Provoking Curriculum Studies

This book collects recent and creative theorizing emerging in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory, through an emphasis on provoking encounters. Drawn from a return to foundational texts, the emphasis on an ‘encountering’ curriculum highlights the often overlooked, pre-conceptual aspects of the educational experience; these aspects include the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning. The book highlights that immediate components of one’s encounters with education—across formal and informal settings—comprise a large part of the teaching and learning processes. Chapters offer both close readings of specific work from the curriculum theory archive, as well as engagements with cutting-edge conceptual issues across disciplinary lines, with contributions from leading and emerging scholars across the field of curriculum studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory.

Provoking Curriculum Studies pushes forward a strong reading of the theoretical and methodological innovations taking place within curriculum studies research. Addressing an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies—conceptualizing scholars as poets and the potential of the poetic in education—it offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Drawing on poetic inquiry, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, life writing, and several types of arts-based research methodologies, this diverse collection spotlights the intellectual genealogies of curriculum scholars such as Ted Aoki, Geoffrey Milburn and Roger Simon, whose provocations, inquiries, and recursive questioning link the writing and re-writing of curriculum theory to acts of strong poetry. Readers are urged to imagine alternative ways in which professors, teachers, and university students might not only engage with but disrupt, blur, and complicate curriculum theory across interdisciplinary topographies in order to seek out blind impresses—those areas of knowledge that are left over, unaddressed by ‘mainstream’ curriculum scholarship, and that instigate difficult questions about death, trauma, prejudice, poverty, colonization, and more.

Comprised of chapters written by established Canadian curriculum scholars as well as junior scholars and graduate students, this collection of essays provoke readers to imagine the different ways in which educational researchers can engage the narrative inquiry within the broader field of curriculum studies.

Provoking Curriculum Studies pushes forward a strong reading of the theoretical and methodological innovations taking place within curriculum studies research. Addressing an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies—conceptualizing scholars as poets and the potential of the poetic in education—it offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Drawing on poetic inquiry, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, life writing, and several types of arts-based research methodologies, this diverse collection spotlights the intellectual genealogies of curriculum scholars such as Ted Aoki, Geoffrey Milburn and Roger Simon, whose provocations, inquiries, and recursive questioning link the writing and re-writing of curriculum theory to acts of strong poetry. Readers are urged to imagine alternative ways in which professors, teachers, and university students might not only engage with but disrupt, blur, and complicate curriculum theory across interdisciplinary topographies in order to seek out blind impresses—those areas of knowledge that are left over, unaddressed by ‘mainstream’ curriculum scholarship, and that instigate difficult questions about death, trauma, prejudice, poverty, colonization, and more.

This timely edited collection asks bold and urgent questions about the complexity, culture, and character of curriculum studies in Canada. Featuring 30 original chapters and 21 short invocations, this volume includes works by both established and new scholars, illustrating the wide range of cutting-edge writing in this area. Weaving together personal essays, poetry, life writing, and other arts-based inquiry modes, Canadian Curriculum Studies highlights the creative, performative, interactive, and imaginative nature of this field. The contributors were asked to provoke conceptions and understandings of curriculum studies by examining their convictions, commitments, and challenges with/in this discipline. By bringing together diverse indigenous and non-indigenous scholarship, the editors invoke the concept of métissage, which is finding a growing resonance both in Canada and abroad. Exploring the idea of curriculum studies as an interdisciplinary field across transnational contexts, this rich text is well-suited to senior undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and qualitative educational research.

What comes after the reconceptualization of curriculum studies? What is the contribution of the next wave of curriculum scholars? Comprehensive and on the cutting edge, this Handbook speaks to these questions and extends the conversation on present and future directions in curriculum studies through the work of twenty-four newer scholars who explore, each in their own unique ways, the present moment in curriculum studies. To contextualize the work of this up-and-coming generation, each chapter is paired with a shorter response by a well-known scholar in the field, provoking an intra-/inter-generational exchange that illuminates both historical trajectories and upcoming moments. From theorizing at the crossroads of feminist thought and post-colonialism to new perspectives that include critical race, currere, queer southern studies, Black feminist cultural analysis, post-structural policy studies, spiritual ecology, and East-West international philosophies, present and future directions in the U.S. American field are revealed.

Is it possible to bring university research and student education into a more connected, more symbiotic relationship? If so, can we develop programmes of study that enable faculty, students and ‘real world’ communities to connect in new ways? In this accessible book, Dilly Fung argues that it is not only possible but also potentially transformational to develop new forms of research-based education. Presenting the Connected Curriculum framework already adopted by UCL, she opens windows onto new initiatives related to, for example, research-based education, internationalisation, the global classroom, interdisciplinarity and public engagement. A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is, however, not just about developing engaging programmes of study. Drawing on the field of philosophical hermeneutics, Fung argues how the Connected Curriculum framework can help to create spaces for critical dialogue about educational values, both within and across existing research groups, teaching departments and learning communities. Drawing on vignettes of practice from around the world, she argues that developing the synergies between research and education can empower faculty members and students from all backgrounds to contribute to the global common good.

Comprised of chapters written by established Canadian curriculum scholars as well as junior scholars and graduate students, this collection of essays provoke readers to imagine the different ways in which educational researchers can engage the narrative inquiry within the broader field of curriculum studies.