696

C. Ricci

Horace Mann and Schooling in the USA Mann does respond to critics who believed that the USA should not be following a Prussian system because it’s too controlling, but in the end his vision of schooling is very much in line with the Prussian one, and his response to his critiques amounts to empty rhetoric, and he dismisses much of what, he reports, they question. For example, Mann (1868) writes: An octavo volume, entitled “The Age of Great Cities,” recently appeared in England, in which that system is strongly condemned; and during the pendency of the famous “Factories’ Bill” before the British House of Commons, in 1843, numerous tracts were issued from the English press, not merely calling in question, but strongly denouncing, the whole plan of education in Prussia, as being not only designed to produce, but as actually producing, a spirit of blind acquiescence to arbitrary power, in things spiritual as well as temporal, as being, in fine, a system of education adapted to enslave, and not to enfranchise, the human mind. (pp. 240–241)

To this, Mann responds, in part, “But, allowing all these charges against the Prussian system to be true, there were still two reasons why I was not deterred from examining it” (p. 241). His arguments will not be examined in detail because the point is that ultimately Mann lauded the Prussian schooling system and modeled schooling in the USA on it. In fact, Mann (1868) goes as far as writing, “Among the nations of Europe, Prussia has long enjoyed the most distinguished reputation for the excellence of its schools” (p. 240). For Mann schooling was about more than the intellect. Mann (1868) writes, “Where these things are neglected, the children may be well trained in reading and writing and arithmetic; but they are not trained in the way they should go” (p. 513). This statement may sound neutral and perhaps even laudable, but, of course, we need to ask questions such as the following: Who decides? Who benefits? Who gets left out? Who is harmed? And so on. For example, it might seem laudable to indoctrinate students to respect their elders (this is being offered as an example of what Mann might mean by “trained in the way they should go”), but what does that mean? If a teacher assigns homework, and the student blindly does it, is that being respectful? What if the homework is not worth doing? What if the student correctly challenges the usefulness of the assignment? Is this then a sign of being disrespectful? The point is only to suggest that being respectful, and by extension being “trained in the way they should go,” for example, is not neutral and is contentious. So if the system is set up where the state decides what is best, then there will be winners and losers. There will be pain and hurt. Later examples of how some schools and learning approaches use democracy, love, care, compassion, gentleness, peacefulness, respect, trust, self-determination, and so on to create learning places and spaces that are friendlier and less harmful will be explored. People can and do learn to be ethical, moral, literate, numerate, and so many other things outside of and without the approach taken by mainstream schooling. Clearly, Mann and others modeled their schooling approach on Prussia. Here is another instance to make this clear: McClusky (1920) writes, “The fight was

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

697

extremely bitter and revolved in large part around accusations that the new Board was trying to fasten the Prussian system of education on the public schools of Massachusetts” (p. 133). McClusky (1920) then goes on to write, “Not only did the minority report of the committee admit that the Board was borrowing from Prussia but it defended this policy so effectively that the plans of the opposition were defeated” (p. 134).

Egerton Ryerson and Schooling in Canada Like Mann’s approach in the USA, Ryerson followed a similar path in Canada. Egerton Ryerson modeled schooling in Canada by emulating both Prussia, and what Mann did in Massachusetts, that then expanded quickly throughout the USA and Canada. Ryerson (2008, February 12) writes, “While I devoted the year 1845 to visiting educating countries and investigating their system of instruction, in order to devise one for our country. . .” (p. xii). In a chapter titled “1844–1846: Dr. Ryerson’s First Educational Tour in Europe,” Ryerson (2008) shares a number of times that he visited Prussian schools. In the editorial script scattered throughout the Ryerson (2008) book, Hodgins writes: Notwithstanding the zeal and ability with which Dr. Ryerson had collected and arranged his facts, analyzed the various systems of education in Europe (largely in Germany) and America, and fortified himself with the opinions of the most eminent educationists in those countries, yet his projected system for this province was fiercely assailed, and was vehemently denounced as embodying in it the very essence of “Prussian despotism.” Still, with indomitable courage he persevered in his plans, and at length succeeded in 1846 in inducing the legislature to pass a School Act which he had drafted. (p. 370)

Clearly mainstream schooling in the USA and Canada has its roots in the Prussian system. Nicole Thompson (2021, 25 February) of The Canadian Press wrote a story titled “Ryerson Review of Journalism temporarily cuts ‘Ryerson’ from its name.” The Ryerson Review is a biannual magazine published by the Ryerson School of Journalism. It is temporarily removing Ryerson’s name from the publication, and the university is also reviewing what to do about its name given its namesake’s legacy. Thompson (2021, 25 February) goes on to share that: In 2010, the school published a statement saying that while Ryerson did not implement or oversee residential schools, his beliefs “influenced, in part, the establishment of what became the Indian Residential School system.” Eight years later, the school added a plaque beside a statue of Ryerson that’s displayed prominently on campus. It reads, in part, “As Chief Superintendent of Education, Ryerson’s recommendations were instrumental in the design and implementation of the Indian Residential School System.”

698

C. Ricci

Could this be a step toward having a larger discussion on the damage and hurt committed by mainstream schools throughout history and beyond? What were schools like in the 1700s and the 1800s? Again, the purpose is not to be comprehensive but simply to start a conversation around the harms committed by mainstream schooling and how we can do better. Briefly, in this section I will share something about school punishment and school curriculum with the aim of opening up a conversation about how psychological and corporal punishment is disgracefully ingrained in mainstream schooling.

Punishment Schools are harsh and corporeal punishment has been and in many places continues to be a part of schooling, but knowing this does not make it any easier to revisit. Nevertheless, the physical and psychological abuse faced by many schoolers cannot be ignored. Of corporal punishment, Horace Mann (1855) calls it evil, but ultimately, concludes that it is necessary. He writes: That Corporal punishment, considered by itself, and without reference to its ultimate object, is an evil, probably no one will deny. Yet, with almost three thousand public schools in this State, composed of all kinds of children, with more than five thousand teachers, of all grades of qualification, to govern them, probably the evils of corporal punishment must be endured, or the greater ones of insubordination and mutiny being incurred. (p. 45)

That he struggles with corporal punishment is clear. He also states that there are teachers who can maintain order without using corporal punishment. Mann (1855) writes: I hesitate also to speak so fully of the magnitude of these evils, as I would wish to do; because there are some excellent teachers, who manage schools without resorting to it; while others, ambitious for the same honor, but destitute of skill and of the divine qualities of love, patience, sympathy, by which alone it can be won; have discarded what they call corporal punishment. . . . (p. 45)

This might sound hopeful, but as he continues, it’s not that these teachers that are more loving don’t use any punishment; in fact he suggests that they use punishment that (hopefully) would still make us all shutter. This highlights how physically abusive the system was and is still in many places and ways. Of those loving teachers who do not resort to corporal punishment, Mann (1855) writes: . . .but have resorted to other modes of discipline, which, though they may bear a milder name, are, in reality, more severe. To imprison timid children in a dark and solitary place; to brace open the jaws with a piece of wood; to torture the muscles and bones, by the strain of an unnatural position, or of holding an enormous weight; to inflict a wound upon the instinctive feeling of modesty and delicacy, by making a girl sit with the boys, or go out with them, at recess; to bring a whole class around a fellow pupil, to ridicule and shame him;

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

699

to break down the spirit of self-respect, by enforcing some ignominious compliance; to give a nick-name;—these, and such as these, are the gentle appliances, by which some teachers, who profess to discard corporal punishment, maintain the empire of the schoolroom;—as though the muscles and bones were less corporeal than the skin; as though a wound of the spirit were of less moment than one of the flesh; and the body’s blood more sacred than the soul’s purity.

By calling these horrendous approaches to disciplining people “gentle appliances,” he magnifies these ghastly abuses. For many, reading these accounts results in feeling pressure in the heart, outrage, and a deep sadness and disgust at schooling and humanity. In a one-page document titled “Rules,” once again the heartless practices are repeated. This document was adopted by the Board of Education (1883, September 18), Norwich Township, Franklin County, Ohio, on September 17, 1883. In section III titled “For School Discipline,” it reads: 1st—Teachers will be held responsible for the order, attention and deportment of their pupils under their respective charges, and they will be sustained by the Local Directors and Board of Education in all proper and legal means to secure the same. 2nd—Pupils may be detained at any recess or not exceeding 15 minutes after the hour for closing the afternoon session, when the teacher deems such detention necessary, for the commitment of lessons or for the enforcement of discipline. 3rd—Whenever it shall become necessary for teachers to resort to corporal punishment, the same shall not be inflicted upon head or hands of the pupil. 4th—When the parents are dissatisfied with the treatment of their children, teachers shall not allow them to make their complaints in the presence of the scholars, but shall respectfully bear them in private, and, if necessary, refer them to the Local Directors.

More Recent Examples of Punishment If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. When I was a student, I recall many of my friends being abused. Even I (a generally well-behaved young person) did not escape the wrath. I never received the strap (but many I know have), but I do angrily recall a humiliating and painful experience where in my early years one of my teachers yanked me by my sideburns and painfully brought me inline. All I remember thinking was, why did she do that. I was hurt both physically and emotionally and confused. John Taylor Gatto (2003) recounts the number of times when he was punished. He writes: At Xavier Academy, scarcely a week passed without a beating. I was publicly whipped for wetting the bed, whipped for mispronouncing French verbs, whipped for hiding beats inside my Apple pie. . . .” (p. 209)

700

C. Ricci

Of another incident after he got caught attempting to escape the boarding school he attended for a year, Gatto (2003) writes: The whole school assembled to witness my disgrace. Boys and girls arranged in a long gauntlet through which I was forced on hands and knees to crawl the length of the administration building to where Mother Superior stood exhorting the throng to avoid my sorry example. When I arrived in front of her, she slapped my face. (p. 209)

If these examples are still too removed, I can recall how on a trip to Cameroon I witnessed young children being physically punished by teachers. Still too removed, last week my daughter was talking to a friend and she was consoling her. Her friend was crying. Why? The stress and pressure of schooling caused by her teacher and the harshness of schooling. For even more recent examples that are closer to home, simply ask anyone around you about the time it happened to them; unfortunately, it likely will be too easy to find such stories of physical or psychological pain that your loved ones experienced as a result of schooling. It does not have to be this way, and it’s shameful that it is.

Curriculum What about the curriculum?. Was that, at least, worthwhile? The answer is no, it was not and is not, but the reader can decide for themselves. Here is a copy of a Kansas eighth-grade test that Strauss (2015, 16 October) included in a piece she wrote for the The Washington Post, “because it gives us a glimpse back in history at that time.” April 13, 1895 J.W. Armstrong, County Superintendent. Examinations at Salina, New Cambria, Gypsum City, Assaria, Falun, Bavaria, and District No. 74 (in Glendale Twp.) Reading and Penmanship.—The Examination will be oral, and the Penmanship of Applicants will be graded from the manuscripts. GRAMMAR (Time, 1 hour) 1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters. 2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications. 3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph. 4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run. 5. Define Case. Illustrate each case. 6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation. 7–10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

701

ARITHMETIC (Time, 1¼ hour) 1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic. 2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 ft. long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold? 3. If a load of wheat weights 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. Per bu., deducting 1050 lbs for tare? 4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school 7 months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals? 5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton. 6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 per cent. 7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m? 8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 per cent. 9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods? 10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt. U.S. HISTORY (Time, 45 minutes) 1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided. 2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus. 3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War. 4. Show the territorial growth of the United States. 5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas. 6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion. 7. Who were the following: Morse, Whtney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe? 8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865. ORTHOGRAPHY (Time, 1 hour) 1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthogaphy, etymology, syllabication? 2. What are elementary sounds? How classified? 3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals? 4. Give four substitutes for caret ãuä. 5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ãeä. Name two exceptions under each rule. 6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

702

C. Ricci

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super. 8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last. 9. Use the following correctly in sentences: Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays. 10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication. GEOGRAPHY (Time, 1 hour) 1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend? 2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas? 3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean? 4. Describe the mountains of N.A. 5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall, and Orinoco. 6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. 7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each. 8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude? 9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers. 10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth. PHYSIOLOGY (Time, 45 minutes) 1. Where are the saliva, gastric juice, and bile secreted? What is the use of each in digestion? 2. How does nutrition reach the circulation? 3. What is the function of the liver? Of the kidneys? 4. How would you stop the flow of blood from an artery in the case of laceration? 5. Give some general directions that you think would be beneficial to preserve the human body in a state of health. The content is just arbitrary bits of trivia that are not directly transferable to everyday life for most of us. Of course, if someone wanted to make a case for these bits of trivia, they can; however, their argument would be contentious and far from obvious.

Enrollment In the early history of schooling, few people went beyond grade 8, and fewer still went to secondary, and even fewer went to post-secondary. In fact, statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics edited by Snyder (1993, January) lists enrollments as follows:

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

703

The Act of 1867 directed the Department of Education to collect and report the “condition and progress of education” in annual reports to Congress. In the first report of 1870, the Commissioner proudly reported that nearly 7 million children were enrolled in elementary schools and 80,000 were enrolled in secondary schools. Also, some 9,000 college degrees had been awarded. This contrasts with 1990, when 30 million were enrolled in public elementary schools and 11 million were enrolled in secondary schools. Over 1.5 million bachelor’s and higher degrees were awarded. (p. 5)

Of course, the overall population has increased since the 1800s, and so it might be easier to think about percentages of young people who attended school rather than the overall number. Roughly, in the 1800s, about 50% (the percentage for black students was 10%) of young people between the ages of 5 and 19 attended school, compared to percentages in the 1900s specifically in 1993 (Snyder, 1993, January, p. 6). There is also a huge difference in the number of students who attended elementary versus those who attended secondary schooling. And in 1869–1970 only 1 percent of the 18–24-year-old population attended higher education (Snyder, 1993, January, p. 64).

Higher Education and Curriculum Again a case can be made, but it seems to be incredibly disconnected and arbitrary to require Greek and Latin, for example, in order to be admitted to a college or university. Snyder (1993, January) writes: Higher education in the early 19th century was characterized by heavy emphasis on the classics. Higher education often began at 14 to 16 years of age, though 17 to 20 was more common. Generally, prospective students were expected to have an understanding of Greek and Latin and were frequently tested on these before being allowed entrance. Some knowledge of basic mathematics, such as algebra, was assumed. The college curriculum generally comprised four years of study, and the typical core of this instruction was equal parts of mathematics, Greek, and Latin. Sometimes these were the sole elements of freshman and sophomore education. At more progressive and prestigious colleges, juniors and seniors might delve into a variety of scientific topics, perhaps including some medical lectures, though physical sciences were more common. Other common subjects for upperclassmen included rhetoric, philosophy, and Christian studies. (p. 64)

I wonder if 100 years from now, will today’s entrance requirements seem just as arbitrary as requiring Greek and Latin? How many capable people were excluded as a result? How many capable people are being excluded today as a result of our requirements?

Mainstream Schooling Today Of course, a lot of what was written above so far revolved around schooling in the 1700s and 1800s. Surely, in 2021 schools are no longer like that. Beyond what was shared above about how, unfortunately, schools are still causing stress and anxiety

704

C. Ricci

and suicides and so on, can we learn anything about mainstream schooling by looking at how it’s being used around the world to control and harm? Again, the hope is that looking at history and schooling in other places around the world will help better understand how schooling has always operated and continues to operate now. In what follows, how schools are being used in China will be examined. Again, the hope is that by looking at our past and what some might consider defamiliarized examples, insights about schooling closer to home can be gleaned.

China Of education in general, Berci, He, and Tao (n.d.) write, “In China, as in other countries, one political regime after another reformed education to suit their overt and covert aims.” And of early education in China, they write: The beginning of a system of formal education in China may be traced back as far as the Shang Dynasty (16-1045 BCE). From the onset, education was necessary to attain the coveted positions in civil service which were the key to wealth. The result was the perpetuation of a cultural/social cycle in which the elite were the educated and the educated were the elite. Prior to the Imperial Examination system, most appointments to civil service were based on recommendations from aristocrats and existing officials. By 115 CE, in an attempt to remove the patronage system, the government established a curriculum for the so-called First Generation of examination takers. Education under this Imperial Examination system however remained elitist and for the most part existed only to train government officials.

Just as schooling everywhere and throughout time, schools in China have been used and are being used as tools to serve the needs of those with power. Thinking about how this exclusionary system is clearly set up to favor some over others should make us all feel sick and ashamed, but what should be asked is the following: Is mainstream schooling today similarly acting as gatekeepers and unfairly skewing and sorting? In China, that they use schooling as a tool of control is blatantly obvious. By examining the curriculum, the teacher training, the surveillance and supervisions, the books, and rituals, it becomes clear that these technologies are implemented to maintain a certain narrative and world order. Whether we look at the mainstream schooling system or the re-education centers that they set up in China to indoctrinate Uyghur Muslims, their deliberate use of schooling to manipulate and control is tragic. In the case of the Uyghurs, there are reports of cruelty, rape, and the use of physical and mental torture as a way to re-educate them to align with Chinese and the communist parties’ ideologies and to praise the paramount leader. Many refer to these institutions as detention camps, but the Chinese government insists that they are education centers. Chase and Fife (2021, February 23) reported that the Canadian house of commons voted 266 Yeas and 0 Nays that China is committing genocide, “The vote in favour of declaring Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang contravene the United Nations’

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

705

Genocide Convention passed by 266 to zero. The Conservative motion was supported by all opposition parties and dozens of Liberal MPs” (pp. A1, 3). About a week later, the Dutch parliament became the second country to accuse China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. As another example, at one point China accepted that, for example, Korean and Mongolian schools in China be allowed to use their native language. With Xi, that policy is being reversed. They are now using schooling as a means to cancel cultural differences. In an article about how Korean-speaking schools in China are no longer permitted, Vanderklippe, N. (2021, January 29) writes: Mr. Xi has advocated the “forging of a communal consciousness of the Chinese nation,” calling for greater recognition of Chinese culture by people of all ethnic groups. Authorities must strengthen Chinese language education, emphasize patriotic education and “bury the seeds of loving China in every child’s heart,” Mr. Xi said in 2019. (p. A3)

Xi here makes clear that he understands that getting adults to revere him and China starts by indoctrinating young people in schools. Elsewhere, Vanderklippe, N. (2019, October 29) writes: China’s Communist Party has unveiled a new definition of a model citizen—a person no longer ideologically beholden to forefathers such as Mao Zedong or the sway of foreign influence, but possessed instead of a steadfast allegiance to national self-confidence, traditional virtue and, above all, President Xi Jinping.

There is no doubt that schools are being used as tools of control. Yest another example, as China exerts its power in Hong Kong, once again they use schooling to control the population. In an article by Griffiths, J. (2021, February 5) titled, “‘No room for debate or compromise’ as Hong Kong introduces sweeping national security rules for schools,” how schools are used to control a population becomes obvious. Griffiths, J. (2021, February 5) writes about how on 4 February 2021 Chinese style patriotic education was introduced into the schools in Hong Kong. In part, the curriculum was as follows: Kindergartens—both private and public—will be expected to instill in their students a greater knowledge of “Chinese history, Chinese culture, and moral education,” which the guidelines say will “gradually build up students’ identity as a Chinese and thus lay the foundation for national security education.” Beginning at the age of 6, all students in Hong Kong will receive new lessons aimed at helping them “understand the country’s history and development, the importance of national security, the national flag, national emblem and national anthem.” Primary school students will be instructed in singing the national anthem and raising the flag, while older children will discuss the rationale behind the law itself and the importance of institutions such as the People’s Liberation Army.

Understandably, and needless to say, many teachers and students in China are terrified. If teachers are assumed to be contravening the rules, they could be censured, fired, or arrested. This creates a culture of fear, with the aim of total

706

C. Ricci

compliance. In mainland China, the reporting of teachers is routine (Griffiths, 2021, February 5). In China, books are also being checked and censored to make sure that they comply with the stated aims. Private and international schools are not exempted.

Canada and the USA Pick any mainstream school in any country and this same oppressive, controlling, and shameful approach will reveal itself. Sometimes looking at how things are done in other eras or places makes it easier to notice how things are being done closer to home. Thinking about the hurt caused by schooling in this way, causes many to feel shocked and horrified by the audacity. Looking at North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Poland, and countless other countries that have been recently in the news for how they so blatantly, and often, proudly tout how they use schooling to control their population that this legacy of mainstream schooling becomes obvious. Sometimes schooling advocates euphemistically call what happens in mainstream schools, being tough on crime, nationalism, patriotism, morality, ethics, and so on. As we read what happened in the past and other places, we are often disgusted and shocked, but are the outcomes of our mainstream schools similar? The question now becomes: are we also guilty of using schools to benefit some at the expense of others? Do we also use schools to control people’s minds, bodies, spirit, and emotions? Do schools limit opportunities rather than create opportunities for people? Are our mainstream schools racist, sexist, classist, ableist, ageist, homophobic, and so on? Are we also wounding people deeply? And if we are, how? And is there a better way? There is no doubt that mainstream schools in Canada and the USA also use curriculum, books, forced schooling, report cards, faculties of education, teacher training, supervisors, and so on to assert control.

A Better Way Fortunately, there are ways to learn that are more loving, caring, compassionate, democratic, gentle, peaceful, respectful, trusting, and so on. These schools are often ones that subscribe to willed learning. Willed learning is a self-determined approach that empowers the learner. Some examples are Sudbury Valley, Summerhill, unschooling, some forms of homeschooling, resource centers like North Star, and so on. What many of these approaches have in common is that they listen to and empower the learner. They understand that humans are natural learners. Of learning Holt (1989) writes, “Living is learning. It is impossible to be alive and conscious (and some would say unconscious) without constantly learning things” (p. 157). Many of these schools and approaches have been hassled by those in positions of power, and some have been threatened and asked to shut down. Some have had to go through the courts in order to continue. Despite the parents, students, teachers, other school staff wanting these approaches to continue, many have been legally

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

707

challenged. In some countries these approaches are illegal. In the Apology, Plato (1975) has Socrates say of his accusations, “It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of wrongdoing in that he busies himself studying things in the sky and below the earth; he makes the worse into the stronger argument, and he teaches the same things to others” (p. 23 b–c). What did Socrates get for teaching others and challenging the status quo? A man who we now revere and laud as a powerful thinker, a man whose name, for many, is synonymous with philosophy, got the death sentence. If we want to call Socrates’ gathering place a school, it would fit the description of a willed school. There were no assignments and no tests. Attendance was not compulsory. People freely chose to gather out of interest and so on. Bells and tests and assignments and age segregation and report cards and approved books and teachers and gate-keepers and so on are not needed in order to have learning. Schooling is not even needed to have learning, and, in fact, as has been suggested throughout this chapter, mainstream schooling might actually diminish learning by implementing top-down practices that create fear, anxiety, and stress, which are harmful and not conducive to learning, and the results are unethical. In addition, think about how learning happens outside of schooling. Once willed learning is recognized and embraced, the healing can begin. Many of my family members, family friends, and elders only went to school for a few years, and only in elementary school, many of them dropping out before completing even grade 4. Of the dozens and dozens I am thinking, none of them even attended high school. The people that I am thinking of were born in the first half of the 1900s and most of them have since passed. I miss them dearly and their memories fill me with kindness and joy. Some may be surprised to learn that despite having attending so little schooling, by all accounts, they had successful lives, both financially and otherwise. For example, my parents only attended a few years of elementary schooling and I never saw them as less than. In fact, they were wise and very smart people that I often sought advice from. They immigrated to Canada with very little and ended up contributing members of society and outstanding citizens. As a young man, Horace Mann spent very little time in school, and this huge advocate and champion of mainstream schooling homeschooled his own children. Of his own schooling, Mann writes, “Until the age of fifteen, I had never been to school eight or ten weeks in a year” (as cited in Mann, 1865, p. 12). And that Mann’s own children were homeschooled, Gather (2008) writes: Ironically, some of the very people pushing so strongly for common schools that would raise the masses up to the level of the middle-class Protestant consensus were tutoring their own children at home out of a fear that these very masses would corrupt their own kids. One such individual was Horace Mann himself, whose wife Mary taught their three children at home even as he stumped the country preaching the common school. (p. 44)

And on the same topic, Messerli (1972) writes: From a hundred platforms, Mann had lectured that the need for better schools was predicated upon the assumption that parents could no longer be entrusted to perform their traditional roles in moral training and that a more systematic approach within the public school was

708

C. Ricci

necessary. Now as a father, he fell back on the educational responsibilities of the family, hoping to make the fireside achieve for his own son what he wanted the schools to accomplish for others. (p. 129)

In conclusion, mainstream schooling is not neutral and it is a tool used by those in positions of power to try and shape the world to benefit them. Ultimately, mainstream schooling is the same throughout time periods and throughout different places in the world. It is and has always been about shaping people’s minds, bodies, spirit, and emotions, and it’s controlling and harmful. Mainstream schooling is a tool used by those in positions of power to try and shape the world to their advantage. Mainstream schools today are mostly based on essentialism and behavioralism. We need to move them to become holistic, critical, and willed.

References Berci, M., He, W., & Tao, L. (n.d.). Historical background: Expansion of public education. The New York Times. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/college/coll-china-educa tion-001.html Board of Education. (1883). Rules. Norwich Board of Education. https://web.archive.org/web/ 20151014123444/https://www.northwesthistoryexpress.com/timeline/education1800/ studentTeacherRules1883.pdf Chase, S., & Fife, R. (2021). YEA: 266 NAY: 0 China committing genocide, Parliament declares. The Globe and Mail, A1, 3. Cheung, A. (Host). (2020). Schools are the best place for kids’ mental health? Not so fast [Audio podcast episode]. In This matters. The Toronto Star. https://www.thestar.com/podcasts/ thismatters/2020/08/12/schools-are-the-best-place-for-kids-mental-health-not-so-fast.html Gaither, M. (2008). Homeschool—An American history. Macmillan. Gatto, J. T. (2003). The underground history of American education: An intimate investigation into the prison of modern schooling (Rev. ed.). Oxford Village Press. Gray, P. (2020). The case against the case against homeschooling. Psychology Today. https://www. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202005/the-case-against-the-case-againsthomeschooling?utm_source¼feedburner&utm_medium¼email&utm_campaign¼Feed%3A +Freedom-to-Learn+%28Freedom+to+Learn%29 Griffiths, J. (2021). ‘No room for debate or compromise’ as Hong Kong introduces sweeping national security rules for schools. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/05/asia/hong-kongnational-security-education-intl-hnk/index.html Holt, J. (1989). Learning all the time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world, without being taught. Da Cappo Books. Mann, H. (1855). Lectures on education. Ide & Dutton. https://books.google.ca/books/about/ Lectures_on_Education.html?id¼GPpEAAAAIAAJ&printsec¼frontcover&source¼kp_read_ button&redir_esc¼y#v¼onepage&q&f¼false Mann, M. (1865). Life of Horace Mann. Walker, Fuller, and Company. https://play.google.com/ books/reader?id¼qZRDAAAAIAAJ&hl¼en&pg¼GBS.PA1 Mann, H. (1868). Report for 1843. In M. Mann (Ed.), Life and works of Horace Mann (Vol. 3, pp. 230–418). Horace B. Fuller. McClusky, F. (1920). Introduction of grading into the public schools of New England, part II. The Elementary School Journal, 21(2), 132–145. Retrieved 28 Feb 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/993938 Melton, J. V. H. (2003). Absolutism and the eighteenth-century origins of compulsory schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge University Press.

Then and Now: The History of Mainstream Schooling Has Always Been. . .

709

Messerli, J. (1972). Horace Mann: A biography. Knopf. Plato. (1975). The trial and death of Socrates (G.M.A. Grube, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Ryerson, E. (2008). In J. George Hodgins (Ed.), The story of my life. The Project Gutenberg EBook. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24586/24586-h/24586-h.htm. Original work published 1884. Snyder, T. D. (1993). 120 years of American education: A statistical portrait. National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf Strauss, V. (2015). Here’s the famous 1895 eighth-grade test from Kansas. See how you would do. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/ 16/heres-the-famous-1895-eighth-grade-test-from-kansas-see-how-you-would-do/ Thompson, N. (2021). Ryerson Review of Journalism temporarily cuts ‘Ryerson’ from its name. The Canadian Press. https://www.cp24.com/news/ryerson-review-of-journalism-temporarilycuts-ryerson-from-its-name-1.5323636 Vanderklippe, N. (2019). China’s new moral guide for citizens elevates Xi over Mao. The Globe and Mail, A3. Vanderklippe, N. (2021). Language used in schools signals continued shift in China’s cultural policy. The Globe and Mail, A3.

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization 2020 World Events and the Curriculum of Critical Consciousness H. L. J. Tsang and Ardavan Eizadirad

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Frameworks and Positionality of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Colonizing Gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2020 Major World Events: Towards a Curriculum of Critical Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pillar 1: Grassroots Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pillar 2: Revolutionary Pedagogies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pillar 3: Indigenization and Decolonization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

712 713 714 715 717 719 721 723 724

Abstract

Watershed events of 2020 have uncovered an urgency to disrupt the colonizing gaze and use liberatory and revolutionary practices to move towards tangible action for systemic decolonization and social change. While institutions have historically been resistant to transformative work, the same institutions are pressured in the current context to acknowledge and address their complicity in upholding systems of oppression, inequality, political disconnection, and voter ambivalence. Written from the perspective of racialized scholars, aspects of critical race theory, queering, and feminist lenses are weaved and intertwined to examine ways in which educators can center major events, locally and internationally, as part of enacting decolonial pedagogy and curriculum. The COVID-19 pandemic, murder of George Floyd, and the rise of Black Lives Matter movement are examined as teachable moments on how they collectively symbolize ongoing H. L. J. Tsang Toronto, Canada A. Eizadirad (*) Faculty of Education, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_38

711

712

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

systemic inequities within educational institutions. We argue for a divestment from the curriculum of denial towards a curriculum of critical consciousness, where the colonizing gaze is disrupted with intentionality, opening possibilities to advance equity and social justice. The curriculum of critical consciousness is defined using three pillars which include grassroots activism, revolutionary pedagogies, and Indigenization and decolonization. Each pillar includes strategies for implementation as a starting point to work towards systemic decolonization. Keywords

Colonizing gaze · Curriculum · Critical consciousness · Decolonization · Indigenization · Oppression · Inequality · Equity · Activism · Revolutionary pedagogies

Introduction Multiculturalism and cultural mosaics are national narratives known about Canadians on the world stage. Kindness and comfort are cornerstones of the constructed Canadian identity. These ideals and selective narratives provide a sense of safety, enjoyment, and comfort to those in privileged and dominant social positions within the racial hierarchy of Canadian society (Tupper & Cappello, 2008; Eizadirad, 2019; Eizadirad & Abawi, 2021; Razack, 2004). However, exclusively hypervisibilizing the positive traits of Canada’s history dismisses the racism alive in Canadian society which systemically oppresses racialized and minoritized communities and their voices (Curtis et al., 1992; Colour of Poverty, 2019; United Way, 2019). There are many high-profile tragic world events capturing systemic racism, with one being the death of George Floyd. There are also many other examples within the Canadian context. Recent examples include: – The 2020 death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Indigenous-Ukrainian-Black Canadian woman in Toronto, Ontario, who fell to the ground from the 24th floor after police arrived – Recovery of the remains of more than 6000 and counting Indigenous children buried at various residential schools across Canada – The killing of a Muslim-Pakistani family in London, Ontario in June 2021, when the young driver of a truck who is white intentionally mounted the sidewalk and struck the family orphaning a 9-year-old boy These incidents are part of the racialized and minoritized narrative and experience of what it means to live in Canada, yet such incidents are often dismissed as exceptions. Watershed events of 2020, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, murder of George Floyd, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement have led to greater

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization

713

awareness towards disrupting the normalizing and colonizing gaze. These events create a sense of urgency to use revolutionary practices (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2001) to advance systemic decolonization and collective liberation (Ahmed, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2012). While institutions have historically been resistant to transformative work and often advocating to maintain the status quo, they are currently experiencing a moment in time where they are pressured to acknowledge and address their complicity in upholding systems of oppression and inequality. Institutions can no longer resort to ignorance or silence, many now releasing solidarity statements within 48 hours of a tragic event. Further to this, institutions and organizations at all levels are beginning to reflect more critically on how they have contributed to systemic issues and can transition to be part of the solution. In this chapter, the COVID-19 pandemic, murder of George Floyd, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement are examined and discussed as teachable moments for how they collectively symbolize ongoing systemic inequities within educational institutions. We argue for a divestment from the curriculum of denial towards a curriculum of critical consciousness (Freire, 1970; hooks, 2003; Greene, 1971; Jemal, 2017; Noddings, 2013) where the colonizing gaze is disrupted with intentionality, opening possibilities to advance equity and social justice (Battiste, 2013). The curriculum of critical consciousness is defined using three pillars which include grassroots activism, revolutionary pedagogies, and Indigenization and decolonization. Each pillar includes strategies for implementation as a starting point to work towards systemic decolonization.

Theoretical Frameworks and Positionality of Authors The two co-authors met in a graduate course titled “Introduction to Decolonization in Education” at a Canadian university, with one of them being the professor and the other a student. They had many critical conversations in class about defining colonization and what it takes to decolonize. Ardavan identifies as male, Muslim, immigrant, urban, and an English Language Learner who grew up in Scarborough, a geographical neighborhood in the east end of Toronto in Canada. H.L.J identifies as trans/non-binary immigrant, who lives with a disability and grew up migrating from town to town, depending on what their mother could afford for herself and her three children. A friendship was sparked as part of their passion for community work seeking to disrupt normalizing practices via decolonization in education. This was the beginning of many conversations that led to the writing of this chapter. As someone who bears identities that are often seen as detrimental to society, H.L.J is grateful for the time, space, and energy that Ardavan has dedicated to their growing friendship and intersecting advocacy. Written from the perspective of racialized scholars, aspects of critical race theory, queering, and feminist lenses are weaved and intertwined (Apple, 2004; hooks, 2000, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1994) to examine ways in which educators can center major events, locally and internationally, as part of enacting decolonial pedagogy and curriculum. Critical race theory (Fanon, 1961; Ladson-Billings, 2009) is used

714

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

with intentionality to center minoritized perspectives and lived experiences as counter-stories. Queer and feminist theory are used to provide a framework to question and analyze how normalized narratives and values have been legitimized and often unquestioned with historical roots in race-based and gender-based logic, patriarchy, and imperialism (hooks, 2003; Pinar, 2003). As a collective, the intersectionality of these theoretical frameworks allows the reader to engage constructively with what it means to shift towards a curriculum of consciousness (Freire, 1970; hooks, 2003; Greene, 1971; Jemal, 2017; Noddings, 2013) rooted in disrupting the colonizing gaze. As Pinar (2003) points out, “the democratization of American society [and we add by extension also Canadian society] would not proceed without a radical restructuring of hegemonic male subjectivity” (p. 357).

The Colonizing Gaze The concept of the colonizing gaze is defined to better understand the systemic nature of oppression and how it is perpetuated in subtle ways within institutional policies and practices. In affiliation, the term male gaze, which has roots in film and feminist theory, discusses the ways in which cisgender women are objectified in art and media for the enjoyment, satisfaction, and consumption of cisgender men. This applies broadly to the ways in which cisgender women’s bodies are surveilled and subjugated by the patriarchal society (Mulvey, 1989; Glapka, 2018). Others have referred to similar notions under different terminologies. Some scholars have utilized the term white gaze using definitions such as “referent of progress” (Pailey, 2020, p. 730) or “absent centre against which others appear only as deviants, or points of deviation” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 157). Combining the aforementioned definitions and how they are taken up by different scholars, the term colonizing gaze is used throughout this paper. This term encompasses how whiteness and patriarchy intersect to construct and normalize a socially stratified society that arbitrarily defines who is allowed to dominate, in what ways, and who needs to be subjugated. The colonizing gaze normalizes a logic that justifies tokenism, exclusion, and violence enacted on racialized and minoritized identities based on hierarchical and colonial standards, values, and behaviors (Eizadirad, 2017; Memmi, 2013; Razack, 2002; Shahjahan, 2005; Wolfe, 2006). These justifications are rooted in and perpetuated through respectability politics (Carmichael et al., 1992; Higginbotham, 1994), the myth of meritocracy (Godsey, 1995; Au, 2016; Kumashiro, 2004), neoliberalism, and deficit thinking (Apple, 2004; Au, 2016; Bhabha, 1983; Eizadirad & Abawi, 2021; Memmi, 2013). At the core of the colonizing gaze are subtle processes that pressurize everyone to conform or risk experiencing exclusion. The colonizing gaze asks marginalized identities to perform to normalized standards for their own good. Enforcement of this gaze is (re)presented as noble and charitable. Any deviation from these norms, packaged in the neoliberal language of “professionalism,” is seen as acts of resistance in relation to the status quo. Responses to such acts of resistance include phrases such as “It’s for your own good,” “That’s not what we do here,” or “We’re

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization

715

saying this because we care about you.” Further examples of colonial practices legitimized as normal behavior include teaching “proper” utensil placements at a dinner table, the emphasis of speaking without an accent as the “proper” way to speak, and dressing a certain way for specific occasions and locations. Systemically history is selectively taught in schools often ignoring perspectives of Indigenous peoples, while being disguised as both the whole story and entirely benevolent. Ultimately, this is the formula of systemic oppression – normalize it so it is not questioned. However, by not questioning it, it is enabled, and becomes hegemonic (Mayo, 2015). It allows for oppressive practices and its accompanying physical, emotional, and spiritual violence and inequities to be enacted without notice or objection (Matias, 2016; Yancy, 2005). It becomes like the air we breathe; there, but barely noticeable.

2020 Major World Events: Towards a Curriculum of Critical Consciousness The curriculum of denial refers to the teaching of isolated concepts without the full picture or proper attribution. According to Neyland (2006), “Our grammar and vocabulary, like the literary curriculum, are predisposed towards the denial of backgrounds. The reason is simple: our language practices are aimed at making distinctions, being precise, being categorical” (p. 3). While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with those ideals, Neyland theorizes that these language practices force educators to emphasize the foreground of information. Rarely is the background for any concept prioritized. For example, math curriculum will ask teachers to deliver lectures on the foreground of the Pythagorean Theorem (a2 + b2 ¼ c2), but rarely will discuss where and when these theorems were created. The use of this curriculum of denial continues today. When protests erupt and activists fight back, rarely do outsiders understand the why or the historical components leading to the protests and its emotional response. For example, many cannot recall how long Black enslavement lasted in the United States, and that the United States has had more time as a country with slaves than as a country without. This also applies to the lack of knowledge about enslavement in Canada where people typically know only about the Underground Railroad, but not about how Black enslavement was a key component of loyalist Nova Scotia and its economics (Whitfield, 2010). As well, most recently in Canada, the mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools were a genuine surprise to many settlers. They were not aware of the segregation tactics used in Canada or that the last residential school closed in 1996. The curriculum of denial perpetuates a state of apathy by those living within dominant identities in society which gives them access to privileged positions. People most commonly express a combination of anger, sadness, and discomfort when the multicultural narrative of Canada is disrupted and critiqued due to past and ongoing atrocities. Yet, many continue to remain in a state of denial, refusing to (un)learn about the systemic root causes of such oppressive acts. For this group,

716

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

common reactions include “How dare you people criticize this country!” or “Go back to where you came from!” One example would be Don Cherry, a famous hockey coach and commentator who is characterized by his colorful suits and personality. In late 2019, Cherry, a prominent white Canadian, criticized immigrants who do not wear a poppy for Remembrance Day on live television stating, “You people that come here...whatever it is, you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you could pay a couple of bucks for a poppy” (Warburton, 2019, para. 6). This comment received significant backlash and led to his dismissal from Coach’s Corner, a show where he was the main personality for nearly 40 years. Cherry’s comments reflect a lack of critical consciousness with respect to how different identities and social groups are marginalized and oppressed in Canadian society. This is rooted in the normalized colonizing gaze which emphasizes the myth of meritocracy and respectability politics, with an exclusive focus on individual effort without consideration for systemic barriers. Disregarding, down-playing, and dismissing the systemic inequities that racialized and minoritized communities experience is a key characteristic of colonial logic and sense-making (Day, 2015; Fanon, 1961; hooks, 2000). As such, we must divest from the curriculum of denial and move towards a curriculum of critical consciousness (Freire, 1970; hooks, 2003; Greene, 1971; Jemal, 2017; Noddings, 2013), where the colonizing gaze is disrupted and questioned. This process opens possibilities within educational spaces to advance greater understandings of the systemic conditions leading to root causes of inequities and social injustices. In the upcoming subsections, the three pillars of the curriculum of critical consciousness are described supplemented with examples from major world events in 2020. Each pillar includes strategies for implementation for educators as a starting point to work towards systemic decolonization. The three pillars of the curriculum of critical consciousness are grassroots activism, revolutionary pedagogies, and Indigenization and decolonization. However, before describing the three pillars, it is important to emphasize that decolonizing pedagogy is deeper than a metaphor and needs to be treated accordingly. It cannot be a commitment to simply improve society and education. As Tuck and Yang (2012) point out: One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives. (p. 2)

Within the teaching profession there are calls from practitioners for something pragmatic, yet not all actions towards equitable outcomes are decolonizing in nature. As such, this chapter serves as a starting point and stopgap. Below are some suggestions which can serve as a framework to shift towards enacting a curriculum of critical consciousness to disrupt the curriculum of denial and the colonizing gaze: – Start learning and presenting history from multiple perspectives, particularly emphasizing counter-stories told from the perspectives of those who navigate marginalized identities.

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization

717

– Discuss the power dynamics of knowledge production and proliferation. – Adapt content according to evolving contexts. – Teach yourself and your learners to recognize, name, and challenge different forms of oppression and their intersectionalities. – Acknowledge not being an expert in everything but willing to take risks to learn and unlearn in new ways. – Practice expressing vulnerability in public settings and not just in the private realm. Do not dismiss emotions and instead embrace it as an integral part of teaching and learning. However, you will need to move beyond stopgaps. There needs to be a critical awareness of emotional and spiritual realms as part of unlearning which has the potential to decolonize minds, hearts, and actions to advance equitable outcomes. As Kimmerer (2013) states: In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as ‘the younger brothers of Creation.’ We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. (p. 9)

Systemic decolonization seeks to create liberation for all by dismantling deep rooted hierarchies that cause harm. It is a distinct project from other social justice projects and wants something different and revolutionary than mainstream forms of social justice (Simpson, 2017; Tuck & Yang, 2012). The curriculum of critical consciousness is a waystation towards decolonization. It strives to advance a consciousness of how one has acquired land, power, and privilege, and recognize when it is disproportionate to what others have and experience. As such, when systemic decolonization is discussed, the ultimate objective is the repatriation of stolen land back to Indigenous people, led by Indigenous identities and communities and in solidarity with co-conspirators and accomplices (Battiste, 2013; Pasternak et al., 2021; Simpson, 2017).

Pillar 1: Grassroots Activism Activism is labeled as political work whose actions should not be mixed with one’s professional duties, especially as an educator. The colonizing gaze and its logic places parameters around the legitimacy and implementation of activism seeking to control what type of activism is allowed, when, and where (Eizadirad & Campbell, 2021; hooks, 2003). Common examples of criticism about activism in education include; “You can be an activist, but not right now” or “This isn’t the time for it.” Activism being synonymous with being a disruptor is a component of neoliberal logic and professionalism discourse intended to keep educational spaces apolitical and neutral. This perpetuates the colonizing gaze which functions as a source of

718

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

surveillance on minoritized identities and communities pressuring them to conform (Ahmed, 2007; Fanon, 1961). Within this gaze, non-disruptive acts of activism are legitimized and promoted such as voting and writing letters to politicians while other intensive acts are labeled as “too aggressive” and “disruptive.” As a case study, George Floyd was murdered on camera by police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In response, protests erupted around the world, drawing attention towards the realities of institutional, policesanctioned anti-Black racism, and calls to defund and abolish the police. The video footage of George Floyd’s murder, particularly showing the officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck for over 9 minutes (Bogel-Burroughs, 2021) enraged viewers and led to subsequent mass protests worldwide. This brought awareness but also pressurized institutions across different sectors to critically self-examine their policies and practices with a heightened level of critical consciousness to reflect on their role, historically and currently, in perpetuating racism and privileging whiteness as a system (Annamma & Handy, 2021; Henry & Tator, 2012; Karumanchery, 2005). Yet, many people continue to misunderstand phrases such as “Black Lives Matter” or “Defund the Police” with reactionary responses such as, “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter.” Educators need to center activism as part of their decolonial pedagogy and facilitate brave spaces for raw, authentic, emotional, and contentious discussions about high profile events with students. Students can socio-culturally relate to these events as it impacts who they are and where they live. Holding space for discussions about relevant events, such as the death of George Floyd, will facilitate greater understandings of the complexities and inequities involved, and how educators and students can work collectively, and in solidarity, to be activists in their community where they can express their anger, sadness, discomfort, and a range of other emotions constructively. This promotes a curriculum of critical consciousness that does not dismiss emotions or discomfort and instead harnesses its productive force to drive grassroots activism. As Lorde (2017) points out: But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy. (p. 23)

Hence, understanding and embracing emotions are crucial for activism to advance a curriculum of critical consciousness. Instead of exclusively focusing on academic content such as the subject of the day, educators can dedicate time and energy to discussing events that impact students locally, nationally, and internationally with what can be done to challenge systemic forms of oppression. This is what it means to be a socially responsive and sustaining educator. Below are some suggestions that can help educators teach for activism: – Avoid presenting acts of pain and oppression as a spectacle for consumption. These acts are neither linear nor simple, and showing these acts for superficial

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization

719

consumption perpetuates systemic oppression. Instead, through open dialogue and discussions from different vantage points, promote empathy and greater understandings of systemic factors involved leading to various forms of resistance. – There is no such thing as a safe space, but strive to create brave spaces where students are willing to come out of their comfort zone and be vulnerable by taking calculated risks (Eizadirad & Campbell, 2021). Within brave spaces, (un)learning and growth can take place. – No person wants to be the spokesperson for the trauma their social group is experiencing, historically or currently. Provide the opportunity to talk, but do not pressure or force anyone. Create comfortable spaces for silence, as silence itself is a form of response and at times a coping mechanism for survival. Overall, grassroots activism should be foregrounded as an essential skill and taught as part of all subjects and their respective curricula in schools at all levels. Activism is not a singular event such as simply protesting and voting. Rather, activism is a skill that contributes to critical consciousness leading to actions that challenge different forms of oppression and their root causes. In the next pillar, we discuss how a passion for activism and community leadership can be inspired using revolutionary pedagogies by educators.

Pillar 2: Revolutionary Pedagogies Revolutionary pedagogies can be characterized by works of scholars such as Gloria Ladson Billings, bell hooks, Nel Noddings, Maxine Greene, Django Parris, Peter McLaren, and Henry Giroux, among others. They have contributed to concepts such as critical pedagogy, socio-culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, ethics of care, and revolutionary pedagogies. In this chapter, the term revolutionary pedagogy encompasses the following as defined by McLaren and Farahmandpur (2001): Such a pedagogy involves struggle over the production of meaning, a struggle that would enable marginalized social groups to name, identify, and take initial steps to transform the sources of their oppression and exploitation. It would also encourage them to analyze the myriad ways in which asymmetrical relations of power are ideologically concealed by the dominant discourses of equality, difference, and freedom. (p. 144)

Revolutionary pedagogies center the experiences of students including who they are, what they are experiencing, and how they are impacted by their surrounding conditions and circumstances as part of meaningful curricula. It provides options for learners to apply what they are learning to real-life contexts in the hopes they can use these skills to change their lives and better their communities. As a case study that incorporates enacting revolutionary pedagogies, educators can examine and discuss with students the impact of COVID-19 on educational policies and practices. Different identities and communities were impacted disproportionately disadvantaging Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC), and

720

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

those from lower socio-economic status due to existing inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 (Gallagher-Mackay et al., 2021; Eizadirad & Sider, 2020). In Ontario, Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by a weak initial vaccine rollout, uninformed policy decisions, a sharp increase in violent attacks on East and Southeast Asian communities, and inconsistent school preparations with transitions to e-learning, and access to remote educational support. Elementary and secondary schools were considered one of the last places that should close. When schools were closed, it created a moment of reflection where everyone, particularly the privileged, began to be more conscious of things that they were taking for granted from being able to work from home and support their children to access to technology and Wi-Fi to facilitate remote learning. The use of revolutionary pedagogies by educators can facilitate greater understandings of existing inequities and working towards solutions that everyone can be a part of, regardless of identity and status. For example, public health recommendations such as “stay at home,” “social distancing,” and “isolate when you become sick” were suggestions that individuals from higher socio-economic communities could commit to consistently as part of minimizing the spread of COVID-19. Individuals who were unable to consistently commit to these actions due to their circumstances were judged and demonized rather than supported. There was little to no conversation about how existing structural practices contribute to intensified infection rates, subsequent disability, or death. Revolutionary pedagogies begin by acknowledging that standardized (re)actions, created in response to global tragedy, are inherently inequitable because they are created by those in power and with privilege. An educator who uses revolutionary pedagogies takes time to build rapport, identifies needs of their learners, and allows for flexibility and accommodations to support students as they navigate challenges created by COVID-19. This approach to education acknowledges that it is not all about marks and grades but rather about growth and making curriculum connections to real-life contexts. Below are some suggestions that can help educators implement revolutionary pedagogies: – Manage content according to changing contexts and take into consideration learners’ academic needs, circumstances, and emotions. You need to know the needs of your learners to be equitable in supporting them. – Do not dismiss personal experiences shared with you by students. Treat it as valuable information that informs your engagement with them as part of your pedagogy and content selection. Oftentimes, contents of the official curriculum do not give the full picture and can even contradict someone’s lived experiences. Critically analyze the curriculum and pay particular attention to who is (re)presented, not represented, misrepresented, and how you can bring in supplementary external sources and guest speakers with lived experiences to mitigate gaps in the curriculum. – Do not assume silence is a sign of disengagement. It can indicate processing, coping, self-care, anxiety, and other mechanisms that learners use when (re)experiencing trauma. Instead, create an open-door policy, where you are available and accessible for students to talk without being pressured or forced. Seek to connect your students with relevant social services based on identified needs.

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization

721

Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a significant need to move towards systemic change by challenging inequitable institutional policies and practices. As such, when we invoke the term “revolutionary pedagogies,” the intention is to disrupt the existing curriculum of denial. The myth of Canadian tolerance is crucially tied to the denial of oppression, inequity, and racism, even in the face of indisputable proof. As lives are disproportionately lost due to the pandemic, encampments raided, and the atrocities of residential schools investigated, there are many who are still looking to justify such actions and its violence (Memmi, 2013; Wolfe, 2006). At its core, revolutionary pedagogies seek to disrupt the colonizing gaze within mandated school curriculum. In the next section, Indigenization and decolonization are discussed as a methodology that prioritizes lived experiences and cultural practices of historically marginalized identities and communities to facilitate mobilization for resistance and systemic change.

Pillar 3: Indigenization and Decolonization Decolonization is a systemic approach to eliminating inequities and social injustices with a focus on the intersections of power, knowledge production, and land claims. It is authentic when aligned with Indigenization led by Indigenous voices and communities. Decolonization should not be taken lightly. This process seeks to undo historical harms from a framework that advances critical consciousness for mobilization to do something about injustices. Prominent Indigenous scholars who have worked extensively on Indigenization and decolonization efforts are Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nikki Sanchez, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Marie Battiste, Eve Tuck, and Billy Ray Belcourt, among many others. As Nikki Sanchez discusses in her 2019 TED Talk, the work of Indigenization, such as revitalization of oral cultures, is only for Indigenous people to do. However, the work of decolonization, such as challenging inequitable legislation and norms that sustain systemic oppression, belongs to everyone. Sanchez emphasizes that if one is a settler/nonIndigenous to the land they are on, it is important to learn, unlearn, and relearn their connections to the land to move towards decolonization and challenging systemic oppression (TED talks, 2019). Currently there are pressures on institutions to speak up and commit themselves to doing the work of equity beyond simple acknowledgments of past wrongdoings or solidarity statements. This is demonstrated through the rise of equity, diversity, inclusion, Indigenization related consultations, and decolonization initiatives across multiple sectors, particularly within K to 12 and higher education institutions (Dei, 2016). This is a pivotal moment in the history of institutions and how they will be remembered: whether they respond by seeking to reduce the harm they have inflicted upon BIPOC and those from under-resourced communities or continue to be a bystander through silence, complicity, and performative actions. An investment in the curriculum of critical consciousness and its three pillars can serve as a guide and starting point for institutions to ensure their commitment to equity, decolonization, and Indigenization is neither superficial nor performative.

722

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

At the core of decolonization and Indigenization are relationships, resistance, identification of local and land-based needs, and creating accessibility to opportunities beyond normalized frameworks. Eizadirad (2019) points out: Decolonization and decolonizing pedagogy has to be rooted and implemented using an ecological place-based approach where community members have a platform and a medium to voice their concerns and experiences and be given the tools, resources, and the accessibility to relevant social support systems to address inequities and systemic barriers that are co-constructed by institutional policies and practices whether intentionally or unintentionally. (pp. 203–204)

Being conscious of how names are celebrated through symbolism is part of decolonizing educational spaces. Following the identified bodies of children buried at residential schools across Canada, the statue of Egerton Ryerson at Ryerson University was forcefully dismantled by Indigenous activists and allies. The school is named after Egerton Ryerson who is the architect behind the implementation of residential schools in Canada. For many years Indigenous leaders and advocates called for the university to change its name, yet these concerns were dismissed and ignored by those in power and involved with the decision-making. The community eventually forcibly dismantled the statue as resistance and a response to the curriculum of denial. As an act of solidarity with Indigenous communities, many, including professors who work at the university, began referring to the space as X University. The university stated that the statue will not be replaced and as of April 2022 renamed the university to Toronto Metropolitan University. A key component of decolonizing education is centering emotional and spiritual needs of learners, which is an integral part of Indigenous way of life. As Shahjahan (2005) points out, Indigenous knowledge is not only embodied physically, but also metaphysically, as it resides in the spiritual realms of people’s lives. It encapsulates multiple ways of knowing and consists of ways of knowing that are beyond the cognitive, including dreams, visions, intuition and feeling. Oral traditions, passed on through storytelling, are an important mode of Indigenous knowledge transmission from one generation to another. (p. 215)

Eurocentric models of education often emphasize marks and academic outcomes as key metrics and performance indicators for assessing success. Learners are expected to conform and cope with the mandated curriculum and normalized pedagogies which contradict the spiritual well-being, oral histories, knowledges, and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples (Battiste, 2013; Simpson, 2017). Failure to conform to these normalized frameworks can lead to poor grades and other consequences. This contrasts Indigenous ways of being which is about growth, humility, and experiential learning. Indigenous Potlotek First Nation scholar Marie Battiste (2013) outlines key characteristics of Indigenous ways of learning: • Learning is holistic • Learning is a lifelong process • Learning is experiential in nature

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization • • • •

723

Learning is rooted in Aboriginal languages and cultures Learning is spiritually oriented Learning is a communal activity, involving family, community, and elders, and, Learning is an integration of Aboriginal and Eurocentric knowledge. (p. 181)

Below are some suggestions that can help educators enact Indigenization and decolonization within their classrooms and the larger community: – Work with community experts and partners, particularly Indigenous identities and organizations, with relevant lived experiences to enact the 94 Calls to Action outlined in the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation report (2015). – Differentiate pedagogies and assessments to align with different learning styles. As part of assessing learning, create opportunities to center experiential learning, where students can make mistakes and learn from it instead of being penalized for mistakes. – Infuse storytelling as a form of pedagogy where students are encouraged to explore their connections to the land they are on and their family histories. This creates opportunities for dialogue and rich discussions related to understanding what it means to decolonize and Indigenize education at micro and macro levels. – Tell whole stories where you center Indigenous knowledges and ways of being such as land-based practices, medicines, and the importance of spirituality. This involves being critically conscious of the content you present to students, who it is coming from, and the power dynamics around its origins. Some examples include researching the history behind math formulas, writing formats, and scientific approaches. Overall, teaching and learning with the goal of decolonizing and Indigenizing educational practices is not only about the information presented but just as much about the processes involved to holistically meet the needs of learners. This includes taking time to understand who your students are, where they come from and with what lived experiences, and how they can be supported based on their academic, social, cultural, spiritual, and emotional needs.

Conclusion In this chapter, a divestment from the curriculum of denial towards a curriculum of critical consciousness was presented with suggestions and examples on how to enact decolonial pedagogy. The curriculum of critical consciousness was characterized by three pillars which are grassroots activism, revolutionary pedagogies, and Indigenization and decolonization. These pillars work with intentionality to disrupt the colonizing gaze and its normalized logic as part of facilitating mobilization for systemic decolonization. Suggestions for further areas of research include enacting a curriculum of critical consciousness and its pillars with students at different ages and within different educational systems to explore its impact and efficacy.

724

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

Understanding how to disrupt the colonizing gaze through enacting a curriculum of critical consciousness is an ongoing journey, one that will often yield more questions than answers. Like all worthwhile journeys, it will be messy, complex, and unpredictable. This work will require deep thought and unlearning and reimaging alternative radical ways of being. As Sonya Renee Taylor (2020) states on her Instagram post: We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was never normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.

Systemic decolonization at an institutional level requires a willingness to reimagine, adapt, and constantly evolve without attachments to normalized practices. Oftentimes, this need for radical institutional change is created by tragedies and atrocities such as the death of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic. Let us do our part in developing proactive approaches for future generations so that social change no longer needs a tragic catalyst.

References Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168. Annamma, S. A., & Handy, T. (2021). Sharpening justice through DisCrit: A contrapuntal analysis of education. Educational Researcher, 50(1), 41–50. Apple, M. W. (2004). Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed.). Routledge. Au, W. (2016). Meritocracy 2.0: High-stakes, standardized testing as a racial project of neoliberal multiculturalism. Educational Policy, 30(1), 39–62. Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. UBC Press. Bhabha, H. (1983). The other question. Screen, 24, 18–36. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0c8e/ a96f2957d6b0d64e902dc25e07ea7e714880.pdf Bogel-Burroughs, N. (2021, March 20). Prosecutors say Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd for 9 minutes 29 seconds, longer than initially reported. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2021/03/30/us/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-kneel-9-minutes-29-seconds.html Carmichael, S., Ture, K., & Hamilton, C. V. (1992). Black power: The politics of liberation in America. Vintage. Colour of Poverty. (2019). Colour of poverty factsheets. https://colourofpoverty.ca/fact-sheets/ Curtis, B., Livingstone, D. W., & Smaller, H. (1992). Stacking the deck: The streaming of workingclass kids in Ontario schools (Vol. 24). James Lorimer & Company. Day, I. (2015). Being or nothingness: Indigeneity, antiblackness, and settler colonial critique. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(2), 102–121. Dei, G. (2016). Decolonizing the university: The challenges and possibilities of inclusive education. Socialist Studies/Études socialistes, 11(1), 23–61. Eizadirad, A., & Campbell, A. (2021). Visibilizing our pain and wounds as resistance and activist pedagogy to heal and hope: Reflections of 2 racialized professors. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 15, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2021.1937600 Eizadirad, A., & Abawi, Z. (2021). State of emergency: Mapping inequities in early childhood education and care in Canada. In A. Eizadirad, Z. Abawi, & R. Berman (Eds.), Equity as praxis in early childhood education and care. Canadian Scholars Press.

Disrupting the Colonizing Gaze and Mobilizing for Systemic Decolonization

725

Eizadirad, A., & Sider, S. (2020, July). Schools after coronavirus: Seize ‘teachable moments’ about racism and inequities. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/schools-after-coronavi rus-seize-teachable-moments-about-racism-and-inequities-142238 Eizadirad, A. (2019). Decolonizing educational assessment: Ontario elementary students and the EQAO. Springer. Eizadirad, A. (2017). The university as a neoliberal and colonizing institute; A spatial case study analysis of the invisible fence between York University and the Jane and Finch neighbourhood in the City of Toronto. Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 4(1), 25–53. Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury. Gallagher-Mackay, K., Srivastava, P., Underwood, K., Dhuey, E., McCready, L., Born, K., et al. (2021). COVID-19 and education disruption in Ontario: Emerging evidence on impacts. Science Briefs of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, 2(34). https://doi.org/10.47326/ocsat. 2021.02.34.1.0 Glapka, E. (2018). If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then that's a problem’ – Women in the center of the male gaze. Feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis as a tool of critique. Critical Discourse Studies, 15(1), 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1390480 Godsey, M. A. (1995). Educational inequalities, the myth of meritocracy, and the silencing of minority voices: The need for diversity on America's law reviews. Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal, 12, 59–91. Greene, M. (1971). Curriculum and consciousness. Teachers College Record, 73(2), 253–270. Henry, F., & Tator, C. (2012). Interviews with racialized faculty members in Canadian Universities. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 44(2), 75–99. Higginbotham, E. B. (1994). Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Harvard University Press. hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. Harper Perennial. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. Routledge. Jemal, A. (2017). Critical consciousness: A critique and critical analysis of the literature. The Urban Review, 49(4), 602–626. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-017-0411-3 Karumanchery, L. (2005). Engaging equity: New perspectives on anti-racist education. Detselig Enterprises Ltd. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions. Kumashiro, K. (2004). Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice. Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). Critical race theory in education. In The Routledge international handbook of critical education (pp. 110–122). Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers for African-American children. Jossey-Bass. Lorde, A. (2017). The Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Penguin Random House UK. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Brill Sense. Mayo, P. (2015). Hegemony and education under neoliberalism: Insights from Gramsci. Routledge. McLaren, P., & Farahmandpur, R. (2001). Teaching against globalization and the new imperialism: Toward a revolutionary pedagogy. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 136–150. Memmi, A. (2013). The colonizer and the colonized. Routledge. Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Visual and other pleasures (pp. 14–26). Palgrave Macmillan. Neyland, J. (2006). The literary curriculum and the denial of backgrounds. Curriculum Matters, 2, 63–80. https://doi.org/10.18296/cm.0082 Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press. Pailey, R. N. (2020). De-centring the ‘White Gaze’ of development. Development and Change, 51(3), 729–745.

726

H. L. J. Tsang and A. Eizadirad

Pasternak, S., Metallic, N., Numata, Y., Sekharan, A., Galley, J., & Wong, S. (2021). Cash Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper. https://cashback.yellowheadinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2021/05/Cash-Back-A-Yellowhead-Institute-Red-Paper.pdf Pinar, W. F. (2003). Queer theory in education. Journal of Homosexuality, 45(2–4), 357–360. Razack, S. (2004). Dark threats and white knights: The Somalia affair, peacekeeping, and the new imperialism. University of Toronto Press. Razack, S. (2002). When place becomes race. In S. Razack (Ed.), Race, space and the law: Unmapping a white settler society. Between the Lines. Shahjahan, R. A. (2005). Mapping the field of anti-colonial discourse to understand issues of indigenous knowledges: Decolonizing praxis. McGill Journal of Education/Revue des sciences de l'éducation de McGill, 40(2), 213–240. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press. Taylor, S. R. [@sonyareneetaylor] (2020, April 2). We will not go back to normal. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/B-fc3ejAlvd/?hl¼en. TEDxTalks. (2019, March 12). Decolonization is for everyone | Nikki Sanchez | TEDxSFU [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼QP9x1NnCWNY Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Truth and reconciliation commission of Canada: Calls to action. http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Tupper, J., & Cappello, M. (2008). Teaching the treaties as (un)usual narratives: Disrupting the curricular commonsense. Curriculum Inquiry, 35(1), 559–578. United Way. (2019). Rebalancing the opportunity equation. https://www.unitedwaygt.org/file/ 2019_OE_fullreport_FINAL.pdf Warburton, M. (2019, November 11). Canadian hockey commentator don cherry fired over inflammatory remarks toward immigrants. Reuters. Thomson Reuters. www.reuters.com/ article/us-canada-doncherry/canadian-hockey-commentator-don-cherry-fired-over-inflamma tory-remarks-toward-immigrants-idUSKBN1XL2M2 Whitfield, H. A. (2010). Slavery in English Nova Scotia, 1750–1810. Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, 13, 23. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. Yancy, G. (2005). Whiteness and the return of the Black body. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19(4), 215–241.

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance, Grit, and the Corporeal Garth Stahl

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Body Pedagogics and the Socio-Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Student Body and Grit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Corporeal Curriculum and No-Excuses Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications of the Corporeal Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

728 729 731 734 736 737 738

Abstract

This chapter investigates a continual trend in the educative experiences of disadvantaged young people: attention to the compliance of the student body. While bodies have always been a part of schooling, I highlight how increased attention to the corporeal has become the new pedagogy of the poor. These curriculum practices – which I term the corporeal curriculum – blend pedagogy with codified behavioral management techniques to monitor and control the bodies of students living in poverty. This approach is often portrayed as best practice to foster the right dispositions so young people living in poverty will be ready for the neoliberal and competitive market. The chapter introduces two theories – body pedagogics and the socio-material – which serve to underpin the analysis. It also reviews recent scholarship on students’ bodies and grit before establishing how no-excuses schooling has worked to further the corporeal curriculum. As pedagogies and curriculum practices are often representational and, therefore, carry certain symbolic currencies, the analytical work considers how the corporeal curriculum is reflective of a socio-historical imaginary regarding civilizing and disciplining disadvantaged populations. G. Stahl (*) School of Education, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Crown 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_39

727

728

G. Stahl

Keywords

Corporeal curriculum · Pedagogy · Body pedagogics · Socio-material · Noexcuses schooling · Poverty

Introduction We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies through this permanent confrontation, which may be more or less dramatic but is always largely marked by affectivity and, more precisely, by affective transactions with the environment. (Bourdieu, 1997: 141)

This chapter scrutinizes the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy, and the corporeal, highlighting the social justice implications and how such approaches reflect wider societal changes (Evans et al., 2009; Henry, 2014; Golann, 2021). As educational research has sought to address what is gained and what is lost in emphasizing the corporeality of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the arguments presented in this chapter outline some of the dimensions of the shift from pedagogies of the poor to pedagogies on the poor. Given this temper of the times, this chapter scrutinizes the normative practices for controlling the bodies of students living in poverty – specifically in “no-excuses” forms of schooling – and what this may mean for wider historical, sociological, and political questions about both curriculum and curriculum enactment. As Henry (2014) notes: “These regimes, which have broad public appeal, also have important and largely hidden consequences on children’s corporeal performances that merit consideration” (4). In making a contribution to socio-material accounts of bodies and subjectivities, the chapter seeks to reframe an under-researched but ever-present practice in schooling for disadvantaged populations: attention to the compliance of the student body. In considering the relationship between the corporeal and learning, Evans et al. (2009) contend that “the body’s presence as a flesh and blood, thinking, feeling, sentient, species being” which is “moving, growing, changing over time” has “remained rather a shadowy presence” in educational research (392). I acknowledge the body has always been a part of schooling, though rarely considered. In the limited attention to the corporeal, scholarship has sought to delineate how class is scripted on the body (see Henry, 2014) and how representations of student bodies are linked to class backgrounds (Reay, 2004). In this chapter, “pedagogies of the poor” is used as a broad umbrella term that refers to pedagogies and curriculum associated with student populations living in poverty. As Connell (1994) asserts, “‘poverty’ is not a single thing, nor a simple concept” (127). How poverty influences the bodies of students – and how schooling responds to disadvantaged children – remains a complex picture. In critiquing the attention to student bodies in no-excuses forms of schooling mainly located in the United States and United Kingdom, I am interested in what I call the corporeal curriculum, which I define as a blend of rigorous pedagogy with codified behavioral management techniques focused on monitoring and control the

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance,. . .

729

student body (Stahl, 2020a, b, 2021). As a form of pedagogical enactment, the corporeal curriculum is simultaneously focused on both students’ bodily control and their academic performance. The corporeal curriculum has significant overlaps with what Saltman (2014) calls “grit pedagogy,” which foregrounds the fostering of “resilience” and “self-control” (43) of students living in poverty, often at the expense of critical thinking. Furthermore, the corporeal curriculum approach, which is gaining currency internationally (see Cushing, 2021), is often portrayed as best practice to foster the right dispositions so young people living in poverty will be ready for the neoliberal and competitive market (Stahl, 2020b). Within schooling institutions – specifically ones subscribing to a “no-excuses” ideology – these developments are becoming an increasingly normative curriculum approach. The chapter does not focus specifically on the corporeal curriculum practices themselves (see Stahl, 2020a; Golann, 2015, 2021) but instead, drawing on a sociomaterial approach, the aim is to consider the corporeal curriculum as a cultural practice with a currency that influences the assemblages of human bodies, matter, and meaning. To briefly illustrate what these practices entail, there is always a strict adherence to obedience through the punishing of mundane infractions (e.g., the way a student holds a pencil, their posture, how they line up and move through the hallway). Every aspect of students’ bodily movements is timed and is punished or rewarded accordingly. Unsurprisingly, these practices have been described as punitive and authoritarian. I focus on the corporeal curriculum as a normative practice and how the student body is constructed through educational knowledge/s, albeit ones that are problematic. This chapter progresses through three steps to explore the corporeal curriculum as a cultural practice. First, I introduce two theories – body pedagogics and the sociomaterial – which serve to underpin the analysis. Second, I review recent scholarship on students’ bodies and grit before establishing how no-excuses schooling has worked to further the corporeal curriculum. In the final two sections I consider the class-based implications of the corporeal curriculum and conclude by charting some directions for future research.

Body Pedagogics and the Socio-Material The fundamental encounter of learning often comes with a hierarchical dynamic where the figure in power (e.g., teacher, employer, coach) enacts strategies to maintain or reinforce the power asymmetry and it is within this dialectic that the body is worked upon. Though, as Shilling (2018) astutely notes, not every bodily pedagogic is hierarchical and there is room for agency. The corporeal curriculum is couched in what Fenwick et al. (2015) refer to as problematic binaries (e.g., theory–practice, knower–known, subject–object). Underpinning this is an ethos of improvement, habit, and competence (see Shilling, 2018). In thinking critically regarding body pedagogics, specifically in formal schooling, and the implications of these practices, I believe it is important to reflect on the words of Allan Luke (1992) that all pedagogies to some extent are forms of “inscription, of body writing

730

G. Stahl

and mapping” (109) contributing to how dispositions in the habitus are constituted. While studying the connection between the body and learning has been an important aspect of sociology and social theory (see Shilling, 2018 for a full listing), it has featured less in the field of sociology of education. This is interesting when one considers that education itself is often a powerful process of socialization upon the body; after all, as Evans et al. (2009) assert, “‘the body’ as a corporeal reality/entity has always been of interest to the practices of schooling that variously endeavour to shape and regulate its characteristics, usually according to dominant class interests and prevailing social norms” (391). The recognition that the body is regulated in relation to dominant interests highlights the classed nature of the corporeal curriculum. How those in positions of power think the body should be is integral to how we understand curriculum enactments which explicitly dictate how the body should be positioned and move through classroom space (Nash, 2003). Consider this point in relation to Ross’s (2004) assertion that the body is “informed by knowledge” where “the instructed body, is obedient, disciplined, quiet and still” (172). These words reflect a wider socio-historical imaginary where those who are disadvantaged are perceived to require continued exposure to practices which instill docility and are seen as civilizing. The analysis presented in this chapter primarily draws on Shilling’s (2010) definitive work on body pedagogics, specifically what he calls the “society-bodyschool nexus” and how bodies become “worked upon and routinized as an integral part of workaday life” (155). Shilling circumvents the dualisms of biology and culture through an attention to corporeal realism, where the human body is socially and biologically incomplete and socialized toward change over the life course (see Evans et al., 2009, for more detail). Body pedagogics primarily entail “the embodied processes involved in the learning and teaching of those customs, habits, techniques, knowledge and beliefs central to the production and reproduction of cultures, social groups and societies” (Shilling, 2018: 75; see also Shilling, 2017). Furthermore, his work highlights how bodies – in this case student bodies – move through spaces and are conditioned according to both institutional and cultural norms. However, bodies – which are themselves diverse – are not conditioned equally and may respond to different forms of socialization in different ways. In critiquing the corporeal curriculum, specifically within no-excuses schooling, I am interested in the production, regulation, and representation of student bodies within the context of poverty. While educational research has shown that pedagogies of the poor must continue to adhere to asset-based approaches which are culturally sensitive, we are instead seeing a norming of pedagogies focused on corporeality where oppression, conformity, and homogenization are paramount. I see these increasingly normative representations as highly problematic (Stahl, 2021). This chapter makes a contribution by analyzing the ways in which the social and institutional conditions of education and schooling contribute to shaping approaches to curriculum and pedagogical praxis. The study of body pedagogics, according to Shilling and Mellor (2007), involves considering the central institutional practices through which certain cultural prerogatives are transmitted. The corporeal curriculum, as a controversial form of pedagogy gaining popularity (see recent controversy in The New York Times

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance,. . .

731

(Taylor, 2015)), reflects the wider discourses present in our society. Secondarily, I extend Shilling’s (2010) work on body pedagogics and draw on the socio-material dimensions of education, or what Fenwick et al. (2015) refer to as the “energies, processes, motives and outcomes [which] are fully entangled with material practice, nature, time, space, technologies and objects of all kinds” (vii). The corporeal curriculum – as a process where learning occurs – remains “embodied, relational, and situated in social-material relations” (Nyström et al., 2016: 710) where educational actors, subjectivities, knowledge, and activities are configured (see Cushing, 2021; Stahl, 2017). In Henry’s (2014) research on children’s bodies and schooling – and how they represent the power relations of wider society – she notes that as social formations change over time they directly influence embodied relations, effecting “an intensification of the rationalisation (the body as particularised, divisible object) and commodification (the body as property) of embodiment” (20). The fields of body pedagogics and socio-materiality have significant overlap, where both are focused on the “institutionalized social, technological and material means through which cultural practices are transmitted, the varied experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of these processes” (Shilling, 2018: 76). Therefore, the corporeal curriculum is arguably shaped by means/resources and experiences. With this in mind, from a socio-material ontology, there is a strong imperative to be critical of the daily “dynamics and connections that are continuously enacting the taken-for-granted in educational events” (Fenwick et al., 2015: vii) (e.g., forms of pedagogy, language, clothing, timetables, desks) which are informed by ever-changing global and local agendas governing how education is enacted.

The Student Body and Grit Drawing on Foucault’s notion of discourse(s), Ross (2004) argues that “Learning to see the student body in our classrooms requires making a significant shift in our conception of knowledge, academic habits, traditions and vocabularies” (170). What Ross highlights here is how we are powerfully conditioned to see student bodies in certain ways. Students’ bodies – conditioned by pedagogic practices and curriculum practices – are therefore informed by representations and are also representations unto themselves. This is perhaps particularly significant for students from certain ethnic backgrounds who are living in poverty (see Stahl, 2021). In surveying various historical examples, Ross forms an argument that the body, which is socialized through formal and informal education, enters into a process of the fostering of will or moral choice where it is, in Foucauldian terms, disciplined. In this context, it is worth citing Cushing’s (2021) work regarding how the disciplining of language (within rigid school structures) can correlate with the disciplining of the body (see also Evans et al., 2009). In making connections between how the mind becomes embodied (or how the body comes to influence the mind), Ross shows how the words we associate with the vitality of the physical body (e.g., “active,” “vibrant,” “alive”) are also associated with the mind.

732

G. Stahl

Since Freire’s (1974) seminal work, the curriculum and pedagogies associated with disadvantaged communities – the pedagogies of the poor – have experienced many iterations (Moll et al., 1992; Paris, 2012). Foundational to understanding and critiquing these iterations is the wider social justice agenda of equity and the recognition of how cultural practices are valued and devalued. Neoliberalism has been heavily critiqued for its erasure of intersectional identity categories as it foregrounds a meritocratic notion of individualism (Stahl, 2020b). Furthermore, a neoliberal discourse obscures the complexities of poverty. Building on this, I contend that the maintenance and monitoring of students’ bodies is an important function of neoliberalism, particularly as a controlling force shaping the lives of economically disadvantaged students of color – limiting their capacities to determine their engagement and freedom (McCarthy, 2011; Stahl, 2021; Saltman, 2017). In educational research, we must understand the body as being in a process of “both meaning-making and meaning-taking, generative of opportunities for either recognition and reward, or rejection and abjection among teachers, peers and friends” (Evans et al., 2009: 402). The discourses around the corporeal curriculum make up “grids of specification” (Foucault, 1981) which privilege certain classifications and categorizations of subjects. Discourse operates on the subject not as an abstract set of ideas but instead, “as a material series of processes, power actively marks or brands bodies as social, inscribing them with the attributes of subjectivity” (Grosz, 1990: 63). In an early sketch of his theory of the body, Bourdieu foregrounds a tight relationship between the social definition of an individual and their physical form: The body, as a perceptible form, “produces”, we say, “an impression” (what ordinary language calls the physique, or physical appearance – where the properly physical conformation of the body and the manner of carrying which expresses it converge), and is, of all the manifestations of the “person”, the one that is less and less easily modifiable, temporarily and above all definitively, and, at the same time, the one that is held to most adequately signify (because it is outside of all signifying intention) the “profound being”, the “nature” of the “person.” (Bourdieu, 1977b: 51)

Highlighting the importance of the body, Bourdieu (1977a) studied the midtwentieth-century French educational system’s active erasure of working-class dialects, where teachers attempted to control even the shape of their pupils’ mouths. Here we see how the embodied habitus of the student becomes infused with symbolic value established through accent, dialect, posture, and taste (Bourdieu, 1984: 93–94). The body of the student becomes a site of capital accrual where failure to accrue suggests a deficit. The emphasis on inculcating the language of the dominant classes (e.g., correct standard English) is also reflected in other recent studies on pedagogic enactments for disadvantaged populations (see Cushing, 2021; Stahl, 2020a, b), suggesting what could be called a semiotic assemblage of control (Luke, 1992). Many scholars have highlighted the relationship between the body and habitus (Shilling, 2018; Wacquant, 1998) specifically in relation to schooling (Henry, 2014; Luke, 1992). Building on Bourdieu’s work on the intertwined relationship between

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance,. . .

733

capital, habitus, and hexis, Watkins and Noble (2013) contend that educational participation “depends on particular embodied capacities which are evidence of dispositions towards learning which, in turn, affect cognitive ability” (7). Coining the term “scholarly habitus,” Watkins and Noble (2013) theorize a set of dispositions which underlie the capacity for educational success, or what they also refer to as “productive stillness” (83). Drawing on Bourdieusian conceptual tools, they explore the importance of spatial and corporeal congruence and schemas of perception; their empirical research demonstrates how the habitus of students is embodied as selfregulating dispositions which make it possible for students to function largely unconsciously in a particular milieu. As a final point, in considering how the corporeal curriculum manifests in formal schooling today, we are seeing increased attention to grit, where pedagogies are focused on building student resilience and self-control both in mind and body at what psychologists call the “trait level” (Duckworth et al., 2007: 1087). While the research concerning grit in schooling is varied, the main thrust is the expectation that students will increase their grit, regardless of their circumstances. Placing such an onus on young people remains problematic for many reasons. Highlighting the entwined relationship between social class and deficit thinking, Down et al. (2018), drawing on the work of Saltman (2014), assert that the grit approach is one of docility not independence. Furthermore, they contend that “grit pedagogy” privileges the notion that if students are unable to pull this off in the sense of succeeding in school or getting a job, then it will have been because they have not learnt to be good competitors, which is their fault, because as we all know competition is the ultimate game of fairness! (Down et al., 2018: 78)

While grit has been largely critiqued from a character education perspective (Handsman, 2021), my focus here is on the corporeality of grit. Grit pedagogy fosters a “productive stillness” (Watkins and Noble, 2013: 83) as students are compelled to demonstrate sustained concentration and perfect posture at all times. Saltman (2017), in a blazing critique, asserts the “expansion of corporeal control in public education is inseparable from the broader repressive social turn” (xxxv, italics in the original) which shapes the lives of those living in poverty. Making an important connection between grit and corporeality, according to Saltman (2017): “Grit-oriented oriented forms of pedagogy involve heavy doses of corporeal control, physical cues, and rapid-fire shallow exchanges between teachers and students that are geared towards eliciting ‘right’ answers rather than towards thoughtful dialogue” (xxxvii). This recognition that critical thinking is marginalized in favor of corporeal control – and by proxy docility – is echoed by other researchers focused on schooling in disadvantaged contexts. Kerstetter (2016) writes: “In contexts in which authoritarian discipline systems are the norm, students learn to suppress their speech and defer to authority” (513) in preparation for their place as low-skilled laborers at the bottom tier of the workforce. While proponents of grit may believe pedagogic practices which promote grit are working to enable students from disadvantaged backgrounds

734

G. Stahl

to become socially mobile, research would suggest the exact opposite (see Lee and Kramer, 2013).

The Corporeal Curriculum and No-Excuses Schooling The popularity of the corporeal curriculum is largely due to an increase in forms of schooling which subscribe to a no-excuses or “zero-tolerance” approach. Such a schooling model is often present in low socioeconomic contexts, especially in the United States where it has been adopted by various charter schools (see Stahl, 2017; Graham, 2018; Waitoller et al., 2019; Golann, 2021). A key aspect of no-excuses schooling is an emphasis on consistency and precision, where behavior and bodies are rigidly policed. This has been referred to as a “behaviorally engineered environment” (Goodman, 2013: 93; see also Golann, 2021). In the no-excuses model, the discourse of “poverty ¼ excuse” informs a strict culture of academic rigor holding students to high expectations. Gaining popularity, this model of schooling serves as a counternarrative to forms of schooling which have struggled to engage with students living in poverty and where a cycle of generational poverty is furthered through a culture of low expectations (Connell, 1994; Golann, 2018). The foundational underpinning of no-excuses schooling is a belief in social mobility, where the high academic and behavioral expectations are supposed to lend themselves to increased opportunity (Golann, 2015; Stahl, 2017; Kerstetter, 2016). Or, as Lamboy and Lu (2017) note, no-excuses schools have the “explicit goal of college completion for all, [and] measure success in terms of standardized test performance and college acceptance rates” where the “use of rigid instructional and disciplinary practices” (202) remains the primary approach. No-excuses schools often use a specific system of reward and punishments to enact control and socialize their student intake to embody learner identities, which are marked through orchestrated sequences of walking and sitting, rehearsed modes of looking and listening, and staged sanctions for noncompliance (see Goodman, 2013; Lemov, 2010; Ravitch, 2013; Lake et al., 2012; Whitman, 2008). The system and the institutional practices are intended to foster routine and habit (Balogh, 2016). Highlighting the relationship between the corporeal and the cultural, Shilling (2018) writes: While certain habits are required for the perpetuation of life, others are key to the reproduction of specific body pedagogics. The significance of habits here is that, once established, routine orientations and actions incorporate within themselves particular cultural expectations, tools and features of the wider environment. Cultural body pedagogic habits connect us to our surroundings in specific ways, embracing institutional privileging and the power relations with which they are associated, steering encounters and determining what stands fast within a new encounter. (85)

For practitioners interested in fostering a no-excuses style of schooling there are promotional YouTube channels featuring interviews and how-to videos focused on gaining student compliance (Wiley Publishing, 2010) and seminal texts such as

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance,. . .

735

Lemov’s (2010) Teach Like a Champion. These textual artifacts are intended to foster a culture of bodily control that is deemed conducive to academic rigor; furthermore, as “how-to” guides of “best” practice, the guides make recommendations based on the ethos of a no-excuses approach to student attainment. Underpinning these instructional guides is a commitment to character education where the implementation of these practices, it is assumed, will “transfer to desirable behavioral habits” that are of benefit for student employability (Dishon and Goodman, 2017: 188). In Teach Like a Champion, Lemov writes: Effective directions are not just specific; they involve, when possible, clear, actionable tasks that any student knows how to do. If I tell my student to pay attention, he may or may not know how to do that, but if I tell him to put his feet under his desk, I have asked him to do something no student can misunderstand or not know how to do. If he appears to struggle, I can get more concrete: “Turn your body to face me. Bring your legs around. Put them under your desk. Push in your chair.” (179)

What is most apparent in this excerpt is the relationship between language, control, and the corporeal. Ross (2004) writes: “The impact of language on the body can be as direct and brutal as a physical blow” where language, as a source of power, contributes to the construction of “somatic realities” (174). Here we also see a delineation around the pedagogic enactment: pedagogy in this instance is “not only knowledge that is imparted to students, but the methods of getting and accepting that knowledge” (Ross, 2004: 175). Drawing on a socio-material approach, in formal education environments “people constantly influence and adjust to each other’s emerging behaviours, ideas and intentions, as well as with objects, furniture, technologies” and, furthermore, a “whole series of consequences emerge from these micro-actions” (Fenwick et al., 2015: 7). We may never fully know the effects of no-excuses schooling. Echoing recent scholarship that highlights the intermeshing of “language,” “standard English,” and “discipline” (see Cushing, 2021), the explicit command-based control highlighted here arguably “undermine [s] long-term learning, self-determination, and the development of intrinsic motivation” (Lamboy and Lu, 2017: 215). Furthermore, there is extensive documentation that these behavior-intensive environments, which are designed to instill certain habits within the body of the student, are data-driven (Graham, 2018). More specifically, many no-excuses schooling environments graph data about student corporeality, compared and publicly displayed via emails and charts (Goodman, 2013; Stahl, 2017; Kerstetter, 2016). These public displays highlight the posture of students as well as their movement between classrooms (see Stahl, 2017 for more detail). This contributes to how student bodies are produced, regulated, and represented as well as the norming of the corporeal curriculum. Researchers have argued that behavioral systems of constant rewards and punishments in “no-excuses” schools may undermine students’ self-confidence, critical thinking, and ability to make decisions (Ellison, 2012; Lack, 2009). In his definitive work, Kozol (2007) expresses the frustration of teachers of low-income students who are pressured to conform to teaching methods which reduce joy and autonomy.

736

G. Stahl

Furthermore, as a one-size-fits-all model, no-excuses schooling has been critiqued for its failure to recognize the needs of learners who have experienced trauma as well as students with additional needs (see Balogh, 2016; Lamboy and Lu, 2017). Given that these schools are located in areas where parents living in poverty often struggle to access health care, secure housing, and stable employment, the students often come from poor living conditions. As these schools are susceptible to poverty and all it entails, it is highly problematic that the no-excuses schools they attend are robustly not interested in supporting students who may have additional learning needs, instead privileging an unforgiving corporeal curriculum.

Implications of the Corporeal Curriculum The chapter has focused on the existence of a set of pedagogical practices I refer to as the corporeal curriculum; now I seek to consider some of the implications of such practices. While past scholarship has focused on the practices themselves (see Stahl, 2020a; Golann, 2015) I am interested in the corporeal curriculum as a cultural practice which furthers a particular conception of student bodies and what this means for assemblages of individuals, matter, and meaning. More specifically, I am interested in curricular practices as an assemblage of human bodies, matter, and meaning which, in turn, contribute to how subjectivities, knowledge, and activities are configured. Fenwick et al. (2015) highlight that socio-material approaches are interested in the actual processes “of boundary-making that create educational phenomena and produce knowledge and objects” where assemblages are both traced and scrutinized (viii). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to assess all the implications of the corporeal curriculum; instead, I focus my attention on the debates surrounding the role of the corporeal curriculum in social mobility. Henry (2014) writes of a “class-based corporeal performance to school” which differs depending on the background of the student (4). The corporeal curriculum has proved popular with no-excuses forms of schooling – a model designed for a student intake who enter the school gate without middle-class economic and cultural advantages. The aim of no-excuses schooling is to adopt pedagogic and behavioral practices to ensure students’ socialization into middle-class norms and values (Waitoller et al., 2019). In their critique of no-excuses schooling (and by proxy the corporeal curriculum), Lamboy and Lu (2017) write: “This approach emphasizes maximum assimilation, with schools doing whatever it takes to help their students fit into a system designed for a different and more affluent population” (209). While attractive to educators in no-excuses schooling, the corporeal curriculum – as well as the culture around it – works to reduce the agency of students living in poverty and functions as a new form of paternalism (see Whitman, 2008). Or, as Saltman (2017) asserts, “[w]orkers learned discipline, docility, and obedience to authority while future managers learned to question and engage in dialogue” (xxxvi) which highlights the all-important class difference. Certainly, if all students in disadvantaged classrooms receive is the corporeal curriculum, this limits them significantly. Also, as a one-size-fits-all model, the approach homogenizes and contributes to the erasure

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance,. . .

737

of the cultures and dialects of disadvantaged populations (Stahl, 2020a, b). However, at this point it is important to note the limits of body pedagogics, as Shilling asserts: If the transmission of body pedagogics can result in the formation and transformation of people’s habitual behaviour, with all the social consequences that entails, however, it is another matter entirely to conclude that this constitutes a transformation of the habitus. (2018: 85)

So, while the corporeal curriculum feels like a totalizing affair, as a pedagogic practice it is perhaps better thought of as a best effort where students, as agentic beings, accept and reject the practices they are exposed to. Lamboy and Lu (2017) add: “Moreover, behavioral approaches to teaching leave little room for the fact that students have their own motivation to learn” (216). The obvious concern is whether such approaches reinforce a hierarchical power dynamic where proper and improper forms of conduct are rewarded and sanctioned accordingly. The teacher is the knower and the student is the subject, and the student body is, borrowing the words of Shilling (2010), “worked upon and routinized” (155) in reference to what the knower considers to be important. Furthermore, returning to Saltman’s (2014) work on grit pedagogy, he asserts such approaches are an “utter failure of the promise of school for work” and subvert “the conditions for youth to imagine different futures of collective self-control that do not involve the pillage of nature and people” (55). Research suggests the corporeal curriculum does not guarantee the accrual of cultural capital or the dispositions that will lead to accrued cultural capital. Golann’s (2015) important ethnographic analysis provides insight into how the interactional skills taught to the middle class, such as self-assertion, independence, negotiating authority, and taking initiative, are largely marginalized in “no-excuses” schools where “Behavioral norms might help students get through high school, but the types of skills needed for success in higher levels of learning and work become evident when students enter college” (Golann, 2015: 106). The knowledge of when and how best to play those cards to secure an advantageous position cannot necessarily be taught in a classroom (Saltman, 2017; Marsh and Noguera, 2018). This is important when one considers that “Schools are power-full institutions” and “the main bearer of working-class hopes for a better future” (Connell, 1994: 134). Schools are an integral part of social mobility and forms of schooling which serve students living in poverty require scrutiny. It is not simply a question of “does the end justify the means?” but, from a socio-material understanding, “to what ends and what means?”

