Abstract: This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault's concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that worked on the child, rather than with the child. In order to understand how the child comes to be known and recognized as a learner, both at the intersections of normative conceptions of childhood and material expectations of the student, we use Biesta's three domains of education: socialization, qualification, and subjectification as an organizing framework and draw primarily from Common Core Learning Standards and related policy reports with the aim of reorienting educational work away from economic and political universals and toward a subjective respo...

Abstract: There has been a growing concentration of high-achieving students attending selective public schools of choice as part of the neoliberal reforms of education. While this growth has had an eroding e...

Abstract: This research explores the question of how a sex education curriculum can be a form of civics education, moving students from a discourse of personal responsibility to a discourse that represents a “we” voice and takes into consideration not only the other person but society.In two 8-week classes delivered in a charter school to a racially and ethnically diverse group of ninth graders, an individualized neoliberal discourse met up against critical consciousness around an ethic of care regarding sex in relationship and sex in society. Current evidence-based sex education programs are health- and risk-focused, necessitating an approach that emphasizes individual choice and self-care. In this paper we explore several ethical dialogues that occurred during classroom discussions of consent, coercion and media objectification. Through a discourse analysis, we explore the positions of students regarding sex education topics as they sometimes adhere to a neoliberal perspective of choice and sometimes adop...

Abstract: Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonial experience has widely influenced educational theory and practice. Yet, despite much focus on the gendered and sexed dynamics of racialization processes, and their applications to the dynamics in particular of teaching and learning, surprisingly little attention has been given to how these intersect both with generational relations and the models of children/childhood on which his account relies. In this paper, Fanon's representations of childhood across all his texts are analyzed and evaluated. It is argued that attending to the diversities and instabilities of these representations not only strengthens critical engagement with Fanon's ideas conceptually, methodologically and in terms of pedagogical process, but also prompts reassessment of their contemporary relevance for, and corresponding challenges to, current pedagogical and political practice.

Abstract: Education researchers have established the value of dialogic, whole-class discussions across content areas. However, such discussions have been defined primarily in terms of questions that enable or constrain interactions among multiple students. Research remains to be done on whether and how the subject matter with which teacher and students interact during whole-class discussions can also enable or constrain the dialogic quality of their talk. In this article, I begin to explore the possibility that whole-class discussions may manifest in particular ways within a discipline. Based on sociolinguistic discourse analysis of three transcripts from a suburban, ninth-grade history classroom, I suggest that “imaginative-entry activities,” which invite students to imagine themselves into hypothetical scenarios based on historical events, can promote or discourage whole-class discussions. Specifically, I demonstrate how the narratives co-told by a teacher and his students during these imaginative-entry a...

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) Posthumanism and Educational 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 mate...

Abstract: This article draws on ethnographic research at L’ecole Gulliver, a preschool in Paris that integrates children with disabilities in mainstream classrooms with non-disabled peers. The preschool provides a case example of a collectivist integration approach to constructing shared institutional life, which is conceptualized in part through their connection to the work of Felix Guattari with psychiatric patients at a French in-patient clinic, La Borde. At both La Borde and Gulliver, daily life and institutional practices are structured to maximize transversality, with the intention of fostering a new kind of “group-subject” that is responsive to the realities of daily institutional life. We argue that practices at Gulliver challenge progressive inclusive teaching practices that largely ignore or neglect to account for the emotional difficulties of inclusion. Their approach challenges the focus in progressive inclusive education on the individual child or educator to the detriment of understanding the ...

Abstract: This paper explores nostalgia as both a limiting cultural force in the lives of school librarians and a practice that can be used to more accurately portray library work. The stereotype of the shushing, lone school librarian, based on restorative nostalgia, is related to a nostalgic oversimplification of the school librarian's historical role. Yet, this prevalent view overshadows the real work of school librarians, which is often behind the scenes. The persistence of this misperception results in school leaders simultaneously professing love for school libraries of the past while at the same time eliminating current programs. By practicing reflective nostalgia, school librarians can look at the past through the lens of their present working realities to more accurately portray their lives and work. Reflective nostalgia is the foundation of a reflective teaching practice that helps school librarians advocate for their programs and prevent demoralization. This conceptual analysis thus contributes to...

