Curriculum Inquiry 46卷1期

1. A pedagogy of possibility: Reading Roger Simon in the wake of Ferguson, Missouri

Author: Cassily, Shaleen; Clarke-Vivier, Sara

Source: Curriculum Inquiry46.1(Jan. 2016): 8-26 .

Abstract:

Recent examples of police brutality perpetrated against black bodies have called into question issues of class and race relations in the USA. State forms like schooling reconstitute social and racial inequities and allow the perpetuation of abuses. In this cultural moment, this essay turns to two texts by Roger Simon, Teaching Against the Grain and A Pedagogy of Witnessing to examine what it might mean to teach for engagement and solidarity, or what he calls a pedagogy of possibility. After a brief overview of the first book, we focus in on two particular sections, Teachers as Cultural Workers and Pedagogy as Political Practice to examine Simon's ideas regarding cultural work in public spaces as a precursor to freedom. Our purpose is to create a conceptual foundation upon which we can situate Simon's work in his second book. Then we examine the second book as an enactment of the first. Finally we turn to recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and the pedagogical outpouring of online materials attempting to Teach Ferguson. Specifically, we analyze one online resource as a means to uncover an application of Simon's pedagogy of possibility in public space. It is our hope to situate Simon's work in this way in order to highlight specific cultural practices that promote social change.

2. Mirages in the desert: Theorizing Western Muslim identity across 60 years

Author: El-Sherif, Lucy

Source: Curriculum Inquiry 46.1 (Jan. 2016) : 27-44 .

Abstract:

Theorizations on Western Muslim identity that are multi-layered and grounded in actual Western Muslim experiences are hard to find. Two exceptions to this are The Road to Mecca by Muhammad Asad (1954/2005), and Islam is a Foreign Country by Zareena Grewal (2014), rich texts that span across six decades. Asad's classic account of a European convert's nested journeys and Grewal's historical ethnography of American Muslim student-travelers offer readers an opportunity to examine how theorizing Western Muslim identity has changed and to ask: How does theorizing Western Muslim identity construct itself? What does it construct itself against? What are some of the assumptions and contradictions that it tells us? In this essay review, I look at how travel, particularly travel as a quest for knowledge, has served as a way of becoming a sovereign human subject at home in the West through travel to the East. I argue that, paradoxically, Western Muslims may retrieve sovereignty through a process of becoming Western constructed against an Eastern Other. Juxtaposing Asad's and Grewal's writings shows conceptually similar blind spots that reveal the paradox of this pursuit of subjecthood. I argue that the strategies illustrated by the protagonists in the two texts utilize an Orientalist gaze within a framework of a Western human subject that entrenches the eternal Otherness of Western Muslims, even as it secures a Western selfhood for its individual subjects. In doing so, I seek to contribute to a broader debate in curriculum studies on anti-racism, decolonization and racialized minorities by complicating the frame of inclusion for equality.

3. Translanguaging and the multilingual turn: epistemological reconceptualization in the fields of language and implications for reframing language in curriculum studies

Author: Sembiante, Sabrina

Source: Curriculum Inquiry 46.1 (Jan. 2016) : 45-61.

Abstract:

New challenges in education, stemming from the forces of globalization and the continued diversification of the student body, illuminate the need for a reexamination of the role of language in curriculum studies. Through a discussion of the issues around multilingualism and translanguaging and the shift in perspective that these topics have provoked in the fields of SLA, TESOL, BE, I present the relevance and implications of this critical language approach for the field of curriculum studies. My commentary is guided by three questions. Initially, I investigate, how do the purposes and audiences of the May and Garcia and Wei compare? I continue on to discuss, what are common key themes or issues raised by the books? And lastly, I consider, how do the concepts discussed in each book inform each other and the field of curriculum studies at large? I provide concluding thoughts on ways for language as critical pedagogy to be taken up in the broader domains of curriculum studies.

4. Restyling the humanities curriculum of higher education for posthuman times

Author: Siddiqui, Jamila R.

Source: Curriculum Inquiry 46.1 (Jan. 2016) : 62-78.