Conclusion I conclude by returning to the socio-material in order to problematize the taken-forgranted categories which are foundational to how we understand no-excuses forms of education and the corporeal curriculum in this contemporary moment. A sociomaterial understanding foregrounds that education – and educative practices – shape

738

G. Stahl

“how subjectivities are produced, how knowledge circulates and sediments into formations of practice and power, how agency might be understood as material as well as relational, and how practices are configured, reconfigured and transformed” (Fenwick et al., 2015: viii). Not disregarding variations in enactment, the existence of the corporeal curriculum contributes to the production of, from a socio-material perspective, certain “enactments, doings, sayings, and relatings” (Nyström et al., 2016: 714). Educators and students engage in pedagogy according to a certain logic. We know the corporeal curriculum comprises control and discipline of the body; furthermore, it raises ethical questions about how we empower disadvantaged populations. In short, it narrows what is possible. A curriculum focused on bodily control – as a pedagogy of the poor – actively shapes the lives of economically disadvantaged students. From a more ontological standpoint, Evans et al. (2009) argue that: in reducing “corporeality” to a discursive encounter between politics and an unexplicated “existential force”, once again we face the possibility of perceiving interaction as purely affective or semiotic encounters in which the body’s corporeal presence (the personal, physiological self) is but a shadowy presence (albeit a force to be reckoned with) in social relationships. If we do so, the way in which social meanings are mediated somatically barely gets mention at all. (399)

Of course, I accept that the student body is not just a discursive representation which relays messages and societal relations external to itself (see Evans et al., 2009, for a more detailed explanation). A future direction for research on the corporeal curriculum is how students negotiate the corporeal curriculum between student and teacher or individual and institution. Highlighting the relationship between the institution and the body pedagogics, Shilling (2018) emphasizes how “the relations forged between various situations and meanings privileges a particular life-world for participants, bringing certain phenomena and challenges into view and excluding others from the field of significance” (79). The popularity of monitoring and controlling bodies through a corporeal curriculum is reflective of not only wider societal pathologizing in relation to ethnicity and social class but also what those in education value given the political constraints which coordinate their work. Therefore, educational research must decipher who allows such practices to continue despite their contentious nature and the strategies they use to norm these practices.

References Balogh, A. (2016). A narrative inquiry of charter school social work and the “no excuses” behavior model. Columbia Social Work Review, 14(1), 19–25. Bourdieu, P. (1977a). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977b). Remarques provisoires sur la perception sociale du corps. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 14, 51–54. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Routledge.

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance,. . .

739

Bourdieu, P. (1997). Pascalian meditations. Stanford University Press. Connell, R. (1994). Poverty and education. Harvard Educational Review, 64(2), 125–150. Cushing, I. (2021). Language, discipline and “teaching like a champion”. British Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 23–41. Dishon, G., & Goodman, J. (2017). No excuses for character: A critique of character education in no-excuses charter schools. Theory and Research in Education, 15(2), 182–201. Down, B., Smyth, J., & Robinson, J. (2018). Rethinking school-to-work transitions in Australia: Young people have something to say. Springer. Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 1087–1101. Ellison, S. (2012). It’s in the name: A synthetic inquiry of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Educational Studies, 48(6), 550–575. Evans, J., Davies, B., & Rich, E. (2009). The body made flesh: Embodied learning and the corporeal device. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(4), 391–406. Fenwick, T., Edwards, R., & Sawchuk, P. (2015). Emerging approaches to educational research: Tracing the socio-material. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1981). Questions of method. Ideology and Consciousness, 8, 3–14. Freire, P. (1974). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Seabury. Golann, J. W. (2015). The paradox of success at a no-excuses school. Sociology of Education, 88(2), 103–119. Golann, J. W. (2018). Conformers, adaptors, imitators, and rejecters: How no-excuses teachers’ cultural toolkits shape their responses to control. Sociology of Education, 91(1), 28–45. Golann, J. W. (2021). Scripting the moves: Culture and control in a “no-excuses” charter school. Princeton University Press. Goodman, J. F. (2013). Charter management organizations and the regulated environment: Is it worth the price? Educational Researcher, 42(2), 89–96. Graham, L. J. (2018). Student compliance will not mean “all teachers can teach”: A critical analysis of the rationale for “no excuses discipline”. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 22(11), 1242–1256. Grosz, E. (1990). Inscriptions and body-maps: Representations and the corporeal. In T. Threadgold & A. Cranny-Francis (Eds.), Feminine, masculine and representation (pp. 62–74). Allen & Unwin. Handsman, E. (2021). From virtue to grit: Changes in character education narratives in the US from 1985 to 2016. Qualitative Sociology, 44(2), 271–291. Henry, S. E. (2014). Children’s bodies in schools: Corporeal performances of social class. Palgrave Macmillan US. Kerstetter, K. (2016). A different kind of discipline: Social reproduction and the transmission of non-cognitive skills at an urban charter school. Sociological Inquiry, 86(4), 512–539. Kozol, J. (2007, September 10). Why I am fasting: An explanation to my friends. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kozol/why-i-am-fasting-an-expl_b_63622.html Lack, B. (2009). No excuses: A critique of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) within charter schools in the USA. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 7(2), 126–153. Lake, R., Bowen, M., Demeritt, A., McCullough, M., Haimson, J., & Gill, B. (2012). Learning from charter school management organizations: Strategies for student behavior and teacher coaching. Center on Reinventing Education and Mathematica Policy Research. https://crpe. org/wp-content/uploads/pub_CMO_Strategies_mar12_0.pdf Lamboy, L., & Lu, A. (2017). The pursuit of college for all: Ends and means in “no excuses” charter schools. Theory and Research in Education, 15(2), 202–229. Lee, E. M., & Kramer, R. (2013). Out with the old, in with the new? Habitus and social mobility at selective colleges. Sociology of Education, 86(1), 18–35. Lemov, D. (2010). Teach like a champion: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college. Jossey-Bass. Luke, A. (1992). The body literate: Discourse and inscription in early literacy training. Linguistics and Education, 4(1), 107–129.

740

G. Stahl

Marsh, L. T. S., & Noguera, P. A. (2018). Beyond stigma and stereotypes: An ethnographic study on the effects of school-imposed labeling on Black males in an urban charter school. The Urban Review, 50, 447–477. McCarthy, C. (2011). Reconstructing race and education in the class conquest of the city and the university in the era of neoliberalism and globalization. In C. McCarthy, R. Mejia, & H. Greenhalgh-Spencer (Eds.), New times: Making sense of critical cultural theory in a digital age (pp. 86–106). Peter Lang. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Nash, R. (2003). Social explanation and socialization: On Bourdieu and the structure, disposition, practice scheme. The Sociological Review, 51(1), 43–62. Nyström, S., Dahlberg, J., Hult, H., & Abrandt Dahlgren, M. (2016). Observing of interprofessional collaboration in simulation: A socio-material approach. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 30(6), 710–716. Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. First Vintage. Reay, D. (2004). Exclusivity, exclusion, and social class in urban education markets in the United Kingdom. Urban Education, 39(5), 537–560. Ross, J. (2004). The instructable body: Student bodies from classrooms to prisons. In L. Bresler (Ed.), Knowing bodies, moving minds: Towards embodied teaching and learning (pp. 169–181). Springer. Saltman, K. (2014). The austerity school: Grit, character, and the privatization of public education. Symploke, 22(1–2), 41–57. Saltman, K. J. (2017). Corporate power and corporeal control: Aspirations for agency and democracy in the era of educational repression. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 19(1/2), xxxi–xliv. Shilling, C. (2010). Exploring the society-body-school nexus: Theoretical and methodology issues in the study of body pedagogics. Sport, Education and Society, 15(2), 151–167. Shilling, C. (2017). Body pedagogics: Embodiment, cognition and cultural transmission. Sociology, 51(6), 1205–1221. Shilling, C. (2018). Embodying culture: Body pedagogics, situated encounters and empirical research. The Sociological Review, 66(1), 75–90. Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. A. (2007). Cultures of embodied experience: Technology, religion and body pedagogics. The Sociological Review, 55(3), 531–549. Stahl, G. (2017). Ethnography of a neoliberal school: Building cultures of success. Routledge. Stahl, G. (2020a). Critiquing the corporeal curriculum: Body pedagogies in “no excuses” charter schools. Journal of Youth Studies, 23(10), 1330–1346. Stahl, G. (2020b). The making of neoliberal citizenship in the United States: Inculcation, responsibilization, and personhood in a “no excuses” charter school. In A. Peterson, G. Stahl, & H. Soong (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of citizenship and education (pp. 211–225). Palgrave. Stahl, G. (2021). Body pedagogics and the corporeal curriculum in “no-excuses” charter schools. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi. org/10.1080/10714413.2021.1997499 Taylor, K. (2015, April 6). At Success Academy charter schools, high scores and polarizing tactics. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/nyregion/at-success-academycharter-schools-polarizing-methods-and-superior-results.html Wacquant, L. (1998). A fleshpeddler at work: Power, pain, and profit in the prizefighting economy. Theory and Society, 27, 1–42.

“Pedagogies of the Poor” to “Pedagogies on the Poor”: Compliance,. . .

741

Waitoller, F. R., Nguyen, N., & Super, G. (2019). The irony of rigor: “No-excuses” charter schools at the intersections of race and disability. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(3), 282–298. Watkins, M., & Noble, G. (2013). Disposed to learn: Schooling, ethnicity and the scholarly habitus. Bloomsbury. Whitman, D. (2008). Sweating the small stuff: Inner-city schools and the new paternalism. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Wiley Publishing. (2010, March 29). Teach like a champion: Getting everyone’s attention. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v¼EC0ltKOwF_A&list¼PLDvwo-34zGdf00XnJqagGjc6bHfFgbjZQ

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada Ardavan Eizadirad

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Who Are the Remand Population? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Alarming Trend: Remand Population Outnumbering Sentenced Offenders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lack of Access to Education Is Part of Systemic Institutional Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Accessing Education While Federally Incarcerated: From Intake Assessment to Program Placement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Education Programs Offered in Ontario Facilities: Amadeusz and Walls to Bridges . . . . . . . . . Findings, Discussions, and Recommendations from the Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

744 745 746 747 749 751 754 757 758

Abstract

Majority of people incarcerated in Ontario, and on a larger scale in Canada, are part of the remand population, where they are legally innocent and temporarily incarcerated as part of pre-trial detention. It is important to ensure those who are incarcerated have access to education which is their human right as outlined in Article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This literature review outlines how access to education and post-secondary programs for those incarcerated in Canada remains limited and an underdeveloped sector with minimal opportunities. Organizations such as Amadeusz and Walls to Bridges are examined as case studies which are leading the way in Ontario, Canada, by creating opportunities for access to education for those incarcerated. Findings from the literature review and the case studies indicate that access to education needs to be prioritized on a systemic level supported by various levels of government with funding and resource allocation, as education is a key protective A. Eizadirad (*) Faculty of Education, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_37

743

744

A. Eizadirad

factor in reducing recidivism. A more holistic approach to providing education for those incarcerated is recommended involving synergetic partnerships and collaborations with non-profits, community agencies, and post-secondary organizations. The chapter concludes with specific suggestions for what can be changed, altered, and introduced to mitigate some of the challenges and barriers identified. Keywords

Racism · Remand · Pre-trial · Recidivism · Reintegration · Access to education

Introduction Education is a key protective factor in reducing recidivism and enhancing a more holistic and effective reintegration and resettlement back into the community postrelease for those incarcerated (Davis et al., 2013; John Howard Society of Ontario, 2016; Eizadirad, 2016; McMurtry & Curling, 2008; Richer et al., 2015). Education is a human right, even if incarcerated, and consequentially a foundational tool and investment in securing employment, as “stable employment is one of the major pillars for the successful reintegration of releasees” (John Howard Society of Ontario, 2016, p. 20). Investing in education should be a sustainable long-term proactive approach, both in terms of outcomes and costs, rather than investments in reactionary punitive approaches rooted in intensive surveillance and mandatory minimum sentences to reduce crime rates (Eizadirad, 2016; John Howard Society of Ontario, 2018). Bazos and Hausman (2004) conducted a cost-saving analysis of one million dollar invested in incarceration compared to prison education programs and found that one million invested in incarceration prevents approximately 350 crimes, whereas the same amount invested in prison education programs prevents approximately 600 crimes. Access to education for those incarcerated is a timely and relevant issue to explore as it is a human right outlined in Article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 2021). While opportunities for access to education are limited across Canada and in the province of Ontario, the COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified and exasperated these barriers and limitations due to further restrictions related to social distancing to minimize the spread of COVID-19. These restrictions have resulted in a range of changes to programming from some being put on hold to others being adapted or offered less frequently. This has harmful short- and long-term impacts on the mental health of the remand and sentenced population who are seeking opportunities to better themselves as they await their trial date while navigating difficult social conditions in correctional facilities affiliated with jail subculture such as overcrowding, use of lockdowns, solitary confinement (now called “structured intervention”), and exposure to violence (Sapers et al., 2017). A 2016 report by the John Howard Society of Ontario titled Reintegration in Ontario: Practices, Priorities, and Effective Models points out:

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

745

Individuals in the Ontario jails are not provided with adequate or proper medical or psychiatric assessments and treatment. Furthermore prisons are not equipped to deal with people who have severe mental health issues due to the limited access to prescription medication and healthcare for mental health issues. Segregation and overcrowding can also compound mental health issues. (p. 30)

Although many people perceive those incarcerated from a deficit lens (Portelli & Sharma, 2014), often blaming them for their circumstances, it is important to note that most people incarcerated in Ontario, and on a larger scale in Canada, are part of the remand population, where they are legally innocent and temporarily incarcerated as part of pre-trial detention (Correctional Services Program, 2017). The intersection of inaccessibility or timely access to mental health support services and lack of access to educational opportunities intensifies the disadvantages experienced by the remand population, even more so in our current context that has led to temporarily shut down of some regular programs and services due to COVID-19. This literature review outlines how access to education for those incarcerated in Canada remains limited and an underdeveloped sector with minimal opportunities. Organizations such as Amadeusz and Walls to Bridges are examined as case studies, which are leading the way in Ontario by creating pathways to education for those incarcerated. Findings from the literature review and the case studies indicate that access to education needs to be prioritized on a systemic level supported by various levels of government with funding and resource allocation, as education is a key protective factor in reducing recidivism (Davis et al., 2013). A more holistic approach to providing education for those incarcerated is recommended involving synergetic partnerships and collaborations with non-profits, community agencies, and post-secondary organizations. The chapter concludes with specific suggestions for what can be changed, altered, and introduced to mitigate some of the challenges and barriers identified.

Who Are the Remand Population? In Canada, according to the federal Criminal Records Act, a person is considered a youth between the age of 12 and 17 and if charged with a crime during this time the Youth Criminal Justice Act applies to them. This includes parameters such as having their name banned from being released to the public and the use of extrajudicial measures to hold first-time, non-violent offenders accountable. At age 18, a person is considered an adult (Government of Canada, Criminal Records Act, 1985, c. C-47). When a person is charged with a crime, if the crime they are charged with is serious in nature, they are likely held in custody until their bail hearing. A bail hearing does not determine whether the charged person is guilty or innocent. It is a court order that grants or denies permission to be released back into the community while the case is processed and progresses to trial. If the person is granted bail, they will have to follow the conditions set by the judge. If the judge does not grant bail or if bail is set at an amount that the individual cannot afford, they are remanded into custody.

746

A. Eizadirad

A person remanded into custody must remain in a maximum-security facility until their trial, which can take months or years depending on the complexity and the nature of the charges. If the accused are found guilty at trial and sentenced to jail time, the length of the sentence determines whether they are transferred to a provincial or a federal facility. As George et al. (2014) point out, “The federal government is responsible for overseeing the incarceration and care of individuals sentenced to two years or more and provincial/territorial governments are similarly responsible for individuals sentenced to two years less a day and pre-trial custody” (p. 35).

An Alarming Trend: Remand Population Outnumbering Sentenced Offenders The most recent statistics available that outlines the number of people in remand in Ontario is outlined in the Auditor General of Ontario 2019 report which states: On a daily basis, remanded inmates comprise about 71% of the 7,400 inmates in custody. The proportion of remand population in institutions in Ontario has increased by 18% in the last 15 years, from 60% of the daily inmate population in 2004/05 to 71% in 2018/19. Data from Statistics Canada indicate that in 2017/18 (the most recent year for which data is available for all Canadian jurisdictions), Alberta, Ontario and Manitoba had the highest remand rates in Canada. (p. 22)

On a national level, 2005 was the first time Canada’s provincial and territorial jails held more people who were legally innocent in remand compared to sentenced offenders (Malakieh, 2019). Since 2005, the overall population of adults in remand has consistently outnumbered sentence offenders. The 2017 report by the Correctional Services Program titled, Trends in the Use of Remand in Canada, 2004/2005 to 2014/2015, provides detailed statistics about these trends over a 10-year span: In comparison to ten years earlier, the number of adults in remand has grown almost six times more than the number in sentenced custody. From 2004/2005 to 2014/2015, the average daily adult remand population increased 39%, while the average daily sentenced custody population was up 7%. (p. 3)

What is consistent and alarming across Canada as a trend since 2005 is the increase in the remand population to the point of outnumbering sentenced offenders. Examining more up to date statistics that goes beyond 2015, the 2019 report Adult and Youth Correctional Statistics in Canada, 2017/2018 points out that these trends have continued: – In 2017/2018, on average per day there were about 50% more adults (14,812) in remand than were in provincial/territorial sentenced custody (9,543) – Among the provinces and territories in 2017/2018, eight jurisdictions had a higher proportion of remanded adults versus those in sentenced custody: Alberta (70%), Ontario

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

747

(69%), Manitoba (69%), Nova Scotia (65%), British Columbia (65%), Yukon (62%), the Northwest Territories (58%) and Nunavut (55%) in remand. (Malakieh, 2019, pp. 3–4)

It is also important to emphasize that the remand population has increased at a faster rate than sentenced offenders, particularly in Ontario where between 2004/2005 and 2014/2015, “the number of adults held in remand on a typical day increased 39%. This was nearly 6 times the increase in the sentenced custody population (+7%). In contrast, between 2004 and 2014, the number of adults charged with a crime by police in Canada declined(
2.4%)” (Correctional Services Program, 2017, p. 5). Most recently, the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario in their 2019 report point out: [A]bout 80% of the approximately 51,000 individuals admitted into Ontario adult correctional institutions in 2018/19 were accused persons on remand who were awaiting bail or trial. On a daily basis, remanded inmates represent 71% of the 7,400 inmates in custody. The remaining 29% of inmates are those that have been found guilty of a crime with a sentence of less than two years. (p. 5)

These trends are alarming given that those in remand have not been proven to be guilty of their charges and are legally innocent. As well, those remanded into custody must serve their time at a maximum-security facility. In Ontario, there are eight national correctional facilities for convicted inmates sentenced to 2 years or more and nine provincial detention centers, nine provincial jails, and nine provincial correctional centers for people awaiting trial or who are serving a sentence up to 2 years less a day. Having to serve time in a maximum-security facility while remanded into custody can have a large impact on one’s mental health particularly with limited access to educational programs and support services.

Lack of Access to Education Is Part of Systemic Institutional Racism Lack of opportunities for the remand population, particularly access to education, is problematic and perpetuates inequities as time served while awaiting trial becomes counter-productive and in many cases leads to harmful outcomes in mental health. This subsection outlines how a lack of access to education is part of a larger systemic problem within the justice system that largely disadvantages racialized identities, particularly Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds (Colour of Poverty, 2019; United Way, 2019). Roderique (2019) in the article, Why Are Most People in Prison Unconvicted, examines differences and lived realities in circumstances for those serving time on remand in comparison to those being a sentenced offender: In a cruel twist of irony, life on remand is often worse than life in a federal prison. It is a lonely, boring, mentally draining place that seems to only serve to isolate, irritate, and exacerbate any troubles the person is facing in their life, the troubles that usually got them

748

A. Eizadirad

sent to detention in the first place. Detainees are held in maximum-security provincial institutions under the most severe restrictions regardless of the nature of the allegation or their criminal history. Unlike federal prisons, which have life skills, work, reintegration, rehab, and literacy programs, adults held in pre-trial detention have no chance to work and few opportunities for programming, education, and exercise. (para. 7)

It is difficult to discuss systemic inequities in the justice system without having a conversation about race and racialization in Canadian society (Block & Galabuzi, 2011; Colour of Poverty, 2019; Eizadirad, 2019; Williams et al., 2013). Definitions matter and for the purpose of this report, race and racialization are referred to according to the following definition: Race is a socially constructed way of judging, categorizing and creating difference among people based on physical characteristics such as skin colour, eye, lips and nose shape, hair texture and body shape. The process of social construction of race is termed “racialization.” This is the process by which societies construct races as real, different and unequal in ways that matter to economic, political and social life. (Toronto District School Board, 2017, p. 75)

At the core of racialization are dipartites in access to opportunities which lead to perpetuation of systemic inequities. As the Colour of Poverty fact sheet Racialized Poverty in Justice and Policing (2019) points out: – As a result of higher levels of scrutiny compared to white people, minorities are more likely to be arrested, convicted and punished, which has been identified as a significant contributing factor to the overrepresentation of Black males in the criminal justice system. – In 2016, Black people comprise 3.5% of the general Canadian population, but made up 10% of the federally incarcerated population. – In 2016, 25% of the total federally incarcerated population – and 35% of federallysentenced women – were Indigenous, despite accounting for only around 4.3% of the total Canadian population. (pp. 1–2)

The aforementioned statistics situate how racialized identities and communities, specifically BIPOC and those living in poverty, are systemically disadvantaged within the Canadian justice system at all levels leading to their over-representation in incarceration. Zainey (2010) states that “the argument could be offered that the adjudicatory system itself is discriminatory in practice; otherwise all races would be convicted at proportional rates and there would be no disparities” (p. 286). Racialized identities in general have been placed on the margins, making it more challenging for them to move past their criminalized identity post-release with limited access to opportunities for upward social mobility (Colour of Poverty, 2019; Williams et al., 2013). At the core of racialization and being a racialized person is navigating inequitable power dynamics at the institutional level in the form of systemic barriers limiting accessibility to opportunities and services. These issues impact all identities in the community, but it has particularly more severe negative consequences for racialized identities and communities. This is a systemic issue that

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

749

is intrinsic within many institutions that goes beyond the justice system and intersects with other institutions such as healthcare, education, and government (Block & Galabuzi, 2011; Colour of Poverty, 2019; McMurtry & Curling, 2008). Chan et al. (2017) argue that “the overrepresentation of racialized communities in Canada’s prisons reflects the country’s racial profiling and over-policing of Black and Indigenous people” (para. 10). They further deconstruct the statistics explaining that: Out of an average of 14, 615 prisoners in Canadian federal institutions on a given day in 2015–2016, 26 percent are Indigenous and nine percent are Black—and between 2005 and 2016, the federal incarceration rate of Black people in Canada increased by 70 percent. Compare this to the breakdown of the general population: Indigenous people only make up 4.3 percent of the population, and Black people only 2.8 percent. Currently, Indigenous women are the fastest growing prison population, representing more than 35 percent of the federal population of women prisoners. Such overrepresentation reflects how Black and Indigenous people are consistently targeted and over-policed in Canada. (para. 11)

This is an urgent matter that needs attention to mitigate the disparities and inequities disadvantaging racialized identities and communities.

Accessing Education While Federally Incarcerated: From Intake Assessment to Program Placement The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) website (2019) provides information about intake assessment and guidelines for placement into educational programs for those federally incarcerated, meaning they have been sentenced to 2 years or more. Under Education Programs, the website (2018) states that “Education is important as it increases offenders’ chances to successfully transition back into society” (para. 1). The website then explains five stages involved in identifying the educational needs of those incarcerated and how they are placed and monitored within educational programs: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A review of the initial education-related assessments Individual education planning Enrolment and participation in the delivery of education programs Ongoing assessment of progress Reporting

It is important to note that in Canada there is no federal department of education. As a result, the curriculum offered as part of educational programs aligns with provincial or territorial legislation where the facility is located, delivered by certified teachers and trained staff in that jurisdiction. Individuals who have not obtained a high school diploma or its equivalent have education identified as a need in their correctional plans. This is not done for those in remand and only for those sentenced

750

A. Eizadirad

to serving 2 years or more. Sentenced offenders are enrolled into the appropriate level of the Adult Basic Education program which has four levels described on the CSC (2018) website as: (a) Adult Basic Education I – allows inmates to acquire the basic literacy and numeracy skills to function in society. This program level covers grades 5 and under in all regions except Quebec, where this program level covers grade 6 and under. (b) Adult Basic Education II – allows inmates to acquire the necessary education skills to proceed to secondary studies. This program level covers grades 6, 7, and 8 in all regions except Quebec, where this program level covers secondary I and II. (c) Adult Basic Education III – allows inmates to earn compulsory secondary credits as specified by the appropriate Ministry of Education. This program level covers grades 9 and 10 in all regions except Quebec, where this program level covers secondary III and IV. (d) Adult Basic Education IV – allows inmates to earn secondary credits in order to fulfill the requirements of a secondary school diploma (or equivalent) issued by the appropriate Ministry of Education. This program level covers grades 11 and 12 in all regions except Quebec, where this program level covers secondary V. Majority of people incarcerated do not have a high school degree or its equivalent (George et al., 2014). According to the 2018 report by John Howard Society of Ontario The Invisible Burden: Police Records and the Barriers to Employment in Toronto, “Historical data indicates that about 35% of prisoners participate in ABE programs and 25% of participants complete them. This may mean a majority of all incarcerated individuals also leave a federal correctional facility without a high school-level education” (p. 22). This is problematic given that education is a key protective factor in reducing recidivism and providing access to opportunities to more effectively reintegrate back into the community post-release (Davis et al., 2013). Furthermore, according to the 2015 Correctional Service of Canada’s report titled Evaluation of CSC’s Education Programs and Services, “approximately three quarters of federally sentenced offenders present a need for educational programming” (p. vi). The report reiterates the benefits of educational programs expressing that “Offenders who participated in educational programming had lower rates of conditional release failure compared to non-participants and these results were better for medium and high-risk offenders who completed more than 10 educational achievements” (p. vii). These findings signify the importance of continuing to make educational programs accessible and socio-culturally relevant for those incarcerated. Access to post-secondary educational opportunities is considered different with its own unique parameters. The Correctional Service of Canada (2019) website under “Education Programs” points out:

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

751

– The Post-Secondary Prerequisite Program allows inmates the opportunity to earn additional secondary credits that they require in order to participate in postsecondary studies, vocational programs, or employment. This program is for inmates who already have a high school diploma (or equivalent). – Offenders may pursue post-secondary education while incarcerated. The Postsecondary Education Program allows inmates to learn a trade or profession or update trade qualifications. Inmates who want to take post-secondary courses must meet the university or college’s academic requirements. Courses are usually completed through correspondence with community colleges or universities. Overall, there are limited post-secondary education programs offered across prisons and correctional facilities across Canada. Courses are usually completed through paper-based correspondence with community colleges or universities. There has been a lack of urgency and prioritization in improving access to education and lack of a collective effort to increase the quality of how programs are delivered. This is confirmed by the most recent report from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario (2019) which emphasizes, “little emphasis is placed on delivering programming to remanded inmates, who comprise the majority of the inmate population” (p. 17). If education is to be a priority, it needs to be supported with funding and resources to implement new changes. This has not been the case given that “in 2015–2016, the Correctional Service of Canada cut their educational spending by 10 percent” (Chan et al., 2017, para. 19).

Education Programs Offered in Ontario Facilities: Amadeusz and Walls to Bridges In Ontario, two programs are leading the way in creating access to post-secondary education programs for the remand and sentenced population: Amadeusz (https:// amadeusz.ca/home) and Walls to Bridges (http://wallstobridges.ca/). Amadeusz is a non-profit organization in Ontario that provides access to education, community supports, mentorship, and exceptional care for young people ages 18 to 35 who are or have been incarcerated (Amadeusz, 2021). As outlined by Woods et al. (2018), the idea for Amadeusz originated when a group of six to eight young people came together in spaces defined by them as safe such as in apartment building staircases and local housing communities to discuss their experiences, challenges, and needs of living in Toronto’s racialized and marginalized communities. Over the years, their frustrations and experience with the intersection of violence, incarceration, and tragedy turned into a desire to make a difference. The youth organized themselves into a formal group and with the support of the Executive Director of a local non-profit community agency Amadeusz was formulated and established in 2009. In the early years, the most important issue for Amadeusz was mitigating minimal opportunities for young people in remand to access education. Amadeusz envisioned

752

A. Eizadirad

that formal educational attainment such as gaining a high school diploma would lead to positive change for the individual both while incarcerated and post-release as part of reintegration and resettlement back into the community. Amadeusz submitted a funding application which was approved for the implementation of a 6-month pilot education program in partnership with a detention center in Toronto. The project was a success and Amadeusz continued to grow over the years to become an incorporated non-profit organization offering various programs and services centered around creating equitable access to education, community supports, and mentorship for people in remanded custody. Currently, Amadeusz facilitates educational programs for youth aged 18–35 who are incarcerated at the Toronto South Detention Centre, the Toronto East Detention Centre, and the Vanier Centre for Women. They are actively looking to expand their programming into other facilities to further make education accessible to those incarcerated. They have a long waiting list of participants who have expressed interest to enroll into their programs and services. Amadeusz is the only organization in Ontario that provides two streams of educational programs for those incarcerated as part of the remand population: supporting both completion of courses to earn a high school diploma or its equivalent and offering post-secondary courses. In 2018, Amadeusz expanded to provide a service called Prosper which provides intensive case management and peer support for young people with firearm-related charges. Prosper coordinates existing systems to support the transition of those incarcerated back into the community with the objective of reducing their involvement with violence and crime. Below is a step-by-step guide for how Amadeusz educational programs are implemented within correctional facilities from identification and program placement to evaluation and discharge (Amadeusz, 2020): 1. Referral: Program participants are mainly identified through a self-referral process by putting in a request to speak with Amadeusz. Individuals can also be referred by those working within the institution, including, but not limited to, correctional officers, volunteer coordinators, social workers, psychiatrists, community partners, and members of the Amadeusz staff team. 2. Intake/Assessment: A program facilitator meets with the referred individual to determine program eligibility. If eligible for any of the programs, an intake and educational assessment is conducted to determine the participant’s educational goals. If ineligible, the program facilitator will refer the individual to other available services, whenever possible. 3. Programming: Based on the educational assessment and program eligibility criteria, the participant is placed in one or more of the following programs: • High school correspondence credits toward obtaining an Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD). • General Education Diploma (GED) preparation and examination – provides support in working through GED-specific content to prepare participants to write the GED exam and obtain their high school equivalency certificate.

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

753

Amadeusz, in partnership with the Independent Learning Centre, runs GED examination sessions multiple times throughout the year at each institution. • Post-secondary courses – through partnerships with Centennial College, Northern College, and Thompson Rivers University participants work toward earning college certificates or complete courses that can be transferred to their pre-existing post-secondary education through print-based courses. • Career exploration. • Post-release referrals. 4. Evaluation: Ongoing feedback from participants, program facilitators, and volunteer coordinators. 5. Discharge: When a participant is released or transferred from the institution where they were incarcerated, program facilitators will do their best to ensure continued support for the participant in meeting their educational goals. Files are closed when appropriate. Overall, through Amadeusz educational programs, there have been 173 GED graduates with an average amount of 19 graduates per year. Thirty participants in total have earned their OSSD, and 211 post-secondary courses have been completed with an average number of 18 post-secondary courses completed per year. Fifty-seven people have been supported through the Amadeusz Prosper program. Prosper caseworkers have adapted to continue providing support to those incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. They each have a direct toll-free number that their participants can call. Prosper caseworkers have continued to establish strong relationships with probation and parole officers, lawyers, and institutional staff at various jails to support those incarcerated. Walls to Bridges (W2B) is another organization in Ontario that provides access to education through a collective experience bringing together incarcerated (“Inside”) and non-incarcerated (“Outside”) students led by a trained facilitator to complete a post-secondary course (Walls to Bridges, 2016). W2B creates opportunities to explore the complexities of criminalization and punishment through reflection on lived experiences via an intersectional lens. W2B classes are credit courses offered through universities and colleges and taught within correctional settings. All students who successfully complete the course receive a university or college credit. An important principle of W2B courses is that students from outside the correctional system are not “mentoring” or “helping” incarcerated or criminalized students. Rather, all participants in the class are viewed and treated as peers, learning the class content together as community of learners through innovative, experiential, and dialogical pedagogies. W2B was founded based on inspiration from the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program in the United States. W2B began in 2011 under the name Inside-Out Canada and in 2014 established its own autonomous Canadian-based program. In 2012, due to the generous support of the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation, the national W2B Hub was established in the Faculty of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University in Kitchener, Ontario. The first course at Wilfrid Laurier was offered in

754

A. Eizadirad

partnership with Grand Valley Institution for Women led by Dr. Shoshana Pollack. This was a pivotal moment in the Walls to Bridges development, as participants from this course, which included both incarcerated and Master of Social Work students, formed a “collective” after the course. Within 1 year of meeting regularly, the W2B Collective established the National W2B Instructor Training Institute. The institute hosts a 5-day training for university, college, and community educators each summer reinforcing dialogical pedagogies to teach others how to effectively facilitate W2B programs in other communities and jurisdictions characterized by collaborative discussions, decision-making, and sharing of work (Pollack & Hutchison, 2018). Training takes place predominately at Grand Valley Institution for Women and are led by incarcerated and non-incarcerated alumni of W2B classes and W2B instructors. Within W2B courses, participants are asked to engage in holistic learning involving mind, body, spirit, and emotions. Within this framework, participants: • Learn how to develop partnerships between educational and correctional institutions. • Learn experiential activities such as applied theater and circle pedagogies to explore course content and develop curriculum. • Understand the unique dynamics of a W2B classroom. • Learn how to “facilitate” versus “instruct.” • Experience a collaborative learning community within a prison setting. Overall, W2B programs have expanded to be offered through partnerships with other post-secondary institutions including Centennial College and University of Ottawa. To date, 106 instructors from Canada and Europe have been trained in the W2B teaching model leading to the expansion of W2B education to ten Canadian correctional facilities and universities. Amadeusz and Walls to Bridges continue to be the two main organizations in Ontario leading the way in offering educational programs to those incarcerated within correctional facilities.

Findings, Discussions, and Recommendations from the Literature Review Three major findings are outlined below based on the literature review focusing on access to education for those incarcerated in the Canadian context. Following each finding, a series of recommendations are suggested for what can be changed, altered, and introduced to mitigate some of the challenges and barriers identified. Finding #1: There is a lack of information available to the public about all the education programs offered in correctional facilities including who it is offered by, how often, and what are the program goals and outcomes. Information that is currently available via government websites is generic in nature. Access to information is a systemic barrier that disadvantages families of those who have a member

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

755

incarcerated as well as those who are released and are seeking relevant programs and services to better themselves and their living circumstances. Recommendations: Whereas information about some programs are outlined in various reports, there needs to be a tab or a central hub on Correctional Service of Canada’s website that provides a compiled list of information about the various educational programs offered, which organizations offer it, the scope and duration of each program, which institutions it is offered within, and criteria for participation and completion of the program. Collection and sharing of race-based data is also recommended by each institution in terms of who gets approved or declined to participate in such programs, rate of success in completion of each program offered, and barriers in delivery of the programs. A focus on creating access to information via a central hub with user-friendly language will educate the public about the challenges and barriers involved in delivering educational programs within correctional facilities and assist those incarcerated in accessing opportunities that are available. It will also help create new partnerships with relevant organizations and community agencies to assist increasing the quality and quantity of educational opportunities to promote rehabilitation and integration of incarcerated individuals back into the community. It is highly recommended for the provincial governments to also compile a list of organizations that offer relevant post-release programs and services to ensure continuity of care. This comprehensive list should outline the various programs available and the criteria and cost for participation in such programs and services. This will assist those who have been incarcerated and their families to find relevant services to support their unique needs and circumstances to more effectively reintegrate back into the community and become independent. This is important given that one of the systemic barriers that most formerly incarcerated people experience is navigating the realities of the day-to-day social world after being excluded from community life for a long period. These recommendations will help mitigate the systemic barrier of inaccessibility to information while incarcerated and post-release. Finding #2: Access to education needs to be more of a priority supported with funding and resources from all levels of government to promote rehabilitation and effective reintegration of those incarcerated back into the community settings. This will lead to savings for the justice system as it “costs Correctional Service Canada an average of $111,202 annually to incarcerate one man (and twice as much to incarcerate one woman), with only $2950 of that money spent on education per prisoner” (Chan et al., 2017, para. 16). Currently, the type of programs offered are limited, there is a lack of capacity within institutions to meet educational demands, programs offered lack quality due to restrictions in how they can be delivered, and there is lack of partnerships with post-secondary institutions. Majority of the educational programs offered are geared for obtaining a high school diploma and correspondence based. They do not take into consideration unique needs and circumstances of those incarcerated such as limited access to learning tools and platforms. Recommendations: It is recommended that a national funding organization is created similar to the Laughing Gull Foundation in the United States which has a unique branch focusing on “Higher Education in Prison.” The national organization

756

A. Eizadirad

would annually review proposals for programs and partnerships to improve access to education for those incarcerated (Laughing Gull Foundation, 2020). A committee should be created with representatives from various stakeholders to assess the applications based on clear criteria outlined and communicated in advance to the public. This will facilitate new innovative ideas, programs, and partnerships to be presented, assessed, approved, and initiated to meet the demand for more educational opportunities within prisons, jails, and correctional facilities. Overall, more funding and resources needs to be allocated for education and the government needs to provide incentives for universities to create post-secondary educational programs and pathways for those incarcerated. This can be initiated on a small scale as a pilot project involving a handful of post-secondary colleges and universities. It is also recommended that a national list is created outlining various educational programs offered by post-secondary institutions that support incarcerated learners. Important factors such as criteria for getting in, costs, duration of the program, and how courses are delivered should be outlined. The creation of a national or provincial government branch dedicated to “Higher Education in Prison” will center the goal of rehabilitation, reduce long-term costs affiliated with keeping people incarcerated, and lead to more effective reintegration of those incarcerated back into the community. Such level of commitment from the government in making access to education a priority with incentives for post-secondary educations to create and maintain partnerships will lead to innovative policies and practices that will modernize how education is offered with delivering programming in jail settings. This multi-layer collaborative approach will allow relevant non-profits and community organizations to enter innovative partnerships with post-secondary institutions to facilitate delivery of programming in a manner that is socio-culturally relevant and responsive to the needs of those incarcerated and reflect their circumstances with respect to access to resources. Also, it is highly recommended that selective grants are created by the Canadian government for those incarcerated to minimize costs for enrolling into educational programs. This can have similar attributes and characteristics to the Pell Grants in the United States, but it needs to give consideration for local and national needs in Canada instead of being a copy and paste approach. This can be initiated as a pilot project over a 2- to 5-year period, as it is important to collect data to see the results and analyze the efficacy of the initiative over time. In Ontario, such initiative can be incorporated as part of the Ontario Students Assistance Program (OSAP) which provides grants and loans to students to pursue post-secondary education. Overall, the various levels of government must provide incentives for post-secondary institutions to provide alternative or adapted educational programs to ensure access to educational opportunities are increased in jails and correctional facilities and operate in more equitable manners. Where there are opportunities for collaboration between students who are incarcerated and outside students, like the Walls to Bridges program, it is beneficial for students to learn and share their lived experiences and grow as a community of learners. The benefits are beyond impacting those who are incarcerated as it also provides experiential learning opportunities for those not incarcerated by learning about social justice and the complexities and nuances in doing equity work.

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

757

Finding #3: There is a need to modernize policies, practices, and processes in jails, prisons, and correctional facilities to create more opportunities for access to quality education. This involves creating a unique intake assessment for the remand population similar to those sentenced, improving processes within intake assessment, more effective data collection techniques, sharing of data across institutions with multiple relevant stakeholders, and more resources and space allocated for educational programs. This would contribute to an increase in educational opportunities to meet demand, increase in attendance for programs with low enrolment, and overall better quality and consistency in how educational programs are offered. Recommendations: Various changes are recommended as part of modernization to improve access and the quality of education programs offered to those incarcerated. These include upgrading libraries in terms of space available for teaching and learning; updating the list of books, magazines, and other educational materials available based on interests and identities of those incarcerated; better access to computers, educational tools, space, and assistive technology in a manner that is safe for conducting research and completing course assignments; and providing specific training for instructors and staff to offer educational programs more effectively. All facilities should be upgraded so they are enabled to use video conferencing which would lead to creation and access to more educational opportunities and course offerings. This can also be supplemented by allocating more time for trained and certified instructors and staff to lead educational programs. Access to technology and resources to teach and learn is critical as currently almost all post-secondary courses offered to those incarcerated is paper-based correspondence which can be limiting in terms of how fast the person is able to engage with the course content and receive timely feedback about their progress. At all levels of government, there is room for improvement in digitalizing how information is shared to facilitate transition in cases where those incarcerated are transferred to another facility or re-enter a correctional facility due to separate charges. A great resource with detailed recommendations for how to make improvements in teaching and learning conditions within prisons is a 44-page report by Erzen et al. (2019) titled Equity and Excellence in Practice: A Guide for Higher Education in Prison. The report identifies seven core content areas to promote equity and excellence for higher education in prison. These areas include program design; partnerships and collaboration; faculty recruitment, training, and supervision; curriculum; pedagogy; instructional resources; and academic support services. Improvements and adaptations in these areas with consideration for unique needs of those incarcerated and their limited access to resources will contribute to creating greater access to education and higher quality programming in a manner that is equitable and promotes the long-term vision of rehabilitation and reintegration back into the community.

Summary and Conclusion It is important to ensure those who are incarcerated have access to education which is their human right as outlined in Article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 2021). Currently, this is not the case in

758

A. Eizadirad

Canada as access to educational opportunities for those remanded into custody are limited. Instead, punitive measures such as lockdowns and solitary confinement are used as common practices to manage day-to-day realities and escalating situations in prisons and jails (Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, 2019; Sapers et al., 2018). These practices are reactive in their approach and often have harmful shortand long-term impacts on those incarcerated. More importantly, these practices do not align with the long-term objective of effective rehabilitation and reintegration of those incarcerated back into community settings. Overall, access to education for those incarcerated remains limited and an underdeveloped sector in Canada. Organizations such as Amadeusz and Walls to Bridges are leading the way in Ontario, but more funding and resources need to be allocated to expand their programming as there is a large demand for it. A holistic approach involving synergetic partnerships with non-profits, community agencies, and postsecondary institutions are required to revamp and modernize the system at all levels. This is significant given that education is the most significant protective factor in reducing recidivism. Overall, this literature review outlines why the current system in Canada is inequitable, how systemic barriers disadvantage those incarcerated with accessing educational programs, and why we need to introduce new changes to modernize the system at all levels. New improvements and changes will lead to savings in monetary costs and a reduction in recidivism. The introduction and implementation of such new changes needs to be a collective effort involving all levels of the government and advocacy and allyship from grassroots organizations. If we want to be honest with improving access to education for those incarcerated and quality of such programs, we must move from judgment and critique to understanding and collective action in our various roles in the community given our respective access to power and privilege. Acknowledgment Funding for this research project was provided by Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer (ONCAT: https://www.oncat.ca/en/welcome-oncat)

References Amadeusz. (2020). Amadeusz annual report 2019. https://amadeusz.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/ 10/Amadeusz-Annual-Report-2019.pdf Amadeusz. (2021). http://amadeusz.ca/ Bazos, A., & Hausman, J. (2004). Correctional education as a crime control program. UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, Department of Policy Studies. https://www. prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/Correctional%20Education%20as%20a%20Crime% 20Control%20Program%2C%20Bazos%20and%20Hausman%2C%202004.pdf Block, S., & Galabuzi, G. (2011). Canada’s colour coded labour market: The gap for racialized workers. Wellesley Institute and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. http://www. wellesleyinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Colour_Coded_Labour_MarketFINAL.pdf Chan, J., Churn, L., & McLeod, M. (2017). Everything you were never taught about Canada’s prison systems. A primer on Canada’s urgent human rights crisis. http://www.

Systemic Racism and Inaccessibility to Education for the Incarcerated in Canada

759

intersectionalanalyst.com/intersectional-analyst/2017/7/20/everything-you-were-never-taughtabout-canadas-prison-systems Colour of Poverty- Colour of Change. (2019). Fact sheets. https://colourofpoverty.ca/fact-sheets/ Correctional Services Canada. (2018). Guidelines for education programs. https://www.csc-scc.gc. ca/acts-and-regulations/720-1-gl-eng.shtml#s2f Correctional Services Canada. (2019). Education programs. https://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/002/0020005-en.shtml Correctional Services Program. (2017). Trends in the use of remand in Canada, 2004/2005 to 2014/ 2015. Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/85-002-x/ 2017001/article/14691-eng.pdf?st¼NFZnbOsH Criminal Records Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-47). Government of Canada. https://laws-lois.justice.gc. ca/PDF/C-47.pdf Davis, L. M., Bozick, R., Steele, J. L., Saunders, J., & Miles, J. N. (2013). Evaluating the effectiveness of correctional education: A meta-analysis of programs that provide education to incarcerated adults. The Rand Corporation. Bureau of Justice Assistance: U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR266.html Eizadirad, A. (2016). Is it “bad” kids or “bad” places? Where is all the violence originating from? Youth violence in the city of Toronto. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 38(2), 162. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2016.1155956 Eizadirad, A. (2019). Inequality of opportunity: Experiences of racialized and minoritized students. In Decolonizing educational assessment (pp. 41–63). Palgrave Macmillan. Erzen, T., Gould, M., & Lewen, J. (2019). Equity and excellence in practice: A guide for higher education in prison. Alliance for Higher Education in Prison and Prison University Project. https:// assets-global.website-files.com/5e3dd3cf0b4b54470c8b1be1/5e3dd3cf0b4b5492e78b1d24_ Equity%2BExcellence-English-web.pdf George, P., Gopal, T. N., & Woods, S. (2014). Look at my life: Access to education for the remand population in Ontario. Canadian Review of Social Policy, 70, 34–47. Government of Canada. (2014). Criminal Records Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-47). http://laws-lois. justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-47/page-1.html John Howard Society of Ontario. (2016). Reintegration in Ontario: Practices, priorities, and effective models. https://johnhoward.on.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Reintegration-inOntario-Final.pdf John Howard Society of Ontario. (2018). The invisible burden: Police records and the barriers to employment in Toronto. https://policerecordhub.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/The-InvisibleBurden-Report-FINAL.pdf Laughing Gull Foundation. (2020). Laughing Gull Foundation announces over $1.3 million in grantmaking toward organizations focused on higher education for justice-involved individuals. https://www.laughinggull.org/hep-grant-announcement-2020 Malakieh, J. (2019). Adult and youth correctional statistics in Canada, 2017/2018. The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/ 00010-eng.pdf?st¼XU6dminv McMurtry, R., & Curling, A. (2008). The review of the roots of youth violence. Service Ontario Publications. http://www.children.gov.on.ca/htdocs/english/documents/youthandthelaw/ rootsofyouthviolence-summary.pdf Office of the Auditor General of Ontario. (2019). Annual report 2019: Reports on correctional services and court operations (Vol. 3). Queen’s Printer for Ontario. https://www.auditor.on.ca/ en/content/annualreports/arreports/en19/2019AR_v3_en_web.pdf Pollack, S., & Hutchison, J. (2018). Impact of Walls to Bridges classes on correctional facilities. Walls to Bridges. http://wallstobridges.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Impact-on-CorrectionalFacilities-Final-Report-2.pdf Portelli, J., & Sharma, M. (2014). Uprooting and settling in: The invisible strength of deficit thinking. LEARNing Landscapes, 8(1), 251–267.

760

A. Eizadirad

Richer, I., McLean-McKay, M., Bradley, S., & Horne, S. (2015). Evaluation of CSC’s education programs and services. Correctional Services Canada. https://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/publications/ 005007-2014-eng.shtml#s3..2.3.4 Roderique, H. (2019). Why are most people in prison unconvicted? The Local. Issue 3. https:// thelocal.to/why-are-most-people-in-prison-unconvicted/ Sapers, H., Neault, N., McConaghy, E., Monteiro, A., Deshman, A., & Athwal, S. (2017). Corrections in Ontario: Directions for Reform. Independent Review of Ontario Corrections. https:// www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/sites/default/files/content/mcscs/docs/Corrections%20in%20Ontario %2C%20Directions%20for%20Reform.pdf Sapers, H., Murphy, Y., Walker, C. M., Monteiro, A., Crete, J. P., & St-Cyr, K. (2018). Institutional violence in Ontario. Final report. Case study: Toronto South Detention Centre. Independent Review of Ontario Corrections. http://www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/sites/default/files/content/ mcscs/docs/Institutional%20Violence%20in%20Ontario%20Corrections%20Final% 20Report.pdf Toronto District School Board. (2017). Enhancing equity task force: Report and recommendations. http://www.tdsb.on.ca/Portals/0/community/docs/EETFReportPdfVersion.pdf United Nations. (2021). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/universaldeclaration-human-rights/#:~:text¼Everyone%20has%20the%20right%20to%20freedom% 20of%20thought%2C%20conscience%20and,%2C%20practice%2C%20worship%20and% 20observance United Way. (2019). Rebalancing the opportunity equation. https://www.unitedwaygt.org/file/ 2019_OE_fullreport_FINAL.pdf Walls to Bridges. (2016). What we do. http://wallstobridges.ca/what-we-do/ Williams, C., Jones, D., & Bailey, R. (2013). From the margins: Building curriculum for youth in transition. Ministry of Justice & Youth Association for Academics, Athletics and Character Education. Woods, S., Gopal, T. N., & George, P. (2018). Responding to neoliberalism. Critical Social Work, 19(2), 59–74. Zainey, K. M. (2010). The constitutional infirmity of the current federal sentencing system: How the use of uncharged and acquitted conduct to enhance a defendant's sentence violates due process. Loyola Law Review, 56(2), 375.

Part VII Curriculum as Designing

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields Toward Transformative Design Douglas B. Clark, David Scott, and Joshua P. DiPasquale

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Design Process: Design Processes Versus Design Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traditional Industrial Perspectives on Design Process in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Perspectives on Design Thinking from the Design Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Perspectives on Participatory Design in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Participatory Design Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design-Based Implementation Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Potential for Synthesis and Refinement Across Perspectives on Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

764 765 766 768 772 773 773 774 775 777

Abstract

This chapter explores traditional approaches to educational design that have been predominant in education for the past century, considers the limitations of these approaches for fostering transformative second-order changes in schools in ways that can counter normative hegemonic arrangements, and contemplates the possibilities of approaches to design from design fields and research on participatory design. The chapter closes with an exploration of potential approaches for educational design going forward to pursue second-order changes that introduce new goals, structures, and roles to transform education in service of more equitable futures. Keywords

Design thinking · Participatory design · Backward design · Equity · Transformative change D. B. Clark (*) · D. Scott · J. P. DiPasquale Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_52

763

764

D. B. Clark et al.

Introduction A significant body of research suggests that the cultural configurations of schools, including their governance structures, organization, and teachers’ approaches to curriculum and instruction, have not substantially changed in North America over the last century (Cuban, 1988, 2020; Tyack & Cuban, 1997; Hess, 2011; Payne, 2008). Acclaimed historian Cuban (1988) ascribes this reification to a traditional focus in education on first-order, as opposed to second-order, changes. As Cuban (1988) explains, “first-order changes try to make what already exists more efficient and more effective, without disturbing the basic organizational features, without substantially altering the ways in which adults and children perform their roles,” while “second-order changes seek to alter the fundamental ways in which organizations are put together” (p. 72). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, intensification of the global climate crisis, growing economic inequality, proliferation of fake news, increased global migration, calls for justice from minoritized groups, and demands for reconciliation and decolonization from Indigenous peoples have highlighted the need for new approaches to education involving second-order changes that can address issues central to larger shifting patterns of privilege and marginalization. There is a need in this regard to think creatively and explicitly about the assumptions and preconceptions of how we think about and enact education, not just at the macrolevel of how schools are organized, but at the everyday level of how teachers teach, how they organize activities for their students, and how students engage in these activities. Questions remain, however, around how, and the extent to which, prominent and still emerging ways to conceptualize and carry out educational design can work to foster the kinds of second-order changes that might address the immense challenges and inequity present in the world today. Seeking to lend insight into this question, this chapter examines the limitations and affordances of various approaches to educational design for fostering second-order changes in schools that might advance more preferable educational futures. We begin by defining what we mean by design processes and distinguishing between design processes and the more typical focus on design principles. Next, we review the traditional approach to design processes that persistently informs design in preservice teacher programs, school districts/jurisdiction, and learning environments. We then discuss two alternative perspectives on educational design and research that are increasingly gaining traction in the field of education: (a) perspectives on design thinking arising out of design fields and (b) perspectives on participatory design. Each of these perspectives, we argue, offers opportunities for transformative design of learning environments through fostering second-order changes beyond what is usually possible through the traditional design processes. We conclude the chapter with a discussion outlining possible fusions and intersections of these various design perspectives that could better serve all students and address issues residing within the complex and diverse social and cultural worlds in which we live. As part of this discussion, we consider the challenges of integrating these perspectives on design in a manner that does not simply trade one approach for

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

765

another in ways that would simply perpetuate status quo hegemonic arrangements in education.

Defining Design Process: Design Processes Versus Design Principles Before discussing design processes in education, it is important to first distinguish between what we mean by design processes in comparison to the more typical focus on design principles. In defining the nature of design principles, Kali (2006) explains that design fields commonly “gather and abstract designers’ experiences and research by creating collections of design principles or design patterns that synthesize design knowledge and can be used to guide new designs” (p. 188). Kali points to examples of this phenomena in areas from architecture (Alexander et al., 1977), information sciences (Tufte, 1983), and computer science (Gamma et al., 1995). This dynamic can be seen in the field of education where researchers commonly articulate the implications of their work in the form of abstracted design principles (whether or not the researchers use this specific term) to highlight the design characteristics of productive learning environments. Examples of this phenomena include rubrics outlining principles and characteristics to help educators evaluate the extent to which classroom projects they are planning possess the necessary design elements of project-based learning (Krajcik & Blumenfeld, 2006) or discipline-based inquiry (Galileo Educational Network, 2016). Other examples of this phenomena in education that might not use the term “design principles” but work toward these goals include principles emphasizing the importance of drawing on communities’ and families’ funds of knowledge to guide pedagogical actions (e.g., González et al., 2006) as well as the significance of cognitive principles involving visual and auditory processes for optimizing learning (Mayer, 2005). The most well-known set of design principles in the domain of education is probably the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework (e.g., Rose, 2000; Hall et al., 2006; Hall et al., 2012), which presents guidelines for the design of curricular materials and learning experiences to support students with a broad range of needs, goals, abilities, interests, and language backgrounds. A common thread across design principle perspectives, then, is that design principles focus on articulating the characteristics of productive learning environments, or move in this direction by articulating the characteristics of counterproductive learning environments. By comparison, a focus on design processes defines characteristics of the processes through which desirable learning environments might be designed rather than defining the characteristics of the learning environments themselves. Specifically, by the term design process we mean both the articulation of the process of design as well as articulation of the mindsets that contribute to and support productive design. In so doing, we purposefully combine what McKenney et al. (2015) refer to as “technical” and “phenomenological” perspectives in terms of the activity flow of the

766

D. B. Clark et al.

design process as well as the productive mindsets of designers that facilitate the design process. Certainly, designers might focus on design process as well as design principles, but in education much research is focused on design principles with less explicit articulation, particularly in the scholarly literature, of the design processes themselves. While design principles can serve as powerful heuristics to guide design of educational environments, without also attending explicitly to the processes by which educators design, educators miss a powerful opportunity to more fully realize transformative second-order changes because design principles tend to already assume or dictate a frame for the design rather than supporting or prioritizing consideration and exploration of new frames, which is an explicit goal of newer design thinking and participatory design processes. By frames, we refer here to the differing vantage points, perspective, and conceptual lenses by which “we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them” (Schön, 1984, p. 40).

Traditional Industrial Perspectives on Design Process in Education While attending to the design process offers possibilities for transformative secondorder changes, traditional design processes in education have historically focused on technical rational ways of thinking rooted in the “backward design” method first developed by Bobbitt (1918) and then fully articulated and popularized by Tyler (1949) three decades later. This design tradition continued in education with design processes and procedures associated with task analysis as articulated by Gagné (1970). Borrowing heavily from behaviorism, these process-based frameworks start with a learning objective and then work backward to plan for instruction. Within Gagne’s proposed design process, for example, task analysis is conducted to decompose higher-order skills and goals into subordinate constituent elements. Instructional design then focuses on sequential instruction of subordinate elements. The most popular approach to design taught in almost all teacher education programs in North America today, Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), continues to reflect this backward design process focusing on a sequence of (a) identifying the targeted outcomes in terms of big ideas and skills; (b) determining how those outcomes will be assessed; and (c) choosing learning activities that will support the targeted outcomes as measured by the assessments. The ongoing prominence of these traditional approaches for conceptualizing design processes in the field of education may explain, at least in part, why education as practiced in K-12 classrooms has changed so little in North America over the last century (Cuban, 2020; Payne, 2008; Tyack & Cuban, 1997). These approaches to design are emblematic of a focus on first-order changes in educational environments, as opposed to second-order changes that seek to fundamentally alter the ways education is understood and organized (Tyack & Cuban, 1997). The reason for this focus on first-order changes can be largely attributed to the ways these processes

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

767

reflect a technical rational stance toward design. By “technical rational,” we refer to perspectives and approaches that view “practitioners as ‘instrumental problem solvers’ applying well-defined solutions to well-defined problems” (Anderson & Coleman, 2015, p. 270). Through these lenses, educational design is framed as an act of instrumental problem-solving emphasizing correct solutions proceeding from a preset goal or aim, with little or no emphasis placed on deeply exploring the nature of the problem or the ends to be achieved (e.g., Schön, 1984; Strong et al., 2016). An emphasis on technical rational ways of thinking and designing can be seen within the way backward design approaches are often taken up in educational contexts. By focusing primarily on learning goals as articulated in curriculum standards as the objective, most of the effort and emphasis in the design process is then invested in working backward from this given starting point. In such instances, there is a limited emphasis, however, on supporting or prioritizing consideration and exploration of new aims or purposes that might “transform familiar ways of doing things into new ways of solving persistent problems” (Tyack & Cuban, 1997, p. 72). If designers seek to advance more equitable futures in our schools and society, attention therefore needs to consider not only the discrete learning outcomes found in subject-specific programs of study but also the nature of educational problems, the frame the designer is working within, and what might be appropriate design goals (Clark, 2021). One example of the importance of attending to the frame of design is highlighted by Dwayne Donald (2010) in relation to low graduation rates and academic success among Indigenous students in Canada. As Donald explains, much discussion around this issue tends to be framed in terms of how to raise graduation rates and academic outcomes of Indigenous students in ways that imply a cultural deficit wherein culture becomes a code word for race and problematic difference. Donald clarifies that such a framing fails to consider the ways the lack of success seen in Indigenous students is directly connected to the historic and current state of the relationship among Indigenous and settler populations in Canada, and all its associated dynamics and tensions including the history and ongoing legacies of the Indian Residential School system. Donald discusses a more productive frame wherein the lack of academic success among many Indigenous students in school is directly connected to the historic and current state of the relationship between settler Indigenous populations at the heart of this issue. From this frame, Donald argues for making attentiveness to the relationship an educational priority, not just for Indigenous students but for all students and society writ large, equal to what we are talking about in terms of Indigenous student success. Another example of the importance of reframing comes from the domain of history education in terms of the learning intentions teachers might choose to focus on and subsequently design assessment tasks and instructional activities around would vary greatly based on what they believe the overall aim or organizing problem of teaching history to be. Such a framing could include the problem of helping students apprehend predefined historical content with limited attention to why a particular historical narrative is important for students to understand. However, a teacher could equally focus on having students critically assess dominant

768

D. B. Clark et al.

historical narratives, as well as ones that emerge from people and groups that have been silenced and excluded, in ways where the students might use this knowledge to inspire civic action in relation to contemporary issues of equity and racism within the communities in which they live (Scott, 2013). These insights highlight the importance, as we discuss below, of approaching the design process more in line with design fields that focus on problem finding and the lived experiences and perspectives of stakeholders to better support second-order changes.

Perspectives on Design Thinking from the Design Fields The linear, instrumental, and technical rational tradition of design in education stands in contrast to the ways design is conceptualized and understood in design fields (Svihla et al., 2016). While design fields focused heavily on the proposition that design could be a highly rational and scientific process through the middle and late middle portions of the twentieth century (e.g., Simon, 1969), the field underwent significant paradigmatic shifts starting in the 1970s when design began to be understood more holistically in terms of the complexity and “wicked” nature of important design challenges that preclude, defy, and negate such technical rational approaches to problem-solving (e.g., Buchanan, 1992; Rittel & Webber, 1973; Schön, 1984). This more human-centered approach to design – often termed a designerly stance toward design – includes: (a) deeply exploring the perspectives, experiences, needs, and goals of stakeholders in relation to wicked problems; (b) “reframing” design challenges by stepping back and reconsidering the vantage points, perspectives, and metaphors being used to define the actual nature of the challenges; and (c) engaging in ongoing cycles of ideation and iteration of possible responses through multiple rounds of feedback from stakeholders (Buchanan, 1992; Dorst, 2011; Norman, 2013; Schön, 1984). Particularly over the last decade, there have been increased calls to integrate these more human-centered perspectives on design into education (e.g., Kirschner, 2015; Koh et al., 2015a; Razzouk & Shute, 2012; Svihla et al., 2016). The most prominent approach to human-centered design in education, and across many other fields as well, involves the notion of design thinking as articulated and promoted by IDEO and the Stanford Design School (e.g., Brown, 2008; IDEO, 2012). Design thinking as conceptualized by IDEO/Stanford perspectives articulates stages of the design process that are referred to with various names but generally involve four key moments: (a) discovery (where the designer or team comes to understand the nature of the challenge, does background research, and often works to develop empathy with stakeholders), (b) interpretation (where the designer or team works to synthesize what is been learned in a way to frame or reframe the opportunities for design and the specific question that the design process seeks to address), (c) ideation (where the designer or team generates and refines a range of possible ideas to pursue to address the design question identified in the interpretation phase), and (d) experimentation (where the designer or team begins iteratively prototyping, gathering feedback, and refining the approach) (e.g., IDEO, 2012). The IDEO/

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

769

Stanford perspectives on design also heavily emphasize that design thinking mindsets, such as embracing ambiguity, as well as the need for empathy and radical collaboration is also central to the design process. In terms of the affordances of design thinking for fostering second-order changes as compared to traditional backward design, there is an emphasis on the importance of: (a) divergent thinking in addition to the primarily convergent thinking of the backward design approaches; (b) coming to understand the needs and perspectives of stakeholders; (c) exploring the problem before framing or reframing the specific articulation of the design question to be explored rather than jumping in with assumptions of the questions to be designed for as foregone conclusions; and (d) collecting feedback throughout the design process rather than completing the design process before seeking out feedback. This structuring thus has substantial affordances compared to traditional backward design approaches in terms of moving beyond “first-order changes [that] try to make what already exists more efficient and more effective, without disturbing the basic organizational features, without substantially altering the ways in which adults and children perform their roles” (Cuban, 1988, p. 72). By creating an opening to rethink the opportunities and questions to explore, design thinking can create the possibility of exploring “second-order changes [that] introduce new goals, structures and roles that transform familiar ways of doing things into new ways of solving persistent problems” (Cuban, 1988, p. 72). Other research from design fields suggest, however, that design thinking thus conceptualized does not fully constitute a designerly stance that focuses on secondorder changes in service of transforming the cultural configurations within schools. While basic design thinking approaches create openings to rethink educational challenges, issues, and problems related to equity, diversity, and inclusion that might foster second-order changes, research in design fields emphasize the importance of focusing the design process on what are known as “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Buchanan, 1992). Wicked problems are problems that are difficult or impossible to solve, have multiple possible explanations depending on the worldview and perspective of the observer, are often symptoms of deeper structural problems, have no single solution, involve complex interactions of stakeholders with differing needs and values, and resist easy solutions because of complex interdependencies that result in or reveal new challenges when the problem is explored (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Buchanan, 1992). While research has explicitly focused on wicked or ill-formed problems in the context of design thinking with both preservice teachers (O’Byrne et al., 2018; Harth & Panke, 2019) and in-service teachers (Hubbard & Datnow, 2020; Marin et al., 2013; Retna, 2016; Sheehan et al., 2018), the IDEO and the Stanford Design School (Brown, 2008; IDEO, 2012) models of design thinking do not explicitly foreground or frame design challenges in terms of wicked problems. For example, the IDEO (2012) design thinking models encourage designers to frame problems in terms of “How might we. . .” (HMW) questions, which can foster a tendency to place clear boundaries and constraints around problems whereby problems are viewed as relatively “tame,” rather than dynamic, complex, ill-defined, and confusing (i.e., wicked) (Buchanan, 1992, p. 15).

770

D. B. Clark et al.

Notably, the implementations in education of IDEO and the Stanford design thinking models, paralleling the situation in the field of business management, often do not engage with, or reference, other literature in design fields (JohanssonSköldberg et al., 2013; Sosa, 2015). Reflective of this disconnect, design thinking as taken up in educational practice often does not deeply consider key elements inherent to a designerly stance toward inquiry such as the notion of “reframing” or “positioning” a design problem (Buchanan, 1992; Dorst, 2011; Gulari, 2015; Schön, 1984). While educators employing a technical rational stance toward design would be largely unconscious of how they are framing a problematic situation, those adopting a more designerly stance would work to reframe or reposition a problem by stepping back and considering it through differing vantage points, perspectives, and metaphors (Dorst, 2011; Svihla & Reeve, 2016). Working against the tendency of interpreting issues or challenges in education through traditional discourses, a designerly stance to framing challenges educators to view problems through nondominant and often overlooked discourses in education (e.g., feminist, ecological, and critical view). Through this process, educators would then be able to reframe a challenge in ways that might better advance second-order changes that can counter status quo hegemonic arrangements in education. As an example of how educational problems might be approached differently, and more productively, through problem framing, one can look to the problem of bullying in schools. One of the dominant discourses that permeates antibullying policy, the design of interventions, programs, and educational practice in general in institutions across Canada and North America, for instance, often frames the problem of bullying as an individual behavioral issue, as opposed to a social and systemic problem (Winton & Tuters, 2015, p. 123). While such framings may be relevant in certain isolated cases, as bullying may sometimes be a uniquely individual behavioral or developmental problem, this perspective obfuscates and neglects sociocultural influences related to issues of marginalization and exclusion, such as racism, classism, and homophobia, that might be implicated in the phenomena of bullying (Ringrose & Renold, 2010). In their critical examination of the province of Ontario’s bullying policies, Winton and Tuters (2015) argue that this framing often undermines critical democracy and perpetuates a neoliberal and neoconservative status quo. Specifically, such a framing often results in antibullying interventions that are predominantly targeted at the individual level, including palliative punitive responses, zero-tolerance policies, and remedial mediation and counseling that inordinately impact students that come from marginalized communities and socioeconomic situations (Walton, 2005, 2010). Winton and Tuters (2015) argue that more critical and structural understandings of bullying might help educators see the phenomena more broadly where increased attention is given to how the bullying that occurs in schools often reflects larger social inequities. Bullying programs designed through this frame might in turn focus on helping teachers and students make “connections between how people outside schools exercise power over others and how these processes are reflected and recreated in schools” (Winton & Tuters, 2015, p. 137).

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

771

As can be seen, reconceptualizing the problem of bullying as a wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973), or as one that is not easily identified and contained, may allow for a more designerly stance that opens the problem up for consideration through different frames (Dorst, 2011). Paralleling the work of Winton and Tuters (2015), for instance, Meyer (2008) demonstrates how viewing the problem of bullying through a feminist lens can help educators understand and grapple with the complex power relations, including homophobia and sexism, that might be implicated in the phenomenon. This new frame would consequently help educators and policymakers “to examine critically the impacts of gendered harassment in schools and to develop tools to work against it” (p. 45). In this way, the problem of bullying is not narrowly viewed as an individual behavioral problem but also as a feminist one that can account for sociocultural issues of difference (Walton, 2011). Such a reframing of the problem of bullying from what Buchanan (1992) terms a determinate problem to an indeterminate one “implies there are no definitive conditions or limits to design problems” (p. 16) since “the designer must discover or invent a particular subject out of the problems and issues of specific circumstances” (p. 16). In other words, reframing the problem of bullying in schools means that potential solutions cannot be evaluated in terms of being true or false but rather as only successful or unsuccessful and entirely dependent on the context and worldview of the designer and stakeholders involved in their design, which has profound implications for how we ascribe value to different and possibly competing perspectives about given educational problems. The limitations of how human-centered design is most often taken up in educational contexts can also be seen in how stakeholders are positioned in the design process. While IDEO (2012), for example, emphasizes the ways design thinking is a “deeply human approach,” it also asserts that it “relies on your ability to be intuitive, to interpret what you observe and to develop ideas that are emotionally meaningful to those you are designing for” (p. 14). Theorists in design fields, including Sanders and Stappers (2008), have criticized this designer-centered stance for the ways it promotes an “expert mindset” built on “hierarchy and control” (p. 9) that assumes the designer can determine what is best for those implicated in a problem. Additionally, while perspectives on design as promoted by IDEO and the Stanford Design School heavily emphasize that the process is not linear, and that there will be substantial iteration and recursion back and forth between stages of the process, the design thinking process is articulated from a procedural perspective. Reflective of a procedural stance toward design, there is often a focus in the educational literature on the relatively straightforward implementation of IDEO/Stanford conceptions of design thinking for preservice teachers (e.g., Henriksen et al., 2020; Shively & Palilonis, 2018) or in-service teachers (e.g., Spoon et al., 2020; Hennessey & Mueller, 2020; Scheer et al., 2012). Recent research in the field of education, however, is moving beyond IDEO/ Stanford conceptualization of design thinking, by incorporating expanded perspectives from design fields to address wicked problems (e.g., Norman, 2013; Schön, 1984) while working with both preservice teachers (e.g., Jordan, 2016) and in-service teachers (e.g., Goldman et al., 2020; Svihla & Reeve, 2016; Svihla et al., 2016;

772

D. B. Clark et al.

Koh et al., 2015b; Jordan et al., 2014). Within this body of literature, there is a particular focus on framing and reframing design challenges in terms of larger complex structural, social, cultural, historical, and political systems that are implicated in learning environments and students’ opportunities to learn. While the IDEO/ Stanford conceptualization certainly brings strengths in terms of how concrete and accessible it is to new designers, the broadening of conceptualizations of design thinking that are beginning to enter the field of education create many more opportunities for deep consideration of the framing and reframing process whereby challenges might be reconsidered from novel perspectives that have the possibility of generating second-order changes that account for greater equity in our schools and society.

Perspectives on Participatory Design in Education Echoing the concerns discussed above, other researchers propose that the approaches to design thinking outlined in the previous section have substantial potential to sustain and extend neoliberal perspectives furthering the loss of already marginalized identities, perspectives, cultures, and value systems (Gram, 2019; CBC Radio, 2019; Taboada et al., 2020). Essentially, while many design thinking approaches emphasize understanding stakeholder needs, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and even a focus on radical collaboration to include multiple perspectives on the design team, most perspectives on design thinking still envision the designer or the design team as designing “for” stakeholders rather than designing “with” stakeholders, which runs the risk of recreating or perpetuating inequitable power structures and barriers. This dynamic can be seen, for example, in the ways people with differing abilities can be seen as recipients design rather than participants in the design process itself. Liz Jackson, a disability advocate and design strategist, outlines how this designer-centric perspective can lead to “disability dongles” involving an “elegant and well-intended, but ultimately useless solution to a problem people with disabilities never knew they had” (CBC Radio, 2019, para. 2). Reflective of insights like this, approaches to participatory design (Björgvinsson et al., 2012; Ehn, 1988; Luck, 2018) and decolonial design (Taboada et al., 2020) have evolved in design fields resulting in approaches to collaborative design that are more just, equitable, and counterhegemonic. Building on these ideas, similar approaches to participatory design have been explored in education (e.g., DiSalvo et al., 2017; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Bang et al., 2012; Penuel & Gallagher, 2009; Penuel et al., 2020). In this section, we outline some of the major currents of participatory design in educational research and conceptualize them according to their potential to enact second-order changes in schools by designing with, instead of for, stakeholders. That is to say, we seek to demonstrate how several recent participatory approaches to design in education may provide avenues to “introduce new goals, structures and roles that transform familiar ways of doing things into new ways of solving persistent problems” (Cuban, 1988, p. 72) in educational settings. In particular, the following paragraphs consider

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

773

participatory design research (PDR), design-based implementation research (DBIR), and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) approaches to participatory design.

Participatory Design Research PDR can be defined as a form of inquiry designed to “create more culturally-relevant and reusable learning artifacts for, with and by those who will use them” (Chew et al., 2021, p. 541, italicized in original). Notably, as Jurow et al. (2016) explain, PDR “allows for the inclusion of diverse perspectives on what kind of learning matters, why, when, where, and for whom” and also “requires careful consideration and ongoing negotiation about what participation means and how it can be best enacted throughout the processes of design and research” (p. 219). PDR differs from traditional approaches to educational design and research in that it challenges assumptions about “normative hierarchically powered decision-making structures” (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016, p. 174). As a consequence, there are a number of putative advantages to PDR approaches over traditionally hierarchical educational research methods that may lend themselves to realizing second-order change in schools. For instance, PDR methods can function as a means of what Booker and Goldman (2016) regard as “systematic repair” that supports “three related components of repair work: visibility, agency, and power” (p. 232) by promoting claims of epistemic authority among participants, which they describe as “exercising the right or the power to know” (p. 223). According to Booker and colleagues, such systematic repair can be enacted through PDR by (a) maintaining open conversations about phenomenon to be studied; (b) remediating the roles of all stakeholders, including the researchers, as both learners and as authorities in the process of knowing; (c) enacting multiple rounds of collaborative data analysis and design that can expand what counts as data (i.e., the collaborative and methodological processes themselves); and (d) eschewing deficit-based conceptions of the problem that can serve “to diminish participation” (p. 234). Ultimately, PDR, through its commitments to codesign, encourages researchers and educational designers to ask “who does the design and why” (Engeström, 2011, p. 600) and to also pay “attention to the positionality of researchers or their social identities in the unfolding of work” (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016, p. 174).

Design-Based Implementation Research DBIR can be broadly defined as a collaborative mode of educational design and research that features elements of design thinking (Penuel et al., 2011). The main objective of DBIR is “to facilitate the design of educational interventions that are effective, sustainable, and scalable” (Fishman et al., 2013, p. 136). DBIR projects build upon four core principles as outlined by Penuel et al. (2011): (a) a focus on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; (b) a commitment to iterative, collaborative design; (c) a concern with developing theory

774

D. B. Clark et al.

related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry; and (d) an emphasis on developing capacity for sustaining change in systems (p. 332). DBIR explicitly emphasizes second-order changes by focusing on what Fishman and Penuel (2018) term infrastructuring, which is the “process of creating and sustaining new cultural practices and supportive technological mechanisms” (p. 393). Fishman and Penuel (2018) explain that DBIR’s emphasis on how educational innovations are designed expands upon traditional educational research methods that often narrowly focus only on the potentially fleeting efficacy of educational innovations. Accordingly, DBIR is seen as an extension of educational design research that can assist researchers in creating “improvements to educational systems that last” (Penuel, 2019, p. 659).

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Approaches CHAT approaches to educational design vary in scope and name (e.g., Cole & Packer, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Sannino et al., 2016). Nevertheless, these approaches, when taken as a whole, focus on participatory design perspectives that “emphasize the cultural and institutional organization of human action in various forms, in a wide variety of social settings ranging from classrooms in schools to community settings and workplaces” (Penuel et al., 2016, p. 490). Of particular interest, CHAT research has articulated a particular approach to participatory design known as “Change Laboratories” (Engeström et al., 1996). The Change Lab approach focuses on second-order change as a goal, which CHAT researchers articulate in terms of “expansive learning” (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). Essentially, a Change Lab brings together working practitioners and managers of a unit or group (which might be located in a school or other workplace) along with a small number of facilitators, interventionists, and/or researchers to support the group in their processes. Clients, students, and other stakeholders may also be represented in the group. The group conducts a series of five to ten Change Laboratory sessions. Sometimes these Change Labs are also conducted as boundary crossing laboratories with representatives from two or more groups engaged in collaboration or partnership. The Change Laboratory sessions are based on a “double stimulus” approach (Vygotsky, 1987, 1997). The first stimulus involves critical incidents, troubles, or problems from the workplace as recorded at the workplace that motivate the group to consider alternative approaches to their practice and organization. The group analyzes these first stimulus events through the lens of a second stimulus that takes the form of conceptual tools (such as the iconic triangular models of the CHAT approach). These second stimulus models are often replaced or combined with mediating conceptualizations or models formulated by the participants through their work. Essentially, the participants explore second-order change by leveraging the mediating second stimulus in the design of a new concept for the activity they are trying to transform (Engeström & Sannino, 2010; Sannino et al., 2016) through expansive learning processes (e.g., Engeström, 2015) that is “a creative type of learning in which learners join their forces to literally create

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

775

something novel, essentially learning something that does not yet exist” (Sannino et al., 2016, p. 603).

Potential for Synthesis and Refinement Across Perspectives on Design Rather than incommensurable, these perspectives on design offer opportunities for synergistic integration in support of second-order changes to create more equitable learning opportunities for all students and a more equitable world. Each perspective brings affordances and limitations. Traditional backward design perspectives, for example, emphasize integration, coherence, and alignment with end goals throughout the design process, but backward design perspectives are limited by their lack of emphasis on (a) reconsidering and exploring deeply the actual challenges and framings to focus upon and (b) the actual experiences, goals, strengths, needs, and perspectives of the stakeholders. Essentially, traditional backward design perspectives highlight convergent thinking but place less emphasis on articulating divergent thinking and stakeholder centrality. Design principle similarly can focus on first-order changes by already assuming or dictating a goal for the design. For example, within the UDL framework (Rose, 2000; Hall et al., 2006; Hall et al. 2012), the curricular content and discrete learning outcomes that students are meant to learn is taken as a given. Design thinking perspectives, on the other hand, emphasize the cycles of divergent and convergent thinking much more explicitly, and in some cases focus deeply on the role of framing and reframing the nature of the challenge upon which to focus (Dorst, 2011; Buchanan, 1992), which creates the opportunity for second-order rather than first-order change. Design thinking perspectives, however, still can be limited by an emphasis on designing “for” stakeholders rather than “with” stakeholders, and design thinking may not bring the focus on alignment that can be emphasized by backward design perspectives. Participatory design perspectives, in turn, center stakeholders and stakeholders’ understanding of their lived experiences, goals, strengths, and needs. Participatory design perspectives, however, could benefit from (a) design thinking perspectives in terms of the articulation of process to support deliberate attention to the potential of divergent thinking and reframing that could support transformational reconceptualization around those foci and (b) the potential of backward design to focus on the alignment between goals and means. These perspectives could be further extended by integrating ideas from the design justice perspectives (e.g., Costanza-Chock, 2020), for example, that might further emphasize designing for equity and justice for all students including those from historically marginalized communities. Thus, rather than incommensurable, these different perspectives offer substantial opportunities for synergistic integration. At the heart of the matter from the perspective of supporting fundamental second-order changes around equity are the dual needs for: (a) incorporating the voices of stakeholders, particularly those marginalized by the current social, cultural, political, and historical systems and (b) consciously and explicitly analyzing the frames through which the systems and

776

D. B. Clark et al.

challenges have been viewed to date as well as the potential affordances of other existing or new framings that could support fundamental second-order changes in light of those social, cultural, political, and historical systems. Participatory design perspectives are obviously especially well suited to the former (i.e., incorporating the voices of stakeholders) while design thinking approaches are well suited to the latter (i.e., consciously and explicitly analyzing frames and considering new frames), but neither is necessarily sufficient on its own. Alone, both perspectives are capable of reproducing only first-order changes that may improve the efficiency or efficacy of stakeholder experiences without fundamentally transforming or contesting the status quo. Stakeholders in participatory design, like everyone else, may not immediately consider the arbitrariness of the figured worlds in which they live (Holland et al., 2001). Designers on design thinking teams may not bring the lived experiences that would allow powerful frames to be considered or even recognized as needed. Integrating participatory design and design thinking perspectives, however, would appear to provide great opportunity for synergy. Perspectives on participatory design growing out of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (e.g., Engeström & Sannino, 2010; Sannino et al., 2016) provide one possible foundation for such integration. We propose that the Change Laboratory approach with its double stimulus structure (described in the previous section) creates an excellent opportunity for synergizing participatory design approaches with perspectives from design thinking. In particular, design thinking ideas could help provide additional scaffolding to focus the design processes across Change Laboratory sessions (which have minimal articulation beyond the double stimulus structure), and design thinking models could be included as part of the second stimulus materials to help the group attend to and realize the opportunities for divergent thinking and fundamental reframing of the goals at the heart of the group’s activity system. Such an integration would provide greater scaffolding to the actual processes of the group. This proposed synthesis would integrate strengths from participatory design as well as design thinking in a way that could prove more reliably productive in terms of pursuing second-order rather than first-order change. Furthermore, the integration of the design thinking ideas and models might reduce (but not eliminate) the reliance of the Change Laboratory approach on highly skilled interventionists/facilitators/researchers, which is currently an element of the Change Laboratory approach that prohibits broad scaling. A synthesis of Change Laboratory and design thinking approaches is just one possible example of synergies that might be pursued, but it illustrates the opportunities that might be leveraged. Similar synergies are already being explored in models of design-based implementation research (as outlined in the previous section), which emphasize the integration of participatory design with elements of design thinking (e.g., Penuel et al., 2011) to pursue second-order change in the form of “infrastructuring” to create and sustain new cultural practices and mechanisms to transform education (Fishman & Penuel, 2013). Another point of synergy and educational literature more broadly would involve more active leveraging of models from critical theory perspectives as explicit foci for

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

777

reframing in design thinking and as second stimuli in Change Laboratory approaches or other participatory design approaches. A danger across all design teams is that the design team will not consider alternatives to the figured worlds in which they already operate. As Dorst (2011) makes clear, the distinction between successful and less successful designers often hinges on how frames are considered and created. A novice designer or team may default to simply adopting the existing frame without even questioning it. More sophisticated designers or teams may be able to consider a range of other frames provided by others. The most transformative design teams are able to create or discover or identify frames that have not been considered previously in terms of the challenge they are attempting to address. Explicit consideration of critical perspectives may thus prompt possibilities for reframing challenges in ways that have not yet been considered. Ultimately, the goals of design should move beyond first-order refinements of efficiency and effectiveness. These first-order refinements of efficiency and effectiveness most likely only replicate or reinforce existing inequitable neoliberal structures and figured worlds in education (and society more broadly). In order to move beyond these first-order refinements of efficiency and effectiveness, education needs to move beyond its reliance on backward design processes alone to guide design. Integrating and synergizing perspectives on design thinking and participatory design, particularly if guided by insights from critical analyses of the power structures and figured worlds that currently organize our activity systems, provide opportunities to pursue second-order changes that introduce new goals, structures, and roles to transform education in service of a more equitable future. Acknowledgments This synthetic review draws on research supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through Grant #435-2021-0509 (“Reframing Design In Education For Equity, Diversity, And Inclusion”).

References Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A pattern language: Towns, buildings, and construction. Oxford University Press. Anderson, L., & Coleman, C. (2015). Action learning: Approaches, applications, and outcomes. In The Wiley Blackwell handbook of the psychology of training, development, and performance improvement (pp. 261–277). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118736982 Bang, M., & Vossoughi, S. (2016). Participatory design research and educational justice: Studying learning and relations within social change making. Cognition and Instruction, 34(3), 173–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2016.1181879 Bang, M., Warren, B., Rosebery, A. S., & Medin, D. (2012). Desettling expectations in science education. Human Development, 55(5–6), 302–318. Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P.-A. (2012). Agonistic participatory design: Working with marginalised social movements. CoDesign, 8(2–3), 127–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15710882.2012.672577 Bobbitt, F. (1918). The curriculum. Houghton Mifflin Company. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1540-4781.1920.tb03571.x

778

D. B. Clark et al.

Booker, A., & Goldman, S. (2016). Participatory design research as a practice for systemic repair: Doing hand-in-hand math research with families. Cognition and Instruction, 34(3), 222–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2016.1179535 Brown, T. (2008). Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86(6), 84–92. Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5–21. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511637 CBC Radio. (2019, November 8). Disabled people want disability design—Not disability dongles | CBC Radio. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/disabled-people-want-disability-design-notdisability-dongles-1.5353131 Chew, P., Lin, Y., Bermudez, V. N., Bustamante, A. S., & Ahn, J. (2021, June 8–11). Understanding goals, pedagogical frameworks, and relationships in community-based participatory design. ISLS Annual Meeting 2021, Bochum, Germany. https://2021.isls.org/proceedings/ Clark, D. (2021). Forward: Why design thinking? In D. Scott & J. Lock (Eds.), Teacher as designer: Design thinking for educational change (pp. v–viii). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-98115-9789-3 Cole, M., & Packer, M. (2016). Design-based intervention research as the science of the doubly artificial. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 503–530. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406. 2016.1187148 Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press. Cuban, L. (1988). A fundamental puzzle of school reform. The Phi Delta Kappan, 69(5), 340–344. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20403628 Cuban, L. (2020). Reforming the grammar of schooling again and again. American Journal of Education, 126(4), 665–671. https://doi.org/10.1086/709959 Design Council. (2007). Eleven lessons: Managing design in eleven global companies: Desk research report. Design Council. DiSalvo, B., Yip, J., Bonsignore, E., & DiSalvo, C. (2017). Participatory design for learning. Routledge. Donald, D. (2010). On what terms can we speak? Aboriginal-Canadian relations as a curricular and pedagogical imperative. In Big Thinking Lecture Series for the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. https://vimeo.com/21534649. Retrieved 22/19/2021, see 19: 17- 26:04. Dorst, K. (2011). The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application. Design Studies, 32(6), 521–532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.006 Ehn, P. (1988). Work-oriented design of computer artifacts (Doctoral dissertation, Arbetslivscentrum). Engeström, Y. (2011). From design experiments to formative interventions. Theory & psychology, 21(5), 598–628. Engeström, Y. (2015). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Engeström, Y., & Sannino, A. (2010). Studies of expansive learning: Foundations, findings and future challenges. Educational Research Review, 5(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev. 2009.12.002 Engeström, Y., Virkkunen, J., Helle, M., Pihlaja, J., & Poikela, R. (1996). The change laboratory as a tool for transforming work. Lifelong Learning in Europe, 1(2), 10–17. http://www.gicu.sgul. ac.uk/teaching/quality-improvment-qi/Engestrom_Change_Lab.pdf Fishman, B., & Penuel, W. (2018). Design-based implementation research. In International handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 393–400). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315617572 Fishman, B., Penuel, W., Allen, A. R., Cheng, B., & Sabelli, N. O. R. A. (2013). Design-based implementation research: An emerging model for transforming the relationship of research and practice. Teachers College Record, 115(14), 136–156. https://www.psy.lmu.de/isls-naples/ video-resources/guided-tour/15-minutes-penuel/fishman_penuel.pdf

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

779

Gagné, R. M. (1970). The conditions of learning. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Galileo Educational Network Association. (2016). Rubric for discipline-based and interdisciplinary inquiry studies. http://galileo.org/rubric.pdf Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., & Vlissides, J. (1995). Design patterns: Elements of reusable object-oriented software. Addison-Wesley. Goldman, S., Kuo, A. C., Pozos, R. K., Mesinas, M., & Lange, K. E. (2020). Empowering teachers through design thinking: Developing learning prototypes for multilingual students. RChD: creación y pensamiento, 5(8), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-837X.2020.55992 González, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781410613462 Gram, M. (2019). On design thinking. Plus One, 35. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-35/reviews/ondesign-thinking/ Gulari, M. N. (2015). Metaphors in design: How we think of design expertise. Journal of Research Practice, 11(2). http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/485/423 Gutiérrez, K. D., & Jurow, A. S. (2016). Social design experiments: Toward equity by design. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 565–598. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2016. 1204548 Hall, T. E., Meyer, A., & Rose, D. H. (Eds.). (2012). Universal design for learning in the classroom: Practical applications. Guilford Press. Hall, T., Meyer, A., & Strangman, N. (2006). UDL implementation: Examples using bestpractices and curriculum enhancements. In D. Rose, A. Meyer, & C. Hitchcock (Eds.).The universally designed classroom: Accessible curriculum and digital technologies. (pp.149–193). Harvard Education Press. Harth, T., & Panke, S. (2019). Design thinking in teacher education: Preparing engineering students for teaching at vocational schools. International Journal on E-Learning, 18(4), 413–439. https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/187330/ Henriksen, D., Gretter, S., & Richardson, C. (2020). Design thinking and the practicing teacher: Addressing problems of practice in teacher education. Teaching Education, 31(2), 209–229. Hennessey, E., & Mueller, J. (2020). Teaching and learning design thinking (DT): How do educators see DT fitting into the classroom? Canadian Journal of Education, 43(2), 499–521. Hess, F. M. (2011). Spinning wheels: The politics of urban school reform. Brookings Institution Press. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Jr., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (2001). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press. Hubbard, L., & Datnow, A. (2020). Design thinking, leadership, and the grammar of schooling: Implications for educational change. American Journal of Education, 126(4), 499–518. https:// doi.org/10.1086/709510 IDEO. (2012). Design thinking for educators tool kit. IDEO. https://designthinkingforeducators. com/toolkit Johansson-Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J., & Çetinkaya, M. (2013). Design thinking: Past, present and possible futures. Creativity and Innovation Management, 22(2), 121–146. https://doi.org/10. 1111/caim.12023 Jordan, M. E. (2016). Teaching as designing: Preparing pre-service teachers for adaptive teaching. Theory Into Practice, 55(3), 197–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2016.1176812 Jordan, M. E., Kleinsasser, R. C., & Roe, M. F. (2014). Wicked problems: Inescapable wickedity. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(4), 415–430. Jurow, A. S., Teeters, L., Shea, M., & Van Steenis, E. (2016). Extending the consequentiality of “invisible work” in the food justice movement. Cognition and Instruction, 34(3), 210–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2016.1172833 Kali, Y. (2006). Collaborative knowledge building using the design principles database. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1(2), 187–201. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11412-006-8993-x

780

D. B. Clark et al.

Kirschner, P. A. (2015). Do we need teachers as designers of technology enhanced learning? Instructional Science, 43(2), 309–322. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-015-9346-9 Koh, J. L., Chai, C. S., Wong, B., & Hong, H. Y. (2015a). Design thinking for education. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-444-3 Koh, J. H. L., Chai, C. S., Benjamin, W., & Hong, H.-Y. (2015b). Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and design thinking: A framework to support ICT lesson design for 21st century learning. Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 24(3), 535–543. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s40299-015-0237-2 Krajcik, J. S., & Blumenfeld, P. C. (2006). Project-based learning. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of learning sciences (pp. 317–333). Cambridge University Press. Luck, R. (2018). What is it that makes participation in design participatory design? Design Studies, 59, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.10.002 Marin, C., Hargis, J., & Cavanaugh, C. (2013). iPad learning ecosystem: Developing challengebased learning using design thinking. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 14(2), 22– 34. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/155807 Mayer, R. E. (2005). Cognitive theory of multimedia learning. In R. E. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning (pp. 31–48). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10. 1017/CBO9780511816819 McKenney, S., Kali, Y., Markauskaite, L., & Voogt, J. (2015). Teacher design knowledge for technology enhanced learning: An ecological framework for investigating assets and needs. Instructional Science, 43(2), 181–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-014-9337-2 Meyer, E. (2008). A feminist reframing of bullying and harassment: Transforming schools through critical pedagogy. McGill Journal of Education/Revue des sciences de l’éducation de McGill, 43(1), 33–48. https://doi.org/10.7202/019572ar Norman, D. (2013). The design of everyday things (Rev. and expanded ed.). Basic Books. O’Byrne, W. I., Radakovic, N., Hunter-Doniger, T., Fox, M., Kern, R., & Parnell, S. (2018). Designing spaces for creativity and divergent thinking: Pre-service teachers creating stop motion animation on tablets. International Journal of Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology, 6(2), 182–199. https://doi.org/10.18404/ijemst.408942 Payne, C. M. (2008). So much reform, so little change: The persistence of failure in urban schools. Harvard Education Press. Penuel, W. R. (2019). Infrastructuring as a practice of design-based research for supporting and studying equitable implementation and sustainability of innovations. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 28(4–5), 659–677. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2018.1552151 Penuel, W. R., & Gallagher, L. P. (2009). Preparing teachers to design instruction for deep understanding in middle school earth science. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 18(4), 461– 508. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508400903191904 Penuel, W. R., Fishman, B. J., Haugan Cheng, B., & Sabelli, N. (2011). Organizing research and development at the intersection of learning, implementation, and design. Educational Researcher, 40(7), 331–337. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X11421826 Penuel, W. R., Riedy, R., Barber, M. S., Peurach, D. J., LeBouef, W. A., & Clark, T. (2020). Principles of collaborative education research with stakeholders: Toward requirements for a new research and development infrastructure. Review of Educational Research, 90(5), 627–674. Penuel, W. R., Cole, M., & O’Neill, D. K. (2016). Introduction to the special issue. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 487–496. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2016.1215753 Razzouk, R., & Shute, V. (2012). What is design thinking and why is it important? Review of Educational Research, 82(3), 330–348. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654312457429 Retna, K. S. (2016). Thinking about “design thinking”: A study of teacher experiences. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 36, 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2015.1005049 Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2010). Normative cruelties and gender deviants: The performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school. British Educational Research Journal, 36(4), 573–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920903018117

Perspectives on the Process of Design from Education and the Design Fields

781

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730 Rose, D. (2000). Universal design for learning. Journal of Special Education Technology, 15(3), 45–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/016264340001500307 Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068 Sannino, A., Engeström, Y., & Lemos, M. (2016). Formative interventions for expansive learning and transformative agency. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 599–633. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10508406.2016.1204547 Scheer, A., Noweski, C., & Meinel, C. (2012). Transforming constructivist learning into action: Design thinking in education. Design and Technology Education, 17(3), 8–19. Schön, D. A. (1984). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315237473 Scott, D. (2013). A place for a more critical form of historical inquiry in social studies classrooms. Antistasis, 3(1), 15–18. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/antistasis/article/view/20150 Sheehan, N. T., Gujarathi, M. R., Jones, J. C., & Phillips, F. (2018). Using design thinking to write and publish novel teaching cases: Tips from experienced case authors. Journal of Management Education, 42(1), 135–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562917741179 Shively, K., & Palilonis, J. (2018). Curriculum development: Preservice teachers’ perceptions of design thinking for understanding digital literacy as a curricular framework. Journal of Education, 198(3), 202–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022057418811128 Simon, H. A. (1969). The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press. Sosa, R. (2015). Beyond “design thinking”. International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) 2015 Conference, pp. 2934–2942. QUT, Brisbane. Spoon, R., Rubenstein, L. D., Shively, K., Stith, K., Ascolani, M., & Potts, M. L. (2020). Reconceptualizing professional learning within the gifted field: Exploring the instruct to innovate model. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 43(3), 193–226. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0162353220933001 Strong, L., Adams, J. D., Bellino, M. E., Pieroni, P., Stoops, J., & Das, A. (2016). Against neoliberal enclosure: Using a critical transdisciplinary approach in science teaching and learning. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(3), 225–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2016.1202982 Svihla, V., & Reeve, R. (2016). Facilitating problem framing in project-based learning. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1603 Svihla, V., Reeve, R., Sagy, O., & Kali, Y. (2015). A fingerprint pattern of supports for teachers’ designing of technology enhanced learning. Instructional science, 43, 283–307. Svihla, V., Reeve, R., Collins, J., Lane, W., Field, J., & Stiles, A. (2016). Framing, reframing & teaching: Design decisions before, during and within a project-based unit. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 7(1), 19–36. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijdl/ article/view/19427/26872 Taboada, M. B., Rojas-Lizana, S., Dutra, L. X. C., & Levu, A. V. L. M. (2020). Decolonial design in practice: Designing meaningful and transformative science communications for Navakavu, Fiji. Design and Culture, 12(2a), 141–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2020.1724479 Tufte, E. R. (1983). The visual display of quantitative information. Graphics Press. Tyack, D. B., & Cuban, L. (1997). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public-school reform (Revised ed.). Harvard University Press. Tyler, R. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. University of Chicago Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 1. Problems of general psychology. Plenum. Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 4. The history of the development of higher mental functions. Plenum. Walton, G. (2005). Bullying widespread: A critical analysis of research and public discourse on bullying. Journal of School Violence, 4(1), 91–118. https://doi.org/10.1300/J202v04n01_06

782

D. B. Clark et al.

Walton, G. (2010). The problem trap: Implications of policy archaeology methodology for antibullying policies. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2), 135–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02680930903428630 Walton, G. (2011). Spinning our wheels: Reconceptualizing bullying beyond behaviour-focused approaches. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(1), 131–144. https:// doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.537079 Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/03e8/ 20730a873e7f44dbb1f64e4f047b9b321460.pdf Winton, S., & Tuters, S. (2015). Constructing bullying in Ontario, Canada: A critical policy analysis. Educational Studies, 41(1–2), 122–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2014. 955737

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture Joseph Zajda

Contents Introduction: Globalization and Its Effects on Education Policy Reforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining the Term Curriculum and Curriculum Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Curriculum as Constructed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum Ideologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language of Assessment as an Ideology of Measuring Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Four Types of Curriculum in Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Perspectives in Curriculum Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Types of Curriculum Models in Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

784 784 786 786 786 787 787 789 795 796

Abstract

This chapter examines elements of curriculum design and evaluation tools. It covers such concepts as curriculum, curriculum purposes defining aims and objectives, curriculum framework, based on the structure and the content, and classroom pedagogy. It discusses seven major models of curriculum: curriculum as unit to be transmitted, inquiry-based curriculum, curriculum as a process, outcome-based education curriculum, curriculum as praxis, the situational curriculum model, and curriculum as a social transformation. It evaluates the nexus between ideology, the state, education policy, and curriculum design. It is concluded that school curriculum is a dynamic, complex, and multilayered policy document, which is interpreted and implemented in different ways from school to school, both locally and globally.

J. Zajda (*) Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_23

783

784

J. Zajda

Keywords

Curriculum · Curriculum design · Curriculum evaluation · Curriculum reforms · Education reforms · Education as social transformation · Globalization · Ideology · The state

Introduction: Globalization and Its Effects on Education Policy Reforms Globalization and the competitive market forces have generated a massive growth in the knowledge industries that are having profound effects on society and educational institutions. Since the 1980s, globalization, marketization, and quality/efficiencydriven reforms around the world have resulted in structural, ideological, and qualitative changes in education and policy (Zajda, 2020). They include an increasing focus on the UNESCO’s concepts of knowledge society, the lifelong learning for all (a “cradle-to-grave” vision of learning) representing the lifelong learning paradigm and the “knowledge economy” and the global culture. In their quest for excellence, quality, and accountability in education, governments increasingly turn to international and comparative education data analysis. All agree that the major goal of education is to enhance the individual’s social and economic prospects. This can only be achieved by providing quality education for all. Students’ academic achievement is now regularly monitored and measured within the “internationally agreed framework” of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This was done in response to the growing demand for international comparisons of educational outcomes (Zajda, 2021b). To measure levels of academic performance in the global culture, the OECD, in cooperation with UNESCO, is using World Education Indicators (WEI) program, covering a broad range of comparative indicators, which report on the resource invested in education and their returns to individuals. Already in Towards Schooling for the Twenty-First Century, Per Dalin and Val D. Rust (1996) argued that there had to be a new paradigm shift in learning and teaching for the twenty-first century. The authors discussed major transformations globally, including political, economic, ecological, epistemological, technological, and moral “revolutions” (p. 32). They stressed that in a conflict-ridden world, the “school must play a basic role in peace education” (p. 64). The new and evolving paradigm shift in curriculum design and pedagogy is dictated by forces of globalization, politicoeconomic changes, “knowledge society,” and ITCs, to name a few (Zajda, 2021b).

Defining the Term Curriculum and Curriculum Models From a structural-functionalist perspective, I conceptualize the “curriculum” as an umbrella term denoting the totality of the learning experience of children and young people in schools globally. The curriculum would include the core questions of what, how, and why, as well as assessment and evaluation.

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture

785

A curriculum, by its context, tends to be normative and prescriptive and is based on a more general syllabus, which merely specifies what topics must be understood and to what level to achieve a particular grade or standard. A curriculum is normative as it defines desirable knowledge, skills, values, and standards (see Lawton, 1980). According to Stenhouse (1975), curriculum defined and communicated principles of schooling: A curriculum is an attempt to communicate the essential principles and features of an educational proposal in such a form that it is open to critical scrutiny and capable of effective translation into practice (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 4).

A broader definition of curriculum by Page and Thomas (1979) suggested that “Curriculum is the set of studies organised for a particular group of students” (Page & Thomas, 1979, p. 95). Basically, the curriculum is what happens to children in school as a result of what teachers do. It includes all the experiences of children for which the school should accept responsibility (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 2). Stenhouse (1975) also argued that knowledge taught consisted not of facts but of facts so structured by theory that they acquired meaning. This idea that teaching principles was more relevant than teaching facts was inspired by Bruner (1963). Bernstein (1971), on the other hand, using his perspective of sociology of knowledge, provided a summary of his ideas related to curriculum, as “valid knowledge”: Formal educational knowledge can be considered to be realized through three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge, and evaluation defines what counts as a valid realization of this knowledge on the part of the taught (Bernstein, 1971, p. 47).

A much quoted narrative in curriculum discussions and theorizing is that of the “saber-tooth curriculum.” The narrative is told of a Paleolithic tribe. Members of the tribe required fundamental survival skills centered on the provision of shelter and the obtaining of food. This had to be passed on from generation to generation. At some point in their history, the tribal elders decided it was no longer sufficient to rely on parents to pass the essential skills on and so they set up a school with a curriculum of hut making, fish catching, saber-tooth tiger hunting, and so on. Saber-tooth tiger hunting had a particularly valued place in the curriculum, for not only were the tigers an important food source, but they also constituted a danger to the tribe. The school turned out to be very successful, and the young tribes people became very skilled in hut making, fishing catching, and, in particular, saber-tooth tiger hunting. So proficient did they become in the latter that the tigers rapidly became extinct. However, when the question was raised about removing saber-tooth hunting from the curriculum and replacing it with some more useful survival skill, it was vigorously opposed. After all, saber-tooth tiger hunting was a traditional and significant part of the Paleolithic school system. There was a pool of talented and skilled

786

J. Zajda

teachers for saber-tooth tiger hunting, and there was evidence that the students liked it. The saber-tooth curriculum still exists today, because our schools globally teach students on how to perform traditional tasks, using their knowledge and acquired skills.

The Curriculum as Constructed The point about the saber-tooth curriculum narrative is that curriculum is rarely, if ever, the product of carefully planned objectives and “rational” decision-making. Rather, it is the result of human agency, with all the usual school influences and complexities that this process involves. The construction of a curriculum involves, normally, a choice around a number of dimensions, involving educational policies, priorities, schools’ particular needs, knowledge, skills, values, and ideologies.

Curriculum Ideologies Curriculum ideologies represent dominant values and beliefs what schools should teach. The term ideology refers to a “system of dominant ideas, and beliefs affecting every sphere of human social interaction and organisation, be they political, economic, scientific, educational, and cultural, and evolved during the last decade of the eighteenth-century” (Zajda, 2014). The term ideology has a wide range of epistemological, theoretical, and historical meanings and interpretations. It is one of key terms in defining culture (Zajda, 2014). All schools have one or more curricular ideologies. Dominant ideologies are “hegemonies” – ruling ideas concerning education, skills, and outcomes regarded as socially desirable. One of the current dominant ideologies in education globally is the ubiquitous ideology of vocationalism and human capital, or perceiving that the goal of education is for employment.

Language of Assessment as an Ideology of Measuring Outcomes Students and parents need to understand the school’s curriculum, the language of assessment, and the politics of assessment. A practical way of doing this is to provide samples of good work, highlighting the specific features that make them good. Black and William (1998) spent a year surveying 600 research studies of assessment across the world, to determine the best practice. Black and William (1998) in their seminal article “Assessment and classroom learning” (1998) concluded that teacher assessment which diagnoses pupils’ difficulties and provides constructive feedback leads to significant learning gains. This formative approach would be of particular help to low-attaining pupils.

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture

787

Four Types of Curriculum in Schools Cuban (1995) suggested earlier the existence of at least four different curricula at work in schools. The official curriculum is the curriculum officially set forth and approved by institutions and government. It is what institutions expect instructors to teach and learners to learn. The taught curriculum is what instructors, at work alone in their classrooms, actually choose to teach. The choices they make derive from their own worldviews, skills, knowledge, and attitudes, their experiences, their like or dislike of the subject, and their attitudes towards learners. The learned curriculum is what learners actually experience in their learning environment. It encompasses learner experiences beyond marks and test scores and includes unintended lessons embedded in the learning environments. Depending on what is modeled by the teacher, students will learn what kind of learning is valued, to process information in particular ways and not others, when and how to ask questions, and what kinds of attitudes to adopt. The tested curriculum reflects what learning is actually assessed or tested. Cuban stated that “What is tested is a limited part of what is intended by policy makers, taught by teachers, and learned by learners.” Traditional testing often attempts to sort high achieving students from their lower achieving peers and focuses on a narrow band of knowledge (Cuban, 1995). To these four, we can also add the supported curriculum design in schools, which is reflected in and shaped by the resources allocated to support and deliver it, including the time, personnel, materials, and resources allocated (Glatthorn et al. (2012).

Perspectives in Curriculum Design According to Schiro (2007), there are at least “four different perspective” educators take on the relationships among curriculum design, curriculum implementation in schools, and curricular ideologies: Dualistic Educators believe, understand, and value usually one ideology, using a dualistic perspective of right versus wrong: those curriculum beliefs that agree with their own are correct and good, and those that are different from their own are incorrect. At one substage, educators see only two sets of curriculum beliefs: those similar to theirs and those that are different. At another substage, educators perceive a variety of different curriculum belief systems, but they still believe, understand, and value only one curriculum belief system from a dualistic perspective. Relativistic Educators perceive a variety of curriculum ideologies, and they operate from a relativistic viewpoint that gives equal value to each way of viewing curriculum issues. Here it is held that everyone has a right to his or her own opinion, that

788

J. Zajda

no opinion is better than any other, and that curriculum ideologies cannot be measured against any absolute scale of value. From this perspective, educators have the ability to identify and understand the language and images of each curriculum ideology they recognize. Contextual Educators perceive a variety of curriculum ideologies, each of which they believe is best for accomplishing certain goals or purposes. Here educators have the ability to express curriculum opinions using the language and images of each ideology they recognize. They switch their ideology depending on the nature of the curriculum. Hierarchical Educators can differentiate between a variety of well-defined, viable ideologies while making a personal and thoughtful commitment to only one. Educators can use other ideologies to further their goals and can hold discourse with other educators who subscribe to different ideologies using their language and images while still advocating their own curriculum beliefs (Schiro, 2007, pp. 206–207). Educators who take a hierarchical view toward the existence of different ideologies can use different ideologies in order to advance a single educational ideology. For example, they might believe primarily in the Social Reconstruction ideology and use it for certain purposes to promote their ultimate Social Reconstruction model (see Schiro, 2007, pp. 151–199). Educators who take a dualistic view toward the existence of different ideologies tend to hold only one curriculum ideology, and the ideological positions they take correspond fairly closely to the ideological positions presented in the curriculum design (Schiro, 2007, p. 206). I would like to add two additional perspectives for curriculum design, namely constructivist and transformational. Compared with traditional methods of teaching, constructivist approach to curriculum design, learning, and teaching has become increasingly popular and preferred pedagogy in education discourses and curriculum reforms (Zajda, 2021a). One of the most obvious reasons for its popularity is that it offers to students much more social and cognitive interaction and engagement in collaborative groups. Based on prolific research findings dealing with the nexus between constructivist pedagogy, quality teaching, and improvement in academic performance, constructivist pedagogy, based on psychological and social constructivism, has become one of the effective classroom strategies for improving academic achievement (Richardson, 2003; Zajda, 2018). Hence, there exists a compelling reason for the relevance of constructivism to curriculum design and evaluation. Doll (1993) argued that constructivism was a poststructuralist psychological theory and one that perceives learning as an interpretive, recursive, nonlinear building process by active learners interacting with their surrounding – the physical and social world. Like constructivist perspective in curriculum design, transformational perspective in curriculum is equally relevant for policy and curriculum planners addressing global imperatives of equality, social justice, and democracy (Zajda, 2021a). If the goal is sustainable change in the knowledge society, then it necessitates a

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture

789

transformational leadership, or, what Fullan describes as, a “new mind and action set for leading complex change, consisting of personal characteristics of ‘energy/enthusiasm and hope, and five core components of leadership: moral purpose, understanding change, relationship building, knowledge creation and sharing and coherence making’ (Fullan, 2002, p. 9). Leithwood and Sleegers (2007) suggested that transformational leadership had become of great interest to reform-minded school leaders, aiming to improve standards, and quality of learning for all students. Transformational leadership in schools is likely to affect “teacher job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship” (Leithwood & Sleegers, 2007, p. 143). Transformational leadership theory suggests that exceptional leaders have a very powerful moral influence on their followers and that such leaders transform followers’ needs, values, and preferences from self-interest goals to collective-interest goals. Research findings concerning the significance of transformational leadership in schools suggest its increasing relevance to transformational perspective in curriculum design.

Types of Curriculum Models in Schools 1. Rational Planning Curriculum Model as a Unit to Be Transmitted Probably, the most well-known curriculum model in education is Ralph Tyler’s Objectives or Rational Planning Model. This is clearly a model for the curriculum, where objectives define standards of performance. It sets out what curriculum designers need to do, to produce desirable outcomes in education and standards. Tyler’s work Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction was first published in 1949. For Tyler, the curriculum process involved four fundamental questions: • • • •

What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? What educational experiences are likely to attain the purposes? How can these educational experiences be organized effectively? How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?

Tyler discussed four steps for making curricular decisions to guide teaching and learning in schools: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Specify teaching methods. Specify objectives defining content. Specify content and pedagogy employed. Specify changes taking place in students: behavioral objectives, defining standards, and evaluate generalized outcomes, e.g., developing critical thinking.

In Tyler’s (1949) curriculum design, general aims were analyzed into specific observable and thus measurable behaviors. The notion of measuring students’ performance continues to be dominant today. Hilda Taba (1962), in her much cited

790

J. Zajda

book Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice, developed further Tyler’s conceptual scheme into an orderly planning procedure of seven steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Diagnose needs. Formulate objectives. Select content. Organize content. Select learning experiences. Organize learning experiences. Determine what to evaluate and ways and means of doing it.

The “purposes” in Tyler’s model, as the first of these questions, became known as objectives, and hence, the model became known as the Objectives Model. The Objectives Model attracted much deal of attention and criticism. It was claimed that writing objectives was difficult and time consuming, particularly in the form demanded by writers like Mager (1962) who in his high-impact book Preparing Instructional Objectives argued that each objective had to contain a statement of the behavior to be attained, the conditions under which it would be demonstrated, and the standards, by which it would be judged. Mager’s book became very popular, as it provided a very pragmatic approach to curriculum and lesson planning in schools. The book clearly outlined steps on how to define behavioral objectives and standards of performance for lesson planning. Essentially, Taba’s (1962) seven steps in curriculum design capture the key questions in any curriculum planning and design, covering the why? what? how? and to what extent? (evaluation) questions. These key questions not only continue to define curriculum design and planning, but are still being used in lesson planning globally. Tyler’s model for curriculum design was linear in its design, beginning with objectives and ending with evaluation. In this model, evaluation is the final stage, resulting in the process by which one matches the initial expectation with the outcomes. It is important to note that this model is defined by objectives, which form the rationale for the selection of desirable content, together with organization and assessing of the curriculum and learning experiences in schools. Another innovative improvement of Tyler’s model was Wheeler’s cyclic model of curriculum design, which was developed in 1967. This model, like other curriculum models, included five interconnected steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Aims, goals, and objectives Selection of learning experiences Selection of content Organization and integration of learning experiences and content evaluation Evaluation

Wheeler cyclic model of curriculum development stressed that curriculum development was a continuous process/cycle. According to this model, curriculum

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture

791

development should reflect ongoing changes in schooling and make the necessary adjustments, to reflect these changes. 2. Inquiry-Based Curriculum Model Inquiry-based curriculum model, influenced by Bruner (1963), focuses on developing deeper knowledge of principles, skills, and understanding. Bruner developed a specific model of curriculum for the educational system, in order to meet the needs of students, which he called Man: A Course of Study (1965). Bruner wanted to create an educational environment that would focus on (1) what was uniquely human about human beings, (2) how humans got that way, and (3) how humans could become more so. Adopting a Brunerian inquiry approach ensures that students have the opportunity to examine concepts, issues, and information in a range of ways and from various perspectives. By employing discovery learning, advocated by Bruner, who was influenced by Vygotsky, the model encourages students to build on their past experiences and knowledge. Inquiry-based learning, or inquiry approach model, begins with students’ prior knowledge and experience and moves through a deliberate process to extend this knowledge (Vygotskian perspective). In this model, teachers select and group learning experiences and activities and under the following six headings: • • • •

Tuning in Finding out Sorting out Making conclusions and taking action

The inquiry approach to curriculum design focuses on the vision and purposes that frame the curriculum, relevant skills for creative and critical thinking, values, informed decision-making, theory building, and problem-solving. This curriculum design is likely to generate critical thinking, grounded in the values of social justice, democracy, ecological sustainability, and peace. Both teachers and students are encouraged to become active investigators, by identifying a range of information and skills and understanding the sources of information. 3. The Process Model for the Design and Development of Curriculum: An Alternative to the Objectives Model Unlike the objectives model, process model does not consider objectives to be important. The process model curriculum design assumes that: • Content has its own value. Therefore, it should not be selected on the basis of the achievement of objectives. • Content involves procedures, concepts, and criteria that can be used to appraise the curriculum.

792

J. Zajda

• Translating content into objectives may result in knowledge being distorted. • Learning activities have their own value and can be measured in terms of their own standard. For this reason, learning activities can stand on their own (Gatawa, 1990, p. 31). In the 1970s, Lawrence Stenhouse (1975), Professor at the University of East Anglia, mounted a powerful and analytical critique of the objectives model. He argued convincingly that the use of behavioral objectives resulted in curricula which focused on skills, standards, and knowledge acquisition only and ignoring other dimensions of knowledge and skills. In his curriculum model as a process, Stenhouse (1975), influenced by Bruner (1963), proposed his own model of curriculum as a process. As a result of his critique of the limitations of the objectives curriculum model, based on behaviorist theory, which focused on measuring observable behavior only, and mandatory definition of standards of performance in all lesson objectives and planning, Stenhouse offered his own specification for the process model of curriculum design: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Define the value positions in any curriculum specification Specify curriculum in terms of content materials and method. Indicate training procedures for teachers. Define the contextual variables in schools, systems, and environments that will affect realization in practice. 5. List and test hypotheses regarding effects. 6. Attempt to relate effects to contextual variables (Stenhouse, 1970, p. 82). Stenhouse (1975) also suggested that essential questions to be asked of curriculum and ideologies should include the following: 1. Are they “objective”? Are they realistic and worthwhile? 2. Are there benefits for the students in terms of the following: • Knowledge • Skills • Application • Values • Perceptions • Interests • Relevance • Vocational needs (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 116)? In Stenhouse’s model, in steps 1–6, these steps are in constant interaction. Unlike Tyler’s objectives model, Stenhouse’s process model promotes critical thinking and critical literacy. Stenhouse, according to James (2012), found a meaningful way to accommodate both “philosophical and sociological perspectives, to acknowledge the intrinsic worth of disciplinary knowledge and the provisionality of knowledge constituted by the contested interests of sub-cultures”:

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture

793

The key was to see learning as a process directed towards the growth of understanding through critical scrutiny, which sought the best that might be thought and known by subjecting all propositions to testing for bias and error against logic and experience (James, 2012).

In addition, according to Milton (1982), Stenhouse’s process model focused on knowledge, as the growth of understanding. The model depended for its success on the quality of the teacher, who needed wisdom and scholarship (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 96), as well as principles of procedure and skills in their implementation. Stenhouse’s curriculum model as a process focused on understanding principles, as advocated by Bruner, rather than mere memorization of facts, or rote learning. Such a model of curriculum planning as a process necessitated ongoing evaluation, in order to reflect a dynamic, living curriculum that was responsive to the classroom ecology, changing environment, and new needs of learners. 4. Outcome-Based Education (OBE) Curriculum Model More recently, another dominant model of the curriculum process has emerged in the form of Outcome-based education (OBE). OBE curriculum model was an extension of Stenhouse’s inquiry-based and process-focused model. Like Tyler’s model for curriculum design, OBE curriculum design planners start with a clear curricular goal. Curriculum should be defined by first thinking about the outcomes that you wish to be obtained by your students. You then work “backwards” to determine content, teaching, and learning activities, assessment, and evaluation. Outcome-based education is a model of education and curriculum design that goes beyond the traditional focus on what the school provides to students, in favor of making students demonstrate that they know and are able to do, whatever the required outcomes are. Outcome-based education, like most curriculum design models, is learner-centered. Curriculum design based on outcomes allows teachers to measure what students are able to do at the end of the course. The three main elements of outcome-based education are alignment, threading, and laddering of the curriculum elements, which includes outcomes, assessment, skills, concepts/issues, and learning activities (Centre for Teaching and Learning, 2021). 5. Curriculum Design as Praxis Curriculum design as praxis is a further development of Stenhouse’s (1975) curriculum as a process approach, which, by means of critical thinking, focused more explicitly on examining and addressing the social, economic, and political context within which curriculum is framed. As such, it represented a critical theory paradigm, used by reform-minded educators and curriculum planners to address social inequality and unequal access to quality schooling. Freire (1972) defined praxis in education as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1972, p. 52). Freire argued that praxis was “a central defining feature of human life and a necessary condition of freedom” and that “human nature is

794

J. Zajda

expressed through intentional, reflective, meaningful activity situated within dynamic historical and cultural contexts that shape and set limits on that activity” (Glass, 2001, p. 16). In general, praxis refers to the process of applying or practicing ideas, theories, or lessons (Smith, 1996). Curriculum model as praxis adds to the process model. As part of critical theory and social justice approach, it engages with issues of power, privilege, inequality, and oppression and focuses more on emancipation, social justice, and participatory democracy. Consequently, the praxis model of curriculum design, unlike previous curriculum models, is influenced by the ideology of human rights; collective human well-being; the emancipation of the human spirit and social justice, within the curriculum process; and related classroom pedagogy. It implies a more radical and critical approach to curriculum, teaching and learning, and assessment and “encourages learners and teachers together to confront the real problems of their existence and relationships” in order to work together towards praxis, or informed, and committed action (Smith, 2000). 6. The Situational Curriculum Model One of the most influential models of the curriculum is the situational model, also known as school-based curriculum. The model was developed by Malcolm Skilbeck, who was Director of the Curriculum Development Center (Canberra) during the 1980s. In Skilbeck’s model, it is important to understand and consider the role of culture and the “situation,” or context, in which the curriculum is located. Such a curriculum design begins with a “thorough analysis of the situation of the curriculum or the aims, objectives, or outcomes to be achieved, but it could also start from, or be motivated by, a review of content, a revision of assessment, or a thorough consideration of evaluation data” (Prideaux, 2003). Curriculum developers would be asking questions about the significant external and internal factors that are likely to influence the curriculum process. Reynolds and Skilbeck (1976) originally listed some major factors to be considered in curriculum design. These factors defined the structure and content of the situational curriculum model. The five important steps in the curriculum process were the following: • • • • • •

Situational analysis Statements of intent (aims, objectives, outcomes) Content Implementation and organizational strategies Assessment Monitoring and evaluation

Apart from the “situational analysis,” and its focus on culture and the environment, the above steps are typical of most models of curriculum design.

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture

795

7. Curriculum as a Social Transformation The definition of transformative education, relevant to curriculum design, is provided by Stevens-Long et al. (2012), in which it is described as “an educational program or event designed to foster learning experiences that result or catalyze a transformational outcome” (Stevens-Long et al., 2012, p. 184). The authors point out that transformative education is the result of a “planned educational program, experience, intervention or set of pedagogical practices” (p. 184). Essentially, transformative education cannot occur without transformative curriculum design. Curriculum design model as social transformation is grounded in critical theory. It also reflects the imperatives of globalization and ongoing education policy and education reforms. The focus is on social justice, and like a praxis model, the model is guided by the ideology of emancipation and equality. In the model of curriculum design for social transformation, there is a need to continue to explore critically the new challenges confronting education and policy reforms in the provision of authentic democracy, social justice, and cross-cultural values that genuinely promote a transformative pedagogy (Dalin & Rust, 1996). Also, it is necessary to focus on significant issues at the center of current and ongoing education reforms, if genuine culture of learning, and transformation, characterized by wisdom, compassion, and intercultural understanding, is to become a reality, rather than rhetoric (Bindé, 2000; Zajda, 2021b).

Conclusion This chapter has analyzed seven dominant models of curriculum design, namely curriculum to be transmitted, inquiry-based curriculum, curriculum as a process, outcome-based education curriculum, curriculum as praxis, the situational curriculum model, and curriculum as a social transformation. It is important to note that all curriculum models are defined by relevant dominant ideologies, environment, and culture. There is no ideology or values free curricular models. All are dominated by preferred views concerning desirable knowledge, skills, values, and standards. All seven models of curriculum design are useful for defining the structure, the content, and classroom pedagogy. They are both similar and different. They are similar in defining specific steps in curriculum planning, but different in their articulated content, values, and skills. These models reflect the synthesis of structuralist and post-structuralist paradigm shifts. Finally, globalization, marketization, and quality/ efficiency driven reforms around the world have resulted in ideological, structural, and qualitative changes affecting curriculum design and evaluation and reflecting globally driven imperatives of academic achievement and standards in the culture of performing schools.

796

J. Zajda

References Bernstein, B. (1971). On the classification and framing of educational knowledge. In M. Young (Ed.), Knowledge and control. New directions for the sociology of education (pp. 47–69). Collier-Macmillan Publishers. Bindé, J. (2000). Toward an ethics of the future. Public Culture, 12(1), 51–72. Black, P., & William, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Retrieved from https://kappanonline.org/inside-the-black-box-raising-standards-throughclassroomassessment/ Bruner, J. (1963). The process of education. Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1965). Man: A course of study. Occasional Paper No. 3. Retrieved from https://eric.ed. gov/?id¼ED178390 Centre for Teaching and Learning. (2021). Outcomes-based education. Retrieved from http://ctlrdc. ca/curriculum-design-pedagogy/outcomes-based-education/ Cuban, L. (1995). The hidden variable: How organizations influence teacher responses to curriculum reform. Theory Into Practice, 34(1), 4–11. Dalin, P., & Rust, V. (1996). Towards schooling for 21st century. Cassell. Doll, W. (1993). A post-modem perspective on curriculum. Teachers College Press. Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin. Fullan, M. (2002). The role of leadership in the promotion of knowledge management in schools. Paper presented at OECD Conference, March 18–19, 2002. Retrieved from https://www.oecd. org/education/school/2074954.pdf Gatawa, B. (1990). The politics of the school curriculum: An introduction. Jongwe Press. Glass, R. D. (2001). On Paulo Freire’s philosophy of praxis and the foundations of liberation education. Educational Researcher, 30(2), 15–25. Glatthorn, A. A., Boschee, F., Whitehead, B., & Boschee, B. (2012). Curriculum leadership: Strategies for development and implementation (3rd ed.). Sage Publications. James, M. (2012). An alternative to the objectives model: The process model for the design and development of curriculum. In N. Norris & J. Elliott (Eds.), Curriculum, pedagogy and educational research: The work of Lawrence Stenhouse (pp. 61–83). Routledge. Lawton, D. (1980). The politics of the school curriculum. Routledge. Leithwood, K., & Sleegers, P. (2007). Transformational school leadership: Introduction. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 17(2), 143–144. Mager, R. (1962). Preparing instructional objectives. Fearon. Milton, K. (1982). The curriculum design and development process. Retrieved from https://eprints. utas.edu.au/20919/1/whole_MiltonKennethGeorge1984_thesis.pdf Page, G., & Thomas, J. (1979). International dictionary of education. Kogan Page. Prideaux, D. (2003). Curriculum design. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC1125124/ Reynolds, J., & Skilbeck, M. (1976). Culture and the classroom. Open Books. Richardson, V. (2003). Constructivist pedagogy. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1623–1640. Schiro, M. (2007). Curriculum theory: Conflicting visions and enduring concerns. Sage. Smith, M. (1996, 2000). Curriculum theory and practice. In The encyclopaedia of pedagogy and informal education. www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm. Stenhouse, L. (1970). Some limitations of the use of objectives in curriculum research and planning. Paedagogica Europaea, 73–83. Accessible at: http://research.edu.uea.ac.uk/carecentreforapplie dresearchineducation/carear Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. Heineman. Stevens-Long, J., Schapiro, S. A., & McClintock, C. (2012). Passionate scholars: Transformative learning in doctoral education. Adult Education Quarterly, 62(2), 180–198. Taba, H. (1962). Curriculum development: Theory and practice. Harcourt Brace and World. Tyler, R. W. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. University of Chicago Press.

Curriculum Design and Evaluation in the Global Culture

797

Zajda, J. (2014). Ideology. In D. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of educational theory and philosophy. Sage. Zajda, J. (2018). Effective constructivist pedagogy for quality learning in schools. Educational Practice and Theory, 40(1), 67–80. Zajda, J. (Ed.). (2020). Globalisation, ideology and education reforms: Emerging paradigms. Springer. Zajda, J. (2021a). Globalisation and education reforms: Creating effective learning. Springer. Zajda, J. (Ed.). (2021b). 3rd international handbook of globalisation, education and policy research. Springer.

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds of Europeanization and Globalization Maria Erss

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Influence of German Bildung and Didaktik Tradition on Estonian Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soviet Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Influences from the West: The Curriculum Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developments in the National Curriculum Since the 1990s: School Autonomy vs Curriculum Standardization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Europeanization and Globalization of Estonian Curriculum Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changes in the Discourse of Teacher Autonomy in the Estonian National Curricula of 1996–2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Attack on Subject-Centeredness: The Key Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

800 801 801 802 804 805 805 805 808 810 811 812 813

Abstract

The chapter discusses the political and ideological changes in the curricula since regaining independence in 1991 from the point of view of Europeanization and globalization and within the theoretical frameworks of European Didaktik, Soviet education, and Anglo-American curriculum tradition. The research questions are: (1) How have the emphases in the curricula changed over the years? (2) How has the role and autonomy of teachers changed in the state curricula for basic schools and gymnasiums since 1996? (3) How are these changes connected to Didaktik or curriculum tradition? The chapter summarizes several qualitative empirical

M. Erss (*) Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_51

799

800

M. Erss

studies from 2011 to 2013 regarding curriculum change including teachers’ opinions as well as some newer insights about the historical trajectory of Estonian curriculum policy. The results indicate that Estonian curriculum policy has been strongly influenced by globalization and Europeanization: a shift toward the Anglo-American outcome-based curriculum model is evident while preserving some influences of the Didaktik tradition and Soviet subject-centeredness. Despite attempts to grant schools and teachers more autonomy and change their role into curriculum developers, many teachers and school leaders understand their role mainly as curriculum implementers. Furthermore, the curriculum implementation indicates tensions between curriculum standardization and autonomy as well as key competencies vs subject matter. Keywords

Curriculum · Didaktik · Curriculum standardization · Teacher autonomy · Globalization · Europeanization

Introduction In 2021 Estonia celebrated 30 years since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. There is much to think about and to process when looking back at this period. The transition from an occupied territory within the totalitarian megastate Soviet Union to an independent state and member state of the European Union and NATO along with developing a liberal market economy in a formerly socialist state has brought along turbulent developments in all spheres of social life including education. One can safely say that Estonia has been one of the fastest changing and relatively successful states in Eastern Europe during the last three decades. In addition to vast improvements in the economy and development of democratic institutions, Estonia has also become internationally known for its outstanding results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Estonia ranked first in Europe and third in the world according to PISA 2018 (OECD, 2019)). Although these developments have not been unproblematic, they have contributed to international interest in Estonian education. Analyzing the trajectory of Estonian curriculum development in the past 30 years could bring some light into the choices, dilemmas, and decisions that have made Estonian education what it is today – with its strengths and weaknesses. As a small country in the Northern European periphery, Estonia has been since 1219 frequently ruled by foreign powers such as Denmark, Germanic Order, Sweden, Russian Empire, or the Soviet Union. Each of these rules has left its mark on the cultural tissue and education of the country. Therefore, even during periods of independence, as between 1918–1940 and from 1991 onward, Estonia has felt a strong urge to belong to a wider European framework of cultural practices and during the past three decades also to follow the world governance. Institutions that were shaken by the collapse of the Soviet Union needed to respond to the

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

801

legitimation crisis by trying to resemble other institutions in the West – practicing, what is known in the theory of neo-institutionalism, institutional isomorphism (Powell, 2007). With the decline of old power centers and the rise of new ones such as the European Union, important transitions in the prevailing ideology and policies regarding education and curriculum development can be detected (Toots, 2009). As will be argued in this chapter, the major influences for Estonian curriculum development have been the tradition of German Didaktik, the Soviet emphasis on centralized curriculum and encyclopedic knowledge as well as the Anglo-American decentralized curriculum tradition with its stress on learning outcomes. The transitions between these traditions will be discussed from the point of view of Europeanization and globalization as macro-political policy learning processes aiming at homogenization of rules and norms. However, more than detecting clear cuts or ruptures between the traditions, one can observe a merging of them where certain elements from previous traditions are kept, yet new goals are also adopted. The changes are best observed through teachers’ and schools’ role and autonomy as well as the development of key competencies. The research questions are accordingly: (1) How have the emphases in the curricula changed over the years? (2) How has the role and autonomy of teachers changed in the state curricula for basic schools and gymnasiums since 1996? (3) How are these changes connected to Didaktik or curriculum tradition? First, a brief overview of the German Didaktik, the Soviet curriculum and the Anglo-American curriculum tradition will be given in connection with Estonian context.

Historical Context Influence of German Bildung and Didaktik Tradition on Estonian Education Estonian education has a historical influence from the German Didaktik tradition through the fact that until 1918 Estonia was ruled for 700 years by Baltic German upper class under various foreign occupations. The first Estonian born educators that contributed to the national awakening of Estonians at the end of the nineteenth century, Carl Robert Jakobson (1841–1882), Johann Voldemar Jannsen (1819–1890), and Friedrich Reinhold Kreuzwald (1803–1882) (Karjahärm, 2000) were educated themselves in German language schools (Laar, 2006) modeled by the ideas of humanistic German gymnasiums which adhered to the ideas of Bildung. According to one of Bildung’s forefathers, John Gottfried Herder who promoted a romantic concept of a holistic education and virtuous life, the important questions of a man’s being and becoming could be answered by the study of history, languages, arts, and religion which could as well be managed by self-education (Horlacher, 2004, 420). Wilhelm von Humboldt’s concept of allgemeine Bildung (general education) which serves most the cultivation of mind and spirit as opposed to

802

M. Erss

vocational education (Humboldt, 1966, 64) is also seen as an important characteristic of the humanistic and non-instrumental nature of Bildung. This aspect of Bildung can nowadays be seen as the opposite of narrowly labor-market oriented education that focuses only on usefulness of knowledge and skills. The Didaktik as the art of teaching developed originally in Germany where teachers had the major role in organizing the learning process, interpreting the state curriculum, and in evaluating the learning results of students within the humanistic framework of Bildung (Künzli, 2002: 11; Terhart, 2002: 32). From there, Didaktik as a theoretical framework for teacher education and teacher reasoning spread in the Nordic countries as well as in Estonia. One of the main characteristics of Didaktik is the relatively large autonomy of teachers in making curricular decisions on classroom level. This is explained by the fact that quality control in this education system takes place through unified teacher education and state examinations which all teachers must pass prior to entering the teaching profession. Prussia was the first country in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century that developed a unified teacher education system which served as an example for many countries in continental Europe (Hopmann, 2003). In Estonia, the first teacher seminars were established in the first half of the nineteenth century and until today, most teachers have received a specialized teacher education in one of the two major universities of the country. The official education requirement for teachers is a master’s degree. In school year 2019/2020 the percentage of teachers in primary and secondary schools with at least a master’s degree was 68% and approximately 8% had no completed higher education (Haridussilm, n.d.). However, the difficulties in recruiting qualified teachers are increasing, particularly in rural areas, which is why some alternative programmes into teaching have been opened in cooperation with private and third sector. Programmes such as “Noored kooli” (an Estonian version of Teach for America) or “Tagasi kooli” (Back to school) serve as a quick remedy of (temporally) alleviating the teacher shortage in certain areas and subjects. Estonian teacher education has been historically strongly influenced by the Didaktik tradition which stresses teachers’ role in making the curriculum meaningful for the students by adapting it according to the local context. Teachers were trusted with certain autonomy in choosing the topics, methods, and materials. During the first period of Estonian independence from 1918–1940, a child-centered reform pedagogy and progressive education emphasizing real-life connections and work pedagogy in primary education were promoted by school innovators such as Johannes Käis and Peeter Põld who were very active in curriculum development and teacher education (Käis, 2018; Trasberg, 2017). Still, the ideals of a child-centered work-school remained distant for the subject specialists and therefore the curriculum remained mostly dominated by the subject-centered approach (Liimets & Liimets, 2020: 33).

Soviet Curriculum Although Soviet pedagogy aimed at reconceptualizing education for the purpose of reforming society through Soviet ideology, it had little original contribution to curriculum development on global scale. The pedagogical ideas were mainly

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

803

borrowed from the educational innovators in the USA such as stress on technical education and connecting education even tighter to the needs and possibilities of work (Samoff, 1999). At the same time, the curriculum was much like a German Lehrplan in the Didaktik tradition – a prescription of topics, emphasizing thus strongly the input of teachers and even more so, the importance of studying encyclopedic knowledge (Läänemets, 2003). The strong subject orientation and ignoring of the individual needs of students was inherited already from the Tsarist Russia (Liimets & Liimets, 2020: 25, 31). All curriculum decisions were made centrally, in Moscow, and imposed to the rest of the member states which meant that the curriculum was little responsive to local cultures and differences or students’ actual needs and interests (Ruus, 2004). Everything was extremely standardized, except for a few regional peculiarities that Estonian educators managed to achieve such as having the right to issue locally written original textbooks as the only member state in the Soviet Union, to add one extra school year in the 1980s to teach more Estonian language (Ruus & Sarv, 2000) and to establish some schools for the talented students who were offered deepened studies in certain subjects or remedial classes for struggling students. In fact, Estonia was across the Soviet Union known as an innovator and test site for new educational models (Sarv & Rõuk, 2020). Although child-centered ideas were abandoned in practice due to the totalitarian ideology and subject- and society centeredness, Soviet subject programs preserved some influences of Bildung and Didaktik (Sarv & Rõuk, 2020) such as stressing the moral component of education or a harmoniously developed personality. Contrarily to the ideas of Bildung as a non-political educational theory (Horlacher, 2004) for a holistic development of “one’s powers into a whole” (Humboldt, 1966), the Soviet curriculum was highly politicized. Despite mentioning the development of a “healthy personality” the elementary school curriculum of the 1950s viewed it in the context of receiving a communist education and forming patriotic feelings toward the Soviet Union (Programmes of Seven-Grade Schools and Secondary Schools, 1951). In a totalitarian state collective values were clearly preferred over individuality (Timoštšuk, 2020: 318). This view was endorsed by Makarenko’s work with juvenile delinquents. The famous Soviet educator Anton Makarenko used positive peer pressure, manual work, and children’s collectives’ self-governance as innovative methods of achieving positive behavior (Gorkin, 1993) which was manifested in the activities of youth organizations such as pioneer work and extracurricular activities. Searching for harmony between individual and collective development remained nevertheless a research focus for some Estonian educational researchers of this period such as Heino Liimets or Inge Unt (Liimets & Liimets, 2020: 26, 37), but the school system was not geared toward supporting individual development. Teachers, albeit ideologically strongly controlled, still maintained some autonomy in choosing teaching methods or proposing extracurricular activities. Also, attention was paid to teacher education and professional development. For example, in 1962 the Social Research Centre for Pedagogy (Ühiskondlik Pedagoogika Uurimise Instituut) was founded by Aleksander Elango at the University of Tartu which united teachers interested in educational research. Accordingly, a critical mass of teachers

804

M. Erss

existed during the Soviet period who were capable of critical thought and interested in educational innovation. They would play a major role in educational reforms later on. By the end of the Soviet period, in the late 1980s when Gorbachev’s perestroika encouraged more critical attitudes toward the Soviet system, this model of education came under strong criticism by Estonian educators. In 1987 the first Estonian Teachers’ Congress took place where teachers demanded liberation of Estonian education from the dictate of Moscow; child-centeredness, democratization and humanization of education. The excessive amounts of teaching Russian and science needed to be replaced by more emphasis on Estonian language, humanities and social sciences (Ruus & Sarv, 2000). From now on, teachers wanted to be involved in educational decision-making, including the curriculum development. It is estimated that around 1000 teachers, methodologists, researchers, and officials were actively involved in renewing and modernizing the Estonian curriculum at the end of the 1980s which led to the experimental curriculum of 1989 and its further developments in 1991. Another 5000 teachers assisted them on the school level and took part in various brain-storming events and workshops which was for Estonia a democratic process of an unprecedented scale (Sarv & Rõuk, 2020).

New Influences from the West: The Curriculum Tradition In the past three decades, a new model of reasoning about curriculum and teaching has found its way to Estonia and other countries in Europe: the Anglo-American curriculum tradition. One of the main differences between Didaktik tradition, Soviet education, and curriculum tradition is a shift from teacher input-based concept of curriculum to emphasis on learning outcomes. Moreover, the role of teachers has developed historically differently within these traditions. While the Didaktik tradition emphasizes the pedagogical freedom of teachers to make decisions in their classroom where the final curriculum will be defined (Hopmann, 2003), the curriculum tradition has been preoccupied with the institutional curriculum alignment and external control of teachers’ work through standardized testing. Institutional curriculum refers here to an increased attention to the needs of the society (Westbury, 2002: 67) which in the context of the USA often means preference for useful and applied knowledge (Horlacher, 2018). The need for external control arose within the American curriculum tradition due to different historical developments of schooling and the teaching profession. For example, in the United States, teaching did not develop as an independently regulated profession and there was no unified teacher education in the extremely decentralized governance systems. In Europe, the unity of education systems was built on the influence of church and commitment to building a nation-state which was absent in the American context (Hopmann, 2003: 471). This lack of a unified teacher education led historically to great differences in teacher qualifications and skills which is why the authorities did not trust the assessment of students only to teachers. In its extreme forms, the curriculum tradition has led to the development of

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

805

“teacher-proof curricula” since teachers have been seen as the main impediment to reforms (Wermke & Höstfält, 2014; Westbury, 2002). Teacher autonomy has been throughout the twentieth century one of the main dividing aspects between the Didaktik and curriculum tradition although these two traditions are nowadays less distinguishable because they have started to merge (Hopmann, 2003). Even though it cannot be said that teachers in the curriculum tradition have no autonomy over the classroom curriculum, it has been historically much larger in the Didaktik tradition specifically regarding the choice of content and assessment. Teachers in both traditions can choose the methods of instruction: a liberty which can be restricted by some schools. Analyzing the increasing influence of the Anglo-American curriculum tradition in Estonian curriculum development will be the subject of the following research. However, first, some methodological remarks will be made.

Methods In order to answer the research questions stated in the introduction, different sources and methods are combined. First, changes in the curricula are observed through qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis. They are then compared with other relevant policy documents of the EU and reports of OECD, and finally teachers’ own views of the curricular changes are analyzed through qualitative semistructured interviews. This chapter will synthesize the results of teacher interviews which were conducted for different research projects in 2011 (a countrywide study of the perception of teachers on state curriculum revisions which included 50 interviews with basic school teachers), 2012 (a school curriculum study in Estonia) and 2013 (a doctoral thesis about teacher autonomy in Estonia, Germany, and Finland). The timing of the interviews is significant because in 2011 the last major revision of the state curriculum for basic schools and gymnasia was undertaken and schools had to update their school curricula which are required by the state curriculum. The interviews were analyzed by the method of qualitative content analysis which combined a deductive, theory-driven approach with inductive approach.

Results Developments in the National Curriculum Since the 1990s: School Autonomy vs Curriculum Standardization When the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s is generally described as a time of great freedom for schools and teachers in Estonia where educators could unleash their creativity and experiment with new models of curriculum and pedagogy (Krull & Trasberg, 2006), then by mid-1990s certain standardization processes started. The latter can be seen in the development of the first national curriculum (NC) in 1996 which is not any more just a collection of subject syllabi as during the

806

M. Erss

Soviet time but also contains a general part which specifies general educational aims, cross-curricular themes, and general (key) competences. According to the experts of OECD who were invited to evaluate this curriculum, it represents the first modern “framework type curriculum” which allows schools some autonomy to specify the content for the local context by developing a school curriculum. However, since the subject syllabi remained overloaded with content similar to the Soviet period, the actual space of schools to make modifications was rather limited (OECD, 2001: 81–83) compared to the transition period where only very general guidance was given by the curriculum. Nevertheless, the authorization and, since 1996, requirement of schools to develop their own school-based curriculum (SBC) can be considered as one of the most significant changes in reforming Estonian general education. This process must be seen within the context of Estonia’s attempt to become a democratic, Western country with market economy which required decentralization of the educational governance (Erss, 2020: 65). Internationally, the need for SBC development emerged in the 1970s as a result of dissatisfaction with centralized curriculum and control systems which did not enable making modifications according to local circumstances, needs, and interests, therefore becoming an impediment for innovation (Marsh, 2010). Its roots can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century and John Dewey’s criticism of the centrally prescribed curriculum which alienates teachers and students through teachers’ inability to create meaningful connections for their students (Dewey, 1966). The Estonian national curriculum of 1996 stipulates that school curriculum (SC) is a document designed in collaboration between teachers, school leadership, parents, and students which coordinates the learning and teaching activities of a school, based on the NC, while emphasizing the uniqueness of the school (Estonian National Curriculum for Basic and Secondary Education – ENCBSE, 1996). More precisely, the SC is supposed to specify the compulsory topics and subject syllabi, the list of electives and the conditions of choice as well as to develop study directions through electives or deepened study of certain subjects. All this should happen through taking into account the local needs and “intellectual and material resources” (Ibid. own translation). Despite these requirements, the task of developing a SC proved to be more difficult than anticipated and teachers clearly lacked a common understanding of the task. Nor were they prepared for “having knowledge of the education system, sociology, cultural history, economic development of the country and organizational leadership” as the national curriculum of 1996 expected (ENCBSE 1996, own translation). Different interpretations of what SBC development means have been documented on international level as well. Instead of developing something completely new, the SBC development is often understood as modifying or even partially or completely copying the NC (Bolstad, 2004: 15). In 2012, a study on SC development in Estonia was conducted which involved 20 semi-structured group interviews in ten schools with school leaders and teachers. Teachers and school leaders were interviewed separately (Kõiv et al., 2013). The findings revealed that for most teachers, SC was perceived as simply a bureaucratic

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

807

instrument which teachers do not use in their daily work. If there would not be such a requirement, teachers would not work on curriculum development. One teacher said, “. . . the school develops without a school curriculum as well. Why do we have then the development plan?” Others admitted that an SC is needed “. . .in order to show what are the goals of the school and how they can be reached. . .” (In the following, all interview quotes are translated from Estonian by the author) As a positive side of the SC development, some teachers mentioned that it motivates teachers to read the NC. In the early stages of SC development, teachers tended to concentrate on subject syllabi and did not look for connections between the more general aims stated in the NC. The so-called “general part” of the curriculum aka the ideological curriculum remained distant to teachers who found that it was written in a complicated language. “The equivalents of assessment. . . if things are formulated so theoretically, then it is a bit absurd.” The criticism that the curriculum alienates teachers by language which is not understandable to them is not new. It was also mentioned in a large-scale research conducted in 2011 which concerned teachers’ opinions of the NC (Erss et al., 2014). In two schools out of ten, teachers had not been involved at all in composing the general part of the curriculum since “Too much democracy is very time consuming,” according to a principal. The wish of the principal was to save the teachers’ time. Fortunately, compared to 2002, a positive change had occurred with the NC of 2011 in terms of involving teachers in discussions about the general part of the curriculum which was from then on seen as an important part of developing a positive school culture. Nevertheless, the opinion dominated that SC development makes more sense in upper secondary education since the space for making autonomous decisions in the compulsory education (In Estonia, compulsory education covers the grades 1–9 which is called basic school. Upper secondary education is not compulsory.) was too small to merit the effort that it takes. Furthermore, the principals interpreted the concept of comprehensive school as the duty to follow the NC by the letter: Law is law: I can’t turn something upside down here so that I will start imagining some magic tricks or look for a different approach. I have to use the material which is given by the state. (school leader in a rural school]

The interviewers often encountered a negative attitude toward SBC development from teachers. It was perceived as an unpleasant duty which did not make entirely sense for them. This is what makes it difficult, actually. . . If I knew exactly that today we have come that far or should reach this or whatever, and from the next moment we need to do the next part, then it would be easy: I understand what I have to achieve and what is my goal. Maybe this is why we have a slightly negative attitude towards this task. Nobody understands what they have to do and why all of this is necessary. (Estonian language teacher)

808

M. Erss

These examples demonstrate that there was a high level of insecurity regarding the relationship between the NC and SC in many Estonian schools and in some schools the necessity of having an SC was doubted at all. In some instances, the concerns were justified by lack of sufficient autonomy for SC development, and in others, the opposite was true: teachers complained about too much autonomy and expected more specific instructions from the authorities. Despite a few positive examples, many schools featured a formal-bureaucratic school culture where the SC is just a paper which has to be composed in order to put it on the shelf where it can collect dust. It is somewhat ironic that by the time Estonia had finally caught up with the idealistic thinking of Western countries of the 1970s in terms of SBC development, the rationale in the USA and UK had been replaced by far more pragmatic ideas driven by the neoliberal reforms and accountability pressures. Instead of associating the SBC development with democratization of school and a paradigmatic change in the roles of teachers as in Estonia in the 1990s, several Western education systems started seeing it as a tool for raising the efficiency of NC implementation in order to achieve good test results (Kennedy, 2010; Marsh, 2010). The last trend indicates that the originally idealistic aims of SBC development which are characteristic to progressive education and reform pedagogy were rather materialized in the utilitarian framework of the Anglo-American curriculum tradition.

Europeanization and Globalization of Estonian Curriculum Policy Estonian curriculum development can be characterized through paradoxes in the last three decades. Simultaneously, contradictory processes such as increasing school autonomy and accountability of schools by introducing standardized tests took place. Attempts to standardize the uneven curriculum developments of the early 1990s which were perceived by some as “curricular anarchy” (Krull & Trasberg, 2006) culminated with the introduction of centralized exams at the end of the upper secondary school (gymnasium) in 1997. The exams reduced the autonomy given by the SBC development considerably which is why many teachers were skeptical regarding the new liberties. The stated aims of the centralized exams were: checking the achievement of standards set by the NC, increasing the objectivity and comparability of assessment, giving feedback on the effectiveness of the learning process to all interested parties, and uniting graduation exams of gymnasiums with university entrance exams (Adamson & Kond, 1999). However, the minister of education, Georg Aher, had explained the introduction of centralized exams with the wish to avoid a situation where schools would choose very different development paths and to create an opportunity “to effectively intervene if some schools do not achieve the standards required by the state” (Kupp, 1996). Therefore, the main goal appeared to be top-down quality control and an intervention in the work of schools which brought along a reduction of school autonomy.

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

809

At the same time a decentralization of school governance took place: most schools became governed by municipalities and the first private schools were established. This mixture of standardization of assessment and curriculum while developing decentralized governance is typical for the curriculum tradition and it also features some neoliberal influences borrowed from Anglophone countries. Although Estonian policy documents have never admitted the existence of such an influence, the example of British education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s is quite clearly noticeable in the changes (Toots, 2009). The neoliberal principle of “governing without governing” (Olssen et al., 2004) can be seen in the decentralized centralism (Karlsen, 2000) which is expressed in the dominance of centralizing tendencies such as national exams, NC, and accountability of schools over decentralizing rhetoric regarding school and teacher autonomy (Erss et al., 2014). The standardization efforts of Estonian education were impacted by Estonia’s decision to join the European Union in 2004 and the process of homogenizing policies prior to this step (Loogma, 2014). The standardization policies have been strongly influenced by the free movement of workforce and EU’s ambition to become the most competitive economy in the world as manifested in the treaties of Bologna (1999) and Lisbon (2007). These developments concern mainly higher and vocational education but they are also visible in general education. The standardbased approach to curriculum is reflected in the adoption of standardized learning outcomes which are stated as behavioral objectives (“students can do, know, understand, refrain from, behave,” etc.). In the 1996 curriculum, the term “competence” is first mentioned. Although these competences are not clearly measurable yet in the general part of the 1996 curriculum, they are specified through learning outcomes in the subject syllabi that can be measured. This indicates a movement toward learning outcome-based curriculum which is characteristic to the curriculum tradition. The influence of the EU becomes more visible with every revision of the NC. While the 2002 NC mentioned education policy documents of international organizations among its ideological underpinnings (Estonian National Curriculum of Basic Schools and Gymnasia, 2002), the 2011 NC refers directly to the ethical principles expressed in the foundational documents of the EU (Estonian National Curriculum for Basic Schools, 2011). Among the values stated in the Lisbon treaty the 2011 NC stipulates freedom, democracy, tolerance, solidarity, lawfulness, sustainable development, and gender equality (Treaty of Lisbon, 2007). Furthermore, the impact of the strategy for economic growth “Europe 2020” is noticeable in the education documents of the member states. Since this bill was passed during the economic crisis in 2010, the new key words borrowed from this document appear in the 2011 Estonian NC as cross-curricular themes “technology and innovation” and “lifelong learning and career planning.” As a completely new cross-curricular theme, “citizen activity and entrepreneurship” are introduced which can be associated with the rhetoric within EU during the crisis years. The increased attention to students with special learning needs, and curricular adjustments made for them in the 2011 NC are most likely related to the “Europe 2020” strategy’s aim to reduce the dropout rate from schools in Europe from 15% to 10% (EUROPE 2020, 2010).

810

M. Erss

In addition to EU’s standardizing influence, one of the most influential drivers for global homogenization of education has been the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The policy suggestions of OECD based on the international comparative student achievement and adult skills’ studies such as PISA and PIIAC have brought along a transition toward learning outcome-based curriculum in most countries. Due to the attention paid to combining literacy, mathematics, and science in these tests, they are considered as basic competences or core curriculum which should be integrated with other subjects. OECD’s three main policy suggestions based on successful countries in the PISA tests have been: setting specific educational standards (OECD, 2004), school autonomy, and increasing accountability (OECD, 2011). According to PISA tests, Estonia has met all three suggestions and become one of the top-performing education systems in Europe and in the world (OECD, 2019). Although the external evaluation has been reformed in the recent years and instead of school inspections sporadic external thematic evaluations and school-internal evaluations are used. Nevertheless, the national exams still exist, albeit in a reduced form: only three national exams remain in the core subjects of mother tongue, mathematics, and foreign language. Yet, the results of these exams often determine to a great extent the public image of the school. The daily newspapers continue to publish ranking lists based on these exams which increase the public accountability pressure and competition between schools. These traits indicate the influence of the Anglo-American neoliberal curriculum culture in Estonia. It is clear that the messages of OECD have strengthened the position of the neoliberal education policy in Estonia, even though it cannot be said that Estonian NC is primarily dominated by neoliberal ideas. Generally, the education policy in Estonia can be characterized as an eclectic mixture of different ideologies. The NCs during the first phase of Estonian independence between 1918–1940 and all NCs since regaining independence in 1991 have been described by Krull and Mikser (2010) as academically oriented, subject-centered but humanist-oriented core curricula. Concludingly, Estonia has turned into one of the fastest globalizing and Europeanizing countries in the world which forms the background to understand the curricular developments here. On the one hand the desire to integrate with Western institutions is understandable in a country that tries to free itself from its communist past and to reconnect with its European roots. On the other hand, Estonia’s peripheral location and economic deprivation compared to wealthier metropoles who dictate the rules of game probably played a role in this process. Developing countries and countries in transition have often been subjugated to stronger influences of globalization which is caused by the financial dependence of these countries on different development programmes and project funding (Samoff, 1999).

Changes in the Discourse of Teacher Autonomy in the Estonian National Curricula of 1996–2011 The following analysis demonstrates how the concept of teacher autonomy has changed in the consecutive Estonian curricula since 1996. A discourse analysis

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

811

was conducted based on the NCs for basic schools and gymnasia of 1996, 2002, and 2011 (Erss, 2015). The 1996 curriculum emphasized teacher autonomy directly using expressions such as teachers “decide” or “choose.” The choices refer to the criteria and forms of assessment, teaching methods and curriculum integration. Teachers’ role is described as “the planner and creator of instruction and the motivator of the will to learn.” The need to collaborate with colleagues and students is also mentioned but teachers are still seen as having a central role in planning the instruction. The autonomy stressing rhetoric becomes more normative in the 2002 version of the NC. Now the focus lies on the duties of teachers which are expressed from students’ point of view, “Students must know what and when is assessed. . .” The transitive verbs such as “choose” or “decide” are missing. Instead, passive forms which do not disclose the actor are used such as “situations are created, assignments are used.” Increasingly, decision-making is delegated to school collectives instead of individual teachers, “The duty of the school is to support the development of the following field specific competences. . .” or “The school chooses its emphasis of instruction.” Other synonyms are used like “school staff,” “school family,” or “teachers’ council.” A shift in interpreting teacher autonomy becomes visible: whereas in the 1990s individual autonomy of teachers was valued, starting from the 2002 curriculum, autonomy is seen as a collective privilege of teachers which presumes professional collaboration. For example, the 2011 NC stipulates “The whole school family is involved in creating the social and mental environment.” While individual teacher autonomy fits well within the Didaktik tradition, the rise of the collective notion of autonomy points to the dominance of the institutional dimension of the curriculum which is in line with the curriculum tradition. Furthermore, in the 2011 curriculum, the rhetoric becomes more constructivist: students construct their own knowledge which causes a change in teachers’ role. Teachers step back and take the role of creating the learning environment. This change in role peaks with the 2011 NC for gymnasium which omits completely the word “teaching” and only mentions teachers three times. Teachers are being replaced by “learning environment” which is personalized to such extent that it has been attributed to an ability to shape the values of students and to develop local and school traditions (Erss, 2015). The increased attention to learning environment and the changing role of teachers can be linked to OECD’s rhetoric regarding the changes in the labor market (OECD, 2012). Despite the student-centered approach, it carries in itself a pragmatist curriculum ideology according to which a truly valuable and motivating knowledge is only something that is needed in real life; read: in the labor market (Horlacher, 2018). Therefore, a shift toward the Anglo-American curriculum ideology can also be observed in the discourse of teacher autonomy and teachers’ roles.

Attack on Subject-Centeredness: The Key Competencies Since the introduction of the concept of competence in the 1996 NC, the number of competences as well as the key competences with cross-curricular aim has gradually

812

M. Erss

grown throughout three consecutive curricula. While 1996 curriculum distinguishes only between three types of competences: communication, values, and activityrelated competences, the 2011 NC stipulates seven key competences: values and ethics competence, social competence, self-awareness and self-management competence, learning to learn competence, communication, mathematics, and entrepreneurship competence. In 2014, digital competence was added and social competence has been expanded to include active citizenship. The idea behind these general competences was to emphasize soft skills, reduce subject-centeredness, and increase curriculum cohesion. However, one of the perpetual curriculum problems has been the perceived gap between the general part of the curriculum and the subject syllabi whereas teachers have often disregarded the general part and only focused on the subject content. According to the interviews with teachers in 2012, several of them tended to think that the list of general competences is too idealistic and unrealistic to achieve: “General competences. . . There are slightly too many. The result should be some superman! We can’t raise here ideal persons.” Teachers felt overwhelmed with the responsibilities and expectations that were laid on them by the NC. “The responsibility that the society lays on the shoulders of teachers is in my view enormous. . . you should be like a superman. And what does the society give you in return? I don’t even mean money, but support or even understanding. It is just not there” (Erss, 2018a). Although there are many schools in Estonia that have made great progress regarding subject integration, implementation of cross-curricular themes, and general competences while promoting a student-centered approach (Erss, 2018b), the quote above indicates that one of the biggest problems that Estonian education system faces is the imbalance between the societal expectations to the teaching profession and the scarcity of rewards experienced by teachers. This has led to massive problems with retaining and attracting teaching staff to the profession. The average age of teachers in Estonia is 48 years which is above the OECD average and teaching is not a popular career path for young students. Mark Tucker, the president of National Center on Education and the Economy in the United States who visited Estonia after its first major PISA success in 2015 has called this problem “a ticking bomb” in Estonian education (Tucker, 2015). No matter, how sophisticated the curriculum is, if there are not enough qualified teachers to work with it, it remains just an intellectual exercise for the curriculum developers.

Conclusion The results indicate that a shift from input-based, Didaktik-driven curriculum to learning outcome- and competence-based Anglo-American curriculum has taken place in Estonian curricula and also in teachers’ perceptions of their role. At the same time some influences from the Soviet curriculum such as subject overload, or Didaktik, through mainly state controlled teacher education remained until recently.

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

813

This shift can be partly explained by Estonia’s eager policy learning from Western institutions during the processes of globalization and Europeanization as well as the pressures of market economy to endorse a more pragmatic and utilitarian approach to education. Although Estonian general education system is considered nowadays as one of the best in the world according to PISA tests, the success comes with a heavy price paid by teachers. While current good results have been achieved by mainly very experienced teachers who are going to retire soon, the future of Estonian education is endangered by lack of qualified teachers. Although Estonian teachers are in international comparison relatively autonomous, an increased accountability pressure is strongly felt and since the introduction of state exams at the end of the upper secondary school, the autonomy of teachers who teach the exam subjects is greatly reduced. Furthermore, what is considered autonomy differs for policy makers and teachers. The introduction of school-based curriculum in Estonia has not been easy as teachers have often not interpreted it as increased autonomy to be able to influence the school curriculum but rather an annoying growth of bureaucratic workload. Although the state curriculum has since 1996 promoted the curriculum developer role of teachers, the actual focus has been mainly on implementation since the NC l has contained precise prescriptions for subject syllabi. However, a new curriculum for basic schools and gymnasia will be implemented from September 2023 which contains only competences and learning outcomes, leaving the decisions about content to the teachers and schools. With this reform, the transition from content based curriculum to competence and learning outcomes-based curriculum will be completed in Estonia. Further, this raises new questions about the readiness and competence of teachers to embrace the new responsibilities regarding choosing the content. Since content related suggestions and textbooks still have to be published, it is likely that tensions will remain between curriculum standardization and teacher autonomy as well as between key competencies and subject centeredness. These problems also resonate in many countries which is a natural course in the globalizing world.

References Adamson, A., & Kond, M. (1999). Riigieksamid 1998 [National exams 1998]. EKK trükikoda. Bolstad, R. (2004). School-based curriculum development: Principles, processes and practices. A background paper for the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. The Free Press. Eesti põhi- ja keskhariduse riiklik õppekava [Estonian national curriculum for basic and secondary education], Pub. L. No. 228 (1996). https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/29725 Erss, M. (2015). The politics of teacher autonomy in Estonia, Germany, and Finland [Tallinn University]. http://www.etera.ee/zoom/9571/view?page¼1&p¼separate&view¼0,0,2067,2834 Erss, M. (2018a). ‘Complete freedom to choose within limits’ – teachers’ views of curricular autonomy, agency and control in Estonia, Finland and Germany. Curriculum Journal. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2018.1445514 Erss, M. (2018b). Study on supporting school innovation across Europe. Case study 2 – Estonia. https://doi.org/10.2766/24232

814

M. Erss

Erss, M. (2020). Eesti taasiseseisvumisjärgne õppekavaarendus euroopaliku didaktika ja angloameerika curriculum’i risttuules [Estonian curriculum development after regaining independence in the crosswinds of European Didaktik and Anglo-American curriculum tradition]. In M. Heidmets (Ed.), Haridusmõte [Educational Thought] (ACTA Unive, pp. 54–94). TLÜ Kirjastus. Erss, M., Mikser, R., Löfström, E., Ugaste, A., Rõuk, V., & Jaani, J. (2014). Teachers’ views of curriculum policy: The case of Estonia. British Journal of Educational Studies, 62(4), 393–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2014.941786 EUROPE 2020 A European strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. (2010) (testimony of European Commission). https://ec.europa.eu/eu2020/pdf/COMPLET EN BARROSO 007 – Europe 2020 – EN version.pdf Gorkin, A. P. (1993). Макаренко. In Российская педагогическая энциклопедия [Russian Encyclopedia of Education] (Научное из). Haridussilm haridusstatistika portaal [Estonian Education Statistics Portal]. (n.d.). Research, Haridus-Ja Teadusministeerium [Estonian Ministry of Education] and Retrieved January 24, 2021, from https://www.haridussilm.ee/ee Hopmann, S. T. (2003). On the evaluation of curriculum reforms. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35(4), 459–478. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220270305520 Horlacher, R. (2004). Bildung – A construction of a history of philosophy of education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23(5–6), 409–426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-004-4452-1 Horlacher, R. (2018). The same but different: the German Lehrplan and curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 50(1), 1–16. Käis, J. (2018). Õpetuse alused ja teed. Üldine didaktika. OÜ Studium. Karjahärm, T. (2000). Rahvuslik ärkamine [National awakening]. In Estonica. Entsüklopeedia Eestist [Estonica. An Encyclopedia about Estonia]. Eesti Instituut. http://www.estonica.org/et/ Ajalugu/1850-1914_Ärkamisaeg/Rahvuslik_ärkamine/ Karlsen, G. E. (2000). Decentralized centralism: framework for a better understanding of governance in the field of education. Journal of Education Policy, 15(5), 525–538. Kennedy, K. J. (2010). School-based curriculum development for new times. A comparative analysis. In E. H.-F. Law & N. Nieveen (Eds.), Schools as curriculum agencies. Asian and European perspectives on school-based curriculum development (pp. 1–18). Sense Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789460912818_002 Kõiv, P., Lamesoo, K., & Erss, M. (2013). Kooliõppekava arendamine koolijuhtide pilgu läbi [School leaders’ view on school-based curriculum development]. In H. Voolaid (Ed.), Ülevaade haridussüsteemi välishindamisest 2012/2013 [Overview of external evaluation of the education system in 2012/2013] (pp. 68–71). Krull, E., & Mikser, R. (2010). Reflection of cross-curricular ideas in the Estonian curricula of general education. An historical study. Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 14(64/59)(1), 34–53. Krull, E., & Trasberg, K. (2006). Changes in Estonian general education from the collapse of the Soviet Union to EU entry. ERIC Online Submission, 1–19. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ ED495353.pdf Künzli, R. (2002). The common frame and the places of Didaktik. In B. B. Gundem & S. Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik and/or curriculum. An international dialogue (2nd ed.). Peter Lang. Kupp, F. (1996, March 22). Uus õppekava kooli [The new curriculum in schools]. In Õpetajate Leht [Teachers’ Newspaper]. Läänemets, U. (2003). Learning for the future in Estonia: Content revisited and reconceptualised. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), International handbook of curriculum research (pp. 285–299). Lawrence Erlabum Associates, Inc. Laar, M. (2006). Äratajad. Rahvuslik ärkamisaeg Eestis 19. sajandil ja selle kandjad [The awakeners. The national awakening in Estonia in the 19th century and its promoters]. Grenader. Liimets, A., & Liimets, R. (2020). Eesti kasvatusteadusliku mõtte järjepidevusest ja jätkuvusest [Regarding the continuation and sustainability of Estonian educational thought]. In

Curriculum Development in Estonia: 30 Years in the Crosswinds. . .

815

M. Heidmets (Ed.), Haridusmõte [Educational Thought] (Acta Unive, pp. 15–53). TLÜ Kirjastus. Loogma, K. (2014). Professionalism. Õpetajakutse kui professioon? [Professionalism. Teaching as a profession?]. In E. Krull, Ä. Leijen, J. Mikk, L. Talts, & T. Õun (Eds.), Õpetajate professionaalne areng ja selle toetamine [Teacher professional development and how to support it] (pp. 235–247). Eesti Ülikoolide Kirjastus. Marsh, C. J. (2010). Re-examining the conceptual models for school-based curriculum development. In E. H.-F. Law & N. Nieveen (Eds.), Schools as curriculum agencies. Asian and European perspectives on school-based curriculum development (pp. 287–297). Sense Publishers. OECD. (2001). Riiklike hariduspoliitikate ülevaated. Eesti. Haridus ja oskused [An overview of education policies of the state. Estonia. Education and skills]. OECD Publishing. OECD. (2004). What makes school systems perform? seeing school systems through the prism of PISA. OECD Publishing. http://www.oecd.org/education/school/programmeforinternatio nalstudentassessmentpisa/33858946.pdf OECD. (2011). PISA in focus. In PISA in focus (Issue 9). OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/ pisa/pisaproducts/pisainfocus/48910490.pdf OECD. (2019). PISA 2018 Results (Volume I) (Vol. 1). OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/ 5f07c754-en Olssen, M., Codd, N., & O’Neill, A.-M. (2004). Education policy. Globalization, citizenship & democracy. Sage. Põhikooli ja gümnaasiumi riiklik õppekava [Estonian national curriculum of basic schools and gymnasia]. (2002). https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/174787 Põhikooli riiklik õppekava, Pub. L. No. 1 (2011). https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/114012011001 Powell, W. W. (2007). The New Institutionalism to appear in the international encyclopedia of organization studies. In The international encyclopedia of organization studies. Sage Publishers. Ruus, V.-R. (2004). Eesti õppekavareform 1987–2002 [Estonian curriculum reform from 1987–2002]. In A. Liimets & V.-R. Ruus (Eds.), Õppimine mitmest vaatenurgast [Learning from different angles] (A24 Humani, pp. 13–33). Ruus, V.-R., & Sarv, E.-S. (2000). Changes in Estonian curricula (1987–1999) and some thoughts on the future. In B. T. Beck & A. Mays (Eds.), Challenge and change in education: The experience of the Baltic States in the 1990’s (pp. 141–152). Nova Science Publishers. Samoff, J. (1999). Institutionalizing international influence. In C. A. Arnove & R. F. Torres (Eds.), Comparative education: The dialectic of the global and the local. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Sarv, E.-S., & Rõuk, V. (2020, July). Estonian curriculum: Becoming independent. Pedagogy and Educational Sciences in the Post-Soviet Baltic States, 1990–2004: Changes and Challenges, 84–101. https://doi.org/10.22364/bahp-pes.1990-2004.05 Seitsmeklassiliste koolide ja keskkoolide programmid [Programmes of seven-grade schools and secondary schools], Pub. L. No. 29481 (1951). Terhart, E. (2002). Changing concepts of curriculum: From “Bildung” to “Learning” to “Experience” developments in (West)Germany from the 1960s to 1990. In B. B. Gunden & S. Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik and/or curriculum. An international dialogue. Peter Lang. Timoštšuk, I. (2020). Õppijakeskne lähenemine õpetamisele [Learner-centered approach to teaching]. In M. Heidmets (Ed.), Haridusmõte [Educational Thought] (ACTA Unive, pp. 318–330). TLÜ Kirjastus. Toots, A. (2009). Brussels comes via Helsinki: The role of Finland in europeanisation of Estonian education policy. Halduskultuur, 10, 58–73. Trasberg, K. (2017, March 3). Eesti riigi vormija Peeter Põld [The shaper of the Estonian Republic – Peeter Põld]. Õpetajate Leht [Teachers’ Newspaper]. https://opleht.ee/2017/03/eesti-riigivormija-peeter-pold/

816

M. Erss

Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community, signed at Lisbon, 13 December 2007, Pub. L. No. C 306/01, 1 (2007). https://eurlex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri¼celex%3A12007L%2FTXT Tucker, M. (2015). Estonia’s education system: full of promise, facing challenges. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-estonias-education-system-full-of-promisefacing-challenges/2015/04 von Humboldt, W. (1966). Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen [Ideas of an attempt to determine the boundaries of the influence of a state]. In A. Giel & K. Flitner (Eds.), Humboldt-Werke [The Writings by Humboldt (I)]. Wermke, W., & Höstfält, G. (2014). Contextualizing Teacher Autonomy in time and space: a model for comparing various forms of governing the teaching profession. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(1), 58–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.812681 Westbury, I. (2002). Didaktik and curriculum studies. In S. Gundem & B. B. Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik and/or curriculum: An international dialogue. Peter Lang.

Digital Technology and Education David Kergel and Birte Heidkamp-Kergel

Contents Introduction: From Digitalization and Education to E-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Unidirectional Television to Polydirectional E-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Web 2.0 or the “User Participation Net” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Web 2.0 to E-Learning 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Perspective on E-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Origins of E-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E-Learning 1.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning Management Systems: The Spine of Higher Education E-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . MOOCs: Democratization of Learning with a High Drop-Out Quota . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E-Learning 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Personal Learning Environments: Self-Directed Learning in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-Digital E-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

818 818 819 820 824 824 824 825 825 826 827 829 830 830

Abstract

The article provides an examination of digital technology and education. The presentation focuses on the analysis of the communication possibilities of digital technology. A synoptic overview presents how digital forms of teaching/learning have developed over the last twenty years.

D. Kergel (*) Social Work at the IU International University of Applied Sciences, Duisburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] B. Heidkamp-Kergel Coordinator of the E-Learning, Center at Rhine Waal University of Applied Sciences, Krefeld, Germany © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_8

817

818

D. Kergel and B. Heidkamp-Kergel

Keywords

Digitization · Learning management systems · E-Learning 1.0 · E-Learning 2.0 · Post-digitality · Polydirectionality · Web 2.0

Introduction: From Digitalization and Education to E-Learning Digitalization unfolds its increasing significance within the educational field from early childhood education to primary school and higher education. The digitalization process alters the media upon which learning processes are founded and permits decentralized, action, and product-orientated teaching and learning. The term “e-learning” stands for the potential of digital teaching and learning. As digitally supported teaching and learning, e-learning represents a central challenge for knowledge-based societies in the digital age. For the relation education and digitalization, the term e-learning can be used. E-learning signifies digitally based and digitally supported teaching and learning. However, at the same time, the term e-learning is an expression of the media change of digitization in the pedagogical field. In other words, e-learning is the effect of digitalization in the context of teaching/learning. First and foremost, the implementation of digitally supported teaching/learning scenarios is a teaching and learning practice. In the field of e-learning, the discourse is mainly a discourse of best practice examples, the evaluation results of best practice examples, and the discussions of these evaluation result at conferences or in articles. To remain on a practical level when discussing the relationship between digitization and education, it is worth taking a look at media theory. Such a grounding in media theory can help develop a theory-saturated understanding of digitization and education.

From Unidirectional Television to Polydirectional E-Learning The crucial change leading to e-learning is the shift from television culture to digital culture. Television is a unidirectional medium. As a mass medium of the electronic age, television reaches a mass of receivers as a transmitter. This media structure is a characteristic of the mass media of the electronic age, such as radio. Thus, knowledge is conveyed unidirectionally. From the perspective of learning theory, these mass media of the electronic age are suitable forms for teacher-centered forms of teaching and learning. The media structures of the electronic age are particularly suited to behaviorist and cognitivist teacher-learner approaches. The media structure of television constitutes a clear distinction between “recipient and producer” or “communicator and receiver.” In contrast, digital media, due to its poly-directional

Digital Technology and Education

819

and polyphonic structure, opens up potentially dialogic communication spaces and interaction processes. The participatory, media structures that define the Internet – and here Internet is mainly the “Web 2.0” as a so-called participatory net – enable dialogic forms of interaction. To elaborate on this point, the term Web 2.0 is presented below.

The Web 2.0 or the “User Participation Net” The term Web 2.0 is used to describe the increasingly poly-directional and polyphonic use of the Internet (cf. O’Reilly, 2006): People can communicate with each other in dialogue via social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram. The term Web 2.0 describes the possibility that users can quickly produce content – even without any programming knowledge. Web 2.0 is based on the so-called user-generated content technology (cf. Lehr, 2012). Ideally, users create content together via Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, podcasts, and blogs, as well as social networking sites. Media pedagogue Stephen Downes sees a social revolution in Web 2.0: “For all this technology, what is important to recognize is that the emergence of the Web 2.0 is not a technological revolution, it is a social revolution” (Downes, 2005, para. 26). The social dimension of Web 2.0 is also evident in the Social Web, which is based on social media with social networking sites like Instagram or Facebook. Social media is a symbol of this change from “Web 1.0” to “Web 2.0.” People are increasingly involved in identity management based on SNS. Through SNS, users can connect with each other and exchange information. Social media on SNS “became informal, but all-embracing identity management tools, defining access to user-created content via social relationships” (Mitrou et al., 2014, p. 2). With Web 2.0, the Internet developed as we know it today: • The first legal download platform was founded by Apple in 2003. • In 2004, the platform Flickr.com was launched, which made it possible to add short comments to pictures. • Also in 2004, Facebook was founded, and 1 year later. • (2005) YouTube saw the light of day. • In the same year, Google Earth was launched in 2005, followed by Google Maps and Google Street View. • 2006 was the year Twitter was launched. • In 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle e-book reader. • Apple presented the first iPhone. The iPhone marked the beginning of the era of smartphones and mobile digital devices – 3 years later (2010), the first iPad was presented to the public. • In 2009, WhatsApp was founded – today the world’s most popular app. • One year later (2010), Instagram was launched. • One year later (2011), Snapchat was launched.

820

D. Kergel and B. Heidkamp-Kergel

All these applications led to a participatory transformation of the Internet. This use was also supported by the development and distribution of increasingly powerful and cost-effective PCs. These applications have substituted receptive Internet use in the sense of Web 1.0. While the Internet in Web 1.0 showed the receptive structure of established mass media of the electronic age, a new form of participatory media use and knowledge construction emerged: And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, a network (Downes, 2005, para. 21, e.i.O.).

From Web 2.0 to E-Learning 2.0 Web 2.0 enables collaborative forms of knowledge construction. These collaborative forms of knowledge construction can also be used in e-learning. Accordingly, Siemens formulated a “learning theory for the digital age” in 2004 and Downes, a year later, the program of an E-Learning 2.0. According to Downes, E-Learning 2.0 is defined by the utilization of the poly-directional and polyphonic potentials of Web 2.0 for a self-directed learning process in a social context: In the future it will be more widely recognized that the learning comes not from the design of learning content but in how it is used. Most e-learning theorists are already there, and are exploring how learning content—whether professionally authored or created by students can be used as the basis for learning activities rather than the conduit for learning content (Downes, 2005, para. 37).

With E-Learning 2.0, Downes also describes a learning process that is characterized by a remix culture. In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along (Downes, 2005, para, 21).

In this mash-up culture of learning, the organization of learning has a supraindividual structure and takes the form of a network. In the course of dialogical learning, knowledge is constructed rather than received. The result of the action and production-oriented learning culture of E-Learning 2.0 is a collaborative remix culture that is based on the infrastructure of Web 2.0. Against the background of these considerations, E-Learning 2.0 can be read as an expression of a cultural change in the educational field. With Web 2.0, the Internet has established itself as a new leading mass medium. With Web 2.0 at the latest, the digital age begins – which also brings with it new forms of learning. Against the background of the participatory or collaborative potential of Web 2.0 media, E-Learning 2.0 can be defined as dialogic learning that unfolds through the media infrastructure of Web 2.0.

Digital Technology and Education

821

For e-didactic practice, it is crucial to make Web 2.0 tools usable for formal educational contexts in the sense of E-Learning 2.0. Grell and Rau (2011, p. 6) compiled an overview of the possible uses of Web 2.0 media in learning contexts. The following overview represents a specification of possible uses of Web 2.0 media in the sense of E-Learning 2.0 and is adopted here with slight modifications and extensions (see Table 1). The overview can be read as a rough, e-didactic orientation grid for developing usage strategies of Web 2.0 media for teaching/learning scenarios. A lot of These tools were provided by the so-called EdTechs: Table 1 Overview of the possible uses of Web 2.0 media Web 2.0 media Blogs

Wikis

Microblogging tools like Twitter

Sharing platforms like Slideshare

Social bookmarking tools like Diigolet

Collaborative writing tools such as Etherpad, Google Drive and Authorea

Based on Grell and Rau (2011), p. 6

Possible use in education Written presentations of own ideas and considerations provide a basis for reflection and feedback from teachers and students Use as a Web 2.0-based learning platform Stepping out of the university sanctuary and into the “real world,” e.g., through your own blogs or science blogs Mutual commenting (e.g., constructive feedback) enables the development of peer networks for active knowledge generation Collaborative work on ideas and joint structuring of texts, materials, and sources Creating an environment for peer feedback A way to provide brief information and feedback to students. Brief information can provide concrete impulses for thinking Initiating supplementary discussions in virtual space Networking of students, which, for example, enables the exchange of literature references Following the microblog of an expert can help to establish a professional network Annotate and comment on materials used in courses Posting presentations and texts following seminar papers to receive feedback also from an authentic audience from all over the world “Sharing” of material or use of existing materials Enables a cooperative form of research and mutual sharing of relevant information Annotating and commenting on sources Identification of persons and groups with similar interests Enables a cooperative form of research and mutual sharing of relevant information Annotating and commenting on sources Identification of persons and groups with similar interests

822

D. Kergel and B. Heidkamp-Kergel

Educational entrepreneurs and altruists, including countless emerging educational technology (or EdTech) ventures and emerging educational nonprofits, were more than ready to provide their own alternatives in the form of educational products and programs, many of them leveraging the same all-but-free Internet infrastructure being used by large educational publishers and universities themselves to deliver a variety of proposed solutions to society’s educational ills (Haber, 2014, p. 33).