Abstract: This paper places under examination the arguments used to fight against school policies and legislation intended to guarantee and protect the rights of trans students. That is, the paper's central investigation works to uncover the regimes of truth about children, gender, race and privacy implicit in the methods employed by activists who seek to counter the expansion of rights for trans students. Using critical discourse and document analyses influenced by queer theories and Critical Race Theory, this paper examines the group Privacy for All Students and the arguments it makes in campaign documents against California State Assembly Bill 1266 – the statewide trans students’ right law passed in 2013. First, this paper unpacks the intertwined constructions of children before moving to an examination of how notions of innocence are founded by gendered, sexual, and racial regimes of truth. Then, it explores how the foundational logics of the public sphere make possible for PFAS to address their argumen...

Abstract: This paper is about memory, the elusive process of remembering and of an encounter between a researcher and a participant who after five years reunited to remember. The object under study is a high school social justice curriculum with a central focus on the development of social action projects. Grounded in Pitt and Britzman's work on difficult knowledge, this paper asks: What do 10th grade students who spent four years attending a school committed to the Freirian principles of political engagement remember about their high school experience? Past and recent interviews are woven together to surface three emergent lines of thinking: the failure to secure knowledge as unitary and in agreement; education as deferred in time; and research as relational dilemmas and unconscious desire. The aim is to complicate teaching and learning by illuminating its difficulties and unseating our reliance on evidentiary accountability, production and outcome. Throughout, the positionality of the researcher is discus...

Abstract: Foucault's notion of heterotopia offers a novel way to understand teachers’ conceptualizations of childhood, in juxtaposing adult memories of childhood with their present context of teaching children. Memory writing prompts were given to 41 early childhood teachers, and the resulting written narratives were analyzed as heterotopic spaces. The study follows two trajectories. First, in terms of teacher development, we examine how the construct of heterotopia can help teachers and teacher educators understand the impact of memories on their current assumptions about childhood. Second, we argue that examining the teacher's internal experiences through heterotopia can contribute to theoretical thinking about childhood. The study's findings suggest that it is a considerable but meaningful challenge to examine our subjective experience of childhood in relation to our understanding of children today. This process may be useful in assisting the teacher to disentangle the imagined, remembered, conceptualize...

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 ...

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 att...

Abstract: With post-colonial Pakistan inheriting the British colonial ideological and governmental apparatus, the English literature curriculum implemented at the university level in Pakistan carried the interpellatory baggage of its colonial past. Our interdisciplinary exploration focuses on using deconstructive pedagogy to demystify and subvert the ideological conditioning of Pakistani students that is done through the English literary syllabi taught at the Masters level in Pakistani universities. These pedagogical practices involve genealogical and deconstructive readings of selected English literary texts taught to students pursuing a Master of English degree at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. These practices involve an activation of deconstructive readings through class discussions to unveil the different hegemonic processes involved in the constitution of docile political subjects. They challenge any authoritative interpretation of canonical texts, creating new meanings by activating ...

Abstract: You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact ...

Abstract: Sexuality education as an HIV prevention strategy is positioned as a way to empower youth in relation to their sexual identities and behaviours. While the youth subject is recognized as complex, the underlying premise is that identity can be targeted through sexuality education. In this paper, I present data from an ethnographic research study, carried out with the South African non-governmental organization loveLife, that foregrounds identity as an ongoing site of struggle within sexuality education. Data are drawn from field notes, individual semi-structured interviews and artefact analysis. Bringing together the work of educational theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth and feminist geographer Doreen Massey, I theorize the pedagogical encounter as a momentary coming together of understandings of self and other across perceived spatial and temporal boundaries. The findings problematize the possibility of a stable (and “local”) youth subject that can be targeted and empowered through sexuality education. A...

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 W...

