Rhizocurrere: a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to curriculum autobiography

This paper introduces rhizocurrere, a curriculum autobiographical concept I created to chart my efforts to develop place-responsive outdoor environmental education. Rhizocurrere brings together rhizome, a Deleuze and Guattari concept, with currere, Pinar’s autobiographical method for curriculum inquiry. Responding to invitations from Deleuze, Guattari and Pinar, to experiment, I have adapted their ideas to create a philosophical~methodological concept that draws attention to relationships between my pedagogical and curriculum research and the contexts that have shaped my life~work. This paper outlines rhizocurrere, its parent concepts and how I have enacted my attempts to think differently about curricula and pedagogy. The central question is not ‘what is rhizocurrere?’ but rather ‘how does/could rhizocurrere work?’ and ‘what does/might rhizocurrere allow me to do?’     

Understanding Christianity: exploring a hermeneutical pedagogy for teaching Christianity

ABSTRACT

Disagreements about how Christianity should be taught in state-funded school RE have a long history. In this article we take England as a case study and examine the debates that have arisen about the legitimacy of a theologically based pedagogy following the publication of Understanding Christianity, a resource inspired by recent developments in academic theological hermeneutics. We particularly focus on the question whether or not pupils should be treated as insiders or outsiders. Drawing on Anthony Thiselton’s notion of responsible hermeneutics, we argue that this offers a robust model for an academically rigorous approach to teaching Christianity in schools that enables pupils to be both insiders and outsiders in the hermeneutical process. We then illustrate how Understanding Christianity has attempted to embody this aspiration.     

Hermeneutics,aesthetics, and the quest for answerability: a dialogic possibility for reconceptualizing the interpretive process in curriculum studies

This study reviews six traditional approaches to hermeneutics and presents a dialogic understanding of hermeneutics. It concludes with specific applications of hermeneutics to curriculum development practices in schools with a focus on inter‐subjectivity. While 20^th‐century access to post‐structural notions of subjectivity through aesthetic experience began to engender a language of possibility rather than a language of certitude for hermeneutic inquiry in curriculum studies, it nevertheless did not fully account for interpretation as a productive and collaborative act in the inter‐subjective sense of being for the other. This study explores the dialogic emergence of this language of possibility through a review of historical and contemporary approaches to hermeneutics, and subsequently proposes an alternative understanding of hermeneutics and aesthetics to offer a reconceptualized vision of the interpretive process for curriculum studies.     

Environmental education in action: a discursive approach to curriculum design

Why do the designers of environmental education do what they do towards the environment through education? More importantly, how do they account for their design decisions (plans and actions)? Using the theoretical and methodological framework of discourse analysis, we analyse environmental education designers' discourse in terms of the discursive resources—or interpretive repertoires—that they use to (a) make their position, (b) make their talk do work and (c) tell a story about events, situations and who they are (identity). Drawing on observations and interviews from a larger programme concerned with understanding environmentalism and environmental education, we identified five main repertoires: relevance, knowledge transferability and translatability, emotionality, expertise and empiricism. The approach provides us with a more refined characterization of the culture of environmental education curriculum design through the ways designers in the field explain their doings, and we explore the important implications for curriculum design in this field.     

Subject and curriculum in Chile: a historical political perspective

In this article, addressing the curriculum will involve analysing and discussing the configuration of a subject, who has developed himself or herself within a historical–political context, in which a dominant culture has reproduced itself through the official curriculum. Bearing in mind such a framework, the text will follow the journey of this subject through the Latin American continent, specifically through the history of Chilean education. The aim is to understand the situated curriculum as a cultural field of power forces reproducing a subject with an ‘ideal’ education, which has been invented by a dominant power since the conquest of America, the ideals of the Modern Nation State, and was finally captured by neoliberalism and commodification of education.     

镜像与幻像:新时期女性电影的主体想象

新时期以来,女性在挣脱父权权威确立自身主体性的同时,又面临新的男权话语的遮蔽与塑造,中国大陆女性电影的衍变即反映了女性主体的生成与失落过程。女性电影虽然确立了以性别差异为基础的主体性想象,但缺乏电影话语层面的女性自觉,未能形成真正自足的女性主体的电影话语空间。     

Universities and a Human Development Ethics: a capabilities approach to curriculum

This article takes up the challenge of curriculum change in relation to the contested purposes of universities. It argues for an expansive, public good understanding, rather than the thin market exchange norms which currently drive higher education policies. The paper suggests that a human capital approach to curriculum is then insufficient to capture the full range and potential of a university curriculum. Instead, an approach to curriculum based on human development and capabilities formation is advanced as offering a richer perspective on what it means to be human and hence on the kinds of graduates universities should educate. Some implications for teaching, learning and assessment are outlined and a framework to design and operationalise a human development approach to curriculum is proposed.     