In addition to the use of Web 2.0 media, the educational content of the implementation of such media must also be ensured. To this end, the following heuristic key questions can generally be considered when using Web 2.0 in teaching/learning contexts: • What insights has the use of the Web 2.0 application brought about? • What difficulties did I have with the appropriation of the medium within the learning process? • Where do I experience uncertainties in the use of Web 2.0 applications? Against the background of these e-didactic aspects, the following will present approaches that implement the action and production-oriented concept of E-Learning 2.0 in practice. Latest since the Web 2.0, the media structure of digital communication is thus characterized by a polyphonic (several authors can work synchronously on texts) and a poly-directional (several authors can communicate with each other in dialogue) dimension. Asymmetrical communication relationships are – potentially – undermined. For example, in a wiki entry, due to the poly-directional nature of wikis, the “reader” can easily take on the role of “(co-)author.” Consequently, a polyphonic text is created to which several individuals contribute their “voice.” The remix and mashup culture of the Internet has here a medial basis: “Technology could enable a whole generation to create—remixed films, new forms of music, digital art, a new kind of storytelling, writing, a new technology for poetry, criticism, political activism—and then, through infrastructure of the Internet, share creativity with others” (Lessig, 2001, S. 9). It is precisely this ephemeral or non-static/fluid form of communication, in which content and knowledge is produced and changed by users, that poses a challenge for media literacy in the digital age. For example, a text can be “used,” changed, and remixed – readers inscribe themselves in the text. The result is a new text with a new perspective, or a mash-up of the earlier text. Such “textual instability” (cf. Weel, 2011) marks a break with the concept of the “lasting structure of a printed text.” With Web 2.0, a sociotechnical infrastructure has been created that enables new forms of learning. The medial structure of the digital also inscribes into didactic strategies. This is exemplified when Sharples et al. (2005) create a parallelization of a “new” learnercentered understanding of learning and “new” technologies. This parallelization shows how participatory learning strategies find their medial equivalent through the participatory, poly-directional structure of digital media (Table 2).

Digital Technology and Education Table 2 Convergence between learning and technology

New learning Personalized Learner-centered Situated Collaborative Ubiquitous Lifelong

823 New technology Personal User-centered Mobile Networked Ubiquitous Durable

Own figure, following Sharples et al. (2005), p. 4

From an e-didactic perspective, the challenge is to develop strategies that meet the competence challenges of the digital age and, at the same time, enable a learning that is adequate to the structures of digital communication. In doing so, one must be careful to appropriately update the dialogical and collaborative potentials of digital media for teaching/learning scenarios Collaborative forms of learning are becoming increasingly popular methods of adult education, because they involve all students in the process of learning. Social software is based heavily on participation, and this is apparent in a number of features including tagging, voting, versioning, hyperlinking and searching as well as discussion and commenting. The power of this kind of software is that it includes all in the process of creating group based collections of knowledge and artefacts, that are of specific interest to the learning community (Wheeler, 2008, p. 5).

Since the beginning of the 2000s, many e-tools have been developed that promote collaborative learning at the media level. For example, many popular social web applications enable collaborative writing. Well-known tools for collaborative writing are as follows: Google Docs (https://www.google.com/drive/) Wikibooks (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page) Authorea (https://www.authorea.com/) Mind-map tools and digital blackboards are as follows: Coggle (https://coggle.it/) und Padlet (https://padlet.com/dashboard) Collaborative social bookmarking tool and online meeting tools are as follows: Diigo (https://www.diigo.com/) Google Hangout (https://hangouts.google.com/) All these web tools require a user account. In formal educational contexts such as schools or universities, the implementation of such collaborative tools often reaches the limits set by privacy regulations. To overcome this difficulty, learning management systems such as Moodle allow the integration of etherpads without any data

824

D. Kergel and B. Heidkamp-Kergel

protection concerns. Etherpads enable collaborative work in parts, but the editorial possibilities are limited. With reference to this example, one can conclude that the integration of social web tools into formal educational concepts remains one of the central challenges of contemporary e-learning.

Historical Perspective on E-Learning Origins of E-Learning Although e-learning only emerged with the global establishment of the Internet, it has its roots in machine-supported learning and in programmed learning, which both have a behaviorist orientation. Teaching machine-supported learning enables a strongly directed learning. In directed learning, the subject matter is broken down into learning sections. If a learning segment is completed, the next segment is displayed. In machine-based directed learning, the role of the teacher is filled out as far as possible by teaching programs. An example of such learning machines is Skinners teaching machine, or Pressy’s learning machine. The learning machine provides a question with five possible solutions. The learner has to choose a solution. When the learner answers the question correctly, the next tasks follow. The grand time of these teaching/learning machines falls into the 1960s – a time when cybernetic models and cognitivist ideas of learning increasingly unfolded. With the beginning of the “PC age” in the 1980s, computer-supported learning experienced a renewed surge in popularity: “[T]he computer was embraced almost immediately as an educational instrument” (Haber, 2014, p. 28). Thus, computer-based training (CBT) was offered through teaching/learning programs, especially in vocational training. This approach includes, for example, teaching programs that can be accessed via CD-ROM or that are stored directly on the computer. Until the end of the 1990s, CBT was the most common form of e-learning avant la lettre. Moreover, still today in Germany, grade-schoolers look forward to entering the “PC-Room” to play CD-ROM-based learning games. With the establishment of the Internet, web-based training (WBT) came into being. WBT includes all teaching programs that are accessible via the Internet. E-learning, as we know it today, finally saw the light of day at the end of the 1990s with the introduction of E-Learning 1.0. This was followed at relatively short intervals by E-Learning 2.0 and post-digital mobile learning. All three phases are briefly outlined below.

E-Learning 1.0 E-Learning 1.0: Although computer-based learning existed before the Internet, its commercial opening and the global mass distribution of the Internet have given e-learning the importance it possesses today. The term e-learning became increasingly established from the mid-1990s onwards – at a time when the central players of

Digital Technology and Education

825

the “digital economy,” Amazon (1995), Netflix (1996), and Google (1998) were founded. Initially, e-learning was oriented towards conventional forms of learning. In universities, for example, the so-called learning management systems (LMS) like Moodle and Blackboard were set up. At the beginning of the 2000s, digitally supported learning or a rudimentary form of e-learning was thus established in higher education, at least at a basic level – a developmental step from which (German) schools are still a long way from. Examples of E-Learning 1.0 are the so-called learning management systems (LMS) and massive open online courses (MOOCS).

Learning Management Systems: The Spine of Higher Education E-Learning Learning management systems (LMS) enable digital course management: Teachers can make learning material available to students online and interactive chat rooms: The introduction of learning management systems [. . .] into college campuses [. . .] automated the interaction between students and professors (thought features such as automated distribution of syllabus material and submission of homework assignments), as well as professors and administrators (through systems such as centralized grading and reporting)” (Haber, 2014, p. 39f.)

Some significant advantages of LMS are the bundling of existing functionalities such as chat or forum, the possibility of course administration, and learning-specific functions such as the delivery tool and assessment options. The learning possibilities of LMS have been continuously developed since its widespread implementation in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but this does not change the fact that Learning Management Systems are mostly used just for the distribution of learning material. Learning management systems usually function more like content management systems in everyday e-learning. In their depth structure, LMS consequently reproduce more teacher-centered forms of digitally supported learning, which do not do justice to the potential of the media structure of digital communication.

MOOCs: Democratization of Learning with a High Drop-Out Quota MOOCs are always a big issue in e-didactic discussion and can be seen as one of the most popular didactic approaches of E-Learning 1.0. The acronym MOOC stands for “Massive Open Online Courses.” As an online course, participation in a MOOC is not tied to access requirements and conditions of access – it is therefore open. The term “Massive” indicates that a large number of participants are expected or possible in such courses. Besides universities, MOOCs are also offered by (commercial) providers.

826

D. Kergel and B. Heidkamp-Kergel

The xMOOC is characteristic for E-Learning 1.0, whereby the “x” stands for extended and thus for particularly high numbers of participants. The xMOOC represents a digital lecture format. Unidirectional online lectures are offered on fixed dates. The input is often supplemented by online-based assessments and digital learning groups. xMOOCs make use of the media structure of the Internet by enabling a decentralizing “de-localization” and “de-distance” of learning. In principle, xMOOCs retain a unidirectional structure, which is why xMOOCs can be assigned to E-Learning 1.0 – or in the words of Rodriguez (2013): “x-MOOCs can be viewed as learning management systems bundled with high quality content” (Rodriguez, 2013, p. 71). In 2011, xMOOCs experienced their first “hype” when three courses were offered at Stanford University, which met with extraordinary demand – approximately 160,000 participants registered for the course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI).” xMOOCs, as this example shows, can potentially (and of course from an idealized perspective, will) enable a democratization of learning: outsiders can participate in the learning content of elite universities. However, the high number of participants is offset by the relatively high drop-out rate that characterizes xMOOCs. In the course of the first hype about MOOCs in the 2010s, more and more platforms were created which, like Coursera, offer online courses in xMOOC format.

E-Learning 2.0 E-Learning 2.0: The digital “shift from teaching to learning”: With the essays “Connectivism” (2004) by George Siemens and “E-Learning 2.0” (2005) by Stephen Downes, an e-didactic paradigm was increasingly established. This paradigm is called “E-Learning 2.0” and transfers the collaborative potential of the “Web 2.0” to teaching and learning processes. Web 2.0 (see O’Reilly, 2006) enables the “consumer” to become the “producer” of web content through technical innovations (see Gaiser, 2008). The user becomes a “prosumer.” The Internet increasingly offers the possibility of a digital communication platform (Lehr, 2012, p. 47). On this digital communication platform, users can actively participate in creating content. With the E-Learning 2.0 approach, a more action and production-orientated understanding of e-learning was established. The extended freedom of action in the digital world is discussed primarily through a critical examination of LMS. Learning Management Systems such as Moodle and Blackboards were criticized as “walled gardens” that enable only “insular e-learning.” This insular learning takes place within the garden walls and delimits the learner from its digital lifeworld outside the door (cf. Ehlers, 2011, p. 59). The E-Learning 2.0 approach emphasizes that in the sense of situational learning, self-organized learning must be realized in the authentic digital lifeworld. Instead of a central learning platform, individual applications such as blogs become individual learning platforms. Learners network or “connect” with each other for socio-collaborative learning processes. From this perspective, LMSs that enable E-Learning 1.0 have to be replaced by individual learning

Digital Technology and Education

827

platforms that make individual learning in the socio-collaborative contexts of Web 2.0 possible. One example of E-Learning 2.0 is the so-called PLEs (Personal Learning Environments).

Personal Learning Environments: Self-Directed Learning in Practice With the establishment of Web 2.0 applications, personal learning environments (PLEs) are increasingly a didactic topic. For example, the “International Personal Learning Environment Conference” was held in Barcelona in 2006 and marked the innovation phase of Web 2.0 (for more on the connection between social software and PLEs, see Schaffert & Kalz, 2008, p. 2f ). Personal learning environments can be understood as a didactic radicalization of the networking idea of connectivism and the aspect of self-directed learning in E-Learning 2.0. A PLE runs on (web) applications. The basic idea is that a PLE is open for an individual and decentralized combination of many different Web 2.0 tools. A PLE is the most significant possible difference to learning management systems and E-Learning 1.0. Atwell, who brought PLEs prominently into the didactic discussion, defines PLEs as “comprised of all the different tools we use in our everyday life for learning” (Attwell, 2007, p. 4). In dealing with PLEs, the focus is less on the technical aspects and more on selfdirected learning itself. Zingel and Türker (2008) point out that PLEs should be more as a pure organization tool: “Without a pedagogical value-add, PLEs cannot be viewed as educational tools, but perhaps advanced, user-friendly file management tool” (Zingel & Türker, 2008, p. 1). The concept of personal learning focuses on the (digital) environment and the questions raised by the learner. The PLE concept presupposes an active and self-determined learner and is based – more or less explicitly – on (socio)-constructive and connectivist learning theory. When Atwell accordingly states, “The development and support for Personal Learning Environments would entail a radical shift, not only in how we use educational technology but in the organization and ethos of education” (Attwell, 2007, p. 5), the question arises how this new ethos can be operationalized for learning scenarios. The ethos, which according to Atwell assigns a high degree of self-responsibility to the learner, manifests itself in a socio-constructivist or connectivist use of Web 2.0 applications in learning settings. For this purpose, Arnold et al. (2011) developed a normative requirement profile that PLEs have to fulfill and which includes above all the points of information search, information structuring, processing, analysis, reflection, presentation, and “networking with others” (cf. Arnold et al., 2011, p. 75). A didacticization of PLEs aims to promote the strengthening of the individual’s ability to organize themselves so that users can select and use different tools that help them on their learning path (Fig. 1). In summary, it can be said that PLEs target the organizational competence of the individual. The PLE approach requires that (Web 2.0) media tools should be specifically used for learning processes. “Indeed, it may be that PLEs offer

828

D. Kergel and B. Heidkamp-Kergel

Fig. 1 Visualization of a personal learning environment (own figure)

considerable potential for knowledge development and sharing and what has been called organizational learning” (Attwell, 2007, p. 75). The use of PLEs in the context of E-Learning 2.0 is an integrative use of Web 2.0 applications for learning purposes. This use of Web 2.0 applications could (or should) be accompanied by a self-reflective process. This self-reflective process deals with the possibilities of knowledge construction via PLEs: • Which form of media enables access to which knowledge? When it comes to the didactization of PLEs, it is crucial to impart technical competence, i.e., how to deal with the technical requirements of Web 2.0 applications. The learner must also be given the opportunity to reflect on his media use as part of learning processes. Heuristic questions might help: • How do I use which media/Web 2.0 tools for what purposes? This question requires a self-positioning towards individual media use. With reference to learning processes via Web 2.0 applications, the key question can be specified further: • How do I use which media for this learning process? • How do I understand my role in relation to the used medium? (e.g., more receptive, more participative?) These questions can be used as impulses for reflection and help learners to develop a confident use of Web 2.0 media and thus organize a PLE environment and be able to reflect on it adequately.

Digital Technology and Education

829

Post-Digital E-Learning Mobile Learning as Post-digital (e-)Learning: The E-Learning 2.0 phase is followed by the mobile learning phase. The spread of mobile Internet is the basis for the mobile learning approach. With mobile Internet, digital communication has become part of our everyday life. The ubiquity of the Internet in social practice means that digital communication is an integral part of our lives. The digital is such a considerable part of our lifeworld that we have reached a state of a “post-digital” lifeworld. The digital, virtual world of the Internet and the material-physical world are inseparably interwoven. Accordingly, there is not a separate digital learning on one hand and learning in the materialphysical world on the other. The term “mobile learning” stands for a learning in the new digital-physical world. Mobile learning is not interpreted as a variant of e-learning, but rather as a form of learning in the post-digital age. Despite this distinction, mobile learning takes on the socio-constructivist or connectivist foundation of E-Learning 2.0. As an (e-)didactic approach, “mobile learning” elaborates on the potential of the digital devices’ mobility and the (increasing) ubiquity of the Internet for learning contexts. In other words, the didactic approach of “mobile learning” is based on a post-digital infrastructure. Mobile learning is no longer e-learning, but represents a form of learning in a postdigital world. Mobile learning makes it possible to understand learning processes from their situational context and to develop adequate, didactic strategies for these contexts. Through an augmented dimension, mobile learning enables immediate access to the digital world with all its information through portable mobile end devices. In discussions, relevant information can be researched on a smartphone without any problems. According to the approach of mobile learning, the portable device can serve as the following: • A source of information (for navigation, for accessing knowledge databases) • A communication medium • A cognitive tool (in the sense of producing and exchanging notes, photos, videos or mind maps etc.) (cf. de Witt, 2013, p. 18) Mobile learning makes it possible to understand learning processes from their context and to develop adequate didactic strategies: [T]he rising interest in new learning spaces such as information commons, where wireless, mobile connectivity admits the full informatic range of the Internet into any niche or conversation. Older spaces take on new pedagogical meaning; for example, wireless cafes allow the full range of classwork to be deployed between a coffee and a bagel (Bryan, 2004, S. 62).

Important findings and literature tips can be easily shared with other learners via microblogging tools such as Twitter (see also Ravenscroft, 2011, p. 149). Participatory learning strategies find their media equivalent in a post-digital world through the

830

D. Kergel and B. Heidkamp-Kergel

Fig. 2 Visualization of the historical development of e-learning (own figure)

participatory, poly-directional structure of digital media within its synergetic integration with the physical-material world (Fig. 2).

Conclusion In summary, learning and technology can never be separated. In the development of e-learning, Web 2.0 and E-Learning 2.0 represent a turning point. Through Web 2.0, the medial properties of digital media could be used appropriately. The approach of post-digital mobile learning means consistent further development. Here, digital space and material-physical sphere merge dialectically.

References Arnold, P., Killian, L., Thillosen, A., & Zimmer, G. (2011). Handbuch E-Learning. Lehren und Lernen mit digitalen Medien. Bielefeld: Bertelsmann. Attwell, G. (2007). The personal learning environment – The future of eLearning? http://www. elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media11561.pdf. Zuletzt zugegriffen: 5 Sept 2008. Bryan, A. (2004). Going nomadic: Mobile learning in higher education. Educause Review, 39(5), 29–35. de Witt, C. (2013). Vom E-Learning zum Mobile Learning – wie Smartphones und Tablet PCs Lernen und Arbeit verbinden. In C. de Witt & A. Sieber (Eds.), Mobile Learning. Potenziale, Einsatzszenarien und Perspektiven des Lernens mit mobilen Endgeräten (pp. 13–26). VS Springer. Downes, S. (2005). E-Learning 2.0. e-Learn-Magazine. www.elearnmag.org/sub-page.cfm? section¼articles&article¼29-1. Zuletzt zugegriffen: 1 June 2015. Ehlers, U.-D. (2011). Qualität im E-Learning aus Lernersicht. Wiesbaden: VS Springer.

Digital Technology and Education

831

Gaiser, B. (2008). Lehre im Web 2.0 – Didaktisches Flickwerk oder Triumph der Individualität? http://www.e-teaching.org/didaktik/kommunikation/08-09-12_Gaiser_Web_2.0.pdf. Zuletzt zugegriffen: 5 Sept 2014. Grell, P., & Rau, F. (2011). Partizipationslücken – Social Software in der Hochschullehre. MedienPädagogik, p. 21. http://www.medienpaed.com/globalassets/medienpaed/21/grell_rau1111.pdf. Zuletzt zugegriffen: 18 Oct 2015. Haber, J. (2014). MOOCS. MIT. Lehr, C. (2012). Web 2.0 in der universitären Lehre. Ein Handlungsrahmen für die Gestaltung technologiegestützter Lernszenarien. Vwh. Lessig, L. (2001). The future of ideas. The fate of the commons in a connected world. Creative commons version. New York: Random House. Mitrou, L., Kandias, M., Stavrou, V., & Gritzalis, D. (2014). Social media profiling: A panopticon or omnipoticon tool? https://www.infosec.aueb.gr/Publications/2014-SSN-Privacy%20Social% 20Media.pdf. Zuletzt zugegriffen: 23 Sept 2017. O’Reilly, T. (2006). Web 2.0 compact definition: Trying again. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/ 2006/12/web-20-compact.html. Zuletzt zugegriffen: 18 May 2015. Ravenscroft, A. (2011). Dialogue and connectivism: A new approach to understanding and promoting dialogue-rich networked learning. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(3),139–160. Rodriguez, O. (2013). The concept of openness behind c and x-MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Open Praxis, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.5.1.42. Schaffert, S., & Kalz, M. (2008). Persönliche Lernumgebungen: Grundlagen, Mög-lichkeiten und Herausforderungen eines neuen Konzepts. http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1573. Zuletzt zugegriffen: 5 Mar 2013. Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3–10. Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G. (2005). Towards a theory of mobile learning. Proceedings of mLearn 2005, 1(1), 1–9. Van der Weel, A. (2011). Changing our textual minds. Towards a digital order of knowledge. Manchester University Press. Wheeler, S. (2008). All changing: The social web and the future of higher education. http://www. slid/timbuckteeth/all-changing-t-he-social-web-and-the-future-of-higher-education-presenta tion. 14 Aug 2013. Zingel, S., & Türker, M. A. (2008). Formative interfaces for scaffolding self-regulated learning in PLEs. http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media15975.pdf

Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments Marlon Simmons

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Where Is the Classroom? The Material and Its Implications for Network Learning . . . . . . . . . . What About Community and Difference When Teaching and Learning in Online Settings? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

834 836 839 842 843

Abstract

There is a growing dynamism to inspire academic staff to network through Zoom technologies in teaching, research, and supervision. This dynamism has increased demand for more responsive and customized modes of understanding curriculum research and practices in online Zoom settings. Network learning involves interpersonal and relational characteristics as situated within the online classroom, signifying that the teacher has an important pedagogical role in supporting students through their journey to become innovative educators. Another focus within the field of network learning is whether technology is an independent force driving teaching and learning that is socially shaped and co-constructed by its design and context when it is taken up in online settings by the teacher and learner or whether technology and its synchronous and asynchronous features are seen as defining the educational practices of the teacher and learner (Castells, 2000; Goodyear et al., 2014; Gourlay, 2015; Jones, 2015; Van Dijk, 1999). Such a focus prompts the recognition that online and blended learning are at times endowed with specific ethical tenets that support curricular research within Zoom networking environments. As such, the guiding questions for this discussion are as follows: What theoretical ways of knowing are made durable when synchronous platforms M. Simmons (*) Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_30

833

834

M. Simmons

become modes of attachment for online doctoral learners? What signification processes are theoretically embedded through the sociomaterial interactions within synchronous and asynchronous practices of doctoral learners? How might we know the ways in which curricular designs within particular online environments endow incommensurable relations of knowledge among the students and other material actors? What epistemological tasks enable mapping the ways in which human and nonhuman interactions come into being and simultaneously constitute communities of learners and collaboratively enhance student learning within online settings? How do we design curriculum to build students’ trust that allows their agency to emerge through familiarity with the social and the material as shaped by the experiences embodied within network learning? Keywords

Network learning · Zoom · Sociomaterial · Technology · Asynchronous and asynchronous platforms

Introduction There is a growing dynamism to inspire academic staff to network through Zoom technologies in teaching, research, and supervision. This dynamism has increased demand for more responsive and customized modes of understanding curriculum research and practices in online Zoom settings. Network learning involves interpersonal and relational characteristics as situated within the online classroom, signifying that the teacher has an important pedagogical role in supporting students through their journey to become innovative educators. Another focus within the field of network learning is whether technology is an independent force driving teaching and learning that is socially shaped and co-constructed by its design and context when it is taken up in online settings by the teacher and learner or whether technology and its synchronous and asynchronous features are seen as defining the educational practices of the teacher and learner (Castells, 2000; Goodyear et al., 2014; Gourlay, 2015; Jones, 2015; Van Dijk, 1999). Such a focus prompts the recognition that online and blended learning are at times endowed with specific ethical tenets that support curricular research within Zoom networking environments. As such, the guiding questions for this discussion are as follows: What theoretical ways of knowing are made durable when synchronous platforms become modes of attachment for online doctoral learners? What signification processes are theoretically embedded through the sociomaterial interactions within synchronous and asynchronous practices of doctoral learners? How might we know the ways in which curricular designs within particular online environments endow incommensurable relations of knowledge among the students and other material actors? What epistemological tasks enable mapping the ways in which human and nonhuman interactions come into being and simultaneously constitute communities of learners and collaboratively enhance student learning within online settings? How do we design curriculum to build

Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments

835

students’ trust that allows their agency to emerge through familiarity with the social and the material as shaped by the experiences embodied within network learning? Around March 13, 2020, K-12 and postsecondary schools in Alberta moved to online classes. Social distancing protocols were installed, a state of emergency was declared, and quarantine initiatives were mandated. These measures were deemed necessary to diminish the spread of the pandemic. Indoor fitness, entertainment facilities, recreation, and performance activities were closed or restricted. Indoor dining was prohibited in restaurants, bars, pubs, and cafes, and additional safety measures were put in place. There were province-wide mandates to work from home unless one’s physical presence on the job was needed to ensure safety of operations. Masks were required in indoor work areas. These protocols had heartfelt implications for teachers, students, professors, administrators, and staff at K-12 and postsecondary schools, particularly in how they attended to their social worlds, and new work practices and arrangements. What knowledge modalities ensued for educators and staff related to technology and online approaches to work, teaching, and learning? In the global context, an unexpected shift occurred in the daily enactments of work, teaching, and learning. Educators, students, and administrators sought different technological mechanisms and places to adjust to this impromptu shift in life. This materialized in the myriad of undertakings regarding submission of assignments, home schooling, presentations, conferences, teaching, research, working from home, thesis defenses, and candidacy exams. These materializations called for the use of technological mechanisms, including both synchronous and asynchronous platforms to carry out such large-scale educational practices. Zoom emerged as the go-to technological platform for many. These conditions of moving to synchronous and asynchronous platforms engendered implications for teacher and learner subjectivities, including an increased affect given the challenges of home and work relations and the need to make sense of historical tropes of what it means to teach and learn as embodied and embedded in some physical context of a classroom. Some of the concerns that emerged are how the Zoom platform supports the ways in which students learn in relation to their inquiry; identifying what educational practices emerging through Zoom enhance teaching and learning practices; teachers, students, and administrators’ perceptions about course design choices and patterns of learning on the Zoom platform; implications for educational delivery and how students’ learning, teaching, and supervision (given the context) were supported, challenged, or limited in online and blended learning activities; and identifying synchronous and asynchronous limitations and possibilities for student learning and engagement in research activities on Zoom platforms. The foci of Zoom platforms are on learning as a method, as a shared process that encompasses participation through dialogue, embodiment, and the social and learning as being augmented by way of technology (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Latour, 2005; Orlikowski, 2000; Sorenson, 2009). In an inadvertent way, Zoom has come to be the cartographer for delineating new ways of teaching and learning. Embraced globally, Zoom allows for increased participation of online communities. This increasing use of virtual learning environments (VLE) in different educational fields has been experienced by educators as a

836

M. Simmons

global approach to teaching and learning involving educational technology. Educational institutions also experienced an insurgence of different forms of networking, including in classroom settings, social groups, community gatherings, or working from home. This rise fueled a call for creative pedagogical approaches imbued with these emergent digital technologies. Along with this insurgence, pedagogical principles that were previously in play have been transformed through digital technologies. One concern arising is how educators and learners integrated these new digital technologies and pedagogical principles into their practices. Another moment speaks to how the immanent affordance within these digital technologies becomes constitutive of the ongoing pedagogical shift in teacher, learner, and material resources. Designing for learning in these fluid spaces is not about one size fits all, for enmeshed within these designs for learning spaces are epistemological embodiments that drive particular theoretical approaches that heuristically inform and shape relations among educator, learner, curricula, and nonhuman technological resources (Conole, 2013). These relations point to community building and design knowledge as interwoven: sometimes entangled, sometimes partitioned with signature pedagogies engendered by epistemological curiosity (Freire, 2005).

Where Is the Classroom? The Material and Its Implications for Network Learning Of interest to this discussion is the particular relations with knowledge, teaching, learning, nonhuman material artifacts and the self, and how educators come to constitute these ongoing spatial configurations within online environments (Gourlay, 2015; Law & Mol, 1995), keeping in mind that these relationships are engendered through different histories, cultures, values, beliefs, and epistemological practices. In many ways, technology allows for particularized approaches and responses to learning, which, at the same time, constitute the self in relation to this network of the social and nonhuman material artifacts. In a sense, this writing is fecundated, by finding ways to make sense of the incommensurable constitutive factors of technology. One approach forms an inquiry into the process of disclosure and simultaneous enactment of edification and how this technological role of edification opens places of knowing constitutive of meaning making. Part and parcel of this hermeneutic task is the reification of how social signifiers transpire through these ongoing spatial communicative exchanges with the human and nonhuman artifacts (Gourlay, 2015). Such exchanges place the emphasis on a mode of thinking with foci on how material artifacts come to interact with the human through a series of social signifiers. Moving to synchronous and asynchronous platforms while working from home ensued some spatiotemporal challenges concomitant with distinct boundaries and imbrications concerning workspace, home, and classroom. Being governed by the conditions of the pandemic, many educators experienced longer workdays or working on weekends. An emergent boundary worth noting is the interchanging enactment of how space becomes constituted as classroom, work, or home, given the embodied context of the teacher, student, or administrator. The boundaries are fluid, mutable, and

Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments

837

mobile, yet at the same time experienced as obligatory points of passage (Callon, 1999; Latour, 2005). With Alberta households confined to their homes and mandatory social distancing in place, home, Zoom, and phone conferencing simultaneously became mutable and immutable mobiles creating, in myriad ways, different ways of knowing community and belonging. Many social media outlets drew attention to having to move to online platforms. Conversations ranged from the problematics of online teaching and learning, dissimilarity to face-to-face settings, to the paucity of hands-on work. What used to be everyday educator interactions of embodied engagements within the scope of the classroom turned into a network of technological enactments now being used for educational practices. This assemblage of embodied practices and technological enactments are in a sense signified through boundaries that are contingent on home and classroom space, class members, and social distancing practices (Parchoma et al., 2020). Educators moving to online settings faced new challenges with their instructional delivery. An everyday class could now involve inserting video recordings of the self into power points and uploading onto Zoom platforms. Classroom interactions resulted in dialogue materializing in synchronous and asynchronous formats. This shift in educational practice gave rise to numerous conversations on social media about the limitations of e-learning. Another conversation circulating on social media was whether distance learning could replace face-to-face components of teaching in the physical space of the classroom. Over time, the historical organization of the classroom as constructed around chalk, blackboard, material entities of walls, and embodied by teachers and students has come to predetermine the signification process of some stable reading of what it means to teach and learn in educational institutions. Having to shift to this space of technology, embedded with multiple nonhuman actants, brought a range of sociotechnical processes that changed educational practices. Working from home entailed organizing and converting particular elements, to rethink how one relates to colleagues, students, teaching, and research. Instead of walking down the hall and knocking on a colleague’s door, or meeting someone in the lunch room to have conversation over tea and coffee, teachers now had to work through what I interpret as an assemblage of displacements constituted through a series of boundaries. The prompt turn in the ontological condition of the classroom gave rise to a reconfiguration of sociotechnical processes that organize meaning and sensibilities of becoming in one’s social reality (Mol, 1999; Resnick, 2002). Noting the different ontological positions of the classroom invites a discussion concerning how technology and material artifacts come to function – in particular, how technology becomes used by the pedagogue (Mol, 1999; Law & Mol 1995). This leads to the idea of affordance (Gibson, 2014; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2012), which, for the purpose of this discussion, I conceptualize as the relational ways in which the material appears to come into action. By thinking through the concept of affordance, one can gain some insight into how educators come into relations and how they make meaning of the ontological shift of the classroom. Affordance then becomes contingent on the methods of the educator when approaching the material assemblage of the classroom as constituted through place, be it the temporal, work, home, or other outdoor or indoor facilities. In terms of an approach to teaching and

838

M. Simmons

learning, technology becomes an obligatory point of passage for the formation of educator praxis. The idea of affordance provides meaning to technology: as being ontological to the classroom, denoting contingent relations between human and nonhuman actants that constitute a transcendence of our beliefs, values, attitudes, and expressions in ways that can materialize transformative educational possibilities for present and future actions necessary for social change (Mol, 1999; Gibson, 2014; Gourlay, 2015; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2012). Technology allows an approach to online classrooms in a manner that simultaneously divulges and obscures the way in which it is interpreted and used by teachers, students, and administrators in a particular instance. At the same time, affinity to specific aspects of technology also constitutes the subjectivities of teachers, students, and administrative staff. Moving one’s office, classroom, or portfolio into the home imbues a pedagogic engagement that is embodied and at times constituted into some wholesomeness through these newfound relations to materials in the home (Goodyear et al., 2014). In this moment, pedagogy becomes engendered through social engagements as governed by an assemblage of nonhuman material networks. From reciprocity to limiting conditions, these material spatial configurations work to enact network relations with teachers, students, and administrators. Historically, this represents a shift from face-to-face enactments with blackboards, chalk, desks, paper, pens, pencils, erasers, and power points to now be immersed in the synchronous and asynchronous settings of a learning management system (LMS) with multiple users, chat rooms, white boards, and a multiple “reactions settings option” for responding to the various actors. Delineating the performative cartographies of the learning community involves making sense of how teachers, students, and administrators form ties of attachment and, at the same time, transmit different meaning-making receptivity, which in turn becomes constitutive of affordance that emerges through human and nonhuman actants. For some actors, this newfound network of technology represents a tenuous assemblage. My concern here is with making sense of how such a tenuous assemblage emerges, becomes constituted, and is made durable yet at times unstable. How are everyday educational practices in foreseeable ways determined through accustomed or recognizable procedures within trying and shifting conditions? The extent of one’s capacity to connect to the Internet by way of computer, iPad, tablet, or cellular lends to the quality of their interaction. Once there is a durable connection, the network assemblage allows for continuity in the roles of teachers, students, and administrators. It seems that within the countless conversations on social media regarding teaching and learning practices on Zoom, the predetermined moment which formed a through-line in the conversation was the interpretation and positioning of an embodied face-to-face interaction within the physical boundaries of the classroom, as a singular, universalized way of knowing how teachers and students interact in the classroom. In a sense, online learning is always already in comparison to the gold standard of an embodied face-to-face approach to teaching and learning, whereby particular relations become initiated through folding of regions. With this folding of regions, I think of this newfound online work space or online classroom at home: how current teachers, students, and administrators

Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments

839

experience relations with material artifacts, fellow students and colleagues, and course design within an online instructional delivery setting; how prior face-toface, classroom, work, and online teaching and learning settings are understood and brought forward; and what underlying assumptions of how and what we come to know through online environments are rendered possible. These material artifacts and synchronous and asynchronous technologies are not necessarily neutral participants; instead, they are actively involved with forming relations inclusive of the nature of human relations and the myriad relationships with coming to know. Take, for example, the rapid shift in the use of educational technology and how they organize curricula, philosophical, and pedagogic approaches in educational institutions. A given day now rests with material artifacts that spatially arrange timetable, course outlines, presentations, breakout rooms, recorded virtual sessions, asynchronous chat sessions, and formal and informal discussions. This spatial arrangement can incite moments of affect relating to place of work, office space, or classroom. With the increasing foci on the distinctive online modes of workspace, office, and classroom, emerging questions include the following: How does previous knowledge of face-to-face interactions come to constitute and make durable sociomaterial relations in these online modes of workspace, office, and classroom? What underlying assumptions are brought forward into synchronous and asynchronous platforms? What are the ways in which these underlying assumptions come to work when designing knowledge for teaching and learning for class members and instructors? Whether teaching or completing assignments, integral to working in these newfound online settings is the relationship with voice, articulation, making meaning, and the process of typing. How are formal and informal regions enacted by way of voice through typing, and what boundaries are simultaneously established within these synchronous and asynchronous platforms when the record button becomes enacted? Take, for example, the chat room in the context of Zoom and recording of sessions. Recording involves some ethical considerations, particularly situated ethics involving privacy, risk of harm, trust, and vulnerability. Recordings also conjure questions regarding relations of agency and power and what sites of attachment or detachment become enacted. In terms of meaning-making sensibilities, what discontinuities are formed when place – such as classroom, home, or workplace – become lived through sociomaterial enactments which are generative of producing knowledge in synchronous and asynchronous networks and made stable through particular gestures of power and agency?

What About Community and Difference When Teaching and Learning in Online Settings? Thinking about educational institutions, the workplace, and the classroom through an online focus draws attention to relational ontologies, epistemological differences, and the interplay with culture. I am interested in culture and relational ontologies in terms of disciplines; the institution’s epistemic orientation to knowledge; the ensuing constitutive enactments with teacher, student, course outlines, and particular

840

M. Simmons

readings; and how teaching and learning come to be experienced in these moments of epistemological difference. Relational ontologies are embodied and embedded in theory and praxis, materializing through the historical present. These relational ontologies make available principles for teaching practices that at times diverge and converge, given the historical context and embodied experiences. Perhaps educators should consider disciplines as, over time, crystalizing by way of faculty, departments, curricula, texts, and epistemic beliefs and how, historically, these disciplines materialize in the classroom through particular teaching and learning practices constitutive of an identity, or way of coming to know. Put another way, what is the particular orientation of thought, enacted through ideas and expectations and ritualized by way of pedagogic engagements? Thinking of faculty or departments as materializing through certain forms of sociology of knowledge, which transmit different properties of power – particularly regarding what we can know, what counts as knowledge, and where knowledge resides – are important when tracing the historical loci of disciplines within educational institutions. Faculty and departments are neither apolitical nor ahistorical nor do they operate in a vacuum. Instead, the knowledge systems and circulating ways of knowing are both embodied and produced through an embodiment. Over time, these epistemes have been reified, made durable and integral to the organizational process of curricula. At the same time, traditional disciplines have been constituted through an amalgamation of knowledge, accorded with currency, and, over time and through educational institutions as place, come to govern in universalized ways what and how we can know. Some of the concerns arising with this shift in educational technology, teaching, and learning involve coming up with a methodological approach that allows teachers and students a pedagogically imbued engagement that takes into consideration how nonhuman materials become integral to the teaching and learning processes and provide obligatory pathways to where meaning making resides (Gourlay, 2015; Latour, 2005; Sorenson, 2009). I think educators can admit that some changes were needed with how we supported, planned, and determined our teaching and learning requisites in response to the ongoing global issues. Shifting from the idea of a classroom as fixed in time and bound in structure has also changed the ongoing relationship with teaching practices and pedagogical approaches through burgeoning technologies and the changing terrain of education and technology. Within these new digital configurations, what are the different ways teaching and learning become enacted? How do we attend to the multiplicity of epistemological practices embedded within peer review asynchronous learning activities? What are the implications for the learner concerning equity and access to these different forms of technology? Wenger’s (1999) work on communities of practice is relevant here; that work invites us to think about learning as a way of identity, learning as a form of community, learning as meaning making, and learning through practice. In thinking about the formation of communities of practice, it is helpful to trace the different affinities to technology in particular moments to get a sense of how learners relate to them in certain instances. These affinities and relations with technology, I imagine, are informed by social and cultural landscapes, values, and beliefs. At the same time, these technologies are not in stasis; rather, they are

Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments

841

continually being refashioned into new conformations, calling on the user to revise and adjust the ways in which they network with these technologies. This adjustment involves aptitude, dexterity, familiarization, and the ability to find alternate routes to make sense of the ongoing relationship with learning and technology. The adjustment is also at the institutional context. In a sense, then, there is a co-dependency on the shifting terrain of technology by the respective users. Vital to learning is the idea of being socially situated through the histories and politics one brings to the classroom. These histories and burgeoning technologies fecundate different forms of dialogue and communicative strategies. They also provide some profound challenges for educators to face, such as the range of the class size, increasing technological shifts, and reliance on prior approaches to their teaching experiences. There is also no guarantee that educational delivery will change post-pandemic to further adapt these new technologies. This leaves us with the quandary of how we attend to fostering online communities in the postsecondary context, where students draw from each other in ways that go beyond doing the expected in online courses. Moving into a sociotechnical cartography of teaching and learning requires reworking institutional procedures and planning of course outlines and pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. With reworking these processes, relationships are built that afford sociotechnical capital. Embedded in these relationships are the various aspects of ontological and epistemological underpinnings. In this way, the generative capacity of knowledge making becomes enacted; or put another way, ontological difference lends to the conception of different learning environments (Hodgson et al., 2012; Mol, 1999; Resnick, 2002). Needless to say, it is not axiomatic that these learning environments are formed and imbued through these relationships. The suggestion, though, is that these relationships involve a particular habitus contingent on values, beliefs, attitudes, and expressions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Concomitant to these relationships are experiences of difference formed through the myriad possibilities of the collaborative conditions situated in the meaningful locale of synchronous and asynchronous learning management systems. When one is given the chance to generate ways of knowing through participatory dialogue, therein lies the capacity for social change. As these ways of knowing, in each instance, are imbued through ontological and epistemological difference, they allow for a particular praxis, which can propagate realities with the potential to subvert hegemonic arrangements of knowledge. In the context of a decolonial approach, fostering teaching and learning environments in online settings affords the idea of distinct frames of reference and aids with making salient one’s epistemological position within an assemblage of difference. The social world of teachers and students are distributed throughout the spatial online arrangements. Students, teachers, staff, and online instruments are not operating in an apolitical, ahistorical, or some neutral setting. Rather, they are dynamically involved in forming relations nested with power, agency, and knowledge. These relationships are at the fore of this discussion, which urges conversations about the becoming or unbecoming of the student, teacher, or staff through the technological conditions whereby they come to be enmeshed.

842

M. Simmons

Thus far in this discussion, technology has been taken up as material artifacts. This discursive positioning of technology as irreducible to the material can be a limiting condition that, at the same time, produces a school of thought endowed with epistemological currency that organizes and distributes how and what we can know. What do technologies of the self (Foucault, 1997) offer us for reading, writing, and experiencing educational technology differently? Foucault’s approach allows for a rereading of technology, ways to think of technology as not existing independently of the human but instead to think of the governing practices of technology as situated within a series of historical, social, and institutional milieu, rather than as autonomous with its own articulations and devoid of context. Acquiring a fulsome perception of the ways in which technology in educational settings becomes claimed, apportioned, and distributed is, in a sense, underscored through the fashioning process of how enactments of technology are embodied and imbued with a host of curiosities and approaches by the particular user. There is also a need to attend to present possibilities for educational technology, given the newfound reshaping of the classroom and the various ways we teach and learn in these incommensurable environments. In this way, we can pay attention to the multiple realities of how technology is engaged with a frame of mind from the historical present.

Concluding Thoughts Students having access to technology is not a guarantee. Questions of equity are paramount in determining what role educational technology plays in addressing historical forms of oppression and how one participates in educational settings through technology, keeping in mind that educational technology as place is neither apolitical nor ahistorical. Rather, educational technology is embodied with histories and experiences and lived through myriad social realities. The quest, then, is to foster decolonial ideas to challenge hegemonic ways of knowing that persist in technological settings of education while at the same time being mindful that the search for equity and decolonial suggestions can, in and of itself, continue the technological inequality residing in education. In the global context, having an equitable capacity for technology in classrooms is concerning in the sense that students’ access to computers in equity-deserving communities is disproportionate. Dispensation of technological resources needs detailed attention when foregrounding discussions regarding educational research, equity-deserving communities, and social change. Equity and social change call for different ways of knowing, in that different ethical considerations and political orientations coexist in ways that result in historical tensions, contradictions, and possibilities. Considering these material moments in learning management systems could provide pathways to questions regarding bio-power, in the sense of who or what is discounted or embraced and how these moments of exclusion and inclusion form organizational practices of governmentality (Foucault, 1997). With the focus on equity, educational technology shifts the emphasis on how the social and the technical come to interact and at the same time constitute material

Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments

843

assemblages. That is to say, how do the social and the technical relate, link, and make tangible what emerges as apparent pedagogical sites? What permutations were needed for such pedagogical attributes, and how are they lived in sociotechnical learning management systems? Within the networking environment, students dynamically engage technology in ways that are informed and shaped by their social, cultural, and historical present. These ways are also in relation to the governing terms and conditions embedded within educational institutions. This leads to the point: what is the role of place and location of the self when it comes to learning within the incommensurable spatiality of educational technology? Then, is the place the embodiment of space, through which distinct temporal moments have come to bear concerted efforts on what learning is meant to be? Place and learning in the context of educational technology are not limited to a fixity; rather, they can be mutable mobiles traversing through one’s everyday life. They can also appear as immutable mobiles, having the capacity to move through the particular learning network in a fixed modality. Tracing these forms of movement can be beneficial to understanding contemporary questions regarding access and equity. To do so would call for contextualizing these forms of movement as imbued through place and learning within the epistemological spheres of educational institutions. Enhancing the experiences of student learning in network settings involves understanding students’ relationships to technology as well as the constitutive variants that work to materialize such relationships. To note, then, experiences of learners in network settings ought not be reduced to a singular homogenous fixed category. These experiences are laden with ontological differences vested through histories of cultural interactions. If the collective goal of educators is to enhance the experiences of students, which are engendered with ontological and epistemological differences, that is, seeking within educational institutions forms of change to stimulate intellectual, spiritual and emotional growth, then as a requisite we ought to study their experiences in the context of place and location of the learner through a historical present.

References Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. University of Chicago Press. Callon, M. (1999). Actor-network theory—The market test. The Sociological Review, 47(1_suppl), 181–195. Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Blackwell. Conole, G. (2013). Designing for learning in an open world. Springer. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor network theory in education. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1997). Technologies of the self. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity and truth (The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984) (Vol. 1, pp. 223–251). The New Press. Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. Westview. Gibson, J. J. (2014). The theory of affordances (1979). In J. J. Gieseking, W. Mangold, C. Katz, S. Low, & S. Saegert (Eds.), The people, place, and space reader (pp. 56–60). Routledge.

844

M. Simmons

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Bonderup, D. N. (2014). Design for networked learning: Framing relations between participants’ activities and the physical setting. In S. Bayne, C. Jones, M. de Laat, T. Ryberg, & C. Sinclair (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th international conference on networked learning (pp. 137–144). http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/organisations/netlc/past/ nlc2014/abstracts/pdf/goodyear.pdf Gourlay, L. (2015). Posthuman texts: Nonhuman actors, mediators, and the digital university. Social Semiotics, 25(4), 484–500. Hodgson, V., Mc Connell, D., & Dirckinck-Holmfield, L. (2012). The theory, practice and pedagogy of networked learning. In L. Dirckinck-Holmfield, V. Hodgson, & D. McConell (Eds.), Exploring the theory, pedagogy and practice of networked learning (pp. 291–305). Springer. Jones, C. (2015). Networked learning: An educational paradigm for the age of digital networks. Springer. Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi, B. (2012, May). Affordances in HCI: Toward a mediated action perspective. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 967–976). Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor network theory. Oxford University Press. Law, J., & Mol, A. (1995). Notes on materiality and sociality. The Sociological Review, 43(2), 274–294. Mol, A. (1999). Ontological politics. A word and some questions. The Sociological Review, 47(1_suppl), 74–89. Orlikowski, W. J. (2000). Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11(4), 404–428. Parchoma, G., Simmons, M., Jacobsen, M., Nelson, D., & Bhola, S. (2020). Embodiment and engagement in an online doctoral research methodology course: A virtual ethnographic study. In G. Parchoma, M. Power, & J. Lock (Eds.), The finest blend: Graduate education in Canada (pp. 273–298). Athabasca University Press. Resnick, P. (2002). Beyond bowling together: Sociotechnical capital. In J. M. Carroll (Ed.), Human computer interaction in the new millennium (pp. 647–672). ACM. Sorensen, E. (2009). The materiality of learning: Technology and knowledge in educational practice. Cambridge University Press. Van Dijk, J. (1999). The network society. Sage. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet Peter Pericles Trifonas

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning Heuristics in the Digital Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Goes Beyond Learning? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning the Digital Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

845 850 852 856 858

Abstract

The chapter engages ongoing debate around how the rapid proliferation of the World Wide Web affects the means and modes of learning because of the ways we interact with information and communication technology leading to new conceptions of education and curriculum. Keywords

Technology education · Internet access · Online learning · Digital rights · Evaluation

Introduction Has Internet use has altered the ways we process information because it is changing how our brains function in learning contexts? There has been ongoing debate around the rapid proliferation of the World Wide Web and how it affects the means and modes of cognition. P. P. Trifonas (*) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_19

845

846

P. P. Trifonas

On the one hand, there is a negative premise that suggests the Internet is severely inhibiting the ability for “deep learning” by modifying brain function and is impacting the way we think because of how we interact with information and communication technology (ICT) (Carr, 2008). There is a fear that the cognitive core of epistemological subjectivity is gradually being displaced by the automechanics of the shallow interactions of the “user” with digitized data mediated through an online interface affecting and controlling the type, breadth, and depth of intellectual engagement. For Nicholas Carr (2008), the Internet rewires the neural pathways of the brain short circuiting the ability to recall content due to superficial intellectual engagement. So, the experience is considered to be more about “surfing” information rather than analyzing content and understanding it. Sacrificing “deeper processing” and memory retention for the sake of following “a link” to mine data rather than move toward reflection and knowledge building. It is argued that this type of superficial interaction with the Internet resets the parameters of brain function to perform a visual type of “scanning cognition” rather than interactive thought that characterizes learning. The ability to remember and learn is negatively impacted according to Carr (2008) because it does not allow time to mentally engage with the information; even though, the physical use of the technology may improve visual and motor skills in users. Dropping levels of reading comprehension and an inability to perform analytical or critical thinking skills are identified as the manifest effects of immersion in the “click bait” of online platforms that fragment the experience of learning. For Carr (2008), the Internet compresses the time required by the user to consider retrieved information into micro-seconds. Reflection about what is important to store in long-term memory is jammed-up and fragmented by an overwhelming flood of data that we cannot synthesize, know where to put, or even understand. The user is posited to have little or no control of the pace of information transfer and only gets a “Wikipedia” version of the information that may or may not be credible data. If the structure and significance of the content does not immediately become clear or relevant, the level of such a form of engagement can become just another link to follow and more about using ICT than learning through it. The younger generation of Internet users have been called “screenagers” because of their way engaging information by navigating multiple streams of sensory-laden information at once, while pursuing the desire for instant social gratification in online environments. On the other hand, delimiting the effects of the Internet on the brain mobilizes a deterministic view of technology that is overblown, thus minimizing the neurocomplexity and agency of a user. Being online frequently requires tracking links through multiple sites, reading hybrid textual structures, and engaging diverse visualizations that demand a wider range of cognitive modalities and affective dimensions for learning. The experience is not linear and sequential, but it is based on a heuristics of selectivity because decisions have to be made whether or not to follow a thread that could transform raw information to usable knowledge instead focusing on the mechanics of “browsing” the Internet. The transition demands a different set of skills beyond “point and click” requiring the user to slow down and consider the meaning of the content and its utility. The effects on the brain have been

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet

847

posited as the result of neuroplasticity, or the ability of the brain to alter synaptic pathways and functions to suit the type and form of stimuli it experiences. This point of view alters the conception of learning as transmission or transference of content according to the rehabituation practices of education as cultural and epistemological reproduction. The theory of neuroplasticity explodes the paradigm of the brain as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge or an unchangeable organ of finite synaptic structures. Experiments done with Internet users showed greater activity in the pre-frontal cortex as compared to non-Internet users. After 5 h of Internet exposure, both groups began to show responses in the same cerebral regions. Leading researchers conclude that even limited exposure to the Internet rewired the brains of inexperienced users (Carr, 2008). The theory neuroplasticity developed as a result of various types of “cognitive flexibility” that were observed in the synaptic pathways of subjects that were altered because of changes in the circuitry of perceptions (e.g., a blind person whose hearing becomes sharper). Reinforcing the argument that “the medium is the message” and alters the intellectable terms of reception according to its form. The material physiology of thinking is malleable according to the incorporative structures of engagement constituting the “being digital” of the human-computer interaction. There is an element of technological determinism behind the idea of machines rewiring brains. Yet, the process is not one way, or controlling and rigid, for example, leading to an end game that the user cannot affect, escape, or imbibe. Not all brains are alike. The relationship can be one a “singularity” conceived as an interactive fusion of human and machine resulting in the birth of new cyborg forms of hybrid subjectivity. The image conveys both a literal corporeality and metaphorical intentionality. Depicting the influence of technology on life in the modern age that is pervasive and invasive—the bio-logical product of scientific reason. Still, there is the potential for agency in online experiences that can free the user from being constrained or manipulated in being digital and move towards a more transactional relation of human and machine. Archives enable a sharing of the memory load and distribute the responsibility for coding, storing, and retrieving information. Open sources promote the possibility of more information exchanges and transactions. The communal approach to knowledge creation is a very powerful argument for shared learning, but it does have some serious drawbacks because of the hyper nature of ICT and the presence of so much data and the glut of pathways to it on the web. The reliance on information resources distributed to facilitate transactive memory reduces the individual’s responsibility for keeping track of information in short-term and long-term memory, and the Internet becomes something like a “supernormal” memory. On the one hand, there may be more access to credible and trustworthy sources of information, and it can be easier to look up. On the other hand, there may be more opportunity for misinformation and the spread of false information based on bias and ideology about a particular subject or event. More brain activity is not necessarily required or expected since the type of engagement could be on lower level cognitive skills that do not require recalling, synthesizing, or applying information to new contexts and result in saturation or overload.

848

P. P. Trifonas

Multitasking is completing two or more tasks at the same time and switching back and forth between them. The simultaneous performance of multiple undertakings suspends and diffracts a sustained amount of attention and time on one activity. Different types of multitasking have different types of neuro-cognitive and bio-physical demands. The parameters are not discrete but articulated in accordance with the scope and type of performative dimensions. Media multitasking involves the use of a number of devices across platforms to communication and share information. Resulting from the proliferation of technologies and the integration of interfaces in everyday life for productivity and entertainment. The main issue with media multitasking (e.g., using a computer to do cognitively demanding activities while watching television) is that attention is fragmented and concentration on one task at hand reduces the success of the outcomes if it is performance based like writing an essay (Wood et al., 2012). The impetus to enhance productivity and compress time cycles has become part of the social psyche that has resulted in shorter attention spans. The notion that multitasking is a myth because there is a presupposition that it (1) saves time and (2) performance is equal to single tasking may be true. Activities involving lower level performative skills and prior learning can bear some forms of automaticity. However, undertakings with higher levels of cognitive difficulty or conceptual abstraction require single-task concentration for even limited performative success. New performative and hermeneutic norms have resulted from and with changes in the forms of work, schooling, and social structures that have compensated for their transformation through the integration of ICT (e.g., the use of laptops in classrooms, home offices, online dating, blogs, etc.). The negative effects of multitasking in educational contexts are acknowledged. Wood et al. (2012) studied the use of cell phones and social media during lectures and concluded that those who did not use technology performed significantly better “cognitively” by retaining more curriculum content. Switching attention between ICT and the course did not facilitate higher level learning for students because the activities required conscious awareness and concentration to activate and utilize advanced forms of cognition, their apparati, and schemata. The tasks required mental and performative dimensions irreducible to the outcome of automatic and “unconscious” responses achieved through sustained repetition. Resulting in a “cognitive bottleneck” that is characterized as an overload of the user’s capabilities to deal with and process complex information (Wood et al., 2012). There is a risk poorer performance may result because of the change in the medium of delivery and the fragmentation of information in the transition from offline to online ICT. Multiple input streams may reduce the ability of the brain to function efficiently because of its physical limitations to focus on many sources of stimuli at once. There is a greater chance of making mistakes, and tasks may take longer to complete in addition to creating stress (Wood et al., 2012). Thus, causing symptoms of “burn out” or inefficiency in learning situations along with doubt and uncertainty. However, there has been no real effort to address the issue of eliminating the conditions that cause negative mental reactions to social situations that require multitasking and cause more harm than good because there may be other factors that are resistant to change in the system itself (e.g., the notion of excellence, productivity, and “hard

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet

849

work”). In this case, the argument is ideological and rooted in an epistemology out of which a methodology is codified as a form of pedagogical practices linked to teaching and learning outcomes. The impact of media multitasking on education has been seen over the last decade with the appearance of ICT devices (e.g., cell phones, tablets, laptops) in classrooms and lecture halls. Networked learning was generally assumed to be a “good thing” until the devices became integrated into the social lives of students and dominated their day-to-day interactions. At which point, ICT became a threat because of its propensity to distract users because of the constant incursion of text messages and the lure of social media (Wood et al., 2012). Thus, the use of digital media has become an unacceptable norm in classrooms unless embodying or facilitating instruction. On the one hand, multitasking may have the ability to impact learning negatively because it can interrupt the flow of thought and impedes the continuity of the cognitive activity. If memory consolidation—the transfer and storing of information from short-term to long-term memory—is short-circuited. The experience is not educational. The transferability of what is learned from one situation to another cannot happen if the information is forgotten and not synthesized as knowledge. On the other hand, rote learning using short-term memory skills in multitasking limits the ability to recall, compile, and analyze or limits the ability to apply knowledge to new contexts. I do support such an analysis, but I think that ICT has created an architecture within social institutions that have integrated its presence as a necessary evil within classrooms. Multitasking has led to a culture of “boredom” in education because the lack of cognitive stimulation as missed opportunities to engage with content leads to superficial learning experiences. It is a vicious circle because ICT provides the means for escaping anything that does not comply with the knowledge we do have. The argument is that multitasking makes us open to irrelevancy and leads us back to aspects of cognition that do not require long-term memory for “real learning.” Negatively impacting the ability to perform and succeed at tasks in a “timely fashion.” The ideology that productivity is related to cost saving measures is an economic agenda that is promoted by corporations to accrue profit with reduced effort. Having an employee do two or three things at once—even if it is less efficient and of lower quality—is certainly cheaper than paying a second worker for the same job. The expectations are strictly for meeting the demands of stockholders and realizing profit margins outweigh the need to recognize the limits of human abilities to keep costs down. Our psychological need to feel productive may also be invested in the idea of doing many things at once because hard work is not supposed to be easily manageable. In educational contexts, sacrificing “real learning” by multitasking Instagram and Twitter while writing an essay may be due to the fact that we need to seek to some form of distraction during arduous tasks to keep us from abandoning the activity. The “persuasive design” of social media websites and platforms works against user desire to escape distraction by providing the means for social gratification that is good for self-esteem. Conscious reflection on the lure of multitasking and compulsive behavior with ICT while limiting distractions around us can provide a way to potentially change our habits but not make the practice go away.

850

P. P. Trifonas

Learning Heuristics in the Digital Age Cognitive heuristics are the mental processes we use every day to verify, evaluate, and assess online information for learning in the digital age (Metzger & Flanagin, 2013). These are strategies that reduce cognitive load of information processing (e.g., guidelines, “rules of thumb,” mental shortcuts). Decisions about credibility are made quicker and more efficient but do not eliminate biases. Heuristics are important in the online sphere because of the real danger of cognitive overload and fatigue that wastes time and effort. In other cases, peripheral conditions or “cues” that trigger heuristics for establishing the credibility of information become important to the outcome. There are different kinds of cognitive heuristics according to Metzger and Flanagin (2013), and there are problems associated with them. The endorsement heuristic is dependent upon conferred credibility of a source because of the “bandwagon effect” that bases verifiability on the number of users that support it (e.g., online testimonials, peer reviews, “likes”), even though it does not confer credibility of opinion. The previous verification system worked well because it was hierarchical and there is control over access and quantity; so, those at the top of the hierarchy possessed power over the distribution of knowledge and the meaning of information. The existing reputation of a website may influence the judgement of credibility, especially if its authority is rooted in an established and well-respected off-line source because of an old media reputation (e.g., CNN, The New York Times, Harvard Business Journal) even though it may contain and promote biased representations. Endorsement works through “likes” and agreements to create popularity via social recommendations (e.g., consumer testimonials, celebrities). The heuristic is suspect because the motivation for offering support may be monetary. The abundance of rating sources renders it difficult to verify the credibility of information because the veracity of those individuals and groups that filtered information has been watered down according to bias. Information can also be changed or distorted because of the platform and medium (e.g., wikis, blogs, or twitter). There is also an aspect of surveillance that monitors information and those who use it according to ideological and material hierarchies like capitalism that create a need for endorsement as a form of legitimacy, even though it may be just “hype.” Knowledge becomes commodified in the act of endorsement, and information becomes rarified. The scarcity is produced and filtered by few who also set the standards for maintaining credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise. Today, the responsibility to critically analyze endorsements has shifted to the user because of widespread ICT and the decentralization of information dissemination through the Internet because we are all consumers. The consistency heuristic depends upon the confirmation and trustworthiness of information across many sites. It requires more effort on the part of the user to crossvalidate information that impacts them directly; however, there is no guarantee that the information is true or false across multiple platforms. The original gatekeepers are no longer in charge of information dissemination and its authority. Sites may collude to pay users to post reviews and information to create a “false consistency” or have a vested interest in supporting the same information because of business

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet

851

agreements or arrangements, although this may not be made obvious or transparent. For example, Instagram is owned by Facebook, and there is a lot of cross-platform collaboration on the site that seems spontaneous but is not, and user information may be shared between them to drive and motivate users into subscribing to both sites and participating on them. This violates the user’s expectation (e.g., the physical layout of a web site are different but the company is the same), even though the design may not relate to the consistency of the presentation. The democratization of the means to post and circulate information has made the user the ultimate arbiter of truth and credibility. Despite finding the same information on many platforms that mimic the consistency of content, the credibility of “facts” is now subject to the user being aware of the knowledge base and its biases and of sources that produced and circulated it. The architecture of advanced technologies has allowed the manipulation of content which has resulted in a lack of true verifiability of the source and the purpose of the information. The self-confirmation heuristic occurs when the user comes across information that does or does not acknowledge their own values and beliefs. The three factors are as follows: believability, trustworthiness, and expertise. Prior to ICT, expertise was associated with individual intermediaries or gatekeepers of knowledge who essentially controlled access to information, not its “appeal” or acceptability. The selfconfirmation heuristic is a problem when credibility is at stake because it expresses trustworthiness around sociopolitical, religious, and economic factors. All of which are based in values and belief systems and not in the verifiability of information. The selective filtering of content is ideological and can create a “social bubble” in which like-minded users seek only what reinforces their own opinions. For politicians like Donald Trump, CNN is an example of “fake news” because the information it provides on its websites do not jive with the hegemonic values expressed by the policies that the Republican party is endorsing. It infringes on their experience of “the truth” as vested in ideology not facticity. The aspects of information gathering do not relate to its credibility. We need to research the accuracy, authenticity, and trustworthiness of a source to evaluate its validity. We rarely do this unless we (1) have a vested interest (e.g., researching a medical condition) and (2) are confident of the credibility because it affirms our values and beliefs. This also leads to a breakdown of discourse online among social groups that seek different types of selfconfirmation online in echo chambers and feedback loops reflecting similar points of view. The prominence heuristic relates the credibility of information to search engine results. The number of hits marking popularity may be due to the algorithmic manipulation of rankings that is often paid for to market a site. Prominence is arbitrarily constructed. One of the ways that we evaluate the credibility of information on a site is by looking at fact checking organizations such as snopes.com for verifiability. False information tends to travel faster, further, and more deeply in cyberspace because human beings tend to favor its emotional impact perhaps. Politicians like Donald Trump, on the other hand, have taken the opportunity to dismiss the credibility of facts under the label of “fake news” in order to question its trustworthiness. It may seem harmless, but the tangible outcomes can be distorted or

852

P. P. Trifonas

manipulated to influence the outcomes (e.g., the editing of the Jim Acosta episode by the White House to revoke his CNN press pass). Prominence on the web does not relate to credibility or factuality. It becomes a question of how we can determine the trustworthiness and accuracy of web content if the same manipulated information is shown on many sites across platforms. Ironically, Metzger and Flanagin (2013) establish their concept of heuristics on the notion that there has been a disintermediation of information through ICT because the process of vetting content has been eliminated or watered down through the proliferation of online platforms and media. If we were to take another spin on the subject, control of information creates links between knowledge and power that prop up the hierarchical structures of a hegemony by controlling the ability to make meaning. Heuristics does not provide an answer to credibility but tries to explain the pragmatics of how we make sense of the information we consume online and what it means to us.

What Goes Beyond Learning? Can people be addicted to the Internet? The question is still out? The debate centers around the discrepancy between contradictory findings depending on the site where data is collected (Dillard-Wright, 2018). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) does not recognize Internet addiction as a mental disease. Although gaming disorder is acknowledged to be a problematic outcome of excessive ICT use. Internet addiction is defined as the negative impact of use through loss of control over the ability to stop. The integration of ICT in everyday life must be examined in relation to human development. But does technology lead to addiction? How does ICT adversely affect user activity outside of the virtual sphere of a digital interface? Other terms are used to describe the same issue as a disorder or a form of pathological activity involving Internet use that detracts from engagement in real life (Dillard-Wright, 2018). It is necessary to take other factors into consideration such as personal circumstances (e.g., family life, socio-cultural factors) and individual characteristics (e.g., gender, personality traits, culture). Addictive patterns can manifest in different psychological and physical patterns that increase in tolerance of negative effects. All of these aspects affect how the individual functions in the world and relates to others. Internet addiction “boot camps” have used ethically suspect and highly controversial methods (e.g., starvation tactics, psychological pressure, and physical punishment) to treat this disorder around the variable of impulse control. Although there are issues with the validity of self-reporting in such studies due to the Hawthorne Effect, or telling researchers what they want to hear (Dillard-Wright, 2018). Another question might also be asked: What is it about the Internet itself that has addictive properties? Or do the activities like gaming, social media use, and access to pornography cause loss of impulse control? Predisposition may indeed be one factor for addictive behavior. However, design features are purposefully embedded in digital media interfaces and platforms that are there to keep users online.

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet

853

Persuasive technologies are interactive computing systems designed to change behaviors or attitudes. Some are focused on positive effects rather than ethical implications. For example, websites or applications that use reward systems to keep users engaged are beneficial if they improve quality of life, like encouraging fitness or maintaining health. The concepts employed for behavior modification are simple but effective and principle operationalized by cognitive therapists to change the psychology of subject responses to external stimuli. However, persuasive technologies are not always mobilized in the best interest of users. The commercialization of the web may be the main cause for the shift in the purpose of interface design. Given that what we mostly do now on the web is consume media and buy things, Internet companies mine personal data for profit. The use of sense triggers (visual and auditory) designed to stimulate responses (e.g., dopamine release) and reduce anxiety (Dillard-Wright, 2018) is one technique for keeping users online. In other cases, variability of rewards is also effective since the key is surprise in expectations that can lead to habit formation. “Likes” on Facebook are an example that increase engagement through positive triggers. There are recommendation algorithms in YouTube as well as other types of response manipulation, such as autoplay in Netflix, that use sentiment research to potentially affect consumer behavior, engagement, and interaction (e.g., binge watching, previewing programs, creating favorites). Psychological techniques underlie and manipulate how we respond to persuasive design elements, for better or for worse. The longer a user is online, the more data is generated that can be harvested by companies for profit. That is why the Internet has been called the source of an “attentional economy” ground in sentiment research. Many former technology workers have been speaking against the industry and its adverse impacts on the impulse control and social interaction. Who is right? We come back to the original definition and the question of control. Internet dependence is not an outcome of physical dependence, but it does generate chemical responses in the body that have psychological effects. It is believed the release of dopamine caused by the reward system of the popular social media sites trigger response that promote addictive behavior because more and more “hits” are progressively required to get the same “high.” It therefore becomes a matter of managing reactions to physiological impulses causing lack of self-control. Over time, it is thought that the brain may rewire itself to accommodate this behavior (e.g., heavy social media users and drug addicts show the same levels of atrophy in certain neurological regions). There is very little possibility from total withdrawal from digital technology however since it has become so intertwined in our daily lives for work, school, and sociability. It has been suggested that recognizing the difference between habit forming and addictive activities is necessary to move forward in understanding and controlling our Internet use (Dillard-Wright, 2018). Also, we must continue to critique and analyze aspects of persuasive design use in online digital platforms and ICTs to be able to combat their negative effects. “Avalanche and Snowflake Theory” is based on the idea that those who engage in “cybershaming” online feel absolved of responsibility because they are only part of a huge group that is participating in the behavior. So, the individual is “let off the hook” based on common sentiment and shared reaction. It has been said that the

854

P. P. Trifonas

Internet is not responsible for human actions. However, the bigger question then becomes, How do you make people on the Internet responsible for their words and actions? In the past, anonymity allowed users to post things online that they would never say in a face-to-face conversation. However now, that virtual screen has been replaced by “group think” or “safety in numbers.” Being on the wrong side of an ideological fence means that you will become a scapegoat for all the derision, hatred, and anger that the social media “mob” can generate and does online, because it is condoned by the majority. I do not think it is human nature to be “evil” or mean or judgmental all the time, but wanting to belong is a driving social force, often resulting in discourse and actions that contradict the ethics of what is “right” for the logic of what is “popular.” The Internet and social media thrive on manifesting “peer pressure” and channeling conspicuous consumption. On the one hand, posting pictures of our “awesome vacations” to the food we eat and the “beautiful people” in our lives, we make the medium the message and the illusion real. On the other hand, living your life online and posting moments of your private life is a way of exposing yourself to the danger of being ridiculed by others. Not everyone has the same tastes or appreciates the same things, so there will be disagreements that can turn ugly. Some people write from a bad place (jealousy, capriciousness, envy), and it is impossible to stem the tide if it snowballs against you because then it becomes a way to vent negative emotions. For example, the recent case of the actor who faked a “gay bashing” and racist incident online created great sympathy and outrage when fact became fiction. If the incident was indeed real, it would have been inhuman not to feel angry at such injustice and abuse. Everyone supported him strongly online. However, when it was proven to be a hoax, the tables turned on the actor and he was shamed and shunned. If anything, the “kangaroo court” of public opinion happens because even the presumption of guilt makes anyone fair game. Let us not forget that these Internet companies rely on advertising for their revenue, so it is in their economic interest to stir up emotions and get users online to cash in on anger and hatred. In the information age of digital surveillance, the public sphere is made up of a lot of crosstalk. Most comments are blatantly ideological and knowing what to say to whom can be very difficult to discern. Trump and his right wing followers call everything that they do not want to hear “fake news” and dismiss it as lies, rewriting the truth and its facticity according to what they believe is in their interest. It is one way to control public discourse, but it also divides sentiment along ideological lines and causes all sorts of disagreements and dissension, even hate speech in the social sphere. Yet, those leaning on the left call out and descry those who have questions about race, class, sexuality, and gender if their opinions are questioned. I do not think that the punishment of cybershaming outweighs the crime in some instances, but not in others. Open dialogue in good faith is rare in both online and offline encounters. That is the risk we take if someone succeeds in gathering a physical or virtual “mob” that wants to delegitimize opposing viewpoints. Ideology infuses all colors of the political spectrum. The concept of cyberspace is considered outside the “real-life” experience as some undefinable space or bits and bytes where things occur in virtual realm. The Internet is considered to be an open universe transcending geo-political boundaries

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet

855

across space and time (Finley, 2018). Communication can be both anonymous and run at hyper speeds. The openness of the structure has been conceived as “uncontrollable” and “unmanageable” (Marwick & Lewis, 2018), and it has allowed for a deregulation of standards regarding online participation, form, and content. This negative image is based in a technological determinism that characterizes the virtuality of the online sphere and cyberspace. The Internet bridges geographical areas, thereby allowing data to be hosted in one place and be accessed in another (Finley, 2018). This has created problems with respect to security and cybercrime. The plurality of laws in different countries where servers were located created jurisdictional dilemmas. It was therefore difficult to enforce any kind of legality on the web, which has created spaces for cybercrime to fester. The other complication is caused by the perception that any online violations were victimless because of a lack of physical injury. Law enforcement agencies could not cope with the anonymous nature of online interactions in the early years of the web; therefore, cybercrime was not taken very seriously. As the Internet developed and became more pervasive and intrusive, systems of regulation and surveillance have appeared to prevent different forms of abuse and cybercrime among users. Consequently, the web today is very much “controlled” than ever before. International agreements combat cybercrime and instill cybersecurity (e.g., the conventional agreements and territorial jurisdictions), global forces track individuals committing illegal acts online (e.g., money laundering, hate speech, identity theft), and many countries have sophisticated surveillance and censorship technology to monitor users and block content in a manner that is seamless and invisible. Consequently, perceptions around the nature of the Internet have been altered beyond its utility as a form of ICT. To the point where we can now consider it to be a highly controlled space that is not open or lawless. The range and effects of cybercrime are evolving along with the Internet. In Canada, it is defined as an act where (1) the computer is the object of an illegal act or (2) it is used as a tool to commit one. In the first instance, hacking or virus attacks constitute a type of cybercrime, while in the second, a computer is used “to perpetuate the crime” such as fraud or money laundering. The Internet “amplifies” or enhances these illegal acts. That is, it allows for more pervasive and invasive types of criminality like identity theft which can occur much easier, since personal information can be found on the web and also can be more damaging in its immediate and widespread effects. Sometimes, it is even devastating on a global scale. The growth of the dark web has facilitated this type of amplification of cybercrime by allowing access to information that may be illegal as well as serving as a meeting space for those who would commit illegal acts (Raustiala, 2017). Civil and criminal laws apply to cybercrime (Marwick & Lewis, 2018). On the one hand, dealing with property rights, personal dignity, and freedom from injury and, on the other, illegal actions against the state. For example, in Canada legislation has been passed to protect citizens from online crime (Bill C13). Cyberbullying has been a flashpoint for criticism against this law because it was seen by opponents as a way for the government to further intervene in the lives of its citizens; since, there were already provisions in the criminal code for punishing such behavior. The

856

P. P. Trifonas

argument was based on the fact that empirical evidence was lacking in the virtual realm that could be fabricated and misleading. Today, cyberbullying is considered a serious offence causing social and health crises and must be eradicated from online interactions on the Internet, particularly among children (Marwick & Lewis, 2018). Such victimization can be pervasive and ongoing because of the local and global reach of the virtual sphere. This is an example of the amplification of cybercrime that occurs because of the way the Internet is constructed and works across physical boundaries of communication and exchange. Cybershaming is a result of the ubiquitous nature of information on the web and the ability for individuals to hide among and in a mob to criticize and chastise without personal responsibility or risk (Marwick & Lewis, 2018). Other cybercrimes are concerned with intellectual property theft and the copyright laws that limit the fair use of content. Civil law is being linked to protecting individual rights in the online sphere, e.g., libel or slander, against information on blogs, and social media sites that is not true or factual. The rise of identity politics in relation to race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, etc. is also evident on the Internet where communication has been divided along ideological lines with respect to differences between people and political motivations for the types of things that are said in blogs and forums on social media (Marwick & Lewis, 2018).

Learning the Digital Future One example of the case for net neutrality is maintaining the independent governance of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) which had been, until recently, controlled by the United States. In the 1980s, the numbered addresses for a piece of network hardware identified by its Internet Protocol (IP) were paired and replaced by words to locate websites. The “explosion” of Internet use was in part due to the greater simplicity of remember names rather than IP codes. ICANN controls the Internet because it manages assigned Top Level Domain Names (TLDN) that categorize and control online information through designations such as “.com,” “.org,” or “.ca.” If it is not neutral, the traffic on the web network can be directed to specific sites and censored for the benefit of few, mainly elite and corporations, that would profit from it. The online experience of finding information can be enhanced by this sifting of data sources according to purpose, benefit, or location. ICANN is the technical administrator of the Internet that ensures the possibility of equitable availability and access within the web. It looks after the TLDNs that organize the Internet by hosts and servers. ICANN was supposed to be non-profit, but because it was controlled by the US Department of Commerce, there were questions about the neutrality of its oversight given that its actions could be in the best interests of that country and the functioning of its economy or state. There were calls for the implementation of multinational and global forms of governance that would be more egalitarian in its management of TLDNs. Ultimately, the United States now sees no need for net neutrality and dismissed it as a protocol for the structure of the Internet. The result has been a

Deconstructing Curriculum: Learning in the Digital Age of the Internet

857

separation of countries who support net neutrality and those who intervene in the way the web is organized, who can access specific data, and who can profit from this. The case for net neutrality can be made on the grounds that as a safeguard for digital democracy, it prevents the corporate manipulation citizen rights and works against the possibility of an economic monopolies. Two issues stand out in the controversy over net neutrality and lead to support the case for it: the “liberalization” of web address and the .xxx debate. ICANN began selling the right to create new TLDNs for a hefty price. The action was criticized as sowing the seeds for a digital divide that will benefit corporations. One of the dangers of TLDNs is the possibility of cybersquatting or fraud targeting established companies to exploit and profit from their brand recognition. Something that was widespread in the early days of the Internet. A plethora of TLDNs exacerbates the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of categorizing web sites and makes it harder for users to navigate the web. The .xxx debate, regarding its signaling of pornographic content, revealed the power of the domain designation over industry and commerce. It was not a neutral technical issue. It enabled the filtering of adult content and allowed a type of control over access to material that was inappropriate for children, hindered productivity in the workplace, offended religious sensibilities, and led to the exploitation of minors. Ironically, all of these groups were on the same side, supporting the .xxx designation as a TLDN, but were opposed by civil liberties advocates fearing that users would be subject to an invasion of viewing privacy and unfairly judged. The adult entertainment industry objected to the limits imposed on their ability to lure customers to their sites if the specific TLDN funneled users to a category that restricted access. Ultimately, the Bush government pressured ICANN to reject the .xxx domain name because of the lobby groups that threatened to withdraw political and financial support to the Republican party (Raustiala, 2017). Net neutrality was not respected in this instance, and information access was politicized in the interests of those who could affect power. The idea of net neutrality has impacted the Internet since the 1990s. Its assumptions are that the web should not be influenced by service providers or certain applications. Tim Wu, who coined the term, envisioned the Internet as a neutral vehicle to getting information without interference or restriction. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would not control access to it or influence its technical features or digital stream. The reality is that this principle has been violated in many ways by ISPs and search engines through traffic shaping, throttling, and content manipulation. Theoretically, by directing bandwidth to “fast” and “slow” lanes, the Internet could be more equitable and offer more opportunity for profit instead of favoring some uses and applications over others. However, all of these intervention techniques are essentially a violation of any terms of agreement between customers and a service provider. Throttling, for example, is the lowering of connection speeds to users. Lastly, content is also blocked for ideological, financial, or political motives, such as the telecommunications company Telus making information about its labor dispute inaccessible to users. The debate today over net neutrality is essentially an argument over bandwidth and speed of access. On the one hand, there is fear that it will create a two-tier system. Those companies who can afford to pay a higher price

858

P. P. Trifonas

will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace by offering “better” services (Raustiala, 2017). On the other hand, those who are against net neutrality claim the principle is unfair and outdated since ISPs have paid for developing and sustain the infrastructure of the Internet. In Canada, net neutrality is still the guiding force in theory and by law. However, ISPs are allowed to engage in traffic shaping, for example, as long as their customers are informed. The problem is that service contracts are more complex and misleading, so the “fine print” does not often protect consumer rights. The United States has done away with the principle of net neutrality, but it is still too early to gauge its long-term implications. Although it has created an unlevel playing field among ISPs and search engines. Without net neutrality, there is the danger that technopolies would form and take over the Internet to a far greater extent than is already happening with the Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

References Carr, N. (2008, July/August). Is Google making us stupid? Atlantic Monthly. Dillard-Wright, D. B. (2018, January 14). Technology designed for addiction. Psychology Today. Finley, K. (2018, May 9). The wired guide to net neutrality. URL: https://www.wired.com/story/ guide-net-neutrality/ Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2018). Media manipulation and disinformation online. Data and Society Research Institute. Metzger, M., & Flanagin, A. (2013). Credibility and the use of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics. Journal of Pragmatics, 59, 210–220. Raustiala, K. (2017). The internet whole and free: Why Washington was right to give up control. Foreign Affairs, 6(2), 140–147. Wood, E., Zivcakova, L., Gentile, P., Archer, K., De Pasquale, D., & Nosko, A. (2012). Examining the impact of off-task multi-tasking with technology on real-time classroom learning. Computers & Education, 58, 365–374.

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency Christopher Kirchgasler

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curriculum as a Haunted House: An Infra-spectral Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design as Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design as Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design as Anticipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Difference by Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

860 861 862 868 873 878 879

Abstract

Curriculum design is commonly understood as the principles and procedures for creating an organized course of study foundational for a good life. But what life is this? And what does a curriculum presume in designing it? Indebted to Derrida’s thinking on hauntology, the chapter approaches curriculum as a haunted house, examining the assumptions that are built into its shifting design principles since the early 20th century. Through discussion of curriculum’s contingent relationships with evolutionary developmentalism, cybernetic processes, and anticipatory algorithms, the chapter examines how curriculum is haunted by principles that seek to design life efficiently, embodying hopes and fears of who or what menaces these aims and must be tamed. These design principles are examined as immanent to the practices that seek to bring forth hidden developmental potentialities, improve mental processes, and anticipate environmental eventualities. They are analyzed in terms of how they generate differences and exclusions. These design principles cultivate, rank, and compare children’s inborn traits, justifying segregating those seen as “less able”; they systematize processes of continual surveillance, evaluation, and feedback on behaviors; and, C. Kirchgasler (*) University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_26

859

860

C. Kirchgasler

they create data-driven systems to act preemptively upon risk. Taken together, curriculum design principles are orders of order. By approaching curriculum design not as “how-to” but as “haunted” by the norms and values of life itself, the chapter invites the reader to think otherwise to seemingly natural differences and exclusions that are in fact by design. Keywords

Curriculum design · Cybernetics · Datafication · Derrida · Developmentalism · Differences · Educational history · Exclusions · Hauntology · Postfoundational theories

Introduction V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) argues in The Invention of Africa that colonialism and colonization were not only processes of occupation and domination but were fundamentally practices of organization and arrangement, connotations contained within colonization’s Latin root, colěre. Walter Mignolo (2011) likewise contends that colonial categories of comparison, such as religion, language, and society, were in the first instance orders that established modes of comparison integral to the coloniality of knowledge. For both Mudimbe and Mignolo, the organizations and arrangmements of knowledge are intimately tied both to the conditions of what constitutes a life but also to the very forms of exploitation and violence that seek to preclude other possible orders. To design, then, is to order and to order is to design. In most commonsense definitions, curriculum is understood as an organized (or orderly) course of study, an arrangement (or order) of experiences that occur in the educational processes of life. Curriculum design, therefore, would seem to imply profound questions, both in terms of the principles that define this desired life and their proper organization and arrangement. Yet a cursory examination of curriculum design literature today reveals a focus primarily on procedures and implementation, the details of which are considered beyond the attention of serious research and theory. This is not a casual observation. It reflects the dichotomy of the world’s two largest educational organizations, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). For its part, AERA devotes relatively little of its annual conference or publication venues to curriculum design. Instead, the practitioner-focused ASCD publishes design-oriented handbooks and resources marketed to administrators, instructional coaches, and educators. This institutionalized opposition suggests a seemingly settled wisdom: curriculum design is an effect of research and not its object. It also reflects a common sense of curriculum itself: lives need ordering; curriculum design is simply a matter of deciding on proper procedures to realize desired ends (Bobbitt, 1918; Tyler, 1949; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). What would it take to unsettle curriculum design? Mudimbe’s and Mignolo’s calls to think colonization as design offer one opening, suggesting that design is

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

861

colonization. To take this seriously, however, requires a methodological inversion – approaching curriculum design not as procedures to follow but as orders of order. This inverts curriculum’s typically linear, future-oriented teleology (i.e., how much to cover, how to sequence, and which perspectives to foreground) and focuses on what precedes acts of organization and arrangement of content. This inversion draws inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s (1995) querying the archive as the order of orders. Rather than assume curriculum design has something to tell us of who to be or how to live, the approach begins by examining the ghosts of design principles that “haunt” curriculum design’s foundations. These principles presume who “we” really are (developing organisms! information patterns! data points!) and must become (improved! integrated! anticipated!). To do so, the chapter approaches curriculum as a haunted house, requiring an infra-spectral approach to examining what haunts curriculum designs and the differences and exclusions they order through those designs.

Curriculum as a Haunted House: An Infra-spectral Approach The question of “what lives” in curriculum design is indebted to Jacques Derrida’s (1993) response to the question, “whither Marxism?” after the fall of the Soviet Union. Derrida cautioned against the liberal proclamation of Marxism’s demise and “an end of history.” As an alternative to this triumphal linearity, Derrida suggested that Marxism be understood not in terms of its ultimate presence or absence but as a spectral, liminal haunting that continually defers its arrival. He noted that this specter attended communism’s “birth” (playing on the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism”). That is, Marxism, for Derrida, could not simply be or no longer be; rather, it forms a perpetual promise connecting past, present, and future, making the problem not the teleology of realizing or losing Utopia but instead an ongoing radical demand whose revolutionary force derives from being continually forced to reckon with its ghostly presence. He termed this thinking of past-present-future “hauntology” (When spoken in the French, hauntologie is indistinguishable from ontologie—the “ghost” can only be observed when written) (Derrida, 1993, p. 10). Hauntology offers a way to think about curriculum design as containing its Others – an aperture for being otherwise made possible through acts of recollection (p. 10). The chapter’s debt to hauntology can be called infra-spectral because it approaches curriculum design as a haunted house and examines what lives in curriculum as an encounter with curriculum’s “ghosts.” The analysis takes two complementary modes. First, the infra directs attention to the epistemic rules – the organization and arrangement – that subtend curricular design rationales at three moments: evolutionary developmentalism in the early twentieth century, cybernetic processes in the mid-twentieth, and anticipatory algorithms in the early twenty-first. These rules and principles for designing curriculum are juxtaposed with the contemporaneous theories and practices that articulate life’s possible forms. Jacques Rancière describes this focus on rules and principles as “the enunciative and demonstrative capacity to reconfigure the relation between the visible and the

862

C. Kirchgasler

sayable” (Rancière & Panagia, 2000) or simply “the partition of the sensible” (p. 115). For Rancière (2019), these rules and principles are aesthetic forms that create communal, material dwelling spaces. These have been examined in curriculum studies, namely as an intellectual division of labor and theory (Petrina, 2004), or as made possible within a system of reason that forms its subjects and objects (Popkewitz, 2006), or as epistemic infrastructures that design and order (Huang, 2019). The chapter shares with these a focus on attending to the conditions of possibility for curriculum’s form and understanding its design as historically contingent as a way to unsettle it. This brings to the fore how organization and arrangement are also acts of remembering and forgetting that contain the potential for violence and exploitation. To engage the spectral, then, is a disorderly act of recalling how differences and exclusions authorized and naturalized within rational and linear ordering practices of curriculum design. The act of recalling curriculum’s “ghosts,” then, is not to suggest curriculum design is marching toward a triumphal liberation of the human spirit or the discovery of universal knowledge. Rather, as an hauntology, an infra-spectral approach recalls how curriculum continually designs differences and exclusions it opposes to its norms and values of how to live. By juxtaposing different design principles – from scaffolded growth, to feedback and improvement, to anticipatory nudges – curriculum’s rationales, procedures, and frameworks can be made contingent. Their hierarchies, inequalities, exclusions, and differences can be challenged and thought otherwise.