Abstract: Narratives, and the public discourses that they feed into, shape how we think about ourselves, the work we do and both shape and are reinforced through the institutions we are submerged in. Narratives allow us to construct our identity and find our place within our particular context (Bruner, 1996). In this sense, narratives are inextricable from power (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2011). Rather, narratives are imbued with the power relations from which they rise, who can tell a story, who can claim it, and how the story can be told. As De Fina and Georgakopoulou assert, narratives are often an exercise in power relations and serve to perpetuate social inequalities. Narratives hold a special place in the discourse practices that shape ideologies (Jacobs, 2000). The public discourses that shape our social life are often fed by narratives about how this work is done and who does this work. These narratives are expected to conform to a certain motif, which effectively dictates which voices get heard more often or louder than other voices (Blommaert, 2005; Ehrenhaus, 1993). In education, the discourse around the work done in schools is often in contention with discourses around accountability, or resource allocation. The articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry (CI) all touch upon this relationship between narratives, discourse and power, particularly within the context of the United States. This includes exploring how narratives shape the way we see ourselves as educators and as citizens (Hochman and Lamb), examining how these narratives impact the work happening inside the classroom (Sherry), and unpacking larger discourses around what knowledge is deemed critical to a course, how the content is selected and what this means in the larger context of high stakes testing and short course durations (Parker and Lo). These public discourses, which play out in the public space, through the media, political rhetoric and policy making, directly affect the work that happens within the walls of the school. The narratives used often shape how we think of practice or how we construct our social roles. In her piece exploring nostalgia as a “limiting cultural force” (p. 132) on school librarians, teacher educators and school administrators, Jessica Hochman illustrates the ways in which public narratives about school librarians directly influence how the profession is regarded by both those who practice it and those with power to dismantle it. Using Boym’s (2001) distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgias, Hochman’s “School Library Nostalgias” analyses the ways in which the school librarian’s role is misperceived by school leaders, often invisibilizing the work they do and falling into stereotypes about their

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...

Abstract: There are multiple ways of apprehending the current state of an amorphous field-like curriculum studies. While none of them can give us a comprehensive view, some perspectives shed different light ...

Abstract: Examining the subjectification of young people, particularly from marginalized communities, has had a long history in education scholarship and continues to be an important topic for curriculum studies. The authors in the recent special issue of Curriculum Inquiry, titled “The Child in Question,” offered a range of new perspectives for understanding how the very idea of what a child is comes to be formulated, calling into question the “stories of childhood that society uses to delimit concepts of futurity, personhood, otherness, belonging, normalcy, and development” (Farley & Garlen, 2016, p. 228). This issue of CI brings together four articles that examine similar questions with a focus on “youth” and the conditions that shape the subjectivities of those who are positioned as “young people” or “adolescents.” Together, the four articles in this issue provide a comparative view, by focusing on experiences in three different nation states: Canada (Yoon), South Africa (Gacoin), and the Unites States (Sarigianides and Stiegler). By focusing on the subjectification of youth within these three nation states, the articles contribute to a discussion of the ways in which certain lives continue to be valued more than others within settler colonial contexts. Although the papers in this issue do not directly draw upon the framework of settler colonialism, each paper contributes to an understanding of how youth are always-already subjected to white settler colonial ideology. This is important as youth also continue to mobilize in unprecedented ways in resistance to the forces that shape their social conditions within settler states, a point of contrast to which we will return later. The issue begins with Sam Stiegler’s article, “Privacy for all students?: Talking about and around trans students in ‘public’.” Stiegler analyses campaign materials from a group named Privacy for All Students (PFAS), which purports to “protect” students’ safety by arguing against Assembly Bill 1266. The AB1266, which was passed in 2013 by the California State Legislature, gives students the right to participate in sex-segregated school activities on the basis of their own sex identification, thus protecting the rights of trans students. Disguising anti-trans rhetoric through the discourses of children’s privacy, PFAS argued against AB1266 without mobilizing an explicitly transphobic discourse or appearing as being against the rights of trans students. Stiegler’s focus on what these campaign materials do exposes the systems of knowledge that allow for the arguments against trans students to be misrecognized and not perceived as transphobic. Moreover, Stiegler shows

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 explora...

