Curriculum Inquiry 43卷3期文章

1. Reading the Bible as a Pedagogical Text: Testing, Testament, and Some Postmodern Considerations About Religion/the Bible in Contemporary Education

Author: Avner Segall and Kevin Burke

Source:Curriculum Inquiry, 2013, 43(3): 305-331

Abstract:While it is true that following various Supreme Court decisions in the last century, religion is, in most cases, no longer explicitly taught in public school classrooms, we use this article to explore the ways in which implicit religious understandings regarding curriculum and pedagogy still remain prevalent in current public education. Building on previous work, we first aim to problematize the ways religion and particularly Judeo-Christian assumptions remain at the core of secular public education in the United States. To do so, we work to engage the Bible as the foundational Western text and its understanding of testing and of teaching as testament to illustrate particular assumptions about assessment, questioning, and the possibility for interrogating authoritative text. In the process we outline a historical precedent that twins passive reading of the Bible as always-already containing singular truths with a modern educational system underwritten by these same assumptions about knowledge and expertise lying in the teacher and the textbook. We suggest that the Bible is not only our “first” text—authoritative, literal, and fixed—but also our firstpostmodern text which explicitly allows for, indeed encourages, creative, even subversive, encounters with knowledge rather than being subject to passive submission in a system of transmissive education. Ultimately, and using existing work in hermeneutics, critical literacy, and constructivist education, we pursue a critical reengagement with the historical and ongoing role of the Bible and religion in modern public, secular schooling as a way of revisiting fundamental epistemologies and ways of reading text and particularly the curricular implications of revising how we read education-as-text.

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2.Access to Mathematics: “A Possessive Investment in Whiteness”

Author: Dan Battey

Source:Curriculum Inquiry, 2013, 43(3): 332-359

Abstract:While mathematics education gives access to elite universities, higher-paying jobs, and the accumulation of wealth, it continues to be framed as a neutral curricular domain. However, data continually show differential access provided to students of color and their White peers through tracking, the availability of Advance Placement courses, and counselor referrals. This article frames mathematics education within a broader racial context to show how it functions along the same dominant racial ideologies within society. I analyze national data sets in the United States to calculate the wage-earning differential attributable to differences in mathematics coursework by ethnic/racial groups across three time points: 1982, 1992, and 2004. This analysis projects advantages for Whites due to differential access to mathematics that total in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The article explores one way to see how color-blind ideology and whiteness produce material stratification through the institution of mathematics education. Drawing on the constructs of interest convergence and divergence, the article ends with envisioning ways to enact a more race conscious mathematics curriculum.

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3.Dis/ability, Agency, and Context: A Differential Consciousness for Doing Inclusive Education

Author: Srikala Naraian

Source:Curriculum Inquiry, 2013, 43(3): 360-387

Abstract:In any sociocultural context, efforts to promote inclusive education may evoke trajectories of change that are as unpredictable as they are inexhaustible, stimulating the production of a range of disability subjectivities, performances, and constructions. This article unearths such local constructions by focusing on the experiences of nongovernmental organization educators and families of students with disabilities in Chennai, India, as they collectively engaged in inclusive education activity. Using the framework of differential consciousness (Sandoval, 2000) I explore the oppositional agency of participants in securing equitable opportunities for students with disabilities in mainstream settings. My aim in doing thus is to animate the links between local practices and global concepts of inclusive education. Even though the narratives of participants index “place” as the predominant signifier of inclusion, their decision making within hugely inaccessible contexts discloses their compulsory movement through multiple, sometimes contradictory, positions to achieve equitable schooling. I subsequently draw on these narratives and more broadly on U.S. third world feminist scholarship to suggest a few lines of inquiry that can serve a transnational theory of inclusive education.

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4. Dis/ability, Agency, and Context: A Differential Consciousness for Doing Inclusive Education

Author: Wolff-Michael Roth

Source:Curriculum Inquiry, 2013, 43(3): 388-417

Abstract:In this article, I (1) argue for approaching processes, events-in-the-making, by means of process categories—to learn, to teach—not by means of categories that denote differences in state and (2) exemplify doing and writing research consistent with process philosophy. To understand process we must not think, research, and write them in terms of categories (etymologically, things specified by predicates) but in terms of movement itself. The unfinished and inherently open-ended event-in-the-making indicates such movement and is associated with the disappearance of possibilities in its actualization (the event), openness toward the future, unpredictability, and excess of intuition over intention. I use empirical materials from a mathematics classroom to exemplify (give a body to) these categories and to ground my discussion. I conclude by discussing several implications that arise from the fact of theorizing and researching the living curriculum as unfolding, yet-to-be completed event.

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