Reframing the curriculum: a transformative approach

ABSTRACT

While acknowledging higher education’s complicity in inequality, the premise of this paper is that curriculum transformation can be one means of challenging and dismantling structural injustices towards the goal of equity of access and outcomes. Fraser’s multi-dimensional framework for social justice is drawn upon to explore what this transformation requires. The framework is used to critique a particular case of curriculum intervention, Education Development in South Africa. In Fraser’s terms, the interventions have been largely affirmative, not transformative. In addition, they have focused on only the first dimension of justice, redistribution, and have generally failed to attend to misrecognition and representation. Overall, we argue that the responses of higher education institutions in South Africa to the challenges of a globalised, pluralist world have been affirmative, not transformative. A transformative approach demands a ‘reframing’ of the curriculum. This involves adjusting the scale of the problem, interrogating assumptions informing the norms of the curriculum, questioning current boundaries between ‘mainstream’ and ‘other’ students and reviewing the fitness of the curriculum for a pluralist society. The paper concludes with recommendations for what such a reframing of the curriculum might entail.     

Intercultural PhD supervision: exploring the hidden curriculum in a social science faculty doctoral programme

International knowledge markets rely heavily on a ready supply of highly mobile doctoral students, many of whom are from the global South, to bring in revenue. The supervision of these PhD students, however, can reproduce neo-colonial knowledge relations, often in subtle ways. In settler nations, international PhD students may find that they are assigned subaltern status in their university departments and this can have a significant impact on their learning. This paper explores the experiences of a group of international PhD students in a social science faculty in a New Zealand university during the first two years of their doctoral studies. It examines how they responded to the displacement of their cultural values and priorities, the way they navigated intercultural engagements with supervisors, and their ensuing relationships with indigenous and ethnic allies in the faculty. Despite considerable pressure to conform to the dominant modes of academic knowledge production that characterise universities in settler nations, it is concluded that international students find ways of speaking out, often in highly coded forms, that complicate their subaltern academic status.     

Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge-based approach

This paper begins by identifying what it sees as the current crisis in curriculum theory. Following a brief history of the field, it argues that recent developments have led to it losing its object––what is taught and learned in school––and its distinctive role in the educational sciences. Arising from this brief account of the origins and nature of this ‘crisis’, the paper argues that curriculum theory must begin not from the learner but from the learner’s entitlement to knowledge. It then develops a framework for approaching the curriculum based on this assumption which is illustrated by an example of how the Head Teacher of a large secondary school in England used these ideas. Finally, it examines three widely held criticisms of the knowledge-based approach developed here and the issues that they raise.     

Speaking back to Manifest Destinies: a land education-based approach to critical curriculum inquiry

This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism shapes place in the social studies curriculum, producing understandings of land and citizenship in educational settings. To do this, the author uses the emergent framework of land education to move forward the important projects of place-based education, especially its potential for centering indigeneity and confronting educational forms of settler colonialism in environmental education. To emphasize how place-based education can intersect with land education, the author outlines how a concept of place, informed by Indigenous knowledge, renders settler colonialism visible. The author then describes how current models of place-based education differ from land education in a number of ways. Finally, using a land education approach, the author demonstrates how schooling, through social studies curriculum, transmits a settler colonial land ethic that must be made explicit in order to decolonize settler colonial relations attached to current pedagogical models of place. The author insists land education – like environmental education – must take place across the curriculum (k-16). However, land education implies a commitment to begin to understand the process of decolonization that takes seriously the centrality of settler colonialism.     

Collaborating with children in exploring marginalisation: an approach to inclusive education

This article focuses on the importance of engaging with children's voices in school settings in order to understand and deal with marginalisation. Engaging with the views of children and young people is an essential part of the process of developing inclusion. It can be viewed as an approach to inclusive education, which predominantly places emphasis on the views of the learners rather than on other organisational aspects within a school context. The study reported here is from a collaborative piece of research in one primary school classroom where practitioners, children and the researcher worked together in order to identify areas of concern within the particular context, in order to address marginalisation. The benefits, as well as the complexities of engaging in such processes are discussed. Furthermore, the study has led to the development of a framework for promoting inclusion that is presented here. The framework can be used to guide a systematic way of collecting evidence that will facilitate the process of understanding and dealing with marginalisation, and promoting inclusion, that can be incorporated into the daily work of practitioners.     

Teaching data science: an objective approach to curriculum validation

Emerging careers in technology-focused fields such as data science coupled with necessary graduate outcomes mandate the need for a truly interdisciplinary pedagogical approach. However, the rapid pace of curriculum development in this field of inquiry has meant that curricula across universities has largely evolved in line with the internal disciplinary strengths of each institution rather than in response to the needs of graduates. To assist with the development of data science subjects the themes and content that contribute to each subject should be objectively validated. We propose the use of an objective test for data science curricula to quantify whether a particular degree programme maintains an interdisciplinary perspective unconstrained by single discipline bias. The test analyses a given curriculum and quantifies the subject components by category using natural language processing (NLP) techniques.     

Towards a collegiate approach to curriculum management in primary and middle schools

Informed professionals in the education service have put forward a model of good management practice in primary and middle schools, with particular emphasis on the curriculum. Tensions within the model contribute to a gap which exists between the model and actual practice in many schools. A management development approach may help with implementing this model of collegiate management.     

Specifying a curriculum for biopolitical critical literacy in science teacher education: exploring roles for science fiction

In this essay I suggest some ways in which science teacher educators in Western neoliberal economies might facilitate learners’ development of a critical literacy concerning the social and cultural changes signified by the concept of biopolitics. I consider how such a biopolitically inflected critical literacy might find expression in a science teacher education curriculum and suggest a number of ways of materializing such a curriculum in specific literatures, media, procedures, and assessment tasks, with particular reference to the contributions of science fiction in popular media.