Abstract: This article examines the recently released Girl Rising film and associated campaign to analyze how the guarantee that girls’ education is panacea for local, national and global solutions is sedimented through affective logics. I view Girl Rising as a curriculum inclusive of the film, accompanying packaged lesson plans for educators, and related discourses and affects. The Girl Rising curriculum is part of a larger discursive development apparatus that anchors particular storylines about the relationship between girlhood, education and development as truth. I attend to textual and visual representations of empowered Third World girlhood in the Girl Rising curriculum. While empathy is often understood as a good feeling, I analyze its precarious dimensions, which are cultivated through curricular encounters between the Western spectator/learner and the Third World Girl. I ask: How is the ideal Third World Girl produced in and as curriculum? What are viewers provoked to feel as they consume her poten...

Abstract: What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. As Davin (1999) notes, “We all ‘know’ what we mean by child and childhood. Yet its properties are m...

Abstract: The currents of elitism surging through curriculum studies in the United States have long been of chief concern to critical scholars in the field. Elements of this elitism running along racialized,...

Abstract: Teachers’ efforts to re-consider adolescence as a historically-situated social category exposes how dominant biological and psychological discourses of adolescence position youth who do not fit “proper” expectations of adolescence as abject. In this seven-month study with experienced White and Black teachers working with poor youth of color, I employ Kristeva's notion of abjection to show how teachers’ recognition of their own complicity in the abjection of youth in their school offered them an opportunity to re-consider dominant conceptions of adolescence in their curriculum. Understanding their participation in larger discourses that aim to regulate abjected adolescents/ce, teachers’ views of specific students in their school who suffered as a result of teachers seeing them as abject created opportunities for re-thinking adolescence as a category.

Abstract: Advanced high-school courses, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses in the United States, present a content selection conundrum of major proportions. Judicious content selection is necessary if students are to learn subject matter meaningfully, but the sheer breadth of tested material in these courses promotes nearly the opposite: “test-prep” teaching and mere “coverage” of the curriculum. This paper contributes elements of a theory of content selection that is aimed at meaningful learning (Bransford) and centered on the ideas of agency and constraint (Giddens), curricular structure (Bruner and Schwab), and knowledge and power in curriculum practice (Young). We also present the practical tool we used to select content for emphasis in a high-school government and politics course – an “advanced” course where selecting anything for emphasis is perceived as costly.

Abstract: This paper discusses how Julia Kristeva's theory can inform our understanding of unteachable moments. It proposes a pedagogical relationship that can contain breakdowns of meanings and work toward breakthroughs to new awareness, particularly related to social justice pedagogy in teacher education. First, one example from the author's own teaching is used to define an unteachable moment: Compared to a teachable moment, an unteachable moment refers to the breaking down of pedagogical relationships, although the two moments are not dualistic opposites. Second, Julia Kristeva's theory of intimate revolt is discussed to understand in depth the significance of unteachable moments and the process of mourning the loss to generate the capacity for questioning and meaning-making. Along with this analysis, a lens of nonviolence is adopted to examine how to transform these moments into meaningful pedagogical relationships. Informed by the unteachable moment, the author's shift of pedagogical approaches in soc...

Abstract: In this paper, I study the narrative structure of comics as a means to describe the ways that indeterminate modes of representation can allow the reader to imagine that which in childhood can never be fully expressed. Analyzing a number of panels from Gilbert Hernandez's graphic novel, Marble Season, I describe a conceptual link between the psychoanalytic idea of sublimation (referencing the theories of Freud, Loewald, and Winnicott), and Raymond Williams’ notion of a “structure of feeling.” In particular, I examine the latency stage of childhood as a time where the challenges of individual development involve a struggle to channel into the social world, in potentially productive ways, the internalizations of lost love. I also explore how the gutter, the space between the panels in comics, may function as a zone of sublimatory reconciliation between the self and the object world, and where, in their interactions with the space in the middle, the reader invariably engages with the structure of chil...