Design as Organization A common refrain in curriculum histories of the early twentieth-century USA (and in much of the global North) is how the dawn of industrialism and rise of bureaucratization popularized an ideology of social efficiency (Kliebard, 2004; Pinar et al., 1995). These histories contend that the social ideals tied to schooling the child were subverted by a technocratic instrumentalism that “deformed” schooling’s potential to redeem society, denying its reconstructionist potential and orienting it toward economic ends. Within this logic, schooling is captured by elite interests, who continue to defer education’s enlightening, revolutionary potential (Pinar, 2012; Biesta, 2016). This historiography opposes the child’s natural development to the unnatural rise of instrumental rationality. It invokes a familiar Marxian dialectic in which modern techne contaminates a sacred bio. The dialectic envisions the role of the intellectual as leading humanity’s emancipation from forces that constrain or oppress it (Fendler, 1999). Sacralizing “the human” as the origin of politics exacts a cost. It forgets the historical conditions by which life itself became thinkable as the naturally occuring source or origin of all politics. If the history of curriculum does not begin by presuming the child’s necessity but instead examines what haunts the child’s emergence as a developmental form of life, then the history of early twentieth-century curriculum design in the USA could offer more than a clash of ideologies between (i.e., social efficiency versus reconstruction); it could be approached, instead, as a

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

863

sustained proliferation of texts, manuals, guides, and reports that established the child’s growth according to principles of biological life and its evolutionary trajectory (Baker, 2001; Steedman, 1995). The accompanying rationalization of life through curriculum design could be understood, then, as but one strategy among many to scaffold processes of the child’s growth and development in order to better govern it. To do so requires discussing briefly the conditions of life’s emergence as a scientific object in the nineteenth century and, specifically, how practices of visualizing its “organization” made knowledge of the interiority of bodies necessary for curricular design. The association of life with ontological depth and internal organization relied on principles for visualizing functions and organic structures (anatomy, organism, and internal hierarchies) (Foucault, 1970, pp. 160–199). Foucault (1970) has meticulously discussed the epistemic shifts that disentangled living beings from their fixed positions on classificatory tables of Linnean taxonomy to the delineation of structures relating the function and behavior of cells to the growth and reproduction of the organism. The rules and principles distinguishing organic from inorganic life became a crucial dividing line for history itself (Rose, 2007). Origins were contained in the organism’s interior depths. Habits, attitudes, and reflexes contained historical residues, whose display could be explained according to the purposes they served humans’ primal forebears (Mitman, 1992). In the newly evolutionary history of humankind, the child and childhood became imbued with scientific significance as the recapitulated reservoir of primal behaviors. If life’s form was determined by historical processes and genetic (rather than visible) principles of differentiation, then the task of education would no longer be one of repressing one’s innate sinfulness but seeing and guiding life’s expression away from its savage origins in order to realize humankind’s destiny as a species. The 19th century saw the displaement of life from the timeless, abstract, and inaccessible realm presumed of philosophical and theological orders to active, empirical speculation so as to lay bare the hidden principles responsible for determining its seemingly infinite forms (Rose, 2007). Visualization practices sought to surpass the givenness of representations found in the classificatory tables in favor of those that made visible what lay encoded in organisms’ interiors. Daston and Galison (2007) have noted the profusion of nineteenth-century efforts to visualize the topography and interplay of organic structures and functions (p. 256). They termed the efforts to delineate the invisible laws and principles governing growth and development a quest for “structural objectivity” (p. 290), or the hidden organization that governed life’s possible forms. “Organization” – a term rising in popularity from the mid-to-late nineteenth century and reaching its zenith in the early twentieth – came to define visualizations of interior structures. As a concept and a practice, it united aims of the life sciences with those of administration and management. This relationship was defined by the ability to avoid waste in obtaining a desired result. Consider the rise of “organization charts” in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the most famous, The New York and Erie Railroad Diagram (Fig. 1), analogized the railroad company to a living plant. The chart depicts life as a unity defined by structural-functional

864

C. Kirchgasler

Fig. 1 New York and Erie Railroad Diagram: representing a plan of organization (McCallum & Henshaw, 1855). The visualization of an administrative hierarchy as organic was inspired by the

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

865

relationships. Railroads, like plants, are incorporated as units and subunits whose divisions denote roles and duties. The organization chart design is importantly not only intended to represent these relationships, but also to serve as a troubleshooting tool. Representing intended chains of communication, the chart could at a glance relay local dysfunctions to responsible supervisors. In other words, depicting structure enabled its governance. Anything, from the social body to microorganisms, could now be understood in terms of internal differentiations and distributions of roles and could be governed accordingly. While differing in kind and scale, railroads, plants (and as will be seen children and schools) could be organized according to the same fundamental principles of growth, dysfunction, and death; each conceptualized its object in terms of the necessary unification of functions towards achieving a singular purpose. As noted earlier, the shift to an organic conception of life in evolutionary time reconceived childhood as a space to compare differences in human kinds. Evolutionary time transposed extant theories of racial difference into narratives of historical progress differentiating “civilized” and “backwards,” thereby creating the conditions for scientific racism (Schuller, 2018). As noted earlier, the child’s growth could be explained as a recapitulation of racial evolution, which required schools and curriculum to mirror evolutionary stages of humanity’s history written in terms of the child’s developmental stages. The founder of the American Psychological Association and “Child study,” G. Stanley Hall (1901), explained that the recapitulatory purpose of “the school” was to serve as the child’s “primeval paradise”: Beginning with the deep philosophy often embedded in words, “school,” or “schole,” means leisure, exemption from work, the perpetuation of the primeval paradise created before the struggle for existence began . . . . It is sacred to health, growth, and heredity, a pound of which is worth a ton of instruction. (p. 24)

As a precursor to developmental psychology, Child study sought to map the principles that guided the child’s growth, establishing standards of normalcy and deviance, as these would foretell not only the individual’s potential but would help bring about a broader “racial” consciousness that promised social renewal (Hall, 1901). Recapitulation theory turned the child’s interior into an archive that held the mysteries of humankind’s origin and life’s divine significance (Steedman, 1995, p. 85–86). Curriculum promised to complete the child’s hereditary potential. Curriculum required mapping the child’s behaviors and tracking the progress of received sensorial impressions that could be passed on to future offspring (Schuller, 2018). To design the child in this way, curriculum interpreted observed attitudes and behaviors as guideposts for intervening upon a supposed genetic logic. Notably, the child’s conceptual state of grace that Hall invoked was restricted to certain ethnicities, ä Fig. 1 (continued) shape of Salix caprea (pussy willow) common to the Upstate New York region. The organization chart was also a troubleshooting tool by helping to identify and assign responsibility for elements in the railway system at a glance.

866

C. Kirchgasler

populations, or racialized types seen as “White” and who were presumed uniquely capable of evolving and perpetuating civilization (p. 53). Failure to grow meant remaining at a primal stage, associated with those identified as childlike and whose mentalities were classified as “backward” or “savage.” Curriculum design needed to classify and order the qualities that comprised the child’s animal (evolutionary) inheritance. Curriculum’s aim was to develop attitudes, habits, and sensibilities that separated the civilized, scientific, rational type from its primitive, dogmatic, superstitious Other. Hopes of perfectionment and fears of degeneracy were coiled within the child’s developmental stages. The child’s hidden depths were hypothesized as analogous to so-called primitives, governed by irrational economies of sentiment that curriculum design could identify and regulate. Herbert Spencer and psychologists such as William James claimed, for instance, that the mind was divided and governed by the “law of economy” that distributed mental energy between reasoning and motor reflexes (Valasek, 2021, p. 7). James’s (1899) pedagogy of “substitution” elicited impulsive “bad reactions” in order to systematically supplant these with those described as more “rational” and “civilized” (i.e., to the extent they served “social” ends) (pp. 42–43). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century curriculum design, then, can be described as a shift from principles that demanded the child’s repression to principles of expression that required elevating primitive habits, sentiments, and values to the level of “civilized.” Curriculum was a storehouse of “racial subject-matter” – a collection of “ways of acting, thinking, and feeling” that were “created and preserved by the race” (Charters, 1912, p. 3; Dewey, 1900, p. 91; see Baker, 2001). Curriculum needed to scaffold natural developmental processes by scientifically sequencing the habituation of the child’s behaviors according to a logic of functional evolutionary adaptations to a changing environment. The interior organization of the child’s development was defined as “interests” (see, e.g., Van Liew, 1896), “instincts” (James, 1899; Thorndike, 1906), or “needs” (Charters, 1912). Success or failure of the developmental process depended upon the curriculum’s ability to identify and adapt to these changing “needs.” At the same moment that developmentalism found the child and ordered curriculum design through the identification of inborn qualities, statistical methods emerged as a manner to describe and compare differences in habits and attitudes within and among populations (Rose, 2007, p. 53). By correlating growth and age with populational subgroups, it became possible to speak of normalcy and deviance in terms of mathematical averages and their standard statistical deviations on a Gaussian curve (Porter, 2020). By measuring and comparing populations according to norms of conduct, the calculations also served as moral judgments. By locating inequalities in the extremes of statistical distributions (Carson, 2007) institutions, such as asylums, clinics, the military, and schools were tasked with normalizing populations, justifying intervention on groups deemed “abnormal” and therefore unhealthful to society’s reproduction (Steinmetz, 2005; Poovey, 1995). Statistical averages entered curriculum design to provide the psychological standards of normalization, justifying the segregation and exclusion of so-called deviant subpopulations on the grounds of educational inefficiency (Connor & Ferri, 2013).

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

867

The dominance of social efficiency, as an ideology or interest group (Labaree, 2010; cf., Fallace & Fantozzi, 2013) does not suffice to explain these transformations, as they implicate more profoundly transformations in conceptions of life itself. It would be more appropriate to say that the emergence of statistical methods with evolutionary theories redefined educational thinking in the early twentieth century USA, with curriculum reforms continually expressed as twinned projects of child saving and nation building through social scientific knowledge (Baker, 2001). Curriculum and schooling became preoccupied with understanding the conditions necessary to hasten racial progress. One of social efficiency’s alleged opponents, John Dewey, notably drew on the same very same functional, evolutionary principles in describing the ideal school as impeding the “great waste” that arises when the child is unable “to utilize the experiences he [sic] gets outside the school” or conversely “is unable to apply in daily life what he [sic] is learning at school” (p. 67). Curriculum, for Dewey, needed to efficiently account for the diversity of “needs” in society in order to stimulate harmonious development (Fig. 2). Dewey (1900) stated his indebtedness to evolutionary thinking and its role in organizing the design of the school clearly in The School and Society: The idea of heredity has made familiar the notion that the equipment of the individual, mental as well as physical, is an inheritance from the race; a capital inherited by the individual from the past and held in trust by him [sic] for the future. The idea of evolution has made familiar the notion that mind . . . represents the outworkings of the endeavor and thought of humanity; that it is developed in an environment which is social as well as

Fig. 2 John Dewey’s (1900) The School and Society offers a symbolic diagram in which the ideal school is organized according to the most efficient relations to “the larger social life” (given as “home,” “business,” “research,” and so on), with each element posited in dynamic interaction with the school (p. 66)

868

C. Kirchgasler

physical and that social needs and aims have been most potent in shaping it—and the chief difference between savagery and civilization is not in the naked nature which each faces, but the social heredity and social medium. (pp. 90–91)

Proper school (and curriculum) design, for Dewey, was predicated on organizational efficiency; that is, its design needed to impede “waste” while ensuring an environment that would stimulate and improve social reproduction. For Dewey this meant studying the interactions of physiology and psychology (i.e., “racial capital”) with the environment. As Dewey’s formulations make clear, desires for efficiency and the avoidance of waste were not the encroachment of an instrumental rationality imposed upon life but endogenous to an evolutionarily progressive conception of life itself. The concerns with efficiency and waste in processes of schooling would go far beyond Dewey, dovetailing with racialized, gendered, and classed conceptions of differences in people. “Inferior” quality became termed “feeblemindedness,” requiring tracking and segregating children based on perceived inborn “ability” (Connor & Ferri, 2013, pp. 35–39). Only some children could be directed and improved in order to design the future. The principles, hierarchies, and values that differentiated and excluded supposedly inferior bodies and minds issued from the study of life’s linear, stage-like development, its organizational and populational forms, its potential for degeneracy and death, and its capacity for improvability— principles that would become known infamously as eugenics. To summarize, the emergence of contemporary models of curriculum design is haunted by conceptions of biological life, and the norms and values that accompany it. Designing this life required scaffolding natural processes of growth to improve efficiency and impede waste through the proper organization of the organism within the environment. In curriculum design this organization presumes (1) the parallel morphology linking the individual (or “child”) and society (or “nation” or “race”); (2) knowledge as a vital unity that is accretive and genetic; (3) learning as the acquisition of functionally adaptive behaviors; and (4) the agency to direct human improvement. The cultivation of proper habits of thought, sentiments, and behaviors that typified the educated child is set against fears that the failure to do so leads to degeneracy and ultimately extinction. Premises of innate differences in race, class, sex, and heredity hold that differentiation and segregation of unhealthy or abnormal bodies is necessary in ensuring the survival of the fittest. These principles continue to haunt calls to efficiently improve the population’s health, education, and wellbeing.

Design as Process Critical educational research has often argued that curriculum’s unexamined norms and values privilege the experiences, perspectives, and prerogatives of White, English-speaking, able-bodied middle-class, cis-gendered male, heterosexual children. Many of these critiques suggest that in order to redress these ongoing inequities educational research should begin by including or even centering the knowledges

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

869

and experiences of the marginalized as a principle of research methods, including in curriculum design. While hardly representative, the following quotation illustrates how these critiques attribute external causes—such as neoliberalism—to preventing the centering of the needs of the marginalized: Guided by the market-driven principles and priorities of neoliberalism, universities entrenched in academic capitalism are establishing institutional policies and practices that reward faculty for individual economic achievement. Macro-level efforts to frame research as a market activity hold powerful implications for educational scholars who are increasingly incentivized to pursue research agendas and adopt research method(ologie)s that reflect market values, rather than student, school, and community needs. (Brown et al., 2014, p. 15)

The centering of “student, school, and community needs” opposed to “marketdriven principles and priorities of neoliberalism,” should now give pause. It is haunted by the same opposition progressive reformers once made between the ills of an encroaching modernity and those of the natural child. How has needs become ontologically basic, a source of renewal, hope, and optimism, organizing not only curriculum design but educational research more generally? The need for “needs” as a principle of curriculum design—and the voices, experiences, and perspectives of those who can testify to them—highlights a crucial shift in conceptions of life itself. As scholars of cybernetics and systems theory have argued, early twentieth-century efforts to understand the relationship between inner (organic) and outer (environmental) factors of growth and development led to an increasing focus on identifying and improving pathways for harmonizing these relations. Organic needs, as opposed to environmental factors, furnished the basis for integrating organic components within codified communication systems aiming to direct processes of improvement. To understand what made these shifts possible and how they implicate curriculum design in the latter half of the 20th century requires a brief discussion of cybernetics and systems theory. Cybernetics has a curious history. Galison (1994), for instance, has noted how a desire to improve the accuracy of anti-aircraft systems during World War II (i.e., increase the number of enemy airplanes destroyed) catalyzed a broader reevaluation of social scientific efforts to predict and control. In Galison’s analysis, Norbert Weiner’s efforts to delineate a probablistic method of linking future actions (where to point the cannon) to past results (historical data of planes’ evasive tactics) led to the creation of cannon guidance systems. In the decades to follow, Weiner argued that these cybernetic insights could be derived by coding any relevant behavioral data, storing that data, and then analzying informational patterns to identify discrepancies and guide the improvement of outcomes. Cybernetics united human and machine in causal circularities of goal-driven systems (Heyck, 2015). Organic conceptions of life predicated on internal development determined by structural principles did not disappear; instead, cybernetics suggested another dimension by which to understand life – as patterns of communication described as messages, information, and programs (e.g., DNA) (Rose, 2007). Weiner (1988) himself summed up the shift succinctly: “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves” (p. 96).

870

C. Kirchgasler

Cybernetics presumed reality as fundamentally chaotic, probablistic, and uncertain. Design needed to be algorithmic, rule-bound, and fast. Information theory, for instance, conflates biotic and technical elements by describing communication as made up by nodes and channels, with capacities and frequencies that interact with and regulate one another through feedback (Haraway, 1989, p. 103; see also Hayles, 1999; Heyck, 2015). It segments time as causal flows, with the past providing the data from which to anticipate future states (i.e., “feedback”). Time is folded into these processes as durations of action that can be revised in relation to practice (i.e., “real-time”). Information theory created dramatic ramifications for educational research, teacher education, and curriculum design. It revisioned the stable subject as, instead, a bundle of cybernetic processes. Observation, for instance, no longer assumed the observer was a reliable basis for objective representations; instead, observer and observed were entangled in processes of vision mediated by biotic and technical elements that could be modified and evaluated in relation to what was understood as the givens of representation (Hayles, 1999; Halpern, 2015; in teacher education, see Lee, 2021). Whereas the biological formulation of development discussed earlier was defined by processes of internal growth and measured by stages, cybernetics inscribed actionability as in the “betweenness” of cycles of information reception, recollection, and reaction that occured within continuously iterative processes (Halpern, 2015, p. 66). Within cybernetics, efficiency could be measured in terms of the energy necessary to produce measurable change (pp. 75–77) (see also Halpern, 2015, p. 57). Cybernetics held dramatic implications not only for observing change but also for studying the mind. Within the cybernetic paradigm, the mind was neither an inborn “vital force” nor a “consciousness” in the manners proposed by Hall or James – rather, the mind offered an organizing principle for the developmental processes by which humans develop strategies and mental representations of realworld phenomena. Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner’s (1960) The Process of Education compared the child’s mind to a computer (Halpern, 2015, p. 211). Both shared patterns of thought defined as informed guessing, hypothesis-making, and conjecture. Humans differed from computers only because their thinking was bound to organic structures that developed in sophistication from simple to complex, whereas computers remained the sum of their machinic parts. Bruner (1960) argued that, like machines, humans’ cognitive processes required cultivated attention – feedback – in order to stimulate continued growth (as “learning”). These design principles undergirded his proposed “spiral curriculum” that entangled systems thinking and organic development by proposing to augment and improve the human mind by enhancing its biophysical capacities to recognize, code, store, and recall information (pp. 52–54). Bruner argued that the methods of social scientific knowledge production offered paradigmatic examples for how humans learn. This eschewed earlier models of curriculum design that presumed to transfer the results or findings of disciplinary knowledge to students as discrete substances (i.e., learning what scientists have learned). Drawing on cybernetic conceptions of growth, Bruner argued that real learning required modeling the mind’s processes for learning after those of the

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

871

scientists themselves (i.e., learning how scientists know). This meant that curriculum design would need to focus on developing skills, acquiring proficiencies, and helping students master these. By modeling the mind after the computer, Bruner (1960) claimed to offer a universal learning theory. For Bruner (1965), this fulfilled a Enlightenment aspiration; his learning theory held the potential to raise humanity up from its dogmatic state to become “fully empowered with zest, with skill, with knowledge, with taste” (p. 16). This utopian vision held that improved cognitive processes would prevent biases, stereotypes, and other forms of irrationality associated with authoritarianism—a dream in which the scientist would ascend to social paragon (Cohen-Cole, 2014). Bruner, however, was not the only curriculum theorist – or even the first – to think of human improvability through appeal to cybernetic processes. Ralph Tyler’s (1949) Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction called curriculum design “a process of changing the behavior patterns of people” (pp. 5–6). Tyler elaborated on the method by explaining its basis in responding to humans’ innate “needs”: Studies of the learner suggest educational objectives only when the information about the learner is compared with some desirable standards, some conception of acceptable norms, so that the difference between the present condition of the learner and the acceptable norm can be identified. This difference or gap is what is generally referred to as a need. (p. 6)

Needs, for Tyler, gave measurements an organic substrate that cybernetic processes act upon to guide social improvement (toward what Tyler termed “desirable norms” and “acceptable standards”). Needs also gave the cybernetic curriculum its overarching purpose guiding the ends of behavior change, for “the school’s efforts should be focused particularly upon serious gaps in the present development of students” (p. 8). Tyler suggested that these needs could be determined by studying children’s lives according to classifications essential to human flourishing, such as “health,” “social relationships,” and “socio-civic relationships” through surveys and questionnaires (p. 9). Needs provided the basis for selecting, preparing, and evaluating learning experiences that would benefit of not only students in schools but also broader society, restating a Deweyan ideal half a century earlier (Solovey & Cravens, 2012). Hilda Taba’s (1962) revision of the Tyler Rationale made feedback loops paramount in directing curriculum design, with children’s deviations from standards providing the basis of further curricular development, a point that has become takenfor-granted in linking curricular planning to the results of large-scale assessments today. Curriculum design in what has become known as “the Tyler Rationale,” is defined by creating standards, planning experiences, and measuring ends, and all bound to the circular time of processes of feedback. It requires standards and benchmarks to measure the efficacy of “tuning” performance targets toward equilibrium between internal forces and external conditions (Hayles, 1999, p. 95; see also Popkewitz, 2020). It focuses curriculum design on identifying and measuring the achievement of purposes conducive to growth for both individual and society. Tyler’s explained this utopian vision as “extending the Newtonian cosmology from an earlier organicist

872

C. Kirchgasler

discourse that ‘assumed that the great society and [its] social institutions. . . can be studied as organisms’” (Tyler, n.d. in Ivens, 2018, p. 45). The shift in focus to informational patterns, behaviors, and goal-driven systems – from external end to internal process – can be observed in the rise of objectives (Mager, 1962), mastery learning (Carroll, 1963), and a taxonomy of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains (Bloom, 1956). These determine whether the child is developmentally advanced, on track, or at risk by continually assessing performance according to an array of observable competencies associated with positive life outcomes. Sound curriculum design now must follow the mind’s processes (Gagné & Briggs, 1974) in order to address the cognitive needs of the “whole child” (see, e.g., Tomlinson, 2014; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The transformations of curriculum design from scaffolding development into systems-based processes of feedback seem a far cry from eugenicists’ aims of ontological perfectionment. Yet attention to cybernetic processes’ basis in organic needs demonstrates how cybernetics parasitcally depends upon a notion of life that precedes the tautology of its processes and that provides its purposes a organizing telos beyond the purposes themselves. For instance, the Georgia Department of Education’s (2018) System of Continuous Improvement centers the child’s “needs” (as readiness for “living,” “learning,” and “leading”) that sit at the intersection of multiple institutional domains (e.g., instruction, family and community engagement, and so on). “Needs” guide identification, selection, intervention, and evaluation, seeking to harmonize an array of reforms through cycles of feedback. “Readiness to learn,” for instance, begins by evaluating the child’s “curiosity, enthusiasm, temperament, culture, and values” (Williams et al., 2019). A Framework for School Readiness in Georgia (Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, 2017) explains needs as: “A strong foundation for success in school and throughout life results from families, schools, and communities providing safe, stable, and nurturing environments during a child’s earliest years when brain architecture is developing most rapidly” (p. 4). Needs join “families, educators, community leaders, policymakers, and health and service providers . . . in assuring that every child has access to the experiences and supports needed to enter kindergarten prepared for success in school and throughout life.” (p. 6). While the call to center the “needs” of the marginalized may seem like a commonsense starting point for opposing power and organizing change, it is not. Within a cybernetic system, needs is already colonized both in its object of change (the generic human) and its directionality (linear improvement toward developmental ends). This is because needs are not natural but are sociotechnical phenomena that double as standards for measuring the child’s distance from “readiness.” If the concern is responsiveness to voices and perspectives that have not yet been heard, at issue is not only what is and is not an authentic need but how the logic of developmental needs already decides what can and cannot be said by those research presumes to reach. “Needs” highlights how cybernetics systems of curriculum design are entangled in conceptions of life discussed earlier as organizational principles of evolutionary development. Together, they transform curriculum design into the tuning of

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

873

behavioral patterns toward outcomes associated with the good life. This can be understood as (1) the creation of processes directed toward the achievement of purposes; (2) the naming of learning as changes in behavior patterns through feedback; (3) the design of curriculum as the organization and arrangement of these patterns; and (4) the definition of improvement as measurement in relation to standards and benchmarks. Rather than supplant organic life, cybernetics and systems theory shifts the locus for seeing and acting to the processes of bringing deviations into harmonization. In relation to critical studies of education, systemsbased approaches entail a paradox. In seeking to address inequalities, they impede reflexivity toward the very conditions by which these inequalities became inscribed as normative principles of the good life and that continue to locate the burden of change on those marked as unequal, excluded, or different.

Design as Anticipation The seemingly limitless proliferation of cybernetic systems in the twenty-first century has been referred to as processes of digitalization, datafication, or (more menacingly) as Big Data (Kitchin, 2015). Yet many of the epistemic practices that these capacious terms reference – quantification (Porter, 1996), classification (Bowker & Star, 2000), and actuarial risk (Amoore, 2009) – have long and discrete histories beyond the newness of the terms themselves. What is changing, then, is perhaps better described in terms of intensity—the sheer volume, velocity, and varieties of digital phenomena created, circulated, and recorded today as opposed to even a few decades ago. Or to put it another way, a novel system for knocking enemy airplanes out of the sky haunts today’s the hope of making every element of the actual actionable. Once local and isolated, cybernetic systems and digital technologies travel in bags or pockets, as sensors in vehicles or buildings, and even as wearable accessories and implants, thanks to the spread of relatively cheap wireless technology. The intensity of cybernetic systems is matched only by its pervasiveness, enabling a new form of life described as anticipation, in which cybernetic memories of the future have become a prevailing affective mode that gives speculation the authority to represent and act in the present (Adams et al., 2009). What follows is a tentative attempt to haunt contemporary curriculum design aspirations of digital anticipation with those discussed earlier as cybernetics and organization in order to highlight how design regulates and controls in the name of development. It is popular in education reforms discourses today to speak as a matter of fact about the datafication of everyday life. In the more auspicious analyses, datafication is hailed as critical to solving global inequalities (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2018; Driven Data, 2018), improving teaching and learning (Bienkowski et al., 2012), and transforming national economies (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2008). The World Bank (2016), for example, describes the spread of inexpensive data-driven technologies as representing nothing less than “the greatest information and communications revolution in human history” (p. xiii), concluding that “we must take advantage of this rapid technological change to make the world more prosperous and

874

C. Kirchgasler

inclusive” (p. xiii). The politics of technological emancipation have, in recent years, also encountered withering criticism, noting that technological utopianism neglects the social origins of inequalities, which remain rooted in structural causes. Ruha Benjamin (2019), for instance, describes celebrations of data’s potentiality as a form of racial revanchism – a “Jim Code” – in which “the employment of new technologies . . . reflect and reproduce existing inequities but [are] promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (pp. 5–6). No doubt, the onto-epistemological terrain of life is profoundly changing. However, to explain these shifts as the reproduction of inequalities misses something about how the very boundaries of life itself – spatially and temporally – are being transformed through new ways of governing that rely upon protean, calculable values linking individual performance, subgroup variance, and national growth as simultaneously anticipatable (Murphy, 2017). Focusing on the reproduction of social inequalities misses how the very notion of “the social” (as organic development or autopoietic processes) is actively being transformed through the very efforts to predictively optimize it (Rose, 2007). The entanglement of developmentalism, cybernetics, and anticipation in curriculum design can be observed in a low-fee, for-profit chain of schools that, until the COVID pandemic, served hundreds of thousands of students in several sub-Saharan African countries and India called Bridge International Academies (Bridge, hereafter). Bridge’s mission is poverty alleviation through schooling. It promises to do so by designing smart systems built upon inexpensive technology modeled after Silicon Valley startups (Greene, 2021). It defines its success in terms of improving students’ “learning outcomes” through a data-rich, vertically integrated model it calls “the Academy in a Box.” In this model, Bridge links the datafication of classroom instruction to the optimization of the learning outcome; the learning outcome to the developmental norm of the learning sciences; the developmental norm to the creation of human capital; and human capital to economic development as a promise to end social inequalities (Kirchgasler, 2019; see also Kirchgasler & Desai, 2020). Bridge is built on anticipatory models of human behavior made possible by systems of integrated platforms all gathering and sharing data on all aspects of the company’s operations. Bridge’s model tracks teaching and learning through Internetenabled tablets that guide Bridge’s classroom teachers during instructional periods. The tablets are connected with databases linked to data dashboards at Bridge’s network offices (Fig. 3). The dashboards integrate classroom data measuring lessons’ pace and completeness and evaluate thousands of students’ test performance with other forms of data, such as those tracking the arrival and supply of materials at construction sites for future schools and those monitoring teachers’ daily arrivals and departures (Bridge, 2016a, b) (Note that as Bridge continually updates its website, it is possible that website links in the references have been removed since the date of original access. The original links, however, can still be accessed through tools such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). Anticipation guides Bridge’s (2019) curriculum design, explained as the desire “to understand exactly what is happening in our classrooms and iterate and adapt in near

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

875

Fig. 3 For Bridge International Academies, “the Academy in a Box” is a school reform infrastructure that enables the vertical integration of multiple systems in seeking continuous improvement in learning outcomes (see, e.g., Bridge (2021a))

real-time” (para. 6). Bridge claims it collects more than 1 billion data points each year, which its data analysts mine for actionable insights to drive further improvements (see also Kirchgasler, 2017). These are the actions made possible by the digital data created by users’ interactions in Bridge’s various systems, whether as inputs provided by teachers using tablets to record responses or teacher observation data entered by supervisors. The routinized data-gathering operations turn schools into learning labs providing continuous feedback (Fig. 3). These data permit correlations between prompts and actions that anticipate “trans-individual” intentions that become the basis for further experimentation (Andrejevic, 2015, p. 209). For instance, Bridge claims that their data can demonstrate which promotional systems are most effective in attracting new enrollments (Weinstein, 2013, November 19) or which kinds of work experience correlate most strongly with future teaching success (Goldstein, 2013, October 4).

876

C. Kirchgasler

More specific to curriculum design, the principle of anticipation seeks to change behavior patterns less through explicit direction than by supple adjustments of environmental conditions, a form of power Foucault (2003) has termed environmentality. In recent decades, behavioral economists have embraced notions of environmentality as a form of “libertarian paternalism,” calling for the intentional design of environmental “nudges” designed by “choice architects” in order to encourage desired forms of rationality (see, e.g., Thaler et al., 2014). Data’s immediacy, scalability, precision, and verifiability provide the conditions for actionability at new spatial and temporal scales. In Bridge’s US-based Learning Lab, data dashboards gather and display students’ learning outcomes across its multinational networks, which can be disaggregated by geographical factors, age groups, gender, or socioeconomic status. They make possible “minimal viable measurements” – the smallest amounts of data statistically necessary to enable the feedback loop of generating, prototyping, presentation, analysis, and learning. Minimal viable measurements answer questions such as, “Do teachers with really strong academic credentials. . . tend to help kids learn more?” (Goldstein, 2013, October 4, para. 18). Bridge’s Chief Instructional Officer explains the principle sucinctly: “If [a] study is going to be PURE noise, then you don’t bother. ‘Do nothing’ is a better option. If your institutional life depends on the best possible answer, ‘do a very complete study’ is the right choice. Often, however, you’re in between. [Therefore,] MVM [Minimal Viable Measurement]?” (Goldstein, 2013, October 4, para. 19). The goal is to ensure every curricular design decision can be justified by a simple correlation. Curriculum design by minimal viable measurement marks a curious circularity in which now curriculum design itself becomes an evolutionary survival of the fittest. Through a procedure called A/B testing, Bridge yokes demographically similar schools to pilot curricular design and pedagogical experiments in order to determine whether adjustments in teacher pacing, lesson format, or curricular content or explanations – all implemented through daily updates to teachers’ Wi-Fi-enabled tablets – improve student performance. Failure in these experiments is a virtue – the null results aid in designing follow-up efforts (T. Baker et al., 2019, p. 49). When results demonstrate improvement, the revised curricula can be disseminated in the time it takes to apply a software update (Goldstein, 2015, para. 1; Fig. 4). To rapidly iterate, curriculum design and lesson plans become part of Bridge’s broader systems of inputs and outputs; they demand total classroom standardization; this requires all teachers reading the same scripts word-for-word, asking for student feedback using hand signals and yes/no questions, and employing uniform classroom diagrams and heuristics. The goal is to realize cost-efficient, continuous improvement rapidly and at scale. Bridge promises cheap, data-driven results while at the same time depicting its target populations as stuck in perpetual crises that demand humanitarian intervention (Kirchgasler & Desai, 2020). Rights-based critiques of Bridge (see, e.g., Riep, 2019) miss an important nuance of how Bridge does not repress but designs life itself. In evaluating Bridge in terms of whether it respects the roles and duties of state and private actors in education, these critique ignore how the transformations discussed here as anticipation rework the very principles by which Bridge proposes

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

877

Fig. 4 A feedback loop visualization of Bridge’s system for school improvement. The figure’s stated goal of “get every child learning!” is measured by learning outcomes, which perform as feedback in a cycle of continuous improvement (see, e.g., Bridge (2021b))

to design the good life. The anticipated good life is not only articulated as learning outcomes in its curriculum; it is contained in the data Bridge continually collects on its students and families—a value not lost on Bridge. In its pitch deck to potential new investors, Bridge claims it has “more data on children and families living on less than $2 a day than anyone else in the world” (Bridge, 2013) and plans to leverage these data for use in credit scoring and brokering for financial loans, as well as low-cost health insurance (Pawelec, 2018, June 19). The concern with customer preferences and user intentions, and students’ learning is that they can now be gathered, recorded, and mined for further value, insight, and speculation. It raises the question: what is Bridge? Brick-and-mortar schools? A corporation? A digital learning platform? An actuarial database? And to what extent do these distinctions still matter? The difficulty answering the question highlights that what is at stake is

878

C. Kirchgasler

how qualities of curriculum design are never only about curriculum; they remain tethered to shifting notions of efficiency, now as the data necessary for optimizing life itself, biocapital (Rose, 2007). Bridge, the Academy in a Box, and the good life it anticipates, are not merely the recapitulation of a colonial past (i.e., a “Jim Code”); they are designing a new form of life that speaks in the future perfect. This is the anticipation of what one might do and the array of preemptive decisions that a vertically integrated system can take to marshal volume, velocity, and varieties of data to bring them about. In summary, it is (1) the focus on the forecast as the space and context of action; (2) the creation of associations and correlations that seek to establish the significance of all possible actions; (3) the proliferation of digital tools (databases, platforms, and dashboards) to create spaces where forecasts can be and acted on preemptively; and (4) the obligation to optimize these systems. It is a design order that promises to more efficiently navigate an always-aleatory, risk-laden future by more accurately, more quickly, and more comprehensively anticipating it.

Difference by Design Curriculum design embodies a morality this chapter has examined as an exigency to “be efficient” at all times and to the maximum extent in order to realize the good life. Yet as the discussion of design orders makes clear, efficiency is not a transcendental principle, timeless and universal; rather, the exigency is immanent to the conditions of designs themselves. The chapter has discussed three of these: (1) developmental efficiency as the scaffolded cultivation of inborn qualities and the need to curb dysgenic elements; (2) cybernetic efficiency as the feedback on performance toward benchmarks and standards and the need to intervene upon deviations; and (3) anticipatory efficiency as the identification and optimization of all possible actions and the need to preemptively limit potential risks. The chapter’s attention to a history of organizational charts, feedback loops, and A/B testing, then, is not to recount the linear stages of curriculum development in the past century; rather, it has been to dialogue with ghosts that haunt curriculum, precluding ways of being, thinking, seeing, and acting that are not properly developmental, amenable to feedback, or subject to anticipation (Derrida, 1994). Approaching curriculum design as “infraspectral” suggests that differences and exclusions cannot be explained in terms of their representational presence or absence in the curriculum; they are generated in the very forms of life that curriculum designs through its commonsense procedures and how-to rationales. Instead of looking to curriculum design for directions on how to live, the chapter has asked what “lives” in curriculum design. Dwelling with these ghosts—these orders of order—means that curriculum design can no longer be understood as an empty container for technical procedures and therefore a neutral, apolitical site for organizing the good life and planning change. Rather its house is haunted. Every act of design recalls spectres of life otherwise. And so it is hard to say if a good life can designed for oneself, much less another. And at least not in advance. Derrida (1993)

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

879

put the paradox of learning to live as follows: “To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life” (p. xvii). For curriculum to invite futures other than those that have been destined, fed back, or anticipated, it can begin by learning to live with its ghosts.

References Adams, V., Murphy, M., & Clarke, A. E. (2009). Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality. Subjectivity, 28(1), 246–265. Amoore, L. (2009). Algorithmic war: Everyday geographies of the war on terror. Antipode, 41(1), 49–69. Andrejevic, M. (2015). The droning of experience. The Fibreculture Journal (25 2015: Apps and Affect). http://twentyfive.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-187-the-droning-of-experience/ Baker, B. (2001). In perpetual motion: Theories of power, educational history, and the child. Peter Lang. Baker, T., Tricarico, L., & Bielli, S. (2019). Making the most of technology in education. NESTA. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity. Bienkowski, M., Feng, M., & Means, B. (2012). Enhancing teaching and learning through educational data mining and learning analytics: An issue brief. U.S. Department of Education. Biesta, G. (2016). The beautiful risk of education. Routledge. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (2018). Postsecondary success: Data and information. https:// postsecondary.gatesfoundation.org/areas-of-focus/incentives/data-information/ Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Allyn and Bacon. Bobbitt, F. (1918). The curriculum. The University of California Press. Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press. Bridge International Academies. (2013). Presskit. https://bridgeinternationalacademies.com/ presskit2013/Bridge_International%20_Academies-Presskit-2013.pdf Bridge International Academies. (2016a). Mission. http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/ company/mission Bridge International Academies. (2016b). Model. http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/ approach/model Bridge International Academies. (2019). Tech. http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/ what-we-do/tech/ Bridge International Academies. (2021a). The Academy in a box. https://www.bridgeinternationa lacademies.com/what-we-do/tech/ Bridge International Academies. (2021b). Feedback loop. https://media.glassdoor.com/l/15/88/14/ 7d/learning-lab.jpg Brown, R. N., Carducci, R., & Kuby, C. R. (2014). Disrupting qualitative inquiry. Peter Lang. Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1965). The growth of mind. American Psychologist, 20(12), 1007–1017. Carroll, J. B. (1963). A model of school learning. Teachers College Record, 64(8), 723–723. Carson, J. (2007). The measure of merit. Talents, intelligence, and inequality in the French and American republics, 1750–1940. Princeton University Press. Charters, W. W. (1912). Methods of teaching: Their basis and statement developed from a functional standpoint (2nd ed.). Row, Peterson, & Co.. Cohen-Cole, J. (2014). The open mind: Cold War politics and the sciences of human nature. The University of Chicago Press.

880

C. Kirchgasler

Connor, D. J., & Ferri, B. A. (2013). Historicizing dis/ability: Creating normalcy, containing difference. In M. Wappet & K. Arndt (Eds.), Foundations of disability studies (pp. 29–67). Springer. Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. Zone Books. Derrida, J. (1993). Specters of Marx. Routledge. Derrida, J. (1994). In conversation with Richard Beardsworth, “Nietzsche and the machine”. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 7, 57–65. Derrida, J. (1995). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1900). The school and society. University of Chicago Press. Driven Data. (2018). Pover-T tests: Predicting poverty. https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/ 50/worldbank-poverty-prediction/ Fallace, T., & Fantozzi, V. (2013). Was there really a social efficiency doctrine? The uses and abuses of an idea in educational history. Educational Researcher, 42(3), 142–150. Fendler, L. (1999). Making trouble: Prediction, agency, and critical intellectuals. In T. S. Popkewitz & L. Fendler (Eds.), Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and politics (pp. 169–188). Routledge. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage. Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (D. Macey, Trans.). Picador. Gagné, R. M., & Briggs, L. J. (1974). Principles of instructional design. Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Galison, P. (1994). The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision. Critical Inquiry, 21(1), 228–266. Georgia Department of Education. (2018). Georgia’s system of continuous improvement. https:// www.gadoe.org/School-Improvement/Pages/Georgia%E2%80%99s-Systems-of-ContinuousImprovement.aspx Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students. (2017). A framework for school readiness in Georgia. Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students. Goldstein, M. (2013). MVM: Minimal viable measurement [Web log comment]. In The bridge at midnight. http://www.thebridgeatmidnight.com/2013/10/04/mvm-minimal-viablemeasurement/ Goldstein, M. (2015). Fail fast [Web log comment]. In The bridge at midnight. http://www. thebridgeatmidnight.com/2015/01/11/fail-fast/#more-525 Greene, D. (2021). The promise of access: Technology, inequality, and the political economy of hope. MIT Press. Hall, G. S. (1901). The ideal school as based on child study. The Forum, 32(1), 24–39. Halpern, O. (2015). Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. Duke University Press. Hanushek, E., & Woessmann, L. (2008). The role of cognitive skills in economic development. Journal of Economic Literature, 46(3), 607–668. Haraway, D. (1989). Primate visions: Gender, race and nature in the world of modern science. Routledge. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. The University of Chicago Press. Heyck, H. (2015). Age of system: Understanding the development of modern social science. Johns Hopkins University Press. Huang, J. (2019). Science as Utopia: Infrastructures, pedagogies, and the prophecy of design. In T. S. Popkewitz, D. Petterrson, & K.-J. Hsiao (Eds.), The international emergence of educational sciences in the post-World War two years: Quantification, visualization, and making kinds of people (pp. 71–87). Routledge. Ivens, J. P. (2018). Making the modern person: The Tyler Rationale, curriculum studies, and cybernetic systems. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

881

James, W. (1899). Talks to teachers, on psychology: And to students on some of life’s ideals. Henry Holt and Co.. Kirchgasler, C. (2017). The perils of “actionable insights”. In T. S. Popkewitz, J. Diaz, & C. Kirchgasler (Eds.), A political sociology of educational knowledge (pp. 228–243). Routledge. Kirchgasler, C. (2019). Haunted data: The colonial residues of transnational school reforms in Kenya. In F. Salajan & T. Jules (Eds.), The educational intelligent economy: Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the internet of things in education (pp. 215–232). Emerald. Kirchgasler, C., & Desai, K. (2020). ‘Girl’ in crisis. Comparative Education Review, 64(3), 384–403. Kitchin, R. (2015). The data revolution: Big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. SAGE. Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum, 1893–1958 (3rd ed.). RoutledgeFalmer. Labaree, D. F. (2010). How Dewey lost: The victory of David Snedden and social efficiency in the reform of American education. In D. Tröhler, T. Schlag, & F. Osterwalder (Eds.), Pragmatism and modernities (pp. 163–188). Brill. Lee, S. Y. (2021). Rethinking teacher agency: Cybernetics, action research, and the process-oriented rationality. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 53(6), 821–840. Mager, R. F. (1962). Preparing instructional objectives (2nd ed.). David Lake. McCallum, D., & Henshaw, G. H. (1855). Organizational diagram of the New York and Erie Railroad. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Organizational_diagram_of_ the_New_York_and_Erie_Railroad%2C_1855.jpg Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press. Mitman, G. (1992). The state of nature: Ecology, community, and American social thought, 1900–1950. University of Chicago Press. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988). The invention of Africa. James Curry. Murphy, M. (2017). The economization of life. Duke University Press. Pawelec, M. (2018). How Bridge International’s tech-driven for-profit schools in Africa may reinforce global power inequalities [Web log comment]. sicherheits politik-blog. https://www. sicherheitspolitik-blog.de/2018/06/19/how-bridge-internationals-tech-driven-for-profitschools-in-africa-may-reinforce-global-power-inequalities/#fnref-9033-25 Petrina, S. (2004). The politics of curriculum and instructional design/theory/form: Critical problems, projects, units, and modules. Interchange, 35(1), 81–126. Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed.). Routledge. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Taubman, P. M., & Slattery, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. Peter Lang. Poovey, M. (1995). Making the social body: British cultural formation, 1830–1864. University of Chicago Press. Popkewitz, T. S. (2006). Hey dude! It’s not the computer: Technologies, curriculum, and governing the self. In M. Afolayan, D. Browne, & D. Jules (Eds.), Current discourse on education in developing nations: Essays in honor of B. Robert Tabachnick and Robert Koehl (pp. 207–221). Nova Science. Popkewitz, T. S. (2020). The impractically of practical research: A history of contemporary sciences of change that conserve. The University of Michigan Press. Porter, T. (1996). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton University Press. Ranciere, J. (2019). The future of the image. Verso, 91, 102–103. Rancière, J., & Panagia, D. (2000). Dissenting words: A conversation with Jacques Rancière. Diacritics, 30(2), 113–126. Riep, C. (2019). What do we really know about Bridge International Academies? A summary of research findings. Education International. Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself. Princeton University Press.

882

C. Kirchgasler

Schuller, K. (2018). The biopolitics of feeling: Race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century. Duke University Press. Solovey, M., & Cravens, H. (2012). Cold war social science: Knowledge production, liberal democracy, and human nature. Palgrave Macmillan. Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and the idea of human interiority, 1780–1930. Harvard University Press. Steinmetz, G. (2005). The genealogy of a positivist haunting: Comparing prewar and postwar US sociology. Boundary 2, 32(2), 109–135. Taba, H. (1962). Curriculum development: Theory and practice. Harcourt, Brace, & World. Thaler, R. H., Sunstein, C. R., & Balz, J. P. (2014). Choice architecture. In E. Shafir (Ed.), The behavioral foundations of public policy (pp. 428–439). Princeton University Press. Thorndike, E. L. (1906). The principles of teaching: Based on psychology. A. G. Seiler. Tomlinson, C. A. (2014). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners. ASCD. Tyler, R. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. University of Chicago Press. Valasek, C. J. (2021). Divided attention, divided self: Race and dual-mind theories in the history of experimental psychology (pp. 1–23). Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10. 1177/01622439211054455 Van Liew, C. C. (1896). Culture epoch theory. Public School Journal, XV, 546. Weiner, N. (1988). The human uses of human beings: Cybernetics and society. Hachette Books. Weinstein J. (2013). Do for-profit schools give low-income children a real choice? [Web log comment]. Develop economies. http://developeconomies.com/education-3/do-for-profitschools-give-low-income-people-a-real-choice/ Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. ASCD. Williams, P. G., Lerner, M. A., Sells, J., Alderman, S. L., Hashikawa, A., Mendelsohn, A., McFadden, T., Navsaria, D., Peacock, G., Scholer, S., Takagishi, J., Vanderbilt, D., De Pinto, C. L., Attisha, E., Beers, N., Gibson, E., Gorski, P., Kjolhede, C., O’Leary, S., Schumacher, H. K., & Weiss-Harrison, A. (2019). School readiness. Pediatrics, 144(2), 1–15. World Bank. (2016). Digital dividends. World Bank.

Part VIII Curriculum as Teaching

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role of Reflexivity and Networks Sinem Hizli Alkan

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflexivity and Curriculum Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Networks and Curriculum Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design and Data Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Findings and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modes of Reflexivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relational Goods and Evils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National and Organizational Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix 1: Sample Items from Data Generation Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

886 887 889 891 891 891 893 895 895 901 903 904 906 906

Abstract

Teachers often find ways to mediate their curriculum making practices, even in most centralized contexts. In order to delve into this mediation process, this chapter offers a philosophical and methodological framework to investigate the role of reflexivity and networks. Following a critical realist approach, I argue that there are three generative mechanisms underlying teachers’ curriculum making practices that can help us to understand why teachers act in different ways. First, teachers’ modes of reflexivity, distinctive ways of projecting actions, based on teachers’ concerns and by means of their environment, offer strong explanations of why teachers take certain standpoints, follow particular reasoning processes, and act upon curriculum reforms in various ways. Second, relational assets S. Hizli Alkan (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_18

885

886

S. Hizli Alkan

(relational goods and evils) that emerge from teachers’ curriculum making relationships offer explanations as to why certain practices might be enhanced or inhibited. Finally, the national and organizational context, more particularly, schools’ formal organization, curriculum reform as a chain of organic interactions, and performativity culture, explains teacher mediation of curriculum making. Keywords

Curriculum making · Reflexivity · Modes of reflexivity · Ego network · Scotland · Wales

Introduction There has been a strong emphasis in education policy (e.g., Scottish Government, 2008; Welsh Government, 2020) on the importance of teachers’ professional learning communities, often accompanied by rhetoric around the need for reflective practice. Scotland and Wales are two good examples of this, and they both have undertaken a large-scale curriculum reform recently. There have been similarly strong themes in the literature (Prenger et al., 2017; Watson, 2014), but often the focus has remained at a high level – emphasizing the importance of these issues without delving into the black box to explore the complex social processes that occur as teachers engage with one another professionally as they undertake curriculum making. This chapter addresses this issue by examining how teachers’ personal reflexivity, the exercise of considering ourselves and the social environment to project future actions (Archer, 2007), and ego networks, personal networks that focus on the individual actors and their connections to other people (Bellotti, 2015), together play a role in mediating curriculum making practices. It is important to establish how this research understands curriculum making by teachers before exploring the relevant literature. Drawing on several seminal research studies in this field (e.g., Clandinin and Connelly (1992), Doyle (1992), Osborn et al. (1997), and Priestley et al. (2021)), curriculum making by teachers is understood as a relational, complex, multidirectional practice in which teachers constantly reflect, make decisions, and enact policy in different sites. The notion of teacher as curriculum maker has a number of historical roots, such as Dewey (1933), Schwab (1983), Goodson (1994), and, more significantly, Clandinin and Connelly’s (1992) work in the 1990s. Clandinin and Connelly (1992, p. 363) suggested that “the teacher is an integral part of the curriculum constructed and enacted.” Hence, teachers are key actors who make curriculum in different sites, which are entangled and nonlinear (Priestley et al., 2021). This view of teachers was echoed in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) (Scottish Executive, 2006) and the new Curriculum for Wales (CfW) (Welsh Government, 2020) by emphasizing teachers’ being the agents of change.

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

887

This research utilizes Priestley et al.’s (2021) heuristic framing to analyze teachers’ curriculum making practices. This heuristic suggests that there are different actors and types of activities that exist at supra, macro, meso, micro, and nano sites. Although teachers as actors can act in different sites for different purposes, here I explore microcurriculum making, which refers to school-level practices that teachers undertake, while highlighting the multidirectional nature of the different sites (Priestley et al., 2021). To this end, this research sought answers for the following question: What are the generative mechanisms that underlie the mediation of teachers’ curriculum making in relation to reflexivity and networks?

Reflexivity and Curriculum Making Drawing from Archer’s work, reflexivity is defined as “the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their social contexts and vice versa” (2007, p. 4). One of the significant aspects of reflexivity, which is different than reflection, is that reflexivity involves oneself and how people perceive themselves in relation to their environment and evaluate their concerns, expectations, and desires, considering their particular roles within that environment (Ryan & Webster, 2019). Hence, reflexivity explains, even if partially, how people mediate their way through the world. It is, therefore, also a helpful concept to explore why teachers act in certain ways. This view resonates with Zeichner’s (1994) call, made more than two decades ago. Zeichner suggested that, instead of merely focusing on teachers’ individual reflection, we should be researching for different kinds of reflexivity and for structural and cultural factors that inhibit or nurture reflexivity. Similarly, Connelly and Clandinin (1988, as cited in Craig & Ross, 2008, pp. 290–291) stated that “the more we understand ourselves and can articulate reasons why we are, do what we do, and are headed where we have chosen, the more meaningful our curriculum will be.” Archer’s theory offers a nuanced approach to investigate teachers’ reflexivity through internal conversations, which is an individual property that helps to exercise reflexivity. Internal conversations are inner dialogues (hereinafter these terms will be used interchangeably) that one has with oneself in relation to the individual and social environments, which are used to navigate one’s world (Archer, 2007). Furthermore, she argues that the texture of our internal conversations varies, which generates the heterogeneity of reflexivity, meaning that, although we all engage in reflexivity, the way in which we project actions based on our concerns will vary in different contexts and at different times (Archer, 2007). She proposes four modes of reflexivity to understand distinctive ways of mediating social practices (Archer, 2003, 2007, 2012). I shall unpack each briefly: Communicative reflexivity: This mode manifests certain features about how people navigate their way, which is described as “thought and talk” (Archer, 2007). For example, one prevalent characteristic is the inconclusive nature of the

888

S. Hizli Alkan

internal conversations, unless they are shared with one’s dialogical partners. Hence, communicative reflexivity mode brings about interpersonal conversations to resolve issues rather than relying solely on inner dialogues. Because this mode calls for external conversations for confirmation and/or affirmation, close relationships, especially in the work environment, may be sought. Autonomous reflexivity: Unlike communicative reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity manifests in the lonely exercise of inner dialogues which are not required to be supplemented by external conversations to lead actions (Archer, 2007). Autonomous reflexivity mode marks self-sufficient and self-contained ideas which can lead to making self-judgements through independent thinking. If there is a goal to be achieved, individual responsibility will be taken. Another underlying feature of this mode is that the assumption of knowledge of these unique circumstances can only be known by people themselves. Hence, autonomous reflexivity can bring about self-knowledge and, therefore, self-sufficient and self-confident mental judgements. Meta-reflexivity: This modality is exercised by every normal human on at least one occasion (Archer, 2007). The exercise of this mode requires deliberating on one’s actions reflexively by questioning and answering by oneself, in other words, through self-interrogation. Practicing meta-reflexivity constitutes a continuous analysis, monitoring, and interrogating one’s objective circumstances, which are always subjective and fallible. The special relation with social context is described as contextual unsettlement, as meta-reflexivity brings about reaching one’s ideals regardless of the potential consequences. Again, unlike the case of autonomous reflexivity, performative achievements or performance indicators are rarely the focus of mediating actions unless they match with one’s ideals. Meta-reflexivity manifests itself through seeking the right actions instead of strategic actions to reach instrumental goals. Archer states that “pragmatism can never be the resort of the metareflexive” (2003, p. 272). Fractured reflexivity: This mode manifests in inner dialogues, which often do not lead to purposeful actions as the matters are usually beyond one’s control. Archer’s empirical research (Archer, 2008) found that the practicing of fractured reflexivity often occurs due to adverse situations which disable people from initiating a course of action for attaining a sustainable and satisfactory way of life. Fractured reflexivity is therefore closely connected to inner dialogues that usually go round in circles and are inconclusive and distressing. It is crucial to note here that these modes are neither stable nor deterministic and cannot be reduced to fixed personality types. In fact, Archer (2003, p. 179) states that there might be “flashes of different reflexivity modes” and that people need to weight the affordances and limitations of exercising one over another within their unique circumstances. This caveat is also applied throughout this research. Another reason why Archer’s theory of reflexivity is powerful lies in the ways in which she operationalized the concept and offered methodological tools to tackle the challenges of investigating reflexivity. Ten mental activities – mulling over, planning, imagining, deciding, rehearsing, reliving, prioritizing, imaginary conversations, budgeting, and clarifying – are proposed by Archer (2007), to investigate

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

889

reflexivity through qualitative interviews. A further data generation tool was the Internal Conversation Indicator, which was developed to capture people’s marked dominant mode of reflexivity (Archer, 2007). Caetano (2014), however, argued that Archer did not adequately address the issue of socialization, which is considered to be performed through external conversations that can be investigated through networks. Although this might be true for Archer’s early work, her recent collaboration with Donati (a relational psychologist) illustrates that she has started to attend to external conversations and the link between reflexivity and networks (Donati & Archer, 2015). Because this field is relatively new, this research will contribute to understanding the nuanced features and dynamics of the interplay between reflexivity and networks within the context of curriculum making.

Networks and Curriculum Making Bellotti (2018, p. 5) defines social networks as the “empirical phenomena of interconnected patterns of relations among living organisms.” The underlying assumption is that the interconnectedness plays an important role in influencing people’s behaviors (Perry et al., 2018). Thus, a key task of networks is to offer explanations on how a web of relations and their content may explain human (inter)actions. Daly (2010) suggests that network research is particularly helpful to understand educational change and teachers’ responses, as well as potential trajectories of teachers’ interactions through employing sophisticated conceptual and methodological tools. Ego network is one such tool that can be employed to examine individuals (ego) who are embedded in different social contexts, which may have various influences on their actions (Perry et al., 2018). An ego-network approach is particularly important in curriculum making to capture a variety or a lack of resources incorporated inside and outside of the immediate work environment, including formal and informal connections (ties) (Woodland & Mazur, 2018). This is mainly because curriculum reforms often bring a set of unclear meanings and new pedagogical ideas and strategies, which may open up new conversation channels for teachers (Cole & Weinbaum, 2010). These channels may play an important role in curriculum enactment in various ways (Coburn et al., 2012; Coburn & Russell, 2008; Daly et al., 2015). For example, teachers may form networks to make sense of curriculum policy messages (Coburn, 2005; Siciliano et al., 2017); to improve their teaching by learning new instructional strategies (Anderson, 2010; Bidwell & Yasumoto, 1999; Coburn et al., 2012; Sun et al., 2013); to enhance their curriculum making skills, such as curriculum design (Huizinga et al., 2015; Voogt et al., 2016); or to access expertise in curriculumrelated issues (Coburn et al., 2012; Coburn & Russell, 2008). Consequently, a variety of different forms of networks emerge, such as advice networks (Coburn et al., 2012), information-seeking networks (Meredith et al., 2017), and formal and informal support networks (Woodland & Mazur, 2018). Teachers’ networks that are constructed for different reasons may be distinct from each other or may overlap, which is referred to as “network multiplexity”

890

S. Hizli Alkan

(Crossley et al., 2015). The multiplexity of ties illustrates the complexity of teachers’ interactions. For example, teachers may have friendship relations within their professional network (Siciliano et al., 2017). However, some research suggests that, if there is multiplexity in the professional network of teachers, friendship ties might make it difficult to consider conflicting perspectives about curriculum making (de Lima, 2001) or teachers may feel pressure to conform (Cole & Weinbaum, 2010). Other foci within network literature concern the composition and content of the networks, in other words, the degree of diversity within the network and what flows in these connections. The characteristics of people in the networks may include their age, years of experience, personal attitudes, context, and subject background. For example, teachers’ individual subject backgrounds may affect the dynamics of teachers’ interactions (Spillane, 2005) and may influence the direction and content of curriculum making practices (Crick et al., 2019). What flows within teachers’ networks also remains an area that needs further investigation. In fact, the type of content may explain why teachers form ties with certain individuals. Moreover, the content of the relationships may also provide some insights into the meanings attached to the connections. Ties can be perceived as positive, negative, or challenging (Daly et al., 2015; Labianca & Brass, 2006). This is important, as the meanings attached to networks can have an impact on curriculum making practices (Hizli Alkan, 2021; Siciliano et al., 2017). The quality of relationships is another facet that is examined in network literature. For example, strong ties can facilitate complex change processes (Penuel et al., 2009) and can be a building block for positive and supportive relationships. In fact, strong school-based ties can promote mission-aligned practice (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, Coburn et al. (2012) argue that strong ties, when comprised of a combination of high-depth interaction and high expertise, may facilitate teachers’ adjustment to new reforms. Trust is another ingredient to examine when considering the quality of teachers’ networks in relation to innovation (Moolenaar & Sleegers, 2010) or in developing close relationships (Liou & Daly, 2014). More trusting relationships, and those with a high frequency of communication, are seen as the indicators of strong relationships (Brown et al., 2016), as are years of teaching in a school (Liou & Daly, 2014). Johnson (2003) added that it is not only the frequency of the communication but also the intensity and content of conversations that is linked with the degree of trust, echoing Coburn et al.’s (2012) position. Still, more frequent communication was found to be influential on teaching practice (Woodland & Mazur, 2018). Most of the network literature (e.g., Coburn et al., 2012; Sun et al., 2013) focuses on the impact of networks on teaching practice (or instructional practice), yet we have very limited understanding of how this impact is perceived and how networks influence the different domains of curriculum making, such as sense-making, which is argued to be one of the crucial parts of curriculum making practices (Soini et al., 2018). Further, we have limited understanding of what all these quality indicators mean to teachers, such as trust. Exploring these aspects qualitatively will enhance our understanding of the role that networks play in curriculum making.

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

891

Methodology Participants Six teachers from Scotland and two teachers from Wales from different subject specialisms in secondary schools participated in this research during the 2018–2019 school year. Participants (see Table 1) were recruited by employing an opportunistic sampling method through advertising the research study on social media. Pseudonyms were assigned to each participant (displayed differently here than in other publications from this research) in order to further minimize the risk of traceability and to protect anonymity.

Design and Data Generation This research was designed as a convergent mixed-methods research study (Creswell & Clark, 2018), which is an integrated and sequential mixed-methods design. This method is commonly used in social research when a small amount of quantitative data are embedded within a largely qualitative one, which is also the case for this research. Different types of data are generated and connected for different purposes. The research activities entailed semi-structured interviews, participant and non-participant observations, participant-produced reflective diaries, internal conversation interviews, Internal Conversation Indicator (ICNOI) surveys, and ego-network interviews. Each method is integrated to make sense of different aspects of the social phenomena observed and to complement each other in different ways (see Fig. 1). Sample items for each data generation tool are included in Appendix 1. Within a convergent mixed-methods design, I employed a multi-case study approach (Stake, 2006). The main features of critical realism, which will be discussed later, favor this design, due to a great emphasis on context and causation (Kessler & Bach, 2014). Considering their uniqueness and complexity, each teacher Table 1 Demographics of the participants Participants Yasmin Alice Eileen Alma Morris Regina

Country Scotland Scotland Scotland Scotland Scotland Scotland

Gender F F F F M F

Years of experience 9 years 11 years 7 years 11 years 30 years 6 years

Nicole Sophie

Wales Wales

F F

7 years 19 years

Subject specialism History English Chemistry History Chemistry Design and Technology Arts Biology

Role Teacher Teacher Teacher Teacher Teacher Teacher Teacher Teacher and Senior Leadership member

892

S. Hizli Alkan

Fig. 1 The overall design and complementarity of the research activities

has been treated as a single case. Each phase informed the subsequent phase in different ways, which I shall now explain. Phase 1 First, semi-structured interviews and observations aimed to portray teachers’ professional profiles and understand the contextual conditions. This is important in exploring how the teachers acted in terms of enablers, constraints, opportunities, resources, etc., while accepting the subjectivity of the participants, in other words, their interpretations of their world (Smith & Elger, 2014). The framing of the interview guide was mainly informed by the work of Rubin and Rubin (2012): “the conversational partnership” (ibid., p. 7), in which the researcher and participant work actively to construct the conversation as a joint process of discovery. In total, I had eight semi-structured interviews with the teachers and eight full-day classroom and school observations. Data generated through the ICONI (Archer, 2008) questionnaire construe one part of the quantitative aspect of this research. ICONI was developed by Archer to explore reflexivity as internal conversation. It was used to identify teachers’ potential dominant mode of reflexivity at the time of research, after which I utilized the results as a starting point upon which to reflect further, based on some empirical observations. Because the scores only increase the probability of being the dominant mode (Archer, 2007), attribution of the dominant mode to each participant was finalized after analyzing the interviews, observations, and reflective diaries.

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

893

Phase 2 Teachers produced reflective diaries over at least 10 weeks, between my first and the last visit to the school. The structure, frequency, and the tool where teachers generated their diaries were negotiated at the first meeting. The suggested structure for the diaries included teachers’ immediate thoughts, concerns, and priorities about the curriculum and their plans to act upon these. Both WhatsApp and email were used to produce these reflective diaries soon after their reflection, as they are relatively instant, easily accessible, and time-saving for participants (Motteram et al., 2020). Phase 3 In addition to similar observational data generation processes undertaken in Phase 1, internal conversation data and ego-network data were generated in Phase 3. Archer’s (2003) ten mental activities, as mentioned above, were utilized to explore teachers’ internal conversations. Teachers’ concerns about curriculum making, their futureoriented ideas, and their projects about the curriculum were explored in these interviews. Ego-network data were generated through a name generator, name interpreter, and name interrelator with visually aided methods (Robins, 2015; see Fig. 2). A name generator asks participants to name people (alters) with whom they talked about curriculum making. Teachers (egos) write the names of these people on post-it notes and place them according to emotional closeness in concentric circles. Second, follow-up questions about each alter in the network were asked to generate more information about the composition of the network. Finally, teachers were asked whether the alters in the network knew each other.

Data Analysis This research utilized critical realism as a philosophical framework to analyze data alongside conceptual tools derived from Archer’s internal conversation theory (e.g.,

Fig. 2 Ego-network data generation

894

S. Hizli Alkan

modes of reflexivity), social network theory (e.g., multiplexity), and also relevant curriculum research (e.g., three models of curriculum making, Kelly, 2004). The data analysis process I followed is complex and iterative and difficult to capture in a succinct way, so here I will only explain the main ideas and steps focusing on the purpose of this chapter. More detailed accounts of reflexivity analysis and network analysis are provided elsewhere (Hizli Alkan & Priestley, 2019; Hizli Alkan, 2021). To begin with the philosophical framework of this research, critical realism offers strong methodological and philosophical concepts to investigate the complex, dynamic, multidirectional nature of curriculum making, and yet, curriculum research rarely employs this philosophy (Priestley, 2011; see some recent examples Manyukhina & Wyse, 2019; Restad, 2019). One of the main arguments of critical realism is that the social world is stratified by distinguishing what we can observe in the empirical real and the unobservable “real” world. In other words, critical realism holds the idea that the objective world exists independently and even without our knowledge of it (Bhaskar, 1998). The ultimate aim for social research is to identify underlying mechanisms in the real world, which are unobservable, but which generate the events that we can empirically observe. In order to accomplish this, data generated from each method were analyzed individually and then merged to answer the research question. I have adapted Danermark et al.’s (2002) critical realist data analysis method, which starts from making a description of events and situations and moves to abduction, where data is redescribed and recontextualized in light of a conceptual framework, drawn from the literature and theory. Then, the process continues with retroduction to clarify the necessary conditions that create events observed empirically. The final step is identifying mechanisms that have strong explanatory power to allow us to understand events. First, case summaries were generated by describing what counted as data after dissolving some of the aspects of the individual cases in an iterative process of reflecting on the research questions, of which only one of them is addressed in this chapter. To start with ego-network analysis, this was informed by Bellotti (2015), Borgatti and Ofem (2010), and Perry et al. (2018) and was processed in NetDraw, a network visualization tool in UCINET software. I computed some descriptive statistics, such as density – the degree of connectedness in the network – and looked at how similarity plays out in the networks, such as context similarity. I also examined the content of these conversations to see what ideas and resources flow, by looking at some emerging themes, such as content – or assessment – related topics. The next stages in ego-network analysis involved examining the quality of the network ties and the impact of the alters in curriculum making. A more detailed account of this ego-network analysis is presented elsewhere (Hizli Alkan, 2021), and here I will focus more on how networks played out in the generative mechanisms. The other main data analysis was reflexivity analysis, which was informed by several questions derived from the related literature (Archer, 2003; Chalari, 2017), such as what the struggle/conflict is and what may foster and obstruct inner talks about curriculum making. This data analysis captured a range of deliberation activities that teachers engaged, which were then related to curriculum making by

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

895

using the ten mental activities. Moreover, teachers’ concerns and future actions were recorded in the individual cases. Teachers’ modes of reflexivity were finalized after looking at the ICONI scores and reflective diaries through Archer’s internal conversation theory (2007) lens. Cross-case discussions enabled me to note similarities and differences between cases and to identify certain conditions that generate distinctive actions. Drawing from Archer’s (2007) theory, personal, structural, and cultural factors were utilized to see how these factors interacted for each person in their specific circumstances. The modes of reflexivity, relational goods and evils, and national and organizational context emerged as underlying mechanisms that interact in certain ways and manifest in order to engender various curriculum making practices.

Findings and Discussion This section will examine the three mechanisms, providing example extracts from the data, and discuss the findings in relation to the literature.

Modes of Reflexivity One of the entry points of this research was to understand why teachers act upon curriculum reforms in different and often unexpected ways. I argue that the modes of reflexivity are a salient feature of teacher mediation of curriculum making and have strong explanatory power to explain teachers’ stances towards curriculum, reasoning, decision making, and actions. This will also allow us to take the important work of Dewey (1933) and Schön (1983) further, while responding to the discourse around the increasing need for teachers to be reflective practitioner within different sites of curriculum making. As Archer (2007) suggests, I have adopted a dynamic, context-dependent, and relational understanding of the modes of reflexivity rather than labeling teachers with one mode of reflexivity. For example, I acknowledge that teachers’ professional histories and any shift in their roles or in curriculum demands will have an impact on transforming the mode of reflexivity they employ (Westaway, 2019). Further, taking a dynamic approach is important, because, as Ryan (2014) suggests, if people are aware of their modes of reflexivity, they may be able to find ways to manage and improve their practices. He suggests that these modes of reflexivity make the mediation process “visible” so that there might be an increased awareness as to the ways in which people draw upon their personal, structural, and cultural resources (Ryan, 2014). It may be even possible to develop a certain mode through teaching about critical reflection (Cavener & Vincent, 2020). Dyke et al. (2012) suggest that these modes should be considered as a repertoire of reflexive approaches that people can draw on to mediate their actions. I will illustrate how different modes of reflexivity are manifested in a range of curriculum making practices, focusing on teachers’ understanding of curriculum,

896

S. Hizli Alkan

their key concerns, and the type of actions they have taken. In each case, I will present a visualization of teachers’ curriculum making networks, with circles representing individuals, lines representing ties, and the different shades of circles representing the ego, the in-school ties, and the beyond-school ties.

Communicative Reflexivity Although none of the participants exhibited strong features of communicative reflexivity as their only dominant mode, Sophie, however, illustrated some elements of this mode in some situations. This was particularly evident while overseeing the school’s curriculum making activities. Sophie’s curriculum making network (Fig. 3) consisted of mainly in-school ties, while the beyond-school ties offered some curriculum-related support (e.g., curriculum adviser). Her network was the most influential in her curriculum making practices compared to the other cases. Her self-motivated curriculum lead role, and being the assistant head while teaching biology at the same time, intensified her internal and external conversations about curriculum. That resulted in extensive deliberations on whole-school curriculum making events and curriculum provision, especially in relation to timetabling. These deliberations often need to be completed and confirmed by external conversations in a dialogic way to lead her courses of action and to reach consensus. Consequently, her external conversations were mainly to seek reassurance, resolutions, and confirmations relating to her personal concerns. Her concerns included keeping staff informed about the curriculum reform, making progress with the school’s new curriculum making practices, and keeping everyone happy and content, which required intensive and frequent dialogues to lead her actions.

Fig. 3 Sophie’s curriculum making network

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

897

After training, I feel like OK you have all the information required now you go ahead and do. The change is so dramatic and different, so it is a challenge to engage others and not to scare people and make sure that cross-curricular responsibilities are met. [. . .] We don’t have any hierarchy in the curriculum. I am the curriculum leader but how we all make good sense of curriculum will determine how we will be successful all together. (Sophie – first interview)

The ways in which she handled the curriculum work, by engaging in interpersonal dialogues, getting confirmations to reach consensus, as well as drawing novel information from the local curriculum expert, made her feel both proud and, at times, frustrated, of the work of the school. As Archer (2007) describes, within the communicative reflexive mode, there is a tendency to maintain relational goods, which are unpacked later, and in their dense networks, even this requires some level of self-sacrifice for the ego. This was observed in Sophie’s case, when she was spending evenings and weekends working on the curriculum tasks. What mattered for Sophie at that time was to take the school’s curriculum forward together with the colleagues in her school with whom she constructed a dense network with a high level of strength and trust, and with a relatively high level of influence, especially on her practices.

Autonomous Reflexivity Practicing autonomous reflexivity manifests in self-sufficient internal deliberations that are mainly used for checking the quality of people’s work by benchmarking to both their personal standards and also the public standards to which they would like to conform (Archer, 2007). Alma, Yasmin, Regina, and Nicole’s practices illustrated the features of autonomous reflexivity. Alma, for example, was very strategic and mostly instrumental in addressing her curriculum-related concerns and to achieve her aims. Alma’s curriculum making network (Fig. 4) illustrates an example of the dominance of alters with subject similarity as everyone has History background. The strategy in forming beyond-school ties was to address her assessment-related concerns, especially with people linked to the Scottish Qualifications Authority (see for more information: https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/70972.html). Her level of trust in those people was at the maximum level, which indicates that trust may result as a consequence of structural pressures. This recalls Hargreaves’ (1994) notion of “contrived collegiality,” which only helps to execute externally imposed agendas. Although Alma perceived her internal conversations as being self-sufficient and self-contained, these were complemented by external conversations when there were exam-related changes or when the stakes were perceived to be high. She took her own responsibility in achieving the “best,” as subjectively defined by her signaling of autonomous reflexivity: I want the kids to have the best opportunity and that’s on me. They only get a good lesson as I am prepared to deliver. [. . .] The quality depends on the degree of the work you put in. I want to be good, proud of the work I do. (Alma – internal conversation interview)

898

S. Hizli Alkan

Fig. 4 Alma’s curriculum making network

This aspiration, however, needed to be mediated when faced with performativity pressures at senior levels, where there are qualifications to be prepared. She underlined that one of the purposes of school was to prepare for the world of work, which meant preparing for national qualifications, as these would serve this aim. This type of content selection strategy, which can be a sign of the social efficiency ideology (Schiro, 2013), is also seen elsewhere in Scotland with History teachers (e.g., Smith, 2019). Her ultimate concern about curriculum was about assessments. For the other concerns, such as budgetary limitations, she came up with enterprising solutions and often overcame such structural barriers.

Meta-Reflexivity Archer (2003) proposes that practicing this modality results in critical selfinterrogation and self-monitoring to achieve the ideals of people. All teachers in this study exhibited some of the distinctive features of meta-reflexivity to a degree. Among all, Alice’s narrative had the strongest elements to illustrate how the dominance of this modality may manifest in the mediation of curriculum making in distinctive ways. Her curriculum making network (Fig. 5) illustrates a sparse network with three separate components, which Alice connected in her curriculum making practices. This was partly to address her interests and concerns in curriculum making through informal channels and a need to create her own community, which she felt did not exist in her school environment. As a result, she had the lowest density in her network compared to other cases, enabling her to potentially access a variety of information (Buch-Hansen, 2014). Alice’s ultimate concern in nurturing her curriculum practice was to build a sense of community with people who share similar concerns and frustrations about ongoing performativity pressures. For example, the

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

899

Fig. 5 Alice’s curriculum making network

connections she formed in attending a creativity summer school were highly influential, although communication was not frequent. The curriculum is so exam driven. There is a real divide between Broad General Education and senior levels. [. . .] Even in the junior years, which is a quite grim way of thinking, “come in first years, here is a fun activity and now here is the exam prep”. There is not that complete flexibility. You just try to make it work within your practice fit within the overview of the department, and the school, and the council . . . You feel like one little ant in a huge nest. (Alice – first interview)

Alice’s case represents a situation where a highly reflexive and committed (evidenced in her interest in professional development and voluntary activities in the school) teacher, despite having a network with strong, trusted, and diverse support available, can become demotivated to initiate her projects. Thus, teachers’ curriculum making practices can be inhibited due to the incompatibility of the interplay between strong accountability practices, a lack of sense of community, and personal ideals. By leaving the profession, she believed she protected her mental well-being in a way and redesigned her ideals to nurture a better self (Archer, 2012).

Fractured Reflexivity Practicing fractured reflexivity manifests in inconclusive internal conversations which tend to go round in circles and distress people (Archer, 2007). Because such

900

S. Hizli Alkan

matters are usually beyond people’s control, feeling restricted by social contexts or experiencing some adverse or troublesome situations can explain this manifestation. Although there were signs of fractured reflexivity in different cases, especially when faced with no room to achieve teachers’ agency due to structural and cultural factors (including Alice), Morris’ practices illustrate how practicing fractured reflexivity as a dominant mode can help to understand why teachers take certain actions (or do not). His curriculum making network (Fig. 6) is noticeably different compared to others, as it includes academics and more beyond-school ties than in-school ties. His network consists of low-level strength and impact, but with a high level of trust. Morris, a teacher who was interested in academic research and the importance of knowledge in the curriculum, struggled to find satisfactory answers to his questions and dilemmas about curriculum policy/practice through his internal and external conversations. People from different subject backgrounds, with different years of experience and different roles, and who had different attitudes towards CfE were included in his network. From an external perspective, it can be argued that a range of ideas and perspectives about curriculum making were present in the network, which offered a potential orientation on which to project his actions. Although there was a degree of personal and cultural change through some of his conversations (e.g., characterized as thinking differently about his work as a teacher and extending his knowledge of research), he produced the same internal conversations, including unresolved dilemmas. I don’t feel ownership of a lot of things. I pass it on to the senior leadership. I leave the decision to them. There are times I am not happy with the decision but I don’t care. In the past, I have always found you can be really upset for days, sometimes weeks over an

Fig. 6 Morris’ curriculum making network

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

901

instance, and you can become ill. I did become ill over things years ago. (Morris – internal conversation interview)

What we see in Morris’ case is that a teacher, who is highly experienced and knowledgeable about research with a diverse and extensive network, can be disabled in curriculum making to a great extent in a context where there is a lack of curricular, pedagogical, and research-related support and a lack of genuine space and tolerance for making mistakes. In a succinct description, Morris’ case is an example of curriculum making practice which was engendered by an amalgamation of previous distressing life events; inconclusive and conflicting conversations; accountability pressures; and weak meso site and collegial support.

Relational Goods and Evils Relational goods and evils are the relational qualities or products that emerged from teachers’ curriculum making relationships which are perceived either positively or negatively by teachers in their social environments. Relational goods and evils, terms coined by Donati and Archer (2015), are context- and activity-dependent, meaning that they are open to change, depending on the absence or existence of some personal, structural, and cultural factors. Relational goods include collegial trust, diversity of support, high quality and frequent conversations, and the multiplexity of ties. Although the findings concur with previous research that reveals how trust is an essential ingredient (Liou & Daly, 2014; Moolenaar & Sleegers, 2010), there is generally a lack of critical understanding of trust. What this research illustrated is that teachers’ perceptions of trust will offer nuanced insights about the quality of relationships. As for the other relational goods, Nicole’s case is a good example of how diversity of support and the multiplexity of ties can facilitate curriculum work, especially in the early stages of curriculum work. She is my mother-in-law and previous head of art, also a very good friend. We can talk about everything. She can give me perspectives of a family, friend but also as a previous role of head of art, it is a complex relationship. It makes me even to look and think in a more complex way. (Nicole – ego-network interview)

Shared understanding, concerns, and priorities about curriculum were another relational good that enabled teachers to engage with what Anderson (2010) calls mission-aligned practice (e.g., Sophie), to leverage the quality of curriculum work (e.g., Alice), and to receive instrumental support (e.g., Alma). Moreover, new communication channels and possibilities for alternative ways of seeing and doing, which can be seen as complementary to the aforementioned ones, acted as another mechanism to explain teachers’ practices. It is evident that a combination of strong and weak ties for enabling access to different kinds of support is necessary to enhance the quality of teachers’ experience with curriculum making. The

902

S. Hizli Alkan

opportunity of new spaces and channels for talking about curriculum making, or at least the idea of it, was greatly welcomed by all the teachers in this research, but with different purposes. Voogt et al. (2016) suggest that such professional development opportunities, specifically organized for curriculum design, can enhance teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and influence curriculum change effectively. Such communication channels would include meso curriculum events, reconfigured departments, whole-school projects, self-motivated professional development activities (e.g., Creativity Summer School – Alice), as well as social media sites (e.g., Twitter, WhatsApp – Morris, Alma, Eileen). These relational events (Borgatti, 2021) enabled teachers to bring a different perspective to their practices, or sometimes provided different support, even when the relationships were perceived to be not as strong. Positive, transparent, and effective interpersonal and departmental communications appeared to be another relational good. One of the recurrent themes was the significance of the interpersonal relationship with the head of the faculty, which may enable and hinder curriculum making and potentially have an impact on job satisfaction. In fact, much research has underlined the importance that different types of leadership within the departments and schools can have on teachers’ job satisfaction and in preventing them from contributing to creating a collaborative and collegial culture (Cameron & Lovett, 2015; Liou & Daly, 2014). Another recurring theme was complementary and applicable ideas to practice which would enable teachers to undertake curriculum making more effectively. (Huizinga et al 2015), similar to Aitken (2006), suggest that an alignment between the new curriculum reform and offering support with prior experiences and ideas should be carefully planned. As for relational evils, which often disabled teachers from having a satisfactory engagement with curriculum making, negative sentiments and judgements associated with interpersonal and departmental relations were a strong one. These emerge when, for example, there is a perceived lack of praise for good curriculum making, as perceived by individuals, or encouragement to take risks or make mistakes, and simply when teachers may not get on well with each other. This finding resonates with Daly et al.’s (2015) argument that the lack of nurturing an innovative climate in schools is associated with the effect of negative ties and, in turn, the low level of trust in the networks. The cases of Regina and Yasmin, who are positioned at the lowest level of the average degree of trust in their networks, resonate with this finding. He (4C) is a bit of bully of females. He would undermine me in front of parents and student. [. . .] Professionally we are okay. I don’t think I benefit from working with him. (Regina – ego-network interview) You can be teaching a course which is printed in 1992 or you can make a new course every year to fit the needs of your kids and you are still getting paid the same. My head has no idea how much effort I put into curriculum development. Absolutely none. This is demotivating. They do not even value it enough. (Yasmin – internal conversation interview)

Furthermore, a lack of conceptual, pedagogical, curricular, and operational support, as Humes (2013) identifies, acts as another relational evil in teachers’ networks. Indeed, conceptual change is one of the most difficult aspect during a curriculum reform that can be addressed through teachers’ relations (Horn & Kane, 2015).

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

903

Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence from previous research that teachers often have insufficient understanding of curriculum design (Huizinga et al., 2015), which can be enhanced by teacher development programs that are specifically focused on curriculum making (Voogt et al., 2016). Another relational evil identified is having conflicting ideas and incompatible perspectives on practice. As Achinstein (2002) stresses, conflict is inescapable when we talk about teacher collaboration. Hence, it is not surprising to observe conflicting ideas and incompatible perspectives through teachers’ networks. Nevertheless, the contribution of this research lies in the detailed insights pertaining to this relational evil, as perceived by teachers. The conflicts referred to here were just the opposite of what Stillman (2011, p. 134) calls “productive tensions” – referring to enhancing practices without simply complying with the policy agenda. The teachers mentioned conflicting ideas concerning pedagogical decisions, which were either perceived as not being effective by teachers or inapplicable due to time and budgetary limitations as well as exam pressures. Incompatible perspectives were particularly evident when the curricular expectations from teachers conflicted with either what they believed was right or how the success was measured at the end. These findings resonate with much research in this area (Penuel et al., 2009; Philpott & Oates, 2017) which argues that accountability pressures can inhibit teacher agency and influence how teachers benefit from their interactions. Finally, tensions in the department and resistance to change can act as a hindrance for curriculum making. It is important to note here that, although the notion of teacher resistance is under-theorized (Smith, 2020), I use it to refer to practices that imply unwillingness and that are perceived to be challenging to navigate by teachers. Nicole’s case is an example of this. A history teacher in her network was perceived to be one of the biggest challenges as she had several reservations about the new curriculum. This resulted in taking slower steps and disseminating limited information to ease the change process. Such tensions and resistance can explain why these conversations lead to postponing the new curriculum work, or at least some sensemaking activities, at the school level. Moreover, in some cases, teachers came up with some strategic ways of mediating their network, such as Regina: “A does not like B, C does not like A. A has the most influence over these people. If I can get him by my side, I would.”

National and Organizational Context This mechanism refers to faculty departments as a social structure and curriculum reform as a chain of organic interactions and performativity culture to understand teachers’ curriculum making practices. The way the faculties are organized into the small subject units explains the structure and composition of the networks. Similarly, Meredith et al. (2017) found that the formal organization of the schools as subunits may explain why teachers form connections with similar or geographically close ones and potentially make the expertise visible. On the other hand, de Lima (2007) argued that this departmentalization potentially creates distinct social worlds within the school that result in different understandings, for example, of a whole-school

904

S. Hizli Alkan

curriculum making, and challenge the improvement of schools and teachers. Moreover, such departmentalization has the potential to facilitate how the information is sought and exchanged. This is crucial as this impacts on how curriculum making happens and improves through teachers’ development within and beyond their organizations. Furthermore, the faculty heads were often in a strong position in shaping curriculum making practices in different ways, including hindering teachers’ practices (e.g., Yasmin). This finding resonates with much research in this area (Cameron & Lovett, 2015; Sun et al., 2013; Vangrieken et al., 2017) in the sense that the formal positions of the people within the faculties influence how the ideas diffuse in the schools and ultimately have an impact on teachers’ job satisfaction and their professional development. Thus, departmentalization as a social structure needs particular attention when looking at curriculum making by teachers as relational practice. Although departmentalization may make expertise visible and create opportunities to access expertise, preventing teachers from isolation, there is a risk of seeing a lack of transformational practices. The cases of Alma and Yasmin were examples of this. In contrast, Sophie and Nicole’s cases illustrated that the core ideas of the new curriculum reform may require an alternative configuration of departments. Thus, the curriculum-related roles can act as a catalyst in this process, providing timely and adequate support at the meso curriculum making level. Moreover, the faculty heads, who were included in all of the teachers’ curriculum making networks in this research, also play a crucial role either as an impetus for change, or in Yasmin’s case, as an impediment: This is a tricky relationship. She does not even know what I teach. She can give me no advice or any tips about improving the curriculum [. . .] She is a Modern Studies teacher, so she goes to Modern Studies meeting, but she never comes to our meeting. That’s why it is the first year ever that I understand why people are leaving. If I could move to a job now with £40K, I would leave today; that’s how I feel. (Yasmin – Strength: 0 out of 10)

Conclusion This chapter examined the underlying generative mechanisms of curriculum making by drawing upon a critical realist data analysis of teachers’ internal and external conversations in relation to the literature. The core purpose of this chapter was to understand the mediation of curriculum making by teachers, and the three mechanisms provided a window into this complex phenomenon. First, I explained how taking a nuanced and dynamic approach to the modes of reflexivity provides powerful theoretical and methodological tools to make sense of how teachers respond to curriculum reform expectations. Modes of reflexivity explain, even if not fully, how teachers take certain standpoints and project their actions in distinctive ways. I have argued that these should not be seen as fixed personal types, but rather as an interactive and dynamic construct which helps people mediate structural and cultural factors in their social environment. Second, I explained the importance of looking at what relations hold, namely relational goods and evils, to understand teachers’ interactions and collaborations better, as this is another strong mediatory

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

905

factor in curriculum making. Without having rich and comprehensive information about teachers’ relationships, the structural characteristics and patterns of the networks will remain incomplete. This is also important as relational goods and evils interact with the various modes of reflexivity in a multidirectional way. Third, the national and organizational context which refers to a school’s formal organization, curriculum reform, and performativity had shaped curriculum making practices effectively, which was evident in teachers’ internal and external conversations. Empirical generalizations of these findings are not sought here. Instead, this research offers theoretical generalization (Danermark et al., 2002), meaning that the underlying mechanisms can be seen as portable for investigating teachers’ curriculum making in different contexts. Performing a longitudinal and large-scale research with teachers from different sectors and subject backgrounds will further enhance our understanding of teachers’ mediation of curriculum making. This research offers implications and recommendations to policy and practice of teacher education and development, meso curriculum support, and curriculum making theory and practice. To start with the former, the link between teachers’ reflexivity and curriculum making should be strengthened through nuanced discussions about the modes of reflexivity. There is a need for initiatives to support teachers’ ongoing professional development and interrupt some habitual thinking and doing (e.g., Priestley & Drew, 2019). The modes of reflexivity, as forms of reasoning and acting upon, can enhance teachers’ repertoires and make the mediation process more transparent and manageable. Ultimately, the more that prospective and practicing teachers are aware of the distinctive ways of exhibiting reflexivity, the better they can be positioned and supported to navigate their actions effectively. For example, Ryan (2014) argued that engaging with a discussion around the modes of reflexivity may encourage teachers to find ways to manage and improve their practice. As such, if a teacher is aware of the conditions that disable his/her actions, there is a higher possibility for shaping the situation to achieve her agency and move towards a more satisfactory mode of reflexivity. Secondly, meso curriculum making should be strengthen through purposive, research-informed, coherent, and shared sense-making activities to facilitate curriculum making in schools by offering curriculum events and roles for teachers. Moreover, meso curriculum support should enhance already existing relational goods and offer spaces and opportunities to develop these through, for example, coaching/mentoring opportunities. This should be enacted within a diverse composition of networks to address the different needs and concerns that emerge from various influences, including practicing different modes of reflexivity. Finally, there is a need for further investigation into the nature of and changes in teachers’ understanding and operationalization of curriculum to map out what induces a more holistic understanding of and practices in curriculum making and how these might develop. Longitudinal research on teachers’ networks to monitor how different ties are formed, actualized, and maintained is crucial to better project opportunities and identify limitations to shape teacher education and development programmes. Additionally, it would be interesting to see alters’ accounts of the teachers, which would provide a different perspective on such relationality. To conclude, curriculum reforms will never reach an end point, and it is, therefore,

906

S. Hizli Alkan

imperative that we continually work to understand the organic and complex relationship between teachers and the curriculum for achieving satisfactory, sustainable, and effective curriculum making practices.

Appendix 1: Sample Items from Data Generation Tools Observation guide

First interview guide

Reflective diary guide

Internal conversation interview guide

Ego-network interview guide

School observation The physical and social environment of the school Routines of the day Kinds of interactions in the school Artefacts and school curriculum documents Classroom observation Classroom setting Teachers’ pedagogical approaches, interactions with students Content selection and presentation (descriptive rather than evaluative) Teachers’ professional life stories Their perception of school and faculty ethos Understanding of and attitudes towards the curriculum Purposes of teaching that particular subject What are my immediate thoughts and feelings? How do I experience this as a teachers? What is the most important concern for me now? What are my priorities? How do I decide what to do? Comments on the ten mental activities and how these are experienced at any stage of curriculum making Concerns about curriculum making which matter most at the moment and how they plan to project their future actions Main question In this term, with whom have you talked about curriculum for advice, with a question or concern or just to talk something through about curriculum making? Some questions about alters: Occupation Years of experience in the job How do you know? What do you usually talk about? What about particularly going to somebody for advice? What kind of advice? Example The level of strength, trust from 0 to 10

References Achinstein, B. (2002). Conflict amid community: The micropolitics of teacher collaboration. Teachers College Record, 104(3), 421–455. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9620.00168 Aitken, G. (2006). Signalling shifts in meaning: The experience of social studies curriculum design. Curriculum Matters, 2, 6–25. https://doi.org/10.18296/cm.0078

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

907

Anderson, L. (2010). Embedded, emboldened, and (net)working for change: Support-seeking and teacher agency in urban, high-needs schools. Harvard Educational Review, 80(4), 541–573. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.80.4.f2v8251444581105 Archer, M. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. (2007). Making our way through the world. Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. (2008). The internal conversation: Mediating between structure and agency: Full research report ESRC end of award report (Report No., RES-000-23-0349). ESRC. Retrieved from https://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/RES-000-23-0349/outputs/read/ 51ba9f9e-d6d4-4885-8bd0-8e611ab1bc04 Archer, M. (2012). The reflexive imperative in late modernity. Cambridge University Press. Bellotti, E. (2015). Qualitative networks: Mixed methods in sociological research. Routledge. Bhaskar, R. (1998). Philosophy and scientific realism. In M. S. Archer (Ed.), Critical realism: Essential readings (pp. 16–47). Routledge. Bidwell, C. E., & Yasumoto, J. Y. (1999). The collegial focus: Teaching fields, collegial relationships, and instructional practice in American high schools. Sociology of Education, 72(4), 234–256. https://doi.org/10.2307/2673155 Borgatti, S. P., & Ofem, B. (2010). Social network theory and analysis. In A. Daly (Ed.), Social network theory and educational change (pp. 17–29). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Borgatti, S. (2021, 28 October). What social ties mean. Seminar presented at the Mitchell Centre Zoominar Series. https://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:i16d-kgm5patx-bq2noy/mitchellcentre-zoominar-series Borgatti, S. P., & Foster, P. C. (2003). The network paradigm in organizational research: A review and typology. Journal of Management, 29(6), 991–1013. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0149-2063_ 03_00087-4 Brown, C., Daly, A., & Liou, Y.-H. (2016). Improving trust improving schools: Findings from a social network analysis of 43 primary schools in England. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 1(1), 69–91. Buch-Hansen, H. (2014). Social network analysis and critical realism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 44(3), 306–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12044 Caetano, A. (2014). Defining personal reflexivity: A critical reading of Archer’s approach. European Journal of Social Theory, 18(1), 60–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431014549684 Cameron, M., & Lovett, S. (2015). Sustaining the commitment and realising the potential of highly promising teachers. Teachers and Teaching, 21(2), 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602. 2014.928132 Cavener, J., & Vincent, S. (2020). Enhancing knowledge and practice of “personal reflexivity” among social work students: A pedagogical strategy informed by Archer’s theory. Social Work Education, 40, 961–976. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2020.1764522 Chalari, A. (2017). The sociology of the individual. Relating self and society. SAGE. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1992). Teacher as curriculum maker. In P. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 363–461). Macmillan Publishing Company. Coburn, C. E. (2005). Shaping teacher sensemaking: School leaders and the enactment of reading policy. Educational Policy, 19(3), 476–509. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904805276143 Coburn, C. E., & Russell, J. (2008). District policy and teachers’ social networks. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 30, 203–235. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373708321829 Coburn, C. E., Russell, J. L., Kaufman, J. H., & Stein, M. K. (2012). Supporting sustainability: Teachers’ advice networks and ambitious instructional reform. American Journal of Education, 119(1), 137–182. https://doi.org/10.1086/667699 Cole, R. P., & Weinbaum, E. H. (2010). Changes in attitude: Peer influence in high school reform. In A. J. Daly (Ed.), Social network theory and educational change (pp. 77–97). Harvard University Press. Craig, C., & Ross, V. (2008). Cultivating the image of teachers as curriculum makers. In F. M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. Phillion (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of curriculum and instruction (pp. 282–305). SAGE. Creswell, J. W., & Clark, V. L. P. (2018). Designing and conducting mixed methods research (3rd ed.). SAGE.

908

S. Hizli Alkan

Crick, T., Priestley, M., & Hizli Alkan, S. (2019). Co-construction of a national curriculum: The role of teachers as curriculum policy makers in Wales. Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Hamburg, Germany. Crossley, N., Bellotti, E., Edwards, G., Everett, M. G., Koskinen, J., & Tranmer, M. (2015). Social network analysis for ego-nets. SAGE. Daly, A. (Ed.). (2010). Social network theory and educational change. Harvard Education Press. Daly, A. J., Moolenaar, N. M., Liou, Y.-H., Tuytens, M., & del Fresno, M. (2015). Why so difficult? Exploring negative relationships between educational leaders: The role of trust, climate, and efficacy. American Journal of Education, 122(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/683288 Danermark, B., Ekström, M., Jakobsen, L., & Karlsson, J. (2002). Explaining society: Critical realism in social sciences. Routledge. de Lima, J. Á. (2007). Teachers' professional development in departmentalised, loosely coupled organisations: Lessons for school improvement from a case study of two curriculum departments. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 18(3), 273–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09243450701434156 de Lima, J. Á. (2001). Forgetting about friendship: Using conflict in teacher communities as a catalyst for school change. Journal of Educational Change, 2, 97–122. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. D.C. Heath and Company. Donati, P., & Archer, M. S. (2015). The relational subject. Cambridge University Press. Doyle, W. (1992). Curriculum and pedagogy. In P. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 486–517). Macmillan Publishing Company. Dyke, M., Johnston, B., & Fuller, A. (2012). Approaches to reflexivity: Navigating educational and career pathways. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 33(6), 831–848. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01425692.2012.686895 Goodson, I. (1994). Studying curriculum: Cases and methods. Open University Press. Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times. Teachers’ work and culture in the postmodern age. Cassell. Hizli Alkan, S., & Priestley, M. (2019). Teacher mediation of curriculum making: The role of reflexivity. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(5), 737–754. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272. 2019.1637943 Hizli Alkan, S. (2021). Curriculum making as relational practice: A qualitative ego-network approach. The Curriculum Journal, 32(3), 421–443. Horn, I. S., & Kane, B. D. (2015). Opportunities for professional learning in mathematics teacher workgroup conversations: Relationships to instructional expertise. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 24(3), 373–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2015.1034865 Huizinga, T., Handelzalts, A., Nieveen, N., & Voogt, J. (2015). Fostering teachers’ design expertise in teacher design teams: Conducive design and support activities. The Curriculum Journal, 26(1), 137–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2014.990395 Humes, W. (2013). Curriculum for excellence and interdisciplinary learning. Scottish Educational Review, 45, 82–93. Johnson, B. (2003). Teacher collaboration: Good for some, not so good for others. Educational Studies, 29(4), 337–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305569032000159651 Kelly, A. V. (2004). The curriculum: Theory and practice. London: Sage Publications. Kessler, I., & Bach, S. (2014). Comparing cases. In P. K. Edwards, J. O’Mahoney, & S. Vincent (Eds.), Studying organizations using critical realism. A practical guide (pp. 168–185). Oxford University Press. Labianca, G., & Brass, D. J. (2006). Exploring the social ledger: Negative relationships and negative asymmetry in social networks in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 31(3), 596–614. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.2006.21318920 Liou, Y.-H., & Daly, A. J. (2014). Closer to learning: Social networks, trust, and professional communities. Journal of School Leadership, 24(4), 753–795. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 105268461402400407

Teachers’ Curriculum Making as Relational Practice: The Mediatory Role. . .

909

Manyukhina, Y., & Wyse, D. (2019). Learner agency and the curriculum: A critical realist perspective. The Curriculum Journal, 30(3), 223–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176. 2019.1599973 Meredith, C., Van den Noortgate, W., Struyve, C., Gielen, S., & Kyndt, E. (2017). Information seeking in secondary schools: A multilevel network approach. Social Networks, 50, 35–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2017.03.006 Moolenaar, N., & Sleegers, P. J. C. (2010). Social networks, trust, and innovation. How social relationships support trust and innovative climates in Dutch schools. In A. Daly (Ed.), Social network theory and educational change (pp. 97–115). Harvard University Press. Motteram, G., Dawson, S., & Al-Masri, N. (2020). WhatsApp supported language teacher development: A case study in the Zataari refugee camp. Education and Information Technologies, 25(6), 5731–5751. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10233-0 Osborn, M. J., Croll, P., Broadfoot, P. M., Pollard, A. J., McNess, E. M., & Triggs, P. A. (1997). Policy into practice and practice into policy: Creative mediation in the primary classroom. In G. Helsby & G. McCulloch (Eds.), Teachers and the national curriculum (pp. 52–65). Cassell. Penuel, W. R., Riel, M. R., Krause, A., & Frank, K. A. (2009). Analyzing teachers’ professionalinteractions in a school as social capital: A social network approach. Teachers College Record,111(1), 124-163 Perry, B. L., Pescosolido, B. A., & Borgatti, S. P. (2018). Egocentric network analysis: Foundations, methods, and models. Cambridge University Press. Philpott, C., & Oates, C. (2017). Teacher agency and professional learning communities; what can Learning Rounds in Scotland teach us? Professional Development in Education, 43(3), 318–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2016.1180316 Prenger, R., Poortman, C. L., & Handelzalts, A. (2017). Factors influencing teachers’ professional development in networked professional learning communities. Teaching and Teacher Education, 68, 77–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.08.014 Priestley, M. (2011). Whatever happened to curriculum theory? Critical realism and curriculum change. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 19(2), 221–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2011. 582258 Priestley, M., & Drew, V. (2019). Professional enquiry: An ecological approach to developing teacher agency. In D. Godfrey & C. Brown (Eds.), An eco-system for research-engaged schools: Reforming education through research (pp. 154–170). Routledge. Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S., & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making in Europe: Policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Emerald. Restad, F. (2019). Revisioning the Fifth Element. Can critical realism reconcile competence and Bildung for a more sustainable twenty-first-century education? Journal of Critical Realism, 18(4), 402–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2019.1655254 Robins, G. (2015). Doing social network research. Network-based research design for social scientists. SAGE. Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data (3rd ed.). SAGE. Ryan, M. (2014). Reflexive writers: Re-thinking writing development and assessment in schools. Assessing Writing, 22, 60–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2014.08.002 Ryan, A., & Webster, R. S. (2019). Teacher reflexivity: An important dimension of a teacher’s growth. In R. S. Webster & J. D. Whelen (Eds.), Rethinking reflection and ethics for teachers (pp. 65–79). Springer. Schiro, M. S. (2013). Curriculum theory: Conflicting visions and enduring concerns. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc Schwab, J. J. (1983). The Practical 4: Something for curriculum professors to do. Curriculum Inquiry, 13(3), 239–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.1983.11075885 Scottish Government. (2008). Curriculum for excellence: Building the curriculum 3: A framework for learning and teaching. Retrieved from https://education.gov.scot/Documents/btc3.pdf

910

S. Hizli Alkan

Scottish Executive. (2006a). A curriculum for excellence: Progress and proposals. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Retrieved from https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/ 20170701074158/http://www.gov.sct/Publications/2006/03/22090015/14 Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books. Siciliano, M. D., Moolenaar, N. M., Daly, A. J., & Liou, Y.-H. (2017). A cognitive perspective on policy implementation: Reform beliefs, sensemaking, and social networks. Public Administration Review, 77(6), 889–901. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12797 Smith, J. (2019). Curriculum coherence and teachers’ decision-making in Scottish high school history syllabi. The Curriculum Journal, 30(4), 441–463. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176. 2019.1647861 Smith, J. (2020). Community and contestation: A Gramscian case study of teacher resistance. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(1), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2019.1587003 Smith, C., & Elger, T. (2014). Critical realism and interviewing subjects. In P. In Edwards, J. O’Mahoney, & S. Vincent (Eds.), Studying organizations using critical realism. Oxford University Press. Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., & Pyhältö, K. (2018). Shared sense-making strategies in curriculum reform: District-level perspective. Improving Schools, 21(2), 111–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1365480217744290 Spillane, J. P. (2005). Primary school leadership practice: How the subject matters. School Leadership & Management, 25(4), 383–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/13634230500197231 Stake, R. E. (2006). Multiple case study analysis. The Guildford Press. Stillman, J. (2011). Teacher learning in an era of high-stakes accountability: Productive tension and critical professional practice. Teachers College Record, 113, 133–180. Sun, M., Penuel, W. R., Frank, K. A., Gallagher, H. A., & Youngs, P. (2013). Shaping professional development to promote the diffusion of instructional expertise among teachers. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 35(3), 344–369. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373713482763 Vangrieken, K., Meredith, C., Packer, T., & Kyndt, E. (2017). Teacher communities as a context for professional development: A systematic review. Teaching and Teacher Education, 61, 47–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.10.001 Voogt, J. M., Pieters, J. M., & Handelzalts, A. (2016). Teacher collaboration in curriculum design teams: Effects, mechanisms, and conditions. Educational Research and Evaluation, 22(3–4), 121–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/13803611.2016.1247725 Watson, C. (2014). Effective professional learning communities? The possibilities for teachers as agents of change in schools. British Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 18–29. https://doi. org/10.1002/berj.3025 Welsh Government. (2020). Curriculum for Wales guidance. Cardiff: Welsh Government. Retrieved from https://hwb.gov.wales/storage/afca43eb-5c50-4846-9c2d-0d56fbffba09/curriculum-forwales-guidance-120320.pdf Westaway, L. (2019). The role of reflexivity in the emergence and expression of teachers’ identities in teaching primary school mathematics. ZDM Mathematics Education, 51, 481–492. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11858-019-01042-y Woodland, R. H., & Mazur, R. (2018). Of teams and ties: Examining the relationship between formal and informal instructional support networks. Educational Administration Quarterly, 55(1), 42–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X18785868 Zeichner, K. M. (1994). Research on teacher thinking and different views of reflective practice in teaching and teacher education. In I. Carlgren, G. Handal, & S. Vaage (Eds.), Teachers’ minds and actions: Research on teachers’ thinking and practice (pp. 9–27). Falmer.

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing and Assembly Marc A. Ouellette and Dana Gavin

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expertly Assembled: Education and Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pulling on the Threads: Assemblages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Putting It All Together: Learning in and Through Assembling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Picking Up the Pieces: Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

912 914 915 917 923 924

Abstract

This chapter considers the change in the role of the user to that of someone who assembles things, not unlike a set of a building blocks, flat-packed furniture, or meal kits. This offers both a moment to evaluate the extent to which technology will create new roles by altering the pattern and the scale of human experiences as well as an entry point to consider potential pedagogical effects. Increasingly, one key new role is to put things together and to do so in a (very) prescribed and repeated manner consistent with the algorithmic content of the medium and frequently resembling an assembly line. Indeed, as the paper will show, in this version of post-Fordism the factory is now in our homes, in our classrooms, and in the palms of our hands. These effects are only enhanced by the seriality fostered by digital environments so that learning takes on a new set of possibilities based on assembling knowledge in and through a set of repeated actions. That said, a resultant effect derives from imposing a contingent sameness on the outcome, one which precedes and conditions the process. Thus, it becomes necessary to consider the pedagogical effects of the seriality that is quite literally built into the assembly practices upon which so much of our technology depends. M. A. Ouellette (*) · D. Gavin (*) Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_24

911

912

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

Keywords

Assembly · Assemblages · Assemblage theory · Cognition · Curation · Digital media · Expertise · Learning · Production of expertise · Seriality

Introduction The latest online purchase has arrived and eagerly, but carefully, it is cracked open. A bag of parts falls out of the box, making a rattling sound. The color-coded instructions should make life easier, but still there is a feeling of need to race to a phone to find a helpful video or two. Of course, a quick search finds one that not only shows the unboxing, it details the build, too. The estimated time for completion doesn’t include this step, but it should. Searching for a video, for reassurance and for affirmation, is essential in an era when we could be describing anything from a piece of Ikea furniture to a box of Lego bricks, from a meal kit to a set of clothes from Stitch Fix, let alone the never-ending array of apps, widgets, and add-ons – virtual or physical – that we allegedly need for any phone. We no longer make things. We put them together. While some readers will immediately assume that the piece that follows necessarily invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblage” theory (1980), this is only partly the case. Rather than multiple functionalities, the combination of “assembly required” and its contingent relationship with social media operate in and through processes of “seriality.” As Maeder and Wentz (2014) explain, the seriality of online videos operates in two imbricated modes. First, seriality refers to repeated actions, as in a serial number, or one after another. The second, resultant aspect, necessarily derives from the effects of imposing a label and a contingent sameness on the product, one which precedes and conditions the outcome before any process even begins (Anderson, 1998). Whether the item is a bookshelf, a recipe, or a Lego truck, every final product must match an original, and there is no room for deviation. In this last regard, Lego’s own approach has morphed from sets of simple blocks with endless possibilities to kits that are more like scale models without the glue. In earlier research, Ouellette (2010) outlines the way expertise, particularly in “looking things up” – via Google, YouTube, and other social media – increasingly replaces knowledge, not just in public pedagogies, but in formal ones, as well. Ten years later, we recognize that this was not specific enough. That, too, is predictable. In McLuhan’s prescient Understanding Media (1964), he explains that the ultimate effect of technology is to create new roles because technology will alter the pattern and the scale of human experiences. Increasingly, one key new role is to put things together and to do so in a (very) prescribed way. Moreover, McLuhan also argues that as user participation increases, the content matters less. In theorizing the effects of what he called “new” media, Manovich (2001) observes that “if we strip the computer from its usual interface and follow the execution of a typical computer program, the computer will reveal itself to be another version of Ford’s factory” (p. 317). However, what has happened is that Ford’s factory is now in our homes, in

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing. . .

913

our classrooms, and in the palms of our hands – but not in the form of an assembly line. Instead, we operate as mass cottage industries, with knowledge passed by and among a community. The difference is the scale of the communities involved. In India, for example, the smartphone manufacturing industry has taken this to its logical extreme: actual family dwellings (Prasad, 2014). No social media phenomenon better exemplifies the process than the meme. Like an Ikea bookshelf, the meme has a prescribed set of pieces and the user puts them together in a particular order and for a specific intent, with the aid of an online template. Moreover, Maeder and Wentz (2014) argue that seriality is the missing “aesthetic and epistemological” procedure in Manovich’s theorizing (p. 132). More crucial, however, is that nobody has considered the pedagogical effects of the seriality that structures and produces social media and associated assembly practices. Frankly, school curricula, exercises, and activities operate in and through the same logic and do so with the same cognitive and affective results. Not only has Lego itself become a part of many curricula (in science, math, and even in the digital humanities alongside Arduino circuits), too frequently the first instruction, given or received, is simply “Google it,” or better yet, “download the app.” Publishers provide the apps and standardized tests all but necessitate their use because teachers teach to the test. Dedicated websites like TeachersPayTeachers© only formalize what already exists on social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Assembling a lesson is as easy and repetitive as assembling the right hashtags. At the postsecondary level, granting agencies openly emphasize “innovation,” finding new ways to slap existing parts together, over “discovery,” the creation of new parts or ideas. In his legendary address to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, “Changing Paradigms in Education” (itself the subject of a YouTube animated short), Sir Ken Robinson (2011) explains the effect of standardized testing regimes and concomitant practices of teaching to the test on “divergent thinking,” or the ability to see multiple and simultaneous approaches and answers to a given problem. He argues that eradicating divergent thinking is “in the gene pool” of the education system. If that is the case – in both formal and public pedagogies – then the stultifying effects of relentless seriality constitute an ineluctable strand of that helix. We have become experts, but that expertise is increasingly limited to searching for instructions for the things we have to put together. While expertise is self-perpetuating, it is also domain specific (Herling, 2000; Swanson, 2007). As expertise perpetuates its application elsewhere becomes less likely and more difficult. Thus, this chapter will map the dual figuration of seriality and its contingent effects on the production of expertise over knowledge in and through the routines involved in the public and the formal pedagogies of assembling ready-made kits. At the same time, it will consider the limits of that knowledge. This is important because children enter school still in a concrete operational mode. The simple sameness of seriality, and in particular the affirmation entailed in reproducing the assembled bits perfectly, only encourages fixedness and will inevitably prolong, if not concretize, concrete operations altogether. This makes understanding

914

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

assemblage as a learning process important because of the potential entry points for intervention.

Expertly Assembled: Education and Expertise Rather than offering (yet another) theory of knowledge, it may be more useful to consider expertise and its development. There are multiple and simultaneous reasons for doing so. First, as Ouellette (2010) enumerates, it is not a topic taken up within Cultural Studies, nor is it a topic that has interested scholars in pedagogy or critical pedagogy. Instead, it is more likely to be treated in Management Science and Human Resources. Citing Gobet and Ereku (2016) in their literature review of expertise, Cherrstrom and Bixby (2018) write, “Studying expertise offers several benefits, including better understanding of learning and knowledge acquisition, training and coaching of experts, artificial expert systems development, and human cognition (Gobet & Ereku, 2016)” (p. 441). The importance lies in the utility of expertise as self-perpetuating. As Richard Herling (2000) notes, “a person never stops acquiring expertise” (p. 261). This occurs because as Herling explains, “(1) Expertise is a dynamic state; (2) expertise is domain specific; and (3) the basic components of expertise are knowledge and associated skills, experiences, and problem-solving heuristics” (p. 261). The circularity becomes clear when noting that the problemsolving heuristic is itself the location of the expertise and vice versa. Following the instruction set is its own rationale and outcome. The better one becomes at following assembly instructions, the more one knows about following assembly instructions because the problem solves itself even as the problem presents itself. One of the challenges, then, is that as expertise begets more expertise, it becomes increasingly domain specific. Here, Cherrstrom and Bixby (2018) note “developing expertise continues to challenge individuals and organizations” (p. 441). Interestingly, in their literature review, Cherrstrom and Bixby only found three sources who consider the impact of web-based technologies on expertise. Of note is Bennett’s (2010) insight that these technologies offer “a media-rich and culturally relevant Web environment that strategically improves expertise, performance, innovation, and community building through formal and informal learning” (p. 365). The importance, then, lies not in the formal or informal setting but instead rests on the competencies involved. In this regard, Knowles, Holton, and Swanson (2014) state that “the first assumption is that the purpose of education is the development of competencies for performing the various roles required in human life. The first element in a new model would, therefore, be a taxonomy of these roles and their required competencies” (p. 161). Knowles, Holton, and Swanson list curiosity and the willingness to ask questions as the top two factors but place an ability to find and parse experts further down their list. It may be crucial to combine them into one competency for web-based information. Indeed, Grenier and Germain (2014) stress that the transfer of expertise and seeking it pose potential challenges for learners. This points again to the importance of passing the expertise as being underappreciated. Likewise, Gobet and Ereku (2016) note the importance of learned

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing. . .

915

behaviors that have become instinctive or automatic as indicative of expertise. This process reflects the findings Knowles, Holton, and Swanson (2014) offer. The trio explain that the “learner proceeds through several phases in the process of engaging in a learning project, and [. . .] helping them gain increased competence in dealing with each phase might be one of the most effective ways of improving their learning effectiveness” (p. 37–38). One of the most important phases is looking for external supports, which again suggests that the ability to find and parse experts might be more important than previously thought. This becomes an especially key question given the location – frequently online – and the nature of the supports, easy to follow instructions. In fact, the instructions and the search for them become cyclical – find instructions to help follow the instructions – in keeping with the axiom that expertise is self-perpetuating and domain specific. Here, the domain is assembly.

Pulling on the Threads: Assemblages Assemblage theory often starts with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) description of assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; note that the original French term they use is agencement. “Assemblage” is the common English translation of the French term agencement, but John Phillips parses out the important difference between assemblage and agencement, where agencement refers to an “arrangement” which is in a state of being fitted (p. 108). “[B]eing fitted” is being in action: J-D Dewsbury (2011), Professor in Human Geography, notes “[agencement] operates not as a static term but as a process of putting together, of arranging and organizing” (p. 150). The critical difference, then, occurs when “assemblage” can be taken only as a noun, a fixed thing; that interpretation leaves out the dynamism of “agencement,” the movement that foregrounds connections and relationships, not just the collecting and blending of objects that assemblage may connote. Manuel Delanda (2016), though, cautions against abandoning the thing-ness of assemblages as he delineates his “assemblage theory”; he advises not to separate the action from the elements when envisioning assemblages as actual bodies in motion. Delanda points to Deleuze’s preoccupation with symbiosis (the ecological, mutually advantageous relationship between two organisms) as being key to understanding the materiality of assemblages, noting that symbiosis entails “heterogeneous species interacting in exteriority, and their relation is not necessary but only contingently obligatory, a relation that does not define the very identity of the symbionts” (p. 3). Assemblages can therefore be understood as things in active relationships with each other, and Delanda further argues that the assemblages we perceive are themselves made up of assemblages. That is to say, every assemblage is, itself, a collection of assemblages. This is key, for example, when considering the effect of multiple sources in the assembled product. There is some truth in the proverb that “too many cooks spoil the broth.” It is well worth noting that Private Eye magazine, the largest circulating news magazine in the UK, regularly features so-called “malgorithms.” These are examples of adverts that predictive algorithms have paired with news articles in online newspapers, but with inappropriate juxtapositions. At

916

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

the time of writing, the examples include instances of police misconduct with ads for police recruitment and an advert for leaf blowers appearing next to an article bemoaning the noise and pollution caused by the devices (2020). Jane Bennett (2010) brings together the “assemblages within assemblages” concept with the energy of agencement in her analysis of the “vibrancy” of matter: “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storm, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of human but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (p. viii). These nonhuman materials hold great importance, and, as she argues in her case study of the North American blackout of 2003, Bennett (2010) argues that “[t]he electronic grid, by blacking out, lit up quite a lot” (p. 36): electrical currents and voltage (reactive power) energy consumption and dependence, the failings of Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, and neoliberalism writ large were all contributors. Where McLuhan (1964) argues that the content of a medium is another medium, assemblages and their study help to identify the sources and the (multiple and simultaneous) layers of that content. The loss of the most visible component, often through the masking of complexity, illuminates the many, many human and nonhuman others. Assemblage theory in this mold has been employed to study educational spaces (Mulcahy, 2012; Dovey & Fisher, 2014; Cobb & Croucher, 2016) as well as the ontology of teaching (Strom, 2015; Lanas & Huuki, 2017; Colton, 2019), offering a framework that accounts for both the movement of assemblages in space and in relation to one another in addition to their very natures as vital entities. The inclusivity and openness of assemblage theory – that is, the way assemblage theory discards hierarchies as it identifies “bit players” like a black light detects fluorescers – makes it particularly useful for studying less highly regarded “systems,” such as Pinterest and TeachersPayTeachers© (Pittard, 2019) and online education (Scott & Nichols, 2017). Assemblage theory can also be used to dismantle abusive hierarchical systems: for example, Quinlivan (2017) maps the flawed “getting it right” assemblage of school-based sexuality education in order to explore what knowledges are being produced. Araneda-Urrutia and Infante (2020) employ assemblage theory to “demodel” globalized models of dis/ability and decolonize Disability Studies in the Global South. Assemblage theory is specifically useful to account for “short circuits” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 42) in the form of student resistance (Lanas & Huuki, 2017), “messiness” in teacher education (Beighton, 2013), and emotions like hesitation (Sellar, 2012) that may be read as failures rather than rich, important learning moments in a larger system. No one is an island, no educator is the sole, steady stream of content: how humans learn to gather information, or how to parse out the information impacting them unconsciously, is revealed using assemblage theory. Non-linear ways of learning (Strom, 2015; Cobb & Croucher, 2016) and information gathering and application are legitimate and have the capacity to result in intellectual and emotional growth. Strom (2015) argues, “considering the teacher [. . .] working jointly within a larger amalgam of various discourses, bodies, ideas, objects, and institutional structures to negotiate and construct practice within a larger, stratified environment sheds light on processes that constitute the practices of first-year teachers” (p. 323). Mulcahy

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing. . .

917

(2012) notes that practices make worlds, thus humans have control over the worlds we make through our practices; those worlds in action deserve and require rigorous examination as methods of knowledge production.

Putting It All Together: Learning in and Through Assembling There generally are two sorts of approaches to dealing with the “new” media. One tends to look at technologies and develop new literacies and “invention” given the currently available approaches (Ruggill and McAllister (2011) note a similar split in video game studies, which can be taken as a subset, noting that scholars take either a “what can it be?” or “what games are” approach, but there is little to connect the two). This can be summarized as a “what can we do with what we have?” model of analysis. As Greg Ulmer (1994) writes, this version concerns itself with “pattern making, pattern recognition, pattern generation.” (p. 30). A key challenge to this approach is the fact that all media were new at some point. As a result, Ulmer admonishes, “it is not that memory is no longer thought of as ‘place,’ but that the notion itself of spatiality has changed” (p. 30). Although the idea of assembling things is not precisely an issue of “new” or digital media, the situation becomes exacerbated or more pronounced given the multiple and simultaneous layers at work. The smaller the device, the more troubling the assembling happening can be, given the pervasiveness of the process. For example, tracing the ultimate assembly of a mobile phone can take one to call centers in South Asia and/or coltan mines in Central Africa (Coltan (columbite-tantalites) is a metallic ore used to make tantalum capacitors, used in many electronic devices, including smartphones and personal computers. The ore is often illegally mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and finances ongoing military conflict. Coltan mining also has devastating impacts on the environment, including decreasing the gorilla population; see Spira, Kirkby, Kujirakwinja, and Plumptre (2019)). Quite simply, it is easier to lose how much has gone into assembling it. The larger the handprint of the user, the less we pay attention to the thing being used and its own nature as an assemblage. What becomes clear, then, is that as McLuhan (1964) argues, “it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” (p. 24). Here, he offers the example of IBM switching from being a maker of office equipment to the business of processing information. The leap becomes significant when one considers the resultant masking of complexity and the immersion of the medium (For example, we do not say, “I am talking to a device”; instead, we say “I am talking to [XYZ]” when using a telephone or even a video chat. Similarly, we no longer enter a search string into a database. We google). Moreover, as McLuhan presciently notes, there is no going back once the technology has become prosthetic and the user’s role has changed. The content has less impact on human action that might be supposed. What matters is the medium – or extension – because that “shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (p. 24). In this way, Ikea is not a furniture company any more than GE is a lighting company. They are in the business of handling (moving, sharing, distributing) information. Likewise, Lego is neither a toy

918

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

company nor even an “edutainment” company. It is, like Stitch Fix or Blue Apron, an information processor. These services, which send “kits” of clothing and food, respectively, reflect an assemblage of traits about the user while requiring the user to assemble the final product. Thus, a box of clothes, food, or Lego has more in common with a database than with imagination or creativity (Lest there be any doubt, the Lego instructions and some of the more popular Lego build videos online refer to pieces like they are rattling off serial numbers or data points). The assembling starts online and the online tools are built not only to facilitate, they also anticipate and thereby participate in the selections. That said, it becomes important to balance the first approach with the second, which is interpretive and symptomatic. Indeed, the two should be understood in dialectical terms, particularly because students are increasingly, if not as a rule, cognizant of the fact that university is a structured set of hurdles. Is the real education of the neoliberal university the knowledge of how to navigate bureaucracies, to cajole, to beg, to find ways to afford school and leisure, to “hack the system” only to the point that makes you feel clever, but also in a way that upholds the precepts of the system? What are you supposed to be learning beyond assembling parts of a database? The craft of creating one specific thing, or the methodology of thinking so you know where to look for the information to create anything, is not quite the same as recall and still not fully recognition as far as being a mode of memory associated with learning. As Rice (2007) notes, the emphasis remains on writing, as opposed to literacy, or more properly, literacies. Indeed, Sander (2020) decries the lack of “big data literacy,” even among users who might consider themselves proficient. Vartiainen et al. (2020) calls for educators to focus on developing their students’ “data agency” to prepare them for a technological world that values them as robust data sets (p. 10). The gap, then, is one of knowledge, not expertise. The process involves assembling a set of classes as one assembles a take-out or Uber Eats order and producing a set of limited papers based on assembling pieces, often cut and pasted from the sources we ourselves have assembled in our ostensible role as instructors (Brabazon, 2015). It is no wonder, then, that the term “curate” has entered the popular and the scholarly lexicon as a sign of expert and/or insider knowledge. It is an indexical sign to be sure, since it not only points to an arrangement, it also serves as a measure of the expertise and/or cultural capital of the assembler. Curating becomes cherry-picking with a purpose, and if the purpose can be articulated, clearly and convincingly, it becomes evidence of expertise. If we think of curating as arranging – an assemblage, where meaning is made in the relationships between seemingly disparate artifacts – then the curation can be read on its own, but can only be fully understood when taking into account the machines into which the curator is plugged. For example, in 2019, independent curator Chaédria LaBouvier was the first Black person to curate an exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum’s 80-year history. She curated “Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story,” a collection she centered on the painter’s largely unknown work, The Death of Michael Stewart, which is based on a young Black man (himself an artist) who died after being beaten by New York City police for painting graffiti in 1983 (Basquiat painted the piece directly on artist Keith Haring’s studio wall; Haring had the work cut out from the wall and framed in an ornate golden frame (Mitter, 2019)).

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing. . .

919

In an interview with HYPEBEAST, LaBouvier describes that during her studies at Williams College, she initiated her own studies of Basquiat because “for the first 10 years of my Basquiat scholarship, I’m just looking for information because there really wasn’t a field” (Estiler, 2019). LaBouvier indicated that her early life with parents who owned a few Basquiat paintings, and her self-driven assemblage scholarship, informed her purpose with this curated (assembled) show. LaBouvier’s expertise, learned at least in part at Williams College, is not in painting, but in research, archival work, history, activism, critical interpretation, spatial organization, promotion, resistance, and social media outreach. One could assume that her exhibit reinforces the power of the Guggenheim, rather than challenging the power of a single institution over a powerful culture industry; however, LaBouvier used and continues to use her voice (via interviews and her social media presence, particularly on Twitter) to call out the many ways the Guggenheim staff tried to silence her or render her invisible (Mitter, 2019). Her participation in the assemblage of the Guggenheim “turned off the lights” as Bennett (2010) termed it and illuminated the potential for disenfranchisement of curators who may not fit the "mold" of past curators. But what of other curators who may not possess LaBouvier’s expertise in projecting her voice? Is it too far a stretch to think about other curators/assemblers, working with potentially less critically important subjects, as exhibiting some potentially radical and effective skills, even if they ultimately use those skills in the service of technocratic capitalism? Young people (often young women) on social media are able to amass social capital and financial capital, and many are quick to degrade them for possessing no inherent or valuable skill, no talent other than, for example, the ability to buy clothing and then garner views for “unboxing” videos. The content of LaBouvier’s curated exhibit, and her nuanced, thought-provoking commentary on various platforms, elevates critical social justice issues – life and death issues facing Black Americans – and are clearly on a different level than unboxing videos. We can, however, examine the expertise LaBouvier exhibits as a model for other ways of evaluating what skills are brought into relief in other acts of curation and assembling. If those skills could be perceived as valuable, would that inspire the content produced to be more attenuated to facing and dismantling technocratic capitalism, the machine into which we are plugged? Ultimately, considering subjects as assemblages requires some rethinking of how we describe and teach interdisciplinarity, not to mention the idea of multiple literacies. The challenge, however, is not to offer a Jeremiad, or to offer as statement of what it is students should know so much as it is a matter of thinking through the “deskilling processes and practices” that have developed and offering strategies to “reconnect information literacy with context for learning” (Brabazon, 2015). Still, it is not entirely surprising that in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Matilda Boseley writes in The Guardian (2020) that “Everyone and their mum” has taken to OnlyFans, a website where anyone can post provocative pictures and be paid for them. One of the goals of a Cultural Studies approach should always be the production of greater social justice (especially inclusivity and diversity) through understanding and resisting technocratic capitalism. In the current neoliberal education machine, students learn only to question the small things, not the bone-

920

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

crunching system. We educate them into believing their rebellions are clever while also inculcating them to accept greater inequities (As a relevant aside, it is worth recalling that one of us (Ouellette) received a phone call from the student newspaper shortly after the opening of a new on-campus pub. Students had taken to partying on Thursday evenings – a commonplace at nearby universities, but until then not a practice at the school in question – and the paper wanted to know if this was a “new” kind of rebelliousness. After several responses of “No,” along with explanations of why this was actually a multiply layered consumerist containment, they gave up asking me. After three tries, they found another professor to allow that it was a “safe” kind of rebellion). This last point becomes important when one considers that the situation of the current regime, whereby our education palette most closely resembles a set of Ikea instructions, and that these “solutions” echo and mimic, if not replicate completely, the supposed solution of the proverbial post-war house-wife qua “homemaker” whose only purported job was to fill a kitchen and/or home with gadgets and appliances to “make life easier.” In the figure of the “homemaker,” there is also the issue of time: what does it mean to a post-war housewife to have “an easier life” afforded by gadgets and appliances? That homemaker wasn’t to fill that newly freed time with anti-hegemonic activities. Quite the contrary, the homemaker was to assemble the home and herself through increasingly cosmetic technologies (McGaw, 2003). On the one hand, women quite rightly recognized that their biological role was being used as a means of defining the social role. Moreover, entire industries – and pedagogies – were developed to enforce these ideologies. As mentioned earlier, a presumably high-tech industry, like the smartphone industry in India, relies increasingly on cottage – that is, domestic – labor. Following the model of the fireworks industry in the Sivakasi region of India, which uses actual cottage labor, smartphone makers are turning to families in their homes to assemble the final product (Prasad, 2014). Instead of directly copying or counterfeiting Apple and Samsung phones – which the finished products do indeed resemble – designers continue to innovate in ways that streamline the inner workings, that is, the parts most masked by the complexity of the interface. The effect has been increased efficiency, simplified processes, and significantly lower costs. In fact, Prasad continues his study of high-tech companies with examples from China where the same practices are being employed in other industries. Lest Western users imagine this labor model is a foreign phenomenon, it is entirely common among eBay, Etsy, and CaféPress sellers, to cite a few assemblages of retailers, in products ranging from t-shirts to mass-customized computers. The switch to remote learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the failure of traditional industrial models of learning to adapt (Turner et al., 2020). Likewise, Kahila et al. (2020) confirm Ouellette’s (2019, 2020) finding that approaches focusing on metacognition – that is, strategies for learning instead of discrete items or subjects – are not only effective, they can be produced in and through digital sources including video games. Yet, these kinds of expertise have been belittled, ignored, infantilized, and otherwise undervalued socially and culturally. Here, the logic of the reification of knowledge and/or expertise into data has a direct analogue in the reification of everyday life, especially

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing. . .

921

domesticity, into purchasable things. Instead of hotdog cookers and bread makers, we have Instant Pots and apps. This makes the user eminently adaptable but only within a particular band in which the adaptability can occur. As McLuhan (1964) puts it, the effect of automation, or “learning a living,” is that “Centuries of specialist stress in pedagogy and in the arrangement of data now end with the instantaneous retrieval of information [. . .] Automation is information and it not only ends jobs in the world of work, it ends subjects in the world learning” (p. 300). When McLuhan argues that automation is information, he does so from the premise not only of the content of the layered media, but also from the perspective of change – of scale, pace, and pattern of labor. This occurs because the “future of work consists of learning a living in the automation age” (p. 301). Simply put, “the age of information demands the simultaneous use of our faculties” (p. 301). The effect is to break down the presumed opposition of culture and technology and the related and simultaneous dichotomy between art and commerce. Indeed, as Ouellette (2017) argues elsewhere, the post-war assumption of a split between masculinity and technology (Jeffords, 1989; Warner, 1992), one based on the feminization of a dependence on technology and the concurrent valorization of masculinity as natural and inevitable, has been rendered irrelevant by the disposability of the technology. As mentioned above, the emergency switch to remote or online learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic gives any administration an excuse to retrench educators, implicitly arguing that “anyone” can facilitate content delivery, that instructors are plug and play like USB devices, and that students are the product (e.g., statistics on enrollment and matriculation drive marketing (Higher Education Marketing (HEM), a multi-lingual, Montreal-based firm, suggests schools wishing to market online programs develop “student personas” based on current student interviews, and frequently asked questions from prospective students, to accurately target their audience with information about the student experience (including learning flexibility); highlight how current students are able to work in their industry while taking classes; and emphasize student testimonials on the virtue of self-paced study. In a 2020 report, Online College Students 2020: Comprehensive Data on Demands and Preferences, Magda et al. (2020) encouraged higher education institutions to encourage online learning alumni to post testimonials for marketing impact (p. 48))) being sold to other students (For example, as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the largest universities in Canada posted three jobs for online learning specialists to develop content and courses. These required not only a PhD but also at least 5 years of higher education experience. Each was a 1-year term position). It is no surprise, then, that McLuhan (1964) writes that “commodity industries under automation share the same structural character of the entertainment industries [. . .] Automation affects not just production but every phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer becomes the producer in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of the mosaic telegraph press makes his[her] own news, or just is his [her] own news” (p. 303). For example, without having read Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry Thesis,” many people seem to understand that they are the product Facebook is selling – not simply the content of their

922

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

posts, but also, and more importantly, their attention. Boycotts of Facebook have, heretofore, been unsuccessful, however, even on the corporate level. For every item of disinformation shared on Facebook, opponents feel compelled to respond. Even if Facebook were to actively fight disinformation, controversial ideas would appear, and people would feel compelled to generate content to refute it because of Facebook’s market penetration. Users, even users who actively resist Facebook, are essentially automated to generate the assembled content. What is Facebook, then, but an automated assembler of (mis)information? Here it is also important to differentiate the experience of the automation with its effects because the former takes increasing precedence with increased automation. Moreover, McLuhan recognizes that the traditional distinctions between and among academic subjects become less important as automation increases so that “school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the [. . .] world in which they live” (p. 301). Where we agree by the way of disagreement with McLuhan occurs when considering the content if not the role or the mechanism of learning. He argues that the “withdrawal of the present work force from industry causes learning itself to become the principal kind of production and consumption” (p. 304). In fact, this is the case insofar as one is left to one’s own devices when faced with a new app, device, or experience. However, the learning takes the form of a recursion because the assumption of look it up, follow the instructions, assemble the bits, is little changed in substance from the 1960s housewife assembling the bits for the proverbial casserole, Jello mold, or Tupperware set. What has changed is the scale, pace, and pattern of the labor involved. It is everything and is the only thing. As educators, we are facilitating this process but we are also participating in it. We are part of a loop because we still operate on an industrial model in the academy (McLuhan, 1964; Robinson, 2011). However, where McLuhan sees the potential for liberation and creativity, we have all become employees, in part because of an education system that remains geared toward an industrial model. In fact, Robinson’s call for increased attention to “divergent thinking” is entirely in line with McLuhan’s call for mandatory liberal education. Here, the so-called life hacks take on an interesting character because they can resist and/or alter the model of assembling given items only according to the instructions provided. As a relevant aside, in giving students an in-class exercise that involved taking a roll of duct tape and making something from it in 30 minutes, it was not as intriguing to note which students did or did not look for ideas and exemplars online as it was to note which students did not know that they could look in the first place (This occurs in a “digital writing” class, which takes into account the social, political, cultural, economic, and technological dimensions of the apparatus. McLuhan, Brabazon, and others are on the course as “required readings.” The duct tape exercise is now a bonus activity). These fall into three categories: either the task is too “abstract,” as in tape has only one concrete use, or in the absence of an app or instructions nothing else could be done. A surprising amount of “rope” appears. This is not to disparage the students or our increasing reliance on apps and the online equivalent of recipe cards. Rather, it serves as a reminder that the intervention needs to be made earlier, as

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing. . .

923

Robinson (2011) argues, and that less prescriptive teaching and learning be offered because the effect is increasingly proscriptive.

Picking Up the Pieces: Conclusions Intervention is important in terms of timing and also in terms of the expectations those interventions convey. Using assemblage theory to analyze traditional classroom instruction modes reveals that what we think of a linear content delivery (from instructor to pupil) is not the entirety of what is taking place. That is, we are experiencing assemblages whether we recognize it or not. When the instructor intervenes earlier in the duct tape exercise, is it to encourage the students to think beyond creating a “rope” (to address a perceived lack of creativity) or to encourage students to investigate all of their sources of information (of which the educator is but one)? This is not to say that instructors have nothing to impart: when learning the craft of fiction and poetry, writers are encouraged to be well versed in the “rules” of language and form so that when rules are broken, the effect is potent. In music and dance, learning established patterns allows artists to riff. When instructors see themselves and their students as contributors in active assemblages, and recognize that both they and their students are part of assemblages unknown to the other, learning can take on a dynamic quality. Students bring useful, valued information with them everywhere they go – they are assemblages embodied, and are constantly interacting with assemblages inside and outside the classroom assemblage. The “serialization” of classwork has also developed from the expansion of the classroom, from a place of assumed linear learning models into crisis centers, where educators are managing students’ mental, emotional, and physical needs. Whether or not that the information is valued by the instructor, or the higher education organization, depends on a new way of evaluating what is useful. Traditional methods of evaluation disregard or disrespect labor that is cooperative and crowd-sourced, typically coded as feminine. As in the case of Pinterest, for example, people rely on the experience of others (perhaps experts in teaching, knitting, or culinary skills), cobbling together “pins” to which they may refer later. On Twitter, educators share examples of classroom policies and syllabi, while posting appeals for suggestions on a proposed course reading list. Why should educators go out of their way to uphold myths about self-made people, rather than helping students see the systems into which they are plugged? The actions that come with a keen awareness of assemblages include “Googling” information while also considering the makeup and ethics of search engines; learning to following directions while considering what prior information is critical to the process; and seeing in both the search engine and the YouTube video assemblages of other human-nonhuman matter that are vital collections of information. Thinking this way, seriality is not flat: it is robust and rich. For example, in December 2020, a cadre of Italian technicians, craftspeople, engineers, and experts in restoration came together to use highly sophisticated 3-D technology to make an

924

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

exact copy of Michelangelo’s David, which will be displayed at the world fair, Expo 2020 Dubai, as the highlight of the Italy Pavilion. At the end of a television report of CBS This Morning, foreign correspondent Chris Livesay commented, ruefully, that the replica may not have the “soul” of the original (2020, 3:41). Whose soul? Michelangelo’s? David’s? The men who harvested the marble? Michelangelo used tools in his hands to chip the marble. The “copy” will, ostensibly, have the same soul as the hands of the people who created the technology, who harvested the raw materials to build the 3-D technology, who created the marble powder, and the nature of those minerals. Upholding the myth of self-generated genius only serves to erase the diverse vitality of the contributing humans and nonhuman matter.

References Anderson, B. (1998). Nationalism, identity, and the world-in-motion: On the logics of seriality. Cultural Politics, 14, 117–133. Araneda-Urrutia, C., & Infante, M. (2020). Assemblage theory and its potentialities for dis/ability research in the global south. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 22(1), 340–350. https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.698 Beighton, C. (2013). Assessing the mess: Challenges to assemblage theory and teacher education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(10), 1293–1308. Bennett, E. E. (2010). Virtual HRD: The intersection of knowledge management, culture, and intranets. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 11, 362–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1523422309339724 Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Boseley, M. (2020, December 22). ‘Everyone and their mum is on it’: OnlyFans booms in popularity during the pandemic. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2020/dec/23/everyone-and-their-mum-is-on-it-onlyfans-boomed-in-popularity-during-thepandemic Brabazon, T. (2015). Turnitin? Turnitoff: The deskilling of information literacy. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 16(3), 13–32. Cherrstrom, C. A., & Bixby, J. (2018). Construct of expertise within the context of HRD: Integrative literature review. Human Resource Development Review, 17(4), 440–464. Cobb, H., & Croucher, K. (2016). Personal, political, pedagogic: Challenging the binary bind in archaeological teaching, learning and fieldwork. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 23(3), 949–969. Colton, J. (2019). Breaking out, finding and using information: Theorising learner identities in assemblages of teaching and learning with technology. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 28(4), 425–434. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A thousand plateaus [Mille plateaux] (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Dewsbury, J.-D. (2011). The Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage: Plastic habits. Area, 43(2), 148–153. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41240478 Dovey, K., & Fisher, K. (2014). Designing for adaptation: The school as socio-spatial assemblage. The Journal of Architecture, 19(1), 43–63. Estiler, K. (2019). Meet the first black curator at the Guggenheim. Hypebeast, 21 June. https:// hypebeast.com/2019/6/basquiat-defacement-chaedria-labouvier-guggenheim-profile

A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing. . .

925

Gobet, F., & Ereku, M. H. (2016). What is expertise? Psychology Today, 23 Feb. https://www. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-expertise/201602/what-is-expertise Grenier, R. S., & Germain, M. L. (2014). Expertise through the HRD lens. In N. E. Chalofsky, T. S. Rocco, & M. L. Morris (Eds.), Handbook of human resource development (pp. 183–200). John Wiley. Herling, R. W. (2000). Operational definitions of expertise and competence. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 2(1), 8–21. Jeffords, S. (1989). The remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press. Kahila, J., Valtonen, T., Tedre, M., Mäkitalo, K., & Saarikoski, O. (2020). Children’s experiences on learning the 21st-century skills with digital games. Games and Culture, 15(6), 685–706. Knowles, M. S., Holton, E. F., III, & Swanson, R. A. (2014). The adult learner: The definitive classic in adult education and human resource development. Routledge. Lanas, M., & Huuki, T. (2017). Thinking beyond student resistance: A difficult assemblage in teacher education. European Journal of Teacher Education, 40(4), 436–446. Livesay, C. (2020). Michelangelo’s David recreated in 3D. CBS This Morning, 21 Dec. https:// www.cbsnews.com/video/michelangelos-david-faithfully-recreated-using-3d-technology-dur ing-florence-lockdown/ Maeder, D., & Wentz, D. (2014). Digital seriality as structure and process. Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 8(1), 129–149. Magda, A. J., Capranos, D., & Aslanian, C. B. (2020). Online college students 2020: Comprehensive data on demands and preferences. Wiley Education Services. Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. MIT Press. McGaw, J. (2003). Why feminine technologies matter. In W. Lee, N. Lerman, & R. Oldenziel (Eds.), Gender and technology: A reader (pp. 13–36). Johns Hopkins University Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Signet Books. Mitter, S. (2019). Behind Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: Reframing a tragedy. The New York Times, 30 July. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/arts/design/basquiat-defacement-guggenheimcurator.html Mulcahy, D. (2012). Affective assemblages: Body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 9–27. Ouellette, M. A. (2010) Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Expertise as knowledge and a technocratic generation. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 10(2). https://bit.ly/3pC2WD3 Ouellette, M. A. (2017). She was just a glitch: The ludic erasure of the feminine in call of duty: Black Ops III. In N. Garrelts (Ed.), Responding to call of duty: Essays on the game franchise (pp. 158–172). McFarland. Ouellette, M. A. (2019). ‘I’m controlling and composing’: The role of metacognition in the incredible machine. inVisible Culture, 30 June. http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/im-controlling-andcomposingthe-role-of-metacognition-in-the-incredible-machine/ Ouellette, M. A. (2020). ‘I told you that to tell you this’: Metagaming and metacognition in the hybrid classroom. Journal of Literacy and Technology, 21(4), 58–84. Pittard, E. A. (2019). Gettin’ a little crafty: Teachers Pay Teachers©, Pinterest© and neo-liberalism in new materialist feminist research. In J. Ringrose, K. Warfield, & S. Zarabadi (Eds.), Feminist posthumanisms, new materialisms and education (pp. 63–82). Routledge. Prasad, G. (2014). Micromax phenomenon: Propaganda or reality? Guruprasad’s Portal. http:// guruprasad.net/posts/micromax-phenomenon-propaganda-or-reality/ Private Eye (2020). Malgorithms. Private Eye 1536, p. 12, 4–17 Dec. Quinlivan, K. (2017). Getting it right’? Producing race and gender in the neoliberal school based sexuality education assemblage. In L. Allen & M. L. Rasmussen (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of sexuality education (pp. 391–413). Palgrave Macmillan. Rice, J. (2007). The rhetoric of cool: Composition studies and new media. Southern Illinois University Press.

926

M. A. Ouellette and D. Gavin

Robinson, K. (2011). Changing paradigms in education. TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. https:// www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms Ruggill, J. E., & McAllister, K. S. (2011). Gaming matters: Art, science, magic, and the computer game medium. University of Alabama Press. Sander, I. (2020). What is critical big data literacy and how can it be implemented? Internet Policy Review, 9(2), 1–22. Scott, J., & Nichols, T. P. (2017). Learning analytics as assemblage: Criticality and contingency in online education. Research in Education, 98, 83–105. Sellar, S. (2012). ‘It’s all about relationships’: Hesitation, friendship and pedagogical assemblage. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 61–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01596306.2012.632165 Spira, C., Kirkby, A., Kujirakwinja, D., & Plumptre, A. J. (2019). The socio-economics of artisanal mining and bushmeat hunting around protected areas: Kahuzi–Biega National Park and Itombwe Nature Reserve, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Oryx, 53(1), 136–144. Strom, K. J. (2015). Teaching as assemblage: Negotiating learning and practice in the first year of teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(4), 321–333. Swanson, R. (2007). Analysis for improving performance: Tools for diagnosing organizations and documenting workplace expertise. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Turner, J. W., Wang, F., & Reinsch, N. L. (2020). How to be socially present when the class becomes ‘suddenly distant’. Journal of Literacy & Technology, 21(2), 76–101. Ulmer, G. (1994). Heuretics: The logic of invention. Johns Hopkins University Press. Vartiainen, H., Tedre, M., Kahila, J., & Valtonen, T. (2020). Tensions and trade-offs of participatory learning in the age of machine learning. Educational Media International, 57. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09523987.2020.1848512 Warner, W. (1992). Spectacular action: Rambo and the popular pleasures of pain. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 672–688). Routledge.

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to Reflect on STEM Curriculum Research and Practice Thelma Akyea and Nenad Radakovic

Contents Writing Ourselves into the Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Portrait of Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Do You Situate Yourself in Your Practice? How Do You Identify as an Educator and Curriculum Researcher? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Are Identities That Shape Your Interactions with Others in Your Work? . . . . . . . . . . . What Intersections in Identity in Particular Are Important in Your Work as a Professor and a Researcher? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Context of the Critical Episodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenging Disempowerment vs. Empowerment Narrative Through Mutual Stretching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lessons Learned from the Practice Portrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lesson 1: Be Aware of the Power of Mathematics as the Gatekeeper (Mathematics Opens Doors to Research Sites, but This May Be Problematic) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lesson 2: Keep Questioning and Challenging the Language That You (and Others) Use When Talking About Students, Including Minoritized Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lesson 3: Question Whether and How the Knowledge Production Benefits All Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lesson 4: “Embrace Mutual Stretching” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

929 929 931 931 932 932 933 934 936 938 938 938 939 939 940 940 940

T. Akyea (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] N. Radakovic Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_60

927

928

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

Abstract

The landscape of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education in the United States and Canada is diverse and multifaceted. Within its complex landscape, there is a growing number of educators that call for a sociopolitical turn in mathematics education and science education (Gutierrez, 2013; Tolbert & Bazzul, 2017). The focus of sociopolitically conscious and responsive STEM education scholars includes understanding and documenting the ways that mainstream STEM research and practice has disempowered students, particularly students of color. These mechanisms include perpetuating the deficit narrative and focusing on the needs of teachers and researchers rather than on the needs of the students and communities (Martin, 2009).

The landscape of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education in the United States and Canada is diverse and multifaceted. Within its complex landscape, there is a growing number of educators that call for a sociopolitical turn in mathematics education and science education (Gutierrez, 2013; Tolbert & Bazzul, 2017). The focus of sociopolitically conscious and responsive STEM education scholars includes understanding and documenting the ways that mainstream STEM research and practice has disempowered students, particularly students of color. These mechanisms include perpetuating the deficit narrative and focusing on the needs of teachers and researchers rather than on the needs of the students and communities (Martin, 2009). Researchers who have taken the sociopolitical turn have primarily been examining the ways that STEM education research and practice has been formulated to favor some individuals over others or to marginalize a particular group (Martin, 2009; Gutierrez, 2013). Martin (2017) defines mainstream mathematics education research as follows: I distinguish mainstream mathematics education research and policy as that which has relied on traditional theories and models of teaching and learning (e.g. information processing, constructivism, situated cognition) and research approaches (race-neutral analyses, race comparative analyses) developed primarily by white researchers and policy-makers to normalize the mathematical behavior of white children. Simultaneous to their use for normalization and generalization, these models have generated and validated conventional wisdoms about African American children and mathematics. (p. 474)

Mathematics education “continues to be validated and reified as a white institutional space” (Martin, 2009, p. 10), because it is “not immune to the structural and institutional racism that characterizes many other areas of society” (p. 11). This is also true for other components of STEM as discussed in Thelma Akyea’s chapter ▶ “Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American, Normative Physics and Astronomy Post-Secondary Curriculum” in this handbook. In this chapter, we consider and reflect on the ways that we can examine the practice of educators and researchers within the curricular spaces of STEM.

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to. . .

929

Writing Ourselves into the Curriculum We take the most general and inclusive definition of curriculum to include all forms of learning in all contexts and see it as a rich space that is in a permanent state of change “unbounded and endlessly open and interactive” (Jagger, 2018, p. 89). In this chapter, we critically investigate our own research and practice in STEM education and the ways that our own work can be seen as liberatory. To do that, we must identify in which ways we are in fact replicating the sites of oppression that exist in curricular spaces. We believe that by examining tensions in our own research, we can become better researchers which for us means that our end goal is “empowerment and liberation from oppression of marginalized learners” (Martin, 2009, p. 24). Our investigation is guided by Black Canadian feminist thought and the ways of knowing. As scholars dedicated to (STEM) education and/for social justice, we are interested in ways that our research serves to empower students and to find ways in which we may be still creating and replicating oppressions within our own research. The work on the research presented in this article began with Nenad’s questioning of his own practice in mathematics for social justice. Nenad, a White cis man and an Eastern European immigrant professor in Charleston, South Carolina, does research centering around mathematics for social justice. After reflecting on his own research and being involved in several research and teaching initiatives involving the work with Black children, he was motivated to more closely examine his research and practice. This need for reflexivity became apparent when he was invited to do research at a school in Charleston, South Carolina, on middle-grade students’ understanding of statistics and probability. The study took place in an all-Black classroom in a Title I school. (“Title” I is a federally funded program in the United States to assist schools with large numbers of low-income students.) Nenad taught the probability unit and conducted a series of one-on-one interviews in which he explored students’ understanding of statistical information related to life expectancy. He invited his friend and colleague Thelma to examine his research practices to see if they align with the tenets of social justice and equity. Thelma is a vice-principal, doctoral student, and veteran teacher and identifies as a Black Canadian cis woman.

Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing Our identities inherently shape the research framework and methodology, and we understand that the investigation of social justice research would look different for different scholars. Thelma uses her own take on Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing in her research. Nenad struggled with using Black Canadian framework within the context of the American South; at one point, he wanted to take the “Canadian” out the framework and explore different uses of Black Feminism, such as those described in Evans-Winters (2019) and Leonard et al. (2020). However, in this research, the point was to “write yourself in” the methodology, to use an oftencited Octavia Butler quote (New York Times, 2000). As Thelma is a Black Canadian

930

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

feminist, this is her way to look at the question, and for this reason, we frame our research around Black Canadian feminism. Black Canadian feminist thought is a theoretical framework that centers the theorizing of Black women by providing organizing principles for research and practice. Black feminist theorizing in general is rooted in Black women’s enacted responses to racism and sexism. It is through these lived experiences that the scholarship and activism of Black feminist thought is mobilized. There are several organizing principles or tenets that problematize intersecting systems of oppression and provide insights on how Black women respond to racism and sexism, and they include mutual stretching, collectivity, and community mothering which together highlight the strength of a community learning together. Specifically, mutual stretching, collectivity, and community mothering honor the histories and experiences of oppressed peoples who are engaged in rebuilding rich cultural traditions that were lost through the process of colonization. These tenets anchor how Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing integrates experiences (Cutrara, 2008). For example, mutual stretching requires having conversations “across difference” (Lorde, 1985) and seeing the intersections of identity as strengths. It calls for communities to identify differences without fear or intimidation but rather with mutual respect and love and the drive for growth. As Wane and Waterfall (2005) explain, mutual stretching requires a common understanding and mutual respect for difference in authentic ways. Such work requires constant interrogation and is collaborative. In research, mutual stretching is seen when women share sites of oppression but have conflicting interpretations of the sources of oppression or diverging responses to the oppression. Despite differences, these women work collectively to resist racism and sexism. For example, Parsons and Mensah (2010) differ on the importance of intersectionality, yet they work together to problematize Black women scientists’ experience in higher education. Collectivity is the process of sharing experiences and educating one another en route to challenging the way that oppression is enacted upon Black women. It is a way to problematize the status quo through collective voices, collective goals, and collective activism. Collectivity takes place when women confront racism in collaboration with others. Collectives form in response to activist movements, for example, the creation of The Combahee River Collective, to give Black women a voice apart from the mainstream feminist movement in the United States (Nayak, 2019). Wane (2013) describes a collective approach to community farming in her study with the people of Embu, Kenya. In a move that contradicted the government’s incentives, this community chose to uproot commercial coffee plants in order to plant food for their village and is an example of resisting institutional directives to instead meet goals that reflect the collective desire of the community. Community mothering is activism. It refers to multiple ways that Black women lead as providers, role models, disciplinarians, counselors, advocates, and heads of households. It is the leadership and mentorship provided by Black women to others. It is a complex institution, borne out of contemporary and historical legacies (Wane, 2000). There is sharing, responsibility, nurturing, and care that move this relationship far beyond that of mentorship (Collins, 2002). It can be characterized by the term, Ubuntu, which denotes the need for individuals to be seen and affirmed by others (Bernard et al., 2000).

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to. . .

931

Having identified the need to examine the knowledge production in research on math for social justice through the Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing, we ask the following questions: What are the ways that Mathematics for Social Justice research contributes to liberation and oppression of marginalized students? What methods, ways of knowing, and worldviews can be useful in unearthing the oppressive elements?

Methodology Research Context We used a practice portrait methodology to gain insight into our research and practice. Developed within the tradition of Danish/German Marxist critical psychology, practice portrait is a comprehensive method that consists of a large set of questions that practitioners answer together in order to describe, analyze, and discuss their own practice (Nissen, 2000; Thomsen, 2016). Practice portrait belongs to a sociocultural tradition (Roth & Lee, 2007) and is based on Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, particularly the 6th thesis and the 11th. The 6th thesis states that “the essence of humanity is not the abstraction inherent in each individual, but really ‘the ensemble of social relations’” (Marx & Engels, 1977). In this case, to understand mathematics for social justice research is to study researchers in relation to their practice, their institution, and the participants in their research. Practice portrait is also based on the 11th thesis of Feuerbach, which states that the “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx & Engels, 1977). The practice portrait methodology that we use aligns closely to the one of Thomsen’s (2016) implementation of practice portrait with career guidance counselors at a university in Denmark. In order to develop the portrait of practice for career guidance professionals at the university, Thomsen asked questions organized around the following themes: (1) the institution and the conditions for work; (2) the theoretical and practical cornerstones of daily practice, i.e., theories, methods, technologies, and procedures; (3) specific situations at work; and (4) internal and external communication regarding practice. The important feature of the practice portrait that we borrow from Thomsen is that the practice portrait is a collaboration between researchers and practitioners to bridge the gap between theory and practice. In our case, Nenad wanted to see if and how the research that he does contributes to social justice and the actual empowerment of students, particularly Black students in the South. In this context, we cast Nenad as the practitioner (practicing research) and Thelma as the researcher. Methodologically, practice portrait enabled us to lay out the landscape of our own research, identity, and positionality within the larger landscape of education, politics, structural racism, and institutional racism in the relevant contexts such as South Carolina, the United States, and academia. Informed by Black Canadian feminist thought, as an entry point, Thelma to used Black feminist theorizing to develop practice portrait questions. The goal is to ask questions that move the researcher to think about how they define themselves ontologically, epistemologically, and axiologically within the research, again as a starting point.

932

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

Table 1 The phases in the research and structure of research sessions Phases Phase I Phase II Phase III Phase IV Phase V

Phase VI

Phase VII Phase VIII

Action Meeting to discuss practice and concerns about his practice We went through Nenad’s field notes, videos of interviews, transcripts, and codes Reading and discussing articles on knowledge production and Black children (Martin, 2009; Stinson, 2012) Thelma identified Episodes I and II in order to challenge the codes Thelma used (engaged vs. disengaged) Thelma introduced tenets of Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing, and we discussed how the tenets connect to social justice research Sociocultural theories of learning were discussed (Roth & Lee, 2007) and we read on our own and discussed articles that led us to Practice Portrait (Thomsen, 2016) and Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, particularly the 6th and 11th (Marx & Engels, 1977) Using the theory and practice of mutual stretching, we started to question dichotomy of empowerment and disempowerment and the ability for the researchers to identify episodes as such Thelma created Practice Portrait Questions based on Black Canadian Theorizing, and both Thelma and Nenad answered the questions. The Critical Episodes were described by Nenad since here we draw from his research and practice Completing the practice portrait

Nenad and Thelma met weekly between September 2016 and May 2017 and September 2017 and May 2018 and sporadically from September 2019 to November 2019. The phases of the research project can be seen in Table 1.

Portrait of Practice Based on our regular discussions about Black Canadian theorizing, practice portrait, and our practice, we created and answered questions that investigate our practice and that would synthesize the conversations we had before. The questions were designed to shed light into our practice with our identities and commitment to social justice. The following questions are in the first person because they describe our experiences as curriculum practitioners and researchers.

How Do You Situate Yourself in Your Practice? How Do You Identify as an Educator and Curriculum Researcher? Thelma: I understand the research process and knowledge production through a Black feminist paradigm. Black feminist research centers the theorizing of Black women who confront racism, sexism, and classism. This theorizing draws on Black women’s lived experiences, narratives, commitment, and accountability to communities (Collins, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Lived experiences and critical dialogue are the foundation of theorizing. Commitment and accountability to communities are expected throughout the research process.

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to. . .

933

I believe it is a fallacy that all students have access to post-secondary opportunities in physics and astronomy. Some reports show that access to Canadian physics and astronomy is limited by gender, both contemporarily and historically (Prentice, 2006); these reports indicate there are more men in physics than women. Relevant in Canada’s post-secondary education are the racism, sexism, and classism (James & Taylor, 2008; Wane & Massaquoi, 2007). In my experience, I found that achievement in physics and astronomy is more likely if you are a White man who is afforded many opportunities for distinction through education. I believe that opportunities to learn are essential for students to achieve. Nenad: I position myself in the tradition of mathematics education research. In terms of the content, I am broadly situated within the field of probability and statistics education with a more specialized focus on the risk literacy and even more specific focus of the critical pedagogy of risk, which follows work in critical pedagogy and mathematics education (Gutstein, 2006; Skovsmose, 2011). My research was originally in the vein of cognitivist approaches to risk and probability (Kahneman et al., 1982), but I am moving toward the sociocultural theory (including this current work). I am using qualitative methodology (broadly speaking) and moving away from postpositivist view that enforces the researcher-participant divide, to the view of the research that blurs the line between researcher and participant. When I started my research, I was a nontenured professor navigating research with social justice. I made a decision to engage in the social justice work early in my career despite the potential risks of my work being seen as “not having rigor.”

What Are Identities That Shape Your Interactions with Others in Your Work? Thelma: I am a Black Canadian woman with an undergraduate degree in biophysics. In 2003, I was the only Black woman to graduate from my program. Today, 19 years after my graduation, there are still very few Black Canadian women with graduate degrees in physics. Although I recognized racism, sexism, and classism throughout my physics education, I was not deterred because I loved to study physics. My lived experiences, coupled with the current status of Black Canadian women in postsecondary physics education, drive me throughout this study. Nenad: My professional identity as mathematics teacher/tutor is important in this work. As a former refugee, and an immigrant to Canada and later United States, I have used my knowledge of school mathematics to make a living. I have recognized and taken advantage of the power that mathematics holds over other disciplines and individuals. I have benefited from the hierarchy established by putting math on the pedestal, but I recognize that power as problematic. I am aware of the way that school mathematics has been used to oppress different groups in Canada and the United States. My identity has always been categorized by its borders, and I write about this elsewhere (ndunda & Radakovic, 2020). I grew up in Yugoslavia of Serbian, Croatian, and (some) Slovene heritage. During the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, I walked a delicate line between my Serbian and Croatian heritage and tried to define and redefine with which ethnic group I identify. In the last couple of years, I identify

934

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

myself as Canadian coming from former Yugoslavia living in the United States. I am an atheist living in the American South aware of the role that Christianity has played both as the ideology of slavery and white supremacy and the ideology of the civil rights and liberation.

What Intersections in Identity in Particular Are Important in Your Work as a Professor and a Researcher? Thelma: Opportunities like mentorship, laboratory experience, and tutoring support students for success in science. When growing up, I had limited access to take part in any of these opportunities. I grew up in an inner-city neighborhood with two siblings. Together we attended neighborhood schools, played baseball and soccer in the playground adjacent to our house, took weekend trips to the local library, and went to church every Sunday. We grew up looking for opportunities to play and learn outside of school, yet opportunities to engage in extracurricular science exploration were never an option. In the United States, many Black students attribute their science degree attainment to STEM extracurricular programming for Black youth (Perna et al., 2009; Whitten et al., 2003). While I believe my lived experiences contain structural barriers that have obscured opportunities for achievement, there is limited research that discusses the experiences of other Black women seeking to study physics in Canada. There should be a greater push to collect the narratives of Black women who take physics in Canada. I believe Black Canadian women in physics are underresearched. Little is known about how Black women navigate obstacles in Canadian physics. A study about Canadian women (Adeyemi, 2013) shows that gender equality is a persistent concern in Canadian, secondary-school physics, and astronomy programs. Another study shows physics and astronomy doctorate holders are relegated to manual labor jobs because of their status as immigrants in Canada (Mojab, 1999). These kinds of research hide the experiences of Black Canadian women within the overall narrative about gender equity in physics and astronomy. As such, research about equity in Canadian physics makes the experiences of Black women invisible, and opportunities to learn about any nuances within Black women’s narratives are lost. Through my lived experiences, I know that being a Black woman pursuing postsecondary studies is complex. For example, my choice to enter graduate school in education rather than graduate school in biophysics was shaped by my lived experiences as a Black, working-class girl. Growing up, my parents instilled the value of education. My parents also argued that because I am a Black woman, I would have to work much harder than everybody else to achieve academically. Hard work was worthwhile as it would help with financial and employment security. While in teacher’s college, I considered doing graduate studies in biophysics. However, I abandoned the idea because I lost my passion for physics. I loved

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to. . .

935

teaching children, but I could not afford the tuition for another degree without a career, and jobs in biophysics were scarce. I later completed graduate studies in education. Based on what influenced my choices, I wonder how other Black Canadian women engage in physics studies beyond high school. How do their lived experiences inform physics and astronomy study? Dialogue and documenting experiences will help us begin to understand the nuances of Black womanhood (Wane, 2000). Centering the voices of Black women is the foundation of Black feminist theorizing. To me, being a Black Canadian feminist means I am committed to the importance of plurality, indigeneity, and theorizing toward the emancipation and liberation of all oppressed peoples (Wane et al., 2002). I have intersectional identities. I identify as a heterosexual, cis-gendered, able-bodied Black woman who speaks English. My husband and I are raising three Franco-Ontarian children and our nephew. I am a practicing Christian. I am a Black Canadian feminist and believe in Black women’s right to self-definition and resistance. I believe dialogue with and about Black Canadian women will illuminate what can be done to make the Canadian physics and astronomy curriculum more accessible. My overlapping experience of taking physics and astronomy courses in Canada forms my connection with the other Black Canadian women in STEM spaces. I think the physics and astronomy curriculum leaves racism, sexism, and classism unchallenged and thus limits access for Black Canadian women. There is a perception that physics is for smart people (Holmegaard et al., 2014), so who views themselves as a physicist is regulated by the perception of “smartness.” It is also reported that Black women face challenges in becoming a part of physics education communities (Rosa & Mensah, 2016). In Canada, Black women report similar challenges in postsecondary education (Wane et al., 2002). While Black Canadian women have a variety of responses and encounters with racism, sexism, and classism, Black Canadian women are all united in that we all must respond (Cummings, 2007). Pulling together conversations about race, gender, and class will present an opportunity to show how to infuse the Canadian physics and astronomy curriculum with a more critical description. Nenad: I find the racial dimension of my own identity extremely relevant to this research project and my work in Charleston, a de facto segregated city that slavery built. I am White and grew up in a European country in which I was raised and viewed as White. In the past, people who aren’t familiar with the Balkans and its people have assumed that I’m not White. This definitely contributes to my view of race as a social construct, but does not negate the fact that I have benefited from the White and European privilege. Moving to Charleston, I am often seen as an outsider or as a “foreigner” (I was called this at a Professional Development session I was co-facilitating). My gender, appearance, and name combined with my glasses and accent often elicits a stereotype of being “a math person,” so I am seen by my students as someone who is math proficient and am not dismissed in terms of my mathematical knowledge.

936

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

Context of the Critical Episodes After gaining insight into our identities and positionality, we identified two critical episodes from Nenad’s then-current research (since Thelma’s doctoral research was still in the planning stages). Below, Nenad describes the context of the research that helps situate the critical episodes. Nenad: I was awarded a college-wide grant to work on this research in the fall of 2015. In the proposal, I stated that I would be conducting classroom research with middle school students. I wrote a recruitment letter and started circulating it widely in February of 2016. I sent the letter through different activist networks and was approached by a principal of the local public school (K-8). I moved to Charleston in 2015, and I quickly learned about public education in the South: that the schools are de facto racially segregated, that there are discriminatory policies with academic magnets, tensions between charters and public schools, and a school-to-prison pipeline. I learned this from my colleagues at the college and from attending a meeting of a local education activist group. I did not know anything about the students. I knew that more than 80% of teachers in local school district are White. There is subsidized housing around the school. There are elements of gentrification with many White-owned businesses popping up in the school’s neighborhood: coffee shops, a record store, newly renovated houses, etc. Anecdotally, I know that there are White middle class families moving to this neighborhood, but they tend to avoid the public schools in favor of enrolling their children in private schools. There is also a math and science charter school in the neighborhood, and the two schools are competing for students. The data collection took place in two phases. In the first phase, I conducted semistructured interviews with 14 Black seventh graders in the school described above. The interviews focused on students’ understanding of the concept of average life expectancy at birth and the factors that may influence it. I presented students with average life expectancy data across countries, the United States, and socioeconomic groups in the United States. The one-on-one interviews were audio-, video-, and screen-recorded using the QuickTime program. This data collection was a part of previous research on teaching mathematics for social justice and for giving children tools to “read and write the world.” Below are two episodes chosen by Thelma that Nenad had originally (prior to work with Thelma) identified as examples of engagement and disengagement and consequently empowerment and disempowerment. These episodes serve to illustrate the practice and are not a complete picture of Nenad’s practice. Episode 1: Contested Labels: Research as the Site of Empowerment. In this episode, Nenad and Anna are discussing average life expectancy at birth in South Carolina and why it is lower than the average life expectancy for the whole United States: Nenad: [It is lower] because everything [INAUDIBLE] in South Carolina. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything.

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to. . .

937

Nenad: What do you mean, everything? Anna: “Like Walter Scott. Like Ferguson. Like the [INAUDIBLE]. That was on [INAUDIBLE]. Walter was gone first. But that wasn’t here. But yea, Treyvon Martin. Yea. All that.” Nenad: “Mm hmm. Oh yea, so because of the violence, uh, that’s happened. Life expectancy by state. Ok. Let’s see where South Carolina is.” Anna: “Bye, Terrence.” [Anna turned towards Terrence, who was leaving the classroom] Nenad: Hmm? Anna: Was talking to Terrence. Nenad: See, [in Hawaii, life expectancy is] 81. Anna: That’s good! Nenad: And where is South Carolina? Anna: Right there! That’s North Carolina. Oh. 77?! Nenad: On average, it’s 77. Anna: What’s North Carolina, cause I have family in North Carolina.

Nenad identified this episode as the example of empowerment, because the student, Anna, makes connection between statistical information and police brutality toward the Black people. She is in control of the conversation – deciding when and when not to participate. She also uses the Interviewer as resource to find the information relevant to her. Episode 2: Research as the Site of Disempowerment. This is the episode that originally Nenad identified as an example of disengagement. In this episode, Nenad and Andre are both sitting and looking at the screen and using statistics online (Wikipedia) as well as different internet sites. One can see that Nenad was the one leading the conversation about life expectancy. This conversation about life expectancy was formed from the developmentalist point of view. Nenad is trying to make an introduction to average life expectancy, to look at the factors including infant mortality, civil war, and disease. He is trying to draw Andre into this conversation by asking questions. The students’ answer, gaze, and body language suggest that he is disengaged from the conversation. Nenad: So what that means is that the reason [Andre turns head away] why the number is so low [Andre smiles] is because life expectancy looks at everybody, and in some countries, unfortunately, you have even babies that aren’t born because they don’t have enough resources [Andre leans back and makes direct eye contact with the Interviewer] for them and they die. So this number looks at everybody [Andre looking at the screen and nods] and then averages everybody. So what do you think are some of the reasons [Andre gazes toward the Interviewer] why in Sierra Leone life expectancy is so low? [Andre begins to smile there and rub hands together, he keeps smiling and aligning his hands together] Do you know where have you ever heard of this country before? Sierra Leone? Andre: No.

Nenad viewed this episode is an example of disempowering students in a sense that the topic does not connect with Andre – his gestures, body language, and terse answers suggest disengagement. The topic comes from Nenad and fails to connect with Andre’s identity. There is lack of shared goal. The topic did not align with Andre’s interest and identity.

938

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

Challenging Disempowerment vs. Empowerment Narrative Through Mutual Stretching When discussing oppression, the literature usually identifies mainstream educational, often color-blind, research as the site of oppression (Martin, 2009). In the above vignettes, Nenad identified contextualization and choice as contributing to empowerment (Anna’s episode) and decontextualization or miss-contextualization as contributing to disempowerment (Andre’s episode). Andersson and Valero (2012) pointed out that although “mathematics education counts in society [. . .] society does not necessarily count in mathematics education” (p. 199). However, the decontextualization of classroom mathematics is not just unfortunate, it is also unethical as mathematics teachers have moral and ethical imperative not to “close the door (i.e., close off the world)” in their mathematics classroom (Stinson, 2014, p. 2). In other words, failure to connect with Andre, due to the topic being outside of his own context and understanding could be viewed as an ethical failure. Thelma, in conversation with Nenad, challenged him to think more deeply about empowerment. For example, does Andre’s apparent disengagement actually correspond to disempowerment? First of all, Black students are often stereotyped as disengaged and uninterested in mathematics, and school and Black students are “wrestling daily with the legacy of strong and pervasive stereotypes about African American students, there is often little support for students in making sense of these negative stereotypes” (Nasir et al., 2009). Second, disengagement can be a deliberate act of transgression against the formal education. Regarding the episode with Anna, although she seemed to Nenad to be in control and leading the engagement, the notion of “empowerment” may be problematic. It is important for researchers to understand that the meaning of empowerment is contested (Lawson, 2011) and that the fact that the student showed independence does not say anything about this research and its relation to empowerment.

Lessons Learned from the Practice Portrait The practice portrait has produced the following lessons about research and our place in the curriculum. These lessons are relevant to Thelma and Nenad; however it may also hold relevance to other researchers. We do realize, however, that should they go through the same process, other researchers would draw different lessons from their own portrait.

Lesson 1: Be Aware of the Power of Mathematics as the Gatekeeper (Mathematics Opens Doors to Research Sites, but This May Be Problematic) To challenge the gatekeeping status of mathematics, mathematics researchers for social justice must keep the space open to all learners. The research and quality

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to. . .

939

education must be open for all. We acknowledge that doors to schools are often open to STEM and math educators because of the societal focus on STEM and on the school administrators’ effort to increase their school’s standardized math test scores. Therefore, we must also challenge the position of mathematics within education and its value. Consistent with the principles of Black feminist theorizing, we should advocate for inclusion of voices, ideas, and worldviews beyond those typically taken up in mathematics. For example, Radakovic et al. (2018) argue for “dethroning” mathematics, and Shah (2019) questions whether we should teach less mathematics if that means that students get to learn about climate policy and healthcare reform and also have a robust ethics curriculum. In other words, should mathematics education “prioritize a goal of justice for minoritized groups and do so with urgency, even if it means there should be less mathematics education?” (p. 31). So, should we not teach about how crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic reveal deep structural inequities and how to mobilize against them together with teaching the mathematical content?

Lesson 2: Keep Questioning and Challenging the Language That You (and Others) Use When Talking About Students, Including Minoritized Students As a White Eastern European man, Nenad saw the actions and behaviors of Andre as disengagement, which he then linked to Andre’s disempowerment. One lesson is to follow best practices in qualitative research, including code checking. However, had Thelma not been looking at the data through the lens such as Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing, it is questionable whether this language would be identified and challenged. Naming is a political act, and researchers for/and social justice should be critical of the process. Deborah Ball, in her presidential address to the American Educational Research Association (AERA, 2018), discusses teachers’ discretionary spaces – the opportunities of teacher to send messages both explicitly and implicitly, that influence their action in the classroom. A similar space is located in interaction with colleagues, and here it is important to question the acts naming. This might be done on a more global level by questioning naming practices based on a deficit view, for example, labeling of multilingual students as “ESL” or “ELL students”; however this is also done on a microlevel through, for example, coding.

Lesson 3: Question Whether and How the Knowledge Production Benefits All Students Being an education scholar, particularly an emerging scholar, comes with many tensions and challenges, particularly with respect to knowledge production and the pressure to publish. Scholars take a risk of not being seen as “rigorous” mathematics education researchers when focusing on social justice (Baucom, 2019). In spite of the struggle to survive and thrive in the academia, researchers should center and

940

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

prioritize benefits for all students. Students should be involved in the knowledge production, and the pressure to publish should not outweigh the benefits to the students and their communities.

Lesson 4: “Embrace Mutual Stretching” The tenets of Black Canadian feminist thought, particularly mutual stretching, enabled us to have conversations “across difference” (Lorde, 1985) and to fearlessly investigate our own episodes of disempowering students and question the very notions of empowerment and disempowerment. In the spirit of the tenets of Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing, the process of the community members working toward a common goal is mutual stretching – challenging and molding each other’s ideas and practices. In this spirit, the evaluation of our colleague’s work should go beyond quality control and evolve asking deep ethical and foundational questions about their research.

Conclusion We firmly believe that curriculum researchers and practitioners need to interrogate their own practice to grasp how it relates to the existing societal structures. This interrogation is the first step to social justice (Thomsen, 2016). In this practice portrait, we problematized our own research and used it as evidence that research with social justice orientation is not a priori empowering and equitable for all students. We plan to use the lessons learned from this study in our future curriculum research and practice. The result of our investigation is not a primer on how to conduct socially just curriculum research but is a step in this direction. We believe that an honest analysis of our research (even if we practice under the label of social justice) will make us better researchers and better equipped to work toward the ultimate goal: STEM education for all.

References Adeyemi, A. (2013). The social factors influencing undergraduate females to study mathematics and physics. Journal of Educational and Social Research, 3(8), 157. Retrieved from http:// www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/jesr/article/viewFile/1752/1756 American Educational Research Association. (2018, May 4). AERA 2018 presidential address: Deborah Loewenberg Ball [video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼JGzQ7O_SIYY Andersson, A., & Valero, P. (2012). Negotiating critical pedagogical discourses: Stories of contexts, mathematics, and agency. In P. Ernest, B. Sriraman, & N. Ernest (Eds.), Critical mathematics education: Theory, praxis, and reality (pp. 199–226). Information Age Publishing. Baucom, L. (2019). Two paths: Tensions of an emerging scholar. In S. Otten, A. G. Candela, Z. de Araujo, C. Haines, & C. Munter (Eds.), Proceedings of the forty-first annual meeting of the

Portraits of Our Practice: Using Black Canadian Feminist Theorizing to. . .

941

North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. University of Missouri. Bernard, C., Bernard, W. T., Epko, C., Enang, J., Joseph, B., & Wane, N. (2000). “She who learns teaches”: Othermothering in the academy. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 2(2), 66–84. Collins, P. H. (2002). The sexual politics of black womanhood. In P. H. Collins (Ed.), Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (pp. 123–148). Unwin Hyman. Cummings, J. G. (2007). Forward. In N. N. Wane, K. Deliovsky, & E. Lawson (Eds.), Back to the drawing board: African-Canadian feminisms (pp. xii–xiv). Sumach Press. Cutrara, S. (2008). Notisha Massaquoi and Njoki Nathani Wane, editors. Theorizing empowerment: Canadian perspectives on Black feminist thought. Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice, 33(1), 18. D’Ambrosio, B., et al. (2013). Addressing racism. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 23(6), 23–36. Evans-Winters, V. E. (2019). Black feminism in qualitative inquiry: A mosaic for writing our daughter’s body. Routledge. Gutierrez, R. (2013). The sociopolitical turn in mathematics education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(1), 37–68. Gutstein, E. (2006). Reading and writing the world with mathematics: Toward a pedagogy for social justice. Routledge. Holmegaard, H. T., Madsen, L. M., & Ulriksen, L. (2014). A journey of negotiation and belonging: Understanding students’ transitions to science and engineering in higher education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 9(3), 755–786. Jagger, S. (2014). How does your garden grow? Or, a poststructural uprooting of the school garden (Doctoral dissertation). University of Toronto. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1807/72610 Jagger, S. (2018). Opening a space of/for curriculum: The learning garden as context and content for difference in mathematics education. In L. Jao & N. Radakovic (Eds.), Transdisciplinarity in mathematics education: Blurring disciplinary boundaries (pp. xi–xviii). Springer. James, C. E., & Taylor, L. (2008). “Education will get you to the station”: Marginalized students’ experiences and perceptions of merit in accessing university. Canadian Journal of Education, 567–590. Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge University Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Lawson, T. (2011). Empowerment in education: Liberation, governance, or a distraction? A review. Power and Education, 3(2), 89–103. Leonard, J., Walker, E. N., Cloud, V. R., & Joseph, N. M. (2020). Mathematics literacy, identity resilience, and opportunity sixty years since Brown v. Board: Counternarratives of a fivegeneration family. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 13(1B), 12–37. Lorde, A. (1985). I am your sister: Black women organizing across sexualities. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Martin, D. B. (2009). Liberating the production of knowledge about African American children and mathematics. In D. B. Martin (Ed.), Studies in mathematical thinking and learning. Mathematics teaching, learning, and liberation in the lives of Black children (pp. 3–36). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Martin, D. B. (2017). Equity, inclusion, and antiblackness in mathematics education. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 22(4), 459–478. Mojab, S. (1999). De-skilling immigrant women. Canadian Woman Studies, 19(3), 123–128. Nasir, N., Atukpawu, G., O’Connor, K., Davis, M., Wischnia, S., & Tsang, J. (2009). Wrestling with the legacy of stereotypes: Being African American in math class. In D. B. Martin (Ed.), Mathematics teaching, learning, and liberation in the lives of Black children (pp. 231–248). Routledge.

942

T. Akyea and N. Radakovic

Nayak, S. (2019). Occupation of racial grief, loss, as a resource: Learning from “The Combahee River Collective Black Feminist Statement”. Psychological Studies, 64(3), 352–364. ndunda, m., & Radakovic, N. (2020). Standardization and borders in mathematics pre-service teacher education: A duoethnographic exploration. In N. Radakovic & L. Jao (Eds.), Borders in mathematics pre-service teacher education (pp. 267–277). Springer. New York Times. (2000, January 1). We tend to do the right thing when we get scared. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/01/books/visions-identity-we-tendto-do-the-right-thing-when-we-get-scared.html Nissen, M. (2000). Practice research: Critical psychology in and through practices. Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 2, 145–179. Parsons, E. C., & Mensah, F. M. (2010). Black feminist thought: The lived experiences of two black female science educators. In K. Scantlebury, J. Butler Kahle, & S. N. Martin (Eds.), Re-visioning science education from feminist perspectives (pp. 13–24). Brill Sense. Perna, L., Lundy-Wagner, V., Drezner, N. D., Gasman, M., Yoon, S., Bose, E., & Gary, S. (2009). The contribution of HBCUs to the preparation of African American women for STEM careers: A case study. Research in Higher Education, 50(1), 1–23. Prentice, A. (2006). A blackboard in her kitchen: Women and physics at the University of Toronto. Scientia Canadensis, 29(2), 17–44. Radakovic, N., Weiland, T., & Bazzul, J. (2018). Transdisciplinarity, critical mathematics education, eco-justice, and the politics to come. In L. Jao & N. Radakovic (Eds.), Transdisciplinarity in mathematics education: Blurring disciplinary boundaries (pp. 109–124). Springer. Rosa, K., & Mensah, F. M. (2016). Educational pathways of Black women physicists: Stories of experiencing and overcoming obstacles in life. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2), 020113-1–020113-15. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.12.020113 Roth, W.-M., & Lee, Y.-J. (2007). Vygotsky’s neglected legacy: Cultural-historical activity theory. Review of Educational Research, 77(2), 186–232. Skovsmose, O. (2011). An invitation to critical mathematics education. Sense. Stinson, D. W. (2012). Teaching mathematics for social justice: An ethical and moral imperative? Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 7(2), 1–5. Thomsen, R. (2016). The practice portrait – A method for promoting social justice in practice. Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling, 36, 1–37. Tolbert, S., & Bazzul, J. (2017). Toward the sociopolitical in science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 12(2), 321–330. Wane, N. N., & Massaquoi, N. (Eds.). (2007). Theorizing empowerment: Canadian perspectives on Black feminist thought. Inanna Publications/Education Incorporated. Wane, N., Deliovsky, K., & Lawson, E. (2002). Back to the drawing board: African-Canadian feminisms. Sumach Press. Wane, N., Jagire, J., & Murad, Z. (2014). Ruptures: Anti-colonial & anti-racist feminist theorizing. Springer. Whitten, B. L., Foster, S. R., & Ducombe, M. L. (2003). What works for women in undergraduate physics? Physics Today, 56(9), e834. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1620834

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM Samia Khan and Robert VanWynsberghe

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceptual Background of Funds of Knowledge for STEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Review of STEM Fund of Knowledge Curricula and Impacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Development of a STEM Fund of Knowledge Out-of-School Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . The STEM Fund of Knowledge Curriculum in Out-of-School Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trustworthiness of the Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Results and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s STEM Funds of Knowledge Identified for the Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Impacts of a STEM Funds of Knowledge Program on Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children Had Opportunities to Learn STEM Concepts Through a Fund of Knowledge Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Opportunities to Learn from a Fund Curriculum May Have Influenced Academic Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Longitudinal Analysis of Report Card Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analysis on Attendance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions and Significance of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

944 945 946 948 949 950 951 953 954 954 955 957 958 962 962 963 963 964

S. Khan Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada R. VanWynsberghe (*) Faculty of Education, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_31

943

944

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

Abstract

This research investigated the funds of knowledge of elementary-aged children in a “low-asset” community and the impact of a community-based curriculum on these funds of knowledge. Funds of knowledge refer to historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills for household or individual functioning and well-being (González et al., 2005). Funds of knowledge theorizing practices in households and classrooms. STEM funds of knowledge refer to social and intellectual resources gained from community practices and household activities that relate to codified STEM learning outcomes. In order to ascertain the STEM funds of knowledge of children in their homes, household visits, parent and child questionnaires, and extensive community consultations were conducted. This data was analyzed using a process of collective coding by members from this community and researchers. Drawing upon the codes, a STEM funds of knowledge curriculum was co-developed for over 45 children with the goal of incorporating children’s STEM funds of knowledge from their homes into the lesson plans of the curriculum. Children questionnaires, parent questionnaires, and teacher reflections were analyzed to assess the impact of this curriculum on children’s learning of STEM. Our analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data revealed that (1) young children’s STEM funds of knowledge can be identified through home and community-based methods used, (2) young children’s STEM funds of knowledge in this community involved construction (painting, design), technology (usage of computers and electronic devices, understanding graphical user interfaces), plant (plant anatomy and biology, gardening), and environmental science (sustainability concepts, pollution, human impact on environment, recycling and composting), and (3) elementary curricula designed based on children’s funds of knowledge can be a powerful way to integrate existing STEM knowledge from the household with new STEM knowledge. This study aims to contribute to research on curriculum by conceptualizing a case of a funds of knowledge curriculum in the area of STEM and by assessing the possible impacts of curricula using a mixed-methods approach. Keywords

Funds of knowledge · Education · Household · Children · STEM · Sustainability · Science · Math · Technology · Engineering (STEM)

Introduction The goal of our research is to investigate the impacts of a household STEM funds of knowledge curriculum on children in a multicultural, “low-asset” community in North America. Our interpretation of “STEM” funds of knowledge are those funds of knowledge that are related to codified forms of science, technology, engineering, or math and largely gained through activities that are part of how the household or community functions. It is similar to the perspective of Hogg (2011) where STEM

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

945

funds of knowledge refer to social and intellectual resources gained from such household activities and practices at home that relate to codified STEM learning objectives. In processual terms, curriculum refers in this study to a relational process of meaning-making experiences by agentive social actors in intersecting contexts (Priestley & Philippou, 2018). The term curriculum in this case study thus refers to a process to examine how, and what is important to study, and for whom. This chapter discusses how funds of knowledge were identified and used to co-construct a curriculum over a year-long period and postulates the impacts of this curriculum on students’ knowledge of STEM. The research goal was to investigate what are the possible contributions of fund of knowledge curriculum to children’s STEM knowledge. The research is significant because it adds to the growing body of research on how knowledge of STEM can be fostered with a “funds” curriculum.

Conceptual Background of Funds of Knowledge for STEM Funds of knowledge refer to historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being (González et al., 2005). These funds are typically generated through social and labor history of families and are communicated to others through the formation of social networks – central aspects to the functioning of the household and greater community (González et al., 2005). As part of their pioneering research giving rise to this concept, González et al. conducted research in a Latinx community in Tucson, Arizona, USA. They sought to understand, from an anthropological perspective, how children’s funds of knowledge could be integrated into school settings. González et al. hypothesized that people gain knowledge through functioning within a community and that curricula should be designed to build upon and make connections with knowledge and resources already embedded within the local histories and community. After offering children such a funds of knowledge-based curriculum in their study, González et al. found evidence that children can utilize their knowledge when lessons incorporate the rich cognitive resources that were identified by educators and researchers in their households. The outcomes of this engagement generally taught teachers what they could do with their students while dispelling negative stereotypes. Funds of knowledge researchers theorize the special place of the “home” or “household” or “community.” The units of analysis are often these sites rather than say culture or identity. Arguably, from the perspective of the authors of this chapter, the emphasis on “the home” begins to distinguish the theoretical concept of a fund of knowledge from other very related concepts in science education, including individual prior knowledge, border crossing into science, legitimate participation, and communities of practice in science, culture, or identity (c.f. Barton & Tan, 2018; Esteban-Guitart, 2016; McIntyre et al., 2001). The literature on funds of knowledge supports the hypothesis that funds of knowledge curricula can impact children in positive ways such as in science (Cruz et al., 2018; Barton & Tan, 2009; Fraser-Abder et al., 2010; Civil & Khan, 2001;

946

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

Rohandi & Zain, 2011). Barton and Tan (2009) theorize that since funds of knowledge emphasize a child’s experiences and communal relationships, children become more interested in their homes and experiences, thus contributing to more “authentic engagement,” “high participation levels,” and a positive “shift in achievement” on major and minor assignments in science (p. 66). In their review of the funds of knowledge literature, including those on science funds of knowledge, Llopart and Esteban-Guitart (2018) suggest that, “Through this process of recognition and validation, school curricula can be adapted to these realities which are used as scaffolding material in the act of teaching and learning” (p. 156) and can contribute to gains in cultural and social capital for the child. Researchers have further emphasized the significance of “validating” children’s funds of knowledge by incorporating them into the curriculum for learning and children gaining epistemic or positional authority (Barton & Tan, 2009; Conant et al., 2001; Seiler, 2001). Barton and Tan (2009) suggest that validating the children’s funds of knowledge allows for a, “Smoother transition between students’ life worlds and the science classroom” (p. 52), aiding children in becoming more comfortable and confident in participating in the science classroom. A possible reason for why valuing the children’s funds of knowledge would have such effects was proposed by Fraser-Abder et al. (2010), who suggested that using children’s funds in the classroom, “Added credibility to their family’s ethnic heritage” (p. 144) and potentially supports engagement in science topics. While critical notions of the capital metaphor, legitimation, and powerful knowledge are very relevant to funds of knowledge research and curriculum development (Niemelä, 2021; Muller & Young, 2019; Oughton, 2010; Rios-Aguilar et al., 2011), this chapter focuses on how the household funds of knowledge were integrated by stakeholders in this study and postulates the role of a STEM funds of knowledge curriculum in making an impact on children.

Review of STEM Fund of Knowledge Curricula and Impacts To elucidate the outcomes of fund of knowledge curricula, studies of ten established funds of knowledge curricula were examined for impacts on students. These funds of knowledge programs were selected for a review because they discussed their curricular activities in greater detail than others we examined, focused on children in K-12 school settings and STEM areas as opposed to higher education, and were published in peer-reviewed journals or books. Relevant to our research, the area of impacts from the curricula could be described as those in close association with curricular goals such as knowledge acquisition, attitudes toward science, and use of science language, as opposed to longer-term interventions focused on identity formation (Cowie et al., 2011). At the conclusion of these programs we reviewed, often children were described as being eager to share their own funds of knowledge and willing to express their ideas regarding the scientific topics of study with confidence (Ayers et al., 2001; Barton & Tan, 2009; Conant et al., 2001; Cowie et al., 2011; Seiler, 2001; Fraser-

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

947

Abder et al., 2010; Civil & Khan, 2001; Rohandi & Zain, 2011; Upadhyay, 2009). A display of this kind of engagement was found in the example from Seiler’s (2001) fund of knowledge science lunch group study that took place in a mostly AfricanAmerican inner-city high school. The researchers and educators from the lunch group began to uncover the high school children’s funds of knowledge by asking children what they did outside of school that they thought included science (Seiler, 2001). Seiler (2001) led scientific discussions and demonstrations that stemmed from the children’s funds of knowledge on various topics such as drumming and sports within this setting. The uninterrupted student-to-student discussion using science terms was previously not observed in the regular science class. An increase in participation in science was also reported by Barton and Tan (2009), in their study at The Inquiry School, a science-focused, zoned school in a low-income, mostly African-American and Hispanic neighborhood of a large city in the USA. Barton and Tan’s (2009) study incorporated children’s funds of knowledge into a sixth-grade unit on food and nutrition. The children’s funds of knowledge were uncovered by including five children in curriculum planning conversations to discuss their ideas for incorporating their funds of knowledge into the unit (Barton & Tan, 2009). The lessons and assignments incorporated children’s funds of knowledge from home recipes, fast food, and nutritional habits (Barton & Tan, 2009). Barton and Tan (2009) noted that all children were eventually involved in voluntarily sharing information during discussions, and quiet students did not wait to be called upon. This increase in participation, compared to those class episodes where funds were not actively incorporated in the curricular activities, according to Barton and Tan (2009), attributed to the “reciprocity” between the children and their peers and the funds of knowledge curriculum. Attitude toward science was commonly examined in the literature on children’s funds of knowledge. Certain terminology in STEM-oriented funds of knowledge curricula suggests the prevalence of interest and a positive attitude toward these disciplinary fields. For example, “enjoy,” “interest,” “motivation,” “less resistance,” “eager,” and “fun” were stated outcomes among children of these funds studies (Barton & Tan, 2009; Fraser-Abder et al., 2010; Hedges et al., 2011; Hedges, 2012; Civil & Khan, 2001; Rohandi & Zain, 2011; Upadhyay, 2006, 2009; SandovalTaylor, 2005). For one example, a middle-school teacher in Tucson, AZ, designed a “Build Your Dream House” funds of knowledge project to teach his predominantly Hispanic seventh- and eighth-grade class mathematical concepts, after administering a survey to his students and their families to uncover their funds of knowledge (Ayers et al., 2001). Initially, most children in the class were unmotivated to work in school, and their test scores showed that they were at a third- to fourth-grade mathematics level. In an effort to incorporate the children’s funds of knowledge into his lessons, the teacher distributed surveys to the children and found that 60% of them had parents working in construction. Working with their funds of knowledge, the teacher engaged his class in a long-term project that connected to the entire core curriculum in mathematics. Some children who had initially had negative attitudes toward

948

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

learning mathematics reportedly left the class with a newfound confidence in their mathematics abilities (Ayers et al., 2001). Zipin (2020) also developed a hypothetical scenario from a collection of actual funds of knowledge projects. The curriculum was given to a semester-long year 9 class with diverse students. It was facilitated by three teachers representing STEM. In the curriculum, students shared stories of the impacts of three floods during their young lives and how these catastrophes affected homes, livelihoods, and hopes. The teacher began the new class by inviting student dialogue on flood effects. Their opening question was: “How were the recent floods talked about among family and neighbors?” (p. 113), thus encouraging students to situate “personal” experiences of floods in wider social networks and contexts. Year 10 students took leading roles in explaining community-based problems using research that stretched across school and community spaces and involved collaborating with local residents as well as teachers and academics. A more crucial focus for this scenario was not on a fixed curriculum but on processes that draw on, and further cultivate, students’ capabilities for working on the problem. The processes can also be a part of a curriculum. The hypothetical outcomes in this imaginary scenario were teachers finding that “poor academic-performing” students, who did not engage with text-based curriculum, show new readiness to read texts relevant to their STEM and funds investigations. In our synthesis of ten STEM-related curricula that were about funds of knowledge related to STEM, we found that student outcomes were varied but predominantly focused on opportunities to participate in or co-construct knowledge and the curriculum (both content and process). Fewer studies examined student grades as doing so would not align with the goals of the research, while all attempted to connect curricula with outcomes such as readiness, capacity, engagement, and participation. This research is significant in that it attempts to build on existing explanations for how a fund of knowledge approach can enhance children’s STEMrelated knowledge outcomes using both quantitative and qualitative data.

Research Methods The research goal was to investigate what are the possible contributions of a funds of knowledge curriculum to children’s STEM knowledge. A mixed-method case study approach was carried out in a “low-asset” North American community for this research. A case study, according to VanWynsberghe and Khan (2007), is a transparadigmatic heuristic that enables the circumscription of the unit of analysis. In general, case studies are often a preferred strategy in educational research when “how,” “in what ways,” or “why” questions are being pursued, when the investigator has little control over events, and when the focus of study is on a contemporary phenomenon within some real-life context (Yin, 2003). While we recognize that the standard methods of assessing students’ academic achievement do not take into consideration the funds of knowledge existing in households that are available to children and youth in “low-asset” communities,

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

949

some statistical analyses can help us to view the features of the curriculum that might have a greater impact on specific academic outcomes. For example, Rios-Aguilar (2010) surveyed the funds of knowledge of 212 Latinx students, specifically their household’s labor history, social interactions, educational experiences, and language use. In addition, social reciprocity, household frequency of activities, parental educational philosophy, parental language acquisition, English literacy-oriented activities, and Spanish literacy-oriented activities were surveyed. These factors were linked with academic outcomes such as standardized test scores and GPAs using multiple regression analyses. The analysis indicated that factors that attempted to capture the concept of funds of knowledge (i.e., social reciprocity, parental educational philosophy, frequent activities, and parental language acquisition) were not significantly associated with students’ academic and reading achievement. The author concluded that there remains a need to study the relationship between funds of knowledge and academic and non-academic outcomes.

Case Selection Parkstown is a pseudonym for a major North American city with a population of approximately 578,000. A Parkstown community was chosen for this study because this community was assigned some of the lowest scores in terms of assets through a specialized Middle Years Development (MDI) study (Human Early Learning Partnership, 2019). The MDI study examined the overall well-being of children, socioeconomic status of families, and presence of assets as being the lowest among children in this community compared to other communities in the same city, all of which affect children’s learning ability (Human Early Learning Partnership, 2019). The assets examined included those related to social and emotional development, physical health, well-being, connectedness, use of after school time, and experiences. Demographically, this community consists of a higher percentage of Chinesespeaking households (56%). The average household income of this community is also lower than that for the rest of the population of the city. In a designated “lowasset” community, children have less access to resources or assets such as those mentioned above from the MDI. In order to ascertain the funds of knowledge of children in this community, a community resource scan, community consultations, and household visits were conducted. Out-of-school and summer programs were developed based on identified funds, using a “curriculum study group” similar to the one developed by Sandoval-Taylor (2005) and Civil (2018). Children’s knowledge of STEM was assessed after the programs. Each of the data sources is discussed in greater detail below. Voluntary consent forms were collected for data collection.

Understanding the Parkstown Community A community resource scan was conducted to learn about the existing resources and programs in this urban North American community. Researchers conducted such a scan by contacting all local community organizations and their programming in the

950

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

area. Researchers also interviewed program directors. Only one program offered by the public school’s out-of-school program team focused on cultivating STEM concepts. This out-of-school environmental study program was not aligned with the school curriculum nor was there a formal documentation of the program. Instead, instructors appeared to have a focus on developing social relationships among the children and adults in a safe environment. They followed a chart of activities. Community consultations were conducted in Parkstown, with more than 36 community members (grandparents, resident realtors, stay-at-home and working parents’ school-aged children, new couples without children) attending, to share what they know about the community, its history and resources, their knowledge base, and ideas for out-of-school programming for children. The community consultations were a way to involve the community in this project. The consultations involved large group question and answers, small paired activities, and a walk-about photo gallery where photos of the community were annotated by its members. A real-time translator was present in order to facilitate dialogue from Mandarin to English. A total of 60 pages of transcripts were obtained from community consultations on their funds of knowledge. Household visits were conducted by researchers as a way to learn more about the historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills that supported household or individual functioning. Questions asked during household visits aimed to involve community in the development of an out-of-school program and uncover family history and the activities, practices, or hobbies children participated in households related to STEM. Through household visits, researchers learned how children allocated their time at households for different activities (Conant et al., 2001). A total of 20 pages of transcripts from household visits were collected. Finally, stakeholder interviews were conducted with leaders of local community and school organizations to gain insights into the purposes and intentions for “programming [sic.]” or new curriculum development. These interviews were approximately 1 hour in length. Five interviews were conducted in total.

The Development of a STEM Fund of Knowledge Out-of-School Curriculum Curriculum study group. A curriculum study group (CSG) consisting of elementary school administrators in the local community, community-based nongovernmental organizations, preservice teacher candidates from a local university, education and sociology researchers, certified elementary teachers and community workers in the school system, and sustainability experts was convened. CSGs have been used to create curricula with stakeholders in previous research (Moll & Greenberg, 1990; Moll, 1992, 2001). A total of 12 members participated in our CSG. The purpose of the CSG was to engage in the building of a curriculum based on the funds of knowledge that could be identified through the household visit, community

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

951

consultation, and community scan data. The CSG met on a bi-weekly basis over the course of 4 months, for a total of seven 3-hour meetings. The CSG used the data from the community and located emergent themes to construct a funds of knowledge-based curriculum. The CSG also had resources available to them, including the provincial curricula, articles about funds of knowledge, and a funds of knowledge book by González et al. (2005). The researchers facilitated each meeting and provided readings. After the CSG, participants completed reflection cards on the process. An out-of-school program initiated by the CSG was subsequently elaborated upon by two educators (one who was a certified teacher and the other a community educator) and three preservice teachers enrolled in a 3-week community field experience component of their teacher education practicum. The STEM curriculum ultimately aimed to incorporate various types of STEM funds of knowledge identified in the community.

The STEM Fund of Knowledge Curriculum in Out-of-School Programs A funds of knowledge STEM curriculum for children aged 5–12 was subsequently offered within the community, and 47 families enrolled. The funds of knowledge STEM curriculum was taught over the course of 1 year and by two educators, with the assistance of two of the three preservice teachers. Two after-school K-7 programs were offered, consisting of 5.25 and 10.5 hours at two schools over the course of 1 month each, and one out-of-school summer K-7 program was offered consisting of 44 hours. A number of children who attended the programs were identified as at-risk (as referred by teachers and school administrators), although there was also one gifted student and a number of other students who had heard about the program and asked to be involved through a dropbox method. All members of the community were also invited to join through dropboxes placed throughout schools and local organizations in the community. Two students were dropped off by parents on the day of the program and only attended for several days in the summer offering. Educator reflections. During the enactment of the STEM curriculum, educators kept track of children’s progress in developing their funds of knowledge on a daily basis (educators are a subset of CSG membership that were defined as those in a position to teach and educate the children in the out-of-school program developed). The educators group included activity leaders from the community, elementary teachers, preservice teachers, and researchers in education). A total of 28 pages of reflections were collected. Educators were also asked to follow a child of their choice in the class and develop a longer narrative on this child and their observations of curriculum and its impacts. Observation rubrics and photographs. Researchers conducted classroom observations and completed observation rubrics regarding children’s inquiries. The observation rubric coded articulations of STEM through talk and activity by time period (Lemke, 2001). Research team members also took over 300 photographs of the

952

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

program and of the community throughout the entire process to help serve as further observations for analysis of children’s funds of knowledge. Teacher questionnaires. Five teachers, 25 parents, and 46 pre- and post-program child questionnaires were also collected and analyzed to identify and assess children’s funds of knowledge in this community as well as the impacts of the program. The purpose of the teacher questionnaire was to have teachers refer children into the program and answer questions about the children referred. Children who were identified by teachers through these questionnaires were offered placements into our program. A total of 60 pages of teacher questionnaire data were collected. Only 4 of the 23 teacher-referred children actually attended our program. The other referred children who attended the program were referred specifically by school administrators. Child questionnaires. Child questionnaires distributed before and after the program investigated children’s funds of knowledge in their households and their attitudes toward science. Questions in the child questionnaire focused on the children’s interests and activities outside of school, particularly in the households. Examples of children’s interests and activities asked about included sports, music, foreign languages, and math. Four hundred nineteen pages of child questionnaires were collected in total (n ¼ 47). Parent questionnaires. Parent questionnaires were distributed during the program to investigate parents’ interests that they shared with their children and activities they did with their children. One hundred thirty-two pages of parent questionnaires were collected in total (n ¼ 25). Examples of interests and activities asked about include sports, music, culture, cooking, and gardening. For questions that required parents to choose options, the options proposed were based on common household or out-ofschool activities that were observed and mentioned in community consultations and household visits. Report card data. This data was collected from the six children who consented with their parents to having their report cards released. Report card grades collected at two different time points during the study were compared with data from a year prior to the program, for both non-referred and referred children. Non-referred students are those who expressed interest in the program but were not referred by a teacher or school administrator. Of these six children, two children were referred by teachers from the teacher questionnaire. Report card grades for one term prior to the program were collected in electronic format from the school district as one collated spreadsheet. In addition, 49 pages of data were collected in both term 1 and term 2 from these six children after the program. The attendance of these students was also collected and analyzed. The following comparisons were done among all consented students: (1) average grade for all subjects for term 1 after the program versus a year prior the program, (2) average grade for term 2 after the program versus average grade for 1 year prior the program, (3) average grade for mathematics for term 1 after the program versus a year prior to the program, and (4) average grade for mathematics for term 2 after the program versus a year prior to the program. Math was selected because the science grades were not evident on the report card.

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

953

Data Analysis The qualitative analysis included analyses of all collected questionnaires and CSG reflections, household visits, community consultations, and classroom observations. The qualitative analysis began with a preliminary scan of relevant qualitative data, that is, data which addressed (1) the funds of knowledge of the children, (2) changes in their STEM-related knowledge, (3) changes in their interests and attitudes, and (4) other apparent effects on the children as a possible result of the program. A preliminary codebook was established and created using methods outlined by Miles and Huberman (1994). Additionally, the codebook was structured with rules for inclusion and examples from data. The codebook included STEM-related concepts and relevant sites such as “home,” “community,” and “school.” An inter-rater reliability was calculated during the first iteration of coding and was found to be 68%; further refinement to the rules of inclusions was made during the second iteration and the codebook was updated. Codes were then divided into two broad categories: STEM funds of knowledge (e.g., animals, insects, construction) and other funds of knowledge not typically associated with STEM (e.g., creative writing, religious studies). Any other non-fund of knowledge responses (e.g., answers left blank) were not coded further. The first two iterations of coding were done manually. In the third iteration, IRR was found to be 89.64% and was calculated from using the qualitative data analysis software, NVivo. To further strengthen the trustworthiness of the analysis, methods of triangulation were employed (Mathison, 1988). Data across all of the relevant data sources were analyzed and compared. The percentage of various types of STEM funds of knowledge from the dataset were calculated to respond to our first research question. This calculation was performed by dividing the frequency of references coded across datasets to each type of codifiable STEM fund of knowledge. Quantitative analysis was performed using SPSS (Statistics Package for Social Sciences by IBM) on report cards collected (n ¼ 6 students) a year prior to the program as well as one and two terms after the program. Since children grades K-3 were assessed using an expectation system and children grades 4–7 were graded by a letter grade system, report card grades of the children were standardized according to Table 1 and quantified. Nonparametric statistical tests were conducted to avoid issues of non-normality of the data. We analyzed the students through a dependent nonparametric analysis. Table 1 Percentage of participating families that regularly (about four times/month or more) help their children with the following top five household activities after school (n ¼ 25) Living sustainably 36%

Gardening 28%

Digital technology 24%

How to build things/how machines work 24%

Cooking 20%

Note: Out of the 15 possible activities in an item in the parental questionnaire, including a fill-in-theblank for other unlisted activities

954

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

Report card grades of all school subjects were summed and averaged to get a mean grade. Science grades were not available for our prior 1-year (before program) dataset for the K-3 cohort. The K-3 cohort was graded on oral language (speaking and listening), writing and representing, reading and viewing, and mathematics on an expectation-level system. In comparison, the 4–7 cohort was graded on health and career education, physical education, social studies, mathematics, fine arts, science, and English language arts using a letter grade system. We thus compared average grades between mathematics as our STEM-related subject to test for performance differences. Comparisons were made using these mean grades of the group. Further nonparametric tests were conducted to determine any statistically significant relationship in the grades of the participating children prior and after the program.

Trustworthiness of the Data Analysis Multiple methods, uses of more than one classroom observer, and rich sources of data were collected to produce thick descriptions and to support triangulation (Mathison, 1988). As mentioned previously, the child questionnaire was piloted and peer reviewed in an extensive process to strengthen trustworthiness. In terms of classroom observations, persistent observation of the learning environment and prolonged engagement with the data contributed toward the emergence of discernable patterns of educator–child interactions. Multiple debriefing sessions with the educators sought to achieve consistency in thematic coding of videotaped and taperecorded classroom observations with written observation notes. Observational data was compared with student accounts of their experiences via the questionnaire. Direct quotations were included in the study from participants in the research. Furthermore, memos summarizing classroom events were written for every observed class or CSG as a method to capture and compare salient classroom events and codes from the beginning to the end of the research. Collectively, these efforts strengthened the trustworthiness of the findings.

Results and Discussion Our analysis aims to identify underutilized STEM funds of knowledge in this community and discuss possible impacts of a jointly constructed fund of knowledge curriculum on children’s learning and engagement in STEM. In the first section, we discuss children’s household funds of knowledge that were identified and later incorporated into a curriculum that would be provided to children in that community (section “Children’s STEM Funds of Knowledge Identified for the Curriculum”). Next, the suggested impact of the fund of knowledge curriculum on children’s STEM knowledge will be explored, with both sections drawing upon the analysis of the data (section “Impacts of a STEM Funds of Knowledge Program on Children”).

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

955

Children’s STEM Funds of Knowledge Identified for the Curriculum The data from the community consultations, household visits, CSGs, and stakeholder interviews were coded, and significant quotes, photos from the community, and quotations from the visits and interviews were sorted into themes, to identify overarching funds of knowledge. Data from child questionnaires and parent questionnaires were also analyzed to identify elementary-aged children’s STEM funds of knowledge in the Parkstown urban community. The coding of these data produced several themes and subcategories of STEM funds of knowledge in the households of these children. These STEM funds of knowledge were identified as knowledge of carpentry, gardening and sustainability, plants and plant physiology, food nutrition and health, cottage baking businesses, and medicinal broths and teas. In this section, we elaborate upon the ways in which we identified children’s STEM funds of knowledge in this community and how several of these funds were incorporated into a new STEM out-of-school curriculum. In order to explore parents’ involvement in children’s out-of-school activities, the following prompt was given in the parent questionnaires (n ¼ 25): “After school, I regularly help my child learn: (check all that apply; may include hiring someone to come to the household or enrolling child in an out of school program; regular means about 4 times per month)” with 14 options/categories including, but not limited to, math, science, gardening, cooking, digital (computer) technology, how to build things or the way machines work, and how to live sustainably. Table 1 constitutes the top five chosen responses. Home-baking businesses and sustainable gardening were among the predominant funds of knowledge found in this community and will be the focus of this particular chapter. Home-baking businesses. This fund of knowledge fully emerged from a household visit and serves as an exemplar for how connections from community and household (of everyday life practices) were made to the classroom and were a leverage point for the co-construction of curricular activities. In a household visit in the neighborhood, a parent spontaneously revealed that her children would conduct bake sales outside their households after school stating, “[She] sells stuff . . . [She] takes a table, chair, box for money, and a plate of cookies to outside. . . they made a killer last time. . .[She] usually makes the cookies with a friend. Then sometimes dad helps because he bakes a lot.” Furthermore, a child mentioned from the household visit that she owned a candy-making kit from a toy store: “We have a candy making kit.” From this fund of knowledge, it can be inferred that they learned how to measure ingredients and how chemicals interact or react with one another. The child could also establish specific mathematics funds of knowledge such as measurement when measuring ingredients of her candy-making kit. This fund of knowledge could help build facility with currency, exchange, operations, and symbolic value through the handling of money and entrepreneurship skills through advertising the bake sales. Twenty percent of the parents who responded to the parent questionnaire indicated that they regularly cooked at home with their children (Table 1) and cooking was a prevalent theme in the community consultations. A grandparent from a

956

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

community consultation reported, “I like to do it [cooking and baking] with grandkids, let them stir and mix and everything.” Similarly, a parent interviewed from a household visit spontaneously identified that her child made her own recipes after she was familiar with baking, “They cook. . .get flour/spices and stuff . . .and make something and then bake it in oven and see what happens.” Cooking’s prevalence as an important fund could be because cooking is a common household activity that children can be actively engaged with. We speculate on the inclusion of elements such as measurement (mathematics funds of knowledge), for example. Through exploring different ratios of ingredients and seeing the eventual product, it can be inferred that a child from this community could further develop their mathematical sense of proportions, especially when modifying recipes. Possible curricular venues for STEM meant building on this fund of knowledge about baking to additional discussions of measurement, food science, and nutrition. Sustainable gardening. Twenty-eight percent of the parents revealed in the parent questionnaire that they regularly engaged in gardening activities with their children (Table 1). Gardening also appeared as a major theme during the community consultations as it was discussed separately four times in a 1-hour session and more than other household activities. For example, a grandparent shared about her household, “Gardening. . . I like to teach my grandson and grandkids what’s good for the Earth, like worms . . . and the bees.” In the community resource scan and review of photographs in the community, evidence of community gardens was present, such as a rooftop garden at the neighborhood house and makeshift backyard gardens. Further, an action plan of the city, called the Greenest City Action Plan, called for increased composting and an increased number of community gardens to be established. The presence of these community funds of knowledge involving gardening and basic information on plant life is relevant to a STEM curriculum. Thirtysix percent of the parents who responded to the question – “After school, I regularly help my child learn. . .” (see Table 1) – noted they have taught their children how to live sustainably. Also stated in a follow-up question was the assertion that they teach sustainability/unsustainability through introducing the concepts of reusing, reducing, and recycling, the effect of carbon dioxide on global warming, conserving water and electricity, and pollution. In the household visits, sustainable activities mentioned by the parents were noted by the researchers. For example, a parent mentioned in one of the household visits that: “We grew our own vegetables and also some flower . . . the vegetables were really, really good.” In a separate household visit, the parent mentioned her partner, “[Taking] public transit. . . .” In child questionnaires, children were asked the question, “Has anyone taught you about unsustainability? If so, what specifically did you learn?” and responses from children included “keeping the environment clean,” “not to waste water,” and “to pick up the garbage.” The curriculum constructed could build upon those household funds of knowledge by teaching children additional plant physiology and sustainable approaches to school gardens in a planned funds of knowledge gardening activities. For example, a gardening activity used in the STEM curriculum included the planting of seeds, and it was also used as an interlude to the discussion of a plant’s necessities for survival. Other activities conducted helped reinforced children’s knowledge of

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

957

plants, like the growth stages of plants, through Garden Tag (students who were tagged for the first time became a seed, then a shoot, and then a flower).

Impacts of a STEM Funds of Knowledge Program on Children A second aim of this research was to study the possible effects of a STEM fund of knowledge curriculum on children’s learning and understanding of relevant concepts. We extend the discussion to hypothesize how bridging the household-school divide might be fostered by a STEM funds of knowledge curriculum and why this is important. The majority of children in the first out-of-school program reported in their pre-questionnaire that they would “like to know more about jobs that use science.” It was also noted that only 6 of the 16 children reported that “home is one of the three favorite places to hang out.” An out-of-school program was built on the funds of knowledge in the community. The curriculum was constructed within the CSG and by preservice teachers and educators. Two educators involved in the curriculum writing offered two after-school K-7 programs, consisting of 5.25 and 10.5 hours each over the course of 1 month and an out-of-school K-7 summer program, consisting of 44 hours. In total, the number of hours of funds of knowledge programming was 60 hours. The term “program” in this case study denotes the offering of the curriculum at three different time periods and in this way is distinguishable from the term curriculum used to refer to a process of meaning-making. The curriculum was enacted by the educators and assistants with over 47 families involved in total out of all program offerings. Siblings were permitted to be enrolled in this multi-age fund of knowledge program. Part of the curriculum was based on a fund of knowledge about foods. Foods, food science, and STEM connections were reinforced in this curriculum. For example, one activity involved measuring. As part of an activity, an educator began a lesson with, “What have you measured at home?”, to try to connect to children’s funds of knowledge on measurement and cooking. An educator observed that, “Most students had helped measure while their parents were cooking.” Curricular expansions of STEM meant building on this fund of knowledge about cooking to support further discussions of measurement and food science with a dandelion tea activity. In an educator’s narrative reflections, she capitalized on this fund of knowledge to build a further learning opportunity. She observed that a child, [C]ame running in to program, and dropped a tea bag sachet into my lap and ran away. . . . He had brought in Chinese tea in a wrapped sachet. He said he liked the tea and it “relaxed” him. I asked him if he know what was in it? He said “no”. I asked how could we find out? He stated, “Read the ingredients and look at it [the tea leaves]. How do you know? I’ve tried it before. Just how to find out the flavor.” I informed him we would be doing just that later today. . . . He is becoming more fascinated with our world map and locating where fruit [and food] stickers come from. Will not abort task until completed.

Funds of knowledge on sustainability evident from the community consultations and household visit were further reinforced in the curriculum through activities that

958

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

promoted it, such as the lunch box investigation activity. In this activity, educators noted that not all children bring their lunch in a box. For example, a number of children had grandparents come by with hot soup in a container at lunch. This fund of knowledge about our lunches raised discussions about how to keep our lunch and soup warm. It further supported an activity where students are split into two random, mixed-aged groups to discuss and categorize all food scraps and wrappers placed within our landfills. A student was then assigned to take and remove stickers from fruits or vegetables or to bring their fruit with the stickers on from their lunch. Students were then encouraged to ask questions about where these foods go and where they came from. These two examples show how funds of knowledge were used to develop curricular activities and the pedagogical strategies of the educators to make connections and note learning opportunities.

Children Had Opportunities to Learn STEM Concepts Through a Fund of Knowledge Curriculum Educators were asked to share their strategies in daily reflections, and they also each filled out a pre- and post-questionnaire. Educators also participated in a 3-day curriculum retreat at the end of the summer program. Additionally, a photobook of their teaching and classroom observations were made by researchers. In an analysis of their reflections, it was evident that educator open-ended questions permitted an exploration and reinforcement of children’s funds of knowledge further. Given that gardening was apparent in the community consultation and community scan, the curriculum contained a gardening component on plants and pollinators. On Day 1 of the program, educators asked children, “What do we know about planting?” Instead of asking a factual question about plants, an open-ended question allowed all children to share their funds of knowledge with the educators and served to help educators, who were not involved in the household visits, understand the scope of their knowledge base. Teachers avoided assuming the knowledge level of the children and instead used the funds of knowledge to build upon ideas familiar to the child rather than assuming what the children do not know as a natural starting point of learning. Next, to distinguish between prior knowledge and funds of knowledge, educators asked the question, “Where did you learn this from?” It was noted by the educators in their reflections that the responses the children gave were frequently tied to their household and communities, as they would reference their household or community gardens. Following these questions on their funds of knowledge, children were invited to engage in curricular activities that were based on their funds of knowledge. For example, during an activity where children planted seeds in a pot, educators noted in their reflection journals that, “Most children could reason why their pots had four holes in the bottom.” Educators gave positive reinforcement in the form of recognition of the children’s funds of knowledge about plants to help affirm their existing STEM fund of knowledge and then provided a pathway for enrichment by relating existing knowledge to new knowledge. In this case, educators elaborated on reasons

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

959

behind each step in a basic planting process (e.g., too much water causes drowning) from their household gardens, to include what plants need in order to grow to allow children to plant their own seeds in the pots. According to educators, discussions that started by probing questions based on funds of knowledge enhanced child participation and insightful thinking. In educator reflections, it was found that more children shared their thoughts and insights with one another and with the educator as the program progressed. It was also recorded that children were seen talking about previous discussion topics later in the program. An example of a conversation later in the program between a child and an educator that suggested transference occurred after a nature walk in the neighborhood: Child: Next time can the bugs eat the humans once the humans die? Educator: Why? Child: Because worms eat humans when they are dead like worms in the compost. Note that children were not told that decomposers would decompose humans; they were only introduced to the concept of decomposers. The child in this example suggested transference by establishing a connection between decomposers to other real-world examples such as the decomposition of organisms rather than being limited to food scraps. In another example of a major funds activity in the out-of-school program, children were given an “artifact bag” to bring items from home for discussion and a themed activity. This belonging served to bridge the knowledge between the child’s household and the program. The goal was for the children to relate items from their household with the lesson. In this program, children brought six artifacts that were elicited in the research process and helped consolidate knowledge that corresponded with prescribed learning outcomes. For example, children brought something representative of their dinner, and educators discussed with the children where their food came from and how it was obtained. Next, children were asked to categorize their dinner into the different categories of foods only eaten by humans, food eaten by humans and birds, and foods eaten by birds. They were also asked to bring in something a bird would eat from their community. Subsequently, the concepts of food chains and food webs were introduced to the children. With this evidence, children extrapolated knowing the relationship between their dinner and the food web. In a narrative on one child in the program, Archie, one of the educators, noted that “[Archie] entered the program exhibiting a high level of energy and anxiety.” The educator shared later that he improved over his time in the program. Archie had participated in both the June and July programs: I know this because he came into the circle eventually. His responses to repeated activities showed that he acquired knowledge and was more creative. He expressed greater knowledge of birds from program 1 to program 2. He began categorizing things such as the recyclables and fixing others’ mistakes. He was very vocal on the slideshow we did of comparing food. The children in this lesson showed their funds on food. He seemed to love math, was

960

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

un-coordinated when not in a sport; his self-care seemed low, he was athletic. I got to see development, what he was getting from the program. He knows new things about birds, planting, and recycling. It was hard to probe for his household funds of knowledge. He brought in artefacts everyday in the artefact bag. He was able to say where do you know this from (eg. home or school)?

These examples show how children had opportunities to learn STEM concepts through a fund of knowledge curriculum, although they might not have realized it. In the child post-questionnaire, children reported that they did not do any new activities in science. They also reported that they shared what they did with parents and family members and learned, for example, about, “[T]he sound of birds, birds and new birds, how to help someone look at books, fennel is edible, watching nests, birds talk to each other by chirping, hammers, different types of plants, pollinators, building a bird house.” Children also added new job activities to their list that they could do, including organic farming, compost farming, beekeeping, that were not present in the pre-questionnaire. During a food, pollination, and bee investigation, Archie inquired about the other colors within the other jars of honey and what would happen if we ate that honey. There were shops in the neighborhood that sold honey. He retained knowledge about honey and pollination and by the end of the day could recall all veggies we used the day before and even attempted saying “turmeric,” a spice used in the local community. The funds of knowledge approach also may have allowed educators to value children’s existing knowledge as opposed to approaching the curriculum as document to address deficits in the community (Ford & Grantham, 2003). A deficit approach locates the basis of educational failure in students, their families, and cultures (Valencia, 2012; Rios-Aguilar et al., 2011; Irvine & York, 1993). A funds of knowledge approach to curriculum aims to remedy this problem. Importantly, in our case study, educators reported that children were highly committed to exploration, suggesting that a funds of knowledge curriculum is capable of bridging STEM concepts multidirectionally, from the community to the school and vice versa, and among children and their teachers and vice versa. The artifact bag was activity designed in this curriculum to promote the ebb and flow of knowledge among these sites, via the curriculum. Curricular activities that were designed to build upon their existing funds of knowledge included “making birdhouses,” “pollination tag,” and “making jam”; these activities tie in with construction, gardening, and cooking funds of knowledge that were present in the community. These activities were also ranked the top three aspects of the curriculum that children enjoyed the most, among all activities in the curriculum as reported in the child post-questionnaire. Furthermore, children gave positive responses about the program from the child post-questionnaire such as, “Just being a part of the program was fun,” and “I thought the program was awesome.” These activities also helped children meet prescribed learning outcomes as outlined by the provincial government. The construction of birdhouses fulfilled a prescribed learning outcome of “develop[ing] spatial reasoning” and it allowed the

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

961

group to describe, compare, and construct 3D objects. In another narrative, an educator introduced us to Chandra: Chandra was made a student leader because she appeared to not be making new friends. . . . She worked in a patty shop; she brought in a patty in as well as chicken bones one day in her artefact bag. For the birdhouse activities, her sibling was arguing with her, [but they eventually agreed on constructing and painting the birdhouse]. She asked whether chefs can be artists. We could support this from the home, the home is where confidence can be built. I talked with her about how cake decorators use artistic funds of knowledge.

With the number of painted murals in the community and links to art, baking at the patty shop and baking cakes, and construction projects in the class and community, spatial reasoning, mathematics, ratio, proportion, visualization, and communication skills could be well-fostered by drawing on links to the community while working with a sibling. It bears repeating that the funds of knowledge curriculum was connected to the provincial science curriculum and academic outcomes in schools. For example, the gardening fund of knowledge could include concepts of pollination and plant life, both of which are in the provincial government curriculum. By participating in pollination tag, children may have also gained a better understanding of the role of bees and the mechanism and consequences of pollination. Detailed discussion of the premise of this game, such as asking the children what they know about pollination and how their favorite fruits come about, was also connected to provincial learning outcomes. During the jam-making activity, educators asked children what pollinated the fruits they were using to make jam. Children considered how pollination is connected to food production by making jam out of berries, a product of pollination. Educators discussed how an ecosystem is connected in myriad different ways, building upon children’s previously described funds of gardening and cooking. This activity helped achieve science prescribed learning outcomes as children analyzed the roles of organisms in food webs, populations, communities, and ecosystems as well as understanding ways in which plants and animals are important to other living things and the environment. Food webs were also part of the provincial science curriculum. Indeed, children were asked to respond to the following in the child questionnaire: “After the Project, I now know more about these 3 things.” Responses of the children included knowing more about, “[F]ood chains and webs, and how one thing can change a food chain completely” and “pollinators, food chain.” Eighty-seven percent of the child respondents specifically included pollination, bees, and/or food chains as part of their answer. These responses and this percentage suggested that the curricular plans involving the pollination tag and jam-making activity added to the children’s understanding. As a result, co-constructed fund curriculum leveraged funds of knowledge from the households, and through it, educators were able to foster an enriched learning experience for the children. Since those activities were building upon children’s household STEM funds of knowledge, these results suggest that a possible impact of funds of knowledge curriculum is facilitating children’s learning of STEM concepts.

962

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

Opportunities to Learn from a Fund Curriculum May Have Influenced Academic Outcomes Few studies report quantitatively on the impacts of funds of knowledge curricula on academic outcomes (Rios-Aguilar, 2010). This paucity appears to be because academic outcomes, such as increase in grades, test scores, or attendance, are rarely at the heart of fund curricula designed to foster dialogue, discourse, equitable opportunity, and family and community engagement. Thick description provides a method with which to deeply explore fund curricula and connections to STEM instruction (Kilburn et al., 2014; Aguirre et al., 2013). In this study, in addition to thick description, we attempted to analyze knowledge-related outcomes using quantitative data (Mathison, 1988). The quantitative data for triangulation is obtained from the standpoint of the community through their questionnaire responses and educators, through their observations and subsequent narratives of their teaching as well as their pre- and post-educator questionnaires. In this subsection, we continue a quantitative assessment to gauge changes to children’s knowledge who participated in the curriculum and their school academic performance using report card data over three points in time. With a low sample size who we were able to gather this data for over this length of time, we recognize major limitations to measures of statistical significance. We still opted to include this data in the chapter, more so as a way to show how we might carry out such statistical tests if interested in a similar assessment with a larger sample size than to make inferences about the curriculum.

Longitudinal Analysis of Report Card Data A Wilcoxon signed-ranked test was conducted comparing the year prior to the curriculum and two terms of the school curriculum during which time the program was run. The Wilcoxon test revealed that the curriculum did not elicit a statistically significant change in grade performance for n ¼ 6 participants between term 1 marks (Z ¼ 0.31, p ¼ 0.75) to the mean grade of 70.43 prior to the curriculum. This result was repeated on the test with term 2 (Z ¼ 1.15 and p ¼ 0.25) to the mean grade of 70.43 prior to the program. Following participation in the program, the mean grade for all subject areas for term 1 was 71.27 and term 2 was 75.70; it too was not significantly different compared to the prior year among participants. We then repeated the above Wilcoxon signed-ranked test on the n ¼ 6 students for mathematics marks as our STEM-related criteria of analysis. We present this statistical analysis for only mathematics as a specific STEM-related subject for comparison that was found to be present across our n ¼ 6 sample for prior 1 year, term 1 and term 2 since other STEM subjects, including science, were not available in the report card data to be analyzed. The statistical analysis revealed that the curriculum did not elicit a statistically significant change for the students with respect to mathematics. It was found for our n ¼ 6 students that the mean mathematics marks between term 1 and prior 1 year was not statistically significant (Z ¼ 1.35 and p ¼ 0.89) either. This result was repeated on the test with term 2 (Z ¼ 1.60 and p ¼ 0.11). Mean

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

963

mathematics grades for term 1 was 77.83 and term 2 was 84.42 which were also not significantly different compared to prior year (mean mathematics grade of 78.33).

Analysis on Attendance We then turned to attendance as a measure of engagement and an academic outcome. An analysis for the between prior 1 year, term 1 and term 2 of attendance was conducted to determine if there was a difference in attendance (absences and lates). The formulas used for difference calculations were similar: (1) prior 1 year – term 1 and (2) prior 1 year – (term 1 + term 2). The means and the standard deviations of the attendance were calculated for our analysis of attendance. A positive mean difference would indicate that there were more absences in the prior year and an improvement in attendance was seen. The differences between attendance for the n ¼ 6 population from the year prior to the program to term 1 were found for (1) absences (mean ¼ 11.83 and standard deviation (SD) ¼ 7.62) and (2) lates (mean ¼ 5.33 and SD ¼ 2.68). To determine a prolonged effect, a comparison between attendances from the year prior to the program to term 1 and term 2 cumulative was found to be as follows: absences, mean ¼ 9.41 and SD ¼ 8.43; lates, mean ¼ 1.33 and SD ¼ 10.74. Taking into consideration the standard deviation, low sample size (n ¼ 6), and possible confounding variables, we conclude that the results are not significant. There may be a possible correlation between student engagement in schools after a fund of knowledge program. Isolation of confounding variables was not conducted and other factors may have affected students’ attendance. Given that our findings are non-significant potentially due to sample size, we cannot claim that a funds of knowledge approach did not have any significant negative or positive effects on the children’s grades. Rios-Aguilar (2010) conducted a statistical analysis using multiple regression on features of a fund curriculum and reading scores, test scores, and GPA with a large sample size. A study on grades over time among those who engage in a funds of knowledge curriculum is warranted; however, it is also understood that standard methods of assessing students’ academic and reading achievement do not take into consideration the funds of knowledge households that are available to children and youth (Rios-Aguilar, 2010). We have thus included qualitative evidence to suggest an impact of this curriculum on children’s STEM funds of knowledge and to provide more thick description of the kinds of curricular activities that might support positive development of these funds.

Conclusions and Significance of the Study STEM curricula used in schools are often based on a deficit model of what the child does not know. This may be detrimental for children in new subjects as the knowledge they bring into the classroom from outside may be devalued (Basu & Barton, 2010). Funds of knowledge focuses on what knowledge a child has acquired

964

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

and possessed from sources other than school, such as their households and communities. In this case, the household STEM funds of knowledge were identified in this community as knowledge of cooking, gardening, and construction. Our analysis of qualitative and quantitative data suggests that (1) young children’s STEM funds of knowledge can be identified through home and communitybased methods used, (2) young children’s STEM funds of knowledge in this community involved construction (painting, design), technology (usage of computers and electronic devices, understanding graphical user interfaces), plant (plant anatomy and biology, gardening), and environmental science (sustainability concepts, pollution, human impact on environment, recycling and composting), and (3) curricula designed based on children’s funds of knowledge can be a powerful way to integrate existing STEM knowledge from the household with new STEM knowledge and sponsor extensions of this knowledge. Our case study suggests that curricula built upon children’s funds of knowledge can be an effective way of integrating STEM rather than a curriculum built through the use of a deficit model. Additional implications of this research into curriculum are the opportunities to use varied data collection techniques to meet families and undertake household visits and community consultations. We contribute in this chapter a mixed-methods approach to funds curriculum development and assessment of impact. Relevant and meaningful curricula developed in collaborative setting are arguably a significant departure from traditional approaches to curriculum development by STEM educators. We demonstrated that a funds-derived curriculum is a valuable knowledge. Further research into STEM-related knowledge building episodes needs to concentrate on the translation, bridging, and extension of children’s knowledge, gained from their homes and communities through curriculum development practices. Funds of knowledge may thus help to also impact educators’ curricular choices and teaching practices to reflect a greater understanding of community as a STEM resource.

References Aguirre, J. M., Turner, E. E., Bartell, T., Kalinec-Craig, C., Foote, M. Q., Roth McDuffie, A., & Drake, C. (2013). Making connections in practice: How prospective elementary teachers connect children’s mathematics thinking and community funds of knowledge in mathematics instruction. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(2), 178–192. Ayers, M., Fonseca, J., Andrade, R., & Civil, M. (2001). Creating learning communities: The “build your dream house” unit. In E. McIntyre, A. Rosebery, & N. González (Eds.), Classroom diversity: Connecting curriculum to students’ lives (pp. 92–99). Heinemann. Barton, A. C., & Tan, E. (2009). Funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 46(1), 50–73. Barton, A. C., & Tan, E. (2018). STEM-rich maker learning: Designing for equity with youth of color. Teachers College Press. Barton, A. C., Hindin, T. J., Contento, I. R., Trudeau, M., Yang, K., Hagiwara, S., & Koch, P. D. (2001). Underprivileged urban mothers’ perspectives on science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(6), 688–711.

Identifying Children’s Funds of Knowledge as a Bridge to STEM

965

Basu, S. J., & Barton, A. C. (2010). A researcher-student-teacher model for democratic science pedagogy: Connections to community, shared authority, and critical science agency. Equity & Excellence in Education, 43(1), 72–87. Civil, M. (2018). A commentary on identifying and connecting to family and community funds of knowledge. In T. Bartell (Ed.), Toward equity and social justice in mathematics education (pp. 145–149). Springer. Civil, M., & Khan, L. H. (2001). Mathematics instruction developed from a garden theme. Teaching Children Mathematics, 7(7), 400–405. Conant, F. R., Rosebery, A., Warren, B., & Hudicourt-Barnes, J. (2001). The sound of drums. In E. McIntyre, A. Rosebery, & N. González (Eds.), Classroom diversity: Connecting curriculum to students’ lives (pp. 51–60). Heinemann. Cowie, B., Jones, A., & Otrel-Cass, K. (2011). Re-engaging students in science: Issues of assessment, funds of knowledge and sites for learning. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 9(2), 347–366. Cruz, A. R., Selby, S. T., & Durham, W. H. (2018). Place-based education for environmental behavior: A “funds of knowledge” and social capital approach. Environmental Education Research, 24(5), 627–647. Esteban-Guitart, M. (2016). Funds of identity: Connecting meaningful learning experiences in and out of school. Cambridge University Press. Ford, D. Y., & Grantham, T. (2003). Providing access for culturally diverse gifted students: From deficit to dynamic thinking. Theory Into Practice, 42(3), 217–225. Fraser-Abder, P., Doria, J. A., Yang, J.-S., & De Jesus, A. (2010). Using funds of knowledge in an ethnically concentrated classroom environment to teach nutrition. Science Activities: Classroom Projects and Curriculum Ideas, 47(4), 141–150. González, N., Moll, L., & Amanti, C. (2005). Funds of knowledge theorizing practices in households and classrooms. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hedges, H. (2012). Teachers’ funds of knowledge: A challenge to evidence-based practice. Teachers and Teaching, 18(1), 7–24. Hedges, H., Cullen, J., & Jordan, B. (2011). Early years curriculum: Funds of knowledge as a conceptual framework for children’s interests. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43(2), 185–205. Hogg, L. (2011). Funds of knowledge: An investigation of coherence within the literature. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(3), 666–677. Human Early Learning Partnership. (2019). MDI maps set. The Human Early Learning Partnership. Retrieved January 31, 2022 from: http://earlylearning.ubc.ca/maps/mdi/ Irvine, J. J., & York, D. E. (1993). Teacher perspectives: Why do African American, Hispanic, and Vietnamese children fail? In S. W. Rothstein (Ed.), Handbook of schooling in urban America (pp. 161–173). Greenwood Press. Kilburn, D., Nind, M., & Wiles, R. (2014). Learning as researchers and teachers: The development of a pedagogical culture for social science research methods. British Journal of Educational Studies, 62(2), 191–207. Lemke, J. L. (2001). Articulating communities: Sociocultural perspectives on science education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(3), 296–316. Llopart, M., & Esteban-Guitart, M. (2018). Funds of knowledge in 21st century societies: Inclusive educational practices for under-represented students. A literature review. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 50(2), 145–161. Mathison, S. (1988). Why triangulate? Educational Researcher, 17(2), 13–17. McIntyre, E., Rosebery, A., & González, N. (Eds.). (2001). Classroom diversity: Connecting curriculum to students’ lives. Heinemann. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc. Moll, L. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141.

966

S. Khan and R. VanWynsberghe

Moll, L. (2001). Through the mediation of others: Vygotskian research on teaching. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed., pp. 111–129). American Educational Research Association. Moll, L. C., & Greenberg, J. (1990). Creating zones of possibilities: Combining social contexts for instruction. In L. C. Moll (Ed.), Vygotsky and education (pp. 319–348). Cambridge University Press. Muller, J., & Young, M. (2019). Knowledge, power and powerful knowledge re-visited. The Curriculum Journal, 30(2), 196–214. Niemelä, M. A. (2021). Crossing curricular boundaries for powerful knowledge. The Curriculum Journal, 32(2), 359–375. Oughton, H. (2010). Funds of knowledge—A conceptual critique. Studies in the Education of Adults, 42(1), 63–78. Priestley, M., & Philippou, S. (2018). Curriculum making as social practice: Complex webs of enactment. The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 151–158. Rios-Aguilar, C. (2010). Measuring funds of knowledge: Contributions to Latina/o students’ academic and non-academic outcomes. Teachers College Record, 112(8), 2209–2257. Rios-Aguilar, C., Kiyama, J. M., Gravitt, M., & Moll, L. C. (2011). Funds of knowledge for the poor and forms of capital for the rich? A capital approach to examining funds of knowledge. Theory and Research in Education, 9(2), 163–184. Rohandi, R., & Zain, A. N. (2011). Incorporating Indonesian students’ “funds of knowledge” into teaching science to sustain their interest in science. Bulgarian Journal of Science & Education Policy, 5(2), 303–322. Sandoval-Taylor, P. (2005). Home is where the heart is: A funds of knowledge-based curriculum module. In N. González, L. C. Moll, & C. Amanti (Eds.), Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices (pp. 153–165). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Seiler, G. (2001). Reversing the “standard” direction: Science emerging from the lives of African American students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(9), 1000–1014. Upadhyay, B. R. (2006). Using students’ lived experiences in an urban science classroom: An elementary school teacher’s thinking. Science Education, 90(1), 94–110. Upadhyay, B. (2009). Teaching science for empowerment in an urban classroom: A case study of a Hmong teacher. Equity & Excellence in Education, 42(2), 217–232. Valencia, R. R. (Ed.). (2012). The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice. RoutledgeFalmer. VanWynsberghe, R., & Khan, S. (2007). Redefining case study. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 6(2), 80–94. Yin, R. (2003). Applications of case study research: Design and methods (3rd ed.). Sage Publications. Zipin, L. (2020). Building curriculum knowledge work around community-based “problems that matter”: Let’s dare to imagine. Curriculum Perspectives, 40(1), 111–115.

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in the Pre-service Special Educator Curriculum Adam W. Jordan and Nenad Radakovic

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Perspective of Special Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Special Education and the Nature of Mathematics Teaching and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction of a Model of Math-Based Actions of Special Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Statistical Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Teacher Mindset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rationale for Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconsidering Special Education Teacher Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Provide Content Opportunities: Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Center Statistics: Critical Statistical Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Promote Fluidity of Approach: Critical Teacher Mindsets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Purpose Matters: Rationales for Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

968 969 971 972 973 974 975 975 976 977 977 978 978 979 979

Abstract

Special Education (SPED) teachers interact with mathematics in two distinct ways. First, math is necessary to operationalize the field. This includes the interpretation of various psychological assessments using statistical analyses in order to advocate alongside vulnerable students. Second, teachers also must deliver mathematics instruction in a way that is consistent with best practices. In order to satisfy these two mathematical attributes of the field, assessment, and content delivery, teachers A. W. Jordan Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] N. Radakovic (*) Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_25

967

968

A. W. Jordan and N. Radakovic

possess an understanding of their own as well as their students’ ability to engage in mathematics To support teachers, teacher education in the field of special education must promote conceptual understanding and mathematical teaching practices and help students understand that math can be a tool for “reading and writing the world.” In this chapter, we describe an approach to teacher education in the field of special education that empowers pre-service teachers to consider mathematics as a tool toward liberatory practices instead of mathematics as a performance-based and gate-keeping subject. We start by outlining the critical disability perspective and the existing literature on the nature of mathematics teaching and learning. The chapter ends with a model of pre-service special educator mathematics and mathematics education curriculum. Keywords

Special education · Math education · Teacher education

Introduction There is a long held belief by policy makers that the mathematics education of students’ receiving special education should look different from the students who do not receive special education services. This stems from the assumption that students receiving special education services are not capable of doing complex mathematical tasks or at least, in order for them to access mathematics, pedagogy should be based on the transmission models such as direct instruction (Greenstein & Baglieri, 2018). As mainstream mathematics education moves toward practices that take up a constructivist paradigm and away from behaviorist models to embrace creativity, exploration, and student-centered approaches, in special education there still prevail rules-based, rote, and direct instruction models of mathematics teaching and learning. This is not only true for what is happening in P-12 classrooms, but also in special education teacher preparation programs (Tan et al., 2019). The opportunities that pre-service teachers receive to learn about the pedagogy of teaching math is often limited to specialized courses which ascribe to a medical model of disability, positioning math learning differences as inherent deficits within students, rather than the courses available to other pre-service teachers outside of special education. In terms of theoretical and research perspectives, special education is experiencing a paradigm shift as it moves away from the medical model of disability and toward the acceptance of other models of understanding disability, such as the social model, for example. To be epistemologically and ethically aligned with these ideas, we have to acknowledge that everyone should have access to creative mathematics education and rich mathematical opportunities. Although the professional organizations such as the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators are advocating for this access (AMTE, 2022), the process of creating these opportunities is slow and many students in P-12 spaces still do not have rich and equitable opportunities (Gutierrez, 2018). It makes sense then that the first step in considering innovative approaches to mathematics instruction in special education should be changing the pre-service special education teacher curriculum by starting from the principle that all students

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in. . .

969

should have access to rich mathematical opportunities. In addition, the mathematics that both current and future special educators need to know includes statistics, since statistical models (such as the normal distribution) are prevalent in special education. As the nature of statistics and data science is evolving due to technological advances and as we are also questioning the usefulness of some models, it is important to rethink the nature of statistical education that future special educators are receiving. In this chapter, we outline the elements of pre-service teacher mathematics and mathematics education curriculum. The chapter starts with a brief outline of a critical perspective to special education and its history, followed by the reason why math training of pre-service special educators should change. We then describe the deficit model of mathematics education, as well as constructivist mathematics efforts in special education. Finally, we propose a model for understanding the role of mathematics in the lives of special education teachers.

Critical Perspective of Special Education The origin of special education in the United States, in many ways, is revolutionary, though centuries late. The 1975 enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, last reauthorized in 2004 and now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), established, for the first time, the federal protection of a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities. Essentially, students with disabilities could no longer be denied an education, as they often were, based on their disability. This law, however, was not berthed in the altruism of caring congresspeople. To the contrary, federal legislation only came into existence after people both with and without disabilities protested, lobbied, and brought litigation in the pursuit of dignity and equity. IDEA, then, represents the progress of the people in bringing about disability justice in education. However, like nearly every civil rights law before and after it, IDEA is simply a legislative marker in time. It is the social response of the people which dictate the history. Likewise, it is the responsibility of the citizenry to continue to critique, adapt, and improve upon not only the legislation, but the social constructs surrounding it. Since its inception, special education has existed predominantly within a medical model of disability. Disability is seen as a deviation from the “norm” and often as a flaw that must be corrected through intervention. Davis (2017) reminded us, however, that the very notion of the norm is problematic, as it is code for the “ideal” (p. 2). The notion that there exists some mean, some average human being by which all individuals should be compared and contrasted has served to fuel many social ills from the very constructs of racism, classism, and eugenics, to name a few. Under this medical model of disability, the notion of the “otherly abled” becomes a position of deficit. This position suggests that individuals with disabilities, while legislatively included, are in fact “other than,” requiring “special” instruction and settings in order to thrive. Contrasting the medical model of disability is the social model. The social model, unlike the medical model, does not position disability as being a deficit of the self.

970

A. W. Jordan and N. Radakovic

Instead, it is society itself which is disabling. For example, a person who uses a wheelchair is not disabled because they do not use their legs to walk from place to place. They are disabled because someone built steps when a ramp would have been the inclusive architectural choice. Under this model, and using this example, the inability to walk is understood as an impairment, but it is society that has constructed the disability. Ramps are just as accessible as staircases to those using their legs to move about. In the trajectory of special education, we find ourselves in a time when folks become quickly encamped, clinging tightly to the medical model on which special education was founded, or standing firm in rejection for a full embracing of the social model of disability. However, we argue here that neither approach, adopted singularly, is particularly helpful. The flaws of the medical model are obvious, but the social model is not without fair critique. As Shakespeare (2017) suggested, even the social model, while important in the promotion of the disability rights movement, is inadequate in understanding issues of disability and for moving society in a progressive direction. He stated, “I find the social model unhelpful in understanding the complex interplay of individual and environmental factors in the lives of disabled people” (p. 202). He outlines a number of criticisms, including the reality that the social model continues a “neglect of impairment as an important aspect of many disabled people’s lives” (p. 199). Critiques of the way in which we attempt to “model” disability are necessary. In fact, these critiques are an invitation to progression when considering disability within cultural context. While an advancement toward justice, the social model is not the arrival point. Given this reality and the ongoing development of the fields of disability studies, critical disability studies, and yes, special education, it is past time to consider the ways in which we consider the preparation of teachers in P-12 schools as well as the ways in which we enact educational realities for children in schools. We must continue to ask questions that push us toward more liberated spaces. For example, we should ask, “In what ways are our schooling structures the genesis of disability for thousands of students?” This is a question that must be explored in the twentyfirst century if we are to approach, as Ferguson (1995) put it, a model of “rabid inclusion.” This approach means approaching disability not from a lens of deficit, but a lens of diversity. Critiques such as those offered by Shakespeare (2017) are an invitation to progression when considering disability within cultural context. In the same way the social model of disability may be viewed as a step toward justice, though imperfect, neither is a definition of “inclusion” an arrival point if it simply means we have students “with and without” disabilities co-inhabiting classroom spaces. Drawing on Shakespeare’s (2017) call to sophistication and complexity of approach, we suggest that one way we might have an immediate impact contributing to justice-oriented progression in special education is through the preparation of teacher candidates. Broad conversations about the conceptualization of special education are important, but for the purposes of this chapter, we begin by considering a core content area as well as a field essential to successful special education: mathematics. After all, math anxiety among pre-service and in-service teachers is a

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in. . .

971

very real phenomenon (Gresham, 2018). As P-12 classrooms continue to diversify, the notion of disability in mathematics, of disability in general, may benefit from teachers who understand the complexity of disability alongside the mathematics used both within and underpinning the field of special education. Teachers, perhaps, should imagine ways in which disabilities are functions of larger systems, not inherent deficits within people. Even when math-related impairments, such as dyscalculia, are present, perhaps teachers may embrace the ways in which students can and should be accommodated in order to obtain success. In order to achieve this view of mathematics within special education, special educators need to engage with mathematics in ways that consider math as a tool for social justice situated within the complexity of disability. In reality, as professionals, they will engage in mathematics in a variety of ways, both as teachers of mathematics and as professionals which must collect, analyze, and interpret data in ways that best support students.

Special Education and the Nature of Mathematics Teaching and Learning Depending on how it is framed, mathematics education practice, research, and policy can either humanize students or dehumanize them (Gutierrez, 2018). This also holds true for mathematics education of students within special education spaces. Unfortunately, there are many ways in which mathematics education of students with disabilities is a dehumanizing experience. Lambert and Tan (2017) described how mathematics education research excludes students with disabilities from the best practices in math education by focusing on low cognitive demand tasks and numbers and avoiding high cognitive demand tasks and other parts of mathematics, such as algebra, geometry, and data analysis. The consequence of this is that mainstream special education research positions students with disabilities as not being able to do powerful mathematics – the one that is challenging, emancipatory, and authentic (Yeh et al., 2017). The belief that students with disabilities are unable to do “hard” mathematics (that they are inadequate or incapable mathematicians) informs and frames the role that mathematics and mathematics education plays in pre-service special educator curriculum. First, special education teachers use mathematics and statistics to describe and make their decisions about their students. This is done through mathematical and statistical models such as the normal distribution. In teacher education programs, students are required to take statistics either as a stand-alone class, as a component of special education assessment courses, or both. Although originally designed to assist teachers to make informed decisions about their students, mathematical models and deciding on the course of students’ education based on quantitative data (scores) is often used to exclude and dehumanize students. In this way, these mathematical models, instead of becoming the tools to describe the reality, become realized abstractions (Skovsmose, 1994) in which mathematical models (abstractions) are applied to individuals and then individuals’ reality (their place in the educational system) is shaped by the models.

972

A. W. Jordan and N. Radakovic

Secondly, teacher education programs define mathematical pedagogical content knowledge needed for teaching mathematics. In these programs, mathematics is often reduced to the sets of procedures and mathematical learning paradigms which remain situated in the behaviorist traditions while mainstream mathematics education has been predominately framed using constructivist theories. Instead of teaching creative, inquiry-based, and personally authentic mathematics, students are subjected to direct instruction and denied access to other aspects of mathematics such as creativity, beauty, and play (Su, 2020). In summary, mathematics in special education spaces is seen as the tool to classify and track students, and the underlying assumption is that students with disabilities cannot do mathematics, at least not with the complexity of their non-disabled peers. While direct instruction is prevalent in mathematics education, in recent years there is an emerging vision of mathematics for students with disabilities which is humanizing. It involves centering students with disabilities, listening to their voices, and ideas and shifting the paradigm so that teachers and educators are working with students to reimagine math educator rather than simply working for students. This math education moved beyond basic skills and seeing mathematics as only a tool for “practical mathematics” (e.g., shopping and personal finance) and positioning students with disabilities as being able to do creative and powerful mathematics. Consistent with this vision, educators have documented working with students on mathematics that goes beyond basic numeracy such as teaching middle graders about Simpson’s Paradox in the context of sports (Ruttenberg-Rozen, 2020) and 3D geometry (Yeh et al., 2020).

Introduction of a Model of Math-Based Actions of Special Educators In order to meet the demand for a more complex consideration of the ways in which pre-service teacher candidates in the field of special education are prepared to engage in nuanced analysis of disability as well as the role mathematics plays in the lives of special education teachers, we present a suggested model (Fig. 1). In this chapter, we have asked the reader to consider the role of mathematics in the life of the special educator. Further, we have asked special educators to consider the very real and concrete ways math is a part of praxis, while also considering the nature of disability. It is through the enacted realities of teachers, that math becomes a sociopolitical tool. As such, we propose here a model for understanding the role of mathematics in the lives of special education teachers, with hopes that this model may drive discussion and contemplation about the ways in which math is both a necessity in the lives of special educators, but also a powerful tool for the social and political change. The model is built around four concepts, explained in detail in subsequent sections: 1. The special educator’s mathematical knowledge for teaching. 2. The special educator’s conceptualization of critical statistical literacy.

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in. . .

973

Fig. 1 Math-based actions of the special educator

3. The special educator’s critical mindset toward mathematics. 4. The special educator’s rationale for teaching.

Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Mathematical knowledge for teaching acknowledges that teachers' math knowledge is always in relation to their teaching (Ball et al, 2008). We borrow the term “powerful mathematics” from Yeh et al. (2017) to describe the kind of mathematics that students should learn. Knowledge of powerful mathematics centers around conceptual understanding, logical thinking, and problem-solving. It also involves what Gutstein (2006), following Paolo Freire, calls “reading and writing the world with mathematics,” that is, using mathematics to understand the world we live in. In order for students to do and use mathematics, it is necessary for “every student [to] have access to quality mathematics curriculum, effective teaching and learning, high expectations, and the support and resources needed to maximize their learning potential” (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics, 2014). In order for all individuals to be effective learners of mathematics, students must have a productive

974

A. W. Jordan and N. Radakovic

disposition toward math, that is, believe that math is a worthwhile enterprise that can be learned by themselves and their future students (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics, 2014). In addition, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2014) recognizes that math is learned through making connections between mathematical objects, practices, and representations. There are many ways to make these connections since mathematical representations and concepts are interconnected. The learning of mathematics is more than the acquisition of basic computational and procedural skills: it is an act of enriching the web of connections. Another feature of powerful mathematics is that it is connected to contexts that are personally and culturally authentic for learners. Authenticity involves the development of tasks and activities that are meaningful, relatable, and relevant to students. There are many views on what makes a task authentic (e.g., Levinson et al., 2012), but we choose to follow the distinction made by Murphy et al. (2007) between cultural authenticity and personal authenticity. They assert that cultural authenticity is present when students engage in a common social issue (e.g., community building, climate change, police brutality, etc.) whereas personal authenticity refers to an issue of importance to an individual student (e.g., family, job, etc.). These two types of authenticity are not mutually exclusive: it is possible for an issue to be both culturally and personally authentic.

Critical Statistical Literacy Special education teachers need to be able to collect, represent, analyze, interpret, and make decisions using quantitative and qualitative data (Swain & Hagaman, 2020). This is anything from interpreting various psychometric measures to collecting their own data as well as communicating that data to students, families, and administrators. This also includes creating Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), a bedrock structure of special education. These processes are legally mandated through the Individuals with Disabilities with Education Act (IDEA, 2004). Data collection, analysis, and interpretation are not only a form of best practice, but a mandate of IDEA. Recent work in statistical literacy shows that it is not enough for PSTs to use statistics as a tool but also understand how statistics has been historically misused and how it creates aforementioned realized abstractions. As the result of recent sociopolitical turn in math education (Gutierrez, 2013), Weiland (2017) makes a distinction between statistical literacy and critical statistical literacy. Statistical literacy approach includes making sense of data and constructing and critiquing statistical arguments in diverse contexts. It also includes both knowledge elements and dispositional elements. The dispositional elements of statistical literacy include asking the “worry” questions about the data that includes questions about sample, reliability of the source, and the validity of the methods presented (Gal, 2005). Weiland (2017) introduced the critical statistics elements including the understanding how statistical arguments can shape and enforce social structures,

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in. . .

975

understanding one’s own privilege and positionality and how it influences the statistical arguments, and use statistical information and arguments to “destabilize and reshape structures of injustice for a more just society” (p. 41).

Critical Teacher Mindset Admittedly, the concept of mindset has become a controversial topic in the field of education. Dweck (2007) was certainly not the first person to consider attitudes toward learning, but she did coin the now popular phrases of “growth and fixed mindset.” The notion is that individuals can, through a growth mindset, focus on a position of flexibility which welcomes challenges and subsequent learning or they can remain fixed in preconceived notions of “can and cannot.” In short, having a growth mindset means that one believes in the potential for development in an area. While we agree that teacher dispositions and attitudes toward mathematics, key components of mindset, are important, we posit here that the dichotomous way in which mindset is often discussed is incomplete in this context. In our experiences, special educators often have views of mathematics which exist much more on a continuum than in a fixed or growth dichotomy. For example, many teachers feel comfortable thinking of themselves as mathematicians, but struggle with trusting their abilities to “teach math.” Many teachers, on the other hand, may feel comfortable teaching mathematics, but may feel limited in what type of math they feel comfortable teaching. We have certainly worked with more than one pre-service teacher who has avoided teaching special education in the secondary setting due to fears of content inadequacies. In many ways, these views may be associated with the imposter syndrome many early-career teaching professionals face, but they may also be associated with longstanding math anxieties and inconsistent beliefs of what math “is” or “is not” in the lives of teachers (Ball et al., 2008). Additionally, the concept of a dichotomous mindset is problematic because it takes the responsibility away from the societal structures that prevent many students (including students with disabilities) to participate in powerful and creative mathematics instruction. Instead, the responsibility is placed on individuals and their mindsets. Thus, the students who are not successful by traditional metrics are labeled as having “fixed mindsets” about their abilities. We suggest that teachers should have a critical mathematical mindset which means being aware of their attitudes toward mathematics but also understanding that mathematics teaching does nor exist in a vacuum, but rather is the result of complex sociopolitical interactions (ndunda & Radakovic, 2020).

Rationale for Teaching One approach to supporting teachers in their understanding of the complexity of their role is through the use of a written rationale. The language of a “rationale” for reaching has historical roots in the social studies, though the concepts of teacher

976

A. W. Jordan and N. Radakovic

purpose or a vision for teaching span across the disciplines. However, it was Newmann (1970, 1977), Shaver (1977), and Shaver and Strong (1982) that brought about the early conversations of a “rationale for teaching.” Their collective position was that teachers should teach from articulated and written statement of purpose. This articulated purpose, then, should be constantly revisited and revised as teachers engage in a process of reflective practice. Other authors have expanded this understanding of rationale-based teaching. Dinkelman (2009), for example, helped to clarify the function of a rationale by centering the focus around the answering of a powerful question, “What are you teaching for?” He furthers the notion by stating that a rationale for teaching should go beyond the “rhetoric of a ‘teaching philosophy’ and towards a practical, vital statement of the aims that direct the very real deliberations teachers engage in as they sort out questions of what is worth knowing and how best to teach it” (p. 92). Drawing on Dinkelman’s (2009) work, Hawley (2010) focused on how beginning teachers understand and enact their rationales once they are engaged in the teaching process. His findings suggested that while beginning teachers often struggle to implement their stated rationales, the written rationale process aided new teachers in goal development and the rationale served as a center-piece for teacher reflection (p. 155). Subsequently, other authors such as Jordan et al. (2017) have considered how rationales may impact the ways in which teachers in high-needs schools may benefit from an articulated rationale, finding that a theme of care as pedagogy is a common connecting theme among teachers in public alternative school settings. We posit that special education teachers should develop a general rationale for teaching which responds to Dinkelman’s (2009) question of teacher reflection, “What are you teaching for?” Special education is a field with high rates of turnover and documented teacher burnout. Through purpose articulation, teachers may benefit from more targeted reflection, much like the participants in Hawley’s (2010) study. In relation to mathematics and as we continue to consider the ways in which special educators engage with mathematics at multiple levels, we extend a revised, targeted version of Dinkelman’s question to future and current special educators: “How is mathematics important to your praxis?” As teachers engage in the targeted articulation of expressing the function and purpose of mathematics in their daily lives, we believe they will have the potential to connect mathematics to their overall purpose for teaching. For teachers who struggle to express a connection to mathematics, this process may allow teachers to consider math as a tool instead of a task.

Reconsidering Special Education Teacher Preparation Admittedly, our proposed model is theoretical in nature. Drawing on research from a number of different fields, our model asks teachers to consider their interaction with mathematics in four domains: mathematical knowledge for teaching, critical statistical literacy, critical mindset toward mathematics, and finally, the development of a rationale for teaching. Each of these domains is grounded within its own literature base, but considering these constructs in collaboration with one another is a novel

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in. . .

977

approach. In the following sections, we offer our own reflections of how we have attempted to incorporate these constructs into our own teaching and our own reflective practices.

Provide Content Opportunities: Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching While this construct may be obvious, we suggest that teacher preparation programs in special education incorporate course work focused on both the content and the praxis of teaching math. These are changes we are currently engaged in making at the College of Charleston. Student feedback suggests that many students feel underprepared in the area of mathematics, particularly when considering the direct teaching of mathematics. To address this, we have worked to propose curricular revisions which place SPED majors in math pedagogy-focused classes alongside their general education major peers. In doing so, it is our hope that students not only begin to have more direct experiences with mathematics teaching at the pre-service level, but that the university classroom begins to engage special and general educators in practices that will be common in the professional lives of teachers, such as co-teaching. One of the courses we are working to include in the SPED curriculum is a course called Development of Mathematical Thinking. In this course, pre-service teachers (PSTs) learn mathematics knowledge for teaching: through problem-solving, they explore conceptual understanding of numbers and operations, algebra, data and probability, and geometry. PSTs investigate their own relationship with mathematics as well as encountering mathematics as being a creative discipline.

Center Statistics: Critical Statistical Literacy Statistics is important to Special Education. It is often a subject that many students would prefer to avoid. First, teacher preparation programs should evaluate how well they are preparing students for the mathematics of statistics. However, second, we are proposing an approach in teacher education that helps students become not just statistically literate, but critically statistically literate. As the shift toward data-driven instruction dominates P-12 spaces, teachers must obviously be able to collect, analyze, and interpret data. Special educators are vital team members on Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams, Multi-tiered Systems of Supports teams, Response to Intervention teams, and a whole host of other data-driven teams. While sound data and statistics skills are essential, we argue that so too is an approach to statistics that is critical in nature. Teacher preparation programs can promote critical statistical literacy by incorporating publicly available data in coursework focused on the assessment process. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics offers a number of publicly available datasets which can be broken down into demographic categories such as race, class, gender, and ability status. By helping students conceptualize the way data

978

A. W. Jordan and N. Radakovic

and statistics can be used as tools to recognize and combat injustice, special educators can begin to conceptualize their role in the struggle for inclusion and equality.

Promote Fluidity of Approach: Critical Teacher Mindsets As stated earlier, we believe an approach to mathematical mindsets must be one viewed on a continuum, not a dichotomy. Much like the learning process itself, students should be allowed to move from statuses of uncomfortability to comfortability within the many aspects of math content and math pedagogy. The ascertainment of mathematical knowledge for teaching is a constant process. Students must be allowed to express their anxieties and share their triumphs with mathematics just as we expect students in P-12 to do. Special education is a field with a long history of advocacy. In fact, the very field itself was berthed from the struggles of activists, not from the altruism of the general populace. As such, teacher preparation programs must allow students the opportunity to consider their role as a critical educator. Lerone Bennett Jr. (1972) said, “An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor” (p. 40). It is our view that a call to inclusive education is a call that requires the “pushing up against” oppressive systems built upon the idea that separate can be equal. Helping students develop this mindset is no small task. We suggest that special education teacher preparation programs teach disability history as one powerful tool for helping students engage in the process of being critical about the power structures within their chosen profession. In our program, we do this in two direct ways. First, in a course entitled Foundations of Education, students engage in a critical history of disability. Second, through the use of book and film studies as assignments in courses focused on the characteristics of students with disabilities, we ask students to grapple with the history of the field. One powerful text resource we use and recommend is Kim Nielsen’s (2012) A Disability History of the United States. Through a collaborative book study, students are introduced to the history of disability in the United States, for better or worse. This process leads students to reckon with the reality of systemic oppression while also recognizing the potential for justice. A second resource we suggest, through film, is the documentary Crip Camp, which at present is freely available on YouTube. This film, which features profound disability rights activist Judy Heumann, offers students the perspective of seeing disabled people as fierce self-advocates alongside non-disabled supporters. After the film, students engage in critical self-analysis. These experiences allow students the opportunity to discuss their own continuum of development as critical educators.

Purpose Matters: Rationales for Teaching Finally, purpose matters in teaching. Numerous studies support this notion (Dinkelman, 2009; Hawley, 2010, 2012; Hawley et al., 2012; Jordan et al., 2017). It is our belief that teacher preparation programs should invite students to engage in

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in. . .

979

the rationale development process. By asking students, early in a program, to articulate their purpose, and then asking them to continually reflect upon that purpose and restate their intent, we invite teachers to reflective practice. This invites students into a process, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) would state, of “inquiry as stance.” Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) described “inquiry as stance” as “a grounded theory of action that positions the role of practitioners and practitioner knowledge as central to the goal of transforming teaching, learning, leading, and schooling” (p. 119). We too believe that teachers, both pre-service and veteran, must be central to the reality of transformative teaching. In order to help our students engage in this process, we ask special education majors to write a rationale for teaching, using the model provided by Hawley et al. (2019), in their first semester of coursework. Each semester after, students are asked to revise and update this document, with class discussions accompanying their process of becoming teachers. Quite often we see rationales transition from an early thought of “helping others” to a very detailed discussion of the ways in which they will stand alongside their students with disabilities in advocating for inclusion. By engaging undergraduate students in the very processes we expect of ourselves as teacher educators, and of teacher leaders in P-12 spaces, we prepare students for a culture of reflective practice. When considering mathematics and special education, this is critically important. Engaging students in reflection about math and math teaching, students can begin to identify their own dispositions and work to develop their abilities.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have outlined an approach to teacher preparation in special education that sees math as central to the lived realities of special educators. We see mathematics as important from a content perspective, but also from a data collection, analysis, and interpretation perspective. Likewise, we recognize that students’ understanding of the nature of mathematics in their lives exists on a continuum, changing all the time. Our model for a progressive special education is, hopefully, one part of an ongoing conversation in the field about the nature of mathematics in teaching and the role of the critical special educator. While there is much to learn and much to figure out, we hope our present approach offers transparent insight, acknowledging our own places on the continuum. Math matters in special education, and the goal is to help students understand this reality.

References Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators. (2022). Statement on equitable and inclusive mathematics teaching and learning. AMTE. https://amte.net/sites/amte.net/files/AMTE% 20Statement%20April%202022.pdf

980

A. W. Jordan and N. Radakovic

Ball, D. L., Thames, M. H., & Phelps, G. (2008). Content knowledge for teaching: What makes it special? Journal of Teacher Education, 59(5), 389–407. Bennett, L. (1972). The challenge of blackness. Johnson Publishing Company. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance practitioner research for the next generation. Teachers College Press. Davis, L. J. (2017). Introduction: Disability, normality, and power. In L. J. Davis (Ed.), The disability studies reader (5th ed., pp. 1–14). Routledge. Dinkelman, T. (2009). Reflection and resistance: The challenge of rationale-based teacher education. Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education, 2(1), 91–108. Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Ballantine Books. Ferguson, D. (1995). The real challenge of inclusion: Confessions of a “rabid inclusionist”. Phi Delta Kappan, 77(4), 281–287. Gal, I. (2005). Towards “probability literacy” for all citizens: building blocks and instructional dilemmas. In Jones, G. A. (Ed.), Exploring probability in school: Challenges for teaching and learning (pp. 39–63). Springer. Greenstein, S., & Baglieri, S. (2018). Imagining mathematical thinking for inclusive curriculum: A conversation. Investigations in Mathematics Learning, 10(3), 133–144. Gresham, G. (2018). Preservice to inservice: Does mathematics anxiety change with teaching experience? Journal of Teacher Education, 69(1), 90–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0022487117702580 Gutierrez, R. (2013). The sociopolitical turn in mathematics education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(1), 37–68. Gutierrez, R. (2018). The need to rehumanize mathematics. In I. Goffney, R. Gutierrez, & M. Boston (Eds.), Rehumanizing mathematics for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students (pp. 1–10). NCTM. Gutstein, E. (2006). Reading and writing the world with mathematics: Toward a pedagogy for social justice. Routledge. Hawley, T. S. (2010). Purpose into practice: The problems and possibilities of rationale-based practice in social studies. Theory and Research in Social Education, 38(1), 298–316. Hawley, T. S. (2012). Purpose as content and pedagogy: Rationale-development as a core theme of social studies teacher education. Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education, 4(3), 1–17. Hawley, T. S., Pifel, A. R., & Jordan, A. W. (2012). Structure, citizenship, and professionalism: Exploring rationale development as part of graduate education in social studies. The Journal of Social Studies Research, 36(3), 245–262. Hawley, T. S., Levicky, M., & Jordan, A. W. (2019). Purpose matters in teaching: Leveraging purpose to transform teaching and learning. Teaching Social Studies, 19(2), 15–20. Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 (2004). Jordan, A. W., Jordan, K. H., & Hawley, T. S. (2017). Purpose and passion: The rationales of public alternative school teachers. The Journal of Social Studies Research, 41(4), 263–273. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jssr.2017.01.004 Lambert, R., & Tan, P. (2017). Conceptualizations of students with and without disabilities as mathematical problem solvers in educational research: A critical review. Education Sciences, 7 (2), 51. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci7020051 Levinson, R., Kent, P., Pratt, D., Kapadia, R., & Yogui, C. (2012). Risk-based decision making in a scientific issue: A study of teachers discussing a dilemma through a microworld. Science Education, 96(2), 212–233. Murphy, P., Lunn, S., & Jones, H. (2007). The impact of authentic learning on students’ engagement with physics. The Curriculum Journal, 17(3), 229–246. National Council for Teachers of Mathematics. (2014). Principles to actions: Executive summary. Retrieved from https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Standards_and_Positions/ PtAExecutiveSummary.pdf ndunda, m., & Radakovic, N. (2020). Standardization and borders in mathematics pre-service teacher education: A duoethnographic exploration. In N. Radakovic & L. Jao (Eds.), Borders in mathematics pre-service teacher education (pp. 267–277). Springer.

Mathematics as Praxis: Reconceptualizing the Role of Mathematics in. . .

981

Newmann, F. M. (1970). Clarifying public controversy: An approach to teaching social studies. Little, Brown, and Company. Newmann, F. M. (1977). Building a rationale for civic education. In J. P. Shaver (Ed.), Building rationales for citizenship education. National Council for the Social Studies. Nielsen, K. E. (2012). A disability history of the United States. Beacon Press. Ruttenberg-Rozen, R. (2020). A wonder-full task leads to a wonder-full intervention. The Mathematics Teacher, 113(6), 474–479. Shakespeare, T. (2017). The social model of disability. In L. J. Davis (Ed.), The disability studies reader (5th ed., pp. 195–203). Routledge. Shaver, J. P. (1977). The task of rationale-building for citizenship education. In J. P. Shaver (Ed.), Building rationales for citizenship education (pp. 96–116). National Council for the Social Studies. Shaver, J. P., & Strong, W. (1982). Facing value decisions: Rationale-building for teachers. Teachers College Press. Skovsmose, O. (1994). Towards philosophy of critical mathematics education. Kluwer. Su, F. (2020). Mathematics for human flourishing. Yale University Press. Swain, K. D., & Hagaman, J. L. (2020). Elementary special education teachers’ use of CBM data: A 20-year follow-up. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 64(1), 48–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/1045988x.2019.1678009 Tan, P., Padilla, A., Mason, E. N., & Sheldon, J. (2019). Humanizing disability in mathematics education: Forging new paths. NCTM. Weiland, T. (2017). Problematizing statistical literacy: An intersection of critical and statistical literacies. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 96(1), 33–47. Yeh, C., Ellis, M. W., & Koehn Hurtado, C. (2017). Reimagining mathematics classroom. NCTM. Yeh, C., Sugita, T., & Tan, P. (2020). Reimagining inclusive spaces for mathematics learning. Mathematics Teacher, 113(9), 708–714.

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research: A Post-critical Dialogue Susan Jagger and Peter Pericles Trifonas

Contents Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 984 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 999

Abstract

This text enacts a form of deconstructive inquiry into the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research as it reflects on a participatory exploration of the school garden. The characteristic features of the post-critical dialogical approach we take – putting two columns in play – actively decenter meaning in the interpretive moments of the act of reading as writing. The point of entry attempts to broach the set of systemic hierarchical relations underlying the relations of power and knowledge in the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research. Specifically, the ethics and politics of its representation, the practices it enacts, endorses, and tries to reproduce. Respecting what Jacques Derrida has called the “exigencies” or norms of a classical protocols of reading and writing, it interrogates the representation of qualitative inquiry and the conditions of its interpretability as the working-out of ideas through language in the power and knowledge of a shared space of meaning-making. The text exemplifies what a deconstructive mode of intervention would actually look like and do as qualitative inquiry and how its praxis of productive resistance could enable an ethical reform of the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research. S. Jagger (*) School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. P. Trifonas Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_17

983

984

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

Keywords

Deconstruction · Post-critical · Participatory research · School garden · Teaching · Learning

Prologue The matter-of-course underestimation or outright dismissal of the potential – if not the substantive value – of deconstruction for reconceptualizing the ethical and political questions associated with issues of pedagogy and research is most curious. Institutional authority is always grounded in the relations of its own language to a philosophy of practice. The natural propensity to push the borders of deconstructive inquiry beyond the limits of textuality into the “real world” of educational institutions is justified by the fact that the educational bodies comprise the scene of teaching, learning, and research. The teacher and the student situated within the institution and its self-sustaining narrative are in themselves the empirical constructions of discourse and therefore textualizations of living experience subject to, or the subject of, an enacted language. This poststructuralist viewpoint clears the way for a post-critical questioning of the discourse endorsing the institutionalization of educational practices embodied within curricular frameworks in the scene of teaching, learning, and research previously believed to be neutral and transparent. In essence, it prepares the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological groundwork for deconstructive acts of research as reading and writing that possess the potential to reveal the submerged sociocultural structures and juridico-political forces at work within the pedagogical institutionalization of knowledges that directly affect the teacher and the student and also shape the ethical course of a given discipline. That is where we begin. In this respect, this text enacts a form of deconstructive inquiry into the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research. The characteristic features of the postcritical dialogical approach we take – putting two columns in play – actively decenter meaning in the interpretive moments of the act of reading as writing. The point of entry attempts to broach the set of systemic hierarchical relations underlying the relations of power and knowledge in the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research. Specifically, the ethics and politics of its representation, the practices it enacts, endorses, and tries to reproduce. The column on the left takes the form of a series of epistolary address to “R” and “J” that describe a participatory research project with elementary students, the Cool Researchers, on the school garden. Respecting what Jacques Derrida has called the “exigencies” or norms of a classical protocols of reading and writing, it interrogates the representation of qualitative inquiry and the conditions of its interpretability as the working-out of ideas through language in the power and knowledge of a shared space of meaningmaking. The column on the right supplements the pragmatic and conceptual sense of the one on the left and produces the hermeneutical problems of reading and writing research. The text exemplifies what a deconstructive mode of intervention would

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

985

actually look like and do as qualitative inquiry and how its praxis of productive resistance could enable an ethical reform of the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research. Dear R, And what is to come? What remains to be done? And what comes next? And first, at the end as at the beginning there must be a recognition, a thanks to you, Reader, for your willingness to engage with this text, for accepting the envois that I have sent out, unsure of their recipient, and grateful for their receipt by your hands, and in your time. This sharing of the work, the research text, is an opening of me and this story to you and I am happy that you accepted the invitation to add your authorship to it. Our presentation at the research conference was great. The Cool Researchers, while nervous, did an excellent job presenting their research of the school garden to an audience of university graduate students, faculty, and even a few of their own parents. They answered questions from the audience thoughtfully, honestly, and eloquently. And to be honest, but of course biased, the research that the Cool Researchers presented, their engagement in the research process, the level of skill and also intuition as they worked through determining research questions, planning and conducting data collection, analyzing a large volume of data and disseminating their work matched the work of other researchers presenting at the session. The conference organizers were very excited to have the Cool Researchers there—this was the first time that elementary school students presented a research project that they had done—and enthusiastically congratulated the

I Given that the problem of the institution of education is posed “at the [epistemological and performative] root of philosophy as teaching,”2 the scene of teaching has been of sustained interest for Jacques Derrida in this regard since Of Grammatology. And he has painstakingly reiterated this point many times before as in “Où Commence et Comment Finit un Corps Enseignant,” for the sake of protecting the right to philosophy education and free thinking in France since the early seventies: “Deconstruction—or at least that which I proposed under this name that is as good as (qui en vaut bien) anotherbut not more—has therefore always had bearing (porté) in principle on the apparatus and the function of teaching in general.”3 Derrida’s philosophical work has exposed contradictions in the decidable ethics of a “right” and “wrong” approach to thinking and thought active below the structures of pedagogy that oppress agency. Like Paolo Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy of conscientização, deconstruction acts upon the hegemony of dominant ideologies and fixed meanings within the institution of education that render “official knowledge” as the only reproducible form of cultural capital, but keeps the systemic manifestation of coercive elements in the discourse of schooling practice and the logic of its institutions that have the potential to

986

researchers. To this, the Cool Researchers graciously accepted the kind words and very humbly spoke of their research experience. And in their response, and in their participation in the conference, and in the whole of the research project, I was struck by their honesty and their openness, and their humility. Despite concerns at the university whether it was “feasible” to have elementary school aged students participate as “researchers,” I suspected that the students would be able to do it. I did not know, I could not possibly know, how the research text would unfold, how the research space would be navigated. There was no map. But there was in the Cool Researchers a willingness to explore an openness to try, a curiosity to find out what might actually be possible. And the school garden, while being the focus of the research space and the research text, also provides a motif for the research itself. Working with and in the bounding structures of the overlapping historical structures of education and academia, and traditions of research. This research space and research text extends beyond, spilling over its planters, growing over its fences, resisting the boundaries of these structures, even weakening their strength and uplifting their foundations. Despite the structures and the fences and the boundaries put into place to enclose the space, to separate inside from outside, the garden grows in its own way. Sustaining life from the environment around it and giving life back to that environment quietly, persisting quietly, growing quietly, carrying on always and already there. The garden opens up its enclosures to possibilities, to difference.

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

shape the trajectory of teaching and learning in continual displacement. The biases of pedagogical goals or aims are laid bare as the products of a normative projection of curricular ideology working toward a specific production of epistemological subjectivity. Deconstruction enacts a post-critical resistance that heightens our academic responsibility “to interrogate, to exhibit, to criticize [curriculum and pedagogy] systematically – with an eye toward transformation”4 of educational institutions for increasing subjective agency, enhancing democracy, and actualizing social justice. The point is not a peaceful resolution of the master/ slave dialectic of the teacher/student relation proposed by Freire (1970) in Pedagogy of the Oppressed for an enlightened synthesis of oppositional ontologies and conflicting ideologies linking knowledge with power in the form of a self-corrective thinking that clarifies and transforms a consciousness of “the real.” Moving toward a postcritical pedagogy after Freire, what does it mean to deconstruct the institution of education as the scene of teaching? What are the implications for educational research? The principles of deconstruction have opened up the possibilities of a postcritical displacement of the emancipatory impetus for rethinking the historical materialism of the scene of teaching and the politics of exclusion after Freire (1970).5 This focus alone can and has helped minimize the gap or delay separating theory from practice with a view to the righting of wrongs of pedagogy without foreclosing the ends of liberatory interventions.

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

Inhabiting this openness, this opening to possibility, the organic dehiscence permeated through the research space we created, through the research texts that were penned collaboratively by the Cool Researchers, the adult research participants, and me. All so informed by the contexts that we worked with and in. And these openings were both recognized always and already within the research space and also re-created through our inter-actions with and in that space. Within the research space, and with and in the garden, were curricular openings. The garden was both a content and context for learning about the prescribed curriculum: for learning and teaching in science, social studies, language arts, mathematics, and fine arts. And with and in the garden, these disciplines separated by name, in written and widely understood texts, came together, complemented each other, supported each other, blurred each other’s boundaries and in doing so opened up further possibilities for unique and different experiences for learning. And not only was the garden a context for engaging with and in the traditional curriculum, but organically opened, it was also a place where students through experiencing place and being in place nurtured affective understandings of the garden and of the broader environment. For many students, the garden was a place of refuge: a space for relaxing, and for caring, and for being cared for. And to the Cool Researchers, this was surprising. It was unexpected and opened up for them further a curriculum of the garden beyond what is written, enclosed within science, social studies, and so on.

987

Deconstruction explores the contradictions, impossibilities, and contingencies of praxis grounding acts of hegemonic resistance. Disrupting the power/knowledge nexus at work for the privileging and canonization of certain texts that uphold the sanctity of a system of education as well as those that descry it. Born “of an other logic,”6 parergonal – outside but operating against (and therefore within) the conceptual enclosure Western oppositional rationality – deconstruction has done much to question the ethical polity and good faith underlying the education reproduction and transmission of given or common understandings. It is an effective and efficient manner for undoing the ideological substrata reinforcing the politics of educational discourse and the ethics of practice. Deconstruction can offer a profound post-critical resistance to the philosophical and institutional instruments of domination embedded within the praxeology of teachinglearning. Some aspects of Derridean philosophical play have been invaluable for the evolution of “educational inquiry”: difference, différance, deferral, trace, inversion and displacement, binary thinking, phallogocentrism, writing, undecidability, decentering, play supplementarity, and so on. Respecting what Derrida has called the “exigencies” of a classical protocol of reading, deconstruction is has been useful for actualizing a positive transformation of the institution of pedagogy. It forces reflection on the objectified values of teaching, learning,

988

The school garden as a content and a context for learning displaces and decenters the centrality of the C & I landscape1, upsetting its rigid and divided structures. The garden digs beneath and digs around, uprooting and replanting curriculum. Nurturing a curriculum that grows from lived experiences in place and with place: sensory experience, emotional experiences, memories of past experiences, possibilities for experiences to come, and that organically, persistently, quietly beckon the learner to be open to the difference of multiplicity, of alterity, that is always and already there within curriculum. The garden and the research space that it permeated also opened necessary spaces for difference in the research methodology and methods. Going into this research space, I was very much responding to the roles of researchers and the framing of research within classrooms that I taught in, and whose communities I was a member of. I observed and experienced research projects in which researchers— experts, outsiders— standing at the periphery with their sunglasses on came into the class, the school, the community. Armed with surveys and questionnaires to be completed, these “researchers” snapped some postured photographs and then left just as abruptly as they arrived as strangers. In some instances, “findings” were shared, usually as “listed recommendations to be followed” to improve teaching practice with their theory. This is not to say that all research in schools is done this way— it is not! There are many examples of research that are respectful, reciprocal, and supportive of classes, schools, and school communities. But these are the

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

and knowledge by enacting resistance to the decidability of meaning and interpretation. Only at the threshold of sense is epistemological subjectivity is compelled to push the outer limits of its own frames of knowledge and reference thereby extending consciousness beyond what is possible within definite limits of experience. Learning is relative to the dissonances of thought and thinking always already “at war” within the confinement of the normative parameters of reflexivity. Freedom resolves the conflict in a new consciousness and more ethical ontology (Freire 1970). The scene of teaching comprises the student the teacher and the institution. These constituent bodies are defined not only in and of themselves with respect to their rights, obligations, freedoms, and duties as the entities of a tripartite division of educational space. Each agent is more and less than the sum of its parts as mutable figures grounding the synchrony and diachrony of interrelations in the scene of teaching. The one cannot exist without the other. Moreover, the performativity of each educational agent is subjectively prone to the empirical and ideological effects of internally and externally motivated influences upon the formations situating the scene of teaching that create a specific sociocultural and ethicopolitical niche for the possibility of pedagogy to happen. Support for the material conditions of the system’s structure crucial to its “living on” is maintained by the hegemonic entrenchment of legitimating metanarratives that demarcate the logic of the evolution of theory and theory and practice within the institution of

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

cinders of my experiences within the research space, that I bring forth to this moment of writing. And these experiences so highlight the binary oppositions commonly and historically traced in educational research, researcher-researched teacher-student expert—novice adult-child university—K-12 school quantitative-qualitative objective-subjective were what I wanted to work against to overturn, to upset. And so I chose to counter the dominant terms of these binaries by working collaboratively, openly, not with teachers, not with adults, but with elementary school students, and opened up the research space and the research text to their active involvement in all elements of the process: discussing and planning topics to study, creating methods for and conducting data collection, analyzing data, and disseminating research findings. In the research space and the research text, I was not exclusively in the role of expert or teacher, nor was I in the role of student or novice. Instead the Cool Researchers and I worked within the tensions of the space in-between the text, in-between where we were at once teacher and student, student and teacher, expert and novice, novice and expert. It was a space, a text, in flux always changing, responding, and requiring response. And the research space, the research text, opened up spaces in-between for additional tensions as we negotiated our respectively shifting roles. I struggled throughout the research with the very impossibility of possibly knowing what my role should be at any given moment in the research space, the research text. I worked

989

education. “Official discourses” justify and are justified by an ethos of praxis. The applicability of the general principles of deconstruction to the constitutive elements comprising the materiality of the scene of teaching is due to the fact that the educational bodies inhabiting the scene of teaching interpellate the effects of a pervading textuality in thought and action. The semiotic elements of language are plastic – malleable in form and negotiable in content – and construct the virtual space of pedagogy and its communicational logic of meaning making. Signs, signifiers, and referents circulate in the scene of teaching anchoring the possibilities of interpretability to an epistemological metanarrative as a textual “staging” of “knowledge events.” The semiotic bounds of meaning making are thus always already delimited and inscribe the rationality of teacher and student subjectivity in the action of the classroom. The discourse infusing the constitution of this educational site is a fertile ethical and political ground for deconstruction because the actual circumstances of a particular pedagogy imply the institutional privileging of a set of ideological assumptions toward teaching, learning, and knowledge. The precise logic of which underlies and guides the prescriptive implementation of a hierarchical frameworking of “knowledge events” in the concrete form of enacted curriculum. Education is always the intentional and non-intentional construction of a philosophy. II Within the existing disciplinary structure and valuations of a

990

through these tensions on my own; looking back, I wish that I discussed them with my research partners. Did they also feel these tensions? At times, I thought that they may have felt confusion as I also did. However, their confusion (if indeed it was confusion) did not seem to hold back the Cool Researchers as they dug into the research space, the research text, with enthusiasm and a keenness to explore, to question, to take risks, to try things out. And together, these characteristics allowed them to wonder and to wander through the research space, the research text, reading that space and taking a shared authorship, for that time, of the research text. I did tell the Cool Researchers at one point early on in our work together, in our exploration of the research space, the research text, that there was some uncertainty at the university whether or not they would be able to do research, they were after all only in grade six. And as these spoken uncertainties motivated me to quietly prove louder voices wrong, I suspect that the same was true for the Cool Researchers. And while fueled, at least to some extent, by spite, this motivation helped them to break through the dominance of the researcher, the teacher, the adult, the expert, the academy, the institution. In doing so, to create a space, a text that quietly but certainly asserted the ability, the extent of which, is immeasurable of the Cool Researchers in particular, and children in general, to engage with and in research and make invaluable contributions to practice and theory, theory and practice. Their voices can and should be heard both as the researched and researcher, researcher

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

pedagogical institution, deconstruction charges neither a destruction of the “old system” nor a flat-out denial of the conventionality of any “inherited epistemology.” There is no “false consciousness” to transgress or resist to engender a new ontology or ethic. Any writing inscribed on the mind and body cannot be forgotten or erased. Rather, it is a more complicated and delicate matter of acknowledging and managing a debt and duty to the past, present, and future of teaching, learning, and knowledge. Resistance and transformation are enacted agentially by a responsibility to question the logic of a priori assumptions about the world and being in it. Deconstruction obliges a patient and unrelenting reading from within the scene of teaching that problematizes the arbitrary working-out of its “knowledge events” as the discursive practices grounding epistemological foundations via a procedural normativity. An “ethics of practice” is operationalized in thought and action to produce particular ontological objectives through a method of discourse performances. Deconstruction unbalances the deliberate equationing of language and meaning as the only authentic and “rational” hermeneutics of education. Challenging and disrupting the historical continuity of the institution’s capability to reproduce its logic as the codic source for “Truth” manifest in the mind of “pure[ly] egological subject”7 nurtured with a teaching body. Unlike a Marxist ideology critique, deconstruction eschews the possibility of recourse to any conception of reality unmediated by language, “Il n’ y a pas

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

and researched. These openings in curriculum and in methodology, for me, needed to be mirrored in my re-representation of the research text. My re-presentation needed to reflect the openings, the disruptions, the spaces created by the research itself. It needed to itself have spaces, openings, and disruptions, in its physical layout and in its possible readings. Following Derrida, trying to trace his gait but with my own steps, and informed by Barthes, my re-presentation of the research space, the research text, attempted, with the very possibility of non-arrival, of failure, to upset the linearity, the structure, the rigidity of the writing. I remember a friend in academia once telling me that an academic text could be written in any number of ways and then proceeding to tell me that it would begin with the introduction, then the literature review, the methodology and methods, and so on. And again, I needed to push boundaries, this time playing with and in the structure of what is an academic text, interrupting its typical linear flow and hiding within the space of the texts, the introduction literature review methodology results discussion. In this re-presentation, I quietly extend an invitation to you, , the Reader, to join in the play of the text, in memory of the Author, in my passing, and which you have so graciously accepted. And with this playful space of text comes the impossibility of a fixed meaning, a certain reading. Meanings differ and are deferred, différance coils throughout the text and throughout its readings. Traces, cinders, ashes, memories of my presence, remain scattered through

991

de hors-texte.”8 There is no outsidetext; there is nothing outside of the [con] text). The meaning of signification cannot be fixed in accord with the rules of its evaluation or rendering as “philosophy in action”: Underside or recesses, because it is not a matter of discovering today, belatedly, what has been known all along: that there is such a thing as a philosophical institution [of education]. Indeed “Philosophy” (“la” philosophie) has always had a dominant concept to take this into account and institution is at bottom the name it has reserved for this task. Underside and recesses because we are not satisfied with what the institution reveals about itself: neither with what we can perceive empirically, nor with what we can conceive according to the law of the philosophical concept. Underside and recesses would no longer have a signification dominated by the philosophical opposition that continues to order discourse in terms of a concealed substance or essence of the institution, hidden beneath its accidents, circumstances, phenomena, or superstructures. Underside and recesses would designate, rather, that which while still being situated within this venerable (conceptual metaphoric) topos might begin to extricate itself from this opposition and to constitute it in a new manner.9 At the border crossings of the transhistorical strife over the praxeological

992

the text in my absence, opening the future of texts to come. *** Dear J, And what comes afterward after the words and before what is to come? A representation of the representation of the interpretation. Which once written is then at once read and rewritten as I, the author of this telling of the story, pass the pen on to you, the reader and next author. First, to you, J, as before and now after a modest and humble extension of thanks and of gratitude to you and to your work for opening up spaces and texts for further, and necessary, openings of spaces and texts to difference, to discourse, to discussion. For releasing possibilities in seemingly impossible spaces and texts. In my working with and in the work that is this research space, this research text, I have been guided by your lead, attempting to follow your gait, but of course, wandering, and wondering, along different paths, tracing different possibilities that I discover, uncover, and recover. And for the memory of you in the work that is at work, the presence in your absence, I am both honoured and grateful. And now, let us turn, and turn to the earth, to the very ground beneath our feet, supporting us, supporting this research space and this research text, and nurturing its growth and the very possibilities that it opens. A garden, an organic emergence, a space opened from a collaboration between the earth, the natural world, and the humans bounding, enclosing, shaping of it provides us with a motif for the opening and exploration of the research space and the research. The garden, that enclosure of a natural space for the use and benefit of often a selected group of humans, providing in part for our basic needs (e.g., food) and also for our pleasures (e.g., for leisure activities, spiritual reflection, aesthetic appreciation) has over history

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

intelligibility of a philosophy of teaching, learning, and knowledge enacted as pedagogy is the discourse of the educational institution. The uncompromising gatekeeper of “Sense” and “Reason” ordering and translating for the epistemological foundation and curricular substance of a discipline. A theory of language posited as the “logic” and “order” of thinking and the “house of Being” has safeguarded the particular directions adopted for the instruction of the subject and its teleology.10 And what Derrida calls the cure and poison of this discursive/nondiscursive circularity construes the nature of semiotic effects in the pharmakon of teaching-learning that one can never escape. Language is the symbolic violence that in-forms the conceptual-metaphorical schemata of the psyche for dealing with everyday reality.11 It is within the mastery of the rhetoricized heart of the institution’s disciplinarity that the in-grained habitus of one’s own subjectivity is subject to, and a subjectification of, the flux of language expended upon the ideology of freewill.12 Derrida is succinct: “There is no neutral or natural place in education (l’enseignement). Here, for example, is not an indifferent place.”13 To be sure, the institutionalization of knowledge consolidating the philosophical lessons of Western epistemology bears the transcription of a logoarchy that intertwines the ontotheological foundations of a metaphysical language with the intellectual backdrop of a pedagogical history inseparable from the truth of its object.14 The semiotic effect of this operative model of learning upon a knowledge-centered teaching of closed

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

re-presented a breadth of relations in-between humans and the environment, from dominance and control towards a more reciprocal partnership. However, there runs through the history of gardens a centrality of human desire, of power over, of enclosure and bounding. But despite this bounding, this fencing in, these enclosures, the garden grows beyond its boundaries, beyond the plan in the gardener’s mind, in her imagination. Seeds are planted, seedlings transplanted, nutrients added, beds watered, but then the gardener has to stand back, to let go, to see what will emerge, to how these elements will play off of each other, with each other, in spite of each other. The garden’s roots burrow deeply and shallowly, broadly and narrowly, converging and diverging, tangling and untangling only to tangle once again. The garden’s stems, strong and woody, delicate and herbaceous, rising above ground and hidden below the surface, support, nourish, and re-generate the plant and the garden. The garden’s vines coil and climb, twisting, turning, and trailing, at once leaning on the structures, enclosing them and weakening, even breaking down those structures. The garden’s flowers bloom, showing in turn and at the same time, different sensory experiences—colours, shapes, sizes, fragrances, textures—simultaneously deceivingly simple and unfathomably complex. The garden’s seeds, and their protective and dispersing fruits, pods, and cones, disseminated to re-new, re-vitalize, re-create traces of the garden, the absence of the garden in the garden that is to come. And the garden does not simply include its plants; it reaches beyond this bounded kingdom as it inter-acts with the environment, inviting the outside in and inside out, welcoming animals, plants, and other living things and visiting animals, plants, and other living things. The defining enclosure of what is garden is

993

values is described by Derrida as follows: Teaching delivers signs, the teaching body produces (shows and puts forth) proofs (enseignes),more precisely signifiers supposing knowledge of a previous signified. Referred to this knowledge, the signifier is structurally second. Every university [or general system of education] puts language in this position of delay or derivation in relation to meaning or truth.15 A pedagogical method patterned after conceptual simulacra of ideal forms of thinking and knowing cannot be anything but a laconic dictation of selfobscuring memory. An invasive instruction cast of a mechanical repetition that has a retrospective function is more apt to valorize the reproduction of knowledge than to create the conditions for discovering or inventing it:16 Along the stages that are always idiomatic, we are always guided back to the most durable tradition of the philosophical concept of teaching: revelation, unveiling, the discovered truth of the “alreadythere” (déjà là) according to the mode of “not-yet” (pas encore), a Socrato-Platonic anamnesis sometimes taken up by the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Throughout these specific determinations may be found, time and time again, the same scheme, the same concept of truth, of a truth linked to the same pedagogical structure. But the interpretation of these specificities must not succumb to this determination as though one had to settle for the

994

unclosed, the fence taken down, the gate opened. And so can be described the research space and the research text meditated upon in this dehiscence of words. Like the garden, the research space was full of life, of actions, of inter-actions, growing beyond, beneath, and over the boundaries and structures already in place. Learning in and about the school garden blurred disciplinary distinctions, those subject areas so often ranked and ordered became obsolete. Instead, learning in and about the school garden was a decentering of the traditional curriculum, upsetting the dominance of cognitive learning in mathematics, language arts, and science, those subjects that haunt large scale testing. This decentering opened a curricular space for affect and action, for caring and caring for, and for what is not in the prescribed curriculum. The voices that echoed through this opening spoke not only of external frameworks, of learning objectives, but also of internal connections, of emotions, of feelings, of ways that they felt cared for by the garden. And in return, students cared for the garden. Their connections to their rootedness with and in the garden ran deeply; to the students of City, their school garden was important, a special place, a space that they cared for and that cared for them. The school garden created unique openings within the framed and bounded institution that is school for inter-actions with the natural world, with the community, with each other, and with the self. Students experienced the school garden through their senses, nurturing students’ embodied ways of knowing their community, their environment, and their place within it, and with these ways of knowing, spaces are further opened for difference, for difference of meanings as countless and endless chains of signifiers and signifieds, signifieds and signifiers,

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

discovery of the same beneath all variations. One should never settle for this but also never forget to take its power into account . . . the question at issue is always, as it was for Plato, one of a double metaphoric of inscription: a bad writing (une mauvaise écriture), secondary, artificial, cryptic or hieroglyphic, voiceless, intervenes to obscure good writing (la bonne écriture); it overdetermines, occults, complicates, perverts, makes a travesty of the natural inscription of the truth of the soul. By effacing . . . the teacher (maître) is also promoting the unlearning of bad writing.17 The “teaching body”18 Derrida refers to a conservative role in the educational institution fundamental to a necessary fulfillment of the dominant pedagogical theme of Western philosophy: the logic of binary thinking supported by a “metaphysics of presence” and “logocentrism.”19 Where teaching characterized by the mere delivery and reception of signs “has [as] its ideal, with exhaustive translatability, the effacement of language (la langue),”20 learning is and can be – no more, no less – equivalent in difficulty to the cognitive capabilities of a minimal technical competence required for the “error-free” exchange of transmitted concepts. It presumes, and Derrida is clear on this, that the “living spirit” of a writing enfleshed as the memory of Truth can be actively etched or inscribed the conscious materiality of a passified “student body.” The “positive value” of signifiersignified/sign-referent relations that is exhibited and perpetuated as the

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

are caught up in the play of meaning, in differing and deferring. Through difference, through deferral, through différance, and in difference, in deferral, in différance, deconstruction is at work within the work, with the research space, and the research text, freeing contradictions, interrogating oppositions, and reversing hierarchies that are always already post-critical within the space, within the text. And in its intervention, deconstruction overturns classically held oppositions, displacing the systems within which the oppositions are held. J, this research space, this research text, is a writing attempted to undertake such a displacement, an overturning, an opening as the traditional roles, oppositions, of researcher-researched teacher-student expert-novice adult-child university-K-12 school quantitative-qualitative objective-subjective to difference in différance. And it is true, J, that much educational research that is done does not follow exclusively to the dominant terms of these binaries. But what lingers in the spaces, in the shadows, in the (typically) unspoken and taken for granted norms of educational research and in the texts of educational research are the memories of these dominances, memories that continue to, albeit sometimes quietly, actively shape the spaces and texts of educational research. For example, participatory research projects with teachers are planned by researchers from the academy. Student perspectives, ideas, and understandings are gleaned from discussions with teachers and parents. Interview data are quantified and tabulated. Research findings are presented in academic publications and presentations and not to the communities in which and with which the research was

995

traditional discourse of a teachinglearning practice (e.g., a positivistic didactics of total cognition) connects thought to expression to bring about the essential possibility of faultlessly duplicating the content of signification in the contours of the mind. Its transcendental inspiration of a “transportable univocality or of formulizable polysemia”21 propagates the illusion of a correspondence theory of pedagogical truths. Nothing remains untheorized outside the oppositional complementarity of this metaphysical system that could counter the dialectic of its glorious memory. Essentially because the conceptualization of “meaning,” “truth,” and “reality” is sequestered in the liminal scope of the singular, the finite, and the totalizing: Following the consistency of its logic, it [deconstruction] attacks not only the internal edifice, both semantic and formal, of philosophemes, but also what one would be wrong to assign to it as its external housing, its extrinsive conditions of practice: the historical forms of its pedagogy, the social, economic or political structures of this pedagogical institution. It is because deconstruction interferes with solid structures “material” institutions, and not only with discourses or signifying representations, that it is always distinct from analysis or “critique.” And in order to be pertinent, deconstruction works as strictly as possible in that place where the supposedly “internal” order of the philosophical is articulated by (internal and external) necessity with the

996

conducted. This is not to say that the traditionally dominant members of these oppositions should be wholly silenced. Instead, this research space, and research text, seeks to illuminate, to remove the shades, to take off those sunglasses, and to open a space for and give voice to another, an other, previously unheard. For Socrates and Plato, Plato and Socrates, to both guide and be guided. The post-critical opening in space and in the representation of this as text came through difference, through actively including students as researchers and not reproducing the hierarchy of the binary throughout the process of doing research. The Cool Researchers and I worked together as research partners to plan questions to explore, to create ways to collect data, to discuss and analyze the data, and to disseminate the research findings. Our collaboration in doing research was very much a relationship, a dialogue, a conversation. In this research space, this relationship, this conversation, there were tensions. J, I often felt, often knew, that I was dominating our conversation. My uncertainty, my insecurity, my transition to this uncovered research space, one that I had not previously worked with and in, had me pulling on the threads of roles that I had previously held: teacher, researcher, expert. Sometimes I hurriedly filled those newly realized research spaces, uneasy with the gaps, with the spaces, without the boundaries. I tried to embrace the unknown, to enjoy the silences. And I think that over time and in spite of the lingering traces, the cinders of those oppositions, I became more open to really stepping back, to letting go, to quietly allowing myself to be guided, to rest with the impossibility of knowing and the possibility of what might be to come. With and in the research space, and the research text, the Cool Researchers explored the openings that were made,

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

institutional conditions and forms of teaching. To the point where the concept of the institution itself would be subjected to the same deconstructive treatment.22 As Derrida’s deconstruction of the Foucauldian archeology of madness has demonstrated, the logic of any institution, can only be in the last analysis, the “history of Reason” and its teaching reflect the principles of that foundation. And if “Reason” and “history” are the only conceivable ends of the institutional structure of pedagogy as an objectification of philosophy in action, there is a “double bind” in the laws of the system and of its philosophical analysis. Deconstruction opposes an epistemological reduction of meanings. What justifies deconstruction to move through the arena of discourse to engage the empirical conditions of real-world injustices forged by the ends of the pedagogical institution? The ethical point any act of criticism. A deconstructive reading of the scene of teaching locates institutional inclusions/exclusions, thematic orderings/disorderings, ideological valuations/devaluations, and so on, configuring the formativity of epistemological foundations. It requires the heteroglossia of a fresh writing that inscribes and is inscribed by the rules of an unborrowed code, following “an other logic,” one that can selfconsciously evade the critical conceits of the metaphysical arrangements it is reacting to or may use in the performance of critique. This would presuppose: firstly, the inversion of the argumentative logics, the hierarchy of which privileges a normative arrangement of concepts from a

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

uprooting and rooting, entangling and detangling, and they rejoiced in their voices being heard and recognized the importance of the work that they were doing, both within their school community, and in the wider space of educational research. The Cool Researchers saw the boundaries, the fencing, the enclosure of the research space, and the research text, and simply dismantled it. They were inherent within the research space, and the research text, Plato guiding the hand of Socrates, and tracing the paths of difference with and in the space and the text. This text and epistole, the envois that I am sending out with this representation of the research space, of the research text, whose arrival is not assured, whose acceptance is not guaranteed, is an extension of the opening of the research space that I was working with and in with the Cool Researchers and of the research text that we were uprooting and rerooting (re-routing). Following, and heavily tracing your own textual explorations, the research text itself, as a written text, should be an opening. It should re-present the multiplicity and historicity always already within the research space, and the research text. Postings of methodology, of philosophy, of history, of education, of art—inter-act, inter-sperse, inter-mingle, with and in each other and with and in the stories, the images, the quotations, the comments of the research space, and of the research text. And there is space as well, interruptions in the textual flow for meditation, for play, for difference. The re-presentations that I have worked with and in are also a response to the confining structures of the traditional research frames that enclose, and separate, the work. Its openness is a resistance to that bounding, a dismantling of the fence, and, I admit, a quiet “V” raised behind the back of the institution. The openness of this writing upsets the

997

binarization of terms (good/bad, right/ wrong, etc.); and, secondly, a displacement of the epistemological groundwork coordinating the ethical acceptance of the formal structuring of its concepts that organize the “essential” possibilities of thought itself. Deconstruction is, was, and should be the ethical result of the conscious desire to enact a positive response to alterity. The matter-of-course underestimation or outright dismissal of the potential – if not the substantive value – of deconstruction for reconceptualizing the ethical questions of political issues such as those associated with pedagogy, essentially of interest for us within the discipline of education, is most curious. Like Paolo Freire, the ground-breaking work of Jacques Derrida has influenced recent theoretical reevaluations of how to go about this common political and altruistic intent. Radical ethics in the “age of poststructuralism” – if there ever were such a thing – has been defined by the post-critical impetus of deconstruction. Its counter-hegemonic arsenal has enabled the rise of “postmarxisms,” “post-feminisms,” “postcolonialisms,” or any other revisionist “post-theoretrical” discourses promoting the emancipatory need for protecting the agency of the subject against the ideological tamperings of cultural institutions. Despite the recurrent tendency of many proponents of educational reform associated with the aforementioned “movements” to overzealously appeal to, or even use, some of the Derridean tenets for the expressed purpose of “institutional inquiry” or “cultural critique,” the ethical and political efficacy of deconstruction continues to be

998

accepted, and so often unquestioned, architecture of the text, rupturing the foundation of its form and structure— introductionliteraturereview methodologyresultsdiscussion. It rejects the possibility of a known, a transcendental signified, embracing instead the flickering and endless chains of multiplicity, of alterity, and of difference in meanings, made connections traced, and understandings gained. And so, J, in the aftermath of writing this text, these texts, and with and in this textual space, and as I come to mourn the death of the author, of my authorship, I resist forecasting and broadcasting what comes next, recognizing and embracing the impossibility of predicting l’avenir, a future that is unexpected. What will this text disseminate? What will this garden grow? What is to come? These questions can only possibly be answered in the envois, the sendings, parcels, letters, postcards, and the impossibility of assuring their very arrival. What will you, J, and others now taking on the authorship write? 1

S. Jagger and P. P. Trifonas

vehemently questioned, argued, and vastly undertheorized or examined in this disciplinary area with some care for a certain “philosophical rigor. After critical pedagogy, deconstruction has breathed new-found life into a host of stale and declining theoretical and methodological approaches through which to identify and to engage the ethical dilemma of social inequalities. The radical polemics of deconstruction has value for analyzing the ethical and political implications of pedagogical contingencies of theory and practice. In short, a post-critical questioning of the scene of teaching and research can avail “us” the opportunity for an original recasting of the complicitous grounds of our own academic responsibility.

Aoki (1993). Derrida (1990), p. 119. (All translations from this text are by Peter Pericles Trifonas.) 3 Derrida (1990), pp. 118–119. 4 Derrida (1990), p. 115. 5 Some representative examples include: Cherryholmes (1988); Pinar and Reynolds (1992); Derrida and Trifonas (in press). 6 Derrida (1990), p. 121. 7 Derrida (1992), p. 11. 8 Derrida (1974), p. 158. (The form of the original has been modified.) 9 Derrida (1986), pp. 3–20. 10 Deleuze and Guattari (1987). 11 See Bourdieu and Passeron (1977). The violence of writing as the letter of the law of exclusion is the focus of the second half of Jacques Derrida’s Of grammatology. 12 See Bourdieu (1991). 13 Derrida (1990), p. 114. 14 This is the motivating premise of Derrida’s, Of grammatology. 15 Derrida (1990), p. 130. 16 Bourdieu and Passeron (1977). 17 Derrida (1986), pp. 7–8. 18 See Jacques Derrida (1990) for further elaboration on the role of the teaching body in the forms of reproduction that saturate and amplify the contradictions of the scene of teaching, its field. 19 See Derrida (1974). 2

Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research:. . .

999

20

Derrida (1979), pp. 93–94. Derrida (1979), p. 93. 22 Derrida (1987), pp. 19–20. 21

References Aoki, T. (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3), 255–268. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture (R. Nice, Trans.). Sage Publications. Cherryholmes, C. H. (1988). Power and criticism: Poststructural investigations in education. Teachers College Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1974). Of grammatology (Gayatri Chakavority Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1979). Living on.: Border lines (J. Hulbert, Trans.). In H. Bloom, P. de Man, J. Derrida, G. Hartman, & J. Hillis Miller (Eds.), Deconstruction and criticism. Continuum. Derrida, J. (1986). The age of hegel (Susan Winnet, Trans.). In S. Weber (Ed.), Demarcating the disciplines: philosophy, literature, art (pp. 3–20). University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1987). The truth in painting (G. Bennington & I. McLeod, Trans.) (pp. 19–20). University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1990). Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant. In Du droit à la philosophie. Galilée. Derrida, J. (1992). Mochlos; or, the conflict of the faculties (R. Rand & A. Wygant, Trans.). In R. Rand (Ed.), Logomachia: The conflict of the faculties. University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, J., & Trifonas, P. P. (in press). Deconstructing the machine. PostTexte. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Pinar, W. F., & Reynolds, W. M. (Eds.). (1992). Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text. Teachers College Press.

Index

A Absent presence, 583 Academia, 414 Academic environment, 419 Academic knowledge, 579, 580 Access to education, 744, 745, 747–749, 751, 753, 755–758 Action competence (AC) conceptualization of, 228, 229 key theoretical texts, 222–224 in Nordic guidelines for practice, 224–227 Action Plan for Mathematics, 596 Active participation, 116 Activism, 713, 716, 717 A Disability History of the United States, 978 Adjustable Common Instruction, 87 Adult power, 108 Adult’s surveillance, 107 Aesthetic and epistemological procedure, 913 Aesthetic peace education, 301 Affordance, 837 African-American children, 928, 938 immigrants, 119 Agricultural goods, 108 Alcoholism, 268 Alice’s curriculum making network, 899 Alignment, 544–547, 549, 558, 559 All-mighty, 580 Alma’s curriculum making network, 898 Altruism, 258, 259, 261, 270 American Civic Association, 114 American Educational Research Association (AERA), 860, 939 Andravida School children, 94 Anglo-American curriculum tradition, 801, 804, 805

Annihilation, 322 Anthropocene, 321 climate change, 327 climate change educator, 328–331 curriculum choices, 327 degrees of decentralization, 325 environmental challenges, 316 existential threat, 322–324 firm commitments, 325 hospitality, 320–322 participation and competition, 316 practical implications, 325 school-focused discussions, 324 school model, 324–328 student resistance, 325 teaching, 317–320 Anti-bullying policy, 770 Anticipation, 873, 878 Anti-psychiatry, 453 Anxiety, 447 Apple phone, 920 Archer’s theory of reflexivity, 887, 888 Artificial expert systems development, 914 Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, 336 Artistic energy, 336 Arts-based research approaches, 39 Arts education, 297, 300, 301, 303–304 ArtworxTO, 337 Asian-American immigrants, 119 Asian women, 661 Assemblages connections and relationships, 915 French term agencement, 915 learning, assembling, 917–923 non-human materials, 916 non-linear ways of learning, 916

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. P. Trifonas, S. Jagger (eds.), Handbook of Curriculum Theory, Research, and Practice, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3

1001

1002 Assemblages (cont.) ontology of teaching, 916 police misconduct, 916 theory, 912, 915 Assessment and classroom learning, 786 Assets-centred approach, 261 Assimilation, 322 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), 860 Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE Accord), 674, 678 Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 968 Astronomer, 658, 659, 661–663 Astronomy, 655–664, 666, 667 Asymmetrical communication, 822 Attendance, 963 Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 446, 455 Attitude, 226 Australian curriculum, 372 Authentic engagement, 946 Authenticity/autonomy, 263, 456, 974 Authentic learning, 411 Authorea, 823 Autobiographical narratives patriarchal influence, 414, 415 vulnerability, 415 Autobiographical self, 444, 445 Autobiographical storytelling, 410 Autobiography, 416 Autoethnography aims, 285 anti-bullying, 287 arts, 287–288 audience’s act, 289 building blocks of thought, 287 bullying, 278, 287 caring relationship, 286 children, 278 classroom teacher, 278 co-composing, 279 co-explorations, 279 contemporary ethnographic methods, 281 dramatic role, 280 educational practices, 279 educators, 278 emotional experiences, 286 empathy, 279 ensemble and audience, 288 ensemble of empathy, 283–284 happiness, 286 intervention practices, 280

Index kindergarten students, 280, 289 listener’s response, 289 moral disengagement, 278 negotiating differences in song writing, 281–283 psychological and physical costs, 281 social movements, 289 song composition, 286 song creation process, 286 song of kindness, 284–285 song writing, 288 synchronization effect, 288 Automation, 921, 922 Autonomous reflexivity, 888 Autonomy-independence, 577 Average life expectancy, 936 B Back-to-school season, 693 Backward design, 766, 767, 769, 775, 777 Bandwagon effect, 850 Basquiat scholarship, 919 Behaviorally engineered environment, 734 Behavioural management, 447 Behavioural therapy, 455 Bentway, 337, 339, 340 Beyond Recognition, 205 Bidirectional model, 35 Big data literacy, 918 Bildung, 218, 219, 221, 223, 225, 226, 228, 368–370, 500 to output-oriented curriculum, 501–502 subject of science, 501 Binomials, 598 Biographical text, 566, 573 Biological life, 863, 868 biocapital, 878 developmentalism, 874 eugenics, 868 structural objectivity, 863 Biophysics, 934 Biopower, 694 Birlanders, 375 Birth of Pancasila Address, 370 Bit players, 916 Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC), 719 Black, Tyler, 693 Black and Brown curriculum orientations accommodation, 641 Afrocentric, 643 Black education, 644

Index Black Nationalist, 642, 643 communities, 644, 646 curriculum history, 645 functionalism, 641 liberal-intellectual-abstract education, 640 liberalism, 642 social reconstructionist, 644 socio-educational development, 640 Blackboard, 825 Black Canadian feminist (women), 929–931, 933–935 Black children, 929, 932 Black Feminism, 929 Black Nationalist orientation, 642 Black women, 654–667, 933–935 Blogs, 819, 821, 826 Bloodless angel, 297, 308, 309 BlueApron, 918 Bodily control, 729, 735, 738 Body pedagogics, 729–731 Book clubs, 468–470 See also Identity Border crossing, 96 Bottom-up approach, 88 Bourdieu’s work, 35, 36 Bridge International Academies, 874 Academy in a Box, 874, 875 Bruner, Jerome, 870 Bullying diverse interpretations, 287 ethical and social issues, 279 intervention programs, 280 negative and harmful interactions, 278 programs, 770 unkind behaviours, 278, 280 Bureaucratization, 602 Business management, 770 C Cambridge Peace and Education Research Group (CPERG), 297, 300, 301, 304, 305 Canada, 234, 235, 237, 239–246, 248, 249 Canadian curriculum theory project (CCTP), 234 Canadian eugenics movement, 459 Capability-centred approach, 270 Care free, 577 Caregivers, 279 CD-ROM based learning games, 824 Center statistics, 977–978 Chad, 67

1003 Challenging goals and topics, 86 Change Laboratories, 774, 776 Charter schools, 734 Child-centred approach, 37 Child-centred education, 258 Child-centred learning frameworks, 111 Child citizens, 106 Child development, 444, 450, 451 Childhood discourses, 111 life experiences and contexts, 106 sociology, 106, 107 Childhood curriculum active and social dynamics, 34 Elliot’s concept, 33 Flight framework, 34 learning and child care curriculum framework, 31 Rogoff’s work, 31 social practices, 31 Children, 278 drawings, 88, 89 emotions, 89 engagements, 106 funds of knowledge, 947, 958–961 (see also Funds of knowledge) labour, 114, 117 learning, 949 multimodal artwork, 95–99 school-aged, 950 science education, 110 STEM funds, 955 (see also Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education) and youth, 948 Child’s play active socialization, 48 Bourdieu’s work, 36, 37 cartoons and narratives, 43, 44 childhood, 30 curriculum, 31 embodied experience, 41 examples, 39, 40 families, 39 feel for the game, 47 GORILLA-ZILLA, 45, 46 habitus, 48 informal learning, 46 innocent construction, 41 interpretive qualitative research project, 38 investigating children’s perspectives, 30 normative, 41 research project, 38

1004 Child’s play (cont.) RUBY, 45 socialization, 30 social learning, 31 social position, 30, 36–38, 40, 41, 43, 45–47 social practices, 30 THE CAT, 46 China, 704–706 Circle work, 259, 260 Circumscription, 680 Citizenship policy cycle (2015–2019), 597 Citizenship sentiments, 115 CityPlace development, 339 Civic-ethnic typology, 516 Civil law, 855, 856 Claim-based approach, 510 curriculum-making, 519, 520 history, 520 language, 520, 521 methodological statism, 519 Classical developmental theorists, 42 Classical professionalism, 568 Classism, 969 Climate change, 220, 372, 373, 381 Climate change education, 317, 319 Anthropocene inquiry, 330 characteristics, 323 choices, 328 curriculum choices, 330 engagement from students, 329 environmental educators, 328 existential threat, 323 in grade 10 classroom, 327 hospitality, 317, 329 pedagogical measures, 323 unfamiliar invitations, 329 Climate Education Reform British Columbia (CERBC), 316 Co-constructivist processes, 280 Co-construct knowledge, 948 Coda, 342–343 Co-dependency, 841 Coggle, 823 Cognition, 914 Cognitive flexibility, 847 Cognitive-focused learning, 310 Cognitive heuristics, 850 Cognitive injustice, 676 Cognitive justice, 589 Cognitive learning, 994 Cognitivist teacher-learner approaches, 818 Coherence, 544, 545, 547–550, 554, 555, 558–560

Index Collaborative learning, 95 Collaborative writing, 823 Collective writing, 427, 439 Collectivity, 930 Colonial/gendered hierarchies, 460 Colonialism, 860 Coloniality, 352 Colonization, 636 Colonizing gaze, 716, 721, 724 definition, 714 oppression, 714, 715 Color-blind curriculum, 650 Color-blind ideology, 651 Color-blindness, 636 Colors, 89, 96, 98 Commodification, 680 Communication, 367, 590, 600, 604 Communicative reflexivity, 888 Community consultations, 950 contribution, 613 mothering, 930 resource scan, 949–950 Competence, 218, 219, 224, 226–229, 501 Competence-based curricula and narrativity, 376–378 Competitivity, 589 Conceptual framework, 675–681 Conceptualizations, 567–571 Connectedness, 228 Consciousness-raising opportunities, 413 Constructivist approach, 788 Content-based curriculum, 596 Content-based prescription, 591 Contested labels, 936 Context-sensitive approach, 267 Contextual perspective, 788 Continual displacement, 986 Contrapuntal analysis, 346 Conversations, complicated, 201–203 Corner stones, 370 Corporeal curriculum body pedagogics, 729–731 definition, 728 implications, 736–738 no-excuses schooling, 734–736 student body and grit, 731–733 Corsaro’s theory, 43 Cosmopolitanism, 354 Cost-effective curriculum, 68 Counterspaces, 664, 665 Country life movement, 113 Course assignments, 318

Index COVID-19 pandemic, 237, 271, 317, 337, 428–436, 588, 608, 609, 713, 719, 720, 724, 753, 920, 921 community organization, 616 cross-boundary students, 610 disruptive schooling, 610 educational changes, 609 educational norms and practices, 619 emergence, 615 future school development, 622 home-schooling, 613 learning system, 625 lockdowns, 919 public and private organizations, 623 school closure, 612 social interaction, 614 Cox’s Bazar’s first classroom in the sky, 66 Creative expression, 305 Creativity, 301 Cremin, Hilary, 297, 300, 301, 304 Criminal law, 855 Crisis of praxis, 299 Critical consciousness, curriculum, 89 activism, 717–719 co-authors, 713 colonizing gaze, 713, 714, 716 decolonial pedagogy, 713 decolonization, 713 denial, 715 equity, 713 oppression, 718, 719 revolutionary pedagogies, 720 Critical curriculum, 655 Critical disability, 448 Critical discourse analysis, 805 Critical emancipatory multiculturalism, 639 Critical episodes, 936 Critical GCE (CGCE), 347 Critical pedagogy, 933 of conscientização, 985 Critical race/feminist currere, 649 Critical race theory (CRT), 649 education, 650 race in curriculum, 650 Critical realist data analysis method, 894 Critical thinking, 729, 733, 735 Critiques of wellbeing curricula, 264, 265 Cross-borderscape, 623 Cross-curricular ESE approach, 219 Cross-disciplinary teaching, 227 Cross-pollination, 305–307, 311 Cultural competence, 377

1005 Cultural configurations, 764 Cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), 774, 776 Culturalization of politics, 681 Culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), 85, 86 Cultural narratives in curricula, 378–380 Culture, 234, 236–238, 243, 244, 246–248 Culture Industry Thesis, 921 Curate, 918 Curation, 918, 919 Currere, 200, 239, 468, 470, 484, 572 black feminist, 648 critical race feminist, 648 curriculum studies, 647 educational experience, 647 social reconstruction, 648 Curricular activities, 960 Curricular implications, 212–214 Curriculum, 67, 69, 317, 468, 636, 700–703, 946–948 alignment, 546 as beginning, 4–7 as caring, 10–13 as changing, 16–18 conceptualizations, 571 Cyprus, 570 data of making, 499–500 definition, 785, 929 of denial, 715, 716 as designing, 21–23 disciplinarity, 573–578 educational sciences core, 569 evaluation, 784, 785, 790, 794 in extinction, 202 ideologies, 786 as liberating, 18–21 Norwegian, 491 overflow, 600 as placing, 7–10 policy cycles, 595 in practice, 74–77 reforms, 492, 493, 495, 501, 788 researcher, 933 research-based, 569 spatial arrangements, 570 specific-to-teachers processes, 569 as storying, 13–15 studies, 234–243, 246, 248, 444, 445, 454, 457 teacher education, 566 teacher learning, 569 teacher role, 570

1006 Curriculum (cont.) as teaching, 24–26 types, 787 theory-practice debate, 578–581 Curriculum, research Aoki’s rhizomean landscape, 163 coherence, 547–550 curriculum memos, 146 glass plate photography, 145 Hayashi Studio, 147, 148, 154 Japanese photographer, 145 nontriviality, 144 radical spaces, 151 seeing and hearing, 151, 152, 159 Ted T. Aoki, 144 textured web, 149, 151 unseen and the unheard, 162 watching and listening, 146 Curriculum and Assessment Policy Unit, 553 Curriculum-as-lived, 658–660, 664, 667 Curriculum-as-plan, 660, 664 Curriculum design, 73, 74, 784, 787–795 A/B testing, 876 Bloom’s taxonomy, 872 design as anticipation, 873–878 design as organization, 862–868 design as process, 868 difference by design, 879 educational processes, 860 inborn qualities, 866 mastery learning, 872 Minimal viable measurements, 876 needs, 869, 872 objectives, 872 organization, 863 spiral curriculum, 870 The Tyler Rationale, 871 Curriculum development, estonia accountability of schools, 808 curriculum tradition, 804, 805 Eastern Europe, 800 Europeanization/globalization, 808, 810 German Bildung/Didaktik tradition, 801, 802 key competences, 811 school autonomy, 808 school autonomy vs. curriculum standardization, 806–808 Soviet curriculum, 802–804 Soviet Union, 800 teacher autonomy, NC, 810, 811, 813 Curriculum leadership COVID-19 pandemic, 622 flexible planning, 621 imperatives for comprehensive scenarios planning, 621

Index Curriculum-making, 529–530 Curriculum models design and development, 791, 793 OBE, 793 as Praxis, 793 rational planning curriculum model, 789 situational model, 794 social transformation, 795 Curriculum policies exclusionary nature, 588 liquid condition, 589–592 methodological approach, 592–594 Curriculum reform core reform in Finland, 533–538 practical implications, 538–539 shared and coherent theory of change in, 531–533 Curriculum study group (CSG), 950–951 Curriculum system LWL and community contribution, 613 resourceful, versatile, and creative learning at home, 612 self-management, 613 social-emotional well-being and motivation of students, 614 Curriculum theory project (CTP), 234–236, 238, 239, 241, 245–249 Cybercrime, 855 Cybernetics, 869, 872 anti-aircraft systems, 869 cybernetic efficiency, 870 feedback, 870, 872 informational patterns, 869 information theory, 870 systems theory, 869 Cybershaming, 853, 854, 856 Cyberspace, 854 Cyprus cohorts and periods, 571 context of, 583 profession, 578 professionalism, 570 D Danish/German Marxist critical psychology, 931 Danish teacher educators, 225, 226 Data agency, 918 Datafication, 873, 874 Jim Code, 874 Digital economy, 825 Death anxiety, 328 Decolonial/liminal perspective, 682 Decolonial design, 772

Index Decolonization, 713, 716, 717, 721, 723 curriculum, 722 decolonizing pedagogy, 722 definition, 721 educators, 723 equity, 721 institutional level, 724 systemic oppression, 721 Decolonizing internationalization conceptual framework, 675–681 higher education, 672–673 youth loyalties, 679 Deconstruction, 389, 407, 985 of Foucauldian archeology, 996 post-critical resistance, 986 principles of, 986 Decontextualization, 938 Deep learning, 846 Deep subject-matter knowledge, 86 Deficit model, 969 Dehumanization, 412 Democratization, 676 Demodel globalized models, 916 Denial of oppression, 721 Denzin’s social interactionist approach, 35 Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development (DFATD), 674 Depression, 454 Derogation, 322 Derrida, Jacques, 861, 878 hauntology, 861, 862 Design as process, 868 Design based implementation research (DBIR), 773, 774 Designer-centric perspective, 772 Design fields, 765, 768 expert mindset, 771 framing and reframing design challenges, 772 hierarchy and control, 771 human-centered approach, 768 rational and scientific process, 768 See also Design thinking Design principles, 765, 766 Design processes education, 766–768 vs. design principles, 765, 766 Design thinking, 768 affordances, 769 infrastructuring, 776 moments, 768 notion, 768

1007 reframing/positioning, 770 scaffolding, 776 stakeholders, 775 wicked/ill-formed problems, 769 Developmentally appropriate practice, 448, 459 Developmental psychology, 445, 446, 451, 454, 459, 460, 462 Development of Mathematical Thinking, 977 Dewey, John, 867 Dialectic logic, 862 Dialogue, 471 Didaktik, 369 definition, 496 model, 497 to output-oriented curriculum, 501–502 and role of education, 497 triangle, 496 Didaktik-driven curriculum, 812 Didaktik tradition, 804 Differences, 861, 862, 878 Differentiated curriculum, 85–87, 101 Digital blackboards, 823 Digital communication, 822, 823, 825, 826, 829 Digital configurations, 840 Digitalization and education, 818 See also E-learning Digital media, 849, 917 Digital storytelling, 410 autobiographical documentaries, 416 comfort zones, 417 conceptions, 416 definition, 415 five Cs Framework, 418–421 hermeneutic phenomenology, 417 human relationships, 417 individual and collective process, 416 preliminary data analysis, 417 research, 416 social justice issues, 416 Digital technology, 422 Diigo, 823 Disability, 969, 970 Disciplinarity, 581 academic pursuits, 578 destabilization, 575, 576 elementary school subject-matters, 576 genericness, 575 gymnasium-style, 576 pareistiki, 577 social relations, 576 social relations-relationality, 577 specializations, 574, 575

1008 Disciplinarity (cont.) teacher education literature, 573 teachers’ commentaries, 574 traversions, 577 Disciplinarization, 597 Discipline, 730, 731, 733–736, 738 Discipline-based education, 377 Discipline-based inquiry, 765 Discourse analysis, 108 Discourses, 202 Disempowerment, 932, 936–940 Dispensation, 842 Dispositions, 729, 730, 733, 737 Disruptions, 396 Disruptive behavioral disorders, 458 Divergent thinking, 913 Dolomite rocks, 206 Domestic servitude, 452 Doodoom Aki (Mother Earth) childhood educators, 176, 178 educator models, 175 educators, 176, 178 emergent curriculum, 171, 172, 179 ethical space, 179 eurocentric curricula, 177 eurocentric pedagogies, 176, 178 indigenous approaches, education, 170 Indigenous people, 170 land as a resource, 171 pedagogy, 174 reconciliation, 171 residential school system, 171 rhythm of life, 174 self-actualization, 175 ways of thinking, 173 western pedagogies, 175 young children, 175 Doodoosh (breast), 170 Double stimulus approach, 774 Dualistic perspective, 787 Duoethnographic approach, 470 Dyscalculia, 971 E Early childhood, 278–281 Early childhood education (ECE) professional identity, 448 programs, 66–69, 73, 74, 77 in emergency contexts, 77 Early childhood educator, 107, 445 East-West hybridity managing the tensions between individuals and groups, 619

Index rejuvenating emphasis of home support, 619 student learning, 620 Eco-anxiety coping strategies, 331 Ecological currere, 201 Ecological ethics, 208–212 Ecological witnessing, 202, 205, 212–214 Ecology of knowledge, 593 Ecology of post-abysmal dignity, 358 E-didactic perspective, 823 EdTechs, 821 Education, 914–915 policy reforms, 784 programs, 751–754 reforms, 795 type, 118 Education Act 1998, 553 Educational design, 764 Educational future curriculum and learning design, 625–626 mapping, 626 Educational goals, 318 Educational inquiry, 987 Educational movement, 116 Educational relevance, 593 Educational remembrance, 235 Educational sciences core, 569 Education and Training 2020, 552 Education Bureau (EDB), 609 Education Centre network, 557 Education Development Fund (EDF), 617 Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, 334–336 Education Support Centres Ireland (ESCI), 557 Educators, 278, 317, 328–33, 837, 928, 939, 958, 975 Edutainment, 918 Efficiency, 868, 878 cost-efficient, 876 social efficiency, 862 Ego-centrism, 203 Ego-network analysis, 894 approach, 889 data generation, 893 E-leadership, 609 E-learning, 837 definition, 818 e-learning 1.0, 824–826 e-learning 2.0, 820–822, 824, 826–830 implementation of, 818 origins of, 824 personal learning environments, 827, 828

Index post-digital (e-)learning, 829, 830 Web 2.0, 819 (see also Web 2.0) E-learning 1.0 learning management systems, 825 massive open online courses, 825, 826 Electronic age, 818, 820 Electroshock interventions, 454 Elementary curriculum, 197 Emergent curriculum, 53 definition, 170 intergenerational experiences, 173 natural world weaves relationships, 175 reconciliation, 171 Emotional cost of civic responsibility, 267 Empathy, 278, 279, 281, 288, 290 ensemble of, 283–284 in young learners, 290 Empowerment, 929, 931, 932, 936, 938, 940 Enrollment, 702–703 Ensemble of empathy, 283–284 Environmental and sustainability education (ESE), 218–221, 223, 225 Environmental education, 328, 329 Environment sick, 393 Envois, 388 Ephemeral mechanism, 373, 374 Epistemic authority, 773 Epistemology, 299 e-professionalism, 609 Equality, 593 Equity, 593, 768, 775, 842, 929, 934 Etherpads, 824 Ethical attendance, 205 Ethical entrepreneurialism, 83, 94, 101 Ethical Internationalization in Higher Education (EIHE), 680 Ethical relationality, 234, 244–246 Ethical relationship, 208 Ethical review boards, 397 Ethical space, 174, 179 Ethic of care, 265, 266 Ethics of witnessing, 203–208 E-tools, 823 Eudaimonia, 258–261, 263, 271 Eudaimonic wellbeing, 258, 261, 263–265, 268, 270–272 Eugenics, 969 Eurocentric curriculum, 171, 368 Eurocentric models, 173 Eurocentric values, 460 European Bologna process, 674 European Education Area, 552 Eurostat, 552

1009 Eurydice, 552 Evolutionary theory, 865 developmentalism, 866 racial evolution, 865 racial subject-matter, 866 recapitulation theory, 865 scientific racism, 865 Exclusions, 861, 862, 866, 878 Existential threat, 322–324 Exogenous modernization policy cycle, 595 Expansive learning, 774 Experiential learning, 111 Expertise, 912, 914–915, 918, 920 Expertly assembled, 914–915 Experts, 568 Extended professionality, 568 Extraordinary system, 695 F Facebook, 819, 922 Face-to-face interaction, 838, 839 Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, 916 Feminine values, 450 Fictions of character, 203 Finlanders, 375 Finnish Core Curriculum (FCC), 377 Finnish National Core Curriculum, 372, 533–538 Firm commitments, 325 First-order changes, 764, 766, 769 Five Cs Framework care, 418 choice, 419 community, 418, 419 conscience/conscientiousness, 420, 421 creativity, 420 definition, 410 relational encounters, 421, 422 Fixed mindsets, 975 Fixed terms, 205 Flexibility, 590 Flickr.com, 819 Flight curriculum framework, 34 Food shortages, 116 Formal curriculum, 270 Formal education, 113 Formative assessment/synergetic feedback, 87 Foundations of Education, 978 Fractured reflexivity, 888 Fragmentation, 570 Framework type curriculum, 806 FundaMental SDG Group, 262

1010 Funds of knowledge children, 957–958 children’s funds, 946 curricula, 946–948 hypothesis, 945 knowledge-based curriculum, 945 knowledge research, 946 opportunities, 961–963 social networks, 945 STEM concepts, 958–961 G Garden art project, 187 Garden-based pedagogies, 109 Gardening, 109, 117, 120 Gedankenexperiment, 206 Gender-based abuse, 268 General Education Diploma (GED), 752 Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), 454 Genocide-ecocide imbrications, 201 German Didaktik, 801 Glass plate photography, 145 Global citizenship education (GCE), 358 absorb and transform earlier orientations, 346 coloniality, education, 353–355 cosmopolitanism, 354 democracy, 347 globalization, 347 historical/decolonial perspective, 348, 350–352 neoliberalism, 346 One-Third World, 348 pluriverse, 356, 357 practicing decolonial analysis, 359 transmodern, 356 Two-Thirds World, 348 Global citizenship (GC), 347 Global environmental common resources, 220 Global imaginary, 678 Globalisation, 784, 795 Global North, 672, 676, 678 Global peace, 298 Global rankings, 678 Global South (GS), 673–676, 678, 681, 684 Global violence, 298 Global warming, 206, 372 Google, 912 Docs, 823 Earth, 91, 819 Hangout, 823 it, 913

Index Maps, 819 Street View, 819 Googling, 923 Governmentality, 115 Grammar of schooling, 588 Grand narratives and curricula Bildung, 368, 369 competence-based curricula and narrativity, 376–378 cultural narratives in curricula, 378–380 narratives of phenomena, 372–375 Pancasila, 370–372 Greek kindergarten curriculum, 87 Greenest City Action Plan, 956 Grit pedagogy, 729, 733, 737 Guru-shishya tradition, 265, 266 H Habitus, 37, 38, 730, 732, 733, 737 Hack the system, 918 Hall, G. Stanley, 865 Hands on head classroom, 447 Happiness, 278–280, 285, 286, 288–290 in education, 267 Harmonization, 288 Hedonia, 262, 263, 271, 272 Hegemonic arrangements, 841 Hegemony, 694 Hermeneutics, 499 Heuristic strategy, 374 Hierarchical perspective, 788 Hierarchization, 580 Higher education, 304, 307, 308, 311, 450, 455, 457, 569, 672–673, 703, 946 industrial revolution’s vision, 411 informed knowledge and awareness, 411 personal brand, 411 priorities, 411 remote and hybrid learning, 410 societal and political structures, 412 High-poverty youth population, 268 Historical consciousness, 317 History of schooling, 692, 702 Home baking businesses, 953–955 Homelessness, 336–338, 342, 343 Homemaker, 920 Homophobia, 771 Hong Kong, 610, 611, 613–616, 618, 620, 623–625 Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE), 621

Index Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (HKSAR), 609 Honorable harvest, 177, 178 Hospitality, 320–322 Household, 945 activities, 953 statistical analyses, 949 STEM funds, 944 visits, 950, 958 Hoyle’s concept, 568 Human-centered design, 768, 771 Human-centered ontologies, 318 Human cognition, 914 Human-computer interaction, 847 Human development index, 68 Human-dominated epoch, 321 Humanism, 211 Human knowledge, 366, 368 Human propriety, 211 HYPEBEAST, 919 Hyper-cognitive approaches, 297 Hypocrisy, 316 I IAACS Triennial Conference, 240 iACT, 66–69, 71, 73, 76, 77 Ideal developmental states, 459 Ideal norm approach, 510, 512 community, 514, 515 curriculum-making, 515 family resemblance, 512 history, 514 languages, 513 national identity, 513 political claims, 513 world history, 513, 514 Identity, 929, 932, 936 listening, 471–474 loss, 478–480 markers, 572 narrative, 591 possibilities, 481–484 strength, 474–477 theme, 471 Ideology, 786–788, 794, 795 Imaginative geographies, 339–340 Imagined community, 513 Immersion, 572 Inclusion, 970 Incrementalism policy cycle (1995-20202), 595–596 Indian Residential School system, 767

1011 Indigenization, 713, 716, 721, 723 Indigenous peoples, 112, 764 Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), 974, 977 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 969 Industrialist system, 118 Industrial Revolution, 262 Inequality, 676 Informal curriculum, 46 Infra-spectral approach, 861 Infrastructuring, 774 Inquiry as stance, 979 Inquiry-based curriculum, 791, 795 In-service teachers, 970 Instagram, 819 Instantiations, 309 Institutional authority, 984 Institutional inquiry, 997 Instructional design, 766 Insular learning, 826 Intake assessment, 749–751 Integrative approaches in teaching, 535 Intellectual activity, 430 Interactive digital resources, 601 Intercultural growth mindset, 86, 94, 95, 101 Intercultural responsiveness, 84 Interdisciplinarity, 597 Interests and engagement, 86 Internal elements, 592 Internationalization, 681–684 Internationalization of curricula (IoC), 671, 678–681 Internationalization of higher education (IHE), 671, 673–675 International student mobility (ISM), 675 Internet, 819, 820, 822, 824, 826, 829 addiction, 852 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), 856 Interpretation, 390 Inter-rater reliability, 953 Intersectionality, 930 Intervention, 923 techniques, 857 Invention, 917 iPad, 838 iPEACE model, 301, 304 iPhone, 819 Ireland, 545, 551–554, 556–560 Irish education system, 559 Irish policy development infrastructure, 559 iTeach, 131

1012 I-Thou, 259, 260 IVAC approach, 224 J James, William, 866 Justice-oriented progression, 970 K K-12 school, 265 KidSTART, 129 Kindle e-book reader, 819 Kindness, 284–285 Knowledge, 219, 220, 223–228 capital theory, 589 economy, 784 processes, 85 production, 85, 87, 931, 932, 939, 940 promotion, 493 society, 593 systems, 840 Knowledge-based economy, 589 Knowledge-in-practice, 567 Knowledge-producing modes, 590 Knowledge-sharing, 537 L Labour laws, 116 Labour market, 588, 589 LaBouvier, Chaédria, 918–919 Land-based curriculum, 197–198 Land-based learning, 184 Land ethic, 183 children’s engagement, 187–191 children’s thinking, 191–197 in curriculum and pedagogy, 197–198 Leopold, A. and, 184–186 research community and design, 186–187 Language of assessment, 786 Large-scale curriculum reforms, 528, 536, 539 Learned curriculum, 787 Learning, 984, 987, 994 adult nurturing, 111 assemblages, 917–923 citizen, 113–116 deep, 846 deskilling processes, 919 environments, 109, 110, 764, 765 in the digital age, 850–852 duality of children, 112 effectiveness, 915

Index fiction and poetry, 923 garden, 109–111 Greek mythology, 111 and knowledge acquisition, 914 networked, 849 non-linear ways, 916 outcomes, 874 preoccupation, 113 produce, 116–118 rote, 849 salvation and morality, 112 as transmission or transference of content, 847 urban and rural child, 111 Learning landscape, 609 cross-border, 623–624 ecology, 611–614 future education, 625–627 interface and transition, 624–625 Learning management systems (LMS), 825, 838, 841 Learning through play (LtP) approach, 70 Legitimacy, 299 Lemon Grove Incident, 637 Leopold’s land ethic, 184–186 Liberalization of web address, 857 Lien Foundation, 128 Life expectancy, 929, 936, 937 Life hacks, 922 Life histories, 571–573 Lifelong learning and career planning, 809 Life philosophy, 269 Life’s Rocky Start, 203 Life-wide learning (LWL), 613 Life writing, 241, 245–247 Lisbon Strategy, 674 Literacy-oriented activities, 949 Literature review, 754–757 Little Ripples (LR) curriculum, 67–69, 72–77 application to practice, 72, 73 approach, 68 big ideas, 74 community-led practice, 73, 74 connection to curriculum theories, 69 learning through play approach, 70 mindfulness pedagogy, 70, 71 teacher training, 74–77 trauma-informed early childhood education practice, 71, 72 values, 69 Lived curriculum, 660, 662, 666 definition of, 426 as relational pedagogy’s practice, 436–440

Index testimonies from the Covid-19 Spring, 428–436 transformation, 428–429 Lived experience, 337, 338, 341, 342, 426, 428 Local civic associations, 114 Locus of control, 119 London Greek Schoolchildren, 96 Loose parts theory, 55, 56 M Madness, 445, 447, 448, 453, 455, 456, 458, 461, 462 Mad studies anti-psychiatry, 453 child and adolescent psychiatry, 453 classroom teachings, 456 conceptual shift, 457 consumer/survivor movements, 453 critical scholarship, 453 epistemological and ontological interruption, 452 inquiry, 453 onto-epistemological perspective, 453 psychiatric violence, 452 rational adult male qualities, 454 subjectivity and lived experiences, 454 Making With Place: Public Art Projects, 337 Maladaptive behaviours, 281 Malgorithms, 915 Mann, Horace, 695, 698, 707, 708 and schooling, 695–697 Marginalized groups, 120 Marxism, 861 Marxist class system, 118 Masculinity, 306, 307 Massive open online courses (MOOCS), 825, 826 Mass media, 818 Mastery, 37 Material physiology, 847 Math education cognitive demand tasks, 971 mathematical models, 971 practical mathematics, 972 pre-service special educator, 971 special educators, 972–973 teacher education programs, 972 Mathematical knowledge, 973–974, 977 Mathematics education, 928, 933, 938, 939 Mathematics teacher/tutor, 933 Math-pedagogy, 977 Meaning/significance, 263 Measurement policy cycle (2002-2011), 596

1013 Media, 819 multitasking, 848, 849 Medical professions, 451 Mental distress, 455, 456 Mental health, 452, 453, 460 service user, 445 Mental hygiene, 449, 450, 460, 461 Mental illness, 445, 452, 453, 458 Meong, 94 Meritocracy, 732 equity and policy in Singapore, 125–132 ideology of, 124 policy cycle, 596, 597 Metacognition, 920 Metacurriculum, 458 Metamorphic sedimentary rock, 207 Metaphors, 318 Metaphysical language, 992 Meta-reflexivity, 888 Methodological nationalism, 518 Methodological statism, 518 Middle Years Development (MDI) study, 949 Mindfulness pedagogy, 68, 69, 71 Mind-map tools, 823 Mobication, 222 Mobile digital devices, 819 learning, 829, 830 phone, 917 Mobility through education, 222 Modes of reflexivity, 887–889, 895 autonomous reflexivity, 897–898 communicative reflexivity, 896–897 fractured reflexivity, 899–901 meta-reflexivity, 898–899 Monitoring, 87 Mono-focal knowledge, 680 Moodle, 823, 825 Moral imagination, 302, 307 Morris’ curriculum making network, 900 Mother-Earth-based pedagogy, 175, 176, 179 Motivations, 115 Multiculturalism, 673, 684, 712 half-breeds, 638 multicultural tradition, 637 politics of whiteness, 638 racial/ethnic apparatus, 638 resistance leaders, 639 Multitasking, 848 Multi-tiered Systems of Supports teams, 977 Musealization of publics, 335 Music education, 278–281, 283, 287, 289, 290 Mutual stretching, 930, 932, 938, 940

1014 N Narratives, 299, 685 conception, 591 curriculum proposals and teachers, 593 learning, 588 life narrative, 591 record, 600 teachers’ voices, 598–602 Narratives and narrativity, curricula benefits, 366 communication, 367 grand narrative, 367 (see also Grand narratives and curricula) Narrativity, 366, 367, 373, 374, 376, 378, 380, 381 National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC), 163 National Center for Education Statistics, 702, 977 National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), 553 National Council for Special Education (NCSE), 554 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 974 National curriculum (NC), 379, 805 Nationalism curriculum-making, 522, 523 modern curriculum, 522 national identities, 508, 509, 512 nationalism as a project, 511 national self-determination, 511 state, 508–510 National Program for the Teaching of Portuguese Language, 596 National spirit, 514 Nation-building, 511, 514, 516, 518, 521 Natural curiosity, 460 Naturalization, 676 Nature study, 107, 110, 113, 117 Neoliberal imaginary, 684 Neoliberalism, 346, 410–412, 732, 869, 916 NetDraw, 894 Net neutrality, 857 Network learning, 834, 849 edification, 836 educational technology, 839 educators, 837 learning community, 838 online classrooms, 838 ontological condition, 837 phone conferencing, 837 spatial configurations, 836 spatiotemporal challenges, 836

Index Network multiplexity, 889 Neutrality/universality, 451 New Brunswick Curriculum Framework for Early Learning and Child Care, 34 New learning borderscape cross-border learning landscape, 623–624 cross-national and cross-cultural learning, 624–625 New normal contingent school curriculum leadership, 620–622 COVID-19 pandemic, 609 curriculum system, 611–614 ecology of the learning landscape, 611–614 future education, 625–627 global pandemic, 608 HKSAR, 609 shifting public and non-public relationships, 614–618 No-excuses schooling, 734–736 (non)Academization, 573–578 Non-Chinese speaking (NCS), 624 Noored kooli, 802 Nordic countries, 219, 221, 224, 225, 379 Nordic guidelines, 218, 219, 225, 227, 228 Nordic policy documents, 221 Normal schools, 450 Normative physics, 655, 657–660, 662, 664, 666, 667 Norwegian curriculum, 491–496 Norwegian teacher educators, 225, 226 Nurturing Early Learners (NEL) Framework, 131, 132 O Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), 454 Official curriculum, 787 Online classrooms, 834, 835, 838 meeting tools, 823 modes of workspace, 839 settings, 839–842 teaching and learning, 837, 839 OnlyFans, 919 Ontario Agricultural College (OAC), 450 Ontario Education Association, 112 Ontario’s bullying policies, 770 Ontology, 299 Opioid crisis, 337 Opportunistic adults, 120 Orders of order, 861 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 376, 552, 810

Index Osmosis, 37 Outcomes Based Education (OBE) curriculum model, 793 Out-of-school curriculum, 950–951 P Padlet, 823 Pañca, 370 Pancasila, 370–372 Parkstown community, 949–950 Parson’s functionalist model, 35 Participatory design benefits, 775 CHAT, 774 DBIR, 773, 774 disability dongles, 772 in education, 772 neoliberal perspectives, 772 PDR, 773 stakeholders, 776 Participatory design research (PDR), 773 Participatory net, 819 Participatory research active participants, 403 binary oppositions, 388 consent, 403 curriculum and instruction, 395 deconstruction, 389 educational contexts, 401 expert-novice, 400 postcards, 389 processes and products, 406 project, 984, 995 qualitative research, 394, 402 research space, 398 school garden, 391 with children, 388, 402 Participatory visual arts approach, 87–89 Paternalism, 455 Pathological activity, 852 Patriarchal influence, 414, 415 Patriotism, 117 Peace and conflict studies, 302, 305, 311 Peace-building education, 302 Peace education, 258–261 co-constitutive, 310 curriculum, 312 definition, 298–299 double and triple helices, 311 holistic approach, 310 legitimacy, representation and praxis, 299, 310

1015 lessons, 306 men’s violences, 311 poetry and, 304–310 poetry as peace pedagogy, 311 responding to the crises arts at the nexus, 303–304 CPERG’s work, 300 curricular implications, 300 four paths forward, 301–303 transrational onto-epistemological orientation, 311 using poetry, 297 Peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding model, 301 Peace pedagogy, 299 Peace-related prompt, 305 Pedagogical academy (PA), 570, 571, 575, 579 Pedagogy, 317, 728, 730, 731, 733, 735, 737, 738, 838, 921 of privatization, 339 of the poor, 728, 730, 732 Peer mediation, 258–260, 268 People of colour, 661 Performance Delivery Agreement, 555 Personal electronic technologies, 341 Personal experiences, 461 Personality traits, 264 Personal learning environments (PLEs), 827, 828 Personal well-being, 290 Persuasive technologies, 853 Phenomenological perspectives, 765 Phenomenon related narratives, 381 Philanthropist, 327 Philosophy in action, 991 Physicist, 658, 659, 661–664 Piaget, 42 Pillars, 370 Pinterest, 916, 923 PISA tests, 810 Places of vitality, 34 Play-based learning, 55–57 Pluralistic teaching, 226 Podcasts, 819 Poetry arts-based peace education curriculum, 304 cross-pollinating and peace, 305–307 (see also Peace education) as second-order reflexivity, 307–310 writing workshops, 312 Policy, 218–222, 225 and curriculum alignment, 546 and curriculum coherence, 547–550

1016 Policy (cont.) cycle, 594, 595 discourse, 499 ecosystem, 545 landscape, 544–548, 551, 558, 559 Policy landscape in Ireland curriculum policy development structures, 550, 551 national level, 553, 556 regional level, 556 school level, 557, 558 supranational level, 552 Pollination, 305–307 Polydynamos daskalos, 574, 575, 582 Positioning, 664, 665 Positive moment-to-moment affect, 262 Positive psychology, 261–264 Postcolonial and decolonial analysis, 346 Post-critical dialogical approach, 984, 995 Post-digital (e-)learning, 829 Post-digital mobile learning, 824 Post-humanist ethics, 208–212 Post-secondary education, 656, 657, 933, 935 Poststructural feminism, 448 Poverty, 67, 728–734, 736, 737 Power/knowledge, 392 Powerful mathematics, 973 PowerPoint presentation, 309 Power structures, 777 Practical-academic knowledge, 580 Practical-as-technical tools, 580 Practical preparation, 578 Practical professionalism, 568 Practice, 218, 219, 225, 226, 228 portrait, 931, 932, 938, 940 Praxis, 794 Pre-digested prescriptions, 591 Preferred approaches to learning, 86 Pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) contextualizing, 452 developmentalism, 445–448 educator and researcher, 444 educator subjectivity, 444 hegemonic structures, 444 inclusion/exclusion, 445 mad epistemologies, pedagogies and subjectivities, 457–461 mad narratives, 454–457 mad studies, 452–454 mental illness, 445 self-reflexivity, 444 Pre-service program, 457

Index Preservice teacher education autobiographical storytelling, 415–421 candidates’ autobiographies, 413 neoliberalism, 410–412 reflective practice, 412, 413 transformative potential, 414–415 Pre-service teacher (PSTs), 412, 968, 970, 975, 977 Pressy’s learning machine, 824 Pre-trial detention, 745, 748 Primary school, 545, 550, 553, 555–558 Prior learning and lifeworld characteristics, 86 Problematic binaries, 729 Problem-solving heuristics, 914 Process model curriculum design, 791, 793 Process-oriented definition, 298 Production of expertise, 913 Productive tension, 461 Professionalism, 566 Professionalization, 448 Professional knowledge, 599 Professional practice, 449 Professor, 929, 933 Program(me) for International Student Assessment (PISA), 494, 552, 784, 800 Project-based learning, 765 Prosocial behaviour, 279, 281, 289, 290 Prussian schooling, 694–695 Psychiatric disorders, 453 Psychiatric survivor, 445 Psychological techniques, 853 Psychosocial concerns, 265 Psycho-social violence, 455 Psy-sciences, 446 Public and non-public relationships boosting policy and initiatives bridging the digitial divide, 618 collaborative and resilient spirit, 615 collaborative partnership, 617 complementary roles, 615 mental health conditions, 616–617 Public art, 334–343 Public spaces, 334, 335, 339 Public sphere, 582 Punishment, 698–700 Q Qualitative content analysis, 805 Qualitative research approach, 88 Quality assurance, 448 Quality early childhood programming, 76 Quality Education Fund (QEF), 617

Index Quality instruction, 694 Quebec, 674 Queer theory, 448 QuickTime program, 936 R Racial oppression/domination, 636 Racism, 665, 747–749, 768, 928, 930–933, 935, 969 Radical alterity, 210 Radical ethics, 997 Radio, 818 Ralph Tyler’s Objectives, 789 Rancière, Jacques, 861 partition of the sensible, 862 Rational-based praxis, 301 Rational decision-making, 786 Rationale for teaching, 975–976 Rational planning curriculum model, 789, 790 Read and write the world, 936 Reading list, 318–320 Reardon, Betty, 298 Recidivism, 744, 745, 750, 758 Reciprocity, 947 Reconstructing curriculum, 234, 248 Reconstructions of Home: A wandering, 336–343 Recordings, 839 Recursive feedback, 86 Reflective dialogue, 419 Reflective musings, 389 Reflective practice, 422 Reflexive learning, 95, 101 Reflexive pedagogy, 85 Reflexivity, 304, 307–310, 600 definition, 887 modes of, 887–889, 895–903 Reforms, 544, 545, 547–550, 552, 553, 558, 559 Refraction, 589, 593, 594 Reframing, 767 Refugee, 67, 83, 87–99, 101 border crossing, 87 camps, 71 children, 71 Republic, 88 Republic website, 92 Refugee-led early childhood programs, 67, 72–74, 76, 77 Regan-Thatcher-led global policy shift, 674 Reintegration, 744, 748, 752, 755–757 Relational encounters, 421, 422

1017 Relational ontologies, 840 Relativistic perspective, 787 Remand, 744, 746–747, 749, 751, 757 Re-Mapping public space, 341–342 Report card data, 962 Repurposing art, 341–342 Research Grants Council (RGC), 617 Research process, 932 Residential school system, 170 Resilience, 269, 270 Responsibilization, 583 Responsive action, 100 Restricted professionality, 568 Revolutionary pedagogies, 713, 716, 720, 721 critical pedagogy, 719 curriculum, 720, 721 oppression, 719 public health recommendations, 720 seek, 721 Rock-laden contexts, 206 Roles of researcher, 397, 401 Rote learning, 849 Ruitenberg, Claudia, 320–322 Rumination on rocks complicated conversations, 201–203 natural stone pavers, 200 photographs and plaques, 200 returns towards ethics of witnessing, 203–208 Ryerson, Egerton, 697–700 S Sabre-tooth Curriculum narrative, 786 Sàmi education, 379, 380 Samsung phones, 920 Save the Children’s Boxes of Wonders, 66 Scanning cognition, 846 Scholars, 672 School-based curriculum (SBC), 794, 806 School-based teaching, 228 School community, 395, 399 School curriculum (SC), 806 School garden, 187, 188, 191–193, 197, 391, 984, 985, 988, 994 activities, 106 adult control, 106 army, 117 children groups, 106 history, 106 (see also Learning) method, 107–109 ontological orientation, 107 sociology, 106

1018 Schooling functions, 694 School-mandated curriculum, 260 School mathematics, 933 School practicum, 578 School-supervised home garden, 119 School wellbeing programmes, 264 Schoolwork, 455 Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, 928, 929, 934, 935, 939, 940 children’s fund, 955–957 data analysis, 953–954 definition, 52 early childhood, 52–55, 57, 60 emergent curriculum, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61 emergent vs. conventional curriculum, 53, 54 funds of knowledge, 945–948, 957–958 global competencies, 54, 55, 59, 60 household or community functions, 944 learning objectives, 945 loose parts, 57–59 opportunities for children, 958–961 preschool, 58, 61 preschoolers, 57 preschool interventions, 52 researchers, 57 research methods, 948–954 Science curriculum, 656, 660 education, 656, 657, 659 education narrativity, 373 Scientific knowledge, 589 Scientization of parenthood, 451 Scotland, 886, 891 Secondary witnessing, 202 Second-order changes, 764, 766, 769 Second-order reflexivity, 307–310 Seed packets, 114 Self-actualization, 411 Self authoring, 665 Self-awareness, 280 Self-confirmation heuristics, 851 Self-discipline, 269 Self-efficacy, 271 Self-esteem, 280 Self-government, 115 Self-growth/personal development/selfactualisation, 263 Self-management, 613 Self-other relations, 203 Self-perpetuating, 913 Self-worth, 270

Index Semiotic landscapes, 89 Semi-structured interviews, 572 Sense-making, 545, 549, 550, 559, 560 Seriality assemblages, 915–917 colour-coded instructions, 912 expertly assembled, 914–915 reassurance, 912 Service learning project, 318 Settler colonialism, 238, 246, 249 Settler-colonial models, 178 Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), 611 Sexism, 771, 930, 932, 933, 935 Shared and coherent theory of change, 531–533 Shared inquiry, 318 Shared sense-making, 532, 536–538 Short circuits, 916 Śīila, 370 Singapore early childhood education in, 127–132 ideology of meritocracy, 124 meritocracy, equity and policy in, 125–132 preschool curricula, culture and needs, 132–135 socio-political system, 126 Singapore Pre-school Accreditation Framework (SPARK), 129 Singular narrative, 677 Situational model, 794 SKETCH Working Arts, 337 Skills, 219, 224–227, 229 Skinner’s behaviourist model, 35 Skinners teaching machine, 824 Smartphones, 819 Snapchat, 819 Social/political bodies, 120 Social and emotional learning (SEL), 68 Social behaviours, 290 Social bookmarking tool, 823 Social constructivism, 170 Social constructivist theory, 55–57, 60 Social contract, 592 Social ecology, 266 Social efficiency, 242 Social-emotional well-being, 614 Social engagement, 341 Social inequalities, 458 Social inequities, 770 Social injustice, 281 Social issue, 974 Socialization, 30, 31, 730, 736 assumptions, 36 Bourdieu’s approach, 36

Index contemporary childhood studies, 35 models, 35 Social justice, 598, 929, 931–933, 936, 938–940 Social justice-oriented definition, 298 Social learning and development, 500 Socially engaged art, 334–336, 339–343 Social media, 819, 912 Social mission, 582 Social mobility, 593 Social model, 968–970 Social networking sites (SNS), 819 Social networks, 889 Social psychiatry, 453 Social reading, 468–470 Social reconstruction model, 788 Social relationships, 290, 568, 588 Social revolution, 819 Social sculpture, 336, 341 Social solidarity, 590 Social theory, 730 Social transformation, 795 Social Web, 819, 823, 824 Social worth, 271 Society-body-school nexus, 730 Socio-cognitive approach to policy implementation, 536 Sociocultural influences, 770 Socio-economic determinants, 324 Sociology, 730 Socio-material approach, 728, 729, 731, 735–738 Sociomaterial relations, 839 Sociopolitical tool, 972 Sociotechnical cartography, 841 Socio-technical learning management systems, 843 Sonare and videre, 159 Song writing, 281–283, 288 Sophie’s curriculum making network, 896 Soviet curriculum, 801 Special Education (SPED) conceptualization, 970 critical perspectives, 969–971 critical statistical literacy, 974–975 critical teacher mindset, 975 education teacher preparation programs, 968 fluidity of approach, 978 mathematics teaching and learning, 971–972 policy makers, 968 pre-service special education, 968

1019 purpose matters, 978–979 rationale for teaching, 975–976 special educators, 976 teacher preparation, 976 teachers, 969 trajectory, 970 Special educators, 972–973, 976 Special Needs Assistants (SNAs), 557 Spencer, Herbert, 866 Spiritual and academic mentorship, 265 Standard-based approach, 809 Standardization, 537 Statement, 501 Statistical arguments, 975 Statistical literacy, 974–975 Statistical methods, 866 normalcy and deviance, 866 Statistics Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), 953 STEM, see Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education STEM curriculum child questionnaires, 952 educator reflections, 951 observation rubrics and photographs, 951 parent questionnaires, 952 report card, 952 teacher questionnaires, 952 StitchFix, 912, 918 Stolpersteine, 208, 209 Story of Malak, 90 Structural-functionalist perspective, 784 Structural oppressions, 458 Structure of research sessions, 932 Student artworks, 95 assessment, 318 body, 731–734 learning, 843 profile, 601 Student-centered methodologies, 581 Students’ testimonies, 427, 436, 438 adaptations, 433 coping, 432–433 interdependence, 430 love and social distancing, 429 normality, 434 privilege, 434 reviving, 430–431 routines, 431 togetherness in homelessness, 435 well-being, 436 Subjective frames of reference, 96

1020 Subjectivity, 206 Supernormal memory, 847 Sustainability, 220, 950, 955–957 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), 262, 376 Sustainable gardening, 956 Sustainable peace, 272 Swedish teacher educators, 225, 226 Symbiosis, 915 Synesthetic meaning making, 82, 84 Synergistic integration, 775 Synesthesia/multimodality and diverse learning repertoires/routines, 86 Systematic repair, 773 T Taba, Hilda, 871 Tablet, 838 Taught curriculum, 787 Teacher adjustable practices, 86 Teacher-centered methodologies, 581 Teacher education approach, 977 curricula, 566, 568–571 Cyprus, 581 disciplinarity knowledge, 573–578 education, 567–571 literature, 582 methodology, 571–573 professionalism, 566–571 programs, 446, 971 teacher knowledge, 567–571 theory-practice debate, 578–581 Teacher mindset, 975 Teacher preparation, 976, 977 Teacher professionalism conceptualizations, 567–571 construction, 573 entangled notions, 583 Greek-Cypriot context, 574 space-time, 581 and teacher education, 566 theory-practice debate, 567–568, 578–581 types of, 568 Teacher reflection, 976 Teachers’ curriculum making data analysis, 893–895 design and complementarity of the research activities, 891–893 heuristic framing, 887 modes of reflexivity, 887 (see also Modes of reflexivity)

Index National and organisational context, 903–904 and networks, 889–890 relational goods and evils, 901–903 research methodology, 891 Teachers’ narratives, 589, 593, 602, 603 TeachersPayTeachers©, 916 Teachers’ subjectivation, 581 Teachers’ tertiary education, 571–572 Teachers’ voices, 598–602 Teacher training, 74, 76 Teaching, 985–987, 993, 994 machine-supported learning, 824 philosophy, 976 profession, 571, 572 scene of, 988 Teaching in the Anthropocene course, 317–320, 322 Technical perspectives, 765 Technical-rational models, 567 Technical skill-building for peace, 310 Technocratic capitalism, 919 Technological determinism, 855 Technological mechanisms, 835 Technology and innovation, 809 Temporary custodian, 322 Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA), 621 Tested curriculum, 787 Testimonials, 207 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 204 Text-based curriculum, 948 Textual instability, 822 The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), 749 The Death of Michael Stewart, 918 The European Parliament Study, 673 The Good Citizen’s Factory, 120 The Guardian (2020), 919 The Hampton-Tuskegee philosophy, 640 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience, 209 The Onion, 201 Theoretical marginalia, 389 Theoretical-methodological framework, 594 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 678 Theory of change, 528, 538 in Finnish core curriculum reform, 534–536 shared and coherent, 531–533 Theory of neuroplasticity, 847 Theory-practice binary, 583 Theory-practice debate, 567–571, 573, 578–581

Index Therapeutic intervention, 461 3-D technology, 923 Throttling, 857 Tokiya, 94 Traditional commodity-oriented practices, 335 Traditional monolingual models, 516 Transformation, 537 Transformational leadership, 789 Transformative and reflexive curriculum, 89, 90 Transformative design teams, 777 Transmission, 204 Transrational path forward, 301–303 Transrational peace, 301 Transversal competence, 377 Trauma informed practice, 68, 72 Treaty of Versailles, 511 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC), 243 Twitter, 819, 821, 829 Tyler, Ralph, 871 Tylerian model, 366 Typological approach, 510, 512 curriculum-making, 518 ethnic/cultural and political/civic models, 515 languages, 516, 517 legitimate nations, 515 state, 515, 517, 518 U Ubuntu, 930 Unimaginable occurrence, 204 United National International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 298 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 376 United States School Garden Army (USSGA), 108, 115 Universal design for learning (UDL), 765 Universalism, 676 Universalist approach, 107 Universalization, 676 University-School Support Program (USSP), 617 Unlocking the world, 320–322, 328 Unschooling, 706 USA schooling, 695–697 US Bureau of Education, 118 User-generated content technology, 819 V Valued knowledge, 579 Vibrancy, 916

1021 Victimization, 856 Virtual learning environments (VLE), 835 Virtuosity, 37 Vocational education, 595 Vulnerability, 302, 304, 415 Vulnerable educator, 303 W Wales, 886, 891 War and peace, 92, 93 Web 1.0, 819, 820 Web 2.0, 819–822, 826–828, 830 description, 819 to e-learning 2.0, 820–822, 824 social media, 819 Web-based technologies, 914 Web-based training (WBT), 824 Wellbeing curricula, 261, 262 Western economic system, 676 Western models of education, 677 Western physics, 657 WhatsApp, 819 Wheeler cyclic model of curriculum development, 790 White empiricism, 662 White institutions, 656 White women, 655–661, 663, 664, 666 Wicihitowin, 244 Wicked problems, 769 Wikibooks, 823 Wikis, 819, 821, 822 Willed learning, 706–708 Witnessing contexts, 201–203 Women of Colour (WOC), 655–666 Women empowerment, 469 identity, 469 work, 449 World Education Indicators (WEI), 784 X xMOOC, 826 Y Young people’s eudaimonic wellbeing, 261 Young researchers, 402 YouTube, 912, 923 Z Zero-tolerance approach, 734 Zoom networking

1022 Zoom networking (cont.) community and difference, 839–842 educational institutions, 836 educational practices, 834 materialisations, 835 online environments, 836–839

Index pedagogical principles, 836 protocols, 835 sociomaterial interactions, 834 synchronous and asynchronous platforms, 835 teaching and learning practices, 835