Abstract:

The future viability of the humanities in higher education has been broadly debated. Yet, most of these debates are missing an important consideration. The humanities' object of study is the human, an object that some would argue has been replaced in our onto-epistemological systems by the posthuman. In her 2013 book, The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti addresses and furthers this posthuman shift by explicating both her critical posthumanism and how the humanities curriculum can use it to restyle itself in its time of crisis. In this paper, I put Braidotti's text in conversation with John Dewey's 1929 Experience and Nature, prompting a reconsideration of the nature of experience as it manifests in a posthuman vital materialist form, and how posthuman empiricism may require a return to a new kind of sense experience; a reconsideration of the embodiment of subjectivities, and how they are to be articulated in a posthuman curriculum; and, correspondingly, a reconsideration of how one might come to enact and experience a posthuman humanities. I conclude that, along with this imperative to restyle the humanities for posthuman times comes a need to reconfigure the institution of higher education into an expanded posthuman network, perhaps one that reaches outside its present bounds.

5. McLuhan's challenge to critical media literacy: The City as Classroom textbook

Author: Mason, Lance

Source: Curriculum Inquiry 46.1 (Jan. 2016) : 79-97.

Abstract:

This paper examines the high school media education textbook that Marshall McLuhan and coauthors published in 1977. The City as Classroom textbook provides an articulation of the practical implications of McLuhan's media theories. I offer an explication of this approach and its significance for contemporary media education, while articulating how McLuhan's perspective could bolster the educative potential of critical media literacy, which can be distinguished from other forms of media education by its emphasis on examining the ideological content and power relations behind the construction of media messages. McLuhan's curriculum can be considered a form of critical media education, though it takes a broad approach that facilitates student inquiry within a multitude of mediated environments and includes examinations of media forms and grammar in addition to content. McLuhan's approach to media analysis offers possibilities for expanding the boundaries of critical media literacy by making an exploration of the tools that students use to mediate their experiences a key facet of media curriculum.

6. Pedagogy of an empty hand: What are the goods of education? What is teaching good for?

Author: Maclear, Kyo

Source: Curriculum Inquiry 46.1 (Jan. 2016) : 98-109.

Abstract:

Taking inspiration from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I propose to work through some of the features of false generosity that arise in education and specifically in moments of acute crisis. This inquiry, which begins with (and was sparked by) events following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, continues with a discussion of Philippe Falardeau's (2011) film Monsieur Lazhar, and concludes with a reflection on Jacques Derrida's ethic of hospitality (elegantly applied by Jen Gilbert in her thinking about sexuality in schools.) Derrida provides a supplement to Freire's notion of true generosity by offering a radical (if impossible) model of unconditional giving and welcome. Of primary concern throughout this essay is how a posture of sympathetic paternalism expressed through superficial and symbolic gestures may not only preempt the delicate and hard work of symbolizing loss, but also obstruct the possibility of a more genuine and humanizing solidarity (what Freire would call true generosity and what Derrida would call an ethics of unconditional hospitality). The goal of providing solid and soothing guidance in situations of uncertainty may seem laudable. But are there moments when the oath of doing no harm is in itself harmful? Can we forge new answers to the questions: What are the goods of education? What is teaching good for?

7. On the limits of the human in the curriculum field

Author: Moreira de Oliveira, Thiago Ranniery; Lopes, Danielle Bastos

Source: Curriculum Inquiry 46.1 (Jan. 2016) : 110-125.

Abstract:

Humanism and the concept of the human that informs pedagogical discourse have been increasingly questioned by what has been called post-human times. In this paper, we situate Paulo Freire's (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Nathan Snaza and John Weaver's (2014) PosthumanismandEducational Research within these debates. Both books raise ethical and political questions about the limits of the human. By going beyond a simple opposition between these works, our aim is to map connections and suspensions by which they are paradoxically connected. Our commitment is also related to how a debate on ethics is raised, featuring an interrogation of the human as a theoretical and political category. Between the two books, we bring up the issue of limits, margins, borders and boundaries, but also the instability, fluidity and vulnerability of the human and his/her relationship and dependence of living organisms, including non-human lives. The limits open up to explorations of literal, metaphoric and material relations, and also transmigrations and hybridizations between the human and the non-human. In this sense, we argue that it is necessary to question the centrality of the humanist conception of man in education, which Freire defended, but it is also relevant to question the centrality of modern Western cosmology in providing meanings about the human and non-human in curriculum studies.