Provoking Curriculum Encounters Across Educational Experience: New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory Archive 9780367178642, 9780429058110

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
1 Introduction
2 Currere Tales: Journeying as Pilgrims to the (an)Archive
STRAND I Spaces
3 A Poor Curriculum in Urban Spaces: An Atlas for Ethical Relationality
4 Technotheological Curricular Spaces: Encountering the Circus, Cathedral, and Bridge
5 Experimentation in Afterschool U’s “Movie Maker Studios”: Unexpected Moments of Contingency, Teacher-Becoming, and Joy
STRAND II Plurality
6 Singing at the Burrard Inlet: An Inquiry Into the Reverberations of Sounding in the Natural World
7 Provoking Spiritual Encounters: Dancing With Spirit
8 Locating Who (I Am) in What (I) Do: An Autoethnographic Encountering of Relational Curriculum
9 Toward a Bountiful Curriculum: An Intercultural Encounter With Al-Farabi’s Pedagogy of Proximity (Ittisal)
STRAND III Intensities
10 The Curriculum of Home Things
11 Close Encounters of the Pedagogical Kind: Science Fictioning a Curriculum-to-Come
12 The Minor Gesture and Curriculum Studies
STRAND IV Charges
13 Resistance and Resonance: Postcolonial Texts and Social Justice Conversations in ELA Classrooms in Rural Saskatchewan
14 Love, Loss, and the Horizons of Human Becoming
15 Conceptualizing and Enacting Sensational Currere: Attuning to the Embodied Essence in Autobiographical Curriculum Inquiry
16 Provoking Curriculum (Studies): Intellectual Interpolations
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Provoking Curriculum Encounters Across Educational Experience

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 postgraduate students in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory. Teresa Strong-Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, Canada. Christian Ehret is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, at McGill University, Canada. David Lewkowich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta, Canada. Sandra Chang-Kredl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia University, Canada.

Studies in Curriculum Theory Series Series Editor: William F. Pinar, University of British Columbia, Canada

In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students may not be able to keep up with the proliferation of different topical, trendy book series in the field of curriculum theory. It will be a relief to know that one publisher offers a balanced, solid, forward-looking series devoted to significant and enduring scholarship, as opposed to a narrow range of topics or a single approach or point of view. This series is conceived as the series busy scholars and students can trust and depend on to deliver important scholarship in the various “discourses” that compose the increasingly complex field of curriculum theory. The range of the series is both broad (all of curriculum theory) and limited (only important, lasting scholarship)—including but not confined to historical, philosophical, critical, multicultural, feminist, comparative, international, aesthetic, and spiritual topics and approaches. Books in this series are intended for scholars and for students at the doctoral and, in some cases, master’s levels. Disney, Culture, and Curriculum Edited by Jennifer A. Sandlin, Julie C. Garlen Storying the World The Contributions of Carl Leggo on Language and Poetry Edited by Rita L. Irwin, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Anita Sinner What Is Curriculum Theory? 3rd Edition William F. Pinar Provoking Curriculum Encounters Across Educational Experience New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory Archive Edited by Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich and Sandra Chang-Kredl For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Studies-in-Curriculum-Theory-Series/book-series/LEASCTS

Provoking Curriculum Encounters Across Educational Experience New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory Archive Edited by Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich and Sandra Chang-Kredl

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich, Sandra Chang-Kredl to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-17864-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05811-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet for their provocations over the years inviting us to approach curriculum as a living, encountering (an)archive

Contents

Foreword Acknowledgements List of Illustrations 1 Introduction

x xii xiv 1

TE R E SA S TRO N G- WIL SO N , CH RISTIAN E H RET, DAV ID L E W KOW I C H AN D SAN DRA CH A N G- KRE DL

2 Currere Tales: Journeying as Pilgrims to the (an)Archive

8

TE R E SA S TRO N G- WIL SO N , AMA RO U YO DE R, AV R IL AIT K EN, SA N D R A C H AN G- KRE DL A N D L IN DA RA DFOR D

STRAND I

Spaces

21

DAV I D L E W KOW I C H AN D CH RISTIAN E H RE T

3 A Poor Curriculum in Urban Spaces: An Atlas for Ethical Relationality

25

J E N N I F E R MACDO N AL D

4 Technotheological Curricular Spaces: Encountering the Circus, Cathedral, and Bridge

42

YU-LING LEE

5 Experimentation in Afterschool U’s “Movie Maker Studios”: Unexpected Moments of Contingency, Teacher-Becoming, and Joy M I C H E L L E A . H O N E YFO RD

57

viii

Contents

STRAND II

Plurality

73

TE R E SA S TRO N G - WIL SO N

6 Singing at the Burrard Inlet: An Inquiry Into the Reverberations of Sounding in the Natural World

77

L E N A R E B E C CA RICH ARDSO N

7 Provoking Spiritual Encounters: Dancing With Spirit

90

SA N D R A OW É N :N AKO N DE E R

8 Locating Who (I Am) in What (I) Do: An Autoethnographic Encountering of Relational Curriculum

103

L I SA J. S TA R R

9 Toward a Bountiful Curriculum: An Intercultural Encounter With Al-Farabi’s Pedagogy of Proximity (Ittisal)

116

W I SA M K H . AB DUL - JAB B A R

STRAND III

Intensities

131

C H R I S TI A N E H R E T AN D SAN DRA CH A N G- KRE DL

10 The Curriculum of Home Things

133

SA R A H B Y R NE B AUSE L L

11 Close Encounters of the Pedagogical Kind: Science Fictioning a Curriculum-to-Come

147

JESSIE L. BEIER

12 The Minor Gesture and Curriculum Studies

160

N I K K I ROTA S

STRAND IV

Charges

171

SAN D R A C H A N G - KRE DL A N D DAVID L E WKOWICH

13 Resistance and Resonance: Postcolonial Texts and Social Justice Conversations in ELA Classrooms in Rural Saskatchewan L U K E H E I D E BRE CH T A N D GE RAL DIN E B AL ZER

173

Contents 14 Love, Loss, and the Horizons of Human Becoming

ix 186

RO B E RT C H RISTO P H E R N E L L IS

15 Conceptualizing and Enacting Sensational Currere: Attuning to the Embodied Essence in Autobiographical Curriculum Inquiry

193

E S TH E R O. O H ITO AN D TIFFA N Y M. N YACH AE

16 Provoking Curriculum (Studies): Intellectual Interpolations

206

TE R E SA S TRON G- WIL SO N , JAYN E MA L E N FA NT, ER IK A HASEBEL U DT, R I TA L . IRWIN , IN GRID JO H N STO N , CAR L LEGGO, N I C H O L A S NG- A - FO O K, AN TO IN E TTE O B E RG AND HANS SMIT S

List of Contributors Index

221 230

Foreword

My first response to this collection of essays is to thank the editors and contributors of Provoking Curriculum Encounters across Educational Experiences: New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory Archive for taking up the ideas and aspirations that Bill and I brought to Toward a Poor Curriculum forty-three years ago. But that gratitude reveals my narcissistic error of attributing your interest to our authorship, and not to the problem that provoked it: the contradiction at the heart of curriculum as existence and education perpetually constitute and undermine each other. Just as we offer our children curriculum—the world that matters to us— we sense the arrogance of gift, embarrassed by its certainties, presumptions, and commitments. The language that we found for that tension in the ’70s came from psychoanalysis and phenomenology, brilliantly mediated in Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor, the body-subject, encompassing both prepersonal intuition and profound personal responsibility for choice. If our rhetoric in Toward a Poor Curriculum became a bit rhapsodic in our celebration of individuality, we were desperate to make a place for persons, real students, and teachers in the deserts of educational bureaucracy. In this collection I find that familiar and compelling tension as narratives of personal history, teaching, curriculum, and critique are gathered under the categories of affect theory: spaces, intensities, pluralities, and charges. Certainly the politics of the past few years testify to the contagion of affect, as rational deliberation gives way to attachments, moods, and furies. It is clear that we dismiss these storms of affect at our peril, just as we dismiss the appetites that fuel our consumption and jeopardize our planet and the lives of our descendants. And yet, in the midst of this swirling world, these authors speak from their histories, recognizing and resisting the seductions of habit, and consensus. In visits to the University of Alberta in the ’80s and ’90s, I felt this inclination to push past the horizons of curriculum to what it excludes in the scholarship and teaching of Ted Aoki, Max van Manen, and Terry Carson and their students. Envious, I attributed their fervour to their location at the edge of the familiar, to the mountains rising to graze the skies, and the grizzlies that roamed them. The genealogy that

Foreword

xi

Chapter 16, “Provoking Curriculum (Studies): Intellectual Interpolations,” offers toward the end of this volume corrects this romanticism with its history of the Provoking Curriculum conferences, reminding me that this work was generated by the remarkable politics of the universities where it thrived and by the intellectual community constituted by the scholars who took up the project of Aoki, van Manen, and Carson, and of Bill Pinar, who brought this work to British Columbia. I celebrate the vulnerability that these authors reveal as they acknowledge the coupling of feeling and knowing in their educational experience and as they persist in exploring that experience to discover both what it contains and what it excludes. Madeleine R. Grumet

Acknowledgements

The initial idea for this edited volume came from the Provoking Curriculum conference held at McGill University in Montreal in February 2017. The eventual focus and structure of the book—its theme (“Provoking Curriculum Encounters”) and its strands (spaces, plurality, intensities, charges)—arose from the conference itself. The strands had first been suggested by Christian Ehret, one of our co-editors, who was on the conference organizing committee; we thank him for his inspired contribution. We also acknowledge our indebtedness to that entire organizing committee, whose work on the conference informed our call for chapters. With this volume, we have attempted to further channel the intellectual energy generated at the conference by inviting colleagues to engage more deliberately with “provoking curriculum encounters,” this in the context of the archive (and anarchive) with a particular focus on the place of Bill’s and Madeleine’s seminal work, Toward a Poor Curriculum (now in its third edition), in initiating and shaping that discussion. In our last chapter, we come full circle, with a genealogical account of the vital importance of living encounters with one another as a curriculum community, such as through the Provoking Curriculum conference. Here, too, we turn to thank the curriculum community—our curriculum colleagues—for their/your support, which you showed by submitting more than eighty abstracts for us to consider in response to our call for chapter abstracts; we wish we could have included all or more. As it is, we are deeply grateful to our contributors, who from their invited abstracts, developed highly stimulating chapters—ones whose distinctive perspectives have provoked us and that we hope will do the same for others. We also take this opportunity to remember to thank one another as co-editors. In working together as an editorial team, we came to look forward to, and depend on, hearing each other’s perspectives and insights. We are also thankful to our curriculum colleagues who, at the invitation of Routledge, offered useful critical feedback for us to consider in moving forward with the volume. We could not have put this volume together without considerable help. We gratefully acknowledge CSSE (the Canadian Society for the Study

Acknowledgements

xiii

of Education) for its support of “Provoking” generally and particularly that of its Past President Nicholas Ng-A-Fook (who was President at the time of the conference and the putting together of the book proposal). We are deeply grateful to CACS (Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies) and the Dean of the Faculty of Education at McGill for supporting dissemination coming out of the Provoking Conference, which allowed us to share about the forthcoming book at the 2018 IAACS (the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies) conference as well as engage Jayne Malenfant and Fatima Khan as editorial assistants. Maija Harju was also engaged in an analogous role, this for a post-conference special issue of JCACS (Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies), “The Arts in Curriculum: Aesthetics, Embodiment and Well-being,” edited by Avril Aitken, Margaret Dobson, Maria Ezcurra, Claudia Mitchell, and Teresa Strong-Wilson. We owe a huge thank you to Jayne, a PhD student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill, whose gentle, interested presence and organizational skills were instrumental in helping coordinate our efforts as we began to review and discuss chapter drafts; in addition, she contributed by co-authoring the last chapter with StrongWilson. We are also very thankful to Fatima, also a McGill PhD student in Education, whose deft and knowledgeable hand in preparing the final manuscript for submission proved indispensable. We thank Routledge and its editors for their timely and informative assistance, and especially Matthew Friberg and Katherine Tsamparlis. Above all, we thank William Pinar, as series editor of Routledge’s Studies in Curriculum Theory, for his indefatigable encouragement of our edited volume, and Madeleine Grumet, for so graciously agreeing to write its preface. We feel honoured and grateful, many times over. We hope that this volume now finds a home among scholars, teacher-educators, teachers, and community practitioners, whose scholarship and practice continue to enliven the field of curriculum studies. Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich, and Sandra Chang-Kredl

Illustrations

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3

5.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 15.1

Co-inhabitants of the park January sunrise Nourished by the Bow Movement on the Glenmore Trail Recognizing otherness Paths to gratitude The curricular space of the Roman Circus The curricular space as heaven on earth The bridge which is not a bridge at the Nitobe Memorial Garden in Vancouver, Canada, December 6, 2017 Unexpected Moment Inquiry Framework Touchstone One with accompanying image, Like a Tumour Touchstone Two with accompanying image, Thinking in Rapid Fire Touchstone Two with accompanying image, Thinking in Rapid Fire (2) Words (that) hurt

32 34 35 36 36 38 46 49

51 61 108 110 110 200

1

Introduction Teresa Strong-Wilson, Christian Ehret, David Lewkowich and Sandra Chang-Kredl

Marking the recent re-issue of Toward a Poor Curriculum (Pinar & Grumet, 2015), our edited volume takes up the call for a curriculum attuned to provoking curriculum encounters. “Encounters” have enjoyed a deep resonance within curriculum theory since curriculum’s reconceptualization. The word has close affinities to educational experience—currere, or the running of the course: “It is the lived experience of curriculum . . . wherein the curriculum is experienced and enacted” (Pinar, 2015a, p. 11). Encounters are tied to subjectivity—the body-subject, as Grumet (1988) points to, invoking Merleau-Ponty’s reminder that it is “[t]he body that makes it possible for us to have a world” (pp. 143–3). Merleau-Ponty (2012) explains: The subject that I am . . . is inseparable from this particular body and from this particular world. The ontological world and body that we uncover at the core of the subject are not the world and the body as ideas; rather, they are the world itself condensed into a comprehensive hold and the body itself as a knowing-body. p. 431 To encounter, then, is to “live curriculum” (Grumet, 1999, p. 24); to become aware, as body-subject, of feeling alive, immediate, in-the-moment. An encounter marks an opening toward a pre-reflective time and space of possibility: of consciousness of someone or something that is not ourselves. Encounters are structured, then, by interruption: by alterity or non-coincidence. “When the ‘I’ coincides with itself, it contracts,” Pinar (2015d) says (p. 196); rather, “[i]t is the structural non-coincidence of the alive body—the time and space of subjectivity—that invites us to experience experience” (Pinar, 2015a, p. 113). To unsettle what would otherwise operate “unnoticed,” Gadamer (1998) observes, we need to be “provoked” or “addressed” by encounters (p. 299). Becoming more “present to ourselves” (Greene, 1978, p. 199) is also accompanied by “disquietude” with any notion of curriculum as script (Greene, 1967, p. 5). Such “moment[s] of encounter” (Pinar, 2011, p. 103), marked by “montage of ‘unlike things’”

2 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. (Greene, 2001, p. 118), stretch “me to the limits of my consciousness” and compel me to think (Block cited in Pinar, 2014, p. 175). In the present time especially, amidst the relentless pressures of testing and credentialing, to encounter is to refuse to be defined by others: it is to resist the numbness and inertia associated with reification of the curriculum tale of teacher and student subjectivities amenable to being encapsulated by test outcomes or school rankings (Au, 2011; Cochran-Smith, Piazza, & Power, 2013). Currere, with its “triple telling,” has always been about “splinter[ing] the dogmatism of a single tale” (Grumet, 1987, p. 324). Exemplary of this resistance is Mrs. Brown. In Pinar’s opening essay in Toward a Poor Curriculum, he invokes Virginia Woolf’s story of Mrs. Brown as a metaphor for the ongoing crisis in curriculum—one that continues to hold, this despite rumblings of other crises within contemporary curriculum theorizing (Deng, 2018). The story Pinar tells (with Virginia Woolf’s help) points to the importance of encounters in understanding curriculum. Implacable, Mrs. Brown sits in the train carriage. She is studied in turn by each of three passengers who enter the car and seem to encounter her: Mr. Bennet, Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Their encounters are not with her, per se. Each focuses on a point external to Mrs. Brown: the state of England’s primary schools; the exploitation of the working classes; particulars of the train carriage itself. None focuses on Mrs. Brown herself: what she thinks and feels. “To get underneath the old words we need to abandon them,” Pinar (2015b, p. 4) advises. We need to understand anew what it means to truly encounter Mrs. Brown, for “Mrs. Brown is ourselves” (p. 4). This freeing and abandoning activity is central to encounters which, even as they take their initial cue from the moment, bring us back to a prereflective openness to what matters. Why a “poor” curriculum, Doll (2016) asks, posing a question that has dogged him for years, this given all of the negative ascriptions that might be attached to the word but where he reaches the conclusion that “[w]hat Pinar and Grumet ask us to see, many have missed” (p. 59). “A poor curriculum is one stripped of its distractions . . . naked,” Pinar (2015c) explains (p. xiii). Currere has always “reach[ed]” toward a poor curriculum, toward “pre-conceptual encounters that are their foundation” (Grumet, 2015a, p. 53): a foundation that for the body-subject keeps moving, keeps encountering. “I am experience. With each breath. Experience” (Pinar, 2015d, p. xiii). In moving beyond words that masquerade as curriculum, beyond a return to basics and standards, beyond online learning as reproducible box-ticking templates, and beyond content divorced from the person/ subject, we open ourselves in this edited volume to provoking curriculum encounters and being provoked. The encounters described, discussed and theorized provoke editors and authors to feel alive in and to the moment, to “lived theories” (Grumet, 2015b, p. 86) and living theories, in short, to encounters of a potentially explosive and “catastrophic” kind akin to

Introduction

3

Taubman’s (2004) conceptualization of jouissance—to moments of “vulnerability and ambiguity” which are “sensuous [and] embodied” and that can help us better understand and connect with the social and ideological affects of others’ lifeworlds (Grumet, 2015b, p. 238), even as they open spaces into our own worlds as scholars, teachers, teacher-educators, leaders and practitioners. A living, encountering curriculum is very different from prevailing conceptualizations of curriculum as “management category” preoccupied with generating a “language of input and output within a production system” (Aoki, 2005, p. 271)—and where the emphasis in education is once again skewed toward output (Cochran-Smith et al., 2013). In this volume, we especially want to turn inward, listening for the deeper resonances of curriculum “beyond the reach of the eye” (Aoki, 2005, p. 375), including this surveillance (eye) of accountability. Encounters are plural, occurring in different spaces and modalities; they are made of materialities, felt and psychic intensities, and arrangements of bodies (and minds) moving through time and space. We want to acknowledge how curriculum encounters may exceed our capacities to represent them (Massumi, 2016); that no language may be adequate to articulate their unpredictable and myriad movements. In moving in this direction, the volume joins with a theoretic impetus currently informing education research (e.g., Lesko & Niccolini, 2017 ), the humanities (e.g., Gregg & Seigworth, 2009) and the social sciences (e.g., Clough & Halley, 2007) that is generating new questions about how concepts come to matter imminently in emergent presents. At a time when top-down regulatory measures are placing exorbitant pressure on educators and researchers to focus all of their attention on abstractions (measures, outcomes, best practices), our attention to provoking curriculum encounters affecting minds and bodies (human and non-human) sounds a deep, resonant chord that brings us back to educational experience as moving, lived and living. As Latour (2004) puts it: “To have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated,’ moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans. If you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead” (p. 205). This edited volume has allowed us to explore the provoking of curriculum encounters in breadth and depth through essays that we propose lie on the cutting edge of curriculum theory. The volume opens with the present short introduction, collectively written by the co-editors, which sets the stage for provoking through the prisms of pluralities, spaces, intensities and charges. Each strand is elaborated further in its own corresponding introduction. We open ourselves and others to: (1) spaces that may be disciplinary, interdisciplinary or transitional/in-between, constituted by various modalities and inhabited by (2) a plurality of voices, beings and bodies, involved in ceaseless relational movement (3) that

4 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. through our encounters in such spaces and with such pluralities, affective intensities may be produced which hold the potential to (4) inspire new ethical charges. These four strands, around which the volume has been conceptualized and organized, help orient the reader. The strands map loosely onto a currere process (plurality and spaces with regression and progression; intensities and charges with analysis and synthesis) and are intended to be theoretically generative in helping think through curriculum encounters. With the three chapters in spaces (Chapters 3 to 5), we ask: how are we affected and directed—inescapably provoked—by the larger spaces in which our encounters are embedded? To keep curriculum spaces moving, we seek out productive emergent potentials for difference-making. Toward such creative ends, and drawing inspiration from Indigenous epistemologies of interconnection and embodiment, Macdonald reconsiders the grids that nurture her everyday experiences with urban life. Provoking the relation between technology and theology, Lee turns to three distinct architectural examples of curricular transcendence, and asks how built environments might also contribute to the decentering impulses of poetic experience. Honeyford explores a collaborative, experimental space of intergenerational curriculum making, and considers the value of the unexpected as a way to wonder/wander along with curriculum’s interminable potential. With pluralities, we consider which and whose voices, beings or bodies need to be considered in our curriculum encounters? Which and whose do we need to remember, understand, seek out relation with? Chapters 6 to 9 indicate possible directions (among many that might be considered): Richardson’s evocative encounters with the human and more than human, Deer’s spiritual encounters with her ancestors and ancestral world, Starr’s otherworldly experience of GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) and Abdul-Jabbar’s with medieval Islamic thinker Al-Farabi’s theory and practice. With the three chapters in intensities (Chapters 10 to 12), we ask what it means for the body-subject/the body alive to be alive and present, to confront experiences of ambiguity, incongruity and vulnerability, including instances “where the body takes over from . . . words” (Phillips in Lewkowich, 2015, p. 46)? How may we work with feelings of unease to provoke thinking and expand our curriculum understandings? Bausell addresses these points through reflecting on her memories of lynching photographs found amongst her grandmother’s odds-and-ends; Beier’s provokes the reader through a science fiction rewriting of Mrs. Brown’s train encounter; and Rotas’s analyzes children’s intensity of experiences through their co-use digital cameras. With the three chapters in charges (Chapters 13 to 15), we ask: what kinds of curricular charges (e.g., responsibilities, commitments, projects, movements) might catalyze consciousness and desire? How do we keep transforming and charging, and how might charges that may initially be perceived as depleting,

Introduction

5

return to us in unanticipated and unpredictable ways? These questions are explored through Balzer and Heidebrecht’s use of postcolonial literature with Indigenous students; Nellis’s analysis of stories of loss, love and mourning; and Ohito and Nyachae’s inquiry of an extracurricular program for working-class black girls. As already mentioned, it was in the wake of the recent re-publication of Pinar and Grumet’s seminal work that the call for papers for this edited volume invited our return to encounter the curriculum theory archive. In being provoked and provoking others to re-encounter an archive (specifically Toward a Poor Curriculum but any curriculum text, widely conceived), we were also echoing the title and call of the biennial 2017 Provoking Curriculum conference. A volatile unpredictability attaches itself to the word “provoking” and also, as we have conceived it in this volume, to “encounter.” So too does it adhere to the word “archive.” The book has been framed by two chapters concerned with the curriculum archive, which lie outside of the strands but that are tied to them as well as to the book as a whole. In an opening piece (Chapter 2), we situate the book within curriculum pilgrims’ passionate “peripheral, joyful, intimate, and productive” (Robertson & Radford, 2009, p. 203) encounters with the curriculum an/archive—as we imagine the authors in this book (and potentially, readers coming to this book) to be. While the word archive can “evoke the sturdy furniture of locked cabinets” (Strong-Wilson, Yoder, Aitken, Chang-Kredl, & Radford), in curriculum theory this archive has always been understood as living, as involving “ongoing ethical engagement with alterity” (Pinar, 2015a, p. xi). The forward-looking proposition of an anarchive (SenseLab, n.d.), or living archive, in which always-emergent encounters derive their meaning from embodied and relational practices in-the-moment, thus also animates this volume (Ehret, in press; Whitehead, 1927–1928/1985). In Chapter 16, the volume concludes with a meditation of multiple voices—Teresa Strong-Wilson and Jayne Malenfant with Erika HasebeLudt, Rita L. Irwin, Ingrid Johnston, Carl Leggo, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Antoinette Oberg and Hans Smits—on the significance and ongoing contribution of provoking curriculum encounters, here in the form of the academic conference (which novelist David Lodge (1984) once construed as pilgrimages). We hone in on an/archive of the biennial Provoking Curriculum (Studies) conference, which provided the impetus for this edited volume, as an ongoing locus for generating an “archive of feelings” (Cvetkovich in Pinar, 2006, p. 160) surrounding the collective work of curriculum scholars. We reflect on the Provoking Curriculum conference’s capacity to stoke our energies and renew our commitment to intellectual study, performative embodiment and artful inquiry as a curriculum community committed to provoking encounters—through encounters provoked by/in pluralities, spaces, intensities and charges.

6 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al.

References Aoki, T. (2005). In the midst of slippery theme-words: Living as designers of Japanese Canadian curriculum (1992). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 263–278). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Au, W. (2011). Teaching under the new Taylorism: High-stakes testing and the standardization of the 21st century curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43(1), 25–45. doi:10.1080/00220272.2010.521261 Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cochran-Smith, M., Piazza, P., & Power, C. (2013). The politics of accountability: Assessing teacher education in the United States. The Educational Forum, 77(1), 6–27. doi:10.1080/00131725.2013.73915 Deng, Z. (2018). Contemporary curriculum theorizing: Crisis and resolution. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 50(6), 691–710. doi:10.1080/00220272.2018. 137376 Doll, W. E., Jr. (2016). Reflection on a poor curriculum: With a nod to Edgar Morin. In M. A. Doll (Ed.), The reconceptualization of curriculum studies: A festschrift in honor of William F. Pinar (pp. 59–66). New York, NY: Routledge. Ehret, C. (in press). Propositions from affect theory for feeling literacy through the event. In D. E. Alvermann, N. J. Unrau, & M. Saylors (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of literacy (7th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Gadamer, H. -G. (1998). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. Greene, M. (1967). Existential encounters for teachers. New York, NY: Random House. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2009). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grumet, M. R. (1987). The politics of personal knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry, 17(3), 319–329. doi:10.1080/03626784.1987.11075295 Grumet, M. R. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press. Grumet, M. R. (1999). Autobiography and reconceptualization. Counterpoints, 70, 24–30. Grumet, M. R. (2015a). Existential and phenomenological foundations. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 40–64). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Grumet, M. R. (2015b). Toward a poor curriculum. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 84–112). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Latour, B. (2004). How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies. Body & Society, 10(2–3), 205–229. doi:10.1177/1357034X04042943 Lesko, N., & Niccolini, A. D. (2017). Feeling progressive: Historicizing affect in education. In T. A. Popkewitz, C. Kirchgasler, & J. Diaz (Eds.), A political sociology of educational knowledge: Studies of exclusions and difference (pp. 69–84). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Lewkowich, D. (2015). Reminders of the abject in teaching: Psychoanalytic notes on my sweaty, pedagogical self. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 41–47. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.010 Lodge, D. (1984). Small world: An academic romance. London, UK: Secker & Warburg. Massumi, B. (2016). Such as it is: A short essay on extreme realism. Body & Society, 22(1), 115–127. doi:10.1177/1357034X15612896 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). London, UK: Routledge. Pinar, W. (2006). The synoptic text today, and other essays: Curriculum development after the reconceptualization. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. (2011). The character of curriculum studies: Bildung, currere, and the recurring question of the subject. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. (2014). Afterword(s)? In A. F. Bloch (Ed.), The classroom: Encounter and engagement (pp. 171–180). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. (2015a). Educational experience as lived: Knowledge, history, alterity: The selected works of William F. Pinar. New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. (2015b). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 1–7). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015c). Preface (1976). In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. xiii–xvii). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015d). Subjective reconstruction and the rehabilitation of habit. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Ed.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 191–219). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. R. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum. Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Robertson, J. P., & Radford, L. A. (2009). The private uses of quiet grandeur: A meditation on literary pilgrimage. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 16(2), 203–209. doi:10.1080/13586840902863186 SenseLab. (n.d.). Anarchive: Concise definition. Retrieved May 22, 2017, from http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/anarchiving/anarchive-concise-definition Taubman, P. M. (2004). Reasonable bodies. JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 20(2), 15–28. Whitehead, A. N. (1927–1928/1985). Process and reality. New York, NY: The Free Press.

2

Currere Tales Journeying as Pilgrims to the (an)Archive Teresa Strong-Wilson, Amarou Yoder, Avril Aitken, Sandra Chang-Kredl and Linda Radford

As Robertson and Radford (2009) attest, “the archive/place of pilgrimage is . . . a dynamic space of self-formation” (p. 204). In a manner not unlike Chaucer’s (2003) wayfaring “sundry folk” (p. 3), we gathered as pilgrims to share our currere tales: five different scholars/teacher-educators in education, all women, from three Quebec universities and one Ontario university. Our coming together, our plurality, helped to bring out our questions, doubts and insights, in spaces where “the rooms and stables . . . [were] wide” (p. 3). We established practices of reading slowly and recursively, writing our tales, and sharing them in response to returning to the currere (an)archive, thus giving “an exterior destiny to . . . interior being” (Bachelard, 1958/1994 in Robertson & Radford, 2009, p. 206). While archive, emerging from its Greek roots, meaning government and public spaces (OED, 1989), evokes the sturdy furniture of locked cabinets, we approached it as “a haunted place, spectral, inhabited with promises of the unspoken and unsaid” (Robertson & Radford, 2009, p. 207), even as we felt in the presence of an anarchive, “a repertory of traces” in continual, restless movement (SenseLab, n.d.(a), para 1)—at least within us, as pilgrims. We were seeking our genius loci: productive yet intense spaces for thinking, resting, mulling over, puzzling through. We were feeling haunted but we were also actively looking to be moved or set in motion (Robertson & Radford, 2009). We “passionate[ly]” returned (Robertson & Radford, p. 203) to Pinar and Grumet’s (2015) Toward a Poor Curriculum—our “waystation” (SenseLab, n.d.(a), para 4)—reading and re-reading, discussing the book’s seminal pieces as well as writing in response to currere’s prompts (regressive, progressive, analytical, synthetical). Currere was itself both the destination and the journey, as that “reflexive cycle in which thought bends back upon itself and thus recovers its volition” (Grumet, 2015b, p. 170): its charge. In one of the most evocative studies of a teacher’s practice, Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance, Salvio (2007) observes: “Teaching and learning inevitably invoke ghosts from the past, family dramas, and failed romances” (p. 19). She recounts her run-in with a colleague, who asks: “What has this project [of studying a poet of ‘questionable stability’] got

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to do with teaching and teacher education programs anyway?” (p. 23). While Salvio publicly defends her choice, we soon discover that she herself harbours doubts, questions that “haunt” as well as productively inform her inquiry. In the pages to follow, we explore our hauntings as a form of curriculum encounter, this through our currere pilgrimage. The anarchive is concerned with “how to make felt the infra-perceptible” (SenseLab, n.d.(b), para 4). What were we invisibly (and visibly) haunted by? And how did these hauntings manifest themselves?

Gathering as Pilgrims We found it useful to return to Chaucer’s structure of linked tales to appreciate how our individual stories could contribute to a larger allegory through “walking our talk.” In the manner that Pinar (2011) suggests, we understand curricular reconstruction, or currere, as allegorical. It is at once singular (undertaken by distinct individuals with distinct histories and hauntings) and dialogical. Our gathering was an “adventure” in which “some safety was assured but the destination was unknown” (Pinar, 2011, p. 15). The compulsion to make that pilgrimage, difficult as the journey sometimes was, suggests that something important was trying to work its way through into thought and expression. The pilgrimage was to some place that was simultaneously physical, spiritual, emotional and intellectual but first of all, physical. Our gatherings happened in the basement of a restaurant, with its particular stone work, low ceiling, subdued lighting and long wooden working tables. They were accompanied by close reading of specific texts from the curriculum theory archive and especially from Toward a Poor Curriculum. We gathered as sojourners: itinerants enjoying the solace of one another’s company along the way—along life’s way. We were not a committee struck for an institutional purpose, nor a cross-university collaboration oriented towards garnering funds or sharing results. Our gathering involved encountering one another “first hand” and in person, feeling one another’s “physical presence,” implicitly attuned, as colleagues and friends, to verbal and non-verbal cues (Pinar, 2011, p. 14). We read, we discussed, we wrote, we shared what we wrote, we assembled our writings and invited one another to respond. Through writing, reading and conversation, we were called back to memories of the past that hovered over the present (Pinar, 2015d). Why the pilgrimage towards A Poor Curriculum? Originally published in 1976, we knew that this book stood as the seminal text in what is known as the reconceptualization of curriculum studies, to which currere was central. We had read the book, or parts of it, but each of us felt we had not studied it. We were all working in the area of curriculum studies—teaching courses, engaged in research—this in faculties of education dedicated to teaching and learning but where, as Pinar (citing

10 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. McClintock) points out, learning is now socially and humanly engineered as a “consequence of teaching” rather than being the “result of serious study” (Pinar, 2015a, p. 16). As teachers, we wanted to become students again. We wanted to grapple with currere and in so doing, re-encounter it. We journeyed as pilgrims engaged in study as a “prayerful act” (Pinar, p. 14), seeking practical answers in the sense of “striving for a holiness [that could be] . . . realized in our daily lives in this world” (Block cited in Pinar, p. 15; emphasis added). We wanted to know how (and whether) currere could intervene with our hauntings. We read several chapters in Toward a Poor Curriculum, focussing in on the foundations chapters written by Grumet before moving to the method of currere proposed by Pinar. We discussed and wrote to how currere could bring into view the individual who lives in that chair in that school, occupied and moved by his or her own thoughts, memories, interests and emotions that may or may not coincide with the curriculum as planned. In keeping with currere practice, we produced several narratives (Grumet, 1981) or photographs (Pinar, 2015d), this in response to prompts elicited by the text. And then, in our second year, singly and in pairs, we took responsibility for proposing a text to be read and associated prompts for writing. We understood that autobiography was the form that could best express as well as explore—and complicate—lived experience (Pinar, 2015a). We understood that our narratives did not capture experience but constituted representations of the past as it hovered, ghost-like, over the present. Autobiography was a way to gain access to an occluded “inside” even as distantiation was invoked to step back and look at what we had made. In our writing, we realized that we each suffered from feeling occluded in our thoughts, actions, intentions, dreams or desires. It was difficult to pinpoint and name our Occluder (since we felt ourselves complicit): Was it institutionalization: the pressure to perform? We were variously situated at different stages and places in the university system, from graduate student to full professor. More prosaically, was it busyness? A poor curriculum, as Pinar (2015b) reminds us, “is one stripped of its distractions” (p. xiii). A poor curriculum involves letting down one’s masks, says Grumet (2015c, p. 88). It was as if, in gravitating towards this seminal text, we wanted our re-encounters with ourselves, one another and the archive, to have a kind of cleansing effect such that, coming as cloaked pilgrims to a discrete place outside university parameters, we could be “stripped of all the clothing we drape around ourselves to keep us from seeing” (Pinar, 2015b, p. xiii). What were we each failing to see that was vital? Pinar (2011) points out that currere can play a role analogous to certain kinds of religious experience in the way that attunement to temporality, to one’s self in time, can break “the inertia of the present, bringing a new insight, or a new reality into the world” (p. 17). We didn’t necessarily want to stop being haunted. Like Paula Salvio, we intuited

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that these hauntings were productive for ourselves, our scholarship and our practice. However, we wanted to be able to study our ghosts; to discern their outline better so that we could know what we were being haunted by and why and what to do with this knowledge to be of greatest worth to ourselves and others. Our gathering, like the currere process, was characterized by returns: the return to the restaurant/study space, the return to the curriculum archive, the return to our own currere archives—the narratives we had written. The returns were preceded by a hiatus: between meetings, between writing, between re-visiting the writing. The hiatus acted as a form of distantiation, as well as movement, of ourselves and our archives. Distantiation is an integral part of currere, as is identification or closeness to the details, remembered in the moment. Distantiation is about gaining a vantage point. “I cannot just restate the past; I have emerged from it a little more; I see it more clearly,” says Pinar (2015c, p. 29). In writing autobiographically, an opportunity is created to see ourselves seeing, says Grumet (2015c). As pilgrims, we collected our tales, choosing to compile them in the form of a “quire,” which is that name given to the assemblage of leaves (viz., pages) in a mediaeval manuscript; “quire” also means a “gathering” (Hayman, 2017, p. 9), with contemporary echoes as well of choir—here, a (moving) choir of voices. In so doing, we remarked how our writing came alive in the act of being read/heard by others, inviting us to renewed study and attention to the stories’ allegorical resonances. This we address next, after laying out our tales. The acknowledgement of the social in what is so often depicted as solitary (especially in an academic context) reminds us of currere as a dialogical process. Sharing our writing became a form of support and solidarity. Our juxtaposed stories (which follow) also played off one another in deep and insightful ways, helping summon our ghosts and give shape to our hauntings.

Tales Linda’s Tale I remember the smallness of the apartment we lived in, in Brooklyn, and the brownness of it, but I have no recollection of the transition we made to the suburbs of New Jersey. To my mother, this new home must have been a miraculous transition, a side split with a big yard and near a park. It was far away from where she grew up, a place that seemed to bring her so much shame. And while I write this, I realize the impetus for choosing to move where they did was that the Smiths must have moved there too, but sometime before my parents were able to make the move. The town was called Mountainside, and the Smiths lived on the top of the mountain.

12 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. How psychic life tangles with the social is a haunting for me, and I take this up in my research of what it implies for education. I live this in my relationships with my students who I read as working through their own issues within the space of education. Such issues often manifest themselves through insider/outsider experiences, which intensify what it means to confront one’s “past” struggles. These struggles are current, ongoing and traumatic. Future hopes are always fragile. My mother grew up in Brooklyn, in a tiny apartment with a rusty fire escape. When old enough (or maybe not), she and her sister helped my grandfather in his pizza parlour that he was only able to afford after saving every penny he made by working in the shipyards when he got off the boat from Italy. This story is one of desire and loss, but I am getting ahead of myself. A turning point in this history is religion—my grandfather giving up Catholicism for Christian Fundamentalism and its regulations of what could and could not be done, as anything deemed as worldly would lead one into sin. Accompanying this existence was the problem of being Italian. My mother and aunt’s raison d’être was to come across as non-Italian as possible. It was all about being like Ruth and Edward Smith, the measuring stick of self-worth, and working to gain inclusion into the exclusivity of this all-righteous group of believers. Whenever we visited the luxurious castle-like home of “Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ed,” it was an epic event. Long hair brushed and pulled straight back across the top of the head, matching outfits for my sister and me, which included black patent leather shoes. With hardly a chance to raid the fancy bowls filled with M&M’s, my sister and I would be called upon to come stand by the large ornate organ to sing “Heaven Came Down and Glory Filled Our Souls.” It was only when the chocolates were melting in my mouth or I was jumping off the blue diving board of the deep kidney-shaped pool, that heaven came down and glory filled my soul. Sandra’s Tale I have a photo of myself with my three older siblings. I’m probably four. We’re dressed formally. My two brothers and sister are smiling brightly towards the camera. I’m looking to the side, not yet acculturated into the tradition of the family portrait. My interpretation, which is a guess, is that I’m looking for direction. I remember as a child watching TV sitcoms with my siblings. They’d be lying on the floor, on their fronts, a position that, to this day, I find uncomfortable. I’d be sitting on the couch, legs curled up. My attention was half towards the TV, but the more important half of my attention was on my eldest brother. I was watchful of when he would laugh at something happening on the TV. That was my cue: I could laugh.

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I’ve had dreams that involve animals in pitiful situations. The struggle of the subject to be the one who sees rather than the one who is seen is a question of negating the inconsequentiality. It reminds me of what Frantz Fanon (1952/2008) described as the unnatural and unconscious training of the colonized in relation to the colonizer, and the divided selfperception of the dominated one. It reminds me too of Maxine Hong Kingston’s (1976) likeness of her child voice in American school to “a crippled animal running on broken legs” (p. 196). In my family today, we have a guinea pig. Here is one of my dreams: The guinea pig is sitting on a table. I tell my children that the pig may need to pee. I lift the pig awkwardly (it’s always awkward lifting a guinea pig) and carry her to her cage. A moment later, I notice that she’s peed in the cage. The pee is gathered on one corner as the cage is slightly tilted. Then the piggy starts rubbing herself in it. I move to lift her off, but she suddenly throws her entire body into the pee, luxuriating in it until she’s soaked. I hear people making sounds of disgust—“tssk,” “eww”—and I think, “But the pig doesn’t realize how gross this is to us.” I take a towel and lift her up, trying to soak up the urine without getting any on myself. The figure of the urine-soaked guinea pig interests me. I speculate that the image might arouse surprise, mild disgust or unease, even a chuckle, from others, but mostly, in my mind, a sense of inconsequentiality. Amarou’s Tale When I picked up the book on The Canterbury Tales from which the opening passage in this chapter comes, I had no idea that Abbott and David must have spent decades sharing departmental meetings and parties and hallway niceties. David Williams (1987) wrote: “It is essential . . . that the pilgrims, as authors, understand the implications of their own stories, in order to perceive how these tales have ordered or disordered the worlds they describe” (p. 53). Implications haunt. Tales might order or disorder, or both. The figure of Abbott Conway is a “real” ghost, so to speak, as he was the most important mentor of my twenties and has since died. He stands for order and integrity, a bastion against my greed for specialness. Abbott had no truck with that greed, but I was still special, not a pet, but special. English 553—Abbott’s Anglo-Saxon seminar. Delightful class. What one dreams about when one fancies a seminar in the liberal arts. We gathered in a small room on an upper floor of the Arts Building. There was a wide, wooden table. I worked on The Benedictional of St. Aethelwold, a late Anglo-Saxon manuscript, because Abbott let me write art history papers for an English class. There was one fellow in that class who was really unorthodox; I think he was in English Literature, but I’m not sure. He saw the slides for my presentation and was struck with the geometry of some of the illuminations. It totally caught his imagination, and he ended up changing his presentation to explore

14 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. the geometry of illuminated manuscripts. I remember being extremely sniffy. I was the art historian in the class, the privileged and unconverted interloper into the world of English. But Abbott was impressed—and excited. I didn’t call Abbott “Abbott” then. I called him Dr. Conway. It was only after he ceremoniously told me that I could call him “Abbott,” after I’d graduated, that I called him Abbott. Much later, I returned to the library, and checked out another Williams’ book, this time on the Anglo-Saxon text, Beowulf, feeling for traces of Abbott. All I found was the tradition of Cain. Tales or almost-tales of Abbott continue to haunt, even disorder, in unexpected ways. Avril’s Tale Kindergarten. My face is pressed against a cool mat; it’s vinyl—the room is high-ceilinged. It’s still and the only light is a little filtering through windows. I can’t see anyone—I’m coveting the cinnamon hearts in a small pill bottle. It’s from Libbey—she was wise to my fears and gave it to me when she walked me to school that day. A secret clutched in my fist. That wasn’t her only gift. When I was 21, I visited her over the Christmas holiday—(I, the failed would-be-artist, the almost-would-be-art teacher, the just-about-to-be elementary school teacher). I grated the nutmeg as she stirred the cookie dough. She gave me the painting when I left. It is my go-to totem, hanging wherever I go. Three ridges sloping down toward the water, unmistakeably marking a place so familiar to me. The perspective is upward and four birds spin in the air. It’s really a painting of the birds lifted on the wind with a blue-sky background. Blue. The colour of the deep bruise on my inner arm. I wrapped my painting up this week to take it to my borrowed office. It was an impulse born of a sudden wish—to have it near. And with it under one arm, I stepped out onto the new snow, which hid the ice that provoked the resounding fall. In twisting to save my painting, it bit into my inner arm. I soldiered on and hung it that morning, such that when I glance up from my desk, I see it. I used to think these were separate stories about me, linked through my wish to be Libbey, or at least just like her. But I think I misread the subject. Maybe it’s one story about estrangement and education. Maybe it’s about the significance of feeling like a stranger—for learning and teaching, and for the possibility of transformation. Maybe it’s about why I press on. Teresa’s Tale My favourite route for going to school is a small winding, treed street that rises and curves. There I inhabit the leafy shadows. At school, I can remember being in my seat; rarely out of it. I sat at my desk with hands

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and legs linked, listening with eyes forward. I rarely looked out the window but can remember a spring or summer breeze wafting in from time to time. Did I wander in thought? I must have. I remember being absolutely quiet, focussed on not saying a single word. I once borrowed a book from a wisp of a girl; our fathers’ service commitments threw us together. Her family had a budgie in a cage. It struck me as forlorn, as she did, too. And yet she had a roll-down top writing desk where, hidden, as in a secret archive, was The Diary of Anne Frank. I borrowed the book. I was hidden with Anne in her annex, perceiving “the looming threat of impending darkness,” drawn to that “acuity of observation and precision of formulation which is unattainable from a state of perfect health” (Sebald, 2013, p. 146). One summer recently, I circled Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem like a hawk, first reading an account of Eichmann’s capture and then the colonel’s protracted interview with Eichmann, before re-reading Arendt’s seminal work. The entire exercise was a distraction—I could have been usefully employed doing other things—and yet, it became my main preoccupation. I felt alive: at the centre of what it is that fascinates me—of something that draws me back and back (Hampl, 1999). When I was on sabbatical, I read the German post-war prose fiction writer, W.G. Sebald, and in the course of doing so, I also watched, with horror and fascination, the nine hours of Lantzmann’s Shoah. What would I have done? Where would I have been? How would I have endured? One of the “lessons” from my return to Arendt was how the most courageous person feels fearful, but faces fear so as to act. If I think about it, my whole life has been preoccupied with this—seeking the shadows; overcoming a felt darkness; wrestling with the courage to act.

Galvanizing Ghosts We began by talking about ghosts and then shared our “ghostly” currere tales. The haunting, we realized, was that feeling of being deeply preoccupied with something we cannot see but is there. We feel it. In their elusiveness, ghosts resemble daimōns—that which appears to others as being indelibly attached to a person but remains hidden to the person him- or herself (Arendt, 1958, p. 179). They are like “unconscious or half-known intentions” (Hampl, 1999, p. 29), the questions that keep us awake at night (Chambers, 2004). One of the premises of currere is that their lineaments can only be seen through engaging in autobiography (whatever form that takes: writing, drama, painting, etc.). Hauntings may be understood to be embedded in the liminal spaces of curriculum’s double-entendre: the individual’s (the subject’s) interest or concern with a subject. While curricular subjects are often understood as disciplines or topics, which are highly visible because codified (Mathematics, English Studies), when hovering close to a subject (an individual), they may take

16 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. on the hue of a shadow, a ghost. They follow, pursue and haunt the “bodysubject” (Grumet, 1988, p. 3). An allegory tells one story by means of another, a mode familiar to Chaucer. Each tale is animated by myriad resonances that far exceed the immediate subject matter (Taavitsainen, 1999). Etymologically, the word allegory (from the Greek) means to speak through other means. As literary pilgrims returning to currere, how do our autobiographical currere tales “indirectly” and allegorically speak to us and to our practices (Pinar, 2012, p. 47)? Paul Ricoeur (2007) offers another, non-Biblical model for the “allegorical function of language” (p. 64). Psychoanalysis, he notes, invites the telling of another story through the careful analysis of the first story, the story of “symptoms, dreams, myths, ideals, illusions” (p. 66). Such stories by other means point to an excess of meaning, greater than the literal meaning of the words themselves, suggesting that “double meaning is the means of detecting a condition of being” (p. 66). What conditions of our double meaning can be read in our currere tales? How do these tales participate in (and contribute to) that “double discourse” that Grumet (2015a) likewise envisioned for currere (p. 229)? She wrote: “Rather than parallel play, we must write narratives that pose a question about our experience in the world and invite our readers to join in the exploration that results” (p. 239). What invitations did we take up in hearing, and reading, one another’s narratives? If the purpose of currere is for thought to bend back upon itself and recover its volition (Grumet, 2015a, p. 170), what might we say, collectively and individually, about how our ghosts move, even galvanize us? We used this last question in the preceding paragraph as a prompt to read across our tales, producing readings that were remarkably congruent with one another (other readers coming to this text may see less, or more), even as we also acknowledged that what seemed to matter most was that we inhabited a space where we could experience our uncertainties and learn how to do so, in the company of others; this in itself was a profound lesson to carry back into our scholarship and teaching. We named our ghosts: family members, mentors, literary figures, people who touched us emotionally as well as those who, in our fleeting encounters with them, made an indelible impression. Collectively, they are those who refused to be left behind—or, who we, for whatever reason, refused to leave behind. W.G. Sebald, in a conversation with Eleanor Wachtel, talked about how, in growing up in the Alps where the frozen ground prevented burials, the dead lived literally next door, in the woodshed, later leading him to the notion that “these people aren’t really gone, they just hover somewhere at the perimeter of our lives and keep coming in on brief visits” (Sebald in Wachtel, 2007, p. 39). What were our ghosts reminding us of? Named, they carried lessons in self-denial as well as in self-acceptance. They reflected back our beloved, those who become as secrets clutched tightly in our fists. They provided warnings, protection.

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Some were tireless characters, relentless in galvanizing us to slough off hollow lessons, pressing us to march not up the mountain but downwards and inwardly to be able to say, clearly: “No, this is what makes me feel alive. This is what gives me courage to act, to press on, to resist.” We noted maskings, like the desire to belong and to be seen to belong; we recognized this could become a deeply injurious kind of haunting. We each struggled with not seeing ourselves; of seeing our efforts as inconsequential. We remarked on the different ways that we paid attention, observing ourselves and others, implicitly censuring and judging (especially ourselves), and how this paying attention pointed to larger, social interests and preoccupations as well as anxieties and concerns. Our forms of paying attention could be deceptive; like our students, we could be pretending to attend here while turning elsewhere. Reading one another’s narratives helped draw attention to the direction of our gazes. Reading one another’s responses to our texts also shed insight on the degree of trustworthiness of our selected prisms. In sharing our vulnerabilities, we shared our ghosts, perhaps helping release the hold of ancient hauntings even as, in being shared publicly, the pervasive clutch of thoughtto-be-personal ghosts could be dispelled or attenuated. Finally, we were struck by how our tales, by juxtaposing disparate events within the same narrative frame, pulled and tugged at one another, generating tensions: ironies that, accumulating, piled onto one another, forming a tough palimpsest to crack. Parsing the text required effort, time, multiple readings and prompts like the one we responded to of reading across narratives, to perceive the juxtapositions within the juxtapositions. This could lead to deeper readings but also, we recognized, as part of an anarchive, creative misreadings; each redrafting could result in revised revelations of who we are, or conceive ourselves to be, to ourselves and one another. This uncertainty too was an important galvanizing lesson, recognizing that our pilgrimage was to places and “experiences that reside beyond the perceptible limits of what can be immediately known” (Farley, 2010, p. 10).

Conclusion Currere is a form of social autobiography haunted by a sense of responsibility to another/the other. “Indeed,” Pinar (2012) says, “as an allegorical form,” autobiography stands as “pedagogical political practice for the 21st century” (p. 48). In what sense, we ask ourselves? Education, Grumet (2015a) reminds us, is about social action; as teachers, “we cannot ignore the implications of what we study for the events that are taking place in schools . . . as we read and write, interview and teach, as we visit schools and communities, archives and malls” (p. 234). The implications of our gathering as currere pilgrims has to do with allegory: of understanding this historical moment in time and where we are in relation to

18 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. it by re-encountering ourselves through study of an always moving (an) archive of events, texts, images, this in relation to plurality, spaces, intensity and charges. Allegory’s movements are both outward and inward, Pinar (2015a) reminds us; through allegory, “we can build passages from the particularity of our situations to the alterity of others” (p. 28). The more, Kracauer says, we become “aware of the many-sidedness of things,” the more we can relate the pieces to one another (cited in Pinar, 2015a, p. 29). In so doing, through unmasking ourselves, we might see better our ghosts. We can name them. We may even claim them, peaceably abiding with their haunting. Or we may choose to move to slowly divest ourselves of their hold. As pilgrims, “the curricular task becomes the recovery of memory and history in ways that psychologically allow individuals to reenter politically the public sphere in privately meaningful and ethically committed ways” (Pinar, 2015a, p. 31).

References Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chambers, C. (2004). Research that matters: Finding a path with heart. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 2(1), 1–19. Chaucer, G. (2003). The Canterbury tales (N. Coghill, Trans.). New York, NY: Penguin. Fanon, F. (1952/2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press. Farley, L. (2010). “The reluctant pilgrim”: Questioning belief after historical loss. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 8(1), 1–40. Grumet, M. (1981). Restitution and reconstruction of educational experience: An autobiographical method for curriculum inquiry. In M. Lawn & L. Barton (Eds.), Rethinking curriculum studies: A radical approach (pp. 115–130). London, UK: Croom Helm. Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press. Grumet, M. (2015a). Autobiography: The mixed genre of private and public. In W. Pinar & M. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 220–244). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Grumet, M. (2015b). Psychoanalytical foundations. In W. Pinar & M. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 142–190). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Grumet, M. (2015c). Toward a poor curriculum. In W. Pinar & M. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 84–112). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Hayman, R. (2017). Illuminated manuscripts. Oxford, UK: Shire Publications. Hampl, P. (1999). I could tell you stories. New York: Norton. Kingston, M. H. (1976). The woman warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Oxford English Dictionary. (1989). Archive [Def. etymology]. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Retrieved July 4, 2018, from www.oed.com

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Pinar, W. (2011). The character of curriculum studies. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. (2012). What is curriculum theory? New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. (2015a). Educational experience as lived: Knowledge, history, alterity: The selected works of William F. Pinar. New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. (2015b). Preface (1976). In W. Pinar & M. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. xiii–xvii). Kingston, New York, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015c). Self and others. In W. Pinar & M. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 8–39). Kingston, New York, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015d). The method. In W. Pinar & M. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 65–83). Kingston, New York: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W., & Grumet, M. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed.). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Ricoeur, P. (2007). The problem of ‘doubling meaning’. In D. Ihde (Ed.), The conflict of interpretations: Essays in hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Robertson, J. P., & Radford, L. A. (2009). The private uses of quiet grandeur: A meditation on literary pilgrimage. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 16(2), 203–209. doi:10.1080/13586840902863186 Salvio, P. M. (2007). Anne Sexton: Teacher of weird abundance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sebald, W. G. (2013). A place in the country (J. Catling, Trans.). London, UK: Hamish Hamilton. SenseLab. (n.d.(a)). Anarchiving. Retrieved December 16, 2018, from http:// senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/anarchiving/ SenseLab. (n.d.(b)). Anarchive: Concise definition. Retrieved May 22, 2017, from http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/anarchiving/anarchive-concise-definition Taavitsainen, I. (1999). Dialogues in late medieval and early modern English medical writing. In A. H. Jucker, G. Fritz, & F. Lebsanft (Eds.), Historical dialogue analysis (pp. 243–268). Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Wachtel, E. (2007). Ghost Hunter. In L. S. Schwartz (Ed.), The emergence of memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (pp. 37–61). New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Williams, D. (1987). The Canterbury tales: A literary pilgrimage. Boston, MA: Twayne.

Strand I

Spaces David Lewkowich and Christian Ehret

All experiences of learning and knowledge creation are necessarily affected and directed—in other words, inescapably provoked—by the larger spaces (geographical, cultural, linguistic, social, etc.) in which they are embedded (Judson, 2006). While they may have a liberating, productive, and cathartic effect on thinking and (curriculum) theorizing, spaces can also be used to limit access, potentially causing injury to thought’s intrinsic volition. As Grumet (1988) argues, the connection between curriculum and thinking—if either is “conceived as an aspiration” (p. 131)— involves a play between what we may call unstructured possibility and the possibilities of structure: “curriculum, like language, is a moving form,” where as soon as the semblance of form or static space is reached, the “aspiration” necessarily “slips” (p. 131). Desire, like language, also necessarily keeps curriculum spaces moving. Following Feenberg (2006), the inherently contingent and ambivalent nature of spaces “frame not just one way of life but many different possible ways of life, each of which determines a different choice of designs and a different range of . . . mediation” (p. 13). In this regard, considerations of space in curriculum theory deeply affect the ways in which education happens, as well as how—between teachers and students, students and students, bodies and bodies of knowledge—it can be made to happen. The affordances and constraints of space are also related to Apple’s (1990) classic curriculum questions: Whose knowledge is it? Why is it being taught to this particular group, in this particular way? What are its real or latent functions in the complex connections between cultural power and the control of the modes of production and distribution of goods and services? (p. 156) Or, in other words, what space do curriculum spaces provide, and to whom? The authors in this strand consider the productive interrelations of space and place, and how—as educational subjects—we can implicate ourselves and our projects in inventive activities of curriculum “place-making”:

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“We are all place-makers,” Judson (2006) notes, “as we construct spatial meaning and thus create place through our interactions with the terrains of our daily lives” (p. 231). In Chapter 3, Jennifer Macdonald develops a creative method of urban “wayfinding” (Ingold, 2000), walking the city in which she lives, giving privilege to her body’s knowledge and her heart’s capacity for listening as a means of enacting an organic practice of “ethical relationality.” Macdonald turns to Indigenous epistemologies of place, including those of Elder Bob Cardinal of the Enoch Cree Nation, and Papachase Cree curriculum studies scholar Dwayne Donald, describing the conceptual difference between map as grid and map as story—in effect, provoking maps to story. As an encounter with architectural space, Yu-Ling Lee turns to three architectural examples—the Roman circus, the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, and the “bridge which is not a bridge” at Vancouver’s Nitobe Memorial Garden—that fuse a metaphorical space in between conceptualizations of curriculum as technology and curriculum as theology. Following the provocations of Ted Aoki, Lee asks how we may linger between the curricular effects of built spaces and spaces of transcendence. Michelle A. Honeyford describes a collective and intergenerational experiment in curriculum making, where the edges of space and curriculum bleed, revealing the potential for the effable and observable to contain elusive traces of something more. Describing this recognition as an effect of the “contingency of encounter,” Honeyford suggests that spaces of teacher education should attend to, and actively work to create, spaces of vulnerability where certainty and confidence falter. Reading across these chapters, we are provoked to wonder how theorizations and pedagogical imaginings of curriculum space may continue opening to what geographer Doreen Massey called “a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (2005, p. 130). Massey’s argument relates the potentials of space to, in effect, become different through emergent social relations; that is, “since space is the product of social relations you are also helping . . . to alter space, to participate in its continuing production” (p. 118, emphasis in original). As we pointed to at the beginning of this introduction, classrooms and other curricular spaces carry social, cultural, and institutional histories that, for better or worse, put pressure on the activities and forms of learning that take place within them. Disrupting such striated space, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called it, requires attunement to the trajectories of bodies moving, feeling, and producing potentials for difference in their simultaneity of stories told so far. How might curriculum theorists seek out productive emergent potentials for difference-making in the spaces through which we move in our research, and ourselves move, toward more or less just futures? This question opens us as researchers and educators to consider how the potential value of curriculum encounters in the spaces through which we move every day cannot be fully determined in advance and that to

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do so, through theory, method, or practice, also carries potentials for spatial injustice.

References Apple, M. W. (1990). Ideology and curriculum (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980). Feenberg, A. (2006). What is philosophy of technology? In J. R. Dakers (Ed.), Defining technological literacy: Towards an epistemological framework (pp. 5–16). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York, NY: Routledge. Judson, G. (2006). Curriculum spaces: Situating educational research, theory, and practice. The Journal of Educational Thought (JET)/ Revue de la Pensée Éducative, 40(3), 229–245. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/23767424 Massey, D. (2005). For space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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A Poor Curriculum in Urban Spaces An Atlas for Ethical Relationality Jennifer Macdonald

In Robert MacFarlene’s The Wild Places (2007), he distinguishes between two types of maps: one that grids and one that tells a story. Lately, as I navigate around Calgary, I have been thinking about the difference between these maps and how they provide a different experience of urban space. A grid map, he states, “places an abstract geometric meshwork upon a space, within which any item or individual can be co-ordinated” (p. 141), whereas a story map “represent[s] a place as it is perceived by an individual or by a culture moving through it. They are records of specific journeys, rather than describing a space within which innumerable journeys might take place” (p. 143). In my experience, I see that urban living, and evidently, modern schooling, is typically associated with the likes of grid maps. Efficiency, objectivity, and progress are highly desired. For example, cities boost growth and measure land use, and students are set against pre-determined outcomes. In this regard, a particular experience of the world is privileged; one that benefits cognitive, scientific, and technological ways of knowing over bodied, localized, and affective ways of honouring all that gives life. Michel de Certeau (1984) wrote: “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across” (p. 129). As I consider my journey with this urban terrain, I notice that we all inhabit the world differently, and bring multiple memories, perceptions, and emotions to daily encounters. Against my learned yearning to plan and control consequences, I see that my lived-experiences are often filled with ambiguity and are never predictable. Yet, as I reflect further on my daily ventures I see my own tendency to grid come into view; I usually take the quickest route based on the visual map held in my mind. The stories cutting across the grid of my routine remind me of William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet’s poor curriculum1 (2015), as one “stripped of technology, structured instead by dialogical encounters, solitude, and sustained study” (p. xiii). Here, I see potential for nurturing encounters with place through attuned spatial movements. How do I begin to unlearn my reliance on grid-style ways of being, knowing and moving? How does the story map bring space alive through narrative encounters with the

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world? As I see it, amid an ecological crisis, it is essential for curriculum to grapple with these questions of spatial ontology, epistemology, and relationality. Along these lines, I am inspired by Tim Ingold’s (2000) description of wayfinding as “movement in time, more akin to playing music or storytelling than to reading a map” (p. 238), and I see a connection to the poor curriculum as a way to awaken rich narratives with the world and to bring loving relations to life. While my experience has largely been shaped by linear engagements and representations, Indigenous insights and understandings of place have inspired me and call the limits of my spatial relations into question. Slowing down and paying closer attention to the place through which I am moving has enhanced my practice of ethical relationality, which Papaschase Cree scholar Dwayne Donald (2016) states, “is an ecological understanding of organic connectivity that becomes apparent to us as human beings when we honour the sacred ecology that supports all life and living” (p. 11). In this chapter, I examine my spatial relations in the city to determine how a poor curriculum of place might best appear and how it might inform my commitments to ethical relationality. I begin by reflecting on my history as an outdoor enthusiast, trained by particular sensibilities to experience adventure and challenge, to question how this learned way of being has inspired a specific relationship with the more-than-human world. I then explicate my journey engaging with Indigenous perspectives to describe how this learning has transformed my process for experiencing the world. This is followed by an endeavour to expand my inner and outer boundaries of relationality, as I share a variety of textual and visual story maps from my walking—as a practice of wayfinding—around the city as a mode of engaging, and creating, a poor curriculum.

Understanding Space: Travelling in a Straight Line I enter into this exploration with the assumption that spatial boundaries are informed by cultural, historical, and conceptual traditions. Georgia Warnke (2002) explains: As human beings, we are “thrown” into a history or set of stories that we did not start and cannot finish . . . [and] to determine how to act, we must understand ourselves and the set of stories we find ourselves in. (p. 79) Thus, as a white, able-bodied, middle-class woman, who has spent considerable time with students on wilderness trips, I come already entangled in a set of stories about moving through space and relating with the morethan-human world. Despite my desire, as an outdoor educator, to nurture

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human-nature relationships, I recognize contradictory aspects of this pedagogy that equally feed into a linear and competitive cultural narrative. I had my first taste of outdoor education as a student in grade 11. We embarked on an autumn paddling trip in Algonquin Park, and I hated it. It was cold and wet, and I was hungry the entire time. I could not get my canoe to go straight and the portages were arduous. However, this week seemed to activate something deep in me, which became obvious when I returned to the traditional classroom setting the following semester. I felt trapped and judged by textbook learning and school as a series of tests. I craved the rush of defeating a difficult hiking route or paddling a technical river. I wanted to push my boundaries of what is possible. Now, as an outdoor educator, I respond to many subsequent calls back to Algonquin Park, sharing the stories of discomfort I experienced on my first canoe trip, as a tool to help students feel less anxious about the unknown so they, too, can have a positive outdoor experience. Eventually, it seemed that I felt more at home in the world (Heidegger, 1953/2010) while away from the anxieties of urban life. Over time, however, the separation between the urban and wild space created internal tensions. I wondered how leaving the city to feel more alive through recreation in undomesticated spaces, helped myself, and my students, live with an ecological consciousness. Do these adventures benefit morethan-human co-existence? Amid this line of thinking, I recognize that my feelings of being more full, connected, and alive while on these expeditions are largely tied to the physical domination of the world (Cronon, 1996; Newbery, 2003). Travelling outside the city, I work with students to become skilled in using a map and compass to triangulate positions on a map and to follow the most efficient method to move from point A to B. We use tools that permit a “scientific knowledge [of space and nature] . . . identical with a progressive, cumulative, objective and accurate representation of geographic reality synonymous with the growth of science itself” (Turnbull, 2000, p. 97). I then return to the city and wait out the excitement of the next adventure. What are the ethics of leaving the city to feel more alive in this way? Despite my intentions to facilitate authentic outdoor experiences, I see that such programs are developed with a specific approach to join pre-determined components with a presumed final product (that is often human-centred). In these programs, it is often assumed that a relationship with nature will occur linearly, merely though exposure, thereby simplifying a much more complex process. These are the linear and colonial logics (Donald, 2012) that I want to trouble. In Tim Ingold’s (2007) investigation on the culture of the line, he states: In Western societies, straight lines are ubiquitous. We see them everywhere, even when they do not really exist . . . the straight line has

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Jennifer Macdonald emerged as a virtual icon of modernity, an index of the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natural world. (p. 152)

I am suddenly struck by how deeply embedded straight-line logics are, and how they have dominated my conception of the world. I am part of an ancestral lineage, took the fixed straight path of the school system, I am constantly waiting in line, I am encouraged to sit up straight, I feel frustrated when I fall out of line, I see flight paths in the sky and follow trails on the ground. I am always already in a line. I want to instead shift linear logics to embrace the earth’s interconnected web, and to expand curricular conversations beyond this Cartesian ontology—to “present ourselves” (Greene, 1978, p. 199) as open to more intimate and temporal ways of knowing place.

Unlearning Linearity: Healing and Renewing Place Relations My stories come with contradictions that are revealed through my actions. I recognize that my understandings of human/nature, culture/nature, urbanity/wilderness, mind/body, settler/Indigenous, and space/place relationships are more complex and layered than a scientific grid map or triangulated route could ever allow. To imagine possibilities for a curriculum to support healing and reciprocal relations, Pinar and Grumet (2015) encourage me to look “at what is not yet the case, what is not yet present” (p. 75). Thus, I am reminded of Edward Casey’s (1996) conversation differentiating spaces and places. In this, he describes how in Western cultures the notion of space typically comes first and inherits the quality of place only once stories and meanings are attached: “by ‘space’ is meant a neutral, pre-given medium, a tabula rasa onto which the particularities of culture and history can be inscribed” (p. 14). In contrast, for an Indigenous worldview—specifically he speaks of the Pintupi people—“place itself with its multiple features is logically prior or central” (Myers as cited in Casey, 1996, p. 15). To my mind, this means that stories originate from the specific ecology of a particular place and are revealed through events and interpretations. Therefore, it becomes apparent that my quest for ethical relationality will begin by challenging conceptions of universal space and attune myself to the multidimensional, personal, energetic, and interrelated connections of place. To imagine how place might come alive in this way, I find inspiration from a graduate course I took at the University of Alberta. This course, titled Four-Directions Teachings: A Holistic Inquiry in Support of Life and Living, embodied the essence of a reconceptualizing curriculum— one that challenges my preconceived cultural understandings and invites dialogue to expand relations across different perspectives. Each of our

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class meetings was structured around the circle involving storytelling and ceremony. Symbolically, the circle provided a contrast to the typical learning environment and conversation conventions that I have learned in school. Growing up, the classroom was set up in rows and I was encouraged to reply straight away when a question was posed and to ask clarifying questions if I did not understand. Sitting around the circle, however, everyone is given an equal opportunity to share without being interrupted and this challenged me to listen attentively and to respond differently. As I gained comfort, I began noticing how deeply connected I felt with the others. I learned from many human and more-than-human teachers: Elder Bob Cardinal of the Maskekosihk Enoch Cree Nation, the instructors and my fellow classmates, along with the moon, the Land, and the seasons. At first, I was presented with challenges; not knowing what to expect, what I should pay attention to, or know how to interpret the emphasis on orality. I had to trust myself in the mystery and listen more deeply. Over time, I noticed a shift in my attention as I became more present in the moment and received teachings on my own terms without always overthinking. I developed comfort in my body and with my spirit. As I started to listen and respond in new ways, our gatherings left me feeling “wide-awake” (Greene, 1971/2013, p. 131) to other possibilities for being human, living an ethical life, and relating to kinship networks within my everyday urban routines. As part of this course, we participated in a sustained engagement with the ecology of a particular place. The place I studied was Nose Hill Park in Calgary. Appearing as a large grassy hill in the middle of the city, this space intrigued me since my first arrival to Calgary a year earlier. Following the wisdom teachings of the 13 Moons, through the seasonal changes, allowed me to take notice of small details that were overlooked in my first encounters. Nose Hill is much more than a grassy hill in the middle of the city but a complex ecology of beings. While my time here became a gift for me, my experience was further provoked by a peer who asked, “How will we give back to the places that give to us?” (C. Badger, personal communication, March 4, 2017). Immediately, I could point to my taken-for-grantedness of place and my sense of innocence on the land. How do I acknowledge the traditional Lands I am walking on? How do I reciprocate the gifts of these places? With these questions, I am pushed to consider myself in-relation differently—as a community member in an interconnected ecology. In all of this, as a person of settler-descent, I continuously negotiate how to thoughtfully and respectfully absorb these practices in my own way; not to romanticize or co-opt the teachings, but to enact them as an effort of ethical relationality and to honour those who taught me. I feel guided by the wisdom teachings that Elder Cardinal has shared. He emphasizes balanced attention to the physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental aspects of the self and the interconnectedness among all beings.

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While giving this attention to place, I recognized that the spiritual component is missing in many of the spaces I travel. Omitting this component essentially reduces the experience of a place and the experience of being human. I am pushed to honour spiritual knowing, as part of a poor curriculum, to bring place alive. As I learn to attend to holism and consider my processes of attaining balance, I understand that my relations are always in flux (Gadamer, 1975/2004). What I know to be true is always changing and I am part of a continual emergent process. I am a carrier of story maps.

Story Maps of the City: Provoking Encounters for a Poor Curriculum of Place As I move through space, I am moved differently by the unique elements of place. To embrace an experience of the city that brings place alive, I take up Ted Aoki’s (2005) call for “the lived curriculum,” which he describes as “the more poetic, phenomenological and hermeneutic discourse in which life is embodied in the very stories and languages people speak and live” (p. 207). Elder Cardinal tells us that the “the longest journey you will ever make is from your head to your heart” (personal communication, December 10, 2016), signalling me to focus on my sensory, affective, and perceptual knowing, to balance my habitual linear and cognitive processes. Therefore, a poor curriculum of place will go beyond the certainty of cartography to expose the embodied encounters revealed in paths of movement. Therefore, to privilege my body’s way of knowing over cognitive grid maps of the city, I take up the practice of walking to emphasize a wayfinding approach of opening encounters for organic connectivity with place. Similar to others who take up walking as a methodological approach (Irwin, 2006; Springgay & Truman, 2017), I appreciate the embodied, place-based, and rhythmic characteristics of walking that allow me to be in-the-world, temporally and ontologically, in a way that can open the particulars in everyday situations (Heidegger, 1953/2010). For example, I become more attuned to temperature, the direction of the wind, and the surfaces on which I walk; I have conversations with my neighbours and fellow walkers, I hear bird songs and watch bird routines; I gain a deeper understanding of my own body’s history and wisdom, limits, and wellness, etc. My experience of the world is mediated through dialogue with my surroundings, not merely following a pre-determined linear path. This allows me to expand my boundaries of understanding. As I consider my relationality with the world, the slowness of walking helps me facilitate the journey from head to the heart. As I wander through the city, I pay attention to moments of connection while considering how these moments bring place alive. In what follows, through a series of textual and visual story maps (Harmon, 2004; Solnit, 2016),

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which MacFarlene (2007) suggests will bring the mystery and wonder of the landscape to life, I share how slowing down and paying attention to my encounters allows me to be part of a “more complicated conversation” (Pinar, 2004, p. 9). The first one brings the tensions from my previous theoretical discussion alive and into present action; then, by engaging with my evolving understanding of Elder Cardinal’s wisdom teachings, I share how my walking encounters have helped to go beyond linearity and renew my relationships. I have grown a curiosity towards the school grounds across the street from my home. I walked through the field daily and observe it from my office window. Given my background as an educator, who often felt confined by the walls of the traditional classroom, I was intrigued by different ways this field could be used as a pedagogical space. How could this field promote curricular possibilities available to promote the body, mind, and spirit? Since moving here, I became pleasantly attuned to the more-than-human community that occupied the field. I observed crows, ground squirrels, bats, rabbits, and magpies (not to mention the rocks, insects, grass, amongst others who sustain life); I found myself puzzled over their urban life-worlds, travel patterns, territories, and adaptation to the seasons. I believe this is what a poor curriculum (Pinar & Grumet, 2015) of place might look like. A few months ago, however, the ecology of this field underwent a transformation. The ground was torn up, giant boulders were brought in, and the human community came together to install an elaborate playground. I was disheartened by the disruption and dislocation of the other inhabitants and felt worried about where they might have gone. I began noticing, however, how joy could appear in different forms. Families came to the park together, children were being active and playing outdoors, and there was laughter from the high school students, as they experimented with creative zip-line techniques. While I understood the attraction to the new equipment, I was annoyed by it. I found myself disgruntled, with lots of questions about how we encourage children and youth to engage with outdoor spaces and if the sense of aliveness I was experiencing with the field was visible to others. I wondered how a modern ecological ethic could be practiced, if being engaged with nature was only attractive through recreation at a fancy park. Amid my fussing about the playground, and spiralling observations of other urban spaces being developed for human purpose, I felt helplessly reminded that cities are stories of colonialism and capitalism (Derby, Piersol & Blenkinsop, 2015). About a month ago, while I was walking from the bus stop, and through the field, I had an unexpected, and joyful, encounter with a group of crows. I stood there looking at the crows, and the crows looked back to me. A deeply felt connection. The next day I noticed three rabbits. It seemed they had all returned. I was, and remain, fascinated by how the animals could adapt new patterns and fashion an apparent refusal

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to be defined by the human. In addition, such as captured in Figure 3.1, I was attuned to how the rabbits and crows lived in the space together. A beautiful mystery. At the same time, however, I experienced a wave of confusion about my original reaction. In the rut of my resentment about the playground, I lacked hope that a new story could take shape and overlooked the agency of the more-than-human world. In that moment of connection, I was reminded of the dualistic tension that I carry around with me. I was out of balance. I desired a way to expand my boundaries, to attend to the relationship of the whole, and to, as MaxineGreene (1988) says, create “human freedom, in the capacity to surpass the given and to look at things as they could be otherwise” (p. 3). How might humans and more-than-humans co-exist? Cities are multifaceted ecologies with layered histories and understandings. As the foregoing story shows, the contradictions that I work against are also deeply embedded in my own ontology and epistemology. As I journey along the path to challenge my dominant view, I look for “stories that teach us how to be good relatives with all our relations—human and more-than-human” (Donald, 2016, p. 11). In so doing, it is important for me to pause and to consider the tensions at play. As a non-Indigenous woman, I feel hesitant to incorporate Elder

Figure 3.1 Co-inhabitants of the park Source: Digital photograph

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Cardinal’s teachings, for trepidation that it will be interpreted as a colonial gesture. While I proceed carefully, I am also not fully aware of how my dominant worldview works on me. Stó:lō scholar, Jo-Ann Archibald (2008) states: “If one comes to understand and appreciate the power of a particular knowledge, then one must be ready to share and teach it respectfully and responsibly to others in order for this knowledge, and its power, to continue” (p. 3). Therefore, I understand part of being in this teaching and learning relationship with the Elder comes with the responsibility to bring his teachings alive in ways that are meaningful and for them to continue forward in a good way. As our course was framed around the teachings of the Four Directions—east/emotional, south/spiritual, west/mental, north/physical—and the constant negotiation of balance for a holistic understanding, I share my understanding of each direction with a narrative that brought life to my wandering. I wish to uncover instances that contribute to an atlas of ethical relationality. East/Emotional The early morning has always been my favourite time of day. I wake up at dawn and watch the world expand before me. As the sun rises, a quiet blanket seems to cover the city, before the hurried demands of the day begin. I become attuned to the gusts of cold wind against my bare face, while feeling warmth from the rising sun. The crows and chickadees, too, are coming to life. My morning walk is short—a circuit around the neighbourhood—yet, as in Figure 3.2, I am usually greeted by the sun, and I often return home with a sense of grounding and newness, with ideas stemming from events that occurred the day before. This time of day provides me affective comfort—whether I am happy or sad—and my walk usually offers some clarity. Frye Jean Graveline (2000), Métis Scholar, allows me to see the importance of the cycle—the life cycle, the daily cycle, the moon cycle, cell cycle, seasonal cycles, etc., reminding me that I am bounded by cycles. I am learning that, while I may be bounded, cycles are not enclosed. I can expand my understanding by nourishing myself and listening to other life forces that are always there with me. There will always be new opportunities. On days when the sun is hidden on my walk I come to appreciate, in its absence, how much it nourishes me. South/Spiritual Growing up, being spiritual was most commonly associated with being religious and was not something in which my family or peer group participated. Only in the past few years have I gained comfort labelling my experiences as spiritual. This inner tension signals a deep dependency,

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Figure 3.2 January sunrise Source: Digital photograph

within me, on what the dominant structures of society deem to be normal, and how entrenched these beliefs are in my worldview. I realize that my feelings of isolation, banality, and disenchantment are tied up with the anxieties of trying to meet the unrealistic expectations of society. While I continuously work to unlearn what these expectations mean, I recognize that many childhood experiences did nourish my spirit, providing gratitude for life, connection, and joy. These memories are most vividly alive and visit me as I walk along the Bow River as pictured in Figure 3.3. I remember my pleasure when joining my grandparents for their daily walk along the bay shore, spending days at the beach with my family, my enjoyment for swimming and canoeing— bringing my mystical connection with water to the forefront. The presence of water centres me and makes me more present for others. In other instances, subtle gifts slow me down and make me reflect on what is important. For example, several times I have tripped on a section of uneven sidewalk. The first couple of times this incident happened I was irritated. I was in a rush to get someplace. However, as the frequency increased, I asked myself, What good does my rushing serve? My careless falls are a lesson in humility and a reminder to slow down and to be present.

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Figure 3.3 Nourished by the Bow Source: Digital photograph

West/Mental Built features of the urban landscape often become fixed in our linear paths, without much reflection, and get us to the places we need to go. While being a pedestrian in Calgary, I do a lot of traffic watching. I think about how this experience of watching traffic is different as an outsider (pedestrian), compared with when I am riding transit, or driving my own car in the thick of things. My conversation with the world is totally different in each situation. When I am travelling slowly by foot, I notice the world on a micro level, which alters the dialogue I am engaging in. The traffic along Glenmore Trail in Figure 3.4 leads me to consider the travel routes we choose, and the road maps we create of the city. What is the quickest route? I think about the heated emotions that develop, when one driver does not understand the judgement or actions of another; a lack of dialogue. This points me to a need for opening ourselves to the Other in Figure 3.5, in order to learn about myself. At the same time, I am also reminded that “Nature is an Other that addresses us” (Grün, 2005, p. 164); therefore, just as the city influences nature, nature also influences the city. Without overlooking the evidence that the city habitually acts to control the natural, I am struck as I continuously witness nature’s intelligence

Figure 3.4 Movement on the Glenmore Trail Source: Digital photograph

Figure 3.5 Recognizing otherness Source: Digital photograph

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and resiliency. How can I best attune to this Other? How can I communicate in respectful ways? I acknowledge that the more-than-human beings that I encounter daily are my best teachers. I must learn to attune to their language, to give them gifts. North/Physical I find the short daylight hours and cold during the winter make it more compelling for me to hibernate in the comfort of my home. These are the longest days of the year for me, and I often would like to hide until the spring arrives. Despite the effort it takes to get myself outdoors, I often find that the test of the cold makes me feel maximally present. I become aware of my toes and my fingers, and the tip of my nose. I notice tracks in the snow and I can look back to note my exact path and like Figure 3.6 shows, my path is not straight. I keep moving to keep warm. I am often pleased that harsh conditions tend to bring humans closer together. In my observations, when I pass others on the sidewalk, when I am waiting at the bus stop, or I see neighbours outside their homes, conversations are more genuine during the winter; they do not linger, but I feel acknowledged and that others are looking out for me. A sense of companionship is felt as we survive the winter together. In turn, the cold makes me appreciate all the gifts that I have in my life, and I am sensitive towards others who are not as fortunate, or who are experiencing winter for the first time. I wonder how our trails could come alongside each other. How could I become more generous? How can I be more loving?

Spatial Encountering: Possibilities for Aliveness in Curriculum As I uncover the linear logics that have widely served as my guide and imagine a different way of being in the world, I am more attentive to how space is represented. In Enlightenment-based worldviews, space is conceived as empty, a standing-reserve (Heidegger, 1977) waiting to be used. Meaning is typically ascribed by humans alone. In large part, I see that a cultural dependence on grid maps has contributed to this colonial, anthropocentric, capitalist, and scientific view, and has led to fragmented and detrimental relationships with the earth. When following a grid map, we are not required to engage our intuition or affective sensibilities, and this disembodies us from the place that gives us life. In a time of ecological concern, it seems to me that this linear model is limiting the necessary ontological, epistemological, and relational conversations we ought to be having. In this inquiry, I explained different perspectives for engaging with space and place, and shared stories from my experiences learning Indigenous perspectives and journeys of walking the city. I did so as an

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Figure 3.6 Paths to gratitude Source: Digital photograph

attempt to resist linear conceptions of space, to be part of a more complicated conversation, and to aliveness of place to the fore. Throughout this process, I found that the practice of walking allowed me to slow down and attend to the embodied and sensuous experience of dialogic encounters. At times, I was unsure how to interpret or act on

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my experiences, humbled by my own limitations of seeing and being, and this required me to consider that answers might present themselves in future time and in unexpected modes. I realized that the act of encountering was to embrace the mystery and to remain vulnerable. This journey is parallel with Pinar and Grumet (2015), who advocate that “thinking of being alive as a journey implies movement, encountering obstacles as well as pleasant surprises. . . . We may still be unsure what move to make next but move we must” (p. 191). I understand that ethical relationality will require me to relinquish my own desire for control. I agree with Jane Bennett (2001), who claims that embracing moments of enchantment—along with moments that call what we know into question—can cultivate a sense of ethical generosity. As the earth around me becomes animate and vivid, I feel deeper responsibility. I am provoked to continue learning from all that gives life around me, and to respond lovingly in return. In considering how a curriculum written within urban places and with more-than-human co-inhabitants might appear, I suspect that it should begin within the observer, or student, to understand that we are all part of a complex story. To ensure “respect and love [are] at the forefront of our interactions” (Donald, 2016, p. 11), we need to honour the Four Directions within ourselves, while at the same time honouring their insight for developing a different ethic that will help us move forward together and educate for the continuation of life. For me, it is a continuous tension of being caught up in cultural critique and deciding, instead, for aliveness. A constant and necessary balance. Weber (2017) reminds me that, “to decide in favor of aliveness is to be ready to fight for it at any time” (p. 118), and I believe there is much to be learned here for a curriculum concerned with renewing relationships; to honour corporeality, and to see and listen with the heart. I would like to thank Elder Bob Cardinal, of the Maskekosihk Enoch Cree Nation, for his generosity and for his permission to share his oral teachings.

Note 1. I take inspiration from Pinar and Grumet’s (2015) notion of poor curriculum as a frame throughout this piece. However, through my engagement with Indigenous insights and understandings of place, I also seek to reframe and renew this curricular theory towards sacred ecological insights (Donald, 2016).

References Archibald, J.-A. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Aoki, T. (2005). Legitimating lived curriculum: Toward a curricular landscape of multiplicity (1993). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new

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key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 199–215). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: Attachments, crossings, and ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Casey, E. S. (1996). How to get from space to place in a short stretch of time: Phenomenological prolegomena. In S. Feld & K. H. Basso (Eds.), Senses of place (pp. 13–52). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Cronon, W. (1996). Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature. New York, NY: Norton. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. F. Randell, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Derby, M., Piersol, L., & Blenkinsop, S. (2015). Refusing to settle for pigeons and parks: Urban environmental education in the age of neoliberalism. Environmental Education Research, 21(3), 378–389. doi:10.1080/13504622.2014.994166 Donald, D. (2012). Indigenous métissage: A decolonizing research sensibility. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), 533–555. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2011.554449 Donald, D. (2016). From what does ethical relationality flow? An Indian Act in three artifacts. In J. Seidel & D. W. Jardine (Eds.), The ecological heart of teaching: Radical tales of refuge and renewal for classrooms and communities (pp. 10–17). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Gadamer, H. G. (1975/2004). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. Graveline, F. J. (2000). Circle as methodology: Enacting an Aboriginal paradigm. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(4), 361–370. doi:10.1080/095183900413304 Greene, M. (1971/2013). Curriculum and consciousness. In. D. J. Flinders & S. J. Thornton (Eds.), The curriculum studies reader (4th ed., pp. 127–139). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Grün, M. (2005). Gadamer and the otherness of nature: Elements for an environmental education. Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 28(2), 157–171. doi:10.1007/s10746-005-4190-6 Harmon, K. (2004). You are here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. Heidegger, M. (1953/2010). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper Collins. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York, NY: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. New York, NY: Routledge. Irwin, R. L. (2006). Walking to create an aesthetic and spiritual currere. Visual Arts Research, 32(1), 75–82. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/20715404 MacFarlene, R. (2007). The wild places. New York, NY: Penguin. Newbery, L. (2003). Will any/body carry that canoe? A geography of the body, ability, and gender. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 8(1), 204–216. Pinar, W. (2004). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. R. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed.). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Solnit, R. (2016). Introduction: Centers and edges. In R. Solnit & J. Jelly-Schapiro (Eds.), Non-stop metropolis: A New York city atlas (pp. 1–15). Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). A transmaterial approach to walking methodologies: Embodiment, affect, and a sonic art performance. Body & Society, 23(4), 27–58. doi:10.1177/1357034X17732626 Turnbull, D. (2000). Masons, tricksters and cartographers: Comparative studies in the sociology of scientific and Indigenous knowledge. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic. Warnke, G. (2002). Hermeneutics, ethics, and politics. In R. J. Dostal (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Gadamer (pp. 79–101). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Weber, A. (2017). Matter and desire: An erotic ecology (R. Bradley, Trans.). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

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Technotheological Curricular Spaces Encountering the Circus, Cathedral, and Bridge Yu-Ling Lee

In Conflicting Conceptions of Curriculum, Eisner and Vallance (1974) identify and examine five widely acknowledged conceptions, formulations, or orientations of curriculum. Of interest for this chapter are the two different conceptions of “curriculum as technology” and “curriculum as consummatory experience,” or what Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (1995) later identify as “curriculum as theological text.” Curriculum as technology is typically framed as concerning the objectives of learning, specifically with finding “efficient means to a set of predefined, nonproblematic ends” to curriculum design (Eisner & Vallance, 1974, p. 7). This approach is supposedly value neutral, process focussed, and production driven. Alternatively, curriculum as theological text is value centred and growth oriented, and is involved in discerning “consummatory experiences for individual learners” (Eisner & Vallance, 1974, p. 9). While these two conceptions of curriculum seem to be widely incommensurate, I assert that they have a stronger inter-relationship than may at first appear. The aim for this chapter is to articulate the space in between curriculum as technology and curriculum as theology, a dwelling similar to Aoki’s (1991/2005) call to linger on a curricular bridge. Through Aoki (1987/2005), we recall the ideas of theologian Schleiermacher in attuning to the layered worlds of curriculum and pedagogy. One such way of attunement is through the lens of architecture, which Schleiermacher uses to explicate how a theoretician, practitioner, and practicing worshipper might relate to a cathedral or a school. In these architectural spaces, we may be offered examples of how technology and theology materialize into technotheological spaces. For instance, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was designed with soaring ceilings, creating an atmosphere of mystery, awe, and wonder, rendering the physical reality as sacred space. Similarly, the Trinity College Library in Ireland was designed with a grand “long room” and now, even Apple stores, such as those in New York City and in London, have massive cubic structures that match the grandness of religious buildings. Architectural spaces have a power to engage, connect, inform, and transform. They are embodied forms of lived experience,

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encountering humanity’s inscription into space. Spatial conceptualization and symbolic narratives are often built into the multifaceted— simultaneously technological and theological—agendas of architecture. In the following sections, I invoke the circus, cathedral, and bridge as technotheological spaces that synthesize curricular experience, symbolism, and meaning. Within these built environments, we witness humanity’s quest for transcendence intertwined with the rise of technology, a technotheological space. Beginning with a brief foray into the metaphysics of curriculum, I present how one of the originating uses of curriculum, as infrastructure in ancient Greece, can be traced through our architectural exemplars, through a thread of curriculum as technology and theology. This chapter, then, attempts to theorize a lived curricular encounter, through the materiality and technology of architecture, and the reconceptualization of curriculum as a technotheological space.

Encountering the Metaphysics of Curriculum Encountering curriculum as technotheological spaces has a long and storied history that can be traced back to antiquity. Yet, educational scholars have typically reduced curriculum to merely a discipline that began in 1918 with the publication of The Curriculum by Franklin Bobbitt (Kliebard, 2004). Doll (2002/2012, 2006) and Hamilton (1989/2013), however, have worked further back to suggest that our modern notions of curriculum began in the Renaissance with Peter Ramus, who reconfigured teaching and learning in new ways towards a technical methodology. Petrina, Lee, and Feng (2016) assert that this is a truncated historiography of curriculum that is missing etymological and metaphysical coherence found within ancient history. In response to the gap in curriculum historiography, we follow Huebner (1975) who claimed that “metaphysical and perhaps religious language become the primary vehicle for the legitimation and thinking through of educational activity” (p. 227). In so doing, Huebner sets the stage for how we are to encounter the metaphysical space of curriculum: For some, the encounter of man with man [sic] is seen as the essence of life, and the form that this encounter takes is the meaning of life. The encounter is not used to produce change, to enhance prestige, to identify new knowledge, or to be symbolic of something else. The encounter is. (p. 227) Huebner describes the lived encounter with one another as the fullness of educational activity. This curricular encounter is the beginning of discerning curriculum as technotheological space. Technotheological curriculum is “an extraordinarily complicated conversation” (Pinar et al., 1995,

44 Yu-Ling Lee p. 848) whereby teachers and students may “encounter themselves and the world they inhabit and that inhabits them . . . all threaded through their own lived experience” (Pinar, 2015, p. 30). Greene (2001) suggests that one significant moment of encounter is the juxtaposition of art and subjectivity, or in our case, the encounter between curriculum and architectural space. This is where humanity comes into being via a “circumscribed space—shelter, living space, ceremonial space, a space which replaces the space of the world” (Gorringe, 2004, p. 3), or rather, where humans experience a spatial turn in lived experience. Buildings, as spaces, can be conceptualized in relation to the spaciousness of the human body, the tangible encounters with one another, and the constructed materiality that can evoke the human spirit. The technotheological space is an “in between space that allows intensities and desiring flows to circulate before actualising themselves .  .  . on a physical .  .  . plane” (Colombat, 1991, p. 14). As a person enters a space they find captivating, whether it be a majestic cathedral, a serene Japanese garden, or a simple classroom, there is an experience of “ensouling” (Day, 2004). This ensouling depicts the human spirit that “incarnate[s] progressively into a building with each step from wish, through idea, planning, constructional design and building to occupation” (Day, 2004, p. 159). In this way, our lived encounters of built environments can be readily traced back to the etymological space of curriculum. In researching the metaphysical space of curriculum in ancient Greece, Lee and Petrina (2018) discerned four substantive uses or meanings of curriculum: 1. A course of study (e.g., cursus studiorum) 2. The run or race, autobiography, career and works, experience, journey, or life (e.g., curriculum vitae and currere) 3. The sphere or extension of the mind (e.g., curriculum mentis) 4. A carriage, chariot, conveyance, or vehicle and attendant parts, arenas, circuses, crowds, and infrastructure (e.g., curriculum artis and currus igneus) The first and second meanings have been well covered by educators and curriculum theorists (Connelly, He, & Phillion, 2008; Pinar, 1976/2015). Lee and Petrina (2018) historicize curriculum mentis, literally translated as the “racecourses of the mind,” and link it to the framework of the mind and the noosphere, which is the convergence of matter, mind, and spirit (cf. Teilhard, 1956/1959). This chapter, however, continues the etymological curiosity from Doll (2002/2012) and Quinn (2002), and concretizes the curricular encounter in regards to architectural materiality. Our participation in architecture, then, offers a potential way out of the curricular theology and technology dichotomy by shaping the possibilities of encounter within the technotheological in-between. Following Deleuze (1995), the technotheological is “neither one thing nor the other,

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it’s always in-between, between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow” (p. 45). My discussion of these curricular flights (Reynolds & Webber, 2004) from the technotheological in-between centres on three architectural objects: the Roman circus, the cathedral, and the bridge.

The Circus The circus, from the Greek kirkos, meaning a circle or a ring, was a Roman infrastructure that held a circular shape that serves as one of the originating images of curriculum. Circuses held programs that were known as circus games. The specific games were used for religious rituals and festivals, athletic spectacle, and amusement for the masses. Chariot races were the oldest and most popular of the games. From the opening procession, the delegates paraded throughout the city. As they arrived at the circus, the procession circled the track, and the images of the gods were placed next to the emperor in the shrines or temples situated high above the seats and thus overseeing the games. The circus parade was a symbolic enactment of the cosmos whereby the circus would become the infrastructure of the universe, and the emperor was its god. This was a curricular lived experience whereby Roman cosmology and theology was assembled within the technology of the architecture and ceremony of the circus (Figure 4.1). The Roman circus was a theologically infused, technological marvel. Its racetrack had a median barrier that held multiple statues and altars dedicated to the gods and a middle obelisk demarcating the centre of the world. On one end of the track were the twelve stalls for the horses and chariots at the start of the racetrack, representing the twelve months of the year. The twelve chariots also represented the twelve constellations. As the chariots burst forth out of their stalls, the crowd (upwards of 150,000 spectators at the Circus Maximus) roared with approval. During the race, the real challenge of weaving among competitors and carving a path through the hairpin turns may have led to crashes that would have been particularly exciting for the spectators. The race consisted of the chariots running seven laps in reference to “the courses of the seven planets by which they say the world is controlled, or to the course of the seven stages of life” (Barney, Lewis, Beach, & Berghof, 2006, p. 368). The race would conclude when a chariot crossed the finish line to the triumphant sound of a trumpet. The victorious charioteer would then ascend to the judges’ box and claim the palm branch and laurel wreath, which were symbols of victory. The circus was a curricular space whereby the entire Roman people would encounter the imperial cosmology and Roman worldview through its structured materiality. Its main actors, the chariots and charioteers, have “symbolic depth [that] is historically attested to in the images of education of the Western tradition from which ‘curriculum’ emerged” (Quinn, 2002, p. 239). Quinn speaks of the visionary and symbolic power

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Figure 4.1 The curricular space of the Roman Circus Source: From The Circus Flaminius, by Giacomo Lauro, 1641, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Max Falk. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted with permission.

of the chariot that is particularly evident for the circus as curriculum. The chariots (currus) derived its name from racing (cursus) as well as the wagon (carrus). Charioteering as athletics was part and parcel of traditional Greek and Roman education. Physical training as well as mental gymnastics were part of the general education (enkyklios paideia). The Greek adjective, enkyklios, meaning circular, points to a “completeness of a program that had to envelop a student” or the “multiplicity of the educational circles involved and at the cyclic revisiting of the same texts” (Cribiore, 2001, p. 129). Charioteering at the circus was the “existential experience of external structures” (Pinar, 1976/2015, p. xiv), or rather, running the course of the circus as curriculum. The Roman poet Juvenal wrote that the people only desired two things, “bread and circuses” (as cited in Keane, 2015, p. 135). Various socialpolitical issues were enacted within its walls; for instance, the circus was a place for political negotiation and petition to the emperor, socialization according to seating hierarchy, and demonstration of military power and might (Bell, 2014, p. 494). The emperor was viewed and worshipped

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as the Sun God’s earthly equivalent. In Greco-Roman mythology, Sol, the sun god, drove his four-course chariot through the heavenly circuit from sunrise to sunset. His partner Luna drove her two-horse chariot and travels a twin course alongside Sol. The two gods represent the orderly movement of the cosmos and the circuit of time, which is analogous to the circus track. The circus space, “from an architectural standpoint . . . was like a massive shrine to the gods” (Zaleski, 2014, p. 596). Its material space was structured like the cosmos (Lyle, 1984), and the circus games themselves were ritual enactments of imperial ideology. The circus, then, was a curriculum par excellence. This technotheological curricular space was “the space of the in-between . . . the locus for social, cultural, and natural transformations” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 123) for the Roman people. Its people encounter technotheology curriculum as embodied experience through the in-between space of the circus.

The Cathedral From the circus in antiquity, I turn to the Gothic cathedral as a second exemplar of technotheological curricular space. For Aoki, our embodied and spiritual encounter with the cathedral can foster greater understanding of the curricular space (Lee, 2017). Before moving directly into the curriculum space, a first consideration is how to interpret and understand such religious buildings. In the Notre Dame de Paris, Hugo (1831/2004) asserts that “whoever was born a poet, became an architect” (p. 233). In Hugo’s novel, the Notre Dame Cathedral is a fully developed character. Its materials are not inert, but living. Heine (1887) marvelled at the expressive power of sacred architecture in Gothic cathedrals, exclaiming “how the idea of the church itself is revealed in them! Everything strives upwards, everything is transubstantiated” (p. 150). These kinds of religious buildings allow the viewer/worshipper to readily identify with an experience of the transcendent kind. It is therefore a dynamic space that helps shape the meaning of ritual practices and the content of religious systems. As the circus was a representation of the cosmos, the cathedral is more readily understood as a representation of a celestial city. Eliade (1954) pointed out that humanity constructs according to an archetype, and their cities and temples have celestial models. This is, in part, because “every sacred space implies a hierophany” or an “irruption of the sacred” (Eliade, 1959, p. 26). Spaces such as cathedrals are considered sacred because of a divine or transcendent encounter. Much like the curricular space of the circus, the sacred space of the mediaeval Gothic cathedral was an architectural lived experience of heaven on earth. This is an in-between curricular space where the transcendent meets the technology of Gothic architecture. The Gothic church was designed with meticulous details for its technotheological considerations. It was constructed with large windows to let in as much light

48 Yu-Ling Lee as possible, flooding the church naves with a smooth distribution of coloured light from its stained glass. The light itself “caused the entire church to glow with marvellous uninterrupted light” (Duby, 1981, p. 101), and acted as an “enlightened space for liturgical motion in drama and music” (Bergmann, 2007, p. 368) set forth in the Mass. The towering columns and intricately vaulted ceilings emphasized verticality, invariably drawing one’s gaze upwards in awe. The precise geometric construction was readily evident in the design and orderly aesthetic that was reflected in the twelfth-century theology and cosmology of the scholars at the Cathedral School of Chartres (Scott, 2003, p. 125). These “scholarly” theologians paired with the “practical” theologians—the abbots and bishops who commissioned the church buildings and determined its floorplans. In turn, the scholarly and the practical enrolled the “aesthetic” or the “technological” theologians—such as the architects, masons, and artists—whose “theological and religious sense .  .  . we see express in concrete architectural forms and elements: the sense for what makes the space truly sacred and suitable for the divine presence” (Bychkov, 2009, p. 54). By entering these Gothic churches, worshippers would have been overwhelmed and amazed by its physical features. The cathedral space was a curricular space, teaching each worshipper a theology informed by the cathedral’s materiality and technology. While the sacred space of churches and cathedrals would undergo various design and technological changes through the centuries, the Gothic architectural style re-materialized into the modern era with the emergence of the Gothic revival. In the past, Gothic churches were meant as powerful evocations of holy life. Beginning in nineteenth-century England, the revival of the Gothic style was initially an attempt to recall the Christian faith as foundational in Western society through the construction of Gothic churches and cathedrals (cf. Austin, 2011). Since then, the Gothic revival would become a popular architectural style beyond religious buildings. For instance, the John Rylands library was completed in 1899 in Manchester, England. The Palace of Culture in Romania was built in 1925, and now houses four interrelated museums. Parliament Hill, completed in 1927, is a series of buildings that serve as the home for the Parliament of Canada. Of particular interest is the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh (Figure 4.2). The Cathedral of Learning is the centrepiece of the University of Pittsburgh’s main campus. It is the tallest educational building in the Western hemisphere, standing forty-two stories tall. Designed by the architect Charles Z. Lauder, a master of collegiate Gothic architecture, it mainly houses classrooms, offices, labs, and the administrative centre of the university. Of note are the thirty Nationality Rooms, designed to celebrate inclusivity, whereby each room would stylistically pay homage to a specific nationality found in the city of Pittsburgh. The cathedral was commissioned in 1921 and was completed in 1934. From the beginning, the

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Figure 4.2 The curricular space as heaven on earth Source: Adapted from Wikimedia Commons, by Y. Yue, 2011, Retrieved from https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PittCathedralLearningfromHeinzChapel.jpg

people who originated the plan of the proposed building called it a “cathedral of learning.” This was done, in part, because of the Gothic revival architectural style. It was also named a “cathedral” because the building was “to be a seal or central symbol of creativeness and of achievement” (Bowman, 1925, p. 8). The university’s vision was that this beacon on their campus would represent a “spirit of achievement in which energy, intelligence, and spiritual fitness are combined” (Bowman, 1925, p. 5). John Bowman, the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh at the time of the Cathedral of Learning, explains how the architectural space materializes their proposed values and vision: The structure is to be like a great symphony. Forceful, unafraid, sublime with a sense of upwardness, it starts our accustomed limits of thought and life to move farther away. The unmeasurable quantity of its lift, buttress after buttress rising but never arriving in a spire, suggesting force enough to go still beyond themselves, makes us apprehend that the power to create and achieve is the source of the value of education and of life. The plan is a building which shall be a fitting and central symbol of the topmost, high-motived energy and reverence in Pittsburgh. Any less plan would be proof of clouded vision. (Bowman, 1925, p. 7)

50 Yu-Ling Lee As demonstrated by the Cathedral of Learning, the quest for the transcendent in architecture is not restricted to sacred spaces and holy places. Rather, all space is potentially sacred, waiting for the moment of encounter in which it mediates what the theologian Jürgen Moltmann calls a “living space of creation” or perhaps a “living space for God” (as cited in Bergmann, 2007, p. 357). For Chancellor Bowman, the spiritual quality of the cathedral seeps out of its materiality, with a reverence for the ideals of teaching and learning within its doors. One of the medals made for the formal dedication of the Cathedral of Learning quotes Bowman’s prophetic declaration for the students: that “they shall find wisdom here and faith, in steel and stone, in character and thought, they shall find beauty, adventure, and moments of glory” (University of Pittsburgh, n.d., para 7). The cathedral is a sacred, technological space that can enact greater understanding of technotheological curricular spaces (Lee, 2017). Aoki cultivates the work of theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (Aoki, 1987/2005, pp. 360–361), who offers an illustration of how an architect, carpenter, and worshipper might relate to the cathedral. They showcase different postures in how one might be attuned to the cathedral. The architect, being a theoretician, would frame his experience of the cathedral as a form of conceptual and theoretical understanding, perceiving the infrastructure and architectural style. The carpenter is a practitioner who, using his technical skills, sees a cathedral as something in need of fixing. The worshipper, however, “experiences the cathedral existentially and poetically” (Aoki, 1987/2005, p. 361). For this true worshipper, the cathedral is a site of lived experience, “an embodied spiritual dwelling place wherein the fourfold of mortal self, divinity, earth and heaven gather together and shine through as one” (Aoki, 1987/2005, p. 361). Now, Aoki suggests we “substitute school for cathedral,” resulting in three views of school: oriented towards rational thinking, giving primacy to doing, or emphasizing and nurturing the becoming of human beings (Aoki, 1987/2005, p. 361). To be a true worshipper, in Aoki’s view, is what we are called to be, authentic spiritual selves “being within” the cathedral that is the school. Being within the school, or perhaps even the Cathedral of Learning, is an encounter between planned and lived curricular spaces. It is “where newness can come into being . . . it is an inspirited site of being and becoming” (Pinar, 2005, p. 73).

The Bridge Another metaphor that Aoki brings to the curriculum field is his reconceptualization of the word “bridge.” Aoki was originally prompted to reconsider this architectural concept because educators were emphasizing the bridging of cross-cultural conversations in the curriculum and in the classroom. The function of a bridge is to provide such ease in the crossing

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back and forth between two different points. Yet, Aoki was concerned that this cross-cultural conversation would result in a kind of tourism, a shallow encounter with the other’s culture, or even worse, the colonization and taking of another culture’s resources. Thus, he plays with the bridge as signifier, “to query the prevailing imaginary that allows such language” (Aoki, 1996/2005, p. 316). While the function of the bridge is to allow for the movement of objects and subjects from one point to another, the design of a bridge in an Asian garden functions differently, differences that are mostly due to the distinctions between Western and Asian conceptions of space. In the West, space is typically understood as the area between objects, or as the negative/opposite of physical objects. There is, therefore, a necessity to build a bridge to join the space between objects. In Asia, however, this (empty) space is a worthy entity unto itself (Figure 4.3). In Japan, specifically, this space is called Ma. In Japanese Zen aesthetics, Ma simply translates as the spatial and temporal interval between two different phenomena. The earliest way of visualizing the concept of Ma was to imagine a room positioned between heaven and earth. In this room, there is both spatial and temporal uncertainty. Yet, there is also possibility in the room, as Ferguson and Kuby (2015) explains:

Figure 4.3 The bridge which is not a bridge at the Nitobe Memorial Garden in Vancouver, Canada, December 6, 2017 Source: Author’s photo

52 Yu-Ling Lee The character used for Ma, 間, represents two doors or gates, 門, with the symbol for the sun, 日, or traditionally the moon, 月, shining through the crack of the doors, signifying profound meaning existing in seemingly empty space. Ma is an appreciation of that space, the betweenness, or the produced meanings that reside within the cracks  .  .  . it is an aesthetic of decentering that in doing so reveals within empty space connections among all objects . . . Ma is a reverence or meditation on that spatiality. (pp. 408–409) Within the Ma aesthetic, Asian bridges—and specifically Japanese bridges— have always held particular technological, spiritual, and poetic purposes. The Japanese literary critic, Yasuda Yojūrō, wrote Nihon no hashi (Japanese bridges), one of the most influential essays in the 1930s, as a historical analysis of the bridge and a call for spiritual and cultural transformation after World War I (Tansman, 2008). For Yojūrō, the Japanese people “took deeply meaningful and common pleasures in the ceremonies of first crossing over and even tried to take pleasure in bridges as symbols” (p. 269). Bridges were the sites for meetings, connections, and memorial services. Bridges held nostalgic symbolism in Japanese poetry. A poet would depict how “a maiden walks alone on the Great Vermilion Bridge across the Katashiwa River” and declares that “were my dwelling by the bridge, I would give her shelter, so wistful she looks, going alone!” (“Of a maiden walking alone on the bridge of Kawachi,” 1965). The Tale of Genji (Shikibu, 1990), written in the eleventh century and potentially the first Japanese novel, describes the final chapters as the “bridge of dreams” which is the place of life and death, the space in-between. These lyrical conceptions of the Japanese bridge is also depicted in a most captivating way in the animated movie, Spirited Away (Suzuki & Miyazaki, 2001), where little girl, Chihiro, chooses to cross a bridge into the spiritual world. In this liminal space, Chihiro is renamed Sen and encounters a variety of good and bad spirits, while journeying along to find her way back home. The Japanese bridge is itself a meeting and dwelling place for people. It is “a Heideggerian bridge, a site or clearing in which earth, sky, mortals, and divine, in their longing to be together, belong together” because the bridge is the in-between space, inviting “educators to transcend instrumentalism to understand what it means to dwell together humanly” (Aoki, 1996/2005, p. 316). Moving away from an instrumental sense of the bridge can lead to authentic dialogue in curriculum. Pinar summarizes Aoki’s concept of the bridge as follows: By focusing on the conjunctive space between “East and West,” and by understanding “and” as both “and” and “not-and,” Aoki proposes a bridging space of “both conjunction and disjunction.” This is, Aoki explains, a space of tension, both “and/not-and,” a space “of

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conjoining and disrupting, indeed, a generative space of possibilities, a space wherein in tensioned ambiguity newness emerges.” (Pinar, 2005, p. 83) The bridge, then, can also be a curricular third space that is technotheological. It could be a place where technological artefacts and processes can encounter theological traditions of wisdom and virtue. For Aoki, the bridge is a generative space of possibilities, allowing newness and meaning to emerge. Spending time here in the technotheological space, ensures that the technological cannot enframe or usurp the theological, and the theological cannot render the technological into mere tools. Rather, the “bridging” between the two becomes meaningful when one part is illuminated by the other, finding value and significance in the encounter with each other. The bridge can also be found in the forming of oneself. As Levinas argues, “The human person, the ‘I’ . . . is the reuniting of the profane and the sacred. It is not a substance but a relationship. Man is a bridge, as Nietzsche would have it, a passage, a going beyond” (1993, p. 7). In this way, we may understand the technotheological conversation, poetically, “as a bridging of two worlds by a bridge, which is not a bridge” (Aoki, 1981/2005, p. 228). For Aoki, the act of lingering on the bridge is exemplified by a teacher, Miss O, who dwells between “the horizon of the curriculum-as-plan as she understands it and the horizon of the curriculum-as-lived experience with her pupils” (Aoki, 1986/2005, p. 161). This move towards the middle implies a decentring of fixed being-ness, in order to open a clearing for possibilities between the two curricular worlds, at the bridge which is not a bridge.

Conclusion Encountering the spatial turn in curriculum, I continue to follow Aoki, who provides a curricular language that “grows in the middle” (1992/2005, p. 277), and ask how we might linger on the bridge between technology and theology. This middle way, this in-between third space on the bridge, is both spatial and metaphorical. It becomes an essential third place through the lived curricular encounter with structured space. My exploration of the technotheological was similar to Wang’s (2004) “journey of creating home, in a third space” (p. 1), discerning a synthetic metaphor that has temporal, spatial, cultural, and educative intersectionality. Or perhaps like the Deleuzean middle, curriculum as technotheology allows us to discern experimental lines of flight so that we can poetically experience these architectural spaces. This in-between space opens up the possibility of relationality between experiencing curriculum as technology and encountering curriculum as theology. Much like our foray into built spaces, the curricular space “is dancingly experienced” (Schwarz, 1958, p. 27) through the dialogical encounter with the technotheological.

54 Yu-Ling Lee

References Aoki, T. T. (1981/2005). Toward understanding curriculum: Talk through reciprocity of perspectives (1981). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 219–228). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Aoki, T. T. (1986/2005). Teaching as indwelling between two curriculum worlds (1986/1991). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 159–165). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Aoki, T. T. (1987/2005). Inspiriting the curriculum (1987). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 357–365). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Aoki, T. T. (1991/2005). Sonare and videre: A story, three echoes, and a lingering note (1990). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 367–376). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Aoki, T. T. (1992/2005). In the midst of slippery theme-words: Living as designers of Japanese Canadian curriculum (1992). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 263–277). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Aoki, T. T. (1996/2005). Imaginaries of “East and West”: Slippery curricular signifiers in education (1996). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 313–319). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Austin, L. M. (2011). The nostalgic moment and the sense of history. Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 2(2), 127–140. doi:10.1057/ pmed.2011.1 Barney, S. A., Lewis, W. J., Beach, J. A., & Berghof, O. (2006). The etymologies of Isidore of Seville. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Bell, S. (2014). Roman chariot racing: Charioteers, factions, spectators. In P. Christesen & D. G. Kyle (Eds.), A companion to sport and spectacle in Greek and Roman antiquity (pp. 492–504). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Bergmann, S. (2007). Theology in its spatial turn: Space, place and built environments challenging and changing the images of god. Religion Compass, 1(3), 353–379. doi:10.1111/j.1749-8171.2007.00025.x Bowman, J. G. (1925). The cathedral of learning of the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, PA: Eddy Press Corp. Bychkov, O. (2009). Theology, aesthetics, and the gothic space: Does scholastic theology have anything to do with the gothic? In S. Bergmann (Ed.), Theology in built environments: Exploring religion, architecture, and design (pp. 39–58). New York, NY: Routledge. Colombat, A. (1991). A thousand trails to work with Deleuze. SubStance, 20(3), 10–24. doi:10.2307/3685176 Connelly, F. M., He, M. F., & Phillion, J. (Eds.). (2008). The SAGE handbook of curriculum and instruction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cribiore, R. (2001). Gymnastics of the mind: Greek education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Day, C. (2004). Places of the soul: Architecture and environmental design as a healing art. Oxford, UK: Architectural Press.

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Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations 1972–1990 (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Doll, W. E. (2002/2012). Beyond methods. In D. Trueit (Ed.), Pragmatism, postmodernism, and complexity theory: The “Fascinating Imaginative Realm” of William E. Doll, Jr. (pp. 81–97). New York, NY: Routledge. Doll, W. E. (2006). Method and its culture: An historical approach. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 3(1), 85–89. Retrieved from https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/complicity/index.php/complicity/article/ viewFile/8747/7067 Duby, G. (1981). The age of the cathedrals: Art and society, 980–1420 (E. Leveiux & B. Thompson, Trans). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eisner, E. W., & Vallance, E. (Eds.). (1974). Conflicting conceptions of curriculum. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing. Eliade, M. (1954). Cosmos and history: The myth of the eternal return (W. R. Trask, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks. Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion (W. R. Trask, Trans.). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Ferguson, D. E., & Kuby, C. R. (2015). Curricular, relational, and physical spaces in the Japanese hoikuen. International Journal of Early Childhood, 47(3), 403–421. doi:10.1007/s13158-015-0151-z Gorringe, T. J. (2004). A theology of the built environment: Justice, empowerment, redemption. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hamilton, D. (1989/2013). Towards a theory of schooling. Philadelphia, PA: The Falmer Press. Heine, H. (1887). The prose writings of Heinrich Heine (H. Ellis, Trans.). London, UK: Walter Scott Publishing. Huebner, D. (1975). Curricular language and classroom meanings. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists (pp. 217–237). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Hugo, V. (1831/2004). The hunchback of Notre-Dame. London, UK: CRW Publishing. Keane, C. (2015). Juvenal and the satiric emotions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum, 1893–1958 (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Lee, Y. (2017). Lingering on Aoki’s bridge: Reconceptualizing Ted Aoki as curricular techno-theologian. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 31(3), 18–30. Lee, Y., & Petrina, S. (2018). Hacking minds: Curriculum mentis, noosphere, internet, matrix, web. In N. Ng-A-Fook, S. Pratt, B. Smith, & L. Radford (Eds.), Hacking education in a digital age: Teacher education, curriculum, and literacies (pp. 15–36). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Levinas, E. (1993). Outside the subject (M. B. Smith, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyle, E. B. (1984). The circus as cosmos. Latomus, 43(4), 827–841. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41533979

56 Yu-Ling Lee Of a maiden walking alone on the bridge of Kawachi. (1965). The Manyoˉshoˉ: The Nippon Shinkokai translation of one thousand poems, with the texts in Romaji (pp. 218–219). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Petrina, S., Lee, Y., & Feng, F. (2016). On the historiography of curriculum: The legend of Petrus Ramus. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, Washington, DC. Pinar, W. F. (1976/2015). Preface. In W. F. Pinar & M. Grument (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. xiii–xvii). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. F. (2005). “A lingering note”: An introduction to the collected works of Ted T. Aoki. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 1–85). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pinar, W. F. (2015). Educational experience as lived: Knowledge, history, alterity: The selected works of William F. Pinar. New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Quinn, M. (2002). Holy vision, wholly vision-ing: Curriculum and the legacy of the chariot. In W. E. Doll, Jr. & N. Gough (Eds.), Curriculum visions (pp. 232–244). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Reynolds, W. M., & Webber, J. A. (Eds.). (2004). Expanding curriculum theory: Dis/positions and lines of flight. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schwarz, R. (1958). The church incarnate: The sacred function of Christian architecture (C. Harris, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Scott, R. A. (2003). The gothic enterprise: A guide to understanding the medieval cathedral. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Shikibu, M. (1990). The tale of Genji. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Suzuki, T. (Producer), & Miyazaki, H. (Director). (2001). Spirited away. Japan: Studio Ghibli. Tansman, A. (2008). Japanese bridges: A translation of Yasuda Yojūrō’s “Nihon No Hashi”. The Journal of Japanese Studies, 34(2), 257–261. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/27756569 Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1956/1959). The phenomenon of man (B. Wall, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. University of Pittsburgh. (n.d.). Cathedral of learning. Retrieved from www. nationalityrooms.pitt.edu/about/cathedral-learning Wang, H. (2004). The call from the stranger on a journey home: Curriculum in a third space. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Zaleski, J. (2014). Religion and Roman spectacle. In P. Christesen & D. G. Kyle (Eds.), A companion to sport and spectacle in Greek and Roman antiquity (pp. 590–602). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

5

Experimentation in Afterschool U’s “Movie Maker Studios” Unexpected Moments of Contingency, Teacher-Becoming, and Joy Michelle A. Honeyford

It is only 4 pm on this winter evening, but already the sun is setting behind the dome of the university stadium. In a few minutes the buses will pull up, and a hundred students will spill out. I will be reminded of Wagamese’s (2016) meditation: We approach our lives on different trajectories, each of us spinning in our own separate, shining orbits. What gives this life its resonance is when those trajectories cross and we become engaged with each other, for as long or as fleetingly as we do. There’s a shared energy then, and it can feel as though the whole universe is in the process of coming together. I live for those times. No one is truly ever “just passing through.” Every encounter has within it the power of enchantment, if we’re willing to look for it. (p. 38) Spinning in their “shining orbits,” the students’ trajectories will have brought them here, to the Faculty of Education, from their public schools in mostly low-income areas of this Canadian city, from their homes and families whose journeys have taken them from places far away, or whose connections to this land go back generations. From inside the theatre where I am talking to a group of pre-service teachers, I will hear the suction of the heavy glass doors being pulled open, the sounds of students’ voices carried in on the wind. The students will walk animatedly toward the large room in the Education building that is their gathering space, talking, teasing, laughing, bodies bumping, entangled in their conversations as a few, forgetting the rules, will run by. I will pause and smile. The six pre-service teachers will also hear and feel the reverberations and will grow quiet, glancing at one another and the double doors at the top of the amphitheatre stairs. “Ready or not, here they come!” one will say. “I’m kind of nervous!” another will admit. I will sense their anticipation, building since September, when they imagined their “Movie Maker

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Studios” afterschool academy. Now, on this first night, the trajectories of these pre-service teachers and 10- and 11-year-old students will cross, come together, and in that energy, produce something enchanted, something unpredictable and entirely new. Afterschool U is an experiment, an in-between space formed several years ago in a grassroots effort to make the university and its human and material resources accessible to young people who might not otherwise imagine themselves on a university campus. It is an experiment that has successfully established a university-community partnership that now includes 50 schools, 20 university faculties and programs, and hundreds of university student volunteers. Students in grades 5–10 have opportunities to sample programs and experiences (in the “Explore” program) or to choose programs (known as “Academies”) that allow them to develop specific interests over a period of six weeks. The crossing of trajectories within this space creates the potential for new encounters, experiences that will produce different and ongoing affects/effects for all involved (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska, 2016). On that first evening, the teacher candidates who designed the Movie Maker Studios academy will encounter a student who will make it known that he wishes to join another academy. In a diffractive analysis of the pre-service teachers’ debriefing of the encounter, I use the Deleuzian concept of experimentation to think with, posing questions and following emergent and unpredictable directions (Mazzei, 2014), recognizing “that knowing is never done in isolation but is always effected by different forces coming together” (p. 743). The concept of experimentation positions curriculum, teaching, and learning as contingent and uncertain, alive and dynamic, continually producing new encounters and forces. What this chapter considers, then, is how experimentation, in the space of this organic afterschool program, affords a diffractive way of thinking about those forces and encounters in an unexpected moment. In the debriefing of this team after their first evening, we see what can happen when pre-service teachers engage in collaborative dialogue, question-posing, and imaginative thinking; when they refuse to constrain what is possible by the limitations of assumptions, wellworn excuses, or ready labels; when they take time to consider multiple “what-ifs” and “ands”; and when they are open to opportunities to explore what they do not know and to learn and become something new and different in the process.

At the Edges On the two evenings a week that Afterschool U meets in the Faculty of Education, the ’60s-era building is host to undergraduate and graduate students taking classes. However, the students and pre-service teachers in Afterschool U mark the space differently. As Conley (2010)

Experimentation in “Movie Maker Studios” 59 describes, space is “at the edges of language,” the “discursive practice of a place” (p. 261). For place “becomes space only when it becomes a site of existential engagement among living agents who mark it with their activities or affiliate with dialogue and active perception” (p. 261). Like Hogwart’s Room of Requirement, which appears to Harry Potter and Dumbledore’s Army as the space they need to practice Defense Against the Dark Arts (Rowling, 2003), the Education building becomes a space “rich in potentiality because it makes possible the realisation of [unanticipated] events” (Conley, 2010, p. 261): a classroom becomes an escape room, a hallway, a “detour” in an amazing race, and the twostorey staircase the site for an egg drop challenge. Afterschool U remaps the place and practices of education as a site of “existential engagement” (p. 261) among bodies, materials, activities, and discourses. It perceives of and produces space differently, pushing the limits of what can be done in those spaces and by whom. Within Afterschool U, social and relational spaces are mapped differently as well. Pre-service teachers who largely identify with their cohort—by year (first or second), stream (early, middle, or senior years), or disciplinary areas—discover new peer groups in Afterschool U around their passions and interests. For some, Afterschool U is at the edges of their experience and comfort levels as teacher candidates. Depending on their practicum and personal experiences, they may have very little experience with students from diverse cultural, linguistic, and/or socioeconomic backgrounds, or with students in this age group. As “Grover”1 in Movie Maker Studios admitted after the first evening: For me, what I’m most impressed with, not having worked with little kids before, is how you all handled it when [a student] was going bonkers and you kind of calmed him down and everything. I’m super impressed with that. . . . I’m just learning through everyone here. Afterschool U is also located at the edges of the curriculum. From the start, the pre-service teachers are told that Afterschool U is about creating spaces for them to share their passions with students, to build relationships, and to have fun. What they then describe in their proposals are engaging and experiential programs they have designed, such as “U Create,” “U Escape,” “U Experiment,” “U Solve: Crime Scene Detectives,” “U Code,” “U Dig: Archaeology,” “Afterschool U: The Musical,” and “U Fit.” What I have discovered over the years is that when mandated curriculum is pushed to the edges in favour of playing, making, and relating, these pedagogical movements produce unanticipated possibilities and lines of flight far beyond the predictable outcomes of a prescribed unit of study. Pre-service teachers necessarily become more aware of embodied, material, and affective ways of knowing through “unexpected moments” and encounters that push the edges of their

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epistemological and ontological assumptions about students, teacherbecoming, curriculum, and learning.

Post-Qualitative Inquiry: Thinking Without Answers In my research of teaching, learning, and relation in Afterschool U, I have also been pushed to the edges to find new ways of thinking/doing/ being methodological. As Colebrook (2010) puts it, “We can only begin to think and live when we lose faith in the world, when we no longer expect a world to answer to and mirror ourselves and our already constituted desires” (p. 5). In Afterschool U, I work the hyphens (Fine, 1994) of teacher educator-researcher, striving to create with the preservice teachers a parallel space within the program for inquiry as stance, an interplay between “knowing and acting, .  .  . analyzing and doing” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 119). A “conventional humanist qualitative methodology” (St. Pierre, 2017, p. 686) would restrain research in Afterschool U within the parameters of the “given, the predetermined” rather than in the threshold of “the possible, the experimental” (p. 686). As I challenged the B.Ed. students to let go of “normalized, systematized, formalized” (p. 686) methods and understandings of being teacher and to be awake/open to emerging relational and pedagogical possibilities that they might not have been able to plan or even imagine in advance, so, too, did I have to let go of pre-determined methods and structures of knowing as practitioner-inquirer/educational-researcher/program-designer in this space. Post-qualitative inquiry (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) is an ontological stance “which comes with no methodology at all, no preexisting rules, processes, methods, categories, or ‘determining judgment’ (Lyotard, 1979/1984, p. 81)” (St. Pierre, 2017, p. 686). As Jackson (2017) has described it, “thinking without method” is a “rhythmic movement within an open system,” a creative impulse and a “feminist project of refusal” of existing knowledges (p. 666). But it is more than critique; the growing field of “postqualitative (St. Pierre, 2011), postfoundational educational research” is “a gesture of what current inquiry might become in the future” (Jackson, 2017, p. 668). Concept as/instead of method (Jackson, 2017; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014; Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017) rejects a single, pre-existing, ready-made image of thought that is easily recognized and agreed-upon and instead is alive to difference, open to encounters that are de-centering and de-stabilizing (Jackson, 2017, p. 668). Thought comes from “outside” and “between” (Deleuze & Partnet, 2007, p. 7 as cited in Jackson, 2017, p. 670) through a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Mazzei, 2014; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2016) of data. In Afterschool U, data include photos, video, and audio recordings that the pre-service teachers have

Experimentation in “Movie Maker Studios” 61 taken during their evening activities; field notes I have written during my visits to the academies; material artefacts produced by the students and pre-service teachers; and digital audio recordings of the debriefing sessions held with the pre-service teachers after the academies have concluded for the evening. While engaging in diffractive analysis, my intent is not to impose codes, seek patterns, and identify themes, but to generate new ways of thinking, emphasizing difference, “breaking open the data” and “plugging in” theory by “reading-the-data-while-thinking-the-theory” (Mazzei, 2014, p. 743). This is a process of pushing the edges of experimentation as a concept by posing questions, following new leads, and allowing research and writing to go in multiple directions (Augustine, 2014).

Encounters in Unexpected Moments Experimentation involves engaging in “practices that discover and dismantle assemblages, and which look for the lines of flight of individuals or groups, the dangers on these lines, and new combinations that will thwart predictions and allow the new to emerge” (Baugh, 2010, p. 95). As a site of experimentation in teacher inquiry and learning, Afterschool U requires pre-service teachers to expect some unpredictability as they plan and look forward, but also to be open to uncertainty as it emerges through their reflective debriefing. In the living-moving-ever-changingunfolding-event of curriculum, Roth (2014) notes that we can be carried away, “moved by something that is in excess of our reason or judgment, something that we cannot fully grasp until it is all done and over” (pp. 29–30). In their debriefing sessions, each team of pre-service teachers leads their own discussion about their academy, beginning by identifying unexpected moments (Figure 5.1). This moves the pre-service teachers into the middle of a moment, pushing them away from the relative safety and predictability of an evaluative stance of summarizing “what went well” or “what didn’t go well.” Here, they are urged to crack open a moment, to consider what surprised them and to think together about why that was unexpected, what happened

Figure 5.1 Unexpected Moment Inquiry Framework

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as a result, and what they will do in response. The design of the framework is intended to take up an experimental stance, engaging in practices which Baugh (2010, p. 94), citing Deleuze and Guattari (1983, p. 180), describes as rhizomatic: Experimentation does not interpret what something, such as a text, an idea or a desire [or a moment], “means,” but seeks to discover how it works or functions by uncovering an order of causes, namely, the characteristic relations among the parts of an assemblage—their structures, flows and connections—and the resulting tendencies. When the Movie Makers Studio team opens their debriefing after the first evening, “Thor” begins by talking about Terrence: MICHAEL SCOTT: OK, describe an unexpected moment. GROVER: Did we have one? THOR: I would say Terrence, he was unhappy and then he turned it around. GROVER: He kept saying, I’m going to [another academy]; I’m going to

[another academy]. JENNIFER: At the end I asked, “So GROVER: Oh really? JENNIFER: Yeah. GROVER: He was running around

are you switching?” He said, “No!”

the room [at the end], so I didn’t even see him. EINSTEIN: Especially since you [Michael] gave him the director role. THOR: He kind of hit rock bottom and then. . . GROVER: When we left he was like. . . JENNIFER: Did you notice how when we gave them the director/script writers’ roles they were like “yeah!” GROVER: Yeah, OK. MICHAEL: Hmmm. . . ALADDIN: They were so into it. JENNIFER: They just wanted to do that. MICHAEL: It was the perfect role for them. ALADDIN: Also, when we were playing the games, too, they were there. Like they were so engaged. MICHAEL: Oh totally. GROVER: They were so engaged in the games. EINSTEIN: Terrence had his hand up every time. GROVER: Every single time, right? EINSTEIN: Hmm. . . ALADDIN: Yeah. MICHAEL: So I went up to him at the break and I was like, “So, do you still hate us?” and he was like, “Nah.” [laughing]

Experimentation in “Movie Maker Studios” 63 ALADDIN:

Right before the break when we did the Expectations and I asked him to sign, I went to give him the marker and he said, no, because he was moving to [another academy]. GROVER: Oh. MICHAEL: Yup. ALADDIN: So, I said, “Well, you’re still in the group today, right, so you can still sign.” So even like right before break he was still thinking of moving. EINSTEIN: Hmmmm . . . MICHAEL: Well, that’s interesting. Maybe it was because I asked him if he hated us and he was like [thinking], “Well, that’s extreme.” [laughing] MICHAEL: If I had asked him if he was leaving us, it would’ve been different. EINSTEIN: Yeah. ALADDIN: I’m sure he liked us, he just. . . MICHAEL: I think he felt very validated. ALADDIN: Yeah. GROVER: I think that’s the thing they need to hear: that their ideas count. JENNIFER: Honestly, out of that group, I would pick those two out as the people who need that one-on-one. GROVER: Absolutely. MICHAEL: The small groups really worked. JENNIFER: It was amazing watching them bounce ideas off of each other and then just like. . . MICHAEL: That’s awesome. JENNIFER: You saw their face when I was writing their ideas down. GROVER: I think those two probably have the most energy. EINSTEIN: Yeah, definitely. GROVER: And I was surprised. JENNIFER: And they were the ones that wanted to write the script! GROVER: I know! I was surprised that they weren’t wanting to be actors. (Movie Makers Studio Debriefing, Week 1) Among the various academies, the Movie Makers team had, arguably, taken the most open-ended approach to planning. What they had proposed in their Afterschool U application was to produce a movie written, directed, acted, and produced by the students in five weeks. The team was committed to demonstrating that movie-making was possible without a large budget or specialized technologies; they had two iPads, a homemade green screen (inexpensive green vinyl tablecloths taped together with green painters’ tape), and free movie-making and editing software. While their own experience with movie-making varied, they were eager to prove to themselves, their peers, and the students that movie-making could be a viable teaching and learning tool—in the classroom and for students’ own interests.

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The pre-service teachers had organized this first evening to get to know the students by playing some games, then establishing their expectations together as movie makers to promote a positive and productive space. The team planned to facilitate the students’ choosing of the genre for the movie, and then to determine which roles the students would like to have (e.g., script-writing, storyboarding, costume and set design, acting). The teacher candidates were committed to having the students provide the direction for the project while offering support in small groups—responsively developing whatever knowledge and experience students would need along the way. For Thor, it seemed that what made this an unexpected moment was not that a student wanted to change their mind on the first night and choose another academy. (That was a possibility I knew could happen and for which I had prepared the pre-service teachers.) What was unexpected was that “he [Terrence] turned it around.” In a dialogue lasting fewer than four minutes, the team moved back and through that moment to consider what was produced by Terrence’s initial unhappiness and what caused his turnaround, how the “structures, flows and connections—and the resulting tendencies” shifted, and to explore how this encounter actually contributed to shaping the “functions and uses of the assemblage,” of “‘what [Movie Maker Studios] does and what is done with it’” (Baugh, 2010, p. 94).

Experimentation: Thinking With Theory Reading this moment through the concept of experimentation reveals how the pre-service teachers focus on examples of Terrence’s capabilities and strengths. Thor identifies Terrence as demonstrating how a student has the capacity, after “hit[ting] rock bottom” to “[turn] it around.” Although Terrence has declared right away that he is going to another academy, the group notices that he is highly engaged in the games, having “his hand up every time.” However, when it is time to sign the Expectations, Terrence indicates no need to do so, as he will be moving to another academy. Aladdin appeals to principle (“Well, you’re still in the group today, right, so you can still sign”), telling Terrence that regardless of his plans, his membership in the group that evening warrants his signature. He signs. Michael then reveals that she sought out Terrence during the break, using humour (and perhaps an appeal to guilt) to try to cajole Terrence to rethink his decision. “So, do you still hate us?” she asks. Her hyperbole suggests to Terrence that his intention to leave has produced an opening for the group to feel rejected and that his choice to join another group has an effect on the entire “body” (“us”). Terrence negates that he hates them (“Nah”), but Aladdin suggests that, based on her encounter with Terrence a few moments before, he had not changed his mind. Michael considers that her language (“hate”) had

Experimentation in “Movie Maker Studios” 65 prompted a denial of the extreme emotion, not necessarily a change in purpose: “Well, that’s interesting. Maybe it was because I asked him if he hated us and he was like [thinking] ‘Well, that’s extreme.’” Aladdin affirms her perception that Terrence’s decision was not caused by interpersonal factors (i.e., not liking the group) but to the fact that Terrence had not yet found his “fit” with the function of the assemblage (and that he believed that “fit” would be better elsewhere). Michael suggests that Terrence found that validation in his role as a director/script writer, which occurred after the break. The concept of experimentation opens up new ways of thinking about this encounter and what it reveals about the Movie Maker Studios assemblage: what it can do or produce or what happens when different bodies and elements are combined (Baugh, 2010, p. 94). Within the space of reflective, collaborative inquiry and experimentation, the team of preservice teachers could examine those combinations, learning from the experience. As Baugh (2010) suggests, “The compatibility or incompatibility of different elements and bodies, and the effect of their combination, can only be ascertained through experience; we have no a priori knowledge of them through principles or axioms” (p. 94). While they were exceedingly well prepared for this first session with the students, the time and space to dialogue after the events of the evening allowed the team of pre-service teachers to discover important insights from what they did not expect or anticipate, and to think through how they responded and why. That Terrence was given the director/script writer role when he expressed his interest in it reveals that Movie Maker Studios was more about the “maker” than the movie. The production of a movie, in other words, becomes a secondary priority through this encounter. Moviemaking continues to be a productive force, but relationship-building emerges as a stronger function. While the team is surprised that Terrence and Kaliq wanted to write the script, they are willing to experiment with the combination and to learn from the experience. Thus, with no prior knowledge of Terrence, the pre-service teachers affirm him—a possible flight risk—for the position of director/script-writer—a position on which the timing and quality of the production of the entire project hinged. As Thor comments about half a minute later, “The biggest challenges turned into like, the biggest success.”

Experimentation: Moved by Pleasure and Joy Within my reading of this encounter, the concept of pleasure becomes significant. What the team affirms is that their priority is to make Movie Maker Studios a fun and pleasurable experience for all. They choose to interpret Terrence’s actions affirmatively, as a desire to contribute creatively and substantially to the work of the group. Such a positive reading “of the human as affirmative” is consistent with a rhizomatic analysis of

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the academy—in all its parts—as “a pleasure-prone machine capable of all kinds of empowering forces” (Braidotti, 2010, pp. 310–311). From a stance of experimentation, then, the process of movie-making “is just a question of establishing the most positive or even joyful connections and resonances” (pp. 310–311). For Terrence and Kaliq, being given the director/script writers’ roles was cause for joy. Jennifer describes their response as celebratory: “they were like ‘yeah!’” Aladdin affirms that “they were so into it” as Michael agrees that “it was the perfect role for them.” Jennifer notes it was the only role they wanted: “They just wanted to do that.” This is desire, a productive and positive force; for Deleuze, desire is “not a fantasy of what we lack: it is first and foremost the psychical and corporeal production of what we want” (Holland, 2010, p. 68; italics added for emphasis). Notably, the pre-service teachers’ reading of Terrence has been affirmative from the start; while they recognized his unhappiness, they did not attribute any fault to Terrence. Jennifer and Grover agree that Terrence and Kaliq had “the most energy” of all the students, as Grover hinted at the beginning of the dialogue when she noted that she did not get to see or talk to him at the end of the session because he was “running around the room.” But his enthusiasm for playing games showed him to be “a pleasure-prone machine capable of all kinds of empowering forces” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 311), and that pleasure is again evident when he is engaged in writing the script. It was “just a question of establishing [for him] the most positive or even joyful connections and resonances” (pp. 310–311). As Jennifer, the pre-service teacher working with the script-writers, describes to her peers, “It was amazing watching them bounce ideas off of each other. . . . You saw their face when I was writing their ideas down.” Experimentation is a by-product of the pre-service teachers’ desire, their want to produce joy for/with/in the students. As Jennifer’s comments show, the obvious pleasure that Terrence and Kalin were deriving from writing the script also produced a profound sense of joy in her: “It was amazing watching them.” She comments that she could see on their faces the positive force of “writing their ideas down.” When she shares with the team, later in the debriefing, the narrative and characters for the movie that have been developed so far and re-tells (very animatedly) the creative and imaginative ideas the boys have come up with, her excitement is palpable. The team has effectively organized their “world so as to produce productive—that is joyful—encounters” (O’Sullivan, 2010, p. 277). By bringing together students with a declared self-interest in superhero screen-writing, or “‘bodies’ that essentially agree with one another, such encounters have the concomitant result of increasing our capacity to act in the world” (p. 277). Although Jennifer initially expressed surprise that Terrence and Kaliq wanted to write rather than act, she learns they both have a deep reservoir of knowledge

Experimentation in “Movie Maker Studios” 67 about superheroes, comics, movies, and books that they bring to the task. Writing often became an embodied and exuberant performance of ideas, continuously negotiated in a buzz of creative synergy, debate, humour, enthusiasm, and joy. The process of experimentation, of “exploring what a body, in both the individual and collective sense, is capable of” (O’Sullivan, 2010, p. 277) begins with the pre-service teachers’ desire to create joyful connections— to one another, to the creative process of script-writing, costume design, storyboarding, filming, and editing. Later in the debriefing, Einstein talks about the student, Kaiya, who volunteered to film: “She’s quiet. . . . But then she started working with the camera and started smiling and . . . she kept looking at me and I said, ‘Keep going, keep going.’” This force/flow of pleasure becomes the “ethical principles or guidelines” (O’Sullivan, 2010, p. 277) that then allow for new possibilities and direction to emerge. Einstein adds that with more practice, Kaiya was feeling increasingly confident so that when Grover came with the actors, “she started to move around the group with the camera.” Ultimately, this produces new “understanding[s] of one’s self and world—and in fact a certain overcoming of one’s separation from the world” (O’Sullivan p. 277). For Kaiya, it is the process of becoming-filmmaker; for Terrence, it is the difference between leaving and leading the group.

Experimentation and Contingency: How Are We Going to Make Somebody Fly? The contingency of encounter becomes possible for the group of preservice teachers to perceive, consider, and feel as they dialogue about the evening’s events. As they recall moments (e.g., of Terrence’s hand up), and their memory of those moments, they are engaged in a different kind of movie-making, evoking scenes, or what Deleuze (1989) refers to as recollection-images, that refract perceptions, affections, and actions, depending on how they are considered or put together. The debriefing creates a space for story-mapping as the team shares their individual and collective experiences, “slicing, framing, and connecting . . . aspects of the universe” with images that “become different, become other than what they are/were, simply by being woven together differently” (Vitale, 2011, para. 1). In this way, experimentation as a concept both reveals contingency and produces contingencies. Thus, there is an ethics of experimentation. As Colebrook (2010) explains, if life in Deleuzian terms “is not a given whole with potentials that necessarily unfold through time, but is a virtual power to create potentials through contingent and productive encounters—then this will relate directly to an ethics of reading [practice]” (p. 4). The complexity of relational teaching is becoming-inthe-moment with students, appreciating the potentials being created in

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the movement of bodies, objects, desires—the contingency of encounter and the possibilities produced. In the debriefing session, the pre-service teachers crack open those moments together. Dialoguing about the “unexpected” creates its own contingencies, which like cinema, is “a practice of world dividing and redividing. The more intricate the relations, the more variety of ways we can relate and relate to our world” (Vitale, 2011, para. 3–4). Thor’s initial construction of a “turnaround” narrative becomes much more complex and nuanced in the collective retelling. Scenes and images are added to the story and with each one, the potentials of encounter become more apparent. From this “reading” of the contingency of encounter, it becomes difficult to perceive of the event as “a given whole with potentials that necessarily unfold[ed] through time,” and easier to think of life/curriculum/an afterschool program as a constantly moving, dynamic set of forces with the “virtual power to create [infinite] potentials through contingent and productive encounters” (Colebrook, 2010, p. 4). When experimentation with the contingencies produced in the relational flow of learning is an ethics of practice, “problems” become productive encounters. In the very next turn of the debriefing, Michael states that she has something to share about another student, Hanif: MICHAEL:

I just want to share something about Hanif. He came to me afterwards and he was like, “How are we going to make somebody fly?” He was like, “That’s really tough.” And I was like, “Well, you know we can do some things. Like we can maybe get a rolling chair and put something green over it.” [Laughter] EINSTEIN: Yup. GROVER: Yeah, and they can lie on it. MICHAEL: And [another student] said, “That might look really cheesy though.” And he’s like, “But you wouldn’t even see the chair!” GROVER: Yeah. EINSTEIN: So he understood the green screen. GROVER: Yeah. MICHAEL: Yeah, before we even started! The example is an apt illustration: Hanif’s query posits a challenge. The question “How are we going to make somebody fly?” creates contingency. The issue focuses the collective attention of the “costumes and props” group on thinking about possibilities. For “active experimentation involves trying new procedures, combinations and their unpredictable effects . . . in which desires, intensities, movements and flows pass unimpeded by the repressive mechanisms of judgement and interpretation” (Baugh, 2010, p. 95). When a peer suggests, “That might look really cheesy though,” Hanif reveals his capacity for green-screen thinking: he

Experimentation in “Movie Maker Studios” 69 understands that a rolling chair with something green over it will make it invisible to the viewer.

Conclusion: Experimentation as Pedagogical Stance The concept of experimentation in thinking with the group’s debriefing of their unexpected moments produces new insights into the possibilities emerging in a space like Afterschool U. The dialogue remains inclusive, open-ended, and appreciative of multiple possibilities and contingencies. The group does not fall into the trap of trying to “nail things down,” “make a plan,” or allow other dictates (e.g., outcomes, timelines, their own professional interests) to evaluate/determine/judge/control the narrative or events. Instead, they take time to listen, wonder, and consider how to make possible “the most positive or even joyful connections and resonances” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 311). For example, when the team begins planning for the following week, Michael indicates that they will need to reconnect during the break to “talk about whether we’re ready to start filming [or not].” Michael acknowledges, “That’s going to be a little bit messy.” The team challenges the notion that learning to become-teacher is not demonstrated in determining and enacting plans, but in planning for possibilities and encounters. Thus, we might think more in teacher education about creating spaces that value contingency over certainty, that focus our attention in the curriculum encounter on articulating all we do not know rather than preemptively closing the possibilities of transformation by applying what we assume we do know. For “perhaps the key factor preventing these transformations is habit,” the practice of falling back on “dominant refrains and typical reactions to the world” (O’Sullivan, 2010, p. 277). Ultimately, a theoretical/methodological and pedagogical stance of experimentation contributes to creating new knowledge and practice. As the team created space for experimentation through their reflective dialogue, they were able to play “with different conjunctions and combinations,” to develop, collaboratively, an “art of organising ‘good encounters’” (Baugh, 2010, p. 94), of considering possibilities for bodies, materials, processes, and becomings through which the acts of writing, storyboarding, scripting, acting, costume-making, filming, and editing are positive, relational, and productive. This is the enchanted space of life and of teaching, where shared energy comes together to produce the unexpected, to work within the “messy” in order to create something new.

Note 1. The teacher candidates each chose pseudonyms in the recorded debriefing discussions. They are: Michael Scott (MS): Producer; Jennifer Aniston (JA): Script/Screen Writing; Grover (GA): Acting; Thor (TH): Acting; Einstein (EI): Storyboarding and Filming; and Aladdin (AL): Costumes and Props.

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References Augustine, S. M. (2014). Living in a post-coding world: Analysis as assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 743–753. doi:10.1177/1077800414530258 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baugh, B. (2010). Experimentation. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Rev. ed., pp. 93–95). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Bozalek, V., & Zembylas, M. (2016). Diffraction or reflection? Sketching the contours of two methodologies in educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(2), 111–127. doi:10.1080/09518398.20 16.1201166 Braidotti, R. (2010). Writing. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Rev. ed., pp. 309–311). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Colebrook, C. (2010). Introduction. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Rev. ed., pp. 1–6). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Conley, T. (2010). Space. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Rev. ed., pp. 260–262). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, R. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, Volume 1 (R. Hurley, M. Seem & H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II (Rev. ed.) (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press (original work published 1977). Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Reinventing the self and other in qualitative research. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 70–82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Holland, E. (2010). Desire + social production. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Rev. ed., pp. 67–69). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Jackson, A. Y. (2017). Thinking without method. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 666–674. doi:10.1177/1077800417725355 Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Introduction: Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2013.788752 Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (original work published 1979). Mazzei, L. A. (2014). Beyond an easy sense: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 742–746. doi:10.1177/1077800414530257 O’Sullivan, S. (2010). Subjectivity + art. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Rev. ed., pp. 276–278). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Roth, W. -M. (2014). Curriculum*-in-the-making: A postconstructivist perspective. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Experimentation in “Movie Maker Studios” 71 Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix. New York, NY: Scholastic Press. Snaza, N., Sonu, D., Truman, S. E., & Zaliwska, Z. (2016). Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies. New York, NY: Peter Lang. St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (pp. 611–625). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. St. Pierre, E. A. (2017). Haecceity: Laying out a plane for post qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 686–698. doi:10.1177/1077800417727764 St. Pierre, E., & Jackson, A. Y. (2014). Qualitative data analysis after coding. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 715–719. doi:10.1177/1077800414532435 Taguchi, H. L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2017). Using concept as method in educational and social science inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 643–648. doi:10.1177/ 1077800417732634 Vitale, C. (2011). Guide to reading Deleuze’s the movement-image, part I: The Deleuzian notion of the image, or worldslicing as cinema beyond the human. Networkologies. Retrieved from https://networkologies.wordpress.com/2011/ 04/04/the-deleuzian-notion-of-the-image-a-slice-of-the-world-or-cinemabeyond-the-human/ Wagamese, R. (2016). Embers: One Ojibway’s meditations. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre.

Strand II

Plurality Teresa Strong-Wilson

The term plurality refers to a state of being plural, coming from the Latin root, plus. In its contemporary usages, it is often associated with a desire for diversity or inclusion (“Plurality”, 2018). In this volume, “plurality” evokes, more, a plurality of worlds: that openness to being provoked by multiple kinds of encounters, drawing on another of plurality’s meanings: multitude (OED, 1973). As Greene (1995) reminds us, plurality is “the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (pp. 155–6). However, as the chapters in this strand suggest, plurality entails “keeping oneself open to what is other” (Gadamer, 1998, p. 17)—to whoever, and whichever, voices, beings or bodies need to provoke curriculum encounters. The chapters offer four different possibilities, with the human and more than, or different from, human, for provoking such encounters: one through singing (Richardson), another through dancing (Deer), and a third through artistic visual representations (Starr). The fourth chapter is an invitation to perform, to perform ittisal, which Abdul-Jabbar suggests lies at the curricular confluence of currere and Al-Farabi’s thought within Islamic tradition. Richardson’s highly moving and evocative encounters with the human in relation with the more than human (ravens, trees, water) take place adjacent to Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet. Singing provides the provocation: an overture to an opening, where, as Richardson indicates, encounters are hoped for as “a form of radical participation in the world.” Singing becomes a form of study or prayer (Block in Pinar, 2015) in Richardson’s seeking of “vocal reciprocity” and sonic “reconciliation,” aptly captured in her analogy of the Tibetan bowl, with its ritual of circling, of returns and repetitions. These returns offer “no guarantees,” says Richardson, but are expressive of a longing for “full-throated openness to the plurality of the universe.” Where Richardson’s chapter begins with the ear (and voice), Deer’s spiritual encounters are provoked through her feet, this in response to the “stomping on the longhouse floor” as she evokes her memory of a Kanien’kehá:ka woman’s dance. She recounts her spiritual encounter in being transported to another realm, that of her ancestors. Deer reflects critically on how colonization systematically inhibited such encounters.

74 Teresa Strong-Wilson In this chapter, she reclaims an indigenized and indigenizing curriculum of becoming through becoming more spiritual, showing how such spiritual connections are possible within an Indigenous (specifically Mohawk) epistemology as well as currere, both being sites of “interconnection” where inner and outer worlds intersect. Starr embodies/performs herself as Pinar’s (and Virginia Woolf’s) Mrs. Brown, striving through multiple visual autoethnographic snapshots and touchstone moments to “be seen” and in so doing, to “lean into” and embrace the uncertainty/nightmare of GAD, or generalized anxiety disorder. Using art (drawing/visually playing with text), she shows how she has long walked the line in her multiple otherworldly encounters with GAD, moving between plurality conceived alternately as generous possibility and as cacophonic white noise. She draws on autoethnographic creative self-portraits, pushing back against the disorder’s “less-than-human” aspects—alien effects but also its adverse associations in society—turning it, and her, towards a more nuanced rhizomatic; a more relational and reflexive form of curriculum encounter. The nightmare that is Abdul-Jabbar’s present resonates with Pinar’s, as well as with medieval Islamic thinker, Al-Farabi’s. Abdul-Jabbar looks to intercultural encounters as a “forward-looking praxis” that might interrupt and thus provoke resistance to “the oppositional dialectic of ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’” bringing Al-Farabi’s ittisal into creative relation with currere, evoking a zone of “bountiful” possibility for intercultural encounters of the kind that can move us towards re-conceiving curriculum within reconciliation—a thread that runs through this plurality strand. Reconciliation has become the current by-word—“wave”—for redressing past wrongs (Pinar, 2015, p. 188), whether with reference to, for example, the horrific legacy of apartheid on black South Africans or of residential schooling on Indigenous peoples in Canada. In his Educational Experience as Lived, in which, as in Toward a Poor Curriculum, curriculum is stripped to its essentials, Pinar (2015) considers “how one’s voice becomes increasingly shrill as one moves farther away from shore” (p. 188)—namely, away from the shore of self-knowledge. The chapters in this Plurality strand, structured as they are around the authors’ relational encounters with the human and more than human, and the seeking of places “from which their understanding can project ideas and plans for a better world” (Grumet, 2015, p. 237), point us towards reconciliation— a vision of plurality—as: Attending to what is happening around as well as in one . . . as the present is itself never identical with itself, is always the latest wave washed ashore, carrying us away, miles from where we began, miles away from where the wave began. (p. 189) Any “plural” wave necessarily begins in ourselves.

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References Gadamer, H. -G. (1998). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Grumet, M. (2015). Autobiography: The mixed genre of private and public. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 220–244). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Oxford English Dictionary. (1973). The compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Plurality. (2018). In Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online. Retrieved December 27, 2018, from www.oed.com/ Pinar, W. (2015). Educational experience: Knowledge, history, alterity: The selected works of William F. Pinar. New York, NY: Routledge.

6

Singing at the Burrard Inlet An Inquiry Into the Reverberations of Sounding in the Natural World Lena Rebecca Richardson

This chapter is an exploration of a performative inquiry process of singing regularly at the Burrard Inlet and the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver, British Columbia. For me, the practice of singing and sounding was a form of encounter with this place and its multiplicity of inhabitants: the water, the birds, trees, mountains, and animals, as well as the cars, trains, and occasional humans. Alan Block (2004) said, “Study, like prayer, is a way of being—it is an ethics” (p. 2). This study focused on an ongoing ritual of encounter with the more-than-human world (Abram, 1996). In this process, I was embedded in a “lived curriculum” (Aoki, 1993, p. 255) of encounter with this place through singing with/to/in it. Educational philosopher Maxine Greene (2005) has described encounter as part of a process of learning, which she believed was highly supported by a “wide-awakeness” (p. 80). Drawing on the work of philosophers Bollnow, Greene, Vandenberg, and Harrison, Koskela and Siljander (2014) describe encounter as related to “a phenomenal state that penetrates the consciousness of a learner” (p. 77). William Pinar (2012) suggests it is necessary to invite “students to encounter themselves and the worlds they inhabit (and that inhabits them) through their own lived experience” (p. 214). For me, my singing at the water provided an opportunity for a wideawake encounter in relation to a particular context and a plurality of beings who inhabit or pass through that place. My pursuit of this practice and my writing about it draws on aspects of the underlying principles of currere, conceptualized by Pinar and Grumet. Grumet (2015) writes: “Currere’s reliance on lived experience of the individual draws support from Husserl’s conviction that it was only in the freshness and immediacy of encounter that certain knowledge could reside” (p. 51). My primary site for singing was at the Burrard Inlet on the traditional land of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-waututh peoples.1 Over a period of three months, I went two to four times a week to one of the little green spaces edging the Inlet, with occasional forays to other sites in Vancouver that touch the water. The constantly changing nature of water and its role as a conduit, transforming element, and precious resource made water a potent location for my inquiry. In singing in this

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particular spot, I was encountering seagulls, crows, trees, and other beings, and sharing my singing with them, as they offered their sounds and presence. I was drawn to the outdoors by the edge of the sea because of the kind of curriculum it offered in relationship with living beings in the more-than-human world, an essential part of the plurality of life on earth, which my writing in this chapter explores. I chose to sing rather than silently meditate because the singing offered a particular kind of vocal reciprocity with this place and its inhabitants whom I was encountering. I was interested in the idea of life as a chorus of sounds and vibrations and I wanted to embed singing further into my everyday life. R. Murray Schafer (2001) discusses how in many cultural contexts, music and song are not limited to a concert hall. Most musicmaking takes place outdoors, in relation to life and other sounds, noting: “The other great context for music is the original one, the outdoor environment, and this still survives as the one in which much, and perhaps most of the world’s music is produced” (p. 60). Maxine Greene (2013) asks: How can we engage authentically with the world around us, how can we attempt to translate what we perceive—both physically and emotionally—into our own unique aesthetic responses? I am convinced that one of the crucial ways in which people might connect with the world is to find their own means of expression. (p. 251) For me, singing and sounding allowed a channel of expression that supported a sonic dialog with my environment. Grumet (2015) writes “we are educated to the extent that we are conscious of our experience and to the degree we are freed by this knowledge to act through skills required to transform our world” (pp. 49–50). Underlying the practice of currere is the autobiographical exploration of educational experience as part of a process of “humanization” (Freire as cited in Pinar, 2015a, p. 118) and deepening transformative understandings. Informed by the principles of currere, I was attempting to viscerally explore my own life experience in a particular context as educational inquiry, with the openness to being transformed by this encounter. Exposed in this exploration is the larger planetary context in which my lived experience resides, and hopefully through this individual exploration, I and perhaps others will be sparked or invited further into questions surrounding our own “humanization” in direct relation to the more-thanhuman world. While being informed by the spirit of currere, I drew specifically on the methodology of performative inquiry developed by Lynn Fels (1998, 2014). Fels’ work seeks to challenge a separation between performance and researching, between action and inquiry, enlivened by questions which unfold the inquiry. Performative inquiry shares currere’s focus on

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the importance of embodied, autobiographical research processes which allow us to open, shift, and gain new perspectives as part of a potentially transformative educational scholarship. In this performative inquiry, I asked the question: “What would happen if I sang at the local waters several times a week?” The singing I did was not a formal performance for other human beings. It was mostly quiet and improvisational. I often began with singing a familiar song as a warm-up invocation. To me this felt like sharing some of where I come from and who I was, with the place and surrounding living environment, and then heading into direct, present-time resonance or being-with through improvisational singing, which was often repetitive looping of one set of notes for a period of time, until something led me to shift. I noticed certain familiar melodies creeping in at times, and I tried to resist that, but also not to think about it too much. My research tracking took the form of a field journal, which I kept during the period of the inquiry. In her exploration of performative inquiry, Lynn Fels (1998) notes the importance of narrative writing and poetry to evoke the research experience: “I call on the skills of my writing as narrator and poet to re(play) the rememberings, representings of my fellow participants that shape the unfolding of our journey/landscape” (p. 34). Fels uses narrative writing and poetry to make meaning rather than summarizing or offering measurable analysis. Pinar and Grumet (2015) also suggest that in the process of returning to our experiential narratives in our writing as scholars, we open up to new ways of knowing, acting, and being. Towards these ends, I offer a narrative drawn from field notes I wrote at the water and afterwards. These field notes have been edited to hone the writing so as to resonate in my own ear (and possibly, yours). They are mostly in chronological order, though in one case, I chose to switch the order to support what felt to me like a more alive flow of prose.

Field Notes on Singing at the Water 1 The first day I sang with the water was at Kits Beach. I started out sitting on a rock wall, but moved down to a stone right near the water on the side of the beach, away from the throngs of people. It seemed that the ocean was playing with me, teasing me as the tide came in, the water sparkling in the sun, rushing up to lick the stones, to show itself and its beauty in oceanic play. I felt my particular relationship to it as I hummed and sang and laughed in a spectacular game of tag, my voice and its waves chasing each other back and forth, in a frolicking sport. I felt drawn to shift and vibrate my sound to respond to the particular waves and the glinting water in the distance. I was receiving with my voice in a circle of vibrating, reciprocal call, and response. I felt almost sure the

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ocean knew me, was grateful to be seen and recognized and played with, and acknowledged for its full beingness and offerings. I felt a sadness that we don’t collectively and regularly sing to the ocean and the rivers and the land. I could feel the water light up, like a sore muscle that has been touched. Perhaps this is grandiose of me, but that is exactly how it felt. 2 Sang at Burrard Inlet today. My voice joins the crows and gulls. I play and dance with the waves through sound. I look up at the mountains, which look like strong shoulders, proud. In that moment, I feel welcomed into belonging in this place. My voice and spirit seen. The water laughs. I hear a crow. A man sits down on a bench not so far away and I know he can hear me singing softly. I feel slightly thrown, stifled. I now have a human audience. I realize how sacred and private this act is for me. Now I hear the whistle of the train. 3 Singing at the water, one bird flies right past me and it feels like I could almost touch its white full-fleshed belly, round above my hands, wings spread wide in flight. I am suddenly awed by the miracle of flying. I soar, too, inside, my body light and porous with water, air, and wings. The green tree tingling over the water shimmers and I sing to the shimmering, as green flecks of light beckon. With my voice flowing softly towards the water, it’s like I become part of the world fully, in playful flux like the waves and the looping birds, and the tickling leaves in the sunlight. As soon as I close my mouth and stop sounding, though, I am back closer to a familiar, habitual blank stillness, more rigid and confined outside of this play of life. My voice, the movement and offering of my sound, lets me in. 4 I remember once lying down in a national forest in Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains, and hearing bird calls, crickets, frogs, wind through the trees, the crunch of animal footsteps on leaves, and how it was like a symphony, like a living symphony of resonance, dissonance, wild participation. And how when I left the forest, the air on the asphalt road felt sterile, lonely, and violently bereft of this music. Political economist Jacques Attali (2006) says in his study of music: “Life is full of noise, and death alone is silent” (as cited in Ledarach & Ledarach, 2010, p. 95). Of course, there was noise on the asphalt road outside the forest, too, but it was different than the majestic permaculture symphony, buzzing with life vibration, where I had laid myself down, head cradled in leaves and soil and body rocked by the forest depths.

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5 Today it feels harder to connect with the water. At Meditation Park at the Inlet, I notice the barbed wire fence between me and the blueness. I bike to the next small green space with benches, but still do not feel connected. Then I come here to my favorite spot at this larger expanse of green. As I ride by, a dog barks ferociously and his person freaks out at him. Finally I make it to this bench where I am now. It feels healing to sit here by the water. Today, I don’t sing in close, interwoven resonance with the water, but I sing and the water vibrates and the trees sparkle. It helps put things right. 6 Today at the water, I start to cry. I cry for me, for my mother, my grandmother, for my housemate K. K tells me this morning about her endometriosis in addition to the fibromyalgia and the chronic fatigue. Her womb in pain. Before she told me, I already felt the rigid, ugly blasts of suffering in the air of the apartment. I cry for her and for the intense, numb, fiery unbearable spots in me that are activated by living beside K’s pain. And so today, I sit on this bench, my leg crossed over the other leg, like a shield, watching the water and hearing the trains go by. The water shimmers like a thousand points of light. The birds fly by more when I sing or perhaps I just see them differently. Today they are flying in pairs quite a bit, wings close. Another catches up and lands there, too. One flies alone, dive bombs the sky above my head, and races towards the water. I think of how this land teaches me about relationships and mirrors my path in relationship. (Now two more birds fly by in a pair, wings fast.) (There they go again, fluttering.) How when I feel less connected, less in myself, driven out by the rigidity of pain and fear, I have a hard time feeling the connection between me and the land, the mountains, the water. I have a hard time believing we have a connection or a relationship, that I belong. Then it is harder to feel the sense of play between my voice and the vibrating, green leaves. It is harder to believe I could ever have an impact. Or that connection will reappear. But after an hour here, singing and writing and crying, too, I feel my breath in connection with the green leaves, glittering gold, my notes tingling with vibration and touching their tips. They are lighting up with me, or maybe just playing with me. They are generous like that. Later I might serenade them or sing gently to honor their separateness, their aliveness as is. 7 Today as my voice joins the air and the water, the birds flapping and soaring in flight, I notice how I feel their flight differently when I am

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singing. I realize how singing here, adding my own intimate vibration to the place, feels like a form of radical participation in the world. It is a felt experience of not holding back my own teeming life force, but being-in-flux-pours-open-in-a-constantly-moving-inter-aliveness. There is a dynamic system that flows through all of us—the trees, water, birds, and my own body and sound. And I sensually and viscerally feel the truth of this when I sing. This form of participation I feel when singing here wakes me up to a way of living and being that I only rarely inhabit fully and which cultural dictates and personal habits have taught me to resist, ignore, and forget even right up until the moment when I open my mouth. 8 I am sitting on a bench with a peek at the water through the space between two trees. Today I use my voice raucously. My voice wants loud, wild, throaty sound and when I open my mouth, a flock of birds bursts onto the spot of sky near the water. When I am loud and resonant like this, my whole body lights up. I feel the warmth and pleasure in my voice, in the air, down my back. A part of me monitors, dreads being seen in a socially inappropriate or at least unexpected behavior. Yet I keep riding the fullness of every second. I see no one. Until a woman walks towards me on the path. Suddenly, I feel constrained and find myself rebelling against her approach and the idea that I need to shut down. But she ends up walking up the hill without coming all the way. As I move into louder and “crazier” sounding, I find I love every second and I also am mentally preparing constantly to stop, for it to be over. It’s like pushing the double doors open to a place I love, but the doors feel heavy and onerous and I am not used to being able to hold them open for long. How much space can I take up with this dimension of my voice? I sing now and I might be heard and my skin vibrates with wonder and dread. 9 A part of me can wonder: does it matter that I am singing? Can the birds hear me? Do I exist for them? Am I just inventing this connection? But I find this is most true before I open my mouth. Yet when I get weighed down by the sadness of how the water is polluted and the histories of colonization on this land, I can feel pulled into the heaviness of grief that takes me out of this present relationship. How do I/we grapple with the injustices, the realities of loss, the despairs and doubts while not closing the portals of connectedness that exist in this moment?

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10 I watch the birds more closely here. Now I just saw the whole sky dotted with birds flying over the water. I hear the call of the gulls close and at a distance, almost a call and response. I hear the sound of the train, the expelling of steam or pressure, a rattle hum of a motorcycle, a trill or a tweet of another bird, a call of a crow, the buzzer from the train. I usually tune out some of these noises when I come here to sing, singing more into the visual and felt landscape. But right now, I am paying attention. 11 I hear today from a friend that in her book about plant spirit medicine, there is a glossary with the music and words for Cherokee songs for individual herbs and plants. I think about the power of recognizing the vibration inherent in every living thing and attuning to it as part of honoring and supporting and enhancing its inherent properties and being. It reminds me of the theory of “natural frequency” based in physics mentioned in John and Angela Ledarachs’ (2010) book, When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation: “When vibrations attain natural frequency a power emerges. In the Tibetan bowl the power arises as sound, but in other instances, for example, engineers building bridges, the natural frequency can create a nightmare. When winds, people walking, or cars travelling across the bridge create vibrations that converge into the right rhythms and patterns, the natural frequency produces a powerful combination with a capacity to ‘explode’ the structure in a few minutes. This was seen in the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in the United States in 1940, which was captured on film” (p. 93). Seemingly simple vibrations at the right frequency are powerful enough to cause bridges to explode. Thus, it also makes sense that singing to plants and singing to water, to birds and to each other, could be powerful in a material as well as spiritual way. 12 Today I am aware of all the trucks barreling by: a constant stream tonight. Did I never notice this before? Today I feel sad my voice isn’t resonating with a forest symphony or ocean oasis. Today the water seems hidden behind the highway below. And I feel some shame that my “spot” here isn’t wild enough. Today I sing known songs here to the water. They are familiar grooves, joys I can offer. I think about the delicate territory of improvisation, of moving into the open-voiced unknown. It is comforting to have songs in my belly that have roots and feet and lineages that I can pluck out of my

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pocket. They ground me in familiar vocal structures and patterns. I feel in singing these familiar songs at the water, there is a tiny glimpse into having cultural rituals that are known and held in embodied memory, that provide an embedded pathway for connection. My songs as a lone human being at the water are not grounded in the same community practice, but they do open a window of connection into a form of ritual and conscious connection through repetition and memory. 13 Tonight I sit on the other bench. The one that looks out between two trees onto the warehouse, the train depot, and the water. The mountains peak across the inlet. I hear the sounds of the train tonight, the engine huffing in a buzzing industry. Trucks bring large red and blue and green shipping containers to load, lifting them high. I am annoyed by the noise but I begin to sing, a woeful low-sound, deep and in a minor key. A black crow flies in and perches itself on the tree above me, close. Turned towards me, it caws. I sing. It caws. It cocks its head away and then eyes me again. I keep singing, my face tilted up towards the tree branch where it sits. I notice myself so wanting it to stay. And I keep singing—low and strong and aching. I occasionally turn to see who is walking by, but I want to sing to this crow, staring down at me. It stays on the branch for 10 minutes or so, longer than the crows here have stayed before moving on. I sense it listening, interested, preening a bit. It flies away when I stop singing, as my attention turns to a woman coming down the way with two very loud dogs. It flies to a higher branch, and then a higher branch still and then it is gone. I get up and sing to the trees, to the ones that edge the water, and to the one next to me, shimmering with black light. I feel them energetically, their presence, their leaning, their roots, and the wind rustling through. I feel their company. I like them so much. The trees are dark silhouettes against the white blue of the sky now. I see the yellow loading machine in the distance lurching to pick up a red container below and load it onto the truck. It’s so beautiful, but it is getting dark and I feel a chill so I get up and bike home. 14 Today I brought my audio recorder to the water. This green space where I usually sit with the benches dotting the water is fuller than usual, it being a sunny Sunday afternoon. But one of my favorite benches near the trees was free. When I got here, a train was trundling by, loud and long with many train cars. But then it was quiet enough to hear the wind in the trees.

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I began singing a repetitive series of notes, as I often do, like a chant or a lulling melody. Sometimes I relax into this looping rhythm for a long time; sometimes other notes or sounds emerge that change the rhythm or the melody. Today I stood up with my recorder and was singing near the trees and after a couple of minutes, one crow flew over to the tree close to me, then another, then another, till finally there were five. I have never seen so many crows land this close to me before and stay. It was almost like they came out in full force to join the party of song. I sang to them and they cawed back excitedly. We were singing together. They stayed for a full five minutes in loud cawing force, flying nearer at points, listening at points, it seemed. My voice became louder and louder as they were there; I didn’t care about the people not very far away. I found myself wanting the crows to stay forever, but eventually the moment passed. And when it was over, they flew away one by one and I felt so grateful. I felt they were giving me strength for this chapter, for this life, telling me yes, we do hear you, and we are with you—this interaliveness thing is real.

Sounding Through the Exploration of Song, Nature, and Interconnectedness Sounding and song can provide portals of connection and opening to powerful life energies. According to Schafer (2001), in many non-Western cultural contexts, vibration and song are considered powerful catalysts and practices that are believed to produce specific kinds of change and transformation, specifically through connection between the earth and spirit realms. Yet our dominant Western culture does not teach this understanding of song and sounding as part of multi-dimensional earthspirit relationships. This can lead to a potential strangeness and doubt in human sounding and song in nature in Western contexts. In Dwellings, Chickasaw poet and writer Linda Hogan (1995) discusses going to spend time in Minnesota in wolf country, where the wolves are being killed off. She is traveling with a group of people who have come to learn about the wolves, and she describes a scene in the wilderness: Then there is a howl. It is soft and long. Even the loose skin of the trees holds still. Everything listens. It’s a man speaking. In a language he only pretends to know, he calls out to the wolves. We wait. We are waiting for the wolves to answer. We want a healing, I think, a cure for anguish, a remedy that will heal the wound between us and the world that contains our broken histories. If we could only hear them, the stars themselves are howling, but there is just the man’s voice, crying out, lonely. Not even those of us standing behind him answer. It is a silence we rarely feel, a

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Offering sound into the wilderness in a context of environmental and cultural distress and violence can touch on the loneliness and uncertainty of being met, as well as a strangeness and unfamiliarity. One way to understand this is that there are broken bonds of trust and relationship between humans, animals, and the natural world as a whole, which continue to be made manifest in material policies that devalue and damage the natural environment. Sounding and listening to the world in an attuned way is not what we are taught to do in mainstream Western culture and institutions. I myself am uncertain if the crows will ever come to sing with me again, and I notice my own initial fear of returning to that same tree where they met me, afraid of not experiencing the same connection there that was so beautiful. Sounding and listening in nature reflects a longing for deep connection with the earth, and to other beings; this can bring up an immense sense of uncertainty, as Hogan points to. In my own field notes, this comes up around doubts about whether the connection will somehow not be able to be felt, or is blocked, or fear it will go away or parts of me disbelieve that it exists at all. John Paul and Angela Ledarach discuss the role of sonic processes in reconciliation. Ledarach and Ledarachs’ conflict transformation work focuses on peace-building efforts in the midst of war and conflict worldwide. John Paul Lederach (2001) has previously described reconciliation as “dynamic, adaptive processes aimed at building and healing” (p. 842). He notes that reconciliation “is built on and oriented toward the relational aspects of a conflict [ .  .  . ] and create[s] an encounter where people can focus on their relationship” (Lederach, 1997, p. 30). Ledarach and Ledarachs’ view of successful approaches to reconciliation comes back to metaphorically sonic practices of open voicing, circling, repetition, multi-directionality, and ritual that are (and must be) risked over and over again in the midst of uncertainty or any guarantees. This contrasts with a very different approach to reconciliation as consisting of a linear series of building blocks with a clear beginning, middle, and end (i.e., wars end, peace accords are reached, there is no more violence, end of story). Ledarach and Ledarach (2010) instead compare the work of reconciliation to the sound of a Tibetan bowl when a tuning stick is being circled around its edge over and over. In the Tibetan bowl, minute vibrations are enacted through this circling which eventually leads to the strong sound of the bowl expressing its natural frequency till it fades away. Like this sound, reconciliation is continually “coaxed” and recoaxed, with spaces and places of reconciliation sought over and over again (p. 110). Ledarach and Ledarach suggest that reconciliation is not

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a linear, forward-moving process and in fact, it is not a process at all—it happens in “enspacements,” which, like the playing of the Tibetan bowl, fade away until played again: “Resonance,” they write, “requires attention, circling and repetitious nurturing” (p. 100). I notice the power and value of both the sonic metaphor of life processes, and the understanding of enspacements. Rather than a linear project with a timeline, the practice of singing at the water was more akin to a ritual or ceremony, enacted through repetition over and over in (mostly) the same location. In his chapter, “Subjective Reconstruction and the Rehabilitation of Habit,” Pinar (2015b) writes: “Patterns of meaning—revealing resemblance within difference, and vice versa—become discernible to those whose daily life is structured by repetition housing the immediacy and the differentiation of the moment” (p. 208). In a time of increasing time on screens hijacking our attention spans, Pinar writes of the power of consciously cultivating habits as “systematic and ongoing modes of being-inthe-world, stretching from solitary contemplation to social action” (p. 202). He suggests such habits, if shared among people, can be a form not just of personal rehabilitation, but of “social reconstruction” (p. 204). In coming back and circling round to the same spots and practices, there was an unfolding and spiraling of depth in my relationships to that particular place over time, to the water, trees, and the crows. In Embodied Wisdom: Meditations on Memoir and Education, Alison Pryer (2011) contrasts human intellectual understandings of earth cycles and nature with the lived experience of embodied practices of earth-connected ritual. Discussing her repeated ritual of climbing a mountain to visit a particular tree in her adopted home of Japan after her mother’s death, she writes: “It was only through doing the healing ritual that I was able to understand these concepts [of earth cycles of life and death] in a fully embodied way” (p. 79). She highlights the power of ritual to demarcate and support communion with sacred knowledge through embodied, intimate relationship with the earth and larger universal forces, “[s]tarting from the premise, commonly held in indigenous cultures, that the earth is alive and infused with a vital spirit, which manifests itself through the material” (p. 78). Pryer discusses the transformative power of ritual, which uses both repetition and deep attentional practices to “invite the anima loci to congregate and unite” (p. 78). Yet she points out that such ritual processes have a life energy of their own that cannot be fully regulated or predicted: “Taking place in liminal space-time, at the margins of the everyday, at what the ancient Celts called ‘thin places,’ the processes of ritual have a somewhat anarchic, chaotic quality. To an extent, the outcome of the ritual is beyond the participant’s control” (p. 79). The multi-directional, sonic-like properties of ritual or other repetitive enspacements can be considered chaotic, as Pryer suggests, and also be ineffective or a waste of time in achieving linear goals in a dominant Western worldview. This is one of the significant impacts for me of Pryer’s, Ledarach

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and Ledarach’s, and Pinar and Grumet’s work: the articulation of the value of the creation of enspacements, over and over again, like the minute tunings of many points on the Tibetan bowl, together creating a powerful frequency for the period of resonance of the bowl, till it fades away. I was struck by the dedication it takes to keep repeating experiences that open me in this way. It takes a continual renewal of faith and discipline and stepping out of more normalized cultural expectations and routines; this can be a difficult act to keep repeating even when the rewards can be great. There is often a resistance in me to opening to this expanded way of being, yet frequently, I came away from the water renewed, replenished, and shifted into a different mode of consciousness. During my time of singing at the water, as my field notes indicate, I experienced a profound sense of joy and play. It occurred to me at certain points that the natural world was having way more fun than I was in my everyday life. In opening my voice to the natural world, I could open to this field of resonating play and buoyancy. Play invites joy and a kind of lightness and movement around things that could otherwise weigh one down cognitively; it helps me enter a zone of constant shifting, of surprises, of pleasure, of embodied fluidity and transitions, of full-throated openness to the plurality of the universe. Perhaps it is this shift and touching into a less linear, more chaotic, multi-dimensional, and buoyant consciousness that is the biggest gift of this practice for me. It has opened a path of re-orientation that echoes currerre’s return to the “primordial” as a pathway of reconceptualization (Grumet, 2015, p. 56). My encounters with the plurality of the more-than-human-world have tuned me to places of surprising music. Yet just like the tiny touches on the rim by the circling stick on the Tibetan bowl, it is only in the repeated enactments of wide-awake encounter that I really build a relationship with the natural world’s aliveness and our shared attunement. Without that practice, the consciousness does not remain; it cannot be packaged or stored in a box. It cannot even be stored in this paper to be pulled out at will. These words are simply a reminder, a clue to where the treasure is glimmering and glowing in the water or in the sky full of birds soaring. And even when I return to the practice, there are no guarantees of my immediate opening or shifting into the experience of interconnectedness. Each time, it is uncertain; each time, it is a longing throat call pitched to the unknown.

Note 1. This chapter assumes there is value in relating with the natural world in the place where I dwell, and at the same time, I want to name the complexity of building a relationship with unceded Indigenous land as a visitor and settler here. I want to explicitly acknowledge the importance of Indigenous land claims and struggles. I also want to credit Simon Fraser University professor Vicki Kelly (Anishinaabe), in whose class I began this inquiry, for modeling such deep learning from the land.

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References Abram, D. (1996). Spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-thanhuman world. New York, NY: Vintage. Aoki, T. (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3), 255–268. Block, A. (2004). Talmud, curriculum, and the practical: Joseph Schwab and the rabbis. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Fels, L. (1998). In the wind clothes dance on a line: Performative inquiry: A (re) search methodology. Journal for Curriculum Theorizing, 14(1), 27–36. Fels, L. (2014). Woman overboard: Pedagogical moments of performative inquiry. In S. Walsh, B. Bickel, & C. Leggo (Eds.), Arts-based and contemplative practices in research and teaching: Honouring presence (pp. 108–118). New York, NY: Routledge. Greene, M. (2005). Teaching in a moment of crisis: The spaces of imagination. The New Educator, 1(2), 77–80. doi:10.1080/15476880590934326 Greene, M. (2013). The turning of the leaves: Expanding our vision for arts education. Harvard Educational Review, 83(1), 251–252. Grumet, M. (2015). Existential and phenomenological foundations. In W. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 40–64). Kingston, NY: Educators’ International Press. Hogan, L. (1995). Dwellings: A spiritual history of the living world. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Koskela, J., & Siljander, P. (2014). What is existential educational encounter? Paideusis, 21(2), 71–80. Lederach, J. P. (1997). Building peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Lederach, J. P. (2001). Civil society and reconciliation. In C. Crocker, F. Osler Hampson & P. Aall (Eds.), Turbulent peace: The challenges of managing international conflict (pp. 841–854). Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Ledarach, J. P., & Ledarach, A. (2010). When blood and bones cry out: Journeys through the soundscape of healing and reconciliation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Pinar, W. (2012). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. (2015a). Political-spiritual dimensions. In W. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 113–141). Kingston, NY: Educators’ International Press. Pinar, W. (2015b). Subjective reconstruction and the rehabilitation habit. In W. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 191–219). Kingston, NY: Educators’ International Press. Pinar, W., & Grumet, M. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed.). Kingston, NY: Educators’ International Press. Pryer, A. (2011). Embodied wisdom: Meditations on memoir and education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Schafer, R. M. (2001). Music and the soundscape. In D. Rothenberg & M. Ulvaeus (Eds.), The book of music and nature: An anthology of sounds, words, thoughts (pp. 58–68). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

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Provoking Spiritual Encounters Dancing With Spirit Sandra Owén:nakon Deer

I have come to know that the effects of colonialism that were a mere idea in my head for many years are now layered upon the surface of my own life and the lives of my sons and the lives of my grandchildren. The transformation from mere thought to actuality is cause for me to continue moving forward through my educational endeavors. This transformative journey reaffirms the authentication of my personal beliefs, namely, that Indigenous/Native cultural knowledges provide a vast and unique landscape filled with conceptual philosophies that offer diverse ways of learning and relearning, teaching, knowing, and doing. At this point in life and in my education, all seems to be reflective of one another. My education reflects my life and my life now reflects my education. It feels as though they are one and the same. For me, expressing authenticity stems from the very essence of who I am, culturally and spiritually. I do not know any other way to be.

Kanien’kehá:ka ni tia’tò:ten—I Am a Being of the Flint People Owén:nakon ni waksennò:ten tsi iohontsá:te: Here on earth they call me Owén:nakon. This is my Kanien’keha (Mohawk) name. It translates as: “under the words.” Tánon wakskaré:wake: I am of the Bear clan family. Kanien’kehá:ka ni tia’tò:ten: I am of the Flint nation. I’ve lived in Kahnawa:ke (an Indian reservation) ever since I can remember. I grew up in a time of confusion, when standing up for Indigenous rights displayed pride and strength of the people, but at a time when being on that side was taboo in the eyes of those who rewarded “acting like a good Indian.” Today, my generation talk mostly about what we have lost and how we can get it back (i.e., land, language, culture). We have all not yet looked at what lies “inbetween” the lines that draw our life’s circle from one point to the next. As a Kanien’kehá:ka (people of the flint) and part of the Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse), I owe it to my grandchildren and to their grandchildren to accomplish at least the beginning stages of change: to arrive at a holistic perspective on what and how

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we as Kanien’kehá:ka can begin to fill in those “inbetween” concepts that have led us away from making progress in our own decolonization. What needs to be learned, understood, and acknowledged is the relationship between human and spirit. “Spirituality evolves from exploring and coming to know and experience the nature of the living energy moving in each of us, through us, and around us” (Cajete, 1994, p. 41). Through the experience that I am calling “spiritual encounter,” I am provoked to listen, learn, and live the ways of the ancestors. I am provoked to learn how to live as best I can within an Indigenous context, a relational context, and a living context, this alongside modernity, technology, and the fast-paced world of economic prosperity with its exploitation of our mother the earth. This chapter centers on one experience I call spiritual encounter. It happened at least a decade ago. It was an experience of spirituality in motion that I have never forgotten because it provoked me to open myself wider to the reality that I have come to know, understand, and embrace as my spirit self. I begin with acknowledging the importance of spirit and of spiritual encounters. To create a context for understanding the story of spiritual encounter that I tell, I first explain certain shared Indigenous concepts tied to spirituality. I then tell my story of spiritual encounter and relate it to curriculum theory, through currere, and reflect further on the importance in this world of provoking spiritual (curriculum) encounter(s).

All My Relations Native, Indigenous/Aboriginal identity is best defined by the people’s cultural and historical philosophies: those that define their own authenticity and origin. Trajectories are distinct and detailed, however “there are shared metaphors and concepts that [though they] are unique by region and tribe . . . are derived from similar understanding and orientation of life” (Cajete, 1994, p. 41). One foundational shared concept is “we are all related,” also stated as “all my relations”; meaning: one is, or we are, related to the natural world and all living beings, including spirit (Cajete, 1994, 2005; Deloria, 1992; Little Bear, 2000). Indigenous peoples have based (and continue to base) their philosophies of the world on a cultural belief system upheld and practiced through ceremony and song, storytelling, language, dreams, and the ecology of the land and its seasonal patterns (Battiste, 2010; Cajete, 1994, 2005; Weenie, 2009). These belief systems are intertwined in a philosophy that conceives of the world as a living entity holding significant meaning and understanding for all creation. Through centuries of practicing a nourishing relationship with our ecosystems, Indigenous insight and knowledge has been translated into an awareness and acceptance that our environment is “alive with the enduring processes of creation itself” (Battiste & Youngblood Henderson, 2000, p. 9). Battiste (2010) notes

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that “life is a journey of our spirits that are in a relationship with Creator” (p. 14). Battiste and Youngblood Henderson (2000) define these philosophical relationships as “ecological insight[s]” (p. 9), which are articulated in our ceremonies, oral teachings, art, language, and ways of knowing. These insights reflect back the spirit of the land and life and our responsibilities as humans on the earth we call “our mother.” These philosophies “have been categorized as our culture” (p. 9). Both Cajete (1994) and Little Bear (2000) stress the importance of learning and coming to know and understand spirituality through Indigenous philosophy, that is, as cultural knowledges. Today Indigenous cultural philosophies, though distinct (viz., tribal), continue to share the concept “we are all related.” Little Bear (2000) states that “if everything has spirit and knowledge, then all are like me. If all are like me, then all are my relations” (p. 78).

Spirit and Manitous Bilodeau (2001) points out in “They honor our Lord among themselves in their own way: Colonial Christianity and the Illinois”, how missionaries described the practice of spirituality that they observed within Native nations (specifically, in the Illinois and the Ojibwe). He notes how such interpretations resulted in an understanding that for Native nations, spirituality rested in the environment in which they lived and how they used its elements to explain the world around them and how they understood their relationship to that world. There was no separation between the physical and the spiritual world; they were one and the same. As the missionaries observed, every physical element in the environment held a spiritual energy that was to be respected. The Illinois believed that “manitous,” or spirits, had an overarching effect on the nation at large, and that there were also personal “manitous” that protected, guided, and assisted individuals, “serving as a foundation of personal identity” (Bilodeau, 2001, p. 357). Other instances of spiritual practice are also discussed in Bilodeau’s article, such as: vision quests, tobacco burning as offering, gift giving, and hospitable gestures. Bilodeau explains that these were often expressed as reciprocal practices, with an understanding that some form of reward would be bestowed upon the people. In some cases, the rewards were physical items, and in other cases, establishing a relationship with another group and having access to information that would benefit the community at large. Bilodeau also explains how the vision quest/dream experience was understood as an extension of First Nations reality and not just as a dream per se. Because “spirituality is always connected to a tradition, spirituality does not come out of nowhere” (Morris, 2016, p. 56). Today, many Native nations understand the vision quest as a large part of their reality and connection to who they are as individuals coming

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from a long line of Indigenous peoples. Provoking spiritual encounter involves practices of listening deeply to the insights, experiences, feelings, and intuitions that flow through thought, emotion, hesitation, a dream, and a voice that whispers throughout your being, settling and/or unsettling the human capacity to move beyond what may otherwise seem to be a plain and simple human existence. Ceremonial practices are one way Indigenous peoples experience these relations of spiritual encounter. For instance, burning of tobacco. From a Kanien’kehá:ka perspective, this practice carries the same understanding as it did for the sixteenthand seventeenth-century Illinois. The offering of burning tobacco over an open fire gestures reciprocity, acknowledgment, and thanksgiving for what is to come and for the elements that sustain us. The Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse) continue this reciprocal tobacco burning today, as an offering of thanksgiving and acknowledgment toward the natural world, such as the animals we hunt. We give thanks for the food the animals provide, the gardens we plant; we give thanks for an abundant crop, the medicines we gather; we give thanks that they are still available to us and the properties they bestow for our healing. There are many more significant purposes of the offering and smoking/burning of tobacco, too many to discuss here. However, I will say that the gesture and offering is much more than an expected reciprocal outcome. It is also an acknowledgment of existence, of respect and being thankful for the reciprocity of nature and all that assists in our human existence and survival on our mother earth. It is a practice that rests on an unspoken understanding and gesture, one that supports our humility, reminding us of our place in this universe of energy and power: a spirituality that is sometimes way out of our intellectual reach. It can also be an instrument to provoke spiritual encounter. For instance, practicing ceremonies can help one enter a relationship with the external elements of nature, resulting in an experience that forms spiritual guidance. Cultural knowledge and values are learned through elders or teachers who teach through story, talk, and ceremony (Weenie, 2009). Relationships begin to form with other beings (spirits), such as animals, and natural elements like the trees, water, the earth, the sky, moon, and stars. Through ceremonial practice one begins to know, understand, and respect her/his own inner spirit and the relationship built with spirit guides and the natural world. Through this awareness, one can establish a clearer understanding of what constitutes a spiritual relationship. These relationships develop throughout one’s life. As a child one could learn through daily or cultural activity within the community, home, and ceremonial practices. For instance, Weenie (2009) explains how the different ceremonies she witnessed as a child remain with her. “These gatherings were community and spiritual[ly] oriented and gave us a sense of wellbeing and belonging in our daily lives” (p. 62). As a child, I did not fully understand our ceremonies. I would sit attentively watching it all take place while observing what others were doing.

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As I aged, I began to develop a felt sense of the significance of ceremonial practices in relation to a spiritual connection with the universal elements of creation. There was a mystery about it: the words spoken, the burning of tobacco, the dancing, the way people moved and maneuvered themselves during particular ceremonies. One example of a ceremony among the Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse) is the naming ceremony. While a slight difference exists in ceremony depending on whether the child is male or female, basically it unfolds as follows. The parents, clan mother, singer, and speaker stand before the people and the speaker tells the people who this child is and the child’s name. The speaker reminds the people of their responsibility to this child as she/he grows and how they, especially the child’s clan family, have an obligation to inform the family of any significant issues that may affect the child as well as recognize any special gift this child has and how they can support this child’s growth, culturally and spiritually. The clan family then has a responsibility to direct this child to the right person/ people who could assist in supporting this child’s gift. The Haudenosaunee are a matrilineal society and each clan family includes all the child’s immediate family members from the mother’s side. The mother’s parents, brothers and sisters, and their children are all clan family members. Clan family members are not always blood related. Throughout the Six Nations Confederacy/Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse), all Bear clan members are relatives, no matter to what nation you belong. The Kanien’kehá:ka of the Haudenosaunee have three clan families: Bear clan, Wolf clan, and Turtle clan. The Haudenosaunee practice ceremonies following a seasonal pattern. We like to call this our “cycle of ceremonies”. The cycle tells us when each ceremony is to take place. There are seasonal celebrations that move with the time of natural growth of medicines and plants, as well as the cycles of the moon. Midwinter celebration is after the winter solstice, and medicine society renewals take place during this time as well. Then as the season moves along, you have maple tree ceremony, then medicine and seed, strawberry, green corn, and beans, then harvest and medicine masks. They all fall within the cyclical motion of the earth’s seasons. Hanohano (1999) explains how cultural knowledge moves in a cyclical motion. He emphasizes that “the Circle of Life . . . speaks of the interconnectedness and interrelationships of all life” (p. 212) “since the whole of creation is essentially One, all parts within the whole are related” (p. 213). As “a power far greater than man” (p. 212), the Circle of Life “act[s] through the natural intuition which Creation communicates to those who are open to its laws” (p. 214). Each nation has spiritual entities/guides closely related to their environment, ceremonies, and philosophies. These guides have their own terminology within each culture and certain words within one’s language highlight the relationship these entities provide throughout one’s life. These laws are not written laws as

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we have come to know through modern organized governments. In my language, Kanien’keha (Mohawk) we say, Tho Niiohtonha:tie, meaning, that is the way it is continuously, as in: the constant motion of living, life, and creation (pronounced; toe nee yo doon haw jay). Richards (2001), who is not an Indigenous person, but brings a perspective resonant with our understanding of spiritual encounter, describes the whole human being as a matrix extending energy outward connecting to everything else. She emphasizes that the solar plexus is where this energy or “network of nerves” (p. 146) extends in all directions. Each network “expresses some part of ourselves, which we can call the artistic, the scientific, [and] the religious” (p. 146). I have learned that this extending network of nerves is the central light of our spiritual selves; that it encompasses all of who we are and who we have been from the time of our inception. Spiritual awareness allows one to differentiate between a message of guidance as opposed to daily thoughts of hunger, pain, stress, and thoughts brought on by the ego mind. By building a connection through ceremonial practice, story, song, dance, listening, and calling on spirit guides, one can connect to the inner world of spirit, and extend that into the outer world’s energy. I’m now going to tell you a story that is categorized as a “Shamanic experience” through the definition, interpretation, and guidance of a Kanien’kehá:ka Medicine Woman who resides in my community.

Woman’s Dance as Spiritual Encounter For the Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse), the woman’s dance is a celebratory dance performed for the women. The beginning of the Creation Story of the Haudenosaunee tells about Sky Woman and how she began to create the earth’s surface. Culturally, Haudenosaunee women are leaders, nurturers, and providers; they are wise, and possess the ability to create life. They choose chiefs to represent their nation through insight that is cultural and spiritual, and they share these insights with community in consideration of the future of the people, not the immediate outcome. I was dancing the woman’s dance in the longhouse at one midwinter celebration, just as I have danced over the last five decades of my life. As a young child, I would try to dance like the older girls and women, but did so with less motion. I did not want to attract too much attention in case I was doing it wrong. At lunch break, my younger sister and our cousins would sing in the longhouse and practice their dancing skills. We would all try to dance as sophisticated as we thought the older women did. This one year, I was dancing with this magnificent shawl I had acquired through a ceremonial giveaway for my long-time friend’s daughter. Culturally the Haudenosaunee do not practice giveaway ceremonies for children. We have giveaway during other ceremonies, including personal

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death feasts. However, my friend’s daughter is part Lakota, on her father’s side, and they practice giveaway ceremony for their children. A gift is given to individuals who, the parents feel, will be a special part of their child’s life as they grow into adulthood. It is an honor to be chosen. It is an indication that the parents respect you and feel that you are a positive role model for their child. This was how I acquired this most beautiful shawl. I’ve never owned a shawl prior to this one. I’m dancing, single file, following the women lined up in front of me. We make our way around the two benches that are filled with singers, each singer beating a rattle on one thigh, in sync with the lead singer and his drumming, every singer raising a knee up and hitting a foot down to the floor in unison with the beating of the drum. My body fills with the sound and rhythm of that drum, the rattles, and the stomp of each foot hitting the floor. This sound is mesmerizing, not at first, but it has been decades of listening to this celebratory song that represents, for me, female energy. As a Kanien’kehá:ka (people of the flint nation), I have heard and danced this dance forever, it seems. It is one of my favorite dances. It is a dance that is danced in celebration of woman. The Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse) are a matrilineal society, and many of our practices and most of our ceremonies include the woman’s dance. Moving in unison with the other women is invigorating for the soul’s emotions. As I dance around the circle with my shawl wrapped tightly around my body, holding me steady and stern, my focus is drawn toward the beat of the drum and the shuffling of my feet, back and forth. The right foot twists outward as my left foot shifts forward, guiding me ahead in this single file of women dancing the woman’s dance. My body bounces to the rhythm of that stomping on the longhouse floor. For a moment I feel every beat, stomp, and shake of the rattle travel right through to my bones. The sound of the drum, singers, rattles, and stomping on the floor causes me to fall into a meditative state. I cannot resist. I’m compelled to close my eyes for a brief moment. As I fall into this meditative state, I immediately think of my mother, and in an instant, I think of her mother, and her mother’s mother, and wonder how many women danced before me. My eyes close and I’m immediately projected into another place or dimension. I recall hearing a funny sound like a vacuum, but not a real vacuum sound. That is the best way I can describe the sound. I could also say it sounded like a vacuum in reverse. As quickly as the sound traveled through me, I was transported to a place that I have never seen before, unless I have seen this place in another life, or I had already been there prior to my entry into this human journey. I’m not sure where I was, but the beauty of it was mesmerizing. The land, grass, hills, water, and sky were so brilliant. The colors were iridescent; it seemed as though they sparkled with glitter or shimmered

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from the sun’s rays. I cannot say how long I was there. I could only measure by the distance I traveled on the longhouse floor. It seemed as though I had spent a lifetime there. Over the years, I thought that this place was a place that my spirit longed for and when I leave this earth, this is where I’ll return to. As I’m walking around experiencing this ultimate beauty, I faintly hear the drum beating in the background, and singers singing low in the distance. I am gradually drawn back to my earthly presence. I return in a swooshing motion or sound to the longhouse floor, dancing in single file. As I come to, I open my eyes and look around, wondering what happened and where did I go? How did I return without anyone noticing my absence? I look ahead and see the sunlight brightly shining in the window on the Bear clan side of the longhouse. I now see that I had only moved three feet around that circle of women dancing. I hang tightly onto my shawl wrapped around my body and feel the emotion begin to fill me like water in a glass rising to the top. It rises toward my heart and then to my throat. I feel a great lump of emotion sitting there, waiting to burst into a screaming sound of sorrow and longing. Longing for that wonderful, peaceful feeling that filled me as I walked that beautiful landscape touched with love. I equate this with other spiritual encounters I’ve had over the last few decades. But what makes this one special to me is the fact that the dancing and singing of the woman’s dance was the transformer or provocateur. It was the ignition that sparked this spiritual encounter where I was physically engaged with song and dance, a dance of my ancestors, and their ancestors before them.

Curriculum as Spiritual Encounter For Indigenous peoples, the history of curriculum in Canada tells a story of the long-standing remnants of colonialism’s goal of assimilation: of creating an imagined society that complies with the regulations of being a “good” citizen, unifying national cultures through education (Castellano, Davis, & Lahache, 2000; Chambers, 2003; Kanu, 2003). According to Chambers (2003), “curriculum is inherently political regardless of national context” (p. 223). Morris (2016) concurs, noting that the politics of curricula is unavoidable no matter from which angle you write, research, or study; important is to be aware of where curriculum scholars stand. She then suggests that several curriculum theorists “write in the intersections of spirituality and politics. It is an interesting thought that one can be both a critical theorist and spiritual thinker” (p. 57; emphasis added). When curriculum theorists become interested in spirituality, it is often because they are looking for something that falls outside the tradition or has been left out or because they are interested in looking at things differently.

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Pinar and Grumet, for instance. Both have written extensively about what lies on the sides, or what has been left out. For instance, Pinar (2015) has commented on how curriculum studies has lost its will to know and learn things. A sense of what is important has been lost through exaggerating the having and acquiring of tools, artifacts, the latest hardware, software, and access to it all. Pinar believes that this type of education and the curricula, which emphasizes acquiring over sharing, if not brought under control will leave our society with human beings who have no idea who they really are, from the inside out. Pinar (2015) discusses the processes by which one can become more in tune with the inner self, inner being, and inner spirit. He uses the word, “becoming,” as in: becoming more human. By this, he does not mean to become more of what we already are but to “become in fact what we have not been, or what we are only some of the time and to some extent” (p. 119). To some extent, we are spiritual beings living in the human body. One thing that is obvious to me and also to Pinar is that we are not all at the same stage of becoming our whole selves. Aoki (2004) mirrors the idea of becoming through Miss O’s pedagogic understanding of curriculum as lived and curriculum as planned. Miss O understands the curriculum as plan must be put forth within the schooling system and yet she knows that these plans are a generic guideline for teaching her students about the world. However, Miss O also understands that her students do not all fit into the one shape of the curriculum standards. Her students exist as multiple shapes and require close human interaction if she is to reach them. Miss O knows that each student is a unique being, and so is she, but “she knows that their uniqueness disappears into the shadow when they are spoken of in the prosaically abstract language of the external curriculum planners” (Aoki, 2004, p. 160). A teacher who reflects upon their own skills and experiences through reflection will come to see “what matters deeply in the situated world of the classroom” and “how the teachers’ ‘doings’ flow from who they are, their beings” (p. 160). The process by which we can choose to become our whole selves is just that: a process. From the perspective of Indigenous epistemologies, becoming is a lifelong journey. It involves an interrelationship with the energy of the universe, which assists us in this human journey on mother earth. It helps us become teachers, students, writers, doctors, dentists, artists, hunters, gardeners. It helps us become more spiritual, with a capacity to teach what we have learned through sharing about our spiritual encounters. Bringing about change through the individual first is part of this “becoming” within curriculum theory, according to Pinar. It partly explains why we do the work we do as curriculum scholars. While bringing about change that will influence more than one person is high on the Richter scale, as Pinar (2015) states, “we realize how powerless we are [as theorists] to influence the world condition on this level” (p. 121).

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What he believes is more penetrable are the levels and spheres in which we walk, write, read, and dance. These levels consist of our students and the people we work with regularly. For Pinar, we live with the hope that this penetrable audience will echo what curriculum theorists are longing to share across spheres. One part of Morris’s (2016) recent compilation of insights of scholars focuses on the spiritual. While many curriculum scholars may not consider themselves to be spiritual people, they nevertheless write with religious or spiritual overtones. Morris explains how Jung (as a scholar who has influenced curriculum theory) did not consider his work to be spiritual, yet others have recognized it as relational, speaking to the relationality of the human spirit to the energy of the universe. Relationality has always been one of the pillars that hold and support Indigenous epistemology and cultural practices. Ermine (1995) writes: Those who seek to understand the reality of existence and harmony with the environment by turning inward have a different, incorporeal knowledge paradigm that might be termed Aboriginal epistemology. In their quest to find meaning in the outer space, Aboriginal people turned to the inner space. This inner space is that universe of being within each person that is synonymous with the soul, the spirit, the self, or the being. (p. 103) We are brought back to this notion of interiority or working from within, which has been a cornerstone of currere, but here with a twist. “If we can imagine soul as something that moves beyond our own interiority, it helps us to better understand how interconnected we are” (Morris, 2016, p. 58). By understanding this interconnection, we can establish a relationship with other humans, the animal world, and the universe: “We can see our souls as not localized within ourselves but as an energy field that extends beyond our physical being” (Miller, as cited in Morris, 2016, p. 58). Earlier in this chapter, Richards (2001) explained it in a similar way, noting that we are a matrix of energy moving outward connecting to the universe. A spiritual or mystical experience is not about time, but rather about a “lived timelessness” (Wexler, as cited in Morris, 2016, p. 60). Morris (2016) notes that timelessness can be experienced through “the perfect performance” (p. 60); it is common among dancers, artists, musicians, and writers. I believe that this lived timelessness exists for us all. Whether we choose to embrace it or not, this lived timelessness exists in the back of our minds, as potential spiritual encounters. All we need to do is open ourselves to them. As Pinar suggests, by “becoming,” one can become more engaged with the energy field of creation. From this angle or sphere, one might find the strength, clarity, and understanding of how we as individuals can assist

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in the transformation of a more humanized way of living and learning. Through spiritual encounter, we can be provoked to listen, and listen deeply, to the internal sounds and vibrations of the encounter. Whether it stops us in our tracks, or directs us to move in an unfamiliar direction, spiritual encounter is a lived experience provoked through practices that resonate with individual and cultural awareness. It is all part of the ongoing cycle of creation, and the “life force” that surrounds it all.

Conclusion In light of the information gathered, researched, and contemplated for this piece, what is transparent for me is that I am not the only human who has reflected upon, within, and through mysticism, higher thinking, or inner self-reflection in relation to the outer world, spiritual knowledge, and/or spirituality in motion. Pinar (2015) notes that being spiritual is not the easiest thing to be all of the time. He stresses the importance of internal messages. To understand what these messages are requires a heightened awareness. The process is not to change who we are, but to allow the messages to become a part of us, “not grafting a new skin” (Pinar, 2015, p. 19) but integrating into what one already is. Spiritual encounter is provoked by the inner self. By inner self, I mean the human spirit. It is provoked through the relationship we, I, and you, have built through the lived experiences encountered so far. Making meaning from these encounters requires, first, a decision to look beyond the everyday business-as-usual events that may have us bound up tightly in knots, perhaps preventing us from making meaning in our lives. Spirituality does not mean stop living your life as it is. It is a realization: an encounter with our inner selves in relation to the universal energy that flows within all living beings. As I grow and understand what spiritual encounter means to me, as a Kanien’kehá:ka, a woman, mother, wife, and grandmother, I equate it with what and who I may have been prior to this inception of human experience. I recall Pinar (2015) adding, that it is not only an integration or becoming what we already are, but also an alteration of whom we already are. These alterations are necessary if we (I) are to decolonize ourselves from the generic guidelines of curricula and teaching, allowing our true selves to take shape and flourish into the spirits we are meant to be. Over time, details of experience seem to fade in the distance of my mind; like old photographs, they lose their brilliance and clarity. However, the context in which an experience (like the one I had in dancing the woman’s dance) takes place is equally important when trying to understand its significance in that moment in your life. As I recall, it was a time of loneliness and loss. Daily, I would try to make sense of why my older sister died in such a horrible accident and why wasn’t my mother able to overcome her own grief? Through my own realization of this encounter, I have grown to

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understand that my experience had alleviated some of the pain that was buried so deeply within my heart. As spiritual encounters continuously alter my being, I am drawn back toward the foundation laid out by my ancestors. Therefore, my Indigenousness also lies in the spirit of the people: the people of generations past flood through to the present and the future of those who have yet to come from beneath the earth’s surface. My Indigenousness lies within, in spirit. It is a knowing of who I am, stemming from an awareness through feeling, not thought. And because “I have been taught, nourished, and sustained by my culture, my deepest values and my view of the world were formed within an Indian culture” (Hampton, 1995, p. 7). It is spirituality in motion, through encounters as powerful and as beautiful as pure radiant love. Ne’e non:wa enska entitewahwe’nón:ni ne onkwa’nikon:ra: Now our minds have come full circle.

References Aoki, T. (2004). Teaching as indwelling between two curriculum worlds (1986/1991). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 159–165). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Battiste, M. (2010). Nourishing the learning spirit: Living our way to new thinking. Education Canada, 50(1), 14–18. Battiste, M., & Youngblood Henderson, J. (2000). Protecting Indigenous knowledge and heritage: A global challenge. Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing Ltd. Bilodeau, C. (2001). “They honor our Lord among themselves in their own way”: Colonial Christianity and the Illinois. The American Indian Quarterly, 25(3), 352–487. doi:10.1353/aiq.2001.0045 Cajete, G. A. (1994). Look to the mountain: An ecology of Indigenous education. Durango, CO.: Kivaki Press. Cajete, G. A. (2005). American Indian epistemologies. New Directions for Student Services, 109, 69–78. doi:10.1002/ss.155 Castellano M. B., Davis, L., & Lahache, L. (Eds.). (2000). Aboriginal education: Fulfilling the promise. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Chambers, C. M. (2003). “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances”: A view of contemporary curriculum discourses in Canada. In W. Pinar (Ed.), International handbook of curriculum research (pp. 221–249). Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates. Deloria, V., Jr. (1992). God is red: A Native view of religion. Golden, CO.: Fulcrum Publishing. Ermine, W. (1995). Aboriginal epistemology. In M. Battiste & J. Barman (Eds.), First Nations education in Canada: The circle unfolds (pp. 101–112). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Hampton, E. (1995). Towards a redefinition of Indian education. In M. Battiste & J. Barman (Eds.), First Nations education in Canada: The circle unfolds (pp. 5–46). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Hanohano, P. (1999). The spiritual imperative of native epistemology: Restoring harmony and balance to education. Canadian Journal of Native Education. 23(2), 206–226.

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Kanu, Y. (2003). Curriculum as cultural practice: Postcolonial imagination. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(1), 67–81. Little Bear, L. (2000). Jagged worldviews colliding. In M. Battiste (Ed.), Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision (pp. 77–85). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Morris, M. (2016). Curriculum studies guidebooks: Concepts and theoretical frameworks (Vol. 2). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum. Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press, Inc. Richards, M. (2001). Toward wholeness: Rudolf Steiner education in America (pp. 146–155). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Weenie, A. (2009). Toward an understanding of the ecology of Indigenous education. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 57–70.

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Locating Who (I Am) in What (I) Do An Autoethnographic Encountering of Relational Curriculum Lisa J. Starr

We need to let go of a gridlocked view of curriculum devoid of opportunities for curriculum encounters with self and other. Reading Pinar and Grumet (2015) along with the writings of Maxine Greene, I nod my head in agreement, knowing I am not alone. As a teacher educator, too often I see inservice and preservice teachers reducing curriculum to standards and objectives, instead of considering its intricacies and nuances: relational, reflexive and personal. To encounter is to be confronted, bringing us back to “where we began” (Greene, 1965, p. 424). We need to “live with perplexity: doubts, questions, and the ‘disquietude’ that interrupts any notion of curriculum as simply a script” (Greene, 1967, p. 5). Greene further argues that we need to be “present to ourselves in the encounters” (Greene, 1978, p. 199). As I write, I find myself re-encountering the touchstone stories shared in this chapter. I am struck by how deeply I connect to physical and emotional reactions to publicly revealing my flaws, weaknesses and insecurities, in essence, making myself seen. I hope that throughout this chapter, you too find yourself connecting to the words in ways that make you nod in recognition and resonance. I believe the most important question to emerge from the curricular conversation by Pinar, Grumet and Greene is: how do we break from approaching curriculum as a static teaching manifesto? How do we replace this torpor with a living, breathing way of being in the world of learning? It is a challenge of how to become alive in and to the moment; of opening ourselves to others through embodied encounters that, while disruptive and even challenging, are productive ways to foster growth and understanding. These important moments of “vulnerability and ambiguity” (Grumet, 2015, p. 238) promise to situate us in the plural social and ideological effects of others’ lifeworlds. The plurality intimated by Grumet provides the context for this chapter and arguably a much broader understanding of curriculum. In a fractured world emphasizing standards, achievement and test scores, I can think of few goals more worth pursuing. To address the words of Pinar, Grumet and Greene and more importantly, honour the experiences of my colleagues and peers who are also trying to challenge the stagnancy of a technical curriculum, in this chapter, I attempt to pull back the curtains on my own curriculum encounters.

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In the original call for chapter proposals, the editors highlighted Pinar’s critique of how Mrs. Brown was portrayed. Pinar stated that we need to understand anew what it means to truly encounter Mrs. Brown for “Mrs. Brown is ourselves” (Pinar, 2015, p. 4). As part of this section’s focus on plurality as a condition of human action and uniqueness, my focus is on what it means to be “present to ourselves in the encounters” (Greene, 1978, p. 199). I weave in my autoethnographic snapshots, in effect embodying Mrs. Brown, as I reveal my curricular lifeworld, with the goal of creating a relational, reflexive encounter for you, the reader. This is uneasy territory for me as the path I have chosen to reveal is deeply personal but one to which I am committed. I believe it not only pushes back on superficial notions of curriculum that limit education but also against the societal limitations placed on individuals who for a variety of reasons are viewed as less than human.

Be(come)ing and Encountering To situate the writing to come, my discussion of curriculum encounters shifts encounter from its state as a noun to one of action, encountering. This decision is in line with Deleuze and Parnet’s (1987) description of be(come)ing. Deleuze and Parnet suggested that be(come)ing is represented by multiplicities that are “neither unities nor totalities” (p. vii). The relations formed therein cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts. The notion of be(come)ing is one that dwells in both-and rather than eitheror. Instead of the fixed points implied in either-or, encountering implies a fluid movement between multiplicities. Encountering Mrs. Brown or in the case of this chapter, myself, necessitates movement to truly get a sense of that curricular self as a whole, rather than a series of moments that do not add up to reveal anything meaningful. As such, I see curriculum encounters as more like curriculum encountering unrestricted by time or structure. As I begin to map the terrain of this process of curriculum encountering, I am reminded of Pinar’s (2004) notion of currere, where we study the relationship between “academic knowledge and life history in the interest of self-understanding and social reconstruction” (p. 35). Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery and Taubman (1995) suggested that an individual’s “lived experience as it is socially located, politically positioned, and discursively formed” (p. 417) is the basis for curriculum as currere. This view represents curriculum as more fluid than definite. Pinar’s conceptualization contradicts a rigid and superficial view of curriculum as only what should be taught and how it should be taught (Egan, 2003). It is this obdurate, rigid idea of curriculum that often becomes a starting point in my work with preservice teachers who, beginning there, initially resist the possibility that curriculum can be a creative, imaginative and personal endeavour. Here, my focus is on the creative tensions in

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between understanding myself as a scholar, teacher, learner and person, and how the intersections and interconnections of those senses of self have been woven together to inform my understanding of self and other. That understanding in turn has profoundly influenced how I approach my scholarship as well as my humanity.

Liminal Spaces While my notion of curriculum encountering and the currere process provide context for the movement across the terrain I am exploring, the map itself is situated in a liminal space somewhere between the professional and personal. I recognize that, on the surface, the borders of those spaces appear fixed and distinct but the reality reveals a perimeter that is very much porous and translucent. According to Cook-Sather and Alter (2011), liminal spaces are worlds of possibility, where ideas and relations flourish and conditions create space to “challenge and disrupt established norms” (p. 39). That disruption and uncertainty creates opportunities of imaginative potential or creative tension. Liminal spaces favour a praxis of uncertainty, not knowing and the possibility of new beginnings that advance complexity and affect as central features informing understanding of what it means to teach (Meyer & Land, 2005). Those spaces of uncertainty are not always comfortable spaces, but they are ones rich with opportunity. In this chapter, I have chosen to highlight a liminal space between scholarly professional and mental disorder; two spaces that do not seem to naturally intersect but are profoundly woven together to form an incredible tapestry. A Threshold Concept Within a liminal space, a threshold concept is often featured. According to Meyer and Land (2003), a threshold concept is: Akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden, or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome. (p. 1) Further, Meyer and Land suggested that a threshold concept has three features. First, it is transformative in that once the threshold concept is

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understood, its potential effect on behaviour and learning brings about a significant shift in the perception of a subject. Second, a threshold concept is irreversible in that “the change of perspective occasioned by acquisition of a threshold concept is unlikely to be forgotten or will be unlearned only by considerable effort” (p. 5). Third, a threshold concept is integrative in that it reveals the previously hidden interrelatedness of something. In 2009, in my second year of my doctoral degree, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Brown, O’Leary and Barlow (2001) cite the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 3rd Edition (DSM-III) to characterize GAD as generalized, persistent anxiety or worry that continues for at least one month and that manifests itself in at least three of four categories: (1) motor tension (e.g., muscle aches, restlessness); (2) autonomic hyperactivity (e.g., sweating, dizziness, accelerated heart rate); (3) apprehensive expectation (e.g., anxiety, worry, fear); and (4) vigilance and scanning (e.g., concentration difficulties, irritability) (p. 154). GAD is considered a chronic condition subject to periods of exacerbation and remission. The more recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Edition (DSM-IV) criteria for diagnosis places greater emphasis on the worry component and requires the presence of symptoms over a six-month period or more for diagnosis. Individuals with GAD constitute between 4 and 5 percent of the general population, with many patients indicating childhood onset, unable to recall a time when the anxiety was not present in their lives; GAD can, however, be precipitated by stressful events (Brown et al., 2001). Of importance in understanding GAD is noting the presence of anxious apprehension, explained as: A future-oriented mood state in which one becomes ready or prepared to attempt to cope with upcoming negative events. This mood state is associated with a state of high negative affect and chronic overarousal, a sense of uncontrollability, and an attentional focus on threat-related stimuli (e.g., high self-focused attention, hypervigilance for threat cues). (Brown et al., 2001, pp. 158–159) At the time, the diagnosis came with a sense of relief for being able to name something I had experienced since I was 12 years old when I would lie awake at night worried about the mundane to the apocalyptic. Because of the timing of the diagnosis, my academic career has been profoundly influenced as I have come to embrace my disordered self. Maxine Greene (1995) suggested that to encounter is to take a risk, make a choice, arrive at a decision, all without any expectation of a clear and unequivocal answer. My choice was to accept the waves of uncertainty and in doing so, I have discovered that meaningful learning comes from spaces where we know less, not more. Instead of running from, I find myself leaning into the uncertainty. That leaning in is the embodiment of reflexivity that

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leads to deepened understanding of self and other and a profound awareness of “how social contexts influence who people are and how they behave” (Danielewicz, 2001, p. 155). My GAD is the threshold concept that has unquestionably transformed the way I understand and interpret the world. I cannot change my diagnosis nor do I wish to. The frustration of the repetitive questioning that haunted my adolescent self has opened doors of understanding as a researcher as if they are a natural fit for one another. From understandings and accounts of “disorder” as something often perceived as negative that should be removed or diminished, the researcher learns to “see” or read notions of disorder differently, as an ally that aids in meaning making and understanding (Meyer & Land, 2005).

Touchstone Moments In this section I have shared three touchstone moments with the intention of showing the vulnerability and ambiguity advocated by Pinar and Grumet (2015). Strong-Wilson (2006) described a touchstone as “a text or experience that teachers kept returning to” (p. 70). Tanaka, Stanger, Tse and Farish (2013) characterized touchstone stories as those recollections, memories or stories that “emerge as a crucial place to find emotional, spiritual and intuitive resonance” (p. 68). These touchstone moments serve as autoethnographic snapshots. Autoethnography is rich in its potential to address the tensions and complexities of identity and the intersections of thinking, feeling and acting. Understanding these complexities is particularly valuable in knowing who you are, how you act and why you think/act/behave/feel the way you do. Often in teacher education, we ask student teachers to respond to reflective questions intended to help them identify who they are as teachers, yet how often do we model this practice as teacher educators and to what depth? In moving beyond the individual, such exploration requires us to look at a bigger picture to determine how our discoveries can or even should make a difference. Is the dissemination of my research into the world of education going to transform schools? Perhaps, though I cannot guarantee this outcome, but I embrace Mill’s (1959) assertion that “for public theory to influence educational practice it must be translated through the personal” (as cited in Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001, p. 15). The three touchstone moments are framed as reflexive encountering, personal encountering and relational encountering. While I have no way of knowing if these moments provoke a sense of emotional resonance for the reader, my intent is more to open a door to reveal my human self. Touchstone One: Reflexive Encountering The image in Figure 8.1 is a reflexive account from 2009 not long after I received my GAD diagnosis (Starr, 2017). I was fortunate enough at

Source: Author’s image

I know it is there; I feel its presence as much in my head as in my core, its weight on me, with me, always. What will happen if . . . always met by irremediable calamity. I am a worrier—that is what they have always said but this is more than just concern; it is an uncompromising, unyielding tumour.

Tendrils snake through my body, slowly drifting in a pattern created by knowing it can go anywhere it wants. I cannot stop it. Rising to wind its way around my heart, caressing just enough to remind me of its presence, then squeezing to ensure its grip. My heart cannot escape so it begins to beat faster, as if the rapid movement will push it back. The worry washes through, around, within. Breathing becomes more shallow. My lungs rise and tighten as if believing that by being still, they will remain hidden, unscathed. I attempt to breathe deep to push it back down but it won’t help. I have already begun to feel it in my forearms. I instinctively tuck my arms closer to my body to protect myself but the problem isn’t an attack from the outside that I can protect myself from. I cannot wrap myself in the warmth of a blanket like sheltering myself from the cold. These waves come from deep within and have their own agenda.

The constant, relentless worry rules me; guides my thoughts (oh no), my actions (slow down, what time are you coming back, be careful). It occupies space in my body like a growth and has been there so long it has become me [symbiotic—used of organisms (especially of different species) living together but not necessarily in a relation beneficial to each].

Figure 8.1 Touchstone One with accompanying image, Like a Tumour

I feel the heat creep upwards from my gut towards my heart. The first wave is light, but I know there is more to come. Unlike the gentle ocean waves, the peacefulness on the shores of a sandy beach, I know these waves embody havoc unseen by anyone else.

The white crests crash further out. How far will they travel? I wait. The first wave washes just over my toes. Feet sink further into the wet sand. How far will the next one reach?

Standing on a beach, staring out into the open water, waiting for the waves.

The first wave begins.

How far will it go? How long will it last? What will be left after?

I can feel it swelling, deep in my core, its warmth expanding, burning, coming alive again, reenergized. It languishes as if stretching . . . taunting.

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the time to have a professor who introduced me to autoethnography and encouraged me to explore my emerging sense of my academic self through reflexive writing. As I was preparing my doctoral work, I was engaged in a simultaneous learning experience about myself. The accompanying poetic text in this touchstone is a reflexive account of what anxiety can feel like. As I wrote the words, I felt deeply connected to the experience and could feel the waves I was describing creeping through my body. For many, anxiety is debilitating. For me, I have reframed my anxiety as a source of information and transformation. Embedded within my anxiety is a deep sense of empathy that I believe would be otherwise lacking in my approach to curriculum as learning. In turn, my ability to see and be seen would be limited. Often as I am teaching, I wonder how many people in the room are suffering, questioning or stuck? Maxine Greene (1995) reminded us that plurality is “the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (pp. 155–6). In that vein, my experience drives the question, how can we expect to be seen if we cannot present opportunities for others to be seen? Touchstone Two: Personal Encountering Questions, questions and so many possibilities. Was this the beginning of the journey towards understanding the world through the eyes of a researcher? Throughout adolescence and probably earlier I was plagued by questions, not in the sense of childlike curiosity, trying to understand my world; it was more than that, bigger than that. I played basketball. I had good skills and some natural ability, a decent work ethic and I understood the game but could never really truly excel because in the split second that requires action in a game, endless possibilities rose in front of me: Inevitably and repeatedly, questions became obstacles because people want answers to questions. What are you doing after high school? Where are you going to school? It is not that I did not have answers to those questions; I had too many answers, too many possibilities, so many in fact that I was stalled by them. So much so that despite being accepted into university, I did nothing about it. I did not register for classes. I did not apply to residence. I did not do anything other than try to ignore it. Towards the end of the summer, my father marched downstairs to my room, opened the door, told me to get out of bed and get in the car. Of course, I asked why. He told me we were driving to the university and registering me in any classes that were open. And so my journey began. I did not choose my path, more like it chose me. The autoethnographic snapshots in Figures 8.2 and 8.3 represent in part the evolution of my illness; my worry and anxiety manifested itself in the form of questioning. The more I would worry, the more questions

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Wh at s h o u l d i d o ? w h at s h o u l d i d o ? w h at s h o u l d i d o ? shouldigo?whatwillhappenifigo?willilikeit? n o o n e i k n ow i s g o i n g . i f i s t a y h o m e w h a t w i l l i d o ? e v e ry oneelseisgoingmaybeishouldtoo?whatshould itake?ihavenoidea.somethingeasy?maybetea ching?engineeringistoohard.ithastobesome thingiwillbegoodat.howdoiknowiwillbegood at i t ? p e m ay b e ? i h av e wa i t e dto o l o n g , t he r e w i l l b e n o c o u rs e s l e f t. w h at i f i h at e i t w h at w i l l i d o ? c o m e h o m e ? no!whatshouldido?whatshouldido?whatshouldido? Figure 8.2 Touchstone Two with accompanying image, Thinking in Rapid Fire Source: Author’s image

I c o u l d d r i v e b u t t h e n s h e ’ l l p i c k m e u p s o m ay b e I s h o u l d pas s to J e s s e b u t s h e w i l l s h o o t t h e n I s h o u l d r e b o u n d , wi llsheblockmeout ? Ca n Ig e ta ro u n d h e r ? Wh e r e a r e w e i n t h e p l ay ? I f I pa s s b a c k h i g h s h o u l d I s c r e e n d ow n , r e m e m b e r to ro l l . M ay b e I s h o u l d Ju s t s h o o t. R e b o u n d f i rs t. Bac ko n d e f e n c e . Wh at i f w e g e t t h e r e b o u n d ? Fi n d m y check. Figure 8.3 Touchstone Two with accompanying image, Thinking in Rapid Fire (2) Source: Author’s image

emerged. When I began university my parents bought me an electric typewriter that had enough memory that you could type several full sentences, then review them to edit before they would print. When I hit the print button, the keys would rapidly click clack out my words much faster than I could actually type them. The font and spacing in these shared anecdotes mimic the action of that typewriter spitting out my words faster than I could type them. Much like that typewriter, my thinking was a rapid succession of questions that exceeded my ability to respond to them. When I could respond, the answers multiplied and inevitably led to more questions, making inaction my choice of action in an endless cycle of questioning. I learned to cope through physical engagement—starting in seventh grade, basketball, volleyball, softball, track and badminton. Into university I continued to play sports through intramurals and city leagues and even played varsity basketball for two years. I became a secondary physical education teacher, which allowed me to continue to be active into adulthood. I did not realize at the time how much being physical helped me, how essential it was to my mental health. When looking back, I am reminded of Lather’s (1991) and Le Grange and Beets’ (2005) discussion of rhizomatics as a move away from hierarchies to “networks and the complexity of problematics where any concept, when

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pulled, is recognised as connected to a mass of tangled ideas, uprooted, as it were, from the epistemological field” (Le Grange & Beets, 2005, p. 117). My identity, as presented in this touchstone, is a mass of complex tangles—a weedy and unpredictable garden that is interconnected and interdependent. Through the construction, interpretation and sharing of these touchstone moments, I have engaged in understanding my network and providing insight for others. Such expressive activities “enable learners to share their experiential knowing in a way that provides others with a brief portal of entry into sharing that experience and perhaps relating it to their own experiential knowing” (Davis-Manigaulte, Yorks, & Kasl, 2006, pp. 31–32). More importantly, I have used my experience to further the understanding of validity, both rhizomatic and catalytic, and to challenge the belief that disorder is synonymous with dysfunction. By digging into my own sense of identity as a child, an adult, a researcher, an educator and as someone labelled disordered, I have pulled at the meaning of each to see how they connect to and inform one another. The interconnectedness of these roles and of my identity is found in the roots of childhood questioning and anxiety that inform, contribute and create my identity as a researcher just as being a researcher has created space for my disorder, GAD, to be viewed as an ability as opposed to a dis-ability. Touchstone Three: Relational Encountering What does it mean to find your place? Does it require an actual location? Is it physical, emotional spiritual? Is it all of these? Does it require a sense of purpose or a degree of life experience? Where does who we are fit into what we do? I feel like I want to know why, all of the time, even in the smallest details, in everyday conversation. It can be exhausting. What did that person mean when they said this, or what are they really saying? Would they say the same thing if I wasn’t the one asking? But not everyone else thinks that way. Most people take things at face value. If they ask you a question, they take your response for what it is. They don’t examine it then or afterwards. Questions, questions and more questions. They are noisy and messy, like the constant buzzing of the lights, the fridge, the TV, the computer. There are the noises that are louder, the radio is on playing a song that I don’t really like but I somehow know the words, children are playing outside arguing over who can tag the tagger, someone is mowing their lawn down the road, there is a truck coming down the road, must be a big one if I can hear it from here. How can I be more like that? Can I learn to leave things as is?

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Lisa J. Starr Why would you want to? Isn’t that part of who you are? The challenge is to find a way to make it work and not become a hurdle you are always trying to get over or around.

There are times when the noise stops, like during a storm when the power goes out. After the thunder stops and the winds die down, there is a stillness that only happens when the power is out, especially at night when people are sleeping. There are no cars on the roads; all of the background noise that is ever-present disappears. That is when certain sounds can be heard differently, more clearly; the gentle wind in the trees, or maybe the rain hitting the ground or the roof—sweet sounds, calming sounds, natural sounds—sounds that you can feel. Maybe because they occur without the cacophony of noise in the background. That moment, those moments you can feel where you are—you can hear yourself breathe, your heart beat in your ear, your footsteps on the floor. I feel a sense of perspective that is otherwise drowned in the everyday demands and the noise they make. I have become more at peace with the questions because I have given them purpose. As I learn and grow, I have found that place where there is a sense of calm, of belonging, of purpose and where the questions have become less noisy. They don’t pick or rattle at me like the sounds of a typewriter constantly tapping in my brain. That part of me, who I am, fits in with what I do, and maybe even makes both better. I have chosen my path instead of it choosing me. In retrospect, this conversation was the moment when I recognized that the questioning, the worrying, the anxiety was me, not something that needed to be fixed but something that made me who I was as both a person and a successful academic.

Concluding Thoughts Returning to the words of Maxine Greene (1967) earlier in this chapter, if we are to present ourselves to the encounters and return to where we began, then we must reveal ourselves. By doing so, encountering curriculum becomes a relational experience where we connect to one another as well as the learning we encourage. I have revealed myself in this chapter by inviting the reader into my complex and often hidden lifeworld. I have attempted to create a portal like that described earlier by Meyer and Land. The first touchstone provides insight into the feeling generated by my anxiety, while the second touchstone in its rapid fire, typewriter-like prose, shows the thinking. I am not certain that the insight and understanding is intended more for myself or for the reader.

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Perhaps more accurately, it is both. Since I cannot account for anyone else’s understanding as I imagine people reading this chapter, I can only share mine. I liken my transformed understanding to what Davis and Sumara (2006) described as an enabling constraint where the conditions help to determine a balance between “sources of coherence that allow a collective to maintain a focus of purpose/identity and sources of disruption and randomness that compel the collective to constantly adjust and adapt” (p. 145). I have embraced my anxiety as a source of disruption and adaptability that has forever changed my perspective of myself and the world. I have spent much time reflecting on the integrative nature of understanding my anxiety yet, in the context of this chapter, I cannot see how it might integrate with others. I can only set the table and invite others to join me. My hope is that my writing is much less about the text and more about experiencing the text. The result is a far greater ability to explore the vexing issues, ideas and complexities born out of direct experience with and of curriculum that do not dwell in the neat boxes of understanding that curriculum promote. Drawing on Noddings (1995), encountering curriculum becomes about “caring for self, for intimate others, for strangers and global others, for the natural world and its nonhuman creatures, for the human-made world, and for ideas” (p. 675). I conclude with one last developing touchstone. When I bought my home, I inherited a simple yard. In the flower beds, there was only one kind of plant with tall green leaves. While the plants added greenery, they weren’t very dynamic, just tall green leaves. In the late spring, a few simple but lovely purple flowers bloomed. After some internet searching, I discovered that the plants were bearded irises that rise out of complex rhizomes that form the root system from which the plants grow. As I set out to make this new house my home, I replanted the irises in two different places in the yard: around the base of my favourite tree and along a fence opposite the tree. The following season, neither yielded any blooms nor did either set seem to flourish the way they had in their original home. Under the tree was too dark and along the fence was too bright. I also buried the rhizomes under soil and mulch thinking they would grow when in fact I deprived them of the air the rhizomes needed. Burying the rhizomes meant that the flowers could not be seen nor was the plant allowed to flourish. Through my own actions, though well intended, I prevented any opportunity for the bloom to be seen. To “present ourselves in the encounter” (p. 199) as Maxine Greene (1978) said, we must be willing to put forward our flawed selves and create the conditions in order to generate understanding of curriculum as a living, breathing, nuanced and complex system and one rich with opportunities to grow and connect. The nourishment that allows us to flourish comes from an evolving state of be(come)ing seen, not buried; be(come)ing vulnerable, not perfect and be(come)ing our true selves to allow others to join us.

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References Brown, T. A., O’Leary, T. A., & Barlow, D. H. (2001). Generalized anxiety disorder. In D. H. Barlow (Ed.), Clinical handbook of psychological disorders (3rd ed.): A step-by-step treatment manual (pp. 154–208). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Bullough, R. V., & Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13–21. doi:10. 3102/0013189X030003013 Cook-Sather, A., & Alter, Z. (2011). What is and what can be: How a liminal position can change learning and teaching in higher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 42(1), 37–53. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2010.01109.x Danielewicz, J. (2001). Teaching selves: Identity, pedagogy, and teacher education. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Davis, B., & Sumara, D. (2006). Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching and research. London, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum. Davis-Manigaulte, J., Yorks, L., & Kasl, E. (2006). Expressive ways of knowing and transformative learning. New Directions for Adult & Continuing Education, 109, 27–35. doi:10.1002/ace.205 Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans). London, UK: The Athlone Press. Egan, K. (2003). What is curriculum? Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(1), 9–16. Greene, M. (1965). Real toads and imaginary gardens. Teachers College Record, 66(5), 416–425. Greene, M. (1967). Existential encounters for teachers. New York, NY: Random House. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Grumet, M. (2015). Autobiography: The mixed genre of private and public. In W. F. Pinar and M. R. Grumet, Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 220–244). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York, NY: Routledge. Le Grange, L., & Beets, P. (2005). (Re)conceptualizing validity in (outcomes-based) assessment. South African Journal of Education, 25(2), 115–119. Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practising. In C. Rust (Ed.), Improving student learning: Theory and practice-ten years on (pp. 412–424). Oxford, UK: Oxford Center for Staff Learning and Development. Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2005). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education Research, 49(3), 373–388. doi:10.1007/s10734-004-6779-5 Noddings, N. (1995). Teaching themes of care. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(9), 675–679. Retrieved January 4, 2018, from www.jstor.org/stable/20405432 Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Pinar, W. F. (2015). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 1–7). Kingston, NY: Educators International Press. Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. R. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed.). Kingston, NY: Educators International Press. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P. G., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Starr, L. J. (2017, February). Locating who (I am) in what (I) do: An autoethnography of a relational teacher educator. Paper presented at the Provoking Curriculum Conference (Provoking “Curriculum Encounters”). McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. Strong-Wilson, T. (2006). Re-visioning one’s narratives: Exploring the relationship between researcher self-study and teacher research. Studying Teacher Education: A Journal of Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, 2(1), 59–76. doi:10.1080/17425960600557470 Tanaka, M., Stanger, N. R. G., Tse, V., & Farish, M. (2013). Transformative inquiry. Retrieved March 10, 2016, from www.transformativeinquiry.ca/downloads/files/ transformativeinquiryv4.pdf

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Toward a Bountiful Curriculum An Intercultural Encounter With Al-Farabi’s Pedagogy of Proximity (Ittisal) Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar

In his preface, Pinar (2015c) remarks, “Nineteen seventy-six was no golden era, but—given the nightmare that is the present—it sometimes seems so” (p. vii). This observation urged me to seek a counterpart in my own experiences and pedagogical practices; it should perhaps prompt all educators to do the same. What solace could such a counterpart bring to “the nightmare that is the present”? I theorize curriculum as praxis of emergent intercultural encounters, seeking to identify a “golden era” counterpart marked by forward-looking propositions that can challenge the curriculum as a prescribed and fixed script. Which intercultural encounters can help unpack ethnocentric and xenophobic narratives in education, interrupting the oppositional dialectic of “us” vs “them” or the sense of obligation arising from the dominant group’s imposing of cultural values? In what ways can we develop a curriculum of plurality attuned to provoking intercultural encounters? Further, what can “anarchives,” a term used by the editors to suggest forward-looking praxis, contribute to our understanding of curriculum theory within the context of such an intercultural, pluralistic education? In response to this query, the aim of this chapter is to appropriate the notion of Farabism in order to diversify current curriculum theory, contributing to plurality in education. The term Farabism is borrowed from Madkour (1934) and Netton (1992), for whom it denotes a philosophical framework that attempts to synthesize the thoughts of four medieval Muslim thinkers, including Al-Farabi. This project appropriates the term to refer to an educational and philosophical method that fosters, but is not limited to, a specific skill called Ittisal, which exemplifies Al-Farabi’s reaction to the political upheavals of his time. More importantly, Farabism refers to Al-Farabi’s conceptualization of plurality. I explore how it resonates with Pinar and Grumet’s (2015) concept of a humanities curriculum.

Al-Farabi’s Encounter With the “Nightmare That Is the Present” Netton (1992) has argued that “The Age of al-Farabi,” which runs “from the birth of al-Farabi in AD 870 to the death of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi

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in about AD 1023” (p. 1), defines the intellectual medieval landscape of an age that contributed significantly to the development of the philosophical and educational traditions of Islamic thought. Born in Farab, Turkistan, Al-Farabi studied logic with the Christian cleric Yuhanna ibn Haylan in Baghdad and also had contacts with the Abbasid court. He was therefore linked to the Syriac neo-Aristotelian tradition, heir to the Alexandrian and Hellenistic traditions. He visited Egypt under the reign of the Fatimids, and finished much of his writing in Damascus and Aleppo under the protection of Sayf al-Dawla. He spoke several languages, was a skilled musician, and wrote a now-lost autobiographical tract, The Rise of Philosophy. Well-trained in the Syriac tradition, Aristotelian logic, and the Hellenistic philosophical legacy, Al-Farabi was considered “the first systembuilder in the history of Arab-Islamic thought” (Fakhry, 2002, p. 2). In “On the Appearance of Philosophy,” Al-Farabi argued that the Islamic study of logic is an extension of the early Greek, Alexandrian, Roman, and Christian philosophical traditions (Rescher, 1963, p. 130). His anecdotal account of logical studies demonstrates an autobiographical undertone reflecting his experience as a pupil of famous logicians, including Yuhanna ibn Haylan and Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Baghdadi. As with Plato’s witnessing of the sunset of Greek civilization, Al-Farabi’s lifetime during the Abbasid Caliphate of the eighth century was both a golden era and a disastrous one, “which encompassed major developments on both the political and religious fronts: it was certainly an age of deep instability and change” (Netton, 1992, p. 2). Power was no longer centralized, but had shifted to the peripheries, while centrifugal authorities began to assert themselves in the shape of hereditary rulers. Toward the end of Al-Farabi’s life, the Buyid, a Persian dynasty, took over Baghdad in 945. This “nightmare that is the present” for Al-Farabi, marked by political upheavals and social instability, manifested in a number of political and theological groups that intermittently dominated the scene—Shi’ism, Zaydism, Hellenism, and Mu’tazilism, to name a few. As the empire both expanded and fragmented, Al-Farabi recognized the importance of a shared public interest and a sense of purpose that would bring together the distant parts of the Islamic world. Just as Plato’s witnessing of the demise of Athens inspired him to establish ethical and political foundations of justice, Al-Farabi was likewise inspired by the decentralization of the Islamic world. He departed from the Aristotelian definition of justice as “equitable distribution of ‘common goods’ . . . security, wealth, dignity and public office” (Fakhry, 1998, p. 440) to explore a conceptualization of justice as Ittisal: an intercultural cognitive, communicative, and communal attempt at dialogical reconciliation predicated on biographic education, logic, and synthesis. Al-Farabi defined Ittisal within a cosmological theory of knowledge: When humans attain the highest stage of theoretical knowledge, they will have attained the stage of union with the Active Intellect, the

118 Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar storehouse of all intelligibles. This stage Al-Farabi sometimes called conjunction (ittisal), sometimes proximity (qurb, muqarabah), in which humans’ ultimate happiness consists. (Fakhry, 2002, p. 93) I use the term Ittisal without its cosmological implications, regarding it instead as a signifier of intercultural practices whose ultimate objective is to move toward Farabism, an educational rhetoric primarily informed by synthesis and reconciliation. In practice, if Farabism is a theoretical curricular framework, then Ittisal is one of its particular outcomes. The word Ittisal is often translated as conjunction. However, I prefer the cognate proximity, which emphasizes the interconnection and interdependence of cultural and intellectual elements that designate Farabism as a desirable curriculum theory, one that accommodates intercultural encounters and generates zones of contact. In this context, Al-Farabi was confronted with the arduous task of harmonizing socio-political and regional oppositional forces in the Islamic intellectual landscape in order to embark on a Hamlet-esque quest to set right a world out of joint: an echo of Pinar’s nightmare that is the present. Al-Farabi’s goals were to find common ground among contradictions, harmonize dominant philosophies, reconcile Platonic and Aristotelian views, address opposing metaphysical and epistemological questions, and unite logic with revelation. This move toward a rhetoric of reconciliation, which informs Farabism, is only attainable through the actualization of Ittisal, conceived as a literacy skill that learners can acquire within an encompassing educational narrative of a humanities curriculum.

An Educational Theory of the Humanities In her preface to the 2006 edition of Toward a Poor Curriculum, Grumet argued that the collection of essays on which she collaborated with Pinar was meant as an encounter between educational research and the humanistic tradition. Currere, she elaborated in her 2015 preface, was intended “to propose a humanities methodology as an alternative to the social science inquires that were dominating educational research” (Grumet, 2015a, p. x). Pinar and Grumet sought a method that would support the concept of a humanities curriculum. Pinar (2015b) argued that currere refers to “my existential experience of external structures. The method . . . is a strategy devised to disclose this experience, so that we may see more of it and see more clearly” (p. xiv). It can be argued that this proposed dialectic is Hegelian, at least in terms of its industrious nature, rigorous practices, and intent to resolve presuppositions and oppositional aspects: The thesis of our dialectic is: I don’t know, and I must study, and search. I must be open to my experiences, open to others’, and be

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willing to abandon what I think in the face of what I see. This is the posture of the student. The posture of being open, receptive, ready to incorporate the new. (Pinar, 2015b, p. xv) That spirit of inquiry, of readiness or the receptive quality to “incorporate the new” and rethink normative forms, is not an invention of the Western tradition. A dialectic that is rooted in the liberal arts and seeks to liberate the mind from the shackles of normative thinking is also central to the Islamic educational tradition. Muslim scholars have historically been caught in a crisis of scholarship between ijtihad, a process of reasoning, and taqlid, or sheer imitation. Many medieval Islamic schools of thought such as Kalam school and its Mutazilites have favoured falsafa (Arabic for philosophy) and have championed logic as the intellectual path toward hikmah, or wisdom, popularizing logic and reason as fundamental sources for resolving theological debates and acquiring knowledge. Al-Farabi was a staunch critic of taqlid, opposing the uncritical acceptance of authoritative sources and believing that claims to knowledge were not the exclusive domain of traditional interpretations of scripture. In effect, his pursuit of knowledge was defined by his eagerness to reconcile faith with reason, indigenous thought with foreign influences and non-regional wisdom traditions such as the Hellenistic heritage. The Farabian valuing of reconciliation is important today because of contemporary radical views and extreme acts of violence, which represent an encroachment upon the Islamic tradition, and which have tarnished the image of Islam and its intellectual, scientific, and philosophical contributions, leading to its dismissal as a social oddity. The desire for reconciliation, therefore, frames our encounter with “the nightmare that is the present.” Invoking Farabism as a synthesizing method, especially at the present time, can serve an important educational function in the Muslim and Arab world. Incorporating intercultural dialogue in a politically charged world is a challenge, particularly with the Muslim and Arab educational systems’ present focus on scientific studies while relegating the liberal arts to secondary positions. The dominance of a regurgitative educational system in the Arab/Muslim world betrays the demise of a true implementation of the liberal arts as tools to unfetter dominant presuppositions. Very few universities offer degrees that challenge students’ socio-religious and cultural presuppositions and teach them “to think about important existential and philosophical questions, such as: Who am I? What is my responsibility to society? How does my life connect with a larger history of culture?” (Ghabra & Arnold, 2007, p. 14). Encounters with Farabism are essential for any educational system to be pluralistic and interculturally thriving, reminding us that a revised Islamic intellectual curriculum is within reach, based in Islamic traditions. Rather than attempt to revitalize

120 Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar an educational system that revisits an Islamic tradition rooted in liberal arts, Western universities and Americanized education systems now proliferate in the Islamic world, thriving on their universal appeal and not necessarily because they register any move toward a research-based educational system. In reality, this obsession with Western institutionalized learning enunciates a slip into pale mimicry trapped once again in taqlid. A currere that moves from taqlid toward ijtihad requires encounters that include curricular materials, historical trajectories, and synthetical traits. For instance, in The Virtuous City, inspired by Plato’s Republic, Al-Farabi synthesizes Plato’s vision with a Neoplatonic theoretical content, making sure that he fine-tunes the final product to be consciously conducive to the actualization of an Islamic utopia. Likewise, the Farabian educational system necessitates a move beyond the narrow horizon of taqlid and toward the wider terrain of ijtihad. This proposal can only be actualized by integrating the liberal arts into the curriculum. The intercultural and inquisitive apparatus of Farabism acknowledges with Pinar that the regressive phase initiates encounters with traditional heritage and cultural husbandry: “The first step of the method of currere is the regressive, the free associative remembrance of the past. We work to excavate the present by focusing on the past” (2015b, p. xv). According to Pinar, the next step is “the progressive, [which] asks me to ponder meditatively the future, in order to uncover my aspiration, in order to ascertain where I am moving” (p. xv). Farabism, I argue, entertains two intercultural capacities, fadhl and musammaha, which together constitute a bountiful curriculum that can, in the long run, readily actualize a progressive state. This second stage is followed by analysis and finally by synthesis, which are discussed within the Farabian notions of Active Intellect and Ittisal. In effect, this chapter studies the resonance of Farabism with Pinar and Grumet’s educational method, as both are effusively informed by the humanities. The rest of the chapter is structured around four modes of currere pluralistically interpolated with Farabism.

The Regressive Mode: Encounters With the Biographical Situation in Culture In his attempt to actualize an “educational theory of the humanities” (p. 1), Pinar (2015a) revisited Virginia Woolf’s (2008 [1924]) essay, “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” which describes a train ride. In “Character in Fiction,” Woolf criticized the Edwardian novelists for “having looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature” (as cited in Pinar, 2015a, p. 3). Pinar spoke of striking parallels “between the literary situation” that Woolf described and “the situation of educational research

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in 1974” (p. 3). He explained that “we look at programs, at materials, at teaching styles and techniques. . . . We say we look at the ‘individual,’ but that too is usually just a word, an abstraction, and not the embedded spirit behind the word” (p. 4). Pinar (2015d) argued in favour of the individual’s intellectual and learning capacity. He further explained that the individual “has always been out there . . . someone else . . . at a distance” (p. 21). This “distance” not only separates but also informs classroom practices and content, and renders the knowledge gained in schools both partial and limited. Hence, Pinar invoked a “biographic situation” (p. 27), which strives toward an individualized curriculum informed by the humanities. Just as Mrs. Brown, in Woolf’s essay, was seen at a distance, the individual, who was once at the centre of the humanities curriculum, has become an antagonized subject: “The traditional humanities curriculum is based on the idea that the individual is the cause, and not the effect, of social meanings: he is the origin of signification” (Zavarzadeh & Morton, 1991, p. 1). In effect, the individual “at a distance” (Pinar, 2015d, p. 21) represents the inability on the part of the curriculum: its attempt to chase but never capture the emotive and intellectual potential of the individual learner. More specifically, for Pinar (2015d), the individual at a distance represents “the loss of status of the humanities, the disciplines currently closest to self-study .  .  . a reflection of our estrangement and outer-centeredness, hence bondage to the world of stimulus and response” (p. 28). Any positive move toward eliminating this “distance” entails moments of “psychic exploration,” which provoke a retrieval of the cultural and intellectual storage “from which the hidden reveals itself” through “the reclaiming of the lost” (p. 29). For Pinar, the regressive mode invites us to revisit the past through a biographic reconceptualization of the self. Farabism, as I argue here, provides a theoretical basis from which to conceptualize a curriculum informed by a biographic heritage grounded in the humanities. The biographic aspect of Al-Farabi’s intellectual output is pivotal to better understand the regressive mode: “Al-Farabi’s life represented a striving for order against a background of instability and change. It was the product of a highly eclectic milieu” (Netton, 1992, p. 7). That milieu was self-conscious and inclusive. Al-Farabi’s main contribution was to demonstrate how Aristotelian teachings and logical reasoning can be adapted to answer contemporary questions in an Islamic society where dissidence loomed large. Al-Farabi’s insight into the regressive mode was to see an opportunity for philosophy to reinvigorate itself within the Islamic intellectual heritage. As a result, he was one of the prominent road-makers for the integration of the humanities into Islam and hence the rise of a new biography of a nation. Accordingly, the Farabian conceptualization of the educational regressive mode is paradoxically fascinating for being simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic, resonating with Pinar’s (2015e) visionary educational method which asks

122 Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar us to go back and revisit the past: “The past is entered, lived in . . . to observe oneself functioning in the past. . . . Observe and record. Include present responses to what is observed” (p. 73). In this context, Farabism is an encounter in which the external must be internalized, becoming part of the biographic component, as exemplified by al-Farabi’s integration of the history of thought into the Islamic tradition to address perennial questions as well as the particular challenges of his age. Al-Farabi provides an account of the rise of philosophy in the Islamic world, which he traces to the Alexandrian school of Greek philosophy and how “falsafa,” the Arabic word for philosophy, reached Baghdad. In his biographical narration of his intellectual and philosophical heritage, he acknowledges his teachers, recounting his experiences as the first Muslim to read Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics: Being Muslim was a distinct advantage as Christians were prohibited from reading certain works of logic comprising the Organon of Aristotle. This personal account of al-Farabi is one instance of many fruitful dialogues between the Greek culture and the JudeoChristian-Islamic tradition. (Nanji, 1989, p. 12) This Greco-Islamic pluralistic narrative resonates with Grumet’s conceptualization of currere as the individual’s “active reconstruction of his [or her] passage through its social, intellectual, physical structures” (Grumet, 2015b, p. 142). It is apparent that, in their pursuit of a method, Pinar was looking for “‘thematic variation’ in individual biographies” (Pinar, 2015e, p. 80), which is reflected in Al-Farabi’s vision of cultural variations within the Greco-Islamic pluralistic narrative. Al-Farabi believed that such coherence was valid only if, once realized, it could be linked to sociocultural issues within one’s society. In other words, Al-Farabi found the biographic situation embedded in the national, suggesting that the biographic aspect is significant only as an allegory of the culture’s own trajectory. I am not suggesting here that Farabism is a departure from Pinar’s and Grumet’s conceptualization of the biographic situation, since for all of these, a single narrative or a single past should not inform identity in its entirety: “By moving in the past, one observes how the conceptual is only a part, however integral a part, of the biographic situation” (Pinar, 2015e, p. 79). Al-Farabi finds the collective history of the people enacted in the regressive mode. Likewise, in The Character of Curriculum Studies, Pinar (2011) recognizes a more inclusive and world-encompassing vision that reverberates with Farabism: Recently, I have refocused autobiography from self-study to selfexpressivity through academic knowledge directed to, informed by, the world. The world was always the source of lived experience, but

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early on I underemphasized the world in order to articulate the singularity and specificity of lived experience. (p. xiii) In effect, the regressive phase seeks to perceive “schooling as preparation for life” (Pinar, 2011, p. xi). For Pinar, the curriculum has two structures: “its internal structures (e.g., school subjects, their content and sequencing, and assessment) and its external structures (e.g., the alignment of the curriculum with the world beyond the school)” (Pinar, 2011, p. xi). In this sense, the regressive phase focusses on the external structure of the curriculum. However, a visit is by definition temporary: “The past is entered, lived in, but not necessarily succumbed to” (Pinar, 2015e, p. 73). The capacity to redefine the self through such encounters with external narratives, the world, the foreign, and the individual experience, among other “thematic variations” of the past, can help re-negotiate the biographic situation, which applies to the Islamic context as well.

The Progressive Mode: Pinar’s “Buried Visions” as Farabian Fadhl and Musammaha To imagine a future, Pinar and Grumet invite their readers to look “at what is not yet the case, what is not yet present” (Pinar, 2015e, p. 75). Pinar urges readers to “allow usually buried visions of what is not yet present to manifest” (p. 76). Al-Farabi envisions a city of the future, which he delineated in his book Al-Madinah Al-Fadhilah, often translated as The Virtuous City or The Perfect City. However, I argue that a translation such as The Bountiful City reflects a more panoptic view of the Farabian educational and philosophical perspective. The word fadhilah is a variation of the word fadhl, which appears in the Quran. For instance, in Surah 62, verse 4, referring to the act of sending the Prophet to teach wisdom and the scripture, he says: “That is the bounty (fadhl) of God, which He gives to whom He wills, and God is the possessor of great bounty (fadhl).” In this context, the Arabic word fadhilah means a pursuit and a disposition toward abundance and exuberance. Al-Farabi’s educational model can therefore be called a “bountiful curriculum” since its ultimate aims are plenitude and happiness in life. The ultimate goal of the learner is to collaborate in the creation of an ideal community, “one whose cities all work together in order to attain happiness” (Al-Farabi, 1985, p. 97). The “bountiful curriculum” is progressive and pluralistic, allowing “buried visions of what is not yet present to manifest” (Pinar, 2015e, p. 76) and develop from “thematic variations” (p. 80) and “evolving historical condition[s]” of a tradition (p. 76). Al-Farabi would perhaps have argued that we can actualize Pinar’s progressive vision of an “imagined futuristic state” (Pinar, 2015e, p. 76) via what he calls fadhl and another notion that he calls musammaha.

124 Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar At face value, fadhl denotes abundance in excellence, which is training oriented and felicity directed, but there is more than meets the eye; the following extract from The Virtuous City makes plain: The people of the excellent [fadhilah] city have things in common which they all perform and comprehend, and other things which each class knows and does on its own. Each of these people reaches the state of felicity by precisely these two things. . . . The same is true of the actions by which felicity is attained: the more they increase [tazayadat] and are repeated . . . the stronger and more excellent and more perfect becomes the soul. (1985, pp. 261–265) The verb “tazadyadat,” which is the Arabic word for “become ample,” refers to fadhl, abundance. Hypothetically, the city generates fadhl when its citizens strive toward excellence through consistency and repetition in order for them to achieve felicity. For Al-Farabi, it seems that the relation between the virtues or excellences (aretai) and happiness (eudaimonia), which was a primary concern for both Plato and Aristotle, can be resolved if the people of the city recognize what they have “in common” and what each “class” and community can contribute. This notion of fadhl, geared toward excellence and abundance for individuals, resonates with Pinar’s interest in bildung as “subjective engagement with the social and the cultural for the sake of self-formation” (Pinar, 2011, p. xiv). In Al-Farabi’s envisioned city, fadhl emanates when the citizens truly strive to attain felicity through two capacities; namely to “perform and comprehend” (Al-Farabi, 1985, p. 261) their position in a culturally diverse society. Likewise, bildung is an enabling capacity for the interpretation of “experience as cultural and historical” and “the cultivation of judgment and pleasure” (Pinar, 2011, p. 3). Not only do they contribute to the educational process of self-formation, but they also are both cultural and religious manifestations. Fadhl serves as part of the Quranic rhetoric as aforementioned. Similarly, bildung sits “at the heart of the religion of humanity that emerged out of the German Enlightenment” (Luft, 2003, p. 15). Both fadhl and bildung can be associated with “the formation of the individual” in terms of “aesthetic education” and “religious connotations” (Pinar, 2011, p. xiv). Almost declared as one of “the causalities of postmodernism,” Pinar (2011) argues that bildung survived being buried in “conceptual landfills . . . due to its malleability” (pp. 2–3). In our preparation to teach and formulate a bountiful curriculum, we may have found resonance between bildung and fadhl as “buried visions” (Pinar, 2015e, p. 76) that subscribe to Pinar’s progressive vision of a “futuristic state” (p. 76). After all, Pinar reminds us of George Mosse’s definition of bildung as that “middle-class urge to self-education and character building that in

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central Europe was meant to create good citizens” (Mosse, 1996, p. 35). Similarly, Al-Farabi recognizes the importance of the communal effort and social skills, embedded in citizenship education, as conducive to felicity. This disposition toward inclusiveness could arguably be a Farabian invocation of the Quranic conception of fadhl such as in Chapter 2, verse 237: “Yet that you should remit is nearer to godfearing. Forget not to be bountiful [fadhl] one towards another.” In effect, Farabism invokes a buried vision in the Islamic epistemological heritage, which is an embedded readiness toward coexistence and cultural integration. Al-Farabi further advocated a type of tolerance of difference of opinion that incorporates difference-resolving ethics within an educational framework. He was “at pains to emphasize the need for ‘tolerance’ (musamaha), that is to say, a less rigid approach, with regard to the certainty of knowledge” (Gyekye, 1989, p. 138) across all core subject areas. Al-Farabi argued in favour of a more pluralistic understanding of educational practices. He writes: “We must show some tolerance in establishing the truth of the universal premise in these arts, otherwise, our aim would not be attained” (as cited in Gyekye, 1989, p. 138). He further suggests that: A more liberal attitude, in the sense of a less rigid approach, be adopted in the search for the universal premises in arguments involving theology, ethics and other inexact areas of human knowledge, and consequently in the precise nature of the kind of knowledge obtainable in such areas. (as cited in Gyekye, 1989, p. 138) For Al-Farabi, envisioning a progressive educational method entailed an implementation of fadhl, as part of the Islamic intellectual and epistemological context, and the pedagogy of musammaha. It is the actualization of these two practices, or what Pinar (2015e) has called the “buried visions” of the progressive phase (p. 76), that enacts the pluralistic and bountiful curriculum of Farabism.

Analytical and Synthetical Ittisal: Meeting the Active Intellect The third stage in Pinar’s method is “an analysis devoted to intuitive comprehension as well as cognitive codification. I work to get a handle on what I’ve been and what I imagine myself to be, so that I can wield this information, rather than it wielding me. The beginning of agency” (Pinar, 2015b, p. xvi). Similarly, Al-Farabi introduced a cognitive process of “active intellect” as agency, an adaptation of Aristotle’s De anima, which is an “immaterial, incorruptible, supralunary entity whose existence is pure thinking” (Germann, 2016, para 9). This process influences human beings as a rational faculty and cause of existence. This internalization

126 Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar of the active intellect, which informs the rational part of the soul, is both intuitive and cognitive: “This is the Active Intellect (al-Aql al-fa’al), upon which the whole process of human cognition depends” (Fakhry, 2002, p. 29). Despite its cosmological and epistemological dimensions, AlFarabi argued that once the learner connects with the Active Intellect, he/she acquires a capacity for deductive reasoning, developed through correlation and commitment, or Ittisal (Al-Farabi, 1985, pp. 70–72). As discussed earlier, Ittisal is an educational paradigm that stresses the individual effort toward making contacts and encounters with different regional methods of learning, past or present. It is an attempt to internalize the quest for knowledge as a nexus, a zone of contact, both regressive and progressive, that supports plurality. This is an enabling capacity that Pinar (2015b) describes as a cognitive skill: “I can wield this information, rather than it wielding me. The beginning of agency” (p. xvi). Al-Farabi, however, believed that this transforming capacity both endows agency and moves the learner from individuality to citizenship as represented in the collective biographic situation. The third stage of Farabism defines the individual’s personal happiness as contingent on, and preconditioned by, his/her perception of citizenship education through his/her Ittisal with the Active Intellect. However, that new mental state generates a different form of Ittisal that Al-Farabi calls Ijtima, Arabic for assembly. Ijtima is a form of political association with one’s fellow citizens, achieved through a solid understanding of Al-Madaniyah polity and civil duties. As Pinar’s (2015b) analytical stage projects a wielding agency onto “what I imagine myself to be” (p. xvi), Al-Farabi demonstrated this stage with a would-be citizen who has successfully achieved Ittisal with the Active Intellect. Once this stage of currere is realized, this envisioned self must then be brought into the present in “the antithesis, the synthetical stage . . . I choose what of it to honor, what of it to let go . . . how I wish my life history to read. I determine my social commitments; I devise my strategies” (Pinar, 2015b, p. xvi). Likewise, for Al-Farabi, the synthetic stage registers as a reconciliatory encounter, his attempt to reconcile Hellenistic philosophy with the teachings of Islam is a case in point, which invokes the capacity of musammaha as a pedagogical approach that actualizes Pinar’s “wish” to read his “life history” in currere (2015b, p. xvi). An example of how to appropriate musammaha and Ittisal, one that is pertinent to currere, is the issue of first-language attrition. There is a general dominant perception that belonging primarily to a diasporic cultural assemblage and only secondarily to the mainstream culture of the receiving country would ultimately impede one’s social integration and hinder the process of language acquisition, a belief which regrettably many immigrants have internalized as part of their diasporic reality. The result is the loss of first language among immigrants’ children who can no longer choose to “honor,” let alone “read,” this cultural and linguistic part of their “life history” (Pinar, 2015b, p. xvi). Synthesis, like Ittisal, is essentially an attempt

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to address a breakdown in communication between two cultures. For Al-Farabi, this failure thwarts any prospects of “union with the Active Intellect, the storehouse of all intelligibles” (Fakhry, 2002, p. 93) and therefore an impediment to happiness. Synthesis in this case is attained through the belief that minorities can integrate without losing Ittisal with their storehouse of cultural intelligibles. At this stage, the history of the self becomes a microcosm of the nation in terms of establishing a move toward reconciliation. The intellect manifests as an educational legacy that is geared toward a rhetoric of reconciliation to ensure an accord between the self and the community and a bountiful life. For instance, in his attempt to integrate prophecy into epistemology, Al-Farabi argues that “the prophet is nothing less, but also nothing more, than a perfect philosopher” (Adamson, 2016, p. 90). Farabism, therefore, adopts an interdisciplinary and intercultural matrix, a negotiation of cultural and historical encounters that accentuate Pinar’s (2015e) synthetical stage, which strives toward a plurality of “multidimensional interrelations” (p. 78). Al-Farabi’s pluralistic inclination toward a synthesis of philosophy and society “turns out to be a clever adaptation of Greek ethico-political thought to the needs and demands of its new context, the Islamic world of the 10th century” (Germann, 2016, para 3). His attempts to harmonize the Arab-Islamic and Hellenistic traditions foreshadowed the challenges faced by mainstream cultures seeking to accommodate foreign influences.

Conclusion Colmo (2005) has argued that Al-Farabi “breaks with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle .  .  . he moves from metaphysics to methodology, a move that anticipates modernity” (p. 168). This chapter is an attempt to contribute to the dialectic of Farabism and modernity. Living in the sunset of the golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate, Al-Farabi’s main concern was to restore a semblance of social coherence and a common purpose among the masses in order to encounter “the nightmare that is the present.” Contrary to the general perception of the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1997) and the prevalence of radical views and extreme politics of difference, the aim of this chapter is mainly to argue that Farabism invites dialogue and demands no strict membership or adherence to one discourse or school of thought. It invites us to move from confrontations to encounters, helping learners move away from the narrow path of sheer mimicry, a currere that moves from taqlid toward ijtihad, into the open and wide terrain of synthesis. In Toward a Poor Curriculum, Pinar and Grumet (2015) raised the question of how the curriculum can be tailored in a way that is conducive to living intelligently and communally. How to integrate culture and allow the identity of the learner to take precedence has been a defining

128 Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar factor in education. From a Farabian perspective, an individual’s ultimate felicity requires a collaborative society and an ardent desire toward congenial coexistence, which he believes can be achieved through Ittisal with the intellect. The acquisition of human felicity entails not only the exercise of intellectual knowledge but most importantly the skills of social integration and collaboration within a challenging nonhomogeneous societal fabric, which invoke the exercise of ijtihad and musammaha. Hence, Ittisal serves in its capacity as synthesizing social agency. Farabism advocates a purposeful intercultural endeavour to diversify the curriculum as it faces new regional encounters. Accordingly, to move toward a bountiful curriculum, Farabian propositions such as musammaha, fadhl, and Ittisal cannot be locked in the archive nor should they continue to be buried visions. The interest in Farabism lies in extending the curriculum beyond taqlid. It lies in implementing ijtihad by diversifying contents and facilitating encounters between domestic and foreign, citizen and newcomer, and majority and minority. In an attempt to demonstrate how Farabism contributes to the actualization of the humanities curriculum, this study has focussed on how Pinar and Grumet’s four iterations of currere resonate with Farabism, a crucible in which recurrent diverse encounters can interact, leading to the creation of a currere rooted in recovery of the “biographic condition,” “buried visions,” and “thematic variations.”

References Adamson, P. (2016). Philosophy in the Islamic world: A history without any gaps. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Al-Farabi. (1985). Mabadi’ ara ahl al-madinat al-fadilah (On the perfect state). (R. Walzer, Ed. & Trans.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Colmo, C. A. (2005). Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as founder. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Fakhry, M. (1998). Ethics in Islamic philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy (pp. 439–441). London, UK: Routledge. Fakhry, M. (2002). Al-Farabi: Founder of Islamic neoplatonism: His life, works and influence. Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications. Germann, N. (2016). Al-Farabi’s philosophy of society and religion. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/al-farabi-soc-rel/ Ghabra, S., & Arnold, M. (2007). Studying the American way: An assessment of American-style higher education in Arab countries. Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Grumet, M. R. (2015a). Preface (2006). In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. ix–xi). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Grumet, M. R. (2015b). Psychoanalytic foundations. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 142–190). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press.

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Gyekye, K. (1989). Al-Fārābī on the logic of the arguments of the Muslim philosophical theologians. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 27(1), 135–143. doi:10.1353/hph.1989.0001 Huntington, S. P. (1997). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Luft, D. S. (2003). Eros and inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Madkour, I. (1934). La place d’al-Farabi dans l’Ecole Philosophique Musulmane. Paris, France: Librairie d’Amerique et d’Orient. Mosse, G. L. (1996). The image of man: The creation of modern masculinity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nanji, S. M. (1989). Al-Farabi’s philosophy of education (Unpublished master’s thesis). McGill University, Montreal. Netton, I. R. (1992). Al-Farabi and his school. London, UK: Routledge. Pinar, W. (2011). The character of curriculum studies: Bildung, currere, and the recurring question of the subject. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. (2015a). Mr. Bennet and Mrs Brown. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 1–7). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015b). Preface (1976). In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd., pp. xiii–xvii). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015c). Preface (2015). In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd., pp. vii–viii). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015d). Self and others. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd., pp. 8–39). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W. (2015e). The method of currere. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 65–83). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pinar, W., & Grumet, M. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Educator’s International Press. Rescher, N. (1963). Al-Farabi on logical tradition. Journal of the History of Ideas, 24(1), 127–132. doi:10.2307/2707863 Woolf, V. (2008 [1924]). Character in fiction. In D. Bradshaw (Ed.), Virginia Woolf: Selected essays (pp. 37–55). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Zavarzadeh, M., & Morton, D. (1991). Theory pedagogy politics: The crisis of “the subject” in the humanities. In D. Morton & M. Zavarzadeh (Eds.), Theory/ pedagogy/politics: Texts for change (pp. 1–33). Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Strand III

Intensities Christian Ehret and Sandra Chang-Kredl

Curricular intensities provoke our thinking through pushing us to “experience experience” (Pinar, 2015, p. 113) in often forgotten and uncomfortable ways. These intensities take the form of encounters—material, somatic, emotional, and psychic—that stretch us to resist the daily distractions that immobilize us with inertia. What does it mean to feel alive and “present to ourselves” (Greene, 1978, p. 199)? How can these experiences of intensity help us connect with others alongside and beyond language? Even as these ineluctable affective encounters, moments “where the body takes over from .  .  . words” (Phillips in Lewkowich, 2015), exceed our capacity to describe them, the body-subject (Grumet, 1988) forces us to be present, to confront experiences of ambiguity, incongruity, and vulnerability. The chapters in this section push our capacities to represent difficult experiences and challenge us to expand our understanding of curriculum. Importantly, the chapters in this strand present a theory of affective intensities that is value neutral (Massumi, 2015). This does not mean that the curriculum encounters these authors analyze are devoid of power, politics, or systemic injustices; rather, the authors theorize encounters through their unfolding, where power, politics, and injustices play a role but have not yet determined where the moment, the encounter, may go. Affect is neutral because it moves bodies, but bodies determine where the moment goes next. By provoking us to feel through the intensities of moments as they unfold, these authors force us to meet power in the moment and compel us to ask new questions to better attune ourselves to how even the most mundane moments in the emergent everyday of teaching and learning might be steered toward more just futures. Sarah Byrne Bausell explores connections between the private and public spheres of learning, through engaging with a childhood memory of finding a lynching photograph amongst her grandmother’s oddsand-ends. She contemplates the course of lynching photographs as ethical curriculum in the making. Jessie L. Beier launches the reader into a pedagogical encounter of simulated weirdness through a rewriting of the train encounter with Mrs. Brown, in order to contest our investments in

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notions of subjectivity and focus on the process of continuous folding between “inside” and “outside” experiences. Nikki Rotas opens readers to children’s experiences of curricular intensities in-the-moment by describing a classroom project in which children used images from small, digital cameras. How might we, as researchers and educators, remain open to the potentials for experience to disconfirm the persistent notion that human bodies are fully in control of curricular events? How could a better feeling of the co-composition of curricular events create new potentials for learning and being differently in classrooms, the home, and teacher education? Beier and Rotas argue that curricular intensities are always co-composed in relation between human/non-human/inhuman/more-than-human, and “from mobile positions and perspectives that are in relation with ecologies of soil, grass, water, objects, ice, and sounds of past, present, and future time” (Rotas). In theorizing a curriculum of home things, Bausell describes how the carefully curated display of artefacts in one’s home communicates to a child “a particular familial ethos,” while “hidden home things, when found, are fissures in the curated story.” Drawing parallels with the public space of white supremacist consumables, she confronts what she calls the “practice of silence” in curriculum. In Beier’s chapter, the challenge of curriculum intensities is to address Fisher’s (2009) “reflexive impotence” by remaking curriculum encounters through a science fictioning that provokes an interrogation of “common sense presuppositions and over-coded categories” of the kind alluded to in the introduction to this book.

References Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? London, UK: Zero Books. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Grumet, M. R. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press. Lewkowich, D. (2015). Reminders of the abject in teaching: Psychoanalytic notes on my sweaty, pedagogical self. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 41–47. doi: 10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.010 Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Malden, MA: Polity. Pinar, W. (2015). Educational experience as lived: Knowledge, history, alterity: The selected works of William F. Pinar. New York, NY: Routledge.

10 The Curriculum of Home Things Sarah Byrne Bausell

When I was 10, I found a photograph of a lynched man amongst my grandmother’s odds and ends. It slid from an opaque envelope that I’d lifted from a box of buttons, costume jewelry, receipts, and letters onto the floor. I scooped the photographed murder in my small, child hands the same way I might have, on a day with different circumstances, captured a lightening bug for inspection. The home-health aide was distracted by daytime television—a talk show. I remember how lurid cheers from the television audience members saturated the room and, too, that they could not drown out my thunderous pulse. I thought: What is this? Why do we have it? Beneath a giant window, my silhouetted grandmother was folded into an armchair, a silver swath of hair hitting just at her chin where a newly laundered napkin had been tucked to catch her drool. I scanned the weathered photograph, those pictured there, and her ancient figure in the window. Without fully understanding the context of the photograph, or of her having kept it all these years, I wanted a different ending. Too young to understand captions, in this case the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lettering stamped on the back, and just young enough to worry about someone else repeating this encounter, I decided: I don’t want it. When I thought no one was looking at me looking at it, I shoved it in the trash can, beneath a layer of wet coffee grounds. That night, I lay in bed and suffered two beliefs: the caterwauling of winter birds as police on their way to get me and the caterwauling of winter birds as the wailing dead; it was the faces of the living, white like me, who I could not forget. I’ve reflected often about this encounter, but never enough and never in relation to my work as an English teacher. Teaching the humanities is a practice of intimacy; it involves a routine of close reading of published literature and, when done well, hinges upon the contemplation of each student’s careful articulation of their own world. This essay uses this encounter to engage the tensions and ambiguities between private and public curriculum. Public curriculum, as I use it here, refers to any encounter that occurs outside of one’s home. I explore the course of lynching photographs—white supremacist souvenirs, detoured anti-lynching

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appeals, and consumables for U.S. history textbooks—and subsequent attempts to grapple with such racialized violence in classroom spaces, as examples of public curriculum through the lens of curriculum intensities. Maintaining their intensity, even in challenged, detoured versions, the lynching photograph is ethical curriculum in the making, meaning it begs an ethical response from the viewer. Whereas public curriculum compels an exchange, private curriculum, what I label as the curriculum of home things, offers a semblance of privacy and a rite to silence. Lynching photographs, like lynching itself, transverse the private-public spheres and this work is an attempt to explore that connection, and to undo the silence of home things.

Curriculum of Home Things I engage the memory of this encounter to forge a theorization of the curriculum of home things—a term I use to refer to our emergent encounters with the relics exhibited or hidden in our homes, those things that inextricably link us to the larger social world and do so in a particular order. I think of the curriculum of home things as an extension of the established method of currere, which emerged from Pinar’s (2009) description of subjectivity as: The inner life, the lived sense of self—however non-unitary, dispersed, fragmented—that is associated with what has been given and what one has chosen, those circumstances of everyday life, those residues of trauma and of fantasy, from which one reconstructs a life. (p. 3) I argue that the things in our childhood homes, the props of our earliest play, and the ways in which they were organized (displayed, hidden, cast away, passed down, replaced) transmit a particular ideological charge and, as such, instantiate us in the world in particular ways. In the same vein that Grumet (1978) used literature as foil for the personal study, I turn to home things and our memories of encountering them, as a means of understanding our present experiences. By studying the assembly of home things, and our encounters with them, I suggest an alternate way in to what Pinar called “the complicated conversation.” As Grumet (1978) pointed out, personal study “requires an immersion in text, wide-ranging texts across time, place, and discipline in order to dislodge the present moment as a means to gain perspective on it” (p. 85). The curriculum of home things hinges upon the idea of thing as text. A close study of our encounters with home things provides an affective map for understanding ourselves in present and future experiences. The home thing itself, how it came to be assembled outside of and eventually contained within the home, what Smith (1998) referred to as the complex

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social histories of texts, alongside the nature of the encounter(s), sets the tenor for engagements with more public curriculum. Importantly, it offers a way forward in making sense of ourselves in the world. What good is a study of our things? Things outlast our abilities to tell our stories and they frame the stories that we will tell. A careful contemplation of any object reveals ways that the social context is reflected or contested in its surface. Anthropologist Daniel Miller (1991) explains that objects “continually assert their presence as simultaneously material force and symbol. They frame the way we act in the world, as well as the way we think about the world” (p. 106). Following Miller’s description, things carry a historical and political message, imbued with the creator’s perspective. Despite ways that a particular thing might be altered or detoured over time, the original perspective remains, to some degree, legible. That is, even when taken out of its cultural, historical, and social context, the object can be linked to its ideological point of origin. Beyond the notion that things are instantiated with messages, we select things for our homes that illustrate truths about ourselves, our ideals, preferences, tastes, ethics, and morals. How and where we place objects in our homes conveys even more meaning. Canon home things (e.g., a wall of family photographs that I walked past on my way to throw away the photograph) are curated and displayed in a room open to both family members and guests. They communicate a particular familial ethos that the curator hopes to communicate. In the occasion drawn as point in this essay, the wall of family photographs depicted deceased ancestors from the Mississippi Delta region, each person relaxed, in a certain causal repose, indicating a life of genial peace. By contrast, things tucked away in a book, or buried in a seldom-used drawer, still communicate a truth (or multitudes of them) about the person who placed it there. Most importantly, its placement is a meaningful insurance towards privacy. Thus, dependent upon placement of things, children become accustomed to the canon home things while encounters with the hidden home things are emotionally and often profoundly evocative. The canon home things draw the child into a collective, familial identity and the child begins to understand their history and present. In contrast, hidden home things, when found, are fissures in the curated story and, within the encounter, the child begins to see nuances within their familial history and question their knowing/understanding of the world. Thus, within our efforts to understand ourselves via the curriculum of home things, one should take the mode of display into consideration. How is the object positioned within the space? Who is granted regular interaction with the object? What, if any, explicit conversation surrounds the object? In other words, how is the thing described and explained to others? Additionally, we might extend that same level of consideration into how the home things interrelate. Is there a hierarchy of home things? How does the assembly of home things convey a greater message about

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the social world? The organization of the home things that characterized our childhood homes sets the stage for future encounters. Home things contain and produce intensities. Things carry a charge; the intensity is embedded in the physical material and in the history of its production. Our home things are not other-worldly apparitions or neutral coincidences. They are concrete carry-overs of the world, fashioned, created, and imbued with meaning. While engaging in the curriculum of home things, one should take into consideration the question: What is this thing? How did it come to be? These contemplations help to reveal the social and local dimensions of the thing. Lynching photographs, like the one I encountered as a child, present an extraordinary intensity that is particular (but not exclusive) to a place and time. The inherent intensity is further emphasized by its placement in a home. How did it get here, in the world, in my home and in its particular location in my home? And by the emergent relational experience, the initial encounter of the thing and its steady unfolding into the present: What do I make of this thing (then and now)? The curriculum of home things offers a contemplative space from which to examine the past shock unfolding into the present via the personal (what sense can I make of myself in relation to this?), the social (what does this reveal about the ways we are and are not together?), and the local (what can I come to understand about my home, my wider community and its history?)

The Public Curriculum of Lynching Photographs To illustrate the possibilities of a curriculum of home things, I draw on a particularly devastating home thing, a lynching photograph, and the ways in which my encounter with it initiated contemplation about the nature and brutality of my inherited whiteness. It is possible that some readers will wonder: What of those of us whose homes did not contain such explicit social messaging? In anticipation of such a query, I turn to Quaker activist John Woolman, who in 1763 urged others to “look upon our treasure, our furniture, and our garments, and try to discover whether the seeds of war are nourished by these, our possessions” (Woolman, 1971, p. 225). For this essay, I draw courage to name the lynching photograph as my home thing from Courtney Cook (2015) who wrote about Southern whites’ (then and now) tendency to turn away from proof of their inherited violence as “how whites forgive ourselves without even getting to know ourselves” (p. 6). It has been a shared, and dysfunctional, fantasy among many Southern whites to think of lynching temporally, as a historical atrocity, one that occurred elsewhere, to and by others, hemmed into a past and detached from our present. The move I make in this essay, to examine the lynching photograph, my encounter with it, and how the memory of that intensity continues to unfold into and shock the present, is an attempt to remove the photograph from the trash bin

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where I hid it, essentially locating myself in it and learning about myself more fully. Even the most innocuous photograph is a powerful thing, what Barthes (1981) called a fundamental truth and a this-has-been. A photograph carries an air of authority. The photograph presents as an absolute certitude, a quality which precipitates its inherent intensity for the viewer. If the photograph conveys a truth, then it too contains the inherent possibility of disrupting what the viewer believed to be true. Before my encounter with the photograph, I’d only thought of myself like this: reader, child, then girl. I found the photographic text itself to be excruciatingly decipherable and in my visceral reading of it, I thought of myself in a provisional way—that is, I knew instinctively that my being hinged somehow upon a murderous mystery and that the crucial aspect was couched in the detail of my whiteness. I often think of this aesthetic provocation, which marked the moment I learned I was white, as an encounter which “implicate[d] [me] immanently in the social and ideological affects of others’ lifeworlds” (Grumet, 2015, p. 238). In the moment, I traced what my whiteness meant through the details of that photograph: a line of bowler hats, a small hill from which the murder tree seemed to spring, the tightly drawn mouths of three white men posed at the edges of the murder. That I hadn’t known or been told of such a horrific truth before my finding it out was a powerful initiation into illusory whiteness and silence. I did not question the truth of it. After all, it was a photograph, a patent truth, a particular “this-has-been.” The photograph proved that a violence had happened, while simultaneously, the finding of the photograph provoked an intensity. Since racialized terror continues, the encounter, and my reflex to essentially turn away from the horror, is one that I am returned to often in moments of public experience. In contemplating the course of lynching photographs as ethical curriculum in the making, I draw from two related observations about the over-arching influence of photography on human perception. First, in their celebrated analysis The Ontology of the Photographic Image, Bazin and Gray (1960) argued that the invention of photography wielded enormous, transformative power over viewers: “In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space” (p. 8). Bazin and Gray held that from the viewer’s perspective, a photograph is an indisputable truth, a record, an obligation, and assurance. Further, they argued that the certitude contained within a photograph challenges the viewer’s ontology. In essence, the photograph catapults the viewer into a physically different time and space. Along these lines, a photograph is always true and happens in perpetua, thus challenging the viewer’s perceived spatial barriers. Second, though Benjamin (2008) also emphasized the certitude that viewers entrust to the medium of photography he also emphasized the increasing importance

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of caption. His argument was that, subsequent to the prevalence of photographic record, textual explanation would be a necessary auxiliary to viewer interpretation: Photography became standard evidence of historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. . . . They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory . . . even more explicit and more imperative. (p. 27) Understood through the lens of a curricular intensity, Bazin and Gray’s (1960) argument about ontological fallout for the viewer and Benjamin’s (2008) observation that the certainty of a photograph only begets further textual explanation, are particularly helpful in understanding the longevity and winding course of lynching photographs. At the turn of the twentieth century, the popularization of photography that coincided with the “lynching epidemic” proved to be essential to the perpetuation of the ritualized violence. Professional and novice photographers at the time capitalized on the fervor that lynching sites produced. As a result, a cottage industry of lynching photographs further linked white economic prosperity to the common misanthropic dominance over black bodies. Setting up temporary darkrooms with the intent of developing and selling images, the relics these photographers sold became “as common as dirt” (Allen, 2000, p. xxii) until the mid-1920s when the U.S. Postal Service put an official stop to using mail to traffic homicidal images. White southerners made, peddled, and consumed lynching photographs as enthusiastic records of their participation in the extrajudicial terror. Shortly thereafter, anti-lynching activists, such as Ida B. Wells (1892) and Jesse Daniel Ames (Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching), reproduced the same images in the emergent anti-lynching movement. For the former, the original photographic record operated both “as visual proof for the uncontested ‘truth’ of white civilized morality over” (Wood, 2005, p. 6) a collective, maniac fantasy of black depravity and as a loutish threat to black community members; for the latter, the images, detoured and reprinted in black-operated periodicals such as The Crisis, served to expose the grisly truth about white Southern violence. Though the image often remained intact between the two ideological modes of presentation, captions were used to provoke an ethical response. In both instances, the disturbing images were provocations heralding a particular ideological stance in the viewer via a visceral, guttural reading. Lynching photographs, in both their original and detoured forms, are quintessential curricular intensities, designed to cause discomfort and provoke thinking. Similarly, we ought to read the lynching photograph

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as an ethical curriculum in the making. First, we might consider the visual record of the brutal murder. No matter the positionality and context of the viewer, the photograph produces an intensity. For the viewer entrenched in a white supremacist perspective, the photograph might reference a white hero’s journey for justice. It serves a semiotic promise. For the black viewer the photograph produces a detailed threat: that is, here’s the method of your one-day lynching, and here too, are all those who are eager to take part. The ethical curriculum was achieved via text. Lynching photographs often included signposts reinscribing the intended message for viewers; for example, a sign reading “Warning . . .” attached to the body of one victim works in rhetorical tandem with newspaper accounts that positioned perpetrators and spectators alike as “citizens.” Originally the photograph I found was constructed at the site of a murder, likely designed to communicate an undeterred version of white supremacy. Before it arrived, ostensibly by mail, to my grandmother, it had been detoured by the NAACP as an emblem in an anti-lynching campaign. In both iterations it carried the intent of provoking an ethical-via-aesthetic reaction. By the time I encountered it, nearly 40 years after the supposed “formal” ending of lynching, the intensity resounded. The course of lynching photographs has been winding; transmutations of the white supremacist lynching souvenirs range from explicitly detoured anti-lynching appeals to consumables for U.S. history textbooks. These alterations are particularly important illustrations of how we’ve grappled with lynching photographs in public spaces. In the next section, I compare examples of anti-lynching efforts in the wider public sphere (Wells, 1892; Allen, 2000; Gonzales-Day, 2006). Then, I offer two illustrations of how the conflict over curricular treatment of lynching has taken shape (Loewen & Sallis, 1974; Ayers & Warren, 2017). Public Anti-Lynching Efforts Any discussion about the ways lynching has been taken up in public space over time must commence with Ida B. Wells, who dedicated her career to fostering anti-lynching attitudes through presswork and public addresses. Along the way, Wells commented frequently about the power of the public press as a venue of education against lynching. Her earliest articles, printed on the eye-catching pink paper of her newspaper, the Memphis Free Press, were counter-narratives to the lynching accounts printed in white periodicals. To set public opinion against the ritualistic violence, Wells detoured the dominant portrayals of lynching in deeply personal language. Though her earliest articles resulted in the forced suspension of her newspaper, Wells was undeterred by white mob attempts to censor her campaign for justice. Ever committed to shining a light on the “truth of Southern mob violence,” Wells extended her public appearances (Wells, 2013, p. 22). An excerpt from The Washington Bee describes the

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effects of Wells’ public scholarship on an audience of Washingtonians: “All eyes were turned on Ida B. Wells, for it was she, herself a victim of the portrayed outrages and she was moved to grief” (“Southern Mob Rule”: The Simple Story of an Eloquent Woman, 1892, p. 3). Wells’ tireless efforts to expose the truths about lynching influenced the 1916 creation of the NAACP’s Anti-Lynching Committee, which continued Wells’ approach to utilizing the public press to address the horrors of lynching (e.g., see full-page advertisements, entitled “The Shame of America” printed in the New York Times and the Atlanta Constitution that detailed statistics about lynchings). In regards to what has turned out to be one of the most provocative traveling photography exhibits in the twenty-first century, self-declared antiques “picker” James Allen (2000) described his collection of lynching photographs, Without Sanctuary, as “[P]roof, an unearthing of crimes, of collective mass murder, of mass memory graves excavated from the American conscience” (p. iv). In short, the curation is meant to stave off white America’s inclination towards historical amnesia and galvanize contemporary viewers towards a critical understanding of current incidences of white brutality against black bodies within the historical landscape. Following an initial 2001 showing at the New York Historical Society, the collection of photographs moved through numerous cities across the United States. The Museum of the New South clarified their decision to exhibit the collection as an effort “to recognize the humanity of those who were executed, to educate visitors and acknowledge that these atrocities indeed took place, and to promote cross-cultural discussion that can bring healing and vigilance against future acts of bigotry and violence” (Without Sanctuary, 2012). Essentially, Allen’s curation can be understood as an extension of Wells’ use of lynching as ethical curriculum in the making. More than 100 years apart, Wells first and Allen, later on, forced viewers to grapple with the question: to look or to look away? This conundrum, Apel (2003) argues, has dominated the American psyche: “When we look at lynching photographs, we try not to see them. Looking and seeing become seeming forms of aggression that implicate the viewer, however distressed and sympathetic, in the acts that turned human beings into horribly shamed objects” (p. 457). Allen’s curation demanded the viewer reconcile with the corpus of corpses; alternatively, other contemporary artists have used digital manipulation to reframe the contemporary viewer’s gaze. One such case of digital manipulation is Gonzales-Day’s (2006–2008) photographic series, Erased Lynchings. Through deletion of both the victim and the rope, Gonzales-Day’s intent is to redirect the contemporary viewer’s gaze towards the mob, and more precisely, to individuate and make obvious the everydayness of those murderous individuals. Current attitudes about the curricular portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws of the United States tend to oscillate between

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accusations that book publishers whitewash the brutal details of white supremacy in “a rhetorical attempt to find a happy ending” (Finger, 2015) and the present opinion supported by the Republican National Committee, that accuses the Advanced Placement framework of being “a radically revisionist view of American History” (Resolution concerning advanced placement U.S. history, 2014). According to Fitzgerald, the history textbook is often the site of public contestation as they “tell children what their elders want them to know about their country,” and “the texts contain the truths selected for posterity” (as cited in Loewen & Sallis, 1974, p. 47). Though “common as dirt” (Allen, 2000, p. 24), images of lynchings were intentionally excluded from official school curriculum until 1974 when the state of Mississippi contested the adoption of the recently published textbook Mississippi: Conflict and Change (Loewen, 2017) on the grounds that the inclusion of a lynching photograph would leave the teacher—referred to in official court testimony as “a white lady,” unprotected from “pretty big . . . black male ninth graders” (Loewen v. Turnipseed). Though the editors of the book, Loewen (a sociologist) and Sallis (a historian), eventually won the NAACP-supported lawsuit against the barring of the book on the grounds that their treatment was historically accurate, and therefore pedagogically apropos, a reticent attitude towards the implementation of primary documentation of terrors in school curriculum persists (Gewinner, Krohn, & White, 2000). The logic that undergirds such attitudes is that a white audience must be protected from unnecessary guilt and the imagined hostile reactions from students of color. In an attempt to reveal the excruciating reverberations of lynching in the present moment, Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren’s documentary An Outrage (2017) recently acquired by the Teaching Tolerance organization, and therefore likely to be adapted widely across schools, narrates the history of lynching in the American South within current grief-scapes: narrated by descendants, neighbors, and witnesses. Unlike other activistcreated transmutations of lynching photographs, which emphasize the victim’s body as a catalyst for ethical scrutiny, this film exhibits the callous, extra-legal network, which made such murderous sprees not only possible but feats. They managed this through a visual montage of home videos of white children playing, black children playing, Aunt Jemima advertisements that contributed to the popular imagination of black bodies in need of brutal discipline, present-day church buildings, an early twentieth-century ballroom with white bodies in hooped skirts, a 1950s café courtyard with white bodies sipping cappuccinos, an expansive stage with performers in black face, and a black farmer hitching two mules with the backdrop of a cotton field. This methodical juxtaposition of time, space, and bodies punctuates and is punctuated by testimonies of survivors. Ayers and Warren’s film diverts the semiotic re-consumption of the murdered.

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Activists, artists, and scholars alike have long been concerned with the brutal, ongoing effects of what Lewis (2002) called “America’s pastime”: lynching. Such work includes explorations into the social performance of lynching (Pinar, 2014), the spectacle of lynching (Hale, 1998), the production and circulation of ideologically laden photographs (Wood, 2005), and the intersection between lynching photographs and Critical Black Memory (Raiford, 2009). The examples of lynching portrayals in public space that I draw on here, from 1892 to 2017, suggest that despite when and how relics of the lynching era are displayed, the anticipated viewer reaction takes precedence. On the one hand, the anti-lynching appropriators of these relics sought literal justice for the reign of ritualized racial terror. These efforts were achieved through literal and abstract “captioning” (Benjamin, 2008). On the other hand, the transmutations of these relics, particularly those that patently try to reorient the viewer’s ontological response (Bazin & Gray, 1960) through manipulation, like deletion or video montage, are endeavors to control and ultimately dismantle the white supremacist gaze. In both instances the photographs become ethical curriculum in the making, or curriculum designed to instantiate an ethical stance in the viewer. Though anti-lynching detoured photographs present a particular ethos, the inchoate intent, set in motion by those turn-of-the-century white photographers determined to document and profit from the violent extra-legal spectacle, endures.

Private-Public Home Thing I opened this essay with the description of the moment I encountered a lynching photograph amongst my grandmother’s things. Despite my instinct to destroy the photograph, ostensibly trying to avoid any semblance of “belonging” to such brutality, lynching, and other forms of racialized terror have continued to be a regular feature of life in the United States. They have played out in immediate ways in my work as a high school English teacher, both in the difficult work of making sense of such a pernicious shared history and in witnessing (and being complicit) in extrajudicial discipline against black and brown children. Thus, the immediate encounter with home things is an emergent one. I close the essay with one illustration of how the memory of that encounter persisted in the public space of teaching. A Lynching Keeps on Lynching In 2006, Jasmine Joyner, a high school student enrolled in a literature course I was teaching, responded to Richard Wright’s (1936) elegiac poem Between the World and Me with the following perspicacious declaration: “A lynching keeps on lynching.” For unfamiliar readers, the first-person poem follows the speaker on a walk through the forest during which he

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happens across charred, human remnants. Beguiled and at first unsure, the speaker spans the horizon to frame and make sense of his discovery, what the speaker calls “the thing” (p. 19). He rattles off a list of the odds and ends, items left behind after the lynching spectacle, that encircle the bones. Eventually, identifying the scene as a just-happened lynching, the speaker becomes the skeletal remains. Joyner pointed out the ubiquity of the -ing transitive form of lynching in photographic captions—that is, though they are historical records, we use language that suggests the perpetual nature of lynching. She wondered aloud about the constant refrain “lynching photograph” juxtaposed here with Wright’s use of “thing.” Her remark, “a lynching keeps on lynching,” referenced not only the speaker’s experience of seeing and becoming the lynched, but reflected, too, her experience of reading the poem, of becoming the speaker who became the murdered. I share Joyner’s observation because her testimony returned me to my encounter with home things— where she rooted, my instinct was to vacate. Here, the public realm of the English classroom, where we worked to make sense of our experiences via writing and close reading, became an essential place to come to know our own subjectivities and how they relate. Attending to my emergent encounter with home things ultimately marked the occasion to “become present to the material, to locate myself in the work” (Grumet, 2016, p. 89). Joyner and I both belonged to the “thing,” and the opportunities to understand the implications of our very different ways of belonging to it abounded.

Tensions and Ambiguities Between Home Thing and Public Curriculum reconceptualists have long been interested in the concept of “encounter” as it relates to the educative experience. Encounter has been used to describe those instances when we are suddenly “open to subjective knowing” (Pinar, 2014, p. 23), and Grumet (2015) draws our attention to “the ways a particular person encounters a world coded in the academic disciplines” (p. 76), arguing that the charge to be “present in her work” is complicated by popular methods that favor the fantasy of objectivity over the labyrinthine subjective. Within this chapter, I’ve described an immediate curriculum encounter with a home thing as an aesthetic provocation with personal, subjective, and ethical ramifications. In the immediate encounter, the home thing provoked a personal and ethical dilemma via its produced intensities. In becoming and working as an English educator, resounding encounters, which heralded the original intensity, afforded even more complex conversations about self in world. Public curriculum occurs outside of one’s home. In the case of this essay I explore lynching, photographic records, and any subsequent attempts to grapple with such racialized violence as examples of public curriculum. Home offers a semblance of privacy and a practice of silence. In

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the case of this essay, I exercised this silence by turning away and hiding the lynching photograph in the trash bin. In contrast, public curriculum compels an exchange. The tension between the home thing and the public curriculum exists in part because the very same things, and the ways in which they propel a particularized social organization, occur in both private and public. Similarly, the practice of silence performed in the home sphere reverberates beyond it. The example I draw on in this essay is one of many times I’ve been witness to racialized violence. My instinct to turn away was not unique then nor is it now, but it is a choice. Embedded in what I have laid out as a curriculum of home things are tensions and ambiguities between private curriculum and public curriculum. It is, I argue, the possibility of attending to the span of tensions and ambiguities between the home things and the public things that may shift our dialectic about our experience (past, present, and future) in the world. Herein lies a variation between Pinar and Grumet’s (2015) project of autobiographical inquiry and what I’m calling a curriculum of home things. Currere has been immensely important as it illustrates how personal preoccupations with familial unfolds into present experiences. Curriculum of home things, and more specifically the coming to understand that our home things come from and exist in other contested forms outside of our homes, necessarily extends into an examination of how the personal realm is necessarily influenced by the socio-cultural realm. Drawing from moments in which home things are expounded on in public spaces, like the class discussion on Wright’s Between the World and Me, offers a way to nourish the essential past and present, subjectivity and objectivity, and personal and public dialectic.

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Finger, B. (2015, September 1). Here’s how new Texas public school textbooks write about slavery. Jezebel. Retrieved August 1, 2018, from https://jezebel. com/heres-how-new-texas-public-school-textbooks-write-about-1726786557 Gewinner, K., Krohn, C., & White, C. (2000). Social justice and critical pedagogy for social studies. In C. White (Ed.), Issues in social studies: Voices from the field. Springfield, IL: Thomas, Ltd. Gonzales-Day, K. (2006). Lynching in the West, 1850–1935. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grumet, M. (1978). Curriculum as theater. Curriculum Inquiry, 8(1), 37–64. Grumet, M. (2015). Psychoanalytic foundations. In W. Pinar & M. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed., pp. 111–146). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Grumet, M. (2016). The politics of presence. In M. Doll (Ed.), The reconceptualization of curriculum studies: A festschrift in honor of William F. Pinar (pp. 88–95). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hale, G. (1998). Making whiteness: The culture of segregation in the south, 1890– 1940. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Lewis, D. L. (2002). Two responses to American exceptionalism: W.E.B Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. Black Renaissance, 4(2/3), 8–21. Loewen, J. W. (2017, May 2). Why was there the Civil War? Here’s your answer. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-wasthere-the-civil-war-heres-your-answer/2017/05/02/1445c796-2f76-11e7-8674437ddb6e813e_story.html?utm_term=.2e3be7e3e004 Loewen, J. W., & Sallis, C. (Eds.). (1974). Mississippi: Conflict and change. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Miller, D. (1991). Material culture and mass consumption. New York, NY: Basil Blackwell. Pinar, W. (2014). The gender of racial politics and violence in America: Lynching, prison rape, & the crisis of masculinity. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. (2009). The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service. New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W., & Grumet, M. R. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum. Kingston, NY: Educator’s International, Press, Inc. Raiford, L. (2009). Photography and the practices of critical black memory. History and Theory: Studies in the History of Philosophy, 48(4), 112–129. doi:10. 1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00522.x Republican National Committee. (2014). Resolution concerning advanced placement U.S. history (APUSH). Retrieved August 1, 2018, from https://cdn.gop. com/docs/RESOLUTIONCONCERNINGADVANCEDPLACEMENTUSHISTORYAPUSH.pdf Smith, D. E. (1998). Writing the social: Critique, theory and investigations. Toronto: ON: University of Toronto Press. “Southern Mob Rule”: The Simple Story of an Eloquent Woman. (1892, October). The Washington Bee. Retrieved from https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn84025891/1892-10-29/ed-1/seq-3/#date1=1880&index=1&rows=20&searc hType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&words=B+Ida+IDA+Wells+WELL S&proxdistance=5&date2=1893&ortext=&proxtext=Ida+B.+Wells&phrasete xt=&andtext=&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

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Wells, I. B. (1892). Southern horrors: Lynch law in all its phases [Pamphlet]. New York, NY: New York Age Print. Wells, I. B. (2013). Crusade for justice: The autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Without Sanctuary. (2012, September 12). Retrieved February, 2019 from https:// withoutsanctuary.org/ Wood, A. L. (2005). Lynching photography and the visual reproduction of White supremacy. American Nineteenth Century History, 6(3), 373–399. doi:10.1080/ 14664650500381090 Woolman, J. (1971). The journal and major essays of John Woolman. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wright, R. (1936). Between the world and me. New York, NY: International Publishers.

11 Close Encounters of the Pedagogical Kind Science Fictioning a Curriculum-to-Come Jessie L. Beier 2006/2015: “The Nightmare That Is the Present” In both the 2006 and 2015 prefaces to the third edition of Toward a Poor Curriculum, William Pinar re-positions the original work, first published in 1976, in relation to a transformed educational milieu, or as Pinar writes: “the nightmare that is the present” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. vii). Expanding on the original aim of the book, which was, in part, to express “resistance to the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the accountability trend of the times” (p. x), Pinar describes a present situation wherein teachers have been degraded to mere service providers, where predatory corporations feed off the doubts and fears of both students and parents, and where educational practices have devolved into screen-based distractions and digital abstractions. In these prefaces, Pinar also points briefly to the shortcomings of the original text, particularly in relation to shifts in the political and cultural background in the United States over the forty-some years since the publication of the book. Highlighting the absence of any particular mentions of diversity, equity, or multiculturalism and a naive reliance on limited “fantasies of agency and responsibility” of the educational subject in the original essays (pp. x–xi), Pinar nevertheless concludes both prefaces by asserting that the method of currere, and by extension a “poor curriculum”, remains relevant in its call to examine the distinction between education and ontology, “because the project of education is filled with our interest in transforming our state of being [emphasis added]” (p. xi). In short, given the current context, Pinar (with Grumet) asserts that now, more than ever, curriculum inquiry must return to “the individual as a heuristic fiction” (p. xi) and that a “poor curriculum” remains relevant if, with resolve, we can return to a focus “on the flesh” of the individual human subject so that we can become “historical, individuated, even educated” (p. viii). “Transforming Our State of Being”: Challenging the Limits of Anthropocentrism Although Pinar draws attention to the changing background within which a revived “poor curriculum” might be re-situated, including the relentless

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corporatization of educational domains and a brief nod to “our own crimes against the planet we inhabit” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 193), his analysis of the present situation—“the nightmare that is the present”— does not go nearly far enough. Beyond the ubiquitous “business ontology” (Fisher, 2009) and technological transformations that now characterize ways of living on this planet we call “Home”, we are now confronted with an unprecedented convergence of crises that seemingly hold the potential to challenge, or at the very least question, the fundamental aims and goals of education itself. For example, in light of the (so-called) Anthropocene, the geological era, where, through its activities and its growing population, the human species has emerged as a geological force now altering the planet’s climate and environment, education’s humanist fidelities, and particularly the goal of producing an exceptionally human subject, becomes suspect. That is, what the Anthropocene makes apparent is not only the rise of an increasingly “uninhabitable Earth” (Wallace-Wells, 2017)—mega-fires, perpetual drought, heat deaths, the end of food, climate plagues, unbreathable air, poisoned oceans—but also a planet that no longer evokes a sense of utility, familiarity, or nostalgia for-us. Or, as Isabelle Stengers (2015) puts it, today’s “catastrophic times” might be characterized by “the intrusion of Gaia” [wherein] “‘nature’ has left behind its traditional role and now has the power to question us all [emphasis added]” (p. 12). In terms of pedagogical practice then, the Anthropocene offers a vantage from which education’s long-held anthropocentric (centrism of the human agent) and anthropomorphic (centrism of human representation) commitments, and particularly the essentializing binaries between the human and the non-human/inhuman/more-than-human world, are thrown into doubt. While the effects of anthropogenic climate change become more forceful, while “we” “ourselves” are increasingly caught up in the rhythms and patternings of non-human and inhuman forces— the powerful pulsions of capital, the dividuating forces of algorithms and big data (Deleuze, 1992), the agency of plastic particulates and chemical toxins, to name but a few—educational theory and practice must now contend with the notion that “[t]he ‘human’ is not, except as an effect of complex, shifting, becoming relations among a multiplicity of actants” (Weaver & Snaza, 2017, p. 1063). In this way, it may be apt to suggest, as Pinar does, that “we have lost track of ourselves” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 4), where “ourselves” not only refers to the “flesh” of the human subject, but also more importantly, the understanding that “we” “ourselves” are intimately imbricated in environmental, technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks, which, given the current situation, are increasingly impossible to ignore. Examined through the lens of today’s anthropocenic conditions and the recognition that the human being is intricately entwined within and co-constituted by the ecologies within which it is situated, curriculum thought must not simply return

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to individual personhood, as Pinar and Grumet might have it, but must instead become capable of proposing different starting points for curriculum inquiry that not only recognize the inheritances and limits of anthropocentrism and its necessary distinctions, but also are capable of redirecting and reimagining pedagogical practice beyond “the nightmare that is the present” so as to transform our state of being. Defamiliarizing the Given in Curriculum Theory To be clear, the gesture I offer here is not one of mere critique, nor is it completely counter to the work done by both Pinar and Grumet in the field of curriculum studies. The point of extending the “nightmare” outlined by Pinar is not to depress and disparage. The aim here is not to revel in anthropocenic enjoyment and fantasies of the end of the world. Further, outlining this confluence of crises is not meant as an attempt to pontificate on where we went wrong, to moralize and virtue-signal, nor is it my aim here to set the stage for some universalizing pedagogical solution that will “save” us from our apparently eco-cidal tendencies. Rather, the sense of urgency raised here is meant to extend and bifurcate the context provided by Pinar and Grumet in order to examine the import of a “poor curriculum” in light of the very real situation we are faced with today. Put short, the aim here is to redirect and reimagine Pinar and Grumet’s notion of a “poor curriculum” by defamiliarizing the given within this curriculum legacy itself. With this in mind, the question for curriculum thought today, and in this case a “poor curriculum”, is how to produce an interference into those common-sense assumptions that have come to think on our behalf, in turn impeding our ability to imagine pedagogical life unfolding otherwise. To offer a beginning response to this problematic, I take a series of methodological cues from Deleuze and Guattari, who, through both the content and form of their work, provide modes of interference that might be transposed to the site of curriculum theory in an effort to defamiliarize the given. Throughout his philosophical project, Deleuze (with Guattari) demonstrated an eagerness to examine others’ ideas through creative exchange in order to bring about something new, or, more importantly, to bring about something different from within the same (my italics, Bogue, 2011, p. 86). By (re)positioning curriculum inquiry as a kind of science fiction(ing), I aim to produce a similar mode of interference that might relaunch Pinar and Grumet’s “poor curriculum” so as to provoke speculative and fabulated alternatives to the what-already-is in the field of curriculum research. As Shaviro (2015) writes, “Science fiction proposes counterintuitive scenarios” that might offer “new lines of inquiry that analytic reasoning and inductive generalization would never stumble upon by themselves” (p. 9). Such lines of inquiry are made possible by science fiction’s capacity to dilate perception through strange vantage

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points and weird encounters that ultimately frustrate all-too-human regimes of representation and modes of thinking, rendering epistemology itself mute and in need of new means of expression. This process is, of course, easier said than done. Where the given within curriculum thought (i.e., anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism) most often manifests in silence and invisibility, it is my wager that curriculum thought itself must dilate its speculative potential by posing counterintuitive scenarios and off-the-wall questions that do not ask what is, but rather, what if? In this way, curriculum inquiry might be likened to Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to doing philosophy more generally; as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) assert, a text in philosophy “should be in part . . . a kind of science fiction” (p. xx) in the sense that such a text operates “at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other” (p. xxi). Taking seriously Pinar’s assertion that “[w]e must lay in waiting for ourselves. Throughout our lives. Abandoning the pretense that we know” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. xv), this essay aims to experiment with the notion of the curriculum encounter so as to disrupt the refrain of anthropocentrism that has come to over-determine curricular thought, particularly in relation to this thing we call “human being”. As Deleuze (1994) writes, the world forces us to think when an object is no longer re-cognized but encountered (my italics, p. 139–140). In this way, an encounter is not a mere meeting between two constituted bodies underscored by consensual communication and understanding, but occurs instead as the result of an engagement with a dynamic field of forces and intensive differences from which the creation of something undetermined and unforeseen is given rise. Transposed to the site of curriculum, then, such an encounter denotes a confrontation with that which has yet to become curriculum thought, or what we might think of, following Deleuze and Guattari, as a curriculum-to-come. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975/1986; 1991/1994) notion of a “people to come”, a curriculum-to-come is an approach to curriculum theorizing that seeks to counter common-sense assumptions, or that which is given within curriculum thought, by untethering curriculum inquiry from the presumption of a prior methodology or structure and orientating inquiries to the creation of an unknown future. In what follows, I aim to reorient a “poor curriculum” to the “not yet”, the “otherwise”, and/or the “outside” of curriculum thought via the active process of science fictioning, so as to attune to weird encounters that might be capable of counter-actualizing common-sense binaries and anthropocentric conceits, in turn producing a curriculum-to-come that is adequate to the challenges of living on a suffering planet.

1976: Toward a Weird(er) “Poor Curriculum” As Pinar writes as early as 1976, it seems as though curriculum discourse is “stuck”: “[w]e are stumped and stalled. Theoretically, pragmatically.

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The field is moribund” (as cited in Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 28). For Pinar and Grumet (2015) this “stuckness” is, in part, what drives their call for a “poor curriculum”, that is, a curriculum “stripped of its distractions” (p. xiii), a curriculum that, through the autobiographical method of currere, operates as “a reflexive cycle in which thought bends back upon itself and thus recovers its volition” (p. 130–131). Through a cyclical movement involving four steps or moments—regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetical—the method of currere seeks to depict both the temporal and reflective movements for an autobiographical study of educational experience, where curriculum operates not only as an attempt to talk about education, but to intensify one’s experience of education. Put simply, currere, and thus a “poor curriculum”, seeks to understand the contribution education makes to one’s understanding of his or her life, and as such, the main aim of a “poor curriculum” is to penetrate those public masks, those “heuristic fictions of the individual”, that might otherwise impede the reflexive process of autobiographical study. For Pinar and Grumet (2015) then, the “stuckness” of curriculum thought can be largely attributed to a profound “loss of Self” (p. 15), a loss that is perpetuated and maintained by curriculum’s ongoing focus on concepts such as design, planning, instruction, and evaluation as opposed to “the student’s point of view from the student’s point of view” (p. 22). In response to a curriculum field that is “stumped and stalled”, Pinar and Grumet’s notion of a “poor curriculum” therefore proposes that the most powerful curriculum encounter one can have is an encounter with the Self. In addition to offering an approach that allows one to “see, understand, and integrate” individual experiences in and of education (p. 19), the method of currere is also positioned as a pathway towards what Pinar calls humanization. That is, where currere shares theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology and some of the assumptions of Piagetian research in cognitive structure, assumptions rooted in the recognition that knowledge is a human construction, currere “attempts to identify those experiences that are necessary to the full realization of human potential [emphasis added]” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 108). In one of the most recently added chapters of Toward a Poor Curriculum, for instance, Pinar draws on Paulo Friere’s contention that “the ontological vocation of the human species is humanization” (p. 119) to outline currere’s role as a humanizing force. For Pinar, humanization, or to become “more human”, is not “to become more, historically speaking, what we are, but to become in fact what we have not been [emphasis added]” (p. 119). According to Pinar, the path towards humanization is therefore a process of amplifying certain desirable qualities, while extinguishing less desirable ones through encounters with those who have attained a “higher ontological level” (p. 127). Although Pinar asserts that this notion of humanization is not teleological, he nevertheless concludes that humanization is both a process and an ideal, where one is able to become “ontologically higher” through self-examination, self-reflection, and self-work.

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Beyond the questionable political implications behind this hierarchical formulation of ontology, Pinar’s comments on humanization highlight several central, albeit unspoken, assumptions about the aims and motives of currere, particularly in relation to “human being”. Pinar’s focus on individual processes of self-examination, which for him are key to humanization, not only privilege an understanding of the human subject in terms of rational individualism, where the human Self is characterized by discrete and re-cognizable identities, a stable and rational “I”, and a distinct separation from the ecologies it inhabits, but also an unquestioned posture of human exceptionalism, where the ontological presumptions, including the notion of becoming “ontologically higher”, proceed from the telos of humanism, in turn reducing possible becomings in and with the world to all-too-human regimes of sensing, thinking, and acting. It is simply taken for granted that the world is meant to mean forus, that the world is given to its a priori resemblance to human life, and, further, that it is our “ontological vocation” to enact this particular mode of meaning-making. Further, Pinar’s (2015) comments on humanization also expose, albeit indirectly, yet another layer of “stuckness” in curriculum thought wherein we have limited the ability to think pedagogical life other than the “whatalready-is” or “the way things are” in the here and now. In his brief discussion of “certain extremely potent factors: nuclear weapons, continued economic and political oppression, the ecological crisis” (p. 120), for example, Pinar asserts that “what is necessary for our purposes is to realize that, and of course we do painfully realize, how powerless [emphasis added] we are to influence the world condition on [a planetary] level” (p. 121). Pinar goes on to contend that although a “species perspective” must be kept in mind, “it is not usable information, and hence not a useful perspective” (p. 120). As such, Pinar asserts that what is needed is to return to a focus on the individual: we need “careful, continuous yet not excessive self-examination [emphasis added]” (p. 122). In addition to emphasizing, once again, a vision of the individual as distinct and separate from the world, separate from the species even, Pinar’s comments demonstrate an unstated worldview that Mark Fisher (2009) terms “reflexive impotence”, that is, “[we] know things are bad, but more than that, [we] know [we] can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge,’ that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 21). It is this self-fulfilling prophecy, the “painful realization of our own powerlessness”, that “conspires in a narrowing of belief” (Beier & Wallin, 2017, p. 118), which not only limits action in the present, but also occupies the horizon of the thinkable, limiting how we imagine the world and our relation to it into the future. Pinar’s dismissal of curriculum’s implication in a planetary perspective not only redirects focus back to the individual, erasing the ways in which we are always already exposed to and co-constituted by

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the more-than-human world in which we dwell, but also contributes to the same “stuckness” Pinar laments. If we take seriously Pinar and Grumet’s thesis that curriculum encounters begin from the assertion that “I don’t know, and I must study, and search. I must be open to my experience, open to others’, and be willing to abandon what I think in the face of what I see” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. xv), then the question becomes how might a “poor curriculum” itself address this posture of reflexive impotence so as to dilate what is possible both now and into the future? Or, put another way, how might a “poor curriculum” be reimagined so as to counter the pervasive “stuckness” within curriculum thought by putting curriculum inquiry in contact with its own “outside”, or what we might think of here as those weird percepts, affects, and concepts that lie beyond standard educational perceptions, re-cognitions, and experiences? Here, I elicit the sense of “the weird” developed by Mark Fisher (2016, p. 15), who defines the weird as that which evokes a sense of perturbation, or wrongness—something out of time, something out of place—where an entity or a phenomenon is so strange that it makes us feel as though it should not exist, or at least not exist here. Fisher references black holes, for instance, those weird entities that bend space and time in bizarre and unfathomable ways that seem completely outside our common experience. Yet, if black holes are here, situated, like us, as part of the natural-material cosmos, then perhaps it is the cosmos itself which is “much stranger than our ordinary experience can comprehend” (Fisher, 2016, p. 15). That is, what the weird exposes is not only something out of place or out of time, but rather how the common-sense categories, delineations, and correlations through which we make sense of the world are themselves inadequate. Perhaps this too is the case for a “poor curriculum”, and by extension, curriculum thought more generally. That is, perhaps our ordinary experience of curriculum is also replete with peculiar anomalies, baffling mutations, and cracks in time that have become necessarily occluded behind unquestioned postures of, for instance, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, which ultimately work to maintain the “pretense that we know”.

2023: A Close Encounter of the Pedagogical Kind Perhaps you remember the description of a particular train ride. In this excursion, you recall that the most powerful curriculum encounter one can have is an encounter with the Self. Safely “inside” the simulated train carriage, you have been instructed to keep your gaze steadily on the projection of Mrs. Brown, even as she flickers, intermittently occluded by the passing shadows of the “outside” world that filter the polarized light of the liquid-crystal display. As you settle in, you remind yourself that Mrs. Brown is not just a quivering image, nor is she a mere literary character transported from the pages of Virginia Woolf to signal the stuff of

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which “real” characters are made. Rather, Mrs. Brown is a reminder of what it means to be alive in this time and place. “Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature” (Woolf, as cited in Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 3). Mrs. Brown is you. Mrs. Brown is all of us. And so, you train your gaze on her, fighting the urge to look “outside”, or even around the carriage itself, for to do so would only exacerbate the preoccupation with the “exterior” world. Keep your eyes on Mrs. Brown. The way to move forward is not “manipulation and elaboration of artifacts and activities ‘out there,’ but backward in a certain sense, toward and in fact ‘inside’ the users” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 136), “inside” Mrs. Brown, “inside” yourself. Eyes locked on Mrs. Brown, you ready yourself to enact what you have been trained to do, that is, to perform a “lengthy, systematic search of [y]our inner experience” (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 6), a search facilitated by your immersive interaction with the Mrs. Brown Simulation (MBS). As you prepare to begin, however, the already flickering Mrs. Brown begins to distort and glitch. This was not in the training manual. Between glitches, you strain to keep your stare on Mrs. Brown, whose eyes are now darting around the carriage, as if she is desperately trying to identify the source of the defect. Suddenly, the image snaps back with precision and Mrs. Brown locks her eyes on yours. She calmly asks if you are ready, before launching into one of the weirdest pedagogical encounters you have experienced in your training thus far. Mrs. Brown starts by asking you whether you are “inside” the carriage. The answer seems obvious to you, but you nevertheless reply dutifully. The simulation is graded, after all. “Yes, I am inside”. Mrs. Brown continues by asking if you are able to “describe, as honestly and personally as [you] can, what [y]our internal experience is”? (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 5). Once again, you recall your training, thinking to yourself that this must be part of the assessment. You’ve got this. Through an autobiographical account of your own educational experiences, you launch into a well-rehearsed explanation that demonstrates your deep understanding of currere. Through your own in-depth self-revelations, you not only make explicit the connections between the theory and practice of currere, but you also articulate how the method has allowed you to cultivate your ideal but latent human qualities, while eradicating your most inhuman ones (Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 120). Pleased with yourself, you sit back in the carriage and wait for a response from Mrs. Brown. After staring right through you for what seems like several minutes, Mrs. Brown finally leans forward, locking her eyes on yours once again and begins her reply: Your understanding of currere is, indeed, solid, but your focus on personal voice, meanings, and narratives, not only assumes that meaning can be deduced and represented through self-reflexivity, but that this is a desirable approach for learning about oneself in relation

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to the world. Further, your focus on a so-called “inner” experience, relies on particular distinctions between “insides” and “outsides”, between interiors and exteriors, between human qualities and inhuman ones. These distinctions have become so fundamental to your thinking that they have limited your ability to perceive beyond them. Look at the carriage windows, for instance. Did you notice that as you spoke, the windows became so fogged up that they now obscure the passing countryside? At this point, you look to the window and, indeed, notice a layer of condensation. Mrs. Brown asks you to wipe away some of the fog before returning to her feedback: Now that we can access the “outside”, let’s think about thinking for a moment. Where thinking itself is understood as that which can be analyzed in terms of original intent and volitions, where thought belongs to a some-one—my thoughts—it is conceptualized as something that exists “outside” the subject, “outside” of you, but is nevertheless accessible through reflection and inward observation. In this way, you have carved out a distinct separation between a socalled “interior reality” and an “exterior world”, a distinction that is echoed in the very way in which you have come to understand your Self as a human being in this time and place. That is, you have become so invested in a particular image of the Self, an exceptionally exceptional subject devoid of “inhuman” contamination, that you are unable to recognize how your thoughts are not your own, but are instead emergent from dynamic interactions with seemingly “outside” forces. Not unlike your material make-up, which is constituted by a “viscous porosity” (Tuana, 2007) between your flesh and the flesh of the world, your thoughts are the result of encounters with an “outside”, with that which is not readily re-cognizable, with nonsense, with that which has yet to become thought. So yes, you are “inside” this carriage, here with me now, but you are also co-constituted by your relations to that which lies beyond, or that which lies “outside”. In this way, the divisions between the so-called “interior reality” and an “exterior world” are not mutually exclusive binary oppositions. Instead, what is considered “inside” and “outside” are continuously generated through a relation of multifaceted folds, where that which exists “outside” is continuously folded “inside”, so as to construct a topological space defined by ongoing difference and multiplicity (Deleuze, 1988; 1993). This folding is a thought of co-emergence and continuity; that which is folded is continuous with the dynamic field out of which it is folded. Returning to the question of thinking, then, thought itself can be conceptualized as a kind of fold, or the folding “inside” of the forces

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At this point Mrs. Brown breaks her steady flow of commentary to address your shocked expression. In all of the conversations you have had with peers who have already completed the MBS, you have never encountered any discussion of such things. In fact, after hours of rehearsal and preparation you assumed that your simulation trial would be without surprises, that you would be ready and able to move through the process with familiarity, comfort, and ease. Mrs. Brown can sense your dismay, and so she redirects her focus back to the question of currere: Where this process of folding articulates how the “inside” is a folding of the “outside”, individual personhood, what we might think of as the Self, is reformed as a topology of different kinds of folds, or components of subjectification, that come together to make up who we think we are. This process of folding is, in this sense, necessary for understanding one’s relation to one’s Self, leading us back to one of the fundamental claims of currere. Where this notion of the fold interferes, however, is with the conceit that an encounter with the Self requires a deep exploration of “interior reality”. Instead, if we are to take seriously the multifaceted folds that make us who we think we are, any investigation of one’s relation to one’s Self would also have to take into account the “exterior world” through which the interior is produced in the first place. The implication here is not only educational, but also ethical and political. That is, if an encounter with the Self starts from the figure of the fold then the emergence of new kinds of struggles—political, social, environmental struggles—will inevitably involve the production of new kinds of subjectivity, or new kinds of foldings. It is here where Mrs. Brown finally breaks her eye contact with you and directs her gaze outside the window. You remain shocked and stunned, not only because of Mrs. Brown’s intense monologue disguised as feedback, but because she is unabashedly staring out the window, at the same “outside” you have been trained to disregard. While you have been practicing techniques to keep your gaze “inside” the carriage, Mrs. Brown, your authoritative guide, is doing exactly the opposite. In your confusion, you eventually notice a muffled rattling coming from the vicinity of the carriage door. Just as Mrs. Brown turns back to you as if ready to speak once more, she freezes, suspended in time and space as the carriage door flies open, revealing your agitated Professor, two infuriated technicians, and a group of fellow students. Speaking all at once, they

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lead you “outside” the carriage, apologizing profusely while assuring you that such an egregious error in programming will not happen again. After making sure you are safe, they ask what happened while you were “inside”, to which you respond: “I’m not quite sure what to tell you, but it sure was weird”.

2017/2018: Science Fictioning a Curriculum-to-Come By attuning to the folding of the “outside”, to that which exists “beyond” standardized conceptualizations of the human and “outside” the fiction of the Self, curriculum thought might encounter weird intensities and hitherto occluded potentials that have the capacity to both “transform our state of being” (even for just a moment) and provoke something different to the what-already-is in the field of curriculum studies. In short, the wager I propose here is that it is not enough to simply return to a focus “on the flesh” of the individual human subject, towards the “inside” of the carriage, but rather, to become attuned to the way in which our very perception of this “inside” is constructed through “outside” intensities and protocols that work to discipline and delimit the very questions we are able to ask in and about curriculum in the first place. Such attunement, however, requires the development of novel tools and conceptual resources through which we might begin to think the curriculum encounter differently. As Pinar develops, citing Woolf once again: “[.  .  .] they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But these tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death [emphasis added]” (Woolf, as cited in Pinar & Grumet, 2015, p. 3). The question for today’s curriculum thought is thus not only how to attend to the “internal reality” that is nevertheless constructed through a folding of the “exterior world”, but also how we might develop new conceptual resources counter to those “tools of death”—those common-sense presuppositions and over-coded categories—that obscure and delimit what we are able to think in the first place. These tools, however, will not come ready-made. In fact, curriculum inquiry driven by pre-determined methods that endeavour to reduce and erase complexity, or what Weaver and Snaza (2017) refer to as methodocentrism, may work to actively limit inquiry by disciplining perception and inculcating modes of meaning-making through “the belief that particular, pre-formed methods can guarantee the validity of an intellectual investigation into the world by factoring out the vicissitudes of the observers’ entanglement with the world” (p. 1056). The recognition that there is, indeed, “no methodological instrumentality to be unproblematically learned” (Lather, 2013, p. 635) therefore necessitates the development of creative and emergent approaches, or what Lather (2013) terms a “methodologyto-come”, that might enable us to “begin to do it differently” with every

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new situation, with every new problematic (p. 635). Put another way, if we are to possess a flavour of the beyond, if we are to invoke the “outside” of curriculum thought, which, it should be emphasized, is not just that which exists “outside”, but rather refers to the weirdness within, we cannot rely on already-existing figures and images of thought. In the case of Pinar and Grumet’s “poor curriculum”, for instance, attuning to the nonhuman/inhuman/more-than-human intensities that co-constitute the Self reframes and redirects the central aims and goals of currere, in turn fabulating a fundamentally different register of possibility. That is, by reading a “poor curriculum” as a kind of science fiction, the curriculum encounter is repositioned as an encounter with the weird, with the unknowability that attends the known-world, in turn dilating what counts as knowledge in the first place. By science fictioning a “poor curriculum”, the method of currere is placed in close contact with weird encounters that provoke us to think about what we mean when we talk about the Self, and further, when we talk about human being. It should be noted here that I am not suggesting that science fiction(ing) is the “answer” to reimagining curriculum inquiry today. Further, science fictioning is not just about replacing “the old” with something shiny and new. Rather, science fictioning is just one example of how curriculum encounters might be remade so as to call forth something different within the same, something weird within the banal, in turn defamiliarizing the given within curriculum thought. As highlighted by the Mrs. Brown simulation, the goal is not to get “outside”, to transcend the here and now in favour of some abstract utopia, but to recognize how the “inside” is perhaps weirder than we are able to comprehend. With this in mind, science fictioning does not function to create utopias, but instead, displaces the promise of a “better” future, a “better” curriculum, or a curriculum that is “more embodied”, “more diverse”, or even “more human”, in favour of the production of alternative possibilities within the present. As Deleuze reminds us, “[u]topia isn’t the right concept” (1995, p. 174) because of the way in which it operates through transcendent ideals. In lieu of utopic models, pre-ordained destinations, and the authority of methodocentrism, science fictioning sets up different coordinates, conditions, affordances, and constraints that work to defamiliarize the given, and in the case of this paper, short-circuit the givenness of anthropocentrism and a world for-us within curriculum thought. If we are to take seriously the “nightmare that is the present”, where the future of curriculum thought is “stumped and stalled”, curriculum inquiry must not only attend to the more-than-human complexity that already is, but also dilate what is possible to think in terms of what might be. In short, and following Deleuze and Guattari, it is the invention of a curriculum-to-come—an attempt to articulate a curriculum method that does not yet exist; a curriculum that is not for-us; a curriculum wherein our precious, self-important, and all-too-human sense of knowledge in

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and of the world is rendered insufficient—that holds the capacity to induce weird curriculum encounters, and by extension, propose counterintuitive scenarios and incompossible worlds that might unsettle and singularize otherwise diminished conditions of pedagogical possibility.

References Beier, J. L., & Wallin, J. J. (2017). Beyond belief: Visionary cinema, becoming imperceptible and pedagogical resistance. In C. Naughton, G. Biesta, & D. R. Cole. (Eds.), Art, artists and pedagogy: Philosophy and the arts in education (pp. 117–128). London, UK: Routledge. Bogue, R. (2011). Deleuze and Guattari and the future of politics: Science fiction, protocols and the people to come. Deleuze Studies, 5, 77–97. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault (S. Hand, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1986). Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3–7. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/778828 Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1988). Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published in 1968). Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations 1972–1990 (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Towards a minor literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1975). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? London, UK: Verso. (Original work published in 1991). Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? London, UK: Zero Books. Fisher, M. (2016). The weird and the eerie. London, UK: Repeater Books. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645. doi:10.10 80/09518398.2013.788753 Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. R. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum. New York, NY: Educator’s International Press. Inc. Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. London, UK: Repeater Books. Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism (A. Goffey, Trans.). London, UK: Open Humanities Press. Tuana, N. (2007). Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In S. Hekman & S. Alaimo (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 188–213). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wallace-Wells, D. (2017, July 10). The uninhabitable earth. New York Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-changeearth-too-hot-for-humans.html Weaver, J. A., & Snaza, N. (2017). Against methodocentrism in educational research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1055–1065, doi:10.108 0/00131857.2016.1140015.

12 The Minor Gesture and Curriculum Studies Nikki Rotas

This chapter draws on a yearlong research project situated in a historically underrepresented school and surrounding community in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The goal of the research project was to foster and sustain creative/artistic, critical, and interdisciplinary practices that were responsive to the urban learning environment of children ages 6 to 10. Embedding the project within an Ontario curriculum context and within the field of curriculum studies, I foregrounded post-concepts (i.e., poststructuralist, posthumanist, more-than-human) and interdisciplinary practices (i.e., science, technology, engineering, art, math [STEAM]) to empirically investigate the process of learning and to thus document the relational aspect of knowledge production. My major research questions included: 1) In what ways might teachers and researchers experiment with concepts to support pedagogical learning that affects and is affected by bodies? and 2) How to make visible and value the process of learning and its relationship to the object of knowledge? Methods of data collection included interviews, student journals, and digital photography. Wearable cameras were also used as methodological tools that centred on student voice. Students, teachers, and researcher wore multiple cameras throughout the school day. The cameras offered multiple moving angles that documented the relationships that emerged and the learning that students engaged in. The wide-angled lens absorbed a dizzying array of footage, producing rapidly moving shots. The cameras captured emotion and meaning as it unfolded in the classroom and on the schoolyard. Upon analysis of the moving images, I witnessed students swearing, crying, laughing, and expressing knowledge of curriculum content areas that intersected STEAM disciplines. The meaning-making process was not perceived in such detail by myself and the teacher during pedagogical activities. The additional layer of meaning-making that materialized and thus became evident upon analysis, served as a form of ‘pedagogical documentation’ that both emphasized where students were in the learning process (i.e., what students knew) and how they learned (see Ontario Ministry of Education, 2012, 2015a). However, during the research process I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what else might be made

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possible with the video images. How might moving images become more than documentation recorded by the children? How might these images continue to affect the children and, therefore, provoke students to think about new questions and concerns? Grappling with the foregoing questions, I combed—alongside students— through hundreds of video images that were recorded with the use of the wearable cameras. The process of combing involved the literal cutting and pasting of paper images as well as the digital editing of images recorded with the wearable cameras (see Rotas, 2016, 2018). The latter involved a practice we (students, classroom teacher, and researcher) coined ‘mashing’. This chapter focuses on the practice of mashing and discusses how the digital editing of video images provoked student response, multiplying perceptions of what was learned and how learning unfolded. Through Erin Manning’s (2016) concept of the ‘minor gesture’, I argue that the practice of mashing not only documented learning and thinking as it unfolded, but also activated an affective/intensive response and ‘responsibility’ (Haraway, 2016) for what was said, seen, and learned through the editing of multiple video images. Taking my cue from William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet’s reissued book, Toward a Poor Curriculum (2014), I offer the minor gesture as an opening to activate the Ontario curriculum with a speculative concept and in pragmatic ways that are situated and accessible across disciplinary knowledges. I situate the concept of the minor gesture within the ontological turn in curriculum studies (Snaza & Weaver, 2015; Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska, 2016), and in ways that are attentive to how movements of thought are activated by the viewing and remaking of video images (or data). The ontological turn and its relationship to curriculum studies is one that interrogates relationships grounded in human exceptionalism and thus ‘major’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) constructions of Western thought. The minor gesture offers a potential shift toward pedagogical approaches invested in affective processes that intensify critical and creative thought. The ontological turn and its relationship to curriculum studies and the minor gesture seeks to understand how pedagogical environments shape thinking and in turn the knowledges that shape thought. The minor gesture is therefore concerned with how children learn through relational processes that foreground collectivities of viewing and remaking images, rather than foreground the narrative self. In what follows, I detail the practice of mashing and its potential to alter perceptions about one’s response and responsibility during the learning process. I then turn to the concept of the minor gesture to support an articulation of mashing as a practice that shapes experience as much as that which is shaped by experience. This then leads to a discussion of how the affective dimension of thought, which cannot be contained within the narrative body, is very much part of the process of knowledge production. I conclude with a conversation about value in

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education and the need for the ‘revaluation of value’ (Massumi, 2018) in pedagogical contexts. In so doing, I argue that the practice of mashing provokes thought that potentially alters the ways that students, teachers, and researchers perceive, value, and enact curriculum worlds.

Mashing: A Minor Practice An important part of the research project was ensuring that students and teachers had access to the research data. I encouraged students and teachers to work with digital photography and video in ways that provoked them to think about: 1) their involvement and learning in the research process; 2) learning outcomes (for both students and teachers); and 3) future projects and practices that could potentially foster school and community relationships. Students were, in particular, interested in the images produced with the wearable cameras. They were curious about how they looked and sounded on film. During this particular time in the project, they were also captivated by a popular television show called Glee. The students watched the show every week, which followed the lives of a group of high schoolers who would collectively sing and mix and/or mash different songs together to create a new song (i.e., similar to an ’80s mixtape or ’90s mix CD). Responding to both student interest in the video data and their interest in the television show, we decided to mix and/ or mash the videos produced with the wearable cameras. Using editing software, students mashed (i.e., digitally cut and pasted) different video images that were recorded over the course of the research project. The mashed compositions became digital short variations of lived experience and/or a thousand minor gestures that students recomposed during the digital editing process, which resulted in the composition of short films that were presented to the school and community at the annual Arts Gala. Manning (2016) explains that the minor gesture forces bodies to think—it is felt. The minor gesture in relation to imaging practices, such as mashing, grapples with expressions of knowledge that make the intensive movement of thought felt. This is a shift in thought that sharply departs from neoliberal policies and practices that have placed value on contained knowledge that can, for example, be found in curriculum documents. Learning understood as an intensive process, as opposed to an object or goal to be obtained, is often not valued in schools. This is, of course, not a new reality. What the minor gesture does is emphasize the conscious and non-conscious movement of thought that is always in creative interplay during the learning process. An intensive movement of thought might occur, for instance, before a child expresses excitement about learning something new or feels goose bumps on her arm after an encounter with fear. The practice of mashing provoked students to express many gestures while watching and recomposing the images, including many visceral

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responses. Students noted that they felt nauseous viewing the unfocused movement of bodies on the computer screen. Students also commented on not remembering ‘right’ or ‘forgetting’ that they did and said something. A pair of students who were working together noted their involvement in a conflict in which the ownership of a skipping rope proved to produce tension amongst a group of peers. Their response upon viewing and mashing the videos provoked questions about responsibility. It became evident in their response to the videos, and as evidenced in their written journal entries (in which students reflected daily on their learning), that they did not necessarily take responsibility for their part in the conflict. Students rather questioned how the conflict was resolved. Another pair of students noted that they ‘looked different’ and that their own and their friends’ voices ‘sounded different’. I understood their responses and their written articulations of the mashing experience as more of a questioning of responsibility, rather than taking ownership of their interactions with peers. Process-orientated practices like mashing do not necessarily offer tangible outcomes, nor immediately modify the conditions and constraints of a particular context, learning moment, and/or conflict. What the practice does, however, is activate a creative and/or artistic process. I understand artistic practice through Manning’s (2016) theorizing of the minor gesture, which includes an understanding of art as an expressive learning process that does not always have a set of rules, predetermined response, and/or technical object. Manning contends that learning: Is a fragile enterprise that can too easily be sidetracked by the encroachment of what is set up, in advance, as relevant or irrelevant  .  .  . this fragility is often framed and deadened through the crafting of questions that already have answers, or whose answers are close at hand, contained within pre-existing academic discourse. (2016, p. 9) What I had assumed and perhaps what I had hoped for is that students would take responsibility for their interactions with peers. Although this did not happen, I think that a common understanding of responsibility in classrooms operates narrowly and often involves superficial apologies. Donna Haraway’s articulation of responsibility, on the other hand, requires a much deeper understanding that involves a sustained and ‘situated’ (Haraway, 1988) daily commitment to creating responsive practices. Responsibility, for Haraway, is a collectively sustained commitment to add to worlds rather than subtract. To add is to engage in a creative process that is deeply committed to ‘adding perspectives to engage perspectives, adding subjectivities to engage subjectivities, adding versions to understand versions’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 128). There is potential in the practice of mashing to foster a creative and critical process that

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veers from habit (i.e., telling narratives) toward learning moments where children have to identify what is important to them and what makes that knowledge important (i.e., creating narratives) (Haraway, 2016; Stengers, 2018). In turn, children must also think about what knowledges are neglected, or what and who is often not seen in popular images of representation (Stengers, 2018). Our task as teachers, researchers, and curriculum theorists is to work with students to construct the questions that matter to them and their communities (Haraway, 2016). The fact that students felt a sense of strangeness viewing themselves and their peers on the computer screen is a notable outcome that makes evident the need to facilitate pedagogical processes where students are at the forefront of questioning and recreating their past, present, and future stories. It is furthermore important to underlie that the students’ questioning of responsibility was not solely in response to a past reality. The mashing of images and ultimately the digital short films became technologies that made a sense of time and thus the learning process mobile. The mobility of the learning process, or in other words the ‘curriculum as lived’ (Aoki, 1993/2005), affirms the capacity of students to create realities that are not recorded about or for them, but rather lived and add to worlds. The scholarship of late curriculum theorist, Ted Aoki, has shaped my ways of reading/seeing/perceiving and engaging in curriculum worlds. In resonance with the minor gesture, his curricular meditations have questioned how different bodies relate to processes and practices. Specifically, Aoki’s (1993/2005) concept of ‘curriculum as lived’ connects past and present realities to a future time that works at the edges of what might become possible when students are pedagogically pushed to think about how they relate and creatively add to worlds. More than ever in this digitized time in history, visual forms of representation and technologies of knowing matter. Images matter because they instantly affect bodies in ways that produce hate, love, hope, confusion, anger, kindness, cruelty, optimism, value, etc. The value of mashing (and its digital short compositions) is its provocation to make children feel and to gesture, to articulate and to create collective narratives of responsible commitment that add to worlds. Deleuze’s (1986, 1989) interest in visual forms of representation (or data) and what it can do is timely and relevant in educational methodology, and in the field of curriculum studies (see Pedersen & Pini, 2017). Notably, educational methodologists who engage with Deleuzian theories, such as Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2013, 2017), have been questioning such modes of production throughout the years. It is my impression that Deleuze would not tolerate the curriculum document, nor archives of knowledge and popular images of reality that collect static stories. As Haraway (2016) puts it, ‘[s]tories are essential, but are never “mere” stories’ (p. 128). I also consider Aoki not only to be a visionary curriculum theorist, but also a brilliant methodologist as he and others in

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the field, such as Pinar and Grumet, have been challenging teachers and researchers to think about how to relate, complicate, and provoke new stories. Throughout the years, they have provoked curriculum theorists, along with their students, to reflect and story how lived experience is felt. The curriculum as lived and the minor gesture are important concepts because they are felt and directly relate to practices that are curious about what else might be added and made to count. Both concepts are concerned with the lived, learning body and what else might be thought and created that works at the edges of individualist realities that are grounded in Western educational frameworks. Through pedagogical practice and reflective writing, Aoki tested the limits of Western epistemologies by ‘inspiriting’ (Aoki, 1990/2005) curriculum with sounds that resonate beyond the sensory organ of the human cochlea. Aoki attempts to textually articulate the affective dimensions of knowing by giving an example of champion figure skater Brian Orser and, in particular, notes his skating as an intensive curricular practice. He references an interview given by Orser in the 1980s. Within the interview, Orser describes his skating as a practice that creatively interplays among the music, ice, and spectators that co-compose his performance. Orser understands his practice as a matter of relation that extends beyond artistic gestures of the human skating-body and unto inanimate objects like ice. The minor that is activated in the artistic gesture of the skating-body becomes alive in the intensive moments of an ‘improvisational choreography’ (Manning, 2009) in which Orser does not feel the cool ice and hear the music, but as Aoki writes, rather ‘does not find music distanced from himself; he becomes the music’ (1990/2005, p. 360). Mashing, and learning for that matter, is an improvisational choreography of sorts. It is a creative practice and artistic gesture that concerns how a new composition of experience might come together, and how learning is a process that affects and is affected by matter-form. How might the creative process become valued in curricular worlds? An important question to then ask ourselves is how might researchers, teachers, and curriculum theorists engage in the ‘revaluation of value’ (Massumi, 2018) in educational contexts?

The Revaluation of Value The minor gesture, as it relates to the practice of mashing, emphasizes the importance of pedagogically facilitating ‘decisional opportunities’ (Manning, 2016) within learning environments. Opportunities are collectively negotiated potentialities that materialize in the form of a curriculum that is not set up in advance. This proposed curriculum is invested in collective potential (i.e., what else and/or what other learning opportunities might be activated). It requires a student-centred teaching and learning environment where a commitment to not knowing the end result of a pedagogical activity is a shared commitment at all levels (i.e., classroom,

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school, community, and policy). Such a proposal offers an opportunity to question and reconsider articulations of value in educational contexts. Importantly, it changes the questions students, teachers, researchers, and policy makers could ask in hopes of changing the questions that are in turn supported (Manning, 2016). Questions might include: 1. What if curriculum designers did not know what needed to be taught in advance of learning encounters with students and contexts? 2. How to work toward valuing that which cannot be understood beforehand? 3. What might be the value of valuing that which cannot be understood before it is encountered? 4. What might be the value of valuing that which cannot be seen and understood in language, but is felt? 5. How to make visible that which bears a rhythm, a resonance that registers on communicative planes that cannot be reduced to the mechanics of language? It is my hope that these questions provoke different questions that support understandings of curriculum as a process and potential for what else might be made to matter and added to worlds. To value process and potential is to value a creative and thus ‘qualitative surplus’ (Massumi, 2018), which means that what might result is a dynamic learning experience that is in excess of curriculum expectations and assessments. In its material form, curriculum might take the shape of many objects. It can take the shape of many words and expressions. Or, curriculum might not become dynamic at all. But, again, a curriculum that is lived as opposed to planned might activate a sustained affect that is carried in the desiring body of the child. The desire to be curious and to lead one’s own learning might potentialize. As I am writing this manuscript, years later, I am reminded of a recent conversation that I had with a student who participated in the project. I continue to work with the same school and community, in many different capacities, over the course of 10 years. Just a few months ago, the student stopped me in the school hallway and asked: Do you remember the cameras we used and the videos we made?’ I nodded my head. He replied, ‘I have two SD (secure digital) memory cards that you can use. Do you want them? The foregoing conversation reminded me of how challenging it is to manage massive amounts of video data on multiple SD cards. I expressed this frustration on many occasions during the research project. The student’s gesture of the SD cards, years later, has provoked me to ask if it was my agonizing relationship with the management of digital storage that was

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felt by this student. I wonder if this student’s gesture was more complex, exceeding memories of my frustration with the SD cards. I wonder if this gesture was an expression of a child’s desire to engage in a process that made him feel something different in the context of his classroom and community. I never did ask him, but if I did, I wonder if he could have articulated what he was desiring. The fragility of a process that directs itself is a minor task with major considerations for how facilitation might happen. The role of the researcher and/or teacher would be one that, again, facilitates rather than implements and instructs. The role is also much more complex and requires a commitment to working with children and within their communities over sustained periods of time. Learning to facilitate student-centred experiences takes time and multiple, generative attempts to risk and to fail. Risk and failure are another two concepts that are cautiously used in educational contexts for perhaps obvious reasons that relate to student success and emotional and physical safety. However, and echoing Manning (2016), there is generativity in failure. Risking ourselves and what the human knows is a minor task that fuels and values more subjectivities and more stories. Risk and failure are both vulnerable starting points and/or coordinates to enact a curriculum that values unforeseen additions to worlds. It has become frustratingly too easy to subtract from education in terms of resources and financial funding—this has been the reality for far too long. Within an Ontario educational and political context, subtraction is made visible in the conservative provincial policy to dismantle a revised Health and Physical Education curriculum (2015b), which included sexual health content for young children. It is always easy to revert back to what is comfortable and known, and this has become obvious through this very policy that has deemed access to sexual health and education too radical for children. Students and teachers have been forced to revert back to an interim curriculum that was drafted in 2010, and that is no longer relevant, nor responsive to questions that children have already been posing within their classrooms and homes. Rather than add to worlds that are already happening, the fear of knowledge has consumed current educational and political debates; it has seeped into communities. It is far too easy to reduce knowledge and subtract from worlds, rather than risk and perhaps fail to alter worlds worth valuing.

Conclusion The practice of mashing may not seem like an obvious point of departure; it is indeed a coordinate that is unharmonious and inefficient. It is a knot to grapple with perception and how one relates to worlds. Mashing is an opportunity to reflect on one’s narrative and to join collectivities that question relationships to worlds. It is an opportunity to become conscious of the decisions one makes. Importantly, mashing is

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an opportunity to disrupt one’s habits and frameworks for thinking. It is an opportunity to take up the minor task of creating new stories that the child is in charge of making and remaking. Mashing is a creative and artistic process that intensifies and activates bodies to think, to gesture, to feel and desire the potential of what else might be made possible. There are no immediate solutions to conflict. What mashing does is create a process of possibility for the what else of interaction in a future time. It is a practice that challenges capitalist structures of schooling through its valuation of surplus and excess of what the pedagogue or curriculum theorist sets up in advance. Mashing is simply a piece of art; it dynamically produces quality as opposed to quantity. Pedagogues and theorists must make room for potential. They must labour to open up spaces for such student-led potential. Potentializing qualities of experience in educational environments is an important concluding note that is significant to Massumi’s re-articulation of value. Teaching and learning strategies, and the definitions that articulate these practices will still exist, but must ‘overspill’ (Massumi, 2018) their definitions. A revaluation of curriculum and pedagogical practices must not revert back into neoliberal structures of schooling that economize thought into what looks like a different task. The call for the revaluation of learning is a speculative proposal. It is also a proposition for the activation of dynamic learning environments that centre qualitative relationships that children create in relation with their worlds. Embedded in messy realities, creative practices like mashing potentialize critical questions that consider how responsibility might be taken up in a future time that must be made through the very generative failures that the pedagogue’s practices are not immune to. I think that there is hate, love, hope, confusion, anger, kindness, cruelty, and optimism in valuing such a learning process.

References Aoki, T. (1990/2005). Inspiriting the curriculum (1990). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 357–365). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Aoki, T. (1993/2005). Legitimating live curriculum: Toward a curricular landscape of multiplicity (1993). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 199–215). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: MIT Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema II: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: MIT Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. doi:10. 2307/3178066 Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2009). Relationscapes: Movement, art, philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2018). 99 theses on the revaluation of value: A postcapitalist manifesto. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2012). Capacity building series K-2: Pedagogical documentation. ISSN: 1913 8482. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2015a). Capacity building series K-12: Pedagogical documentation revisited. ISSN: 1913 8482. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2015b). The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Health and Physical Education. Ontario, CA: Queen’s Printer for Ontario. Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. R. (2014). Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed.). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Pedersen, H., & Pini, B. (2017). Educational epistemologies and methods in a more-than-human world. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1051– 1054. doi:10.1080/00131857.2016.1199925 Rotas, N. (2016). Moving toward practices that matter. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 179–196). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Rotas, N. (2018). Mashing: A practice that makes vision felt. In D. Hodgins (Ed.), Lively doings and dialogues in feminist post-qualitative childhood studies (pp. 131–138). London, UK: Bloomsbury. Snaza, N., Sonu, D., Truman, S. E., & Zaliwska, Z. (Eds.). (2016). Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Snaza, N., & Weaver, J. (Eds.). (2015). Posthumanism and educational research. New York, NY: Routledge. Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). The appearance of data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13, 223–227. doi:10.1177/1532708613487862 St. Pierre, E. A. (2017). Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1080–1089. doi:10.1080/00131 857.2016.1151761

Strand IV

Charges Sandra Chang-Kredl and David Lewkowich

A charge—whether defined as responsibility, accusation, consequence, commitment, stimulation or movement—is something whose meaning is typically only revealed in the resonances of its effects, and in this process, made readable and taken into advantage by being superficially arrested and confined. Thankfully, charges also have other ineffable effects that— as Peter Taubman (2006) has written of jouissance—are totally “uncontrollable” (p. 30). Even if ignored or disavowed, effects return, exhibiting the ways in which charges endlessly retain potential for “signs of newness or difference ripening or opening” (Boldt & Leander, 2017, p. 413). Critiquing the tendency to conflate curriculum and pedagogy, Pinar (2005) contends that “teachers provide educational opportunities; students are responsible for taking advantage of them” (p. 79). Passion, emotion, relation, responsibility; no matter the course of our personal histories, we all begin and daily present as charges—a kernel and spark that, put into motion and undetermined sequence, reinforce the persistent echoes of who we were and are in the world today. However, that which is brought to motion may also retroactively change the character—thus also changing the charge—of what may have first been simply a suggestion. Yet, in “taking advantage,” students inevitably also charge a teacher’s provisions, which may have otherwise been a murmur fast forgotten, and use these encounters in unpredictably transcendent ways. As noted in the introduction, curriculum encounters often eclipse our abilities to articulate their effects (Massumi, 2016). In the three chapters that make up this strand, the desire to transform meaning, to keep transforming and to keep meaning, is as basic as our need to recognize that the world we share with others is a place in which we may find love, a place where words and bodies can coincide in the collective charge of educational events. While the provisions provided to compel students to transform their consciousness may differ—for Balzer and Heidebrecht, it is postcolonial literature; for Nellis, stories of love; and for Ohito and Nyachae, an empowerment curriculum—the teacher’s desire to bring change into motion is always present. Geraldine Balzer and Luke Heidebrecht theorize how one particular Indigenous high school teacher uses the charge of postcolonial literature

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to encourage her class of predominantly Indigenous students to move towards personalized visions of social justice. They describe how the teacher, through a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler, 1999) and a shared recognition of colonial charges of oppression, exposed her students to notions of hybridity and the subaltern through texts that demanded “emotional and relational engagement.” Robert Christopher Nellis describes how stories as heuristic devices provoked him to think about the always charged and meaningful natures of love, loss and mourning. Through these stories, he develops his own evolving sense of personal encounter with imminent ecological crises, proposing that mourning may act as a means to potentially affirm the future. For Esther O. Ohito and Tiffany M. Nyachae, the charges of autobiographical and poetic inquiry serve as a means to open up possibilities for marginalized students today in the form of Sisters of Promise, an extracurricular program for working-class black female students in the United States. Charges, however, are unpredictable and may return us to our own autobiographies. Ohito and Nyachae illustrate how an ostensibly liberatory curriculum that challenges popular respectability discourses may nonetheless constrict the agency of those students it otherwise seeks to empower. Balzer and Heidebrecht, in recounting the discomfort occasioned by shared recognitions of how Indigeneity is viewed by much of Canadian society, reveal the teacher’s recognition of her inability to provide answers. Yet in these moments of charged resonance and resistance to the texts, Balzer and Heidebrecht recount how students were provided with the opportunity to “name the nameless” and engage in transformative education. For authors Ohito and Nyachae, by “feeling through” the charges of a more just and self-affirming curriculum, they experienced echoes of their own racialized and gendered autobiographies. In affectively similar ways, Nellis describes how the charges involved in mourning may help us to renew our ecological responsibilities to a necessarily changing world.

References Boldt, G. M., & Leander, K. (2017). Becoming through ‘the break’: A post-human account of a child’s play. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 409–425. doi:10.1177/1468798417712104 Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Massumi, B. (2016). Such as it is: A short essay on extreme realism. Body & Society, 22(1), 115–127. doi:10.1177/1357034X15612896 Pinar, W. (2005). The problem with curriculum and pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2(1), 67–82. doi:10.1080/15505170.2005.10411529 Taubman, P. M. (2006). I love them to death. In G. M. Boldt & P. M. Salvio (Eds.), Love’s return: Psychoanalytic essays on childhood, teaching and learning (pp. 19–32). New York, NY: Routledge.

13 Resistance and Resonance Postcolonial Texts and Social Justice Conversations in ELA Classrooms in Rural Saskatchewan Luke Heidebrecht and Geraldine Balzer Sharing ice cream together may not have been the most natural treatof-choice on a particularly cold winter day. We huddled together with “Charlene,”1 a teacher who has invested much of her life in a small rural school north of Saskatoon, to converse about using postcolonial texts in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classes. For our uses of postcolonial literature, we indicate texts that engage readers in counterdiscourse and challenge dominant narratives, particularly those that perpetuate colonial power relations. This working definition encompasses both Indigenous and minority authors’ works regardless of their historical or political location. For Charlene, the place she works and teaches could be described as a conundrum, a real-world reflection of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (Alexie, 2009). Although the school is populated by 95% Indigenous students, as Charlene claims, it is perceived of as a “white settler space” by many of the Indigenous inhabitants of the neighboring reserve. Like many places that exist outside the borders of the reserves in Saskatchewan, this place is afflicted by “settler colonialism,” which is a particular form of colonization focused on separating Indigenous peoples from their lands for the creation of settler spaces for settler collectives to be able to “exercise their sovereign capacity” (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, & Corntassel, 2014, p. 8). There is an overarching sense that Charlene’s students don’t feel at home in this school, which in part is a byproduct of its geographic location and the historic side effects of settlement. Charlene shares her students’ uncomfortable experiences straddling this in-between space, this conundrum created by settler colonialism by posturing herself as an invested and dynamic person. She is a mid-career Métis educator, whose experiences within her family, her Métis community, and as a teacher have prepared her for the discomforts her students face as they negotiate settler and Indigenous spaces and identities. As a graduate of the Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program (SUNTEP), Charlene had her cultural identity validated as she negotiated her own identity as a Métis educator. Thus, she is able to identify with and respond to the student who tells her that their friends “called me

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white kid and stuff like that” for choosing to attend the town rather than the reserve school. Charlene is one of eight teachers from six small rural high schools who have been part of the Saskatchewan site in an ongoing Canada-wide research study. We have been invested in this research project over the course of three years. We write this together as investigators and bring our stories of experience to the forefront based on conversations we have had with the participants. Geraldine developed an interest in literature as a space for social justice conversations as an educator in predominantly Inuit communities in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Fourteen years of classroom teaching revealed the ways in which colonialism was embedded in the curriculum and shaped worldview to the detriment of local epistemologies. Luke, who has been involved in designing and assessing experiential learning programs, is passionate about creating spaces in curricula for the teaching of social justice as a dialectic and embodied process; recognizing student emotions are a considerable factor in their embrace or resistance of such curricular moves. Our data collection practices for this project included: hosting a student-led symposium, teacher inquiry groups, focus groups, and individual and group interviews with the teacher participants. While data were gathered in ways that highlight both student and teacher experiences, for this chapter we have chosen to utilize field texts that center the narratives of one particular teacher. Methodologically, we aimed to shape physical, emotional and social spaces for these teachers to build trust with one another, share experiences, recommend and share resources, and consider the possibilities of curricular changes. When we met, participants had the opportunity to choose and purchase texts for classroom use, aided by our library of postcolonial literature. This activity became a group favorite where we witnessed a number of inspired and persuasive efforts from teachers who had found certain stories particularly meaningful. Throughout, we observed the participants enthusiastically sharing their experiences of using postcolonial texts for social justice education. Alongside our work to create spaces to meet collectively, we met individually with teachers, both in and out of their classrooms, to converse about their experiences. It was amidst these encounters with Charlene that we learned of her story and, as it differed markedly from the others, we were intrigued. As already noted, Charlene is a Métis educator, which made her the only Indigenous participant, and the only educator in a school with a predominantly Indigenous population; both hers’ and her students’ life experiences differed from those of the predominantly settler and immigrant classrooms of the other participants. As a background note, it is important to know that the current curricula developed by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, which was a central point of conversation amongst the participants of this research project, calls for the infusion of First Nations, Métis and Inuit content

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and ways of knowing in all subject areas. In the ELA curriculum, this can be manifested through the literature chosen and in the ways in which all texts are analyzed. For Charlene’s students, reading texts they might never have encountered such as Part-time Indian was, in many ways, a testimonial reading (Boler, 1999); they not only identified with the story but engaged in self-reflective participation with the text, which reflected to them not just a view of themselves, but a new way of perceiving themselves in their context. This is not always the case with high school literature, especially those traditional curricular texts that perpetuate Eurocentric ways of thinking and forms of representation (Johnston, 2009). Moreover, when those traditional curricular texts are used in settler spaces that are composed of, primarily, Indigenous students, they may reinforce colonial ideologies. One of the responsibilities of an ELA curriculum in rural Saskatchewan, as we see it, is to dismantle colonial extensions such as these. It is in the midst of our learning about the ways settler colonialism has operated within this particular site in this study that we begin to ask more specific questions about the ways curricular changes can be utilized to create movements that are liberatory for students and teachers. For example, Charlene tells us about her female students who have a deep awareness about their positioning in society and that, because of their encounters with postcolonial texts, they are able to articulate how “they live with oppression every day because they are aboriginal and female.” For Snelgrove et al. (2014), as Indigenous students read postcolonial texts, they have the opportunity to gain new language about their experiences, and in doing so are able to uncover a multi-dimensional understanding of how settler colonialism affects their lives. This is a “disruption of settler colonialism” that “necessitates the disruption of intersecting forces of power such as colonialism, heteropatriarchy and capitalism” (p. 2). For Charlene’s students, their reading represents, as we hope to convey, a decolonization of the curriculum. In contrast, while we observed that each of the teacher participants had the goal of disrupting the power structures that perpetuate settler colonialism, those who were positioned as settler-descendants teaching in settler spaces realized that teaching for social justice represented, in many cases, a moment of becoming awake for their students, who were exposed to stories that created dissonance with their own lived experiences. Teaching for social justice was first and foremost, for these readers, an inward activity. It is for this reason that we chose to focus on Charlene’s story, as we believe it offers an outward demonstration of one of the responsibilities of curriculum, which is to foster classrooms that are just and where there are tangible expressions of care (Greene, 1995, p. 167). All our research participants were working toward Cynthia Chambers’ (1999) challenge “to search within the physical and imaginary landscape of Canada for the tools we need to see our home” (p. 147). However, in

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the context of Charlene’s classroom, we realized the impact of postcolonial texts also intersected with students’ existing questions, wonders and puzzles about their stories, and about the stories of their Indigenous communities, as they began to understand what it means “to be ‘out of place’ in this home” (p. 147). Central to our desire in highlighting Charlene’s experience, is the way she revealed the possibilities of using postcolonial stories to help animate social justice in the lives of her students, exposing them to ideas such as the subaltern point of view (Spivak, 1988). An oft-neglected perspective, such as that of the subaltern, invites readers to critique the dominant power structures and epistemologies that comprise the setting of these postcolonial stories. Robert Young (2015) suggests that this is a “double perspective,” something found in postcolonial literature that is equally helpful for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers, because it exposes injustice in historical context, while at the same time illuminating the ways injustice unfolds in the lived experiences of readers. Readers, regardless of their positionality, might find themselves resonating with and/or resisting these stories in different ways. Recognizing this emotional response is an important first step in learning about how to invest in acts of social justice. It is worth saying that there are risks inherent to entering into relationship with any piece of literature. Stories should never be considered a neutral aspect of curriculum, and their perceived neutrality is oftentimes damaging. The risk of complacency lurks in the shadows of our choices to dismiss curricular changes that might invite readers into challenging (postcolonial) stories (Burke, Johnston, & Ward, 2017). The risk of discomfort (Boler, 1999) on the other hand is a possibility and one that we recommend. There are risks worth taking for Canadian curriculum theorists and teachers who, says Chambers (1999), “must come to understand that the topos from which they write [and teach] is the physical, imaginary, and sociopolitical landscape that they share with the communities and children on behalf of whom they work and write” (p. 148).

Resonance and Dissonance Much like our sharing of ice cream and conversation on that cold winter day, reading postcolonial stories together is also a bit of a relational treat, an unexpected taste of life from a sometimes dissonant or—as we hope to convey through Charlene’s story—a sometimes resonant perspective. In either case, we observed that postcolonial stories demanded emotional engagement, something foreign to much of the existing English curriculum in rural Saskatchewan, which is governed by a recommended reading list, a document marred by colonial notions of standardization. We mean to expose this reading list as a cultural document, which has subsequently shaped—or traditioned—a collection of texts in high school English classrooms that take on canonical status.

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In journeying together with our research participants, we have been introduced to stories that are complex, nuanced and often unresolved. These are stories that don’t always fit with the expectations we’ve grown accustomed to because of our experiences with stories from traditioned understandings of literature. One of the tasks in our inquiry groups was to critically assess the texts on the recommended list. For example, as Charlene told us, a text that is often thought of as an archetype of a social justice, anti-racism narrative, To Kill a Mockingbird, no longer serves this purpose. Through the eyes of her Indigenous students, she tells the inquiry group, it is seen as a story that unabashedly glorifies a white savior. Instead, Charlene suggests reading The Hate U Give (Thomas, 2017), a story with postcolonial sensibilities that she says connects with where her students are involved in life. Her desire to find “authentic learning” and to build “authentic relationships” between texts and readers requires that she work “behind the scenes,” drawing her students toward consideration of the context, not only of the stories within, but of how these stories came to be. On this, she said to us: I’m not trying to build a relationship with them (students) with what I’m teaching if it’s through a story they can’t relate to or in which they can’t relate to the characters because they are Indigenous. In this statement, Charlene names one of the reasons why postcolonial literature works so well with her students: It’s not a colonizers’ story that I’m trying to get them to relate to. For Charlene, then, one of the essential aspects of teaching a text is learning about the authors who write them. She told us that before choosing a text she researches the author so that she can tell her students “here is who the author is, this is why their story is authentic, and why I want to read it with you.” It would seem obvious that to create authentic learning experiences for students the choice of which voices we use should be considered for their relatability in specific contexts—whether that be schools with urban and multicultural or rural and Indigenous populations—traditional ELA curricular texts too often represent something foreign and ask these student populations to adapt to an unnamed sense of normality: as defined by settler colonial representations. The colonization of the curriculum extends its impositions on more than just students. Teachers are implicated, required to have two years of teaching experience and a requisite number of university courses in the subject area, and have participated in an assessment workshop to obtain a certification specific to Saskatchewan called Accreditation. Charlene told us the story of a young teacher who, because of a lack of accreditation, was forced to provide departmental exams, which are set by the Ministry of Education, in her English classroom. Charlene made very pointed comments about this arrangement, saying this teacher “has to

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be careful of what she’s teaching,” and that “she’s very constrained by the system and what she can and cannot read with [her students].” This young teacher provided a case study for us to consider regarding one of the challenges of teaching postcolonial literature in high school classrooms, and demonstrates what we consider to be another colonizing impact. Devices such as these departmental exams, built around a predetermined reading list, expose directional power structures that work only in traditioned logic, which perpetuates the teaching of traditioned texts, something that, at least for this young teacher’s Indigenous students, uncovered a small yet tangible expression of neo-colonization. The privileging of certain stories, by putting young and/or new teachers into positions where they are unable to suggest books outside of the recommended reading lists, simultaneously creates an imbalance of power between teachers and students, and shapes teachers as people who are both powerful and powerless. So, what happens when postcolonial stories, which are powerful because they demand emotional and relational engagement, encounter the rigidity of an English curriculum that, by design (or tradition), perpetuates primarily cognitive and individualized engagement with texts? We noticed that power struggles, perhaps previously hidden, were made explicit in each of our sites in this study, and given that power is always present in the practice of teaching and learning, it is no wonder that we have observed conflicts resulting from this projects’ request for teachers to consider using postcolonial texts for the first time. In addition to the constraints created by the departmental exams, participating teachers also struggled with their role, seeing themselves as colonial agents within the school system. Participating in this research allowed them to rethink their roles as educators and challenge the meta-narratives of schooling. This rethinking revealed the emotional landscape teachers encounter when they re-shape their practice. Megan Boler (1999) reminds us that teachers who endeavor to “rattle complacent cages” will likely face “the treacherous ghosts of the other’s fears and terrors, which in turn evoke one’s own demons” (p. 175). During our focus groups, each of the participants reflected on various resistances to postcolonial literature, whether it be a fear of upsetting the expectations and balance of a learning culture, as in our aforementioned example, or something more personal such as the hesitation teachers might recognize in creating space for the expression of students’ difficult emotions. Charlene, who wonders “how a postcolonial text might position them,” suggests that this kind of resistance might engender feelings of uncertainty, and provoke an uncomfortable realization that teachers might need to deal with their own emotions. Boler (1999) makes note of how she frequently encounters her own defensive anger and fears as she, like our participants, struggles with “vulnerabilities as well as systems of denial with respect to the pain and joy we necessarily

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experience in each of our globalized private and classroom lives” (p. 140). In this way, we have observed how Charlene transforms dissonance in the emotional landscape of the classroom into resonance. As our teacher participants have worked toward the development of a social justice pedagogy, two fears have surfaced that have had a particular impact on teachers who find themselves inviting others to take up what is becoming more important to them. First, is the very natural fear of saying, “I don’t know,” which represents an invitation to ambiguity in the emotional landscape of a teacher’s practice. Recognizing and committing to teach in the I-don’t-know space not only positions teachers differently, but also asks that they participate emotionally in the classroom setting—something that might be personally and culturally jarring. Charlene says that this is “one of the biggest reasons why we don’t see more of these texts in the curriculum,” and also wonders, “what happens when a teacher is teaching a postcolonial text and their own biases and privilege, and all their dominant narratives, are exposed and suddenly questioned and they are now faced with feelings of guilt and shame.” In one of our early interviews, Charlene said, “As teachers, we need to acknowledge our privilege and we need to acknowledge [students’] oppression.” While we do not wish to cast teachers as oppressors and students as the oppressed, it is interesting that postcolonial literature might exacerbate these sometimes latent feelings within classroom relationships. The challenge, for teachers who encounter relational and emotional discomforts because of their new curricular commitments, is to remain present and embrace them, recognizing how the embrace of discomfort lays the foundation for transforming relationships between teachers and students. Boler (1999) reminds us that there is an inherent pain we carry in our “separation” and distance from others (p. 182). A pedagogy of discomfort, she argues, unexpectedly offers relief from this pain, by drawing teacher and student into uncomfortable closeness. The deeper pain of fear is thus transformed by the less painful discomfort of the commitment to get to know one another. Charlene’s practice opposes the complacency that occurs when educators are content to resist discomfort rather than encounter it. She says it this way: “If you don’t know all the answers about residential schools you are not going to have the power in that classroom.” We responded by asking her what happens when a teacher relinquishes power. “We all learn,” she tells us: I think (students) engage more because they recognize that I don’t have the power. I don’t lose control of them. Power doesn’t mean “classroom management,” but is rather about allowing students to take ownership of learning for themselves instead of me trying to force that learning on them. When I don’t have all the power and we are all equals, the students who struggle in other classes rise up. You

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As we reflect on our conversation we are struck with an important insight about power in the classroom setting: teachers are always faced with the choice to either consolidate or distribute power—such as Charlene does when creating spaces of discomfort, accepting the reality that living in discomfort is less painful than living in fear (Boler, 1999).

Teaching to Become Awake to New Understandings As Boler and Zembylas (2003) note, power and fear are cultivated through an embrace of binary thinking, which is a way of naming and reducing encounters with dissonance that codifies identities and truths into simplistic and often juxtaposed systems. For instance, these simplistic truths may become a form of propositional knowledge, which Alexis Shotwell (2011) contends reduces knowledge making to a “claim-making activity,” which privileges certain types of knowledge over others (pp. ix–x). This narrow view manifests itself in such examples as we have already mentioned, including the challenge of departmental exams and the adherence to a canonical reading list, an explicit suggestion that this is the literature worth thinking about. However, as Charlene works with her students, introducing postcolonial stories that push against the traditional historic binaries, propositional knowledge is challenged and postcolonial sensibilities, such as the subaltern perspective, are cultivated. Shotwell continues by asserting that it is crucial for learners to become awake to their “implicit understandings”; what she defines as those takenfor-granted or intuitive forms of knowledge we have developed based on our experiences (p. xi). Experiential knowledge often stands in stark contrast to propositional knowledge. For example, Charlene, as a Métis woman, came to her teaching career with an implicit understanding of just and caring relationships that enabled her to challenge propositional knowledge, shifting the framework of presuppositions and envisioning different possibilities for the future. Her personal experiences with whiteness and privilege are foundational in evoking the implicit understandings of her marginalized students: We did talk last year about privilege—I defined it for them and we talked about it. I gave them different scenarios and they were able to identify it. I think it makes them angry. I definitely acknowledged how I have privilege because, yes, I’m Indigenous but my white skin allows me to play both fields. And that was how I brought it up— here’s privilege, here’s what it is, here’s what it means to me and how it affects me. I just talked about how it makes me feel guilty and how it was different in my family because my two older sisters

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have darker skin and myself and my brother have lighter skin and even just how within my own family my sisters were treated differently out in public than we were. Once they started thinking about themselves and privilege it definitely brought up feelings of anger and questions like “Why did it have to be like that?” “Why do we have to have these systems?” and “Why did colonization happen?” and “Why did they do this to us?” A moment such as this exemplifies the pedagogy of discomfort enacted in Charlene’s classroom—discomfort caused by admitting the impact of racism and privilege, discomfort caused by not knowing the answers to the students’ questions, and discomfort caused by knowing that her students will confront these realities multiple times in their lives. Charlene’s pedagogy of discomfort is marked by the cognitive dissonance created of her lived experience—hers and her students—those moments when propositional knowledge and implicit understanding are at odds, opening the possibility for embracing ambiguity. Charlene’s use of postcolonial texts and her willingness to challenge existing binaries provides, in contrast, a space of resonance for her students, not only to become aware of the inequities in their lived experiences, but also to begin developing political awareness. Further, Charlene recognizes that her discomfort is a necessary part of her teaching, which encourages her students to name their discomforts. “It’s about learning through that emotional reaction,” she said. The exposure of biases and the resulting internal crises challenge propositional knowledge and lay the groundwork for anti-oppressive education and political action. It may be apparent, as Charlene indicates, that anti-oppressive work such as this is not easy, as knowing what action to take is not necessarily clear. Situations played out in real time are difficult; Charlene recounts an experience at an urban shopping mall while on a field trip that we see as demonstrating the ways postcolonial texts have helped illuminate her students’ implicit understandings: The other teacher and I were sitting and having lunch and four boys came back. They said, “We just got kicked out of the dollar store.” I reacted and said, “What! What did you guys do?! Oh my gosh.” And they were like, “nothing, nothing, we didn’t do anything.” I said, “Seriously, why would you get kicked out?” They told me they were just wandering around and the lady said, “Can I help you guys find something” and we said, “No, we are just wandering around” and she goes “Well, this isn’t a wandering around store, you should leave.” And I was inflamed . . . When we walked back to the van I said, “So boys, what was that experience? If you had to label that based on what we learned in class, what would you label that?” One of the boys said “racism”

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Luke Heidebrecht and Geraldine Balzer and I said, “Yah it could have been.” Another boy said “ageism” and I said, “Yup, could have been.” I asked, “So in which ways was there oppression there?” They responded, “Well, because of my age I was labeled and because of my race . . . ” I couldn’t say if that was racism or ageism—I don’t know because I didn’t ask her (the store clerk); it could have been both.

Through this experience, Charlene provides her students the opportunity to name the nameless, to confront the “isms” in their world and to consider potential responses. The students’ ability to articulate the possible “isms” at play, she made note, was something that grew out of their exposure to new language found in postcolonial texts. Naming these things transforms the students’ experiences, from what could have been an emotionally confusing encounter into an opportunity for inquiry and connection to their implicit understandings. In her response to the situation, she reveals her own vulnerabilities, as her students understand the subtlety of power relationships and fear of confronting those dynamics. Through embracing a pedagogy of discomfort, Charlene challenges acceptance of the world that is, and encourages her students to be activists in the world they hope for.

Postcolonial Openings for Social Justice Throughout this study we have observed the ways that postcolonial texts invert power, sometimes challenging the structures and the people that maintain it, and sometimes empowering those who have been oppressed by it. The latter seems to be the case in Charlene’s experiences with her students, and as she alludes: They wrote some of the most personal things about themselves. I found that through reading these books they were opening up about their own narratives and their own stories and being okay with that, which I don’t think they could do if those texts weren’t in our classrooms. Charlene used postcolonial texts as both a lens for students to be able to see their own lives, and as a tool for building vocabulary for students to use as they learn to identify internal and external forces: “I wanted them to understand what oppression was and how that affects our lives and that its still here.” These postcolonial texts, says Charlene, “helped them in terms of advocacy and empowerment . . . they want to stand up against discrimination and they question why things are the way they are.” A significant element of Charlene’s story is her ability to use postcolonial texts to create an awareness of and sensitivities to social justice;

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this newfound skill provides her students spaces to create personalized visions of what social justice means for their own lives—something that is so immediately tangible. Her commitment to listening to student emotions, which often emerge because of the postcolonial stories they are reading, and in helping students navigate these emotions, by articulating and categorizing them, creates clear pathways for students to imagine social justice in action. In part, what makes her story distinctive is her Métis heritage and teaching within a predominantly Indigenous school setting. The interplay between Indigenous and settler space becomes a central element of her and her students’ experiences, a theme paralleled in many postcolonial stories. We think that the ways she’s embraced change in her own life and teaching practice, affords her a unique position to be able to ally with her Indigenous students—as she would say, they “learn together.” The connection we see here between students’ growing socio-political awareness and an understanding of how to utilize this for social justice aims is remarkable. We recall the particular conversation we had with Charlene that led us to consider the contextuality of social justice: LUKE:

Your story is a perfect example of what processing social justice looks like. CHARLENE: Sometimes we think social justice has to be a call for a rally, or raising money. No, it can be something as small as just being aware that injustices are going on. LUKE: I also think social justice demands more of those who have more. I think that social justice, for those who have less, or who have been historically decentered, offers a kind of understanding, or comfort, or connection. CHARLENE: It can offer humanity . . . I use the word “reconciliation.” I think that is social justice—taking those steps to create opportunities for reconciliation is an act of social justice. GERALDINE: In the world we have now, where we are unable to totally reconstruct things, there will always be those with power and those without power and part of the responsibility of those on the periphery is to speak back to those who have power—to keep power honest and non-exploitative. Postcolonial texts demand a response. Yet, as we’ve discovered, readers will approach the stories with different questions and will find different and sometimes divergent meanings. For those readers who have benefitted from the kind of learning that is afforded by the traditional curricular material, postcolonial stories may be met with resistance, as they ask readers to resist the comforts they have become accustomed too. In contrast, for those readers who have had to adapt themselves into what is

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for them a foreign curriculum, postcolonial stories are met with resonance and empower readers to find sites of learning outside of traditional material. Resistance and resonance are two words that describe the experiences of readers who are given the opportunity to pick up a postcolonial text. We see both of these terms as denoting something inherently healthy, something emotionally engaging, something that draws readers together, and something that positions readers to consider social justice from multiple perspectives. Something we have realized throughout our study in rural Saskatchewan is the importance of recognizing that where readers are located determines to some extent their resistance and/or resonance with these kinds of stories. In both of these reactions to postcolonial literature, we see opportunities for educators to draw their students toward new understandings of social justice. However, and what we desire to articulate in conclusion, is how hopeful we have become about the importance of curricular changes, in part because of Charlene and her Indigenous students who were offered a different perspective than the traditional English curriculum; instead of seeing themselves as outsiders in need of changing to become more like the norm, there were sudden realizations that the changes they need to make were changes that bring them back to themselves and their own cultural and ancestral roots and relations. Charlene, together with her students, have responded to Chambers’ (1999) challenge—“to search within the physical and imaginary landscape of Canada for the tools we need to see our home” (p. 147)— and in doing so, they have discovered that “it is our story: the one about the commons, what was shared and what was lost” (Chambers, 2012, p. 29). Postcolonial literature has given Charlene’s students the opportunity to see that in their encounter with stories that offer different counter-visions, they might also find themselves transforming their experiences in education from resistance to resonance. And in turn, these students have charged each of us to take up Chambers’ (2012) challenge “to learn from each other’s stories, songs, poems, from other’s knowledge about this world and how to make our way in it” (p. 29). We are all treaty people, and grappling with the difficult questions encountered through reading postcolonial literature; we have an opportunity to lean into those covenants.

Note 1. Pseudonym

References Alexie, S. (2009). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. New York, NY: Little Brown. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Boler, M., & Zembylas, M. (2003). Discomforting truths: The emotional terrain of understanding difference. In P. P. Trifonas (Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social justice (pp. 107–130). New York, NY: Routledge. Burke, A., Johnston, I., & Ward, A. (Eds.). (2017). Challenging stories: Canadian literature for social justice in the classroom. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars. Chambers, C. (1999). A topography for Canadian curriculum theory. Canadian Journal of Education, 24(2), 137–150. doi:10.2307/1585924 Chambers, C. (2012). We are all treaty people. In N. Ng-A-Fook & J. Rottmann (Eds.), Reconsidering Canadian curriculum studies: Provoking historical, present and future perspectives (pp. 23–38). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Johnston, I. (2009). Engaged differences: School reading practices, postcolonial literature, and their discontents. In Y. Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as cultural practice: Postcolonial imaginations (pp. 116–129). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Shotwell, A. (2011). Knowing otherwise: Race, gender, and implicit understanding. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Snelgrove, C., Dhamoon, R. K., & Corntassel, J. (2014). Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(2), 1–32. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Thomas, A. (2017). The Hate U Give. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Young, R. J. C. (2015). Empire, colony, postcolony. West Sussex, UK: WileyBlackwell.

14 Love, Loss, and the Horizons of Human Becoming Robert Christopher Nellis

What is at stake in my following the path of currere (Pinar & Grumet, 2015) today? What am I called to grapple with as I confront that horizon where a changing world meets my inner life and experience? How do I process the realization that the stories I have told myself about who I am, how I fit into the world, and how life hangs together become decidedly insufficient? A lingering response to these questions calls me to a charge to tell new stories. However, one thing about the stories I tell is that they also tell me! I live in them as much as the inverse, if not more: I change the story, and I change myself—with the latter action following with somewhat more difficulty than the former. What is the nature of these stories I tell, especially as heuristics through which to understand the world and my own role in it? I think of them as lenses, surely—but more as lenses belonging to my own eye than those from an optometrist. Indeed, such heuristic lenses are not outside of myself, not somehow standing between the world “out there” and the presumably self-contained subjectivity behind them. But they are lenses nonetheless. I change the lens, and I change what I see, and I also change myself. In view of these considerations (pun unintended, but not denied . . .), how do I understand curriculum encounter—especially in a time of looming environmental crisis and its attendant social, cultural, and political aftershocks? In this chapter I explore the stories informing my sense of who I am as an individual, but also as a member of an ontological category—a human being—and some of the implications of that. If I were to change the story—change the lens—then I would also be changing myself, and to change myself means to say goodbye to the self I have been, implying a kind of death, and death calls for mourning. I seek to explore and linger with a hopefully productive encounter and then gesture toward a letting go, demonstrating how mourning can be embraced and finally internalized. A sense of this work began in the summer of 2014, when I had the opportunity to take a course at the University of Oxford called “Wild Mind: Ecoliteracy and Reconnecting with Nature in the Twenty-First

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Century.” It was about cultivating individual awareness under the fear of a looming environmental catastrophe. A notion that I take away from my reflections around the work in this course is that individual awareness, deep in the heart and mind, is not narcissism collapsed into solipsism, but rather a figurative path drilled down deeply into the earth—this earth to which we all owe our lives; and when I say all, I don’t just mean those of us so named human beings, but all of us. Have you seen the movie Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant—a Hollywood feature (owing a debt to the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk) about the man for whom the film is named, the assassinated member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors? There is a scene in this movie where members of the LGBTQ+ community are concerned about an upcoming plebiscite, and senior advisers in the movement suggest that people maintain a low profile, without rocking the boat, stirring the pot, etc. Milk suggests that on the contrary, they need to do just the opposite, standing up and affirming their presence. They need to say (in my words), we are part of your life, part of your world; we are in your home, your family, your work place, your place of worship! People needed to know that the issue of gay rights did not just affect some abstract other with whom they had no real connection, but the world, the real world, the one of which we all are a part. I find this story to be emblematic of a certain way of thinking about navigating human being and looming ecological catastrophe. People who may have been opposed to the plebiscite needed to see clearly that issues affecting sexual minority communities do not unfold on some distant planet. Even if they do not identify as sexual minorities themselves, this issue affects them at home because it affects people they care about. Milk is advocating clarifying the immediacy of their relationship with the issue. Similarly, a sense of human separateness from the ecological order is part of what has gotten us to this point of ecological neglect. A compelling path forward is to look into one’s heart, into one’s mind, and down to one’s feet, and note where they are resting: the earth. I now pass through another story, but this time from my life of teaching, an account of something folks have shared about the character of the ecological situation in which we are living, a call to shift notions of human being, and some thoughts around how to navigate that—recognizing that it would not be easy, but ultimately worth doing. This next story says something about the nature of love, how it impacts one’s sense of self, and how learning to tell new stories can be difficult.

Old Mournings, New Days I teach a Family Studies course in my institution’s Teacher Education program. I remember addressing the topic of love and showing clips from Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet. I find this film to be tremendously

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fun and wildly inventive. I generally show the first scene and the last. The first depicts a “civil brawl” (Luhrmann, Martinelli, & Luhrmann, 1995) at a gas station and at last the deaths of the two young lovers—both scenes’ mise en scène, as in the rest of the film, saturated with crosses and other Christian iconography. I find that my student-colleagues receive the film as very moving. I turn the lights back on to moist, secreting eyes, amplified by the room’s sterile lights, which seem to hum in the silence. How curious, I posit, that this play, as per the movie’s trailer, “The greatest love story the world has ever known” ([johnleguizamo], Jan 26, 2015) is, of course, not what audiences today would think of as a romance, but a tragedy. What’s with that? I ask. Some moments of pause from the class. I’ll ever remember once, one of my student-colleagues offering, gingerly, that perhaps it is because love is, from the beginning, a looming, impending tragedy! Some pause again—only this time, from me. Every love, every romantic relationship, every friendship, from the beginning is structured as a tragedy in that it will end somehow, somewhere— either by mutual assent, one-sided decision, or by the death of one or both parties. Consequently, for Derrida (and my student-colleague), love is inextricably interwoven with loss, and, as a result, with mourning. Although lovers clasp onto each other desperately, they must also let go. To love is always, necessarily to say goodbye—but perhaps this makes us cherish all the more urgently the fleeting moments that we have together. I recall another moment when I deepened my sense of the relationship between loss and love. A few years ago at the University of Calgary, I was privileged to attend a workshop with John Caputo. He touched upon the recognition of love’s impermanence, where (in my words) future loss whispers in the ear of the present, as part of what makes love so rich. He suggested that perhaps this is why lovers cling to each other so tightly in the night (personal communication, May 2013). Perhaps our intuitive understanding of the loss inherent in love is why lovers become so absorbed in each other, even though this leads to a human-centric view of life on earth that might well—as I suggest in the remainder of this paper—prove catastrophic to the planet. Indeed, increasingly in the past number of years, many have written toward a realization that what it means to be human is shifting—or that it needs to. The story we have told ourselves about what it means to be human will no longer suffice. I think of systems theory as shared by Stephan Harding (2009) in Animate Science: Science, Intuition, and Gaia as a lens, as a kind of heuristic framing that lends coherence to the world. An implication of lens use is that there are other things to see beyond its capture. Harding writes of the implications of a modernist way of thinking about being human. Assuming that we are individuated organisms and cognitive subjects (after Descartes) will no longer do. Systems thinking ruptures the membrane of individuation implied as hovering between us. It smashes the imagined firewall between you and me as individual

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humans, and as humans and in relation to the rest of the world. We are no longer radically independent, but all interrelated. Systems thinking envisions encounter as occurring within a space not necessarily external to oneself. In fact, I would see it as breaking down clear distinctions between inner and outer, between subject and context, between I and thou—a tissue of connectivity. A further implication of systems thinking, and of thinking of systems as heuristic frameworks, is that the heuristic we select represents just one of many possibilities for doing so. Presumed in the act of applying a heuristic is that it is both natural and necessary— and that would apply both to any particular heuristic as well as to the general category of heuristics writ large. Seeing the world becomes situational, interpretive, and amenable or open to other kinds of vision. I remember at the Oxford course engaging in a sensing exercise. Each morning at the start of our day we would gather in the stone-walled garden. We would sit together as our tutor led us in various activities intended to connect us with our sense of the natural world. One morning in particular, I had difficulty focussing solely on my tactile experience. My other senses came crashing in. I was to be attending to the tactile, but the auditory kept whispering in my ear and the olfactory wafting deliciously into my nose. The experience reminded me of Deleuze and Guattari (1983), who wrote that bodies are organized as just one possible structure, and psyches learn to inhabit bodies according to the expected configurations. The body-mind connection becomes particularly vivid when we consider the phenomenon of phantom limbs. A person has lost a limb but can still feel the psychic experience of having it. The changing of the physical apparatus of the body does not change the embodied experience of living with it; one’s experience of the body is not automatic. The point I’m trying to make is that one can imagine these present configurations of our senses and our bodies as just one possible story to tell of them—one possible configuration. By another heuristic, we may also imagine ourselves configured across bodies at the level of microbes, or sub-atomically (Corbett, 2015; Cohen & Capra, 1990), disrupting an assumption of atomistic, integrated, Cartesian subjectivities, distinct from one another and the rest of the world. Even as, after John Donne (1623), no person “is an island, entire of itself” but “a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (para. 4), perhaps even the main is not the “actual” main, but part of another “main” in turn . . . These stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be human need to evolve and adapt. Stories that imply that human beings are somehow outside of nature or that take a position of domination and exploitation in relation to nature need to be recast. This means saying goodbye to the received stories. But these stories run deep—as do many stories, especially about identity. Really profound ideas, ideas that run all the way down to the bottom (if there is one), don’t change easily. The story we tell of ourselves as human beings is like a companion whom we love dearly. We

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have walked with her through our darkest nights, our coldest winters, and our most lonely moments, aching against empty skies. When we’ve had nothing else, at least we’ve had that. And people who come to believe that their gods are no longer there could always at least find refuge in pinching themselves and saying, “Well, at least I’m real dammit—I’m human!” It is the exploration of the possible transcendence beyond human form that has inspired so much recent scholarship and art preoccupied with the posthuman (Snaza et al., 2014) and the transhuman (Blaike, Malloy, & Shakespeare, 2012), as well as explorations of other forms of consciousness such as artificial intelligence (Kinberg & Blomkamp, 2015), and the rethinking of our relationships with animals (in this regard, I draw heartening inspiration from Patricia MacCormack’s [2013] notion of “gracious pedagogy”). It’s not easy to say goodbye, and doing so would bring about change—especially when what we are saying goodbye to is our very sense of ourselves. How does one think about the passing of their very ontological category? If the category of “human” is passing into obsolescence, what does that mean for me and my sense of self, which was so invested in that descriptor? How do I bid farewell to the “me” I have known until now? It would indeed be momentous. Something that we had known for so long and with which we identify closely would not be there as it had previously. It would be a kind of death, and deaths call for mourning. Mourning is strength, and it burns at the core of our shared humanity. When I think about those loved ones who have gone before me—my father, two grandmothers, dear friends, my partner Joyce’s father, and our dear dog Charlie—does this make me less hardy, somehow less able to carry on with my own journey? I think not. It does not weaken my stance upon the earth. Rather, thinking about those I have lost and honouring my ancestors gives me strength and whispers courage into my ear. My sense of what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century is precisely this. The “human being” as we have known it so far may need to become an ancestor. That human was the protagonist in a story we told ourselves in the past because it made sense to us as we tried to make our way in the world. Well, now (as suggested by Johan Rockstrom [2010] and others), the world is telling us that the old model does not work anymore! Saying goodbye to this ancestral human being would call us to enter a space of mourning. Maybe, just as mourning allows us to build strength through loss, saying “no” or “goodbye” to the erstwhile figure of the human is really saying “yes” and “hello” to the world, to a more integrated, holistic, organic, and healthy way of being-in-the-world (with perhaps a whisper of Martin Heidegger [1962] lingering). Perhaps it’s not “no” to yesterday but “yes” to tomorrow. When we think about such kinds of emergent, generative invitations to explore beyond received ontologies and rationalities, one of the last people I would expect to come to mind would be Jean Piaget. But in fact,

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Piaget’s (1952) notion of accommodation, which concerns the ways in which we bring new information into existing schemas or perspectives on the world, is helpful in understanding the paradigm shift we are now undergoing. For Piaget, a schema is a conceptual framework, a mental structure. One may think about learning in terms of how one adds to or expands a scheme. There are two ways this takes place: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation occurs when new representations match those of the schema already. Accommodation occurs when the existing schema does not agree with incoming representations. If the schema is going to receive them, as it were, it would need to change to accommodate them. This is how we must think about developing new stories through which to understand ourselves and our place in the world. If I am to accept novel ideas, possibilities, suggestions, I will need new stories— new structures, frames, lenses—to accommodate them; I will need new stories to accommodate it. This is transformational in the deepest sense. I do not just acquire new information, adding new papers to existing files. I change, and my whole worldview changes. So, coming again to the themes of this chapter, if I am to open my mind, my heart, and my arms to new possibilities, I am called upon to change—to say hello to new selves and goodbye to old. This is a loss, and loss calls for mourning. Morning? New days, turning to new pages upon which to encounter new tales of kindness, inclusiveness, democracy, justice, responsibility, possibility, hope, being. Perhaps lingering with an echo of Romeo + Juliet: after loss, maybe it’s the love we remember.

References Blaike, C., Malloy, C., & Shakespeare, S. (Eds.). (2012). Beyond human: From animality to transhumanism. London, UK: Continuum. Cohen, A. J. (Producer), & Capra, B. A. (Director). (1990). Mindwalk [Motion picture]. United States: Atlas and Mindwalk. Corbett, J. (2015, 3 August). Thinking about ecology and the nature of life. Lecture to Oxford University Summer School for Adults, Wild Mind: Ecoliteracy and Reconnecting with Nature in the Twenty-First Century, University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, Oxford, UK. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1972). Donne, J. (1623). Devotions upon emergent occasions, XVII. Retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditation_XVII Harding, S. (2009). Animate science: Science, intuition and Gaia. Dartington, UK: Green Books. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. johnleguizamo. (2015, January 26). Romeo and Juliet 1996 trailer [Video file]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VBsi0VxiLg

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Kinberg, S. (Producer), & Blomkamp, N. (Director). (2015). Chappie [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures. Luhrmann, B., Martinelli, G. (Producers), & Luhrmann, B. (Director). (1995). Romeo + Juliet [Motion picture]. United States: 20th Century Fox. MacCormack, P. (2013). Gracious pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 13–17. doi:10.1080/15505170.2013.789994 Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York, NY: International Universities Press. Pinar, W., & Grumet, M. (2015). Toward a poor curriculum (3rd ed.). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press, Inc. Rockstrom, J. (2010). Let the environment guide our development [Video file]. Retrieved from www.ted.com/talks/johan_rockstrom_let_the_environment_guide_ our_development Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., .  .  . Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39–55.

15 Conceptualizing and Enacting Sensational Currere Attuning to the Embodied Essence in Autobiographical Curriculum Inquiry Esther O. Ohito and Tiffany M. Nyachae The threads of our stories—presented as vignettes illuminating parts of our past lives and (auto)biographies as Black schoolgirls turned Black women teachers and curricularists—weave together a thick tapestry, albeit unfinished, of our racialized and gendered memories of experiencing education in the United States. Our stories are about Black schoolgirls turned Black women teachers and curricularists’ “struggle to define themselves and the world” (Pinar, 1999, p. xvii). They are, therefore, curricular tales, because in this context, “curriculum becomes intensely historical, political, racial, gendered, phenomenological, autobiographical, aesthetic, theological, and international” (p. xvii). As you read these stories, you may discover dimensions of our autobiographies that startle, resonate, frustrate and perhaps even anger you. We hope that you will feel all of these reactions. These stories are our entry points into the “extraordinarily complicated conversation” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995, p. 848) that is curriculum. These stories are also fibers of the curriculum encounters that we explore in this chapter, where we experiment with method by inviting an embodied essence to currere. Stated otherwise, we bring attention to the corporeal contours of currere, which is “the systematic study of educational experience” (Pinar, 2004, p. 2). We ask: What information do we gather through our senses and our bodies while enmeshed in curriculum encounters? How does this information inform our inquiry into our racialized and gendered educational experiences?

Historicizing and Theorizing Currere Currere emphasizes the examination of the entwinement of knowledge— or knowledge making—and lived experience. As imagined by William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet in the 1970s, currere is understood as a means through which curriculum theorists can detail the relationship among “school knowledge, life history, and intellectual development in ways that might function self-transformatively” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995, p. 515). Even more specifically, at its most foundational, currere is defined as an “autobiographical method [that] asks

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us to slow down, to remember, even re-enter the past, and to meditatively imagine the future. Then, slowly and in one’s own terms, one analyzes one’s experience” (Pinar, 2004, p. 4). In other words, currere involves (self-)inquiry into an individual’s historically situated, racialized, gendered and classed experiences that shape school knowledge and curriculum creation. Since the 1970s, several scholars have re-conceptualized the meaning of currere, drawing on a range of epistemologies (e.g., Baszile, 2015; Gough, 1998). Baszile (2015) approaches critical race/feminist currere as an “autobiographical exploration” (p. 119) of “the relations among race, knowledge, power, and the self.” In this vein, a curricularist might ask: How are these relations reproduced through a number of interlocking rationalities—legal, scientific, neoliberal, technological—that circulate in U.S./world culture/s and work to discipline our thinking and our behavior in racist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, and other oppressive and undemocratic ways? (Baszile, 2015, p. 119) Baszile’s critical race/feminist currere is useful in unsettling accepted oppressive norms through autobiographical exploration. Gough and Gough (2014) tap into the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to employ “collaborative currere” as a means to “produce a multiplicity of bifurcating, divergent and rhizomatic lines of flight which move us to imagine new possibilities for thought and action in educational research” (Gough & Gough, 2014, n.p.). Deleuze and Guattari’s influence is further evident in Stewart’s (2015) rhizocurrere, “a philosophicalmethodological concept that draws attention to relationships between [one’s] pedagogical and curriculum research and the contexts that have shaped [one’s] life-work” (p. 1169). It is this latter spirit of experimentation that informs our conceptualization of sensational currere. In particular, we aim to expand our understandings and the applications of critical race/feminist/currere by merging our experiences of currere with embodiment, allowing us to contextualize those affective, curricular charges visà-vis our autobiographies.

Theorizing Sensational Currere We conceptualize sensational currere as an approach that attends to both our racialized and gendered educational autobiographies and our embodied encounters with curricular materials. Informed by Baszile’s (2015) critical race/feminist approach to curriculum autobiography and Springgay’s (2011) notion of sensational pedagogy, we theorize sensational currere as a method of curriculum inquiry useful for performing embodied readings of curricular materials. That is, we frame this as an

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approach useful for interrogating the sensorial experience of thinking, writing about and reading the curriculum, and mapping the intensities borne of this process onto aspects of our autobiographies. We draw heavily on Springgay’s (2011) notion of sensational pedagogy, which emerges from the idea that “[s]ensation is the information we gather with our senses and the body and the process of it being transmitted to our brains” (p. 637). Hence, sensation becomes useful for the task of autobiographical curricular investigation because “it opens the body to different possibilities of being affected. Affect grounds the connection between the body and thought and increases or diminishes the capacity to act” (p. 637). In short, we illustrate that attending to sensation and affect in curriculum work allows for exploring and gaining a deeper awareness of how we move and act in the world, and why we do so in particular ways. Currere is meant to aid in the “investigation of the nature of the individual experience of the public: of artifacts, actors, operations, of the educational journey or pilgrimage” (Pinar, 1975, p. 400). Central to our experimentation with sensational currere is the premise that the body is always a particular body, shaped by markers such as race, gender and class (Spelman, 1982). It is also always a feeling body—that is, a “weeping, living, hurting” (Bakare-Yusuf, 1999, p. 312) body. According to Whitehead, “we respond to things in the first place by feeling them; it is only afterward that we identify and cognize, what it is that we are feeling” (as cited in Shaviro, 2009, p. 58). Thus, we invoke sensational currere as a method of interrogating what the curriculum worker’s particular body feels sensorially in the moment(s) of curricular contact.

Contextualizing Our Site of Curriculum Inquiry The materials that serve as the site for our methodological play with sensational currere are curricular texts created for Sisters of Promise, an extracurricular program serving working-class Black schoolgirls in the United States (Nyachae, 2016). By way of providing context, we present a brief history and an overview of the program here. In the summer of 2011, three Black women teachers at a school in a Rust Belt city in the northeastern United States formed the Sisters of Promise (SOP) program. The trio—which included Tiffany—was inspired by the knowledge that Black girls are more likely than their non-Black counterparts to experience corporeal and emotional harm in schools (Crenshaw, 2015). SOP was designed as an intervention—a space in which Black girls could source safety and experience empowerment. Specifically, SOP founders aimed to prevent the increased disciplining of Black girls at the hands of school personnel that they regularly witnessed, and to deter the girls’ increasing disengagement with school (Nyachae, 2016). SOP participants met once weekly, after the end of the regular school day, for approximately two hours. The curricular resources and lesson plans for each

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meeting revolved around at least one program “core value,” such as selfawareness, sisterhood and what was termed womanly character (SOP, 2012). For this chapter, we re-viewed the curricular texts produced and distributed in SOP during the 2012–2013 academic year during which a total of 77 girls in grades 5 through 8 participated in the program.

Troubling (Respectability) Discourses in Curriculum The Sisters of Promise program is the site of analysis for a larger collaborative research project investigating the discourses about race and gender that circulated within the extracurricular initiative. In this chapter, we focus on the provocation we felt during early rounds of data analysis when noticing the prevalence of respectability discourses in the SOP curricular materials (Nyachae & Ohito, forthcoming). Under the guise of empowerment, respectability discourses function as rhetorical tactics used to control appearances, behaviors and bodies of marginalized peoples, and force them into alignment with a white, Judeo-Christian, middle-class, heterosexual norm (Higginbotham, 1993; Smith, 2014). These discourses, then, function to maintain social stratification vis-à-vis race, gender, class and other such categories. Analyzing the SOP curriculum for these discourses led us to the realization that—even despite the laudable intention of creating a “just and caring” (Greene, 1995, p. 167) curriculum—it was possible for curriculum workers to cause racialized and gendered harm. A second insight concerned the charges we felt within our bodies in reaction to scrutinizing these texts during the process of analysis—that is, our intensely visceral and embodied reactions to (re)reading and encountering the curricular materials. As we performed data analysis, we recalled our own lived experiences with respectability discourses and bemoaned the fact that these messages limited our imaginings of who we were and who we could be based on others’ definitions, as well as who we should be. It is who we have come to be as working-class Black schoolgirls turned Black women teachers and curricularists that has inspired our approach to this chapter, where we theorize and enact a sensational currere, thus bringing to the fore our feelings about the troubling (respectability) discourses circulating in the SOP curriculum, while also contextualizing these affective intensities (Massumi, 2002) vis-à-vis our autobiographies. Such theorizing allows us to invoke body knowledge, as we “pose a question about our experience in the world and invite our readers to join us in the exploration that results” (Grumet, 2015, p. 239). A sensational currere provides us with a route through which to put our embodied “essences back into existence” (Grumet, 1976/2015, p. 41), by tackling that which our bodies tell us really matters. Moreover, enacting sensational currere vis-à-vis SOP allows us to (re)connect to our commitment to curriculum work that centers the knowledge, lives and lived

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experiences of Black girls, moving us toward more “just and caring” curriculum inquiry (Greene, 1995, p. 167). Thus, our application of a sensational currere reinforces Grumet’s (1988) suggestion that “[a]s we study the forms of our own experience, not only are we searching for evidence of the external forces that have diminished us; we are also recovering our own possibilities” (p. xv). For us, the process of “recovering our own possibilities”—and doing so with attentiveness to our materiality—is necessarily linked to our pursuit for more just and caring curricula for Black girl students in the sense that we see traces of ourselves in our “sister students” (Omolade, 1994, p. 131), who are the intended audience for the SOP curricular texts.

Enacting Sensational Currere In the following sections, we re-present our sensational enactment of the first step of the four-step currere method, the regressive, as inspired by curricular materials collected from SOP. As noted earlier, we previously identified the respectability discourses that were embedded within the texts. In the texts, those discourses took the form of declarative phrases and sentences that were repeated, such as “use correct grammar” (SOP, 2012), and key verbs, for example, “married.” We began our enactment of sensational currere by developing an inventory of these phrases and words, as abridged here: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Promote sisterhood, not dissension. Promote sisterhood not dissension. Promote sisterhood and not dissension. Build stronger personal relationships. Move on from past experiences and learn who your sister is today; moreover, you have to let things go. Don’t put anyone in a box or judge them. Give sincere compliments. Show genuine kindness. Love. Inspire others. Care for others.

To continue undertaking the process of sensational currere, we then re-read and analyzed this list of troubling phrases and words, tapping into our memories and our bodies “at the scene of thinking, writing . . . reading” (Somerville, 2004, p. 47). What follows is an illustration of our doing of sensational currere, which manifested as each of us inquired into our encounters with different parts of the SOP curriculum. These encounters allowed us to return to “where we began” (Greene, 1965, p. 424) as curriculum workers. Individually, we expound upon these different yet

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connected beginnings, offering our readers glimpses into who we are, and the relevant histories (which, coincidentally, rotate around both of our experiences in the Black church) that we are invoking in relationship to this chapter. More broadly, we write with the intention of inviting our readers into our sensational experience of reading the curriculum materials. Our intent is to have our audience figuratively walk beside us as we articulate how encountering the harm of respectability discourses in the SOP curricular texts felt, and then bringing those feelings to the fore, linking them to our autobiographies. Esther’s Sensational Currere The tightness in my body grows with each word that I encounter in the Sisters of Promise (2012) curricular materials. The words leap off the page as if to choke me, limiting my breath and interrupting my movement. The sentences read as directives about how to be a certain kind of Black girl—a “good” Black girl. They ask me to ensure that I am “embodying the poise, grace, and dignity of a sophisticated young lady” (SOP, 2012, p. 4). I turn the sentences into commandments: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Thou shall have no other gods before money. Thou shall not be disobedient. Thou shall not speak freely. Thou shall exercise. Thou shall respect your friends and family. Thou shall not fight or be disagreeable. Thou shall not fornicate. Thou shall only desire men. Thou shall control thine body. Thou shall control thine emotions.

I read the curricular materials, trying to re-collect—that is, to gather again—“what I’ve been and what I imagine myself to be, so I can wield this information, rather than it wielding me. . . . I determine my social commitments; I devise my strategies: whom to work with, for what, and how” (Pinar & Grumet, 1976, p. ix). I read the curricular materials, making note of their underlying, implicit Judeo-Christian principles, and my memories transport me back to Pilgrim Baptist Church, located in the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota (U.S.A.). A physical pillar for the city’s Black community, the church was founded in 1866 by congregants who had escaped enslavement in Missouri and sojourned into Minnesota on the Underground Railroad. Every Sunday, my mother, siblings and I could be found seated in Pilgrim’s polished pews—habitually late to the church, yet early enough for the preacher’s second sermon of the day. I had an ambivalent relationship with the institution of religion itself,

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but strong, personal relationships with the members of the church, and an even stronger desire to be accepted as part of that community. It was years before I understood the church’s teachings about girlhood and womanhood as violence—that is, as a harmful force that at best, constricted my growth, and at worst, could kill me. The possibility of death was figurative, but the material impact of the church’s teachings on how I came to know what was un/acceptable with regard to my embodied behaviors—teachings about how I should and could comport myself as a big-bosomed Black girl—was literal. So, as I read the SOP curricular materials I imagine the words taking the shape of a noose that is slowly but surely tightening around my neck (Figure 15.1). A noose is an object that represents both actual and “symbolic terrorism” (Oriola & Adeyanju, 2009, p. 89)—or figurative and literal violence—with regard to the history of Black peoples in the United States. I rework these declarative statements into the shape of a noose, invoking the history of this object, while also drawing attention to the words and the spaces on the page. This visual arrangement both depicts and crystallizes the violence of these statements, pushing me—and perhaps also readers—to move beyond the verbal in making meaning of the words. Tiffany’s Sensational Currere I am a Black woman descendant of U.S. slaves who grew up in a workingclass family in a northeastern U.S. Rust Belt city, “saved, sanctified, and Holy Ghost filled.” (Here, I refer to a phrase commonly used by members of Black Pentecostal churches, typically of smaller membership, who “testify” or present a testimony of God’s blessings.) My parents separated before I was born and divorced when I was very young. While my father was present in my life, my mother and our Black Pentecostal church community (who were mostly family) did much of the rearing of my sister and me. As an adult, I worked for seven years as a middle-school teacher to mostly Black students, still residing in the neighborhood in which I grew up. I provide this initial autobiographical information to situate myself in relation to the SOP curriculum, as well as to my use of sensational currere in unpacking the SOP curricular materials. While re-reading the SOP curriculum sensorially and sensationally, an uneasiness overtook my body. Conflicting ideas and ideals expressed in the curricula were apparent to me in ways not clear before. Being conscious of my feelings allowed me to notice that, on the one hand, the curriculum encouraged sisterhood by urging Black girls to demonstrate “love and support for one another” and to be “there for each other when no one else is there” (SOP, 2012, p. 26). On the other hand, it promoted the policing of behaviors, encouraging the “noticing [of] behaviors that are undesirable and making a conscious effort to correct them or modify them” (p. 14).

Figure 15.1 Words (that) hurt Source: Text adapted from Sisters of Promise

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As I read on, the visceral response in my body was disorientation. The curriculum sends me candid reminders that my Black-gendered body is not liberated. At these moments, I become acutely aware that my body is still not free, and that a curricular text can bring me back to the asylum of oppressed life. This is what I feel when I read the words in the SOP curriculum, and this is the image that comes to mind: just as I am about to run through the bright green grass of Black feminist ideals, the words on the page catch me and clasp me—like a straitjacket—holding my arms tightly crossed over my stomach. As my body responds in this fashion, I am reminded of particular past events from my life as a Black girl student—moments when others, through their looks, told me to cover up, effectively shaming my body and me. Reading the SOP curriculum triggers autobiographical accounts of my undesired body. These accounts awaken within me reminders and memories of the church I attended as a child.

Autobiographical Accounts of Life in an Undesired Body Part I: Black Girl I did not want the church matriarchs—the church mothers—to think I was “fast” or sexually promiscuous. I did not want them to think that my spiritually anointed, although slightly unorthodox, divorced, single mother did not “raise me right,” in the ways that they had raised their daughters. Therefore, when their Pentecostal eyes stared at my clothed body on Sunday mornings—as well as on Tuesday and Friday evenings— I glanced back, searching for approval. At once, my stomach would clench and a cool breeze would seemingly hit my body. I would wonder: Was my skirt long enough? Did it hug my hips too much? Were my hips and butt swaying too much? A look from them that lingered too long at the hem of my skirt deemed my body unholy. A stare at my legs reminded me that they were stocking-less. I quickly realized that these looks were ways of highlighting actions, appearances and behaviors that were undesirable. I wanted acceptance, so I corrected them. I learned to do this at a very young age. Nevertheless, I also learned that my body was unclean and was an object of temptation for the men of the church. My body’s physical form was a sexual invitation; it was up to me not to “tempt my brethren.” Part II: Black Woman Teacher One afternoon, years later, as a young seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher, I was walking through school hallways with a class of students. My body was clothed in a loose, white-striped gray dress with black leggings underneath and low heels. I made sure the dress more than

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covered my hips and butt. A woman colleague pulled me aside and said, “You can’t wear that because you have a B.B.—a Beautiful Body.” She went on to say that, I really should not wear leggings because my principal hated them. I guess leggings were not professional enough for work, considering the stiff uniforms our students were required to wear. I was angry because on multiple occasions I had seen white women teachers— with slender thighs, narrow hips and behinds that lay flat—walking freely through school hallways wearing black leggings with much shorter tops. The message here was that their bodies were acceptable—respectable even—and, once again, that my body was not. This hurt. I was not in my church anymore, but I felt as if I was still there. I felt so confident— fierce and “slayed”—when I dressed that morning, but here I was again being reminded that my body was undesirable, and that since I could not “correct” my body, I must rectify my clothing. However, something in me had changed. In this instance, instead of searching this woman’s eyes for approval, I looked at her with disappointment. I was beginning to embrace the idea that “my black is beautiful” (SOP, 2012, p. 15). Although “Black feminism” had yet to enter my vocabulary, Black feminist ideals were emerging within me. I was no longer that little Black girl sitting in church pews.

Part III: Black Christian Feminist “You’re my little mockingbird,” said the older white woman as I exited the stage after concluding another worship set—that is, a set of thematically and/or stylistically linked songs and hymns used to transition from one segment of a church service to another. My husband and I were new attendees at this multiracial church, where we would often hear white congregants shouting high praises for my vocal abilities. My singing awed them, but—I quickly realized—my politics did not. Outside of church, on social media, I talked about the toxicity of whiteness, and I discussed my racialized experiences with white folks. I rallied against social injustices such as police brutality. I soon began to hear that the word around the church was that I was not behaving in a positive way, and, therefore, I was not representing Christ. The implied message was that it was acceptable for me to entertain the congregants but calling out (their) racism was frowned upon. They desired the “me” who smiled, sung and shut up. I was raised to be a “good,” respectable girl. I was raised to behave “in a positive way” (SOP, 2012, p. 14). However, by this point in my life, I had discovered Black feminism, and was feeling empowered enough to disagree with others in my church community. These acts of speaking back were not well received. I realized that the white congregants looked at me as a Black woman who had lost her way. I was told—in word and deed—that my Black Christian feminist body needed to be tamed.

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Feeling the Possibilities of Freedom Through Sensational Currere In this chapter, we have conceptualized and enacted sensational currere to explore and comprehend what it means for the particularized bodies of curricularists to feel their way through autobiographical curriculum inquiry. We have considered a method through which bodies marked as Black and girl/woman, in particular, are able to find freedom from the constraints of a curriculum that (re)produces harm while engaging in the deconstruction of that very curriculum. We have shown that if, in fact, curriculum is a struggle for self-definition (Pinar, 1999), then sensational currere can function as a route through which curriculum workers can come into contact with—and indeed, feel—the underpinnings of our commitments. Moreover, if, as curricularists, we are ever to “understand more fully, with more complexities and subtlety” (Pinar, 2004, p. 4), the present, then we must crystalize the embodied stakes at play when we do curriculum work. In this vein, sensational currere offers curriculum workers the opportunity to use—and in fact, embrace—our embodied essence(s) as a way to make sense of how we have been located—and how we locate ourselves—in the world. In other words, sensational currere provides a means through which particular bodies can make and remake themselves, and—perhaps through this remaking—begin to imagine how we might remake the world such that it recognizes and holds our “historical, political, racial, gendered, phenomenological, autobiographical, aesthetic, theological, and international” (Pinar, 1999, p. xvii) multiplicities.

Feeling Our Way Toward More “Just and Caring” Curricula and Classrooms Our ultimate purpose in theorizing and enacting a sensational currere in this chapter is to provide a method to support curriculum creators in grappling with how the felt-ness of our own autobiographies are entangled with our curriculum work. Our hope is that the use of sensational currere will contribute to enlarging possibilities for what it is possible to feel through the (de- and re-)construction of curriculum. Sensational currere is, after all, about feeling through curriculum—that is, feeling how curriculum can constrict—like a straitjacket tightening around one’s body or a noose tightening around one’s neck—or kill the spirits and subjectivities of those who encounter it. Sensational currere invites the interrogation of the embodied essence of curriculum by allowing us to feel our way toward “just and caring” (Greene, 1995) curricula. As such, sensational currere is a method that structures the processes of making, unmaking and remaking curriculum, and makes possible—for both curricularists and students—not only chances to make, unmake and remake themselves, but also opportunities to therapeutically feel or experience moments of (real and imagined) freedom while doing so.

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References Bakare-Yusuf, B. (1999). The economy of violence: Black bodies and the unspeakable terror. In J. Price & M. Shildrick (Eds.), Feminist theory and the body: A reader (pp. 311–323). New York, NY: Routledge. Baszile, D. T. (2015). Critical race/feminist currere. In M. F. He, W. Shubert, & Brian Shultz (Eds.), The SAGE guide to curriculum and education (pp. 120– 126). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Crenshaw, K. (2015). Black girls matter: Pushed out, overpoliced and underprotected. New York, NY: African American Policy Forum. Gough, N. (1998). Reflections and diffractions: Functions of fiction in curriculum inquiry. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum: Toward new identities (pp. 93–127). New York, NY: Garland. Gough, A., & Gough, N. (2014). Becoming-posthuman: A collaborative currere concerning cancer, chaos and complexity. Paper presented at Australian Association for Research in Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Greene, M. (1965). Real toads and imaginary gardens. Teachers College Record, 66(5), 416–425. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Grumet, M. R. (1976/2015). Autobiography: The mixed genre of private and public. In W. F. Pinar & M. R. Grumet (Eds.), Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 220–244). Kingston, NY: Educator’s International Press. Grumet, M. R. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Higginbotham, E. B. (1993). Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nyachae, T. M. (2016). Complicated contradictions amid Black feminism and millennial Black women teachers creating curriculum for Black girls. Gender and Education, 28(6), 786–806. doi:10.1080/09540253.2016.1221896 Nyachae, T. M., & Ohito, E. O. (forthcoming). No disrespect: A Womanist critique of respectability discourses in extracurricular programming for Black girls. Omolade, B. (1994). The rising song of African American women. New York, NY: Routledge. Oriola, T., & Adeyanju, C. (2009). Haunted: The symbolism of the noose. African Identities, 7(1), 89–103. doi:10.1080/14725840802583355 Pinar, W. F. (Ed.). (1975). Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Pinar, W. F. (Ed.). (1999). Contemporary curriculum discourses: Twenty years of JCT. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pinar, W. F., & Grumet, M. R. (1976). Toward a poor curriculum. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

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Shaviro, S. (2009). Without criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sisters of Promise. (2012). Program proposal: Education. Buffalo, NY: U. S. Public Conversion Charter School. Smith, M. (2014). Affect and respectability politics. Theory & Event, 17(3), 1–1. Somerville, M. (2004). Tracing bodylines: The body in feminist poststructural research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 17(1), 47–65. doi:10.1080/0951839032000150220 Spelman, E. V. (1982). Woman as body: Ancient and contemporary views. Feminist Studies, 8(1), 109–131. doi:10.2307/3177582 Springgay, S. (2011). “The Chinatown Foray” as sensational pedagogy. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(5), 636–656. doi:10.2307/41342468 Stewart, A. (2015). Rhizocurrere: A Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to curriculum autobiography. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(10), 1169–1185. doi:10.1080/09518398.2014.974719

16 Provoking Curriculum (Studies) Intellectual Interpolations Teresa Strong-Wilson, Jayne Malenfant, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Rita L. Irwin, Ingrid Johnston, Carl Leggo, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Antoinette Oberg and Hans Smits William Pinar (2006) asks: How does the imbrication of the local and the global, the historical and the futural, structure our private study and public debate over the present circumstances of the field, including who we are, what we hope to do and how, and with whom? (p. 178) One of his answers is the curriculum conference as “counter-culture” (p. 159). CARL:

I remember .  .  . when we dreamed up the notion of Provoking Curriculum . . . RITA: In his very eloquent, and poetic way .  .  . I distinctly remember him [Carl] saying, “Provoking Curriculum.” And we all kind of went, “That’s it, that’s what we want. We want to provoke Curriculum.” CARL: We wanted the idea of curriculum that provokes, and at the same time we wanted to provoke curriculum. The Provoking Curriculum conference has become synonymous with a counter-culture of provoking. Carl Leggo had been playing with the verbal and adjectival possibilities of gerunds. However, deeper resonances of provoking had been on everyone’s mind for some time, this in the wake of the reconceptualization, including, in Canada, the vital presence of, among others, Ted Aoki. Aoki (2005) once said: “I feel a sense of emergent becoming. By being there, I am becoming. I am experiencing a sense of committed involvement in cocreating research paths upon which we might meaningfully tread” (p. 110). He could have been speaking directly about the Provoking Curriculum conferences. The first one celebrated Aoki (Ng-A-Fook & Rottmann, 2012). Through his lifetime and in his work as a curriculum scholar, Aoki invited others to disrupt the takenfor-granted: to linger in the inbetween spaces, staying with the question as a form of provoking encounter. The provenance and character of the Provoking Curriculum conference, and of a tradition of “provoking” in Canadian curriculum studies,

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became the focus of a recent curriculum conversation provoked by the occasion of this volume. It was facilitated by Jayne Malenfant, a PhD student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill.1 Jayne and Teresa Strong-Wilson worked together in creating the dialogic event, inviting curriculum scholars who have been involved in conceptualizing, hosting, organizing, or significantly supporting the Provoking Curriculum conference. Those scholars (with their present affiliations) were: Erika Hasebe-Ludt (University of Lethbridge), Rita L. Irwin (University of British Columbia), Ingrid Johnston (University of Alberta), Carl Leggo (University of British Columbia), Nicholas Ng-A-Fook (University of Ottawa), Antoinette Oberg (University of Victoria), Hans Smits (University of Calgary), and Teresa Strong-Wilson (McGill). By way of the quotation the chapter pulls on and expands from their words in the context of that conversation, words indicated throughout using italics. W.G. Sebald (2013) reminds us that “remembrance, after all, is in the end nothing other than a quotation” (p. 169). He speaks to how “interpolated into a text or an image, [the quotation] forces us . . . to re-visit what we know of other texts and images, and reconsider our knowledge of the world” (p. 169). Conferences are ephemeral by nature, unless proceedings are published, and even then, publications are different from the event itself; they cannot capture the lively interaction and, thinking of Aoki, the sense of becoming brought about by being together in one place for one purpose. In this chapter, we shuttle back and forth between genealogies; we are motivated by an “archiving impulse” generated by a host, an “archive of feelings” (Cvetkovich as cited in Pinar, 2006, p. 160), surrounding the Provoking Curriculum conference. Through quotation, we invoke the event and its provocativeness even as we try to trace the lines (individual, collective) that brought us to this place as we believe these lines—the multiple encounters, within and outside of the conference—are what sustain such counter-culture spaces.

Provoking Genealogies I ANTOINETTE:

So . . . you probably remember, back at the very beginning, 1978 or ’79 was actually the beginning of a series of small conferences, sponsored by CACS and UBC. As President of CACS, I worked with George Tomkins from UBC—anybody remember George Tomkins? (. . .) CARL: Antoinette, you’ve just spurred in me all kinds of thinking back over a history that I know only in a very spotty fashion, but when you mentioned the 1978 first gathering, I went to my shelf. I’m just going to hold it up here, the collection called Curriculum Canada, edited by Walt Werner, 1979. I found this in a United Church, second-hand book sale a while ago. Can you imagine? Here, in Richmond, where I live, there was somebody who held on to this from 1979, and Carl just happened to be at the second-hand bookstore, stopped and

208 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. found it, and said, “Wow.” You’re all in there, Antoinette and Ted, and just a whole bunch of folk, and how exciting it is to see that. To keep in mind that long history and the business of Provoking. The long history and business of Provoking. Before Provoking, there were the Curriculum Canada symposiums. These symposia were held annually between 1978 and 1985, moving from one city (university) to another across Canada, west to east, then back again. The original inspiration was to invite a small number of curriculum scholars representing geographic areas across Canada to come together in an intimate group so as to allow for informal conversation (although formal papers were given). The symposium was deliberately held independent of meetings that curriculum scholars were already commonly frequenting. Supported by the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS) as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the idea was that through “state of the art” discussion (as George Tomkins expressed it; 1980, p. 1), a pan-Canadian perspective might be developed. As Tomkins, Leithwood, and Olson (1982) later wrote, the conference’s existence signalled “an increasing self-consciousness” as Canadian curriculum scholars (p. 200). Conference papers were published through the University of British Columbia’s Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction. The focus of the first symposium (led by Antoinette Oberg in collaboration with George Tomkins) was “Curriculum Inquiry: Problems, Policy and Practice in Canadian Education” while the last one, led by Ted Aoki, took up “Understanding Curriculum as Lived.” One of the recurring threads, hovering in the background, then increasingly moving further into the forefront, was the reconceptualist movement. Tomkins alluded to it in his retrospective on the first symposium, not quite suggesting that reconceptualists had barged in, but not being overly optimistic either about their future role. He wrote: “The view was expressed that the so-called curriculum ‘reconceptualists’ have had limited influence on the actual practice of curriculum in Canada” (v. 2, p. 4). This was 1979. Toward a Poor Curriculum had just been published in 1976. The second symposium focussed on curriculum policy, while the third turned to student outcomes. With the third, co-editors Leithwood and Hughes (1981) suggested that the field was beginning to emerge from its “mid-life passage” thanks to the reconceptualization: Plodding along the rows originally hoed by the Tylers, Tabas, Beauchamps and others of such ilk gets to be pretty dull stuff after three or four decades (Schwab shall make you free). Now, however, some are “reconceptualizing” the field, some are trading in their old tools for others with a more qualitative edge on them; many other bursts of activity are also evident. (p. 1)

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By the fourth conference, held in 1983, we sense a definite change in the air. Led by Richard Butt (of McGill; then CACS President), John Olson (Queen’s) and Jacques Daignault (Laval), the topic was “Insiders’ Realities, Outsiders’ Dreams: Prospects for Curriculum Change.” Here, “conceptualizing or reconceptualizing” (p. 2) (all of one piece) marks a decided shift, away from curriculum documents, outcomes and policies and more towards human beings and their interactions: Pinar’s/Woolf’s Mrs. Brown and Aoki’s sense of emergent becoming. The sixth iteration of the symposia in 1985, held at the University of Alberta, was led by Ted Aoki, who had just received CACS’ Distinguished Service Award (later re-named the Ted Aoki Lifetime Achievement Award). Aoki (1986) talked explicitly about recovering and reclaiming lost ground—that of lived experience: This recovery seems to require of us not only a fundamental reorientation of ourselves to ourselves and to our world but also a new way of speaking, a new language that allows the speaking of our curriculum lives. (p. iv) In the next section, we reflect on how the Curriculum Canada symposia and Provoking Curriculum conferences have traced a continuous thread towards speaking a new provoking language: as a place for encounters that (in the language of this volume) have helped open spaces and pluralities and produce intensities and charges.

Creating Openings: Spaces and Pluralities Whereas Curriculum Canada came about on the cusp of the reconceptualization, Provoking Curriculum was definitely its child. In its plurality, its openness to all conversations (and not just “Canadian” ones) as well as all scholars (graduate students, teachers in addition to education scholars), Provoking Curriculum became distinguished by its name: provoking. Any format—whether dance, live performance, song, poem, métissage, traditional paper—was welcome. It was not about whom, but about what—and how. In our conversation, Rita explained: We intentionally held the conference months away from CSSE and at a different site in Canada as a way to give it a strong presence. Ted Aoki was honoured at this first conference at a gathering at the Asian Centre, amidst the early cherry blossoms and near UBC’s Nitobe Memorial Garden. For her part, Ingrid remembered how unassuming Ted was, when, in the 2003 conference and in the wake of many accolades, “he stood up, and

210 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. the first thing he said was, ‘I’d really like to meet this Ted Aoki.’ It was just so typical of his humility.” Erika reiterated: Ted’s influence and his spirit have always been there in many different ways. The ways conversations were structured and conducted always resulted in provoking, and lingering with the questions. . . . The emphasis was on those conversations .  .  . [and] the intent to unsettle some notions that needed to be unsettled about curriculum. Carl echoed Erika and Ingrid, drawing attention to the openings created for graduate students: So much of Ted’s work was with graduate scholars, and from the beginning . . . we were very keen on opening up a space where graduate scholars would feel not only welcome, but an integral part of the whole experience. The emphasis was on the conversations—its openness to charges and intensities, wherever—and whoever—they came from. Antoinette recalled the 2005 Provoking conference where programs were printed with titles only, without presenter names, which she said was to: Provoke participants to pay attention to what was said, rather than just to who said it. . . . We were not only inviting people to be provocative and to provoke more in what they’ve presented and how they presented it, but we were also trying to be provocative ourselves in the way we set up the conference. Echoing the second chapter in this book, the Provoking Curriculum conference created spaces where all “pilgrims” were welcome and “the rooms and stables . . . [were] wide” (Chaucer, 2003, p. 3). It was a space where plurality was invited. As Hans Smits explained, with room to engage with scholars in different ways, the conference “really, was a real gift to us, of reflecting our own work, and practice.”

Exploring the Gerund: Intensifying and (Re)Charging Provoking Curriculum? Or, Provoking Curriculum Studies? Over the years, the conference title has moved back and forth. We talked about the significance of this. Was the emphasis on theory, or practice, or both? The consensus was that the conference was inclusive of whatever could be imagined as possible in thinking about, performing, and practicing, curriculum. As Carl noted in our conversation, to widespread agreement: “What I’m coming to realize here . . . in this conversation is how fluid and organic a lot of this movement around Curriculum Studies in Canada has been . . . the big focus . . . is around the provoking.”

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The conference stands out first for its openness to multiple forms of presentation and representation: its playfulness and intense interest in experimentation and the charges issuing from encounters with different representational forms, from dance to song to visual installations to talk. “I just want to say, the most magical of all was actually Antoinette dancing the tango,” Erika remembered, thinking back to the UBC 2015 conference. In Teresa’s mind, the performance was exemplary of Antoinette’s approach to teaching her seminars in qualitative inquiry at the University of Victoria: aesthetic, precise, demanding, joyful. The 2017 conference (at McGill) departed from the typical plenary by “riffing” on a format recently tried out at the CACS Presidential Panel: a Q & A session where presenters were invited to speak to the intensity or charge of a self-chosen image. Doctoral students Mitchell McLarnon and Sandra Owén:nakon Deer playfully led the informal panel discussions. Performing/Playing could stretch one’s own limits, in useful ways, to the point of feeling exposed (currere’s “nakedness”: see Chapter 2). Hans remembered presenting with colleagues from the University of Calgary (Anne Phelan, Jo Towers, Darren Lund, and Lisa Panayotidis) at the Provoking in Banff. Their presentation took the form of a “reader’s theatre”: We all dressed up in black, and it was probably very poor drama, but it was fun. It was kind of challenging for me . . . it really opened up something for us that was genuinely provoking. We were in the middle of trying to work with a relatively new program at the University of Calgary Teacher Education program . . . it provided a focus for our collaborative research and writing, and we ultimately published a book of these pieces, with the title provoking in it. Nicholas spoke to deliberate attempts to provoke intensities and charges by opening spaces to different perspectives, this in the two Provoking conferences held at the University of Ottawa (2011, 2013): “to challenge, to try to open up, more space within history, the way in which we recount a history of Canadian curriculum studies.” They invited Jacques Daignault to speak to a francophone perspective on évoquer (with its play on provoquer) and Dwayne Donald and Cynthia Chambers to speak to Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. Some intensities and charges took the form of release—of pleasure derived from being in this space with these people, even beacons within the community, but all of whom were comfortable being themselves. Carl explained: I would like to, actually, just recall one fond memory, in Ottawa, with Bill Doll, and Bill telling the story of why he was using a cane, and how . . . he was putting on his pants, he said, and he put one leg in, and the other leg into the same pants leg, and he fell over. And

212 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. hurt himself. I love that story from Bill, because of the way he told it, because of his willingness to tell it, because Bill Doll has been this wonderful inspiration. . . . It’s the elders, it’s the wise people, it’s the young colleagues, it’s this community that transcends age, and experience, that opens up in a generosity of spirit that I really don’t very often see in the academy, but I have consistently seen it in Provoking Curriculum. As Nicholas further observed, thinking about the generosity of mentors and, in the wake of the recent loss of William Doll, Provoking is a way of re-charging oneself every two years: “It’s like a breath of fresh air, that keeps you going, in relation to each other.” Provoking has become one of curriculum studies’ “safe havens for intellectually experimental work” (Pinar, 2006, p. 159). When we gather in this provoking way as a curriculum community, the objects we “collect”— memories of encounters—come to comprise “an archive of feelings” (in Cvetkovich’s phrase), contributing to a “counter educational culture” (Pinar, p. 160). Reflecting on the revolutionary character of conferences like Bergamo (which features a section called “Provoking Dialogue(s)”), Pinar emphasizes the need to bring forward memories of social “objects” tied to past conferences, and in recalling them, to “re-awaken” from the “nightmare that is the present”: standardized curricula, harried teachers, and increasingly anxious education scholars (p. 160). He argues that now more than ever (and now even more so than in 2006 when he was writing that chapter), we must continue to engage intentionally with one another. The “concept of community” has been, and remains, important to curriculum studies, structured as our field is not by Ministry documents but by our encounters: “our existential enactments of intellectual friendship” (p. 161). Beginning in the first chapter of this book, with pilgrims to the curriculum (an)archive in the form of a community formed among five female scholars through to the collective scholarship—the (an)archive of feeling—and evident in and across the chapters and strands (plurality, spaces, intensities, and charges), closing with this chapter on the Provoking Curriculum conference community, we point forward to the vital friendships and alliances that contribute to this “provoking” spirit in curriculum studies in Canada and internationally, asking, as if joining voice with Aoki: Which pathways committed to co-emergent becoming will emerge/be provoked next?

Provoking Genealogies II In the appendix to Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text, Pinar and Reynolds (1992) offer a genealogy of the curriculum field by way of the people who were there to help shape it

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and who had also been shaped in turn, by others before (or beside) them. We adopt that same format here. Curriculum conferences (their inception, leadership, and organization) often begin in interactions in university departments or between universities: in conferences, with supervisors and visiting scholars, within courses, and in doctoral work and research projects. Such an archival tracing of genealogies might be helpful in illuminating the crosscurrents of ideas and people that have nurtured conferences like Provoking—and that could help keep their counter-culture spirit alive.

First Provoking Curriculum Conference, 2003, UBC, “Provoking Curriculum” Rita L. Irwin began her curriculum studies journey at the University of Victoria where her master’s degree introduced her to visiting instructors such as William Reid, Gail McCutcheon, and Antoinette Oberg, whose eloquence as a curriculum scholar reverberated through her visits to their classes yet it was her commitment to action research within curriculum studies that inspired Irwin years later to imagine the same, but through the arts, eventually leading to a/r/tography. Embarking on an EdD program in Art Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Irwin was soon taking curriculum studies doctoral seminars with Walt Werner and Jim Gaskell. It was during those early doctoral courses that she came across the Curriculum Studies Canada monographs. These inspired her commitment to learning about a Canadian perspective on curriculum studies. At the same time, she happened upon a paper Ted Aoki had given at an art education conference in Montreal. The paper examined three perspectives that clearly articulated what the arts offer curriculum studies and crystallized Irwin’s desire to pursue art education and curriculum studies in her research. After completing her doctorate, teaching at Lakehead University and returning to UBC, Irwin attended curriculum conferences such as Curriculum and Pedagogy (American-based yet one year, offered through the University of Victoria). Remembering the Curriculum Studies monographs and feeling the lack of such focussed scholarship in Canada, inspired her to suggest hosting a curriculum conference at UBC, this during her term as President of CACS. It was here that a group of curriculum scholars at UBC hosted the first Provoking Curriculum Studies conference with that evocative, Leggo-inspired title. One presentation that especially stands out to Irwin took place at the 2015 Provoking Curriculum conference at UBC where she performed a two-person play with George Belliveau, with production support from Graham Lea and Janice Valdez. Irwin also initiated the CACS Celebration of Creative Scholarly Works at CSSE, which marked an important juncture within curriculum studies in Canada. Canada has become a leader in creative curriculum scholarship.

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Second Provoking Curriculum Conference, 2005, University of Victoria, “Trans/forming Narratives” Antoinette Oberg navigated solo for many years at the University of Victoria (UVic), lacking resident curriculum studies colleagues, but buoyed by summer visits of significant scholars in the field from both within and beyond North America, who came to UVic under the aegis of the summer graduate program in Curriculum Studies which she designed and directed for 27 years. After Jim Macdonald came as a visiting instructor in the program at the beginning of the 1980s, the floodgates opened and he was followed in subsequent summers by Ted Aoki, Tom Barone, Terry Carson, Bill Doll, Cynthia Chambers, Jacques Daignault, Freema Elbaz, Annette Gough, Noel Gough, Dwayne Huebner, David Jardine, Gail McCutcheon, Bill Pinar, Bill Reid, Bill Schubert, David Smith, Dennis Sumara, Max van Manen, and many others. Oberg launched her own interest in interpretive inquiry, and autobiographical narrative in particular, long before it was fashionable on the West Coast, riding the currents of Schon’s work on reflection in and on action, van Manen’s phenomenological pedagogy and theorizing, Pinar and Grumet’s (autobiographical) currere, and Gough’s interrogation of narrative inquiry. She refined her craft over many years by writing and reflecting on her own teaching and research practices, and she invited graduate students in her classes to do the same. Oberg’s curriculum scholarship included many collaborations with graduate student scholars who were informed by their studies with the summer visitors, and many years of particularly enlivening collaboration with Cynthia Chambers, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, and Carl Leggo in a mode of inquiry they called Métissage. Eschewing the conventional mode of presentation at the local, national, and international conferences she attended over the years, her mode of presentation with these many collaborators included reader’s theatre, visual poetry, skits, and scripted and unscripted dialogue, and culminated in her performance at the ten-year anniversary of the Provoking Curriculum Conference at UBC in 2015, long after her retirement, where, to honour Bill Doll’s work on postmodern conceptions of curriculum, she enacted his notion of a practical pedagogy based in complexity theory by dancing an Argentine Tango with her husband Daniel Myers. She chose Argentine Tango because it is, like complexity theory, non-deterministic, non-linear, and self-organizing— apt descriptors as well of Oberg’s own inquiry and pedagogy.

Third Provoking Curriculum Conference, 2007, University of Calgary (Banff), “Shifting Borders and Spaces” After teaching school for many years, Hans Smits was fortunate to take some courses from Terry Carson on action research and peace education.

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Carson became Smits’ advisor for his masters and doctoral work at the University of Alberta and mentored his further work in curriculum and teacher education, inspired especially by hermeneutics. Some other key influences for Hans included Madeleine Grumet, whose course on feminism and curriculum began to transform his understandings of gender and curriculum, and Max van Manen’s courses on phenomenology which reminded him to attend to the grounds of our educational experiences. Smits’ graduate studies in a department that was deeply influenced by the legacy of Ted Aoki and European continental philosophy as well as reconceptualism, prepared him well for his work in teacher education understood in curriculum terms. He valued becoming part of the community of curriculum scholars in Canada, especially through his involvement with CACS. The Provoking Curriculum conferences became salient experiences for him. The first Provoking conference in Vancouver came along at a fortuitous time, as together with some colleagues at the University of Calgary, Hans was attempting to understand the implementation of an inquiry-based teacher education program. The provoking theme gave focus to their inquiries, culminating in a collection of reflective essays, Provoking Conversations on Inquiry in Teacher Education (published by Peter Lang in 2012). Smits then helped organize the Provoking conference hosted in Banff in 2007.

Fourth Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference, 2009, University of Ottawa, “An Uncommon Countenance: Provoking Past, Present, and Future Perspectives within Canadian Curriculum Studies” See Sixth Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference.

Fifth Provoking Curriculum Conference, 2011, University of Alberta, “Provoking Curriculum Studies as an Aesthetics of Vulnerability” Ingrid Johnston’s interest in curriculum studies began as a doctoral student in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta where she heard about the strong legacy of curriculum scholarship from the work of Ted Aoki and Bill Pinar. She then had the opportunity to take courses with Madeleine Grumet and Carl Leggo. Terry Carson, as chair of the department, encouraged her to attend CSSE (Canadian Society for the Study of Education) conferences, and invited her to collaborate on research projects in which they drew upon the work of these scholars as well as in creating a Diversity Institute in teacher education, the psychoanalytic perspectives of Deborah Britzman. Over time, Johnston took on executive roles in CACS, taking over as President for a term from Hans Smits and beginning to work collaboratively with Teresa Strong-Wilson.

216 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. Johnston’s research in postcolonial literary studies, diversity education, and curriculum development in schools was further enhanced by attending the first and subsequent Provoking Curriculum conferences, which provided opportunities to showcase new ideas in a supportive academic environment. In 2013, she co-hosted a Provoking Curriculum conference at the University of Alberta with Ng-A-Fook. Feedback from this conference highlighted the value of the longer interactive coffee breaks between sessions that allowed for the kinds of “complicated conversations” (Pinar, 2012, p. 193) that promoted new ideas about the future of curriculum studies in Canada.

Sixth Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference, 2013, University of Ottawa, “Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference: As Strong Poets” In 1999, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook enrolled in two courses that would have a profound impact on his future career. Lous Heshusius, in “Participatory Epistemologies,” invited Ng-A-Fook and his colleagues to shake up the different “ways” they had come to “know,” or better yet “relate” themselves to others and the more-than-human world. The second was William Pinar’s “An Introduction to Curriculum Studies.” During a break, Bill invited Ng-A-Fook to undertake his doctorate within “The Curriculum Theory Project” at Louisiana State University (LSU). During his masters work, Ng-A-Fook had also studied with prominent Canadian educational scholars at York University: Deborah Britzman, Leesa Fawcett, Alex Pomson, and Connie Russell. Celia Haig-Brown’s course, “Decolonizing Research Methodologies,” was life-changing for him. Ng-A-Fook grew up in Kapuskasing, Ontario, a small, rural logging town, as a first-generation immigrant cisgender hyph-e-nated—ChineseGuyanese-Irish-Scottish—male settler Canadian. With Haig-Brown, NgA-Fook explored the question: What does it mean to decolonize one’s self? In Beginning Research: Toward A Vulnerable Education, he attempted to understand how settler patriarchy affected the ways he read historical texts, and how such readings shaped his settler historical consciousness and lived relations with others. In 2001, Ng-A-Fook packed up his car and drove to LSU to begin his studies with William Pinar, Petra Munro Hendry, William Doll Jr., Claudia Eppert, and Denise Egéa-Khuene. That September, alongside fellow graduate students, friends, family, and the world at large, he witnessed the horrors of 9/11. Such events would shape his studies of the psychosocial dynamics of place. For his doctoral research, Ng-A-Fook collaborated with the largest Franco-Indigenous community, the United Houma Nation, to (re)write/(re)right a history of their educational experiences before, during, and after the federally mandated desegregation of public schooling in Louisiana.

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In 2007, he was offered a tenured track position in Curriculum Theory at the University of Ottawa. That year he attended his first Provoking Curriculum Studies conference in Banff. There, William Pinar encouraged Ng-A-Fook to approach Hans Smits and Lisa Panayotidis about the possibility of hosting the conference at the University of Ottawa. Collaborating with Ingrid Johnston (then President of CACS), Karen Krasny (Vice President), and Chloe Brushwood Rose (Editor of JCACS), Nicholas, colleagues, and a group of amazing graduate students welcomed everyone to the fourth iteration of Provoking Curriculum Studies, held that year (2009) as a pre-conference to CSSE. An edited collection, Reconsidering Canadian Curriculum Studies, was later published. In 2013, the University of Ottawa hosted the sixth iteration of the conference, inviting colleagues to address provoking curriculum studies as strong poets. An array of thought-provoking scholars and poets offered their invocations and provocations as keynote speakers, including Gilbert Whiteduck, the Band Council Chief of the Kitigan Zibi First Nations, who accepted the invitation to open up the conference greetings alongside their community fire keeper, Peter Decontie. Provoking Curriculum conferences both pushed and informed Ng-AFook’s understanding of the larger historical context and contemporary issues that Canadian curriculum scholars have been seeking to address within their collective scholarship. He returned anew to questions animating his earlier work, asking how might we understand the psychosocial dynamics of “truth” and “reconciliation” as a vulnerable pedagogy in relation to place and others who have lived here since time immemorial.

Seventh Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference, 2015, UBC Erika Hasebe-Ludt is currently a professor at the University of Lethbridge, but for her, curriculum studies became a calling when she began her doctoral studies at the Centre for Curriculum and Instruction and Department of Language Education at UBC in the early nineties. A significant moment in Hasebe-Ludt’s shift from linguistics to curriculum studies in education was meeting Ted Tetsuo Aoki toward the end of her doctoral studies at UBC. He introduced her to curriculum theory and hermeneutic inquiry through the works of David G. Smith, David Jardine, Cynthia Chambers, and Antoinette Oberg, and to reconceptualist curriculum theory through the writings of William F. Pinar, Madeleine Grumet, William E. Doll Jr., and Hongyu Wang, among others. At the University of British Columbia, Hasebe-Ludt started collaborating with Carl Leggo and Lynn Thomas, among others. Carl Leggo’s graduate studies exposed him to scholars and influential professors who emphasized creative and critical approaches to curriculum studies that resonated with his experiences as a teacher. In addition to collaborating with Hasebe-Ludt, upon joining the Department

218 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. of Language Education at the University of British Columbia in 1990, he quickly connected with wonderful colleagues in Western Canadian universities, including Rita L. Irwin, Karen Meyer, Walt Werner, Ted T. Aoki, Linda Peterat, Antoinette Oberg, Wanda Hurren, Cynthia Chambers, David Jardine, Hans Smits, Darren Lund, Dennis Sumara, David G. Smith, Ingrid Johnston, William E. Doll Jr., and William F. Pinar. For most of the 1990s, John Willinsky and Hillel Goelman directed the Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction. Ted T. Aoki had been the first director. Leggo was actively involved in supervising graduate students at the Centre. When Karen Meyer accepted the position of Director of the Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction in 1999, Leggo volunteered to be the Graduate Advisor. For several years Meyer and Leggo promoted and defended the vitality and creativity of the Centre. It became a significant location for arts-based research, living inquiry, spirituality, and curriculum, and social activism. When Irwin proposed organizing a conference focussed on creative approaches to curriculum, Leggo joined the organizing committee for the First Provoking Curriculum Conference, held at UBC in 2003. Years later, in 2015, with Erika Hasebe-Ludt, he co-organized the Seventh Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference at UBC, from which has come Canadian Curriculum Studies: Inspiration/Imagination/Interconnection (co-edited with Erika Hasebe-Ludt; Canadian Scholars Press, 2018).

Eighth Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference, 2017, McGill University, “Provoking Curriculum Encounters: Plurality, Spaces, Intensities and Charges” Teresa Strong-Wilson’s entry into the curriculum community came through graduate studies at the University of Victoria: Antoinette Oberg’s as well as Roy Graham’s courses, but also those of invited scholars like William Pinar and Noel Gough. She also recalls what it felt like to be seated directly in front of Ted Aoki, watching him speak/teach/think aloud at a lunchtime talk, this at UVic. She can remember the profound impact on her of her first curriculum conference as a graduate student and William Pinar noticing her hanging back in the wings, addressing her and inviting her to join in. Ingrid Johnston was also instrumental in inviting her to become involved, first in CACS, which culminated in her 2015–17 CACS co-presidency with Avril Aitken and, at the invitation of former co-presidents Nellis and Hasebe-Ludt, the co-hosting of the 2017 Provoking Curriculum Conference at McGill, with the support of Nicholas Ng-A-Fook (then President, CSSE). The work of Pinar and Grumet, but also Chambers, Hasebe-Ludt, and Leggo, as well as Eppert, have been central to her scholarship and teaching. Her intellectual engagement is primarily with currere—autobiography in education—as presently explored through her work on W.G. Sebald. Seminal pieces tied to

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Provoking conferences explored this interest, including, at the University of Ottawa “Provoking,” the “And Yet” co-presentation with her doctoral student Amarou Yoder, inspired by Aoki, which she remembers William Doll attended; it was later published in Ng-A-Fook, Ibrahim, and Reis’s Provoking Curriculum Studies as Strong Poets. Also: the “Following One’s Nose” presentation on Sebald given at Provoking in Montreal, later published in Educational Theory. She was part of the editorial team, led by Avril Aitken, who in collaboration with Claudia Mitchell, Margaret Dobson, Maria Ezcurra, and Teresa, published a Provoking-inspired JCACS special issue (16:1, 2018) called “The Arts in Curriculum: Aesthetics, Embodiment and Well-being.” The present edited book bears the deepest imprint of the Provoking Curriculum Encounters conference, with its elaboration of spaces, plurality, intensities, and charges. Jayne Malenfant is a graduate student in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, and just getting her feet wet when it comes to curriculum studies (though not, perhaps, in the business of Provoking). The 2017 Provoking Curriculum conference in Montreal was not only her first experience with curriculum studies, but it also provided an opportunity for her first-ever academic conference presentation—a unique and positive experience. Encouraged by colleague Mitchell McLarnon, who was on the Provoking organizing team, Malenfant volunteered at Provoking and was excited by the many formats and topics presented. Having shifted her area of study from anthropology to education for her PhD, Malenfant echoes appreciation for the openness of the Provoking community and the spaces made for different experiences and approaches in conceptualizing how we approach curriculum. Malenfant has been enjoying getting to know Provoking a little better through working closely with Teresa Strong-Wilson and co-editors Christian Ehret, Sandra Chang-Kredl, and David Lewkowich on the present edited volume.

Note 1. Thanks go to Avril Aitken (also invited to be part of the conversation) who helped set up the platform by which these scholars came together (in February 2018) to think back, and forward, on the subject of Provoking.

References Aoki, T. (1986). Foreword. In T. Aoki, K. Jacknicke, & D. Franks (Eds.), Understanding curriculum as lived: Curriculum Canada VII. Proceedings of the Seventh Invitational Symposium of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (p. iv). Vancouver, BC: Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction. Aoki, T. (2005). Toward curriculum inquiry in a new key (178/1980). In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted. T. Aoki (pp. 89–110). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

220 Teresa Strong-Wilson et al. Butt, R., & Olson, J. (1983). Dreams and realities: An approach to change through critical consciousness. In R. Butt, J. Olson, & J. Daignault (Eds.), Curriculum Canada IV. insiders’ realities, outsiders’ dreams: Prospects for curriculum change. Proceedings of the Fourth National Symposium of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Vancouver, BC: Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction. Chaucer, G. (2003). The Canterbury tales (N. Coghill, Trans.). New York, NY: Penguin. Leithwood, K., & Hughes, A. (1981). Introduction. In K. Leithwood & A. Hughes (Eds.), Curriculum Canada III: Curriculum research and development and critical student outcomes. Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies (pp. 1–6). Vancouver, BC: Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction. Ng-A-Fook, N., & Rottmann, J. (2012). Introduction: An uncommon countenance. In N. Ng-A-Fook & J. Rottmann (Eds.), Reconsidering Canadian curriculum studies: Provoking historical, present, and future perspectives (pp. 1–22). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. F. (2006). The synoptic text today and other essays: Curriculum development after the reconceptualization. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory? New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. F., & Reynolds, W. M. (1992). Appendix: Genealogical notes: The history of phenomenology and post-structuralism in curriculum studies. In W. F. Pinar & W. M. Reynolds (Eds.), Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text (pp. 237–262). New York, NY: Teachers College. Sebald, W. G. (2013). A place in the country (J. Catling, Trans.). London, UK: Hamish Hamilton. Tomkins, G. (1980). Preface/Introduction. In J. Bernier & G. Tomkins (Eds.), Curriculum Canada, II: Étude du curriculum: Conceptions et approches: Curriculum policy and curriculum development (pp. 1–9). Vancouver, BC: Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction, and Quebec City, QC: Départements de Mesure et Evaluation et de Didactique. Tomkins, G. S., Leithwood, L., & Olson, J. (1982). Currents in Canadian curriculum research. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 14(2), 200–202. doi:10.1080/ 0022027820140208

Contributors

Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar, University of Calgary Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar is an SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. Wisam holds a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta, in addition to three master’s degrees, in English Education (University of Baghdad), Humanities (California State University), and English Literature (Lakehead University). His first book, titled Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Arab-Canadian Students—Double Consciousness, Belonging, and Radicalization, will be published by Palgrave in 2019. His book proposal, Intercultural Education for Reconciliation and Curriculum Theorizing, was accepted in principal by Routledge. His primary research interest is in intercultural education, curriculum theory, and social justice. His previous articles have appeared in Critical Discourse Studies and Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, as well as Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies and Teaching in Higher Education. Avril Aitken, Bishop’s University Avril Aitken is a settler scholar in the School of Education of Bishop’s University, in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She is interested in how curriculum theory informs our understanding of subjectivity and psycho-social forces in the classroom. In her most recent work with future teachers, she asks what it means to seek to prepare teachers for equitable, just work in the face of the ongoing effects of colonialism, given institutional participation in this dynamic, and given the regulatory dimensions of teacher education. Geraldine Balzer, University of Saskatchewan Dr. Geraldine Balzer is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. Her experiences teaching Inuit students led to her interest in decolonizing pedagogies and transformative education. Her teaching focuses on ways of disrupting the hegemony of standard English and embracing the diversity of Englishes within our world, incorporating Aboriginal

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Contributors

and postcolonial literature into secondary classrooms, and preparing teachers to be advocates of social justice. Her research focuses on decolonization and social justice. She works with teachers to explore the use of diverse literary texts and literary theory in order to engage students in critical thinking about societal issues. Sarah Byrne Bausell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sarah Byrne Bausell is a doctoral candidate studying teacher education and curriculum theory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her current research draws from dialectical theories of listening and engages English teachers in a critical discourse analysis collaborative. Before her graduate studies, she was a high school English teacher. Jessie L. Beier, University of Alberta Jessie L. Beier is an Edmonton-based teacher, artist, writer, and conjurer of weird pedagogies for dark times. Beier is currently a PhD student at the University of Alberta (Canada), co-director of the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory (University of Alberta), and a contributor to Speculative Energy Futures (University of Alberta). Jessie’s current research—Teaching at the End of the World—investigates how education systems produce resources for thinking about the future in light of what has been termed the “Anthropocene,” with the aim of fabulating alternative speculations on how pedagogical life might be thought otherwise. Sandra Chang-Kredl, Concordia University Sandra Chang-Kredl (PhD, McGill University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia University, where she examines issues related to teacher identity, including cultural representations of childhood and teachers’ uses of memory to construct beliefs about childhood, as well as children’s popular culture and media experiences from the perspectives of new literacies and play theory. Her research in curriculum studies has been published in journals such as Curriculum Inquiry, Reflective Practice, Teaching and Teacher Education, Gender and Education, Early Years: An International Research Journal, Children’s Literature in Education, Child Care in Practice, and Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. Sandra Owén:nakon Deer, McGill University Sandra Owén:nakon Deer is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman of the Haudenosaunee (people of the longhouse). Her doctoral studies at McGill focus on pedagogical philosophies tied to Indigenous identity. She has presented on her work and published a journal article (In Education, 2016) as well as been invited to contribute several curriculumrelated book chapters, using autobiography and storytelling (Deer,

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2018, 2019) or curriculum theory (Deer, in press). Sandra is an active journal/book reviewer and, is one of the co-editors on a special issue on the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and education for the McGill Journal of Education. She has also been a curriculum consultant for the Cree School Board and the Akwesasne Mohawk Board of Education. Christian Ehret, McGill University Christian Ehret is an Assistant Professor at McGill University, where he investigates affective dimensions of learning, literacy, and digital culture through engaged research within and beyond schools. His recent work includes a co-edited volume, Affect in Literacy Teaching and Learning: Pedagogies, Politics and Coming to Know, and the chapter, “Propositions from Affect Theory for Feeling Literacy through the Event,” published in Theoretical Models and Processes of Literacy, Seventh Edition, both also published by Routledge. His work has been published in such journals as Cognition & Instruction, Research in the Teaching of English, the Journal of Literacy Research, and New Media & Society. He received a 2016 Promising Researcher Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. Erika Hasebe-Ludt, University of Lethbridge Erika Hasebe-Ludt is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge. She teaches in the areas of teacher education, curriculum studies, and literacy and language education. Her research focuses on life writing and literary métissage as arts-based inquiry approaches in between curriculum and cultures in Canadian and cosmopolitan contexts. Her publications include the co-edited collections Contemplating Curriculum: Genealogies/Times/Places (with Wanda Hurren, 2014) and Canadian Curriculum Studies: A Métissage of Imagination/Inspiration/Interconnection (with Carl Leggo, 2018). Luke Heidebrecht, University of Saskatchewan Luke Heidebrecht is a PhD candidate in Curriculum Studies in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. His experiences designing and facilitating service-learning programs in postcolonial contexts have taught him about the educative possibilities and perils that emerge when we embrace risky encounters with marginalized and subaltern voices. Of particular interest to him are the ways in which curriculum may help locate individuals in social, transformative, and critical spaces. Michelle A. Honeyford, University of Manitoba Michelle A. Honeyford is an Associate Professor in Language and Literacy in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba. Her

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Contributors

research examines literacy and learning through individual and collective experiences of coming to know, understand, create, and live more fully, often through probing questions of identity, belonging, purpose, and relationship. She is particularly interested in the possibilities that are created in the ongoing (and often unexpected) intra-actions of readers and writers and teachers and learners when curriculum and classrooms are re-located in and engaged with transcultural and multimodal literacies—in the complex and interconnected narratives, experiences, and struggles of people, places, artifacts, arts, and communities. Dr. Honeyford is Co-Director of the Manitoba Writing Project, a network for educators interested in writing and social justice. Rita L. Irwin, University of British Columbia Rita L. Irwin is a Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Art Education and Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests include preservice and in-service arts teacher education and artist-in-schools programs, as well as the intersections between arts education, curriculum studies, and socio-cultural issues. Her research involves action research, case study, image-based research, and many forms of arts-based educational inquiry, including a/r/tography. She is also committed to leadership in arts education, curriculum studies, and education organizations. Notably, the Provoking Curriculum conferences began during her term as President of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies. Ingrid Johnston, University of Alberta Dr. Ingrid Johnston is Professor Emerita of English Education and Curriculum Studies in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. She received her first degrees at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa before moving to Canada. Ingrid’s research focuses on issues of multiculturalism and migrancy, postcolonial literary pedagogies, and curriculum development for diverse classrooms. She has published numerous articles and chapters, authored and edited four books related to curriculum development in secondary schools, and served several terms on the Board of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies. Yu-Ling Lee, Trinity Western University Dr. Yu-Ling Lee is an Assistant Professor of Education in the School of Education at Trinity Western University. His teaching and research is focused on understanding how religion or spirituality matter in the use, design, and engineering of media and technology. He is interested in the articulation of theologies and the manifestations of technologies in curriculum studies. He is aiming to understand and design curriculum as technotheologies.

Contributors

225

Carl Leggo, University of British Columbia Carl Leggo was a poet and Professor at the University of British Columbia. His books have included: Come-By-Chance; Lifewriting as Literary Métissage and an Ethos for Our Times (co-authored with Erika HasebeLudt and Cynthia Chambers); Creative Expression, Creative Education (co-edited with Robert Kelly); Sailing in a Concrete Boat; Arresting Hope: Prisons That Heal (co-edited with Ruth Martin, Mo Korchinski, and Lynn Fels); Arts-based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honoring Presence (co-edited with Susan Walsh and Barbara Bickel); Hearing Echoes (co-authored with Renee Norman); and Poetic Inquiry: Enchantment of Place (co-edited with Pauline Sameshima, Alexandra Fidyk, and Kedrick James). David Lewkowich, University of Alberta David Lewkowich (PhD, McGill University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. He has published frequently in curriculum studies journals, including Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Curriculum Inquiry, and Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, on which he serves as a member of the editorial board. His areas of research interest include reading experience; collaborative spaces of reading; ELA teacher education; reading and teaching with comics; theories and practices of memory and forgetting; psychoanalytic theory; the emotional life of teaching and learning; young adult literature; adolescence in comics and graphic novels; and visual versions of reader response. Jennifer Macdonald, University of Calgary Jennifer Macdonald is a PhD candidate of Curriculum and Learning and sessional instructor at the University of Calgary in the Werklund School of Education. She is a settler-descendant and honoured to study within the traditional territories of Treaty 7 as she responds to the interconnected projects of Indigenous-settler reconciliation and the ecological emergency. Emerging from her experiences as an outdoor environmental educator, her research focuses on holistic ways of knowing and the dynamic meaning-making that can arise through lived experiences with the Land. Jayne Malenfant, McGill University Jayne Malenfant is a PhD candidate at McGill University in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, and Pierre-Elliott Trudeau and Vanier Scholar. She is interested in intersections of curriculum and educational access for youth experiencing homelessness. She also enjoys being a member of the McGill Faculty of Education Community Garden.

226

Contributors

Robert Christopher Nellis, Red Deer College Robert Christopher Nellis is a continuous faculty member in the Red Deer College School of Education, where he teaches courses in Educational Psychology, Family Studies, Educational Foundations, and Curriculum Studies. He is also a former Co-President of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies. His PhD thesis received the 2008 Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies Dissertation Award, and he is the author of Haunting Inquiry: Classic NFB Documentary, Jacques Derrida, and the Curricular Otherwise (Sense, 2009). Robert’s recent work has explored place, home, more-than-human encounters, life writing, and poetic inquiry. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, University of Ottawa Nicholas Ng-A-Fook is a Professor of Curriculum Theory and the Director of the Teacher Education program at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is also the Co-Director of the Equity Knowledge Network for the province of Ontario. He has published several award-winning edited collections such as, but not limited to, Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and Arts of the Possible in Education and Oral History and Education: Theories, Dilemmas, and Practices. Tiffany M. Nyachae, Buffalo State College (SUNY) Tiffany M. Nyachae is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary Education, Literacy, and Educational Leadership at Buffalo State College (SUNY) where she teaches literacy, social studies, and social foundations courses. As a Black feminist pedagogue and an interdisciplinary, community-based scholar, she employs literacy and curriculum to engage race and justice in various urban contexts, for the ultimate purpose of social transformation. This agenda is evident in her research on supporting the racial literacy, social justice ideological becoming, and classroom practice of urban teachers committed to social justice through “race space” critical professional development. Dr. Nyachae recently published in Gender and Education and Qualitative Inquiry. Antoinette Oberg, University of Victoria, Emeritus Antoinette Oberg was present when The Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies was born in 1973 at the University of Alberta. The formation of this organization signified the beginning of curriculum studies as a distinct field of study in Canada. Later, at the University of Victoria, where she taught for 30 years, she built and ran a Curriculum Studies graduate program that opened the door to the many forms of interpretive inquiry, including in particular phenomenological pedagogy and autobiographical narrative. Her own research and

Contributors

227

writing were carried forward through reflection on her own inquiry and teaching practices. She retired in 2005. Esther O. Ohito, Denison University Esther O. Ohito is an Assistant Professor at Denison University, with a joint appointment in the Black Studies program and the Education department. An interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Ohito is attentive to the effects of affect and embodiment in her areas of research. Specific to curriculum studies, Dr. Ohito’s intellectual project centers on (re) claiming Black women’s and girls’ knowledges and asserting claims to their/our human-ness. Dr. Ohito’s publications have appeared in journals such as Curriculum Inquiry, Equity & Excellence in Education, Gender and Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and The Urban Review: Issues and Ideas in Education. Linda Radford, University of Ottawa Linda Radford is a Long-Term Appointment Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education where she leads the Urban Communities Cohort. Her research interests include digital pedagogies that foster self-reflexive reading practices and social change, and understanding how youth can represent their ways of knowing and further develop their literacies in rich and critical ways. Her work has appeared in publications such as the McGill Journal of Education, Digital Culture and Education, Affective Reading Education Journal, Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, and Multicultural Education Review, as well as in Changing English: Studies in Reading and Culture. Lena Rebecca Richardson, Simon Fraser University Lena Rebecca Richardson is a doctoral student in Arts Education at Simon Fraser University. She has an M.A. in Adult Education and Community Development from OISE/University of Toronto, with a focus on narrative and autobiographical stories in community contexts. She is the editor of a book, Stories between Us, which documents an intergenerational oral history project with elder activists in Berkeley, California. She also is a facilitator with a research project on teaching digital storytelling to older adults as a way of learning technology skills and preserving community stories. Nikki Rotas, Rowan University Nikki Rotas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Inclusive Education at Rowan University. Her research is grounded in curriculum studies and intersects environmental science, technology, and arts-based education. As an interdisciplinary scholar,

228

Contributors

she draws on theories of movement and affect in relation to educational research in urban settings. Dr. Rotas is also interested in feminist new materialist methodologies and the use of wearable technologies in urban schools and communities. Hans Smits, University of Calgary, Emeritus Hans Smits is emeritus from the University of Calgary, where he served as associate dean of teacher education. His areas of teaching included social studies education, curriculum theory, and hermeneutic research. Since retiring he has continued teaching courses in curriculum theorizing, leadership and school improvement, and philosophy of teaching. Lisa J. Starr, McGill University Dr. Lisa J. Starr is an Assistant Professor at McGill University in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE). She completed her doctoral degree in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria. Dr. Starr’s career led her from Canada to Pakistan, Kuwait, Mongolia, and back to Canada. Her travels created a passion for the study of the relationship between identity and culture, the preparation of teachers in a complex world, and the intersections of leadership and gender equity. Dr. Starr advocates for the use of autoethnography as means to investigate, understand, and make meaning of the intersections inherent in understanding ourselves as teachers, leaders, and human be(come)ings. Teresa Strong-Wilson, McGill University Teresa Strong-Wilson, Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in the Faculty of Education at McGill University and editor-in-chief of the McGill Journal of Education, has been researching in the area of curriculum studies for close to fifteen years. Her interests encompass curriculum theory, literacy/ies, narrative, children’s literature, early childhood, teacher education, Indigenous education, and social justice education. She has been published in such journals as Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Educational Theory, Changing English, and Teachers and Teaching. Her books include Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers (Strong-Wilson, 2008) and Productive Remembering and Social Agency (Strong-Wilson, Mitchell, Pithouse-Morgan & Allnutt, eds., 2013). She served as Co-President of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (2015–2017), leading the 2017 Provoking Curriculum Conference. Amarou Yoder, McGill University Amarou Yoder is a doctoral candidate at McGill University. Her dissertation research focuses on narrative and non/violence in teaching

Contributors

229

secondary language arts. She has published in Changing English, and with Dr. Strong-Wilson and others in several edited collections, including Provoking Curriculum: Strong Poetry and the Arts of the Possible in Education (2015). She served on the organizing committee for the 2017 Provoking Curriculum Conference in Montreal. She is a secondary language arts teacher in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District, where she also coaches the speech and debate team.

Index

Abbasid Caliphate 127 Abdul-Jabbar, Wisam 4, 116–118, 120, 122, 126, 128, 221 aboriginal 91, 99, 101, 175, 221; see also indigenous; native Abram, David 77 Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, The 173 accommodation 191 Active Intellect (al-Aql al-fa’al) 117, 120, 125, 126, 127 Adamson, Peter 127 Adeyanju, Charles 199 affect x, 3, 58, 105–106, 137, 153, 160, 164, 166, 175, 180, 182, 187, 194–195, 216, 223, 227–228; affected 4, 21; affection 67; affective 25, 30, 33, 37, 59, 131, 134, 161, 165, 172, 194, 196 agency 32, 125–126, 128, 147–148, 172, 228 Aitken, Avril xiii, 5, 8, 14, 218–219 al-Baghdadi, Abu Ishaq Ibrahim 117 Al-Farabi 116–128; see also Farabism Alexandrian 117, 122 Alexie, Sherman 173 all my/our relations 32, 91–92; see also relations allegory 16–18, 122 Allen, James 139–141 alterity 1, 5, 18 alternative(s) 42, 118, 140, 149, 158, 222 ambiguity 3, 4, 25, 53, 103, 107, 131, 179, 181; see also vulnerability Americanized 120 An Outrage (documentary) 141 analysis (currere) 4, 120, 125–126 anarchive xii, 2, 5, 8, 9, 17–18, 116 Anglo-Saxon 13–14

Animate Science: Science, Intuition and Gaia 188 Anthropocene 148, 222 anthropocentrism 147, 149–150, 153 anti-lynching 133, 138–140, 142; see also lynching anxiety 4, 74, 106, 109, 112–113 Aoki, Ted x, xi, 3, 22, 30, 42, 47, 50–53, 77, 98, 164–165, 206–215, 217–219 Apel, Dora 140 Arab-Islamic 117, 127; see also Islamic Arabic 119, 122–124, 126 Archibald, Jo-Ann 33 archive i, x, xi, 5, 8–11, 15, 18, 128, 164, 207, 212 “archive of feelings” (Cvetkovich) 5, 207, 212 Arendt, Hannah 15 Aristotle 122, 124, 125, 127 Aristotelian 117, 118, 121 Argentine Tango 214 Arnold, Margreet 119 artefacts/artifacts 53, 61, 98, 132, 154, 195, 224 art(s) xii, 14, 44, 74, 92, 120, 125, 160, 163, 168, 173, 190, 213, 218, 219, 223–226, 229; artful inquiry 5; artist 48, 99, 140, 142, 222, 224; artistic 73, 95, 160, 163, 165, 168 Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching 138 Atlanta Constitution, The 140 Attali, Jacques 80 Au, Wayne 2 Aunt Jemima 141 autobiographical 11, 16, 78, 79, 117, 144, 151, 172, 193, 194, 199, 201, 203, 214, 226, 227

Index autobiography 122, 194, 218, 222; see also social autobiography autoethnographic snapshots 74, 104, 107, 109 autoethnography 107, 109, 228 Ayers, Hannah 139, 141 Bachelard, Gaston 8 Baghdad, Iraq 117, 122, 221 Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi 195 Banff, Alberta 211, 214, 215, 217 Barone, Tom 214 Barthes, Roland 137 Baszile, Denise Taliaferro 194 Battiste, Marie 91–92 Bazin, Andre 137–138, 142 becoming 50, 57, 60, 67, 69, 74, 98–100, 148, 152, 186, 206, 207, 209, 212, 226 Beets, Peter 110–111 Beier, Jessie 4, 131–132, 147, 152, 222 belonging 93, 112, 126, 142, 143, 186, 221, 224 Benedictional of St. Aethelwold, The 13 Benjamin, Walter 138, 142 Bennett, Jane 39 Beowulf 14 Bergamo 212 bildung 124; see also currere; fadhl Bilodeau, Christopher 92 biographic/biographical 120–123, 126, 128; see also autobiographical biography 121; see also autobiography black 139, 141, 153, 172, 199, 202–203; bodies 138, 140; Christian Feminist 202; feminism 202; girl(s) 5, 193, 196–199, 203; South Africans 74; women teachers 193, 196 Blaike, Charlie 190 Blenkinsop, Sean 31 Block, Alan 2, 10, 73, 77 Blomkamp, Neill 190 body 1, 3, 4, 13, 22, 29–31, 44, 64, 67, 80, 82, 96–98, 108, 109, 131, 139, 141, 165–166, 189, 195, 199, 201–202, 203; body alive/alive body 1, 4; knowledge 196; -mind 189; -subject 4, 16, 131; feeling body 195; narrative body 161; see also mind/body Boler, Megan 175–176, 178–180 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich 77 Bogue, Ronald 149 Britzman, Deborah 215–216

231

Brooklyn, New York 11–12 Brown, Timothy A. 106 Bountiful City, The 123; see also Virtuous City, The Brushwood Rose, Chloe 217 Bullough, Robert 107 Burke, Anne 176 Butt, Richard 209 CACS xiii, 207–209, 211, 213, 215, 217; see also Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies CACS Celebration of Creative Scholarly Works 213 Cain (Bible) 14 Cajete, Gregory 91–92 Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies xiii, 208, 224; see also CACS Canadian Curriculum Studies: Inspiration/Imagination/ Interconnection 218 Canadian Society for the Study of Education 215; see also CSSE Canterbury Tales, The 13 Capra, Bernt Amadeus 189 Caputo, John 188 Cardinal, Bob 22, 29–31, 33, 39 Carson, Terry x, xi, 214–215 Casey, Edward 28 Castellano, Marlene Brant 97 Catholicism 12 Celts, Ancient 87 Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction (UBC) 218 ceremonial 44, 93–95 Chambers, Cynthia 15, 97, 175–176, 184 Chang-Kredl, Sandra 1, 5, 8, 131, 171, 219, 222 Character of Curriculum Studies, The (Pinar) 122 charge(s) x, xi, 3–5, 18, 171–172, 194, 196, 209–212, 218–219 Chaucer, Geoffrey 8, 9, 16, 210 Cherokee (people) 83 Chickasaw (people) 85 child 12, 13, 93–96, 109, 111, 133, 135–137, 162, 166–168, 201, 209, 222 childhood 106, 111, 131, 134, 136, 222, 228 children 4, 13, 31, 90, 94–96, 111, 126, 132, 135, 141–142, 160–161,

232

Index

164, 167–168, 176, 222, 228; and youth 31; grandchildren 90 Christian 12, 117, 122, 188, 196, 198, 202; Fundamentalism 12; christianity 92 Circle of Life, The 94 clan families/family 94; see also families/family Clough, Patricia Ticineto 3 Cochran-Smith, Marilyn 2, 3, 60 Cohen, Adrianna 189 collective 5, 16, 22, 67–68, 80, 113, 122, 162–163, 165, 174, 207; biographic situation 126; charge 171; collectives 173; familial identity 135; maniac fantasy 138; mass murder 140; narratives 164; scholarship 212, 217 Colmo, Christopher A. 127 colonialism 31, 90, 97, 173–175, 221; see also settler colonialism colonization 51, 73, 83, 173, 177, 181; neo-colonization 178; see also decolonization communities 17, 164, 167, 174, 176, 187, 228; community xii, 29, 31, 58, 84, 93, 95, 123–124, 127, 138, 160, 162, 166–167, 187, 198–199, 202, 211–212, 216–218, 226–227 conference xi–iii, 5, 206–219, 224, 228–229 connection 30–32, 34, 52, 57, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 74, 81–82, 84–86, 92, 94–95, 131, 134, 154, 183, 187, 189, 195; interconnection 4, 74, 99, 105, 118, 218, 223 Conway, Abbott 13–14 Cook, Courtney 136 Cook-Sather, Alison 105 Corntassel, Jeff 173 Crisis, The 138 Critical Black Memory 142; see also memory critical race/feminist currere 194; see also currere Cronon, William 27 CSSE xii, 209, 213, 215, 217–218; see also Canadian Society for the Study of Education cultural knowledge 90, 92–93 cultural values 92, 116 currere 1, 2, 4, 8–11, 15–17, 44, 73–74, 77–78, 91, 99, 104–105, 118, 120, 122, 126–127, 134,

144, 147, 151–152, 154, 156, 158, 186, 193–199, 203, 211, 214, 218; anarchive 2; archive 9–11; tales 9, 11, 15–17; see also analysis (currere); critical race/feminist currere; progression (currere); regression (currere); rhizocurrere; sensational currere; synthesis (currere) curricular 4, 18, 21, 42, 44–45, 53, 73, 132, 139–140, 150, 164, 174–176, 179, 184, 195–196, 226; charges 4, 194; conversation(s) 28, 103; effects 22; encounter 43–44; experience 43; intensity/ ies 131, 138; lifeworld 104; lived experience(s) 45; material(s) 120, 177, 183, 194, 196–199; practice 165; reconstruction 9; self 104; space(s) 42, 45–50, 53; subjects 15; tales 193; text(s) 175, 177, 195–198, 201; theory 39; third space 53; transcendence; worlds 165 curricularists 193–194, 196, 203 curriculum x, xiii, 1–5, 9–11, 21, 22, 26, 30, 37, 39, 42–47, 50, 52–53, 58–61, 68, 74, 78, 97–99, 103–104, 109, 112–113, 116, 118–121, 123, 127–128, 131–132, 134–136, 139, 141–144, 148–153, 157–158, 160 – 162, 164–168, 171–172, 174–177, 179, 184, 193–199, 201, 203, 206–219, 222–229; bountiful 74, 116, 120, 123–125, 128; conference xi–ii, 206–207, 212–219, 229; design/ers 42, 166; encounter(s) xii, 1, 3–4, 9, 22, 73–74, 91, 103–105, 132, 143, 150, 153, 157, 158–159, 164, 171, 186, 193, 206, 219; lived 30, 53, 77, 98, 164–166; ELA (English Language Arts) 175; English 178, 184; ethical 134, 142; liberatory 172; poor 2, 8–10, 25–26, 30–31, 127, 147, 151, 153, 158; private 134; public 133, 144; space(s) 4, 21–22, 47; text(s) 5; theorist 44, 97, 99, 164–165, 168, 176, 193; SOP (Sisters of Promise) 196–197, 199, 201; theorizing/theory xiii, 3, 5, 21, 91, 99, 116, 118, 149, 217, 221–223, 225, 228; see also reconceptualist(s); reconceptualization Curriculum Canada 207–209, 213 Cvetkovich, Ann 207, 212

Index Daignault, Jacques 209, 214 dancing 53, 73, 90, 94–97, 100, 211, 214 Danielewicz, Jane 107 Davis, Brent 113 Davis-Manigaulte, Jacqueline 111 De anima (Aristotle) 125 de Certeau, Michel 25 decolonization 91, 75, 222; see also colonization; neo-colonization Decontie, Peter 217 Deer, Sandra 4, 73, 90, 211, 222–223 Deleuze, Gilles 44, 53, 60, 62, 66, 67, 104, 148–150, 155, 158, 161, 164, 189, 194 Deloria, Vine 91 Deng, Zongyi 2 Derby, Michael 31 Derrida, Jacques 188, 226 Descartes, René 188 Dhamoon, Rita Kaur 173 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-III 106; DSM-IV 10 Diary of Anne Frank, The 15 diasporic 126, 221 disruption 31, 105, 113, 175; see also provoking dissonance 80, 175–176, 179, 180 distantiation 10–11 diversity 73, 147, 216, 221; Institute 215 Dobson, Margaret xiii, 219 Doll, Bill see Doll, William Doll, William 2, 43–44, 211–212, 214, 216–219 Donald, Dwayne 27, 32, 39, 211 Donne, John 189 ecological catastrophe 187; see also environmental catastrophe ecological 26–27, 39, 92, 187, 225; crisis 26, 152, 172; ethic 31; responsibilities 172 ecology 26, 28–29, 31, 91 educational experience(s) see experience Educational Theory 219 Egéa-Khuene, Denise 216 Egypt 117 Ehret, Christian xii, 1, 5, 21, 219, 223 Eichmann, Adolf 15 Eichmann in Jerusalem 15 Elbaz, Freema 214 embodied 3, 28, 30, 38, 42, 47, 50, 59, 67, 79, 87, 88, 103, 174, 189, 193–194, 196, 203

233

embodiment xiii, 4, 5, 106, 219, 227 emotional 9, 16, 29, 33, 78, 103, 107, 111, 131, 135, 167, 174, 176, 178–179, 181, 184, 225; discomfort 179; engagement 178; harm 195; resonance 107 emotion(s) 10, 25, 35, 93, 96–97, 171, 174, 178, 183, 198 empathy 109 encountering 2, 3, 9, 18, 37, 39, 42–43, 53, 78, 103–105, 107, 109, 111–113, 134, 196, 198 encounter(s) 22, 25, 29–31, 37–38, 43–45, 47, 50–53, 58–61, 64–69, 73–74, 77–78, 86, 88, 93, 100–101, 103–104, 106, 112–113, 118–120, 122–123, 126–128, 131, 133–137, 139, 142–143, 147, 150–151, 153–154, 155–158, 162, 166, 171–172, 174–175, 178–180, 182, 184, 186, 189, 191, 196–198, 203, 206–207, 209, 211–212, 218–219, 223, 226; curricular/curriculum 9, 22, 69, 73, 91, 103–104, 131–132, 150, 157–159, 171, 186, 193; embodied 194; intercultural 74; re-encounters 10, 103, 116, 118; spiritual 47, 73, 90–91, 93, 95, 97–101; see also curricular encounter; experience(s); lived encounter; lived experience(s) England 2, 48 English 13–15, 43, 173, 176–178, 184, 221, 223–224, 227–228; teacher 133, 142, 222 “Enspacements” (Ledarach and Ledarach) 87–88 environment 4, 29, 43–44, 78, 86, 91–92, 94, 99, 148, 156, 160–161, 165, 168, 186–187, 216, 225, 227 environmental catastrophe 187; see also ecological catastrophe Eppert, Claudia 216, 218 Ermine, Willie 99 ethical 1, 18, 29, 67, 117, 134, 138–139, 141, 143, 156; charges 4; curriculum-in-the-making 134, 137, 139–140, 142; generosity 39; relationality 22, 25–26, 28–29, 33, 39 ethics 27, 67–68, 77, 125, 135 European continental philosophy 215 experience/experienced/experiences xi, 1–4, 10, 12, 16–17, 21, 25–27, 29–30, 32, 33–35, 37–39, 42, 44,

234

Index

46–47, 50, 53, 58–59, 63–65, 74, 77–79, 87–88, 91, 93, 95, 98–101, 103–104, 106–107, 109, 111–113, 116–118, 122–124, 131–132, 136–137, 143–144, 151, 153–155, 161–163, 165, 168, 172–177, 179–184, 186, 189, 193–198, 202–203, 209–210, 216–217, 219, 221, 223–225; collective 67; educational xi, 1, 3, 78, 151, 154, 193, 216; embodied 77–78; felt 82; sensorial 195; see also curricular experience; encounter(s); lived experience(s); personal experience; public experience; relational experience extracurricular 5, 172, 195–196 Ezcurra, Maria xiii, 219 fadhilah 123–124 fadhl 120, 123–125, 128; see also bildung Fakhry, Majid 117–118, 126–127 falsafa (Arabic) 119, 122; see also philosophy families/family 8, 12, 13, 15–16, 31, 33–34, 57, 94, 135, 173, 180–181, 187, 198–199, 216, 226; see also clan families Fanon, Franz 13 Farabism 116, 118–119, 120–122, 125–128 Farley, Lisa 17 Fawcett, Leesa 216 felicity 124, 128; see also happiness Fels, Lynn 78–79, 225 Finger, Bobby 37, 141 Fisher, Mark 132, 148, 152–153 folding 132, 155–157; see also unfolding Four Directions 28, 33 Freire, Paulo 78 GAD see generalized anxiety disorder Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1, 30, 73 Gaskell, Jim 213 genealogy x, 212 generalized anxiety Disorder 4, 74, 106–107, 111 Germann, Nadja 125, 127 Gewinner, Kathleen 141 Ghabra, Shafeeq 119 ghosts 8, 10–11, 13, 15–18, 178, 199 girl(s) 5, 15, 52, 95, 137, 193, 195–199, 201–203, 227; girlhood

18; see also black girls; black schoolgirls; schoolgirls Goelman, Hillel 218 Gonzales-Day, Ken 139–140 Gough, Annette 194, 214 Gough, Noel 194, 214 Graham, Robert 218 Graham, Roy see Graham, Robert grandmother(s) 4, 100, 131, 133, 139, 142, 190 Graveline, Frye Jean 33 Gray, Hugh 137–138, 142 Greene, Maxine 1, 2, 28–29, 32, 44, 73, 77–78, 103–104, 106, 109, 112 Gregg, Melissa 3 grid maps 25, 28, 30, 37 Grumet, Madeleine xi, xiii, 1–3, 5, 8, 10–11, 16, 21, 25, 28, 31, 39, 74, 77–79, 88, 98, 103, 116, 118, 120, 122–123, 127–128, 131, 134, 137, 143–144, 147–151, 153–154, 157–158, 161, 165, 186, 193, 195, 197–198, 214–215, 217 Guattari, Félix 22, 62, 149–150, 158, 161 Gyekye, Kwame 125 Haig-Brown, Celia 216 Hale, Grace Elizabeth 142 Hampl, Patricia 15 Hampton, Eber 101 Hanohano, Peter 94 happiness 118, 123–124, 126–127; unhappiness 64, 66; see also felicity Harding, Stephan 188 Harmon, Katharine 30 harmony 99, 101; harmonize 118, 127 Harrison, Robyn 77 Hasebe-Ludt, Erika 206–207, 214, 217–218, 223, 225 Hate U Give, The 177 Haudenosaunee 90, 93–96, 222 haunting(s) 9–12, 15, 17–18, 226 Haylan, Yuhanna ibn 117 Hayman, Richard 11 heart 22, 30, 39, 97, 101, 106, 108, 112, 187, 190–191 “Heaven Came Down and Glory Filled Our Souls” (song) 12 Heidegger, Martin 27, 30, 37, 52, 190 Hellenism 117; Hellenistic tradition 117, 119, 126 Hendry, Petra Munro 216 heuristic(s) 172, 186, 188–189; fiction 147, 151

Index Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks 196 history x–xi, 12–13, 18, 26, 28, 30, 43, 97, 104, 117, 119, 122, 126–127, 134–136, 139, 141–142, 164, 193, 195, 199, 207–208, 211, 216, 226–227 Hogan, Linda 85–86 home things 135–137, 139, 141–144 Huebner, Dwayne 43, 214 Hughes, Andrew 208 human(s) 3–4, 10, 26, 30–31, 37, 44, 53, 73, 77, 79–80, 84–87, 91, 93, 95, 98–100, 109, 125, 132, 137, 140, 147–148, 150, 152, 155, 157–158, 186–190, 209; see also inhuman; more-than-human; nonhuman; posthuman humanization 78, 151–152 Huntington, Samuel P. 127 Hurren, Wanda 218, 223 Husserl, Edmund 77 identity/ies 91–92, 107, 111, 113, 127, 135, 152, 173, 180, 189, 221 ijtihad 119–120, 127–128 Illinois, the (people) 92–93 Indigeneity 172 indigenous/ness 4–5, 22, 26, 28, 32, 74, 87–88, 90–93, 95, 97–99, 101, 119, 171–178, 180, 183–185, 211, 216, 222, 225, 228; see also aboriginal; native Ingold, Tim 22, 26–27 inhuman 132, 148, 154–156, 158; see also human(s); non-human; more-than-human; post-human injustice(s) 23, 82, 131, 176, 183, 202 inner 26, 33, 74, 93, 95, 98–100, 134, 154–155, 186, 189 intellect 117, 120, 125–129; intellectual 5, 9, 87, 117–119, 121–122, 125, 128, 157, 193, 206, 212, 218, 227 intensity/ies x, xii, 3 – 5, 44 , 68 , 131 – 132, 134, 136–139, 143, 157–158, 195–196, 209–212, 218–219; see also curricular intensity/ies inter-aliveness 82 interconnection see connection intercultural 74, 116–120, 127–128, 221; see also harmonize interdisciplinary 3, 127, 160, 226–227 interrelations/interrelationship 21, 94, 98, 127; see also relations

235

interiority 99 Inuit 155, 174, 221 Irwin, Rita 5, 30, 206–207, 209, 213, 218, 224 Islamic 4, 73–74, 117–123, 125, 127 ittisal 73–74, 116–118, 120, 125–128 Jardine, David 214, 218 JCACS (Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies) xiii, 217, 219 Jim Crow Segregation Laws 140 Johnston, Ingrid 5, 176, 206–207, 209–210, 215–218, 224 Jung, Carl 99 Kanien’keha (Mohawk language) 95; see also Mohawk Kanien’kehá:ka (people) 73, 90–91, 93–96, 100, 222; see also Mohawk Kanu, Yatta 97 Kapuskasing, Ontario 216 Kelly, Vicki 88 Kinberg, Simon 190 Kingston, Maxine Hong 13 Kitigan Zibi First Nations 217 Kracauer, Siegfried 18 Koskela, Jani 77 Krasny, Karen 217 Krohn, Cynthia 141 Lakehead University 213 Land, Ray 105, 107, 112 land(s) 25, 29, 57, 77, 80–82, 85, 90–92, 96, 173, 225; landfills 124; landscape 31, 35, 79, 83, 90, 97, 105, 117–118, 140, 175–176, 178–179, 184 Lantzmann, Claude 15 Lather, Patti 60, 110, 157 Latour, Bruno 3 Lederach, Angela 86 Ledarach, John Paul 86 Leggo, Carl 5, 206–207, 210–211, 213–215, 217–218, 223, 225 Leguizamo, John 188 Le Grange, Lesley 111 Leithwood, Kenneth 208 Lesko, Nancy 3 Lewis, John 54, 142 Lewkowich, David 1, 4, 21, 131, 171, 219, 225 LGBTQ+ 187 lens/lenses 42, 134, 138, 148, 160, 182, 186, 188, 191

236

Index

liberal arts 13, 119–120, 125, 162 lifeworld(s) 3, 103, 104, 112, 137 liminal spaces 15, 52, 87, 105 linear logics 27–28, 37; see also straight-line logics literature 133–134, 142, 171, 173–180, 184, 221–222, 225, 228; see also postcolonial literature Little Bear, Leroy 91–92 lived 3, 73, 90, 92, 99, 109, 122–123, 134, 164–165, 217; curricular encounter 43; curriculum 30, 77, 98, 164–166, 208; encounter(s) 44, 53; experience(s) 1, 10, 25, 42, 44–45, 47, 50, 53, 74, 77–78, 87, 100, 104, 122–123, 162, 165, 175–176, 181, 193, 196, 209, 225; relations 216; theories 2 living 3, 5, 26, 28–29, 47, 61, 80–83, 91, 95, 98, 100, 103, 108, 113, 127, 133, 148, 150, 180, 187, 189, 195; agents 59; beings 78, 98, 100; encounters xii; environment 79; inquiry 218; space 44, 50; theories 2; urban 25 Lodge, David 5 Loewen, James 139, 141 Louisiana State University 216; see also LSU love 5, 39, 82, 97, 101, 113, 164, 168, 171–172, 186–191, 197, 199, 212; beloved 16 LSU see Louisiana State University Luhrmann, Baz 187–188 Luft, David S. 124 Lund, Darren 211, 218 lynching 134, 138–143; photographs 4, 131, 134, 137, 138–144; see also anti-lynching map(s) 26–27, 35, 59, 104–105; affective 134; grid 22, 25, 28, 30, 37; story 22, 25–26, 30, 67; visual 25–26, 30; mapping intensities 195; remap 59 McGill University xii–iii, 207, 209, 211, 218–219, 223, 228 McClintock, Robert 10 McCutcheon, Gail 213–214 McLarnon, Mitchell 211, 219 medieval 4, 9, 74, 116–117, 119 memories 4, 9–10, 25, 107, 134, 167, 193, 197–198, 201, 212

memory 18, 67, 73, 84, 110, 131, 134, 136, 140, 142, 166, 211, 222, 225, 228; childhood 131; embodied 84; see also Critical Black Memory Memphis Free Press, The 139 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice x, 1 Métis 33, 173–174, 180, 183, 209 métissage 214 Meyer, Jan 105, 107, 112 Meyer, Karen 218 Milk (film) 187 Milk, Harvey 187 Miller, Daniel 135 mind 3, 25, 31, 44, 64, 99–101, 119, 147, 186–187, 191; ego mind 95 mind/body 28; see also body; mind Mississippi: Conflict and Change 141 Mitchell, Claudia xiii, 219, 228 Mohawk 74, 90, 95, 222, 223; see also Kanien’keha; Kanien’kehá:ka Montreal, Quebec xii, 213, 219, 229 more-than-human 27, 29, 31, 39, 132; being(s) 26, 37; co-existence 27; less-than-human 74; world 77–78, 88, 148, 158; see also human; inhuman; non-human; posthuman Morris, Marla 92, 97, 99 Mosse, George 124–125 mourning 5, 172, 186, 187–188, 190–191 Mrs Brown (Pinar/Woolf) 2, 4, 74, 104, 120–121, 131, 153–158, 209 multiplicities/multiplicity 46, 77, 104, 148, 155, 203 musammaha 120, 123, 125–126, 128 Museum of the New South, The 140 Muslim 116, 119, 122 Musqueam (people) 77 Mu’tazilism 117 Myers, Fred 28 NAACP 133, 139–141; see also National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nanji, Shamas Malik 122 narrative(s) 10–11, 16–17, 26, 33, 43, 66, 68–69, 79, 118, 122, 154, 164, 167, 174, 178, 182, 214, 224, 227–228; autobiographical 226; body 161; collective 164; counter139; cultural 27; dominant 173, 179; encounters 25; self 161; social justice 177; xenophobic 116

Index National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 133; see also NAACP native 90–92, 173; see also aboriginal; indigenous natural 35, 112, 153; unnatural 13; world 28, 77, 86, 88, 91, 93, 113, 189 nature 27, 31, 35, 85–87, 93, 148, 186, 189; human 27–28, 120, 154 Nellis, Robert 5, 171–172, 186, 218, 226 Netton, Ian Richard 116–117 New York Historical Society 140 New York Times, The 140 Newbery, Liz 27 Ng-A-Fook, Nicholas xiii, 5, 206, 207, 211, 216–219, 226 Noddings, Nel 113 non-human 3, 132, 148, 156; see also human; inhuman; more-than-human; posthuman non-Western 85; see also Western Nyachae, Tiffany 5, 171–172, 193, 195–196, 226 Oberg, Antoinette 5, 206–208, 210–211, 213–214, 217–218, 226 Ohito, Esther 5, 171–172, 193, 196, 227 Ojibwe, the (people) 92 Olson, John 208–209 Omolade, Barbara 197 ontology 32, 137, 148, 152; Cartesian 28; spatial 26 Ontology of the Photographic Image, The 137 Organon (Aristotle) 122 Oriola, Temitope 199 Outrage, An 141 other(s) xii, 3, 5, 11, 16–18, 29, 31, 33–35, 37, 51, 53, 57, 73, 78–79, 99, 109, 111, 113, 118, 131, 153, 171, 174, 178–179, 184, 187, 196–197, 207, 216–217; beings 86, 93; self and 103, 105, 107 others’ lifeworlds 137 otherworldly 4, 74, 136 outer 189; boundaries 26; -centredness 121; space 99; world(s) 74, 95, 100 Ozark Mountains, Arkansas 80 Panayotidis, Lisa 211, 217 Parnet, Claire 104

237

participation 44, 73, 80, 82, 138, 175, 221 pedagogical encounters 131, 154 pedagogy 42, 116, 125, 171, 179, 190, 194–195, 213–214, 217, 226; see also sensational pedagogy; social justice pedagogy; vulnerable pedagogy “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler) 172, 179, 181–182 performative inquiry 77–79 personal x, 17, 28, 65, 82, 87, 90, 92, 95, 103–105, 107, 122, 126, 134, 136, 139, 143–144, 154, 172, 178–180, 182–183, 197, 199; encounter 172; encountering 107, 109; experience(s) 59; histories 171; prepersonal x; see also encounter(s); encountering; experience(s) Peterat, Linda 218 Phelan, Anne 211 Phillips, Adam 4, 131 philosophy 91–92, 117, 119, 121–122, 127, 150, 215, 228; see also falsafa photograph(s) 4, 10, 100, 131, 133–144; photographer(s) 142; photography 137–138, 140, 160, 162 Piaget, Jean 191 Piersol, Laura 31 pilgrimage(s) 5, 8–9, 17, 195; currere 9 pilgrims 5, 8–11, 13, 16–18 Pinar, Bill see Pinar, William Pinar, William xi–iii, 1–2, 5, 8–11, 16–18, 25, 28, 31, 39, 42–44, 46, 50, 52–53, 73–74, 77–79, 87–88, 98–100, 103–104, 107, 116, 118–128, 131, 134, 142–144, 147–154, 157–158, 161, 165, 171, 186, 193–195, 198, 203, 206–207, 209, 212, 214–218 Pinnegar, Stefinee 107 place(s) x, 8–11, 14, 17, 21–22, 25–26, 28–31, 34–35, 37, 38, 46, 50, 52, 57, 59, 74, 77–80, 82, 86–88, 93, 96–97, 107, 111–112, 134–136, 140, 143, 171, 173, 187, 191, 207, 209, 216–217, 223–226; out of 153, 176; space and 21; third 53; time and 154–155; urban 39; see also space(s) Plato 117, 120, 124, 127 Plato’s Republic 120

238

Index

Platonic 118; Neoplatonic 120 play 31, 51, 69, 79–81, 88, 110, 134, 180, 183, 188, 195, 203, 213, 222; interplay 60, 162, 165; parallel 16; playfulness 211; playground 31–32; playing 26, 31, 59, 62, 64, 66, 74, 81, 87, 141, 206, 211; (re)play 79 plurality/pluralities x, xii, 3–5, 8, 18, 73–74, 77–78, 88, 103–104, 116, 126–127, 209–210, 212, 218–219 Pomson, Alex 216 poor curriculum 25–26, 30–31, 39, 147, 149–151, 153, 158; see also Toward a Poor Curriculum postcolonial 175–176, 178–184, 216, 223; literature 5, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178–180, 184, 222 Posterior Analytics (Aristotle) 122 posthuman 160, 190; posthumanist 160; see also human; inhuman; more-than-human; non-human power 33, 42, 45–47, 49, 57, 67–68, 83, 87, 93–94, 112, 117, 131, 139, 148, 175–176, 178–180, 182–183, 194; cultural 21; empower/ing 66, 182, 184, 202; empowerment 171–172, 195–196; relations 173; powerful 83, 85, 88, 101, 120, 137, 148, 151, 153, 178; powerless/ness 98, 152, 178 presence xiii, 8, 78, 84, 106, 108, 135, 187, 206, 209, 225; divine 48; earthly 97; physical 9 private 18, 80, 179, 206; and public 131, 133; curriculum 133–134, 144; private-public 134, 142 professional 69, 105, 138, 202, 226 progression (currere) 4; progressive 8, 120, 123–127, 151 provocateur 97; see also transformer provocation(s) 22, 73, 137–138, 143, 164, 196, 217 provoked x, xii, 2, 4–5, 14, 21–22, 29, 39, 73, 91, 100, 137, 143, 161–163, 165–166, 172, 207, 212 provoking xiii, 3–5, 22, 90, 131, 139, 206–213, 217–218; curriculum encounter(s) 1–3, 5; encounter(s) 5, 30, 73; intercultural encounter(s) 116; spirit 212; spiritual encounters 90–1, 93; see also disruption Provoking Curriculum conference(s) xi–ii, 5, 206–207, 209–210, 212–218, 224, 228

Provoking Curriculum Studies as Strong Poets 217 Provoking Curriculum Studies conference 210, 215–218, 226 Pryer, Alison 87 psychoanalysis 16 public 18, 117, 131–132, 134, 139–141, 143–144, 151, 181, 195, 206; curriculum 133–136, 143–144; experience 137; private-public 142; scholarship 140; schooling 216; space(s) 139, 142, 144; theory 107; publicly 9, 17, 103 Quran, The 123–125 Radford, Linda 5, 8, 227 Raiford, Leigh 142 reciprocity 73, 78, 93 reconceptualist(s) 143, 208, 217 reconceptualization 9, 88, 206, 208 reconciliation 74, 86, 118–119, 127, 183, 217, 221, 223, 225; sonic reconciliation 73 re-encounters 103; see also encounter(s) reflexive encounter/ing 104, 107, 109 reflexivity 106, 152, 154 regression (currere) 4; regressive 8, 120–123, 126, 151, 197 Reid, Bill see Reid, William Reid, William 213–214 relations 22, 26–28, 30, 32, 62, 91–93, 104–105, 148, 155, 173, 184, 194, 216; spatial 26; see also all my/our relations; interrelations relational 3, 37, 103; encounter/ing 104, 107, 111; experience 112 relationality 22, 25–26, 28–30, 33, 39, 53, 99 relationship(s) 12, 26–27, 31–33, 37, 39, 42, 53, 59, 65, 78–79, 81–82, 85–88, 91–94, 98–100, 104, 160–161, 166–168, 177–180, 182, 187–188, 190, 193–194, 197–199, 224, 228; see also interrelations; relations repetition 73, 84, 86–87, 124 Republican National Committee 141 Rescher, Nicholas 117 research 9, 12, 44, 61, 78–79, 97, 118, 151, 160, 162, 166, 174–175, 177–178, 194, 196, 206, 213–216, 218, 221–228; collaborative 211;

Index curriculum 149; research-based education system 120; researcher 3, 22, 60, 107, 109, 111, 132, 161–162, 164–167 respectability discourse 172, 196–198 resistance 2, 74, 88, 147, 172–174, 178, 183–184 resonance(s) 3, 11, 16, 57, 66, 69, 79–81, 87–88, 103, 107, 120, 124, 164, 166, 171–173, 176, 179, 181, 184, 206 Reynolds, William M. 42, 45, 104, 193, 212 rhizocurrere (Stewart) 194 rhizomatic(s) 62, 65, 74, 110–111, 194 Richards, Mary Caroline 95, 99 Richardson, Lena Rebecca 4, 73, 77, 227 Ricoeur, Paul 16 ritual(s) 45, 47, 73, 77, 84, 86–87; ritualistic violence 139; ritualized racial terror 142; ritualized violence 138 Robertson, Judith 5, 8 Rockstrom, Johan 190 Romeo + Juliet (film) 187, 191 Rotas, Nikki 4, 132, 160–161, 227–228 Rottman, Jennifer 206 Russell, Connie 216 sacred 26, 39, 42, 47–48, 50, 53, 80, 87 Sallis, Charles 139, 141 Salvio, Paula 8–10 San Francisco Board of Supervisors 187 Saskatchewan Ministry of Education 174, 177 Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program 173; see also SUNTEP Schafer, R. Murray 78, 85 scholarship x, xiii, 11, 16, 79, 105, 164, 190, 218; collective 212, 217; crisis of 119; curriculum 213–215; public 140; see also research Schön, Donald 214 schoolgirls 193, 195–196; see also black schoolgirls; girl(s) Schubert, Bill see Schubert, William Schubert, William 214 Schwab, Joseph 208 science fiction 4, 149–150, 158; fictioning 147, 149–150, 157–158

239

Sebald, W. G. 15–16, 207, 218–219 self 10, 29, 50, 91, 99, 105, 107, 113, 123, 127, 134, 143, 151–156, 158, 186–187, 190, 193–194, 211, 214, 216; academic 109; -acceptance 16; adolescent 107; -affirming 172; and other 103, 105, 107; and world 67; -awareness 196; -conscious 121; -consciousness 208; curricular 104; -definition 203; -denial 16; disordered 106; -education 124; encounter with the 151, 156; envisioned 126; -examination 151–152; fiction of the 157; -formation 8, 124; inner 98, 100; -interest 66; -knowledge 74; myself 28–29, 31, 33–35, 37, 80–82, 84–87; 91, 103–106, 108–109, 112–113, 125, 136–137, 143, 160, 186, 198–199; narrative 161; oneself 53, 73, 122, 154, 189, 212; -perception 13; -portraits 74; -reflection 100, 151; -reflective 175; -reflexive 227; -reflexivity 154; -understanding 104; -work 151; -worth 12; yourself 112, 154; see also self-study self-study 121–122 sensational currere 193–199, 203 sensational pedagogy 194–195 SenseLab (Concordia University) 5, 8–9 settler 173, 177, 216, 221, 225; classroom(s) 174; colonialism 173; -descent 29, 225; settler/Indigenous 28; space(s) 173, 175, 183; see also colonialism Shakespeare, Steven 190 Shame of America, The 140 Shaviro, Stephen 149, 195 Shoah (film) 15 Shotwell, Alexis 180 Siljander, Pauli 77 singing 73, 77–85, 87–88, 97 Sisters of Promise 172, 195–196, 198, 200; see also SOP Sḵwxwú7mesh (people) 77 Sky Woman (Haudenosaunee creation story) 95 Slattery, Patrick 42, 104, 193 slavery 140 Smith, David 134 Smith, Michelle 196 Smits, Hans 5, 206–207, 210–211, 214–215, 217–218, 228

240

Index

Snaza, Nathan 58, 148, 157, 161, 190 Snelgrove, Corey 173, 175 social 3, 11–12, 17, 21–22, 46–47, 87, 103–104, 107, 117, 119, 121–122, 124–128, 134–137; 142, 144, 156, 186, 196, 198, 202, 212, 216, 218, 223, 227; action 17, 87, 228; autobiography 17; injustice(s) 202; justice 172–176, 182–184, 221–222, 224, 226, 228; justice narrative 177; justice pedagogy 179; reconstruction 87, 104; relations 22, 59; spaces 174 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) 208, 221 Solnit, Rebecca 30 Somerville, Margaret 197 SOP 195–199, 201–202; see also Sisters of Promise sounding 77–78, 80, 82, 85–86 space(s) x, xii, 3–5, 8, 11–12, 15–16, 18, 21–22, 25–26, 28–32, 37–38, 42–44, 47–48, 50–53, 57–60, 64–65, 67, 69, 82, 86, 87, 105–106, 108, 111, 135, 141, 153, 155, 168, 173–174, 178, 180–181, 183, 189–190, 195, 199, 209–212, 214, 218–219, 223, 225–226; and place 28, 37; architectural 42, 44, 49, 53; classroom 134; ceremonial 44; contemplative 136; counter-culture 207; green 77, 81, 84; I-don’t-know 179; ideological 3; in-between 44, 52, 58, 173, 206; Indigenous 173; inner 99; outer 99; pedagogical 31; public 132, 139, 142, 144; relational 59; sacred 42, 48, 50; settler 173, 175, 183; space-time 87; technotheological 42–43, 50, 53; third 53; time and 1, 3, 65, 137, 156; urban 25, 31; wild 27; see also curricular space(s); curriculum space(s); enspacements; liminal spaces; place(s) Spelman, Elizabeth 195 spirit(s) 29, 31, 34, 44, 52, 85, 87, 91–93, 95, 97–101, 119, 121, 137, 194, 203, 210–211; counter-culture 213; guides 95; ‘inspirited’ (Pinar) 50; ‘inspiriting’ (Aoki) 165; medicine 83; of currere 78; relationships 85 spirit/ual self 50, 95 Spirited Away (film) 52

spiritual 9, 29–30, 33, 49–50, 52, 74, 80, 95, 98–99, 111, 201; connection 94; encounter(s) 4, 47, 73, 90–91, 93, 95, 97, 100–101; guide(s) 3, 94; knowing 30; knowledge 100; practice 92; relationship 93; thinker 97 spirituality 91–93, 97, 100, 218, 224 Spivak, Gayatri 176 Springgay, Stephanie 30, 194–195 Starr, Lisa 4, 73–74, 103, 107, 228 Stengers, Isabelle 148, 164 Stewart, Alistair 194 story 2, 12, 14, 16, 22, 25–26, 20, 32, 29, 68, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97, 132, 135, 140, 165, 174–177, 182–184, 186–190, 211–212; storyboarding 64, 67, 69; storytelling 29, 222, 227 straight-line logics 28; see also linear logics Strong-Wilson, Teresa xiii, 1, 5, 8, 73, 107, 206–207, 215, 218–219, 228–229 study 5, 10–11, 17–18, 25, 44, 59, 73, 77, 80, 97, 104, 117–118, 128, 134–135, 151, 153, 193, 197, 206 subaltern 172, 176, 180, 223 Sumara, Dennis 113, 214, 218 SUNTEP 173; see also Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program synthesis (currere) 4, 118, 120, 126–127 Syriac neo-Aristotelian tradition 117 Tacoma Narrows Bridge 83 Tale of Genji, The 52 Tanaka, Michelle 107 taqlid 119–120, 127–128 Taubman, Peter 3, 42, 104, 171, 193 Taavitsainen, Irma 16 teacher(s) x, xiii, 2–3, 10, 14, 17, 21, 29, 37, 44, 53, 58–61, 64–69, 93, 98, 103–105, 107, 110, 122, 133, 141–142, 147, 160–162, 164–167, 171–180, 193, 195–196, 199, 201–202, 209, 212, 217, 221–224, 228–229; teacher-becoming 57, 60, 79; teacher educators 3, 103; see also black women teachers; women teachers teacher education 9, 22, 69, 107, 132, 173, 187, 211, 215, 222–226, 228 teaching x, 8–10, 14, 16, 33, 43, 48, 50, 58, 60, 63, 67, 90, 98, 100, 103, 109, 121, 133, 142, 165, 168, 174–175,

Index 177–181, 183, 211, 213–214, 218, 221–225, 227–228; for social justice; teachings 28–29, 31, 33, 39, 92, 126, 199 Teaching Tolerance Organization 141 text(s) 9–10, 14, 16–18, 46, 62, 74, 107, 109, 113, 135, 139, 141, 147, 150, 172, 174–179, 182, 196–197, 207, 212, 216, 222; curricular 175, 177, 195–198, 201; curriculum 5; photographic 137; postcolonial 173–179, 181–184; textbook(s) 27, 134, 141; textual 26, 30, 138; theological 42; traditioned 178 Thomas, Angie 177 Thomas, Lynn 217 threshold concept 105–107 Tibetan bowl 73, 83, 86–88 To Kill a Mockingbird 177 Tomkins, George 207–208 touchstone moments 74, 103, 107, 111–112 Toward a Poor Curriculum x, xii, 1–2, 5, 8–10, 18, 31, 37, 39, 74 Towers, Jo 221 tragedy 188 transformation(s) 47, 69, 85–86, 100, 109, 148, 191, 226 transformative 78–9, 87, 90, 193, 221, 223 transformer 97; see also provocateur tribal 92 Truman, Sarah 30, 58, 161 Tsleil-waututh (people) 77 Tuana, Nancy 155 Turkistan 117 Turnbull, David 27 Tyler, Ralph 208 UBC 207, 209, 211, 213–214, 217–218; see also University of British Columbia unfolding 61, 79, 87, 131, 136, 149; see also folding United Houma Nation 216 United States 83, 140, 142, 147, 172, 193, 195, 199 University of Alberta x, 28, 207, 209, 215–216, 221–222, 224–226 University of British Columbia 207–208, 213, 217–218, 224–225; see also UBC University of Calgary 188, 207, 211, 214–215, 221, 225, 228 University of Lethbridge 207, 223

241

University of Ottawa 207, 211, 215–217, 219, 226–227 University of Oxford 186, 189 University of Victoria 207, 211, 213–214, 218, 226, 228; see also UVic UVic 214, 218; see also University of Victoria Valdez, Janice 213 Van Manen, Max x–xi, 214–215 Van Sant, Gus 187 Vandenberg, Donald 77 Vancouver, British Columbia 22, 51, 73, 77, 215, 224 Virtuous City, The (Al-Farabi) 120, 123–124; see also Bountiful City, The vocal reciprocity 73, 78 vulnerable 39, 167, 216; pedagogy 217 vulnerability xi, 4, 103, 107, 131, 215; see also ambiguity Wachtel, Eleanor 16 walking 9, 22, 26, 29–31, 37–38, 52, 82–84, 97, 201–202 Wallace-Wells, David 148 Wallin, Jason 152 Wang, Hongyu 53, 217 Ward, Angela 176 Warnke, Georgia 26 Warren, Lance 139, 141 Washington Bee, The 139 water 14, 34, 73, 77, 79–84, 87–88, 93, 96–97, 108, 132 wayfinding 22, 26 Weaver, John 148, 157, 161 Weber, Andreas 39 Weenie, Angelina 91, 93 weird 8, 131, 150, 153–154, 157–159; encounter(s) 150, 158–159; intensities 157 Wells, Ida B. 138–140 Werner, Walt 207, 213, 218 Western 27–28, 45, 48, 51, 85–87, 119–120, 161, 165, 218; see also non-Western Wexler, Philip 99 white(s)/whiteness 26, 133, 136–142 white supremacy 139, 141, 144 Whiteduck, Gilbert 217 Whitehead, Alfred North 5, 195 Wild Places, The 25

242

Index

wild 27, 80, 82–83, 186, 188; see also space(s); wilderness wilderness 26, 85–86; urbanity/ wilderness 28; see also space(s); wild Williams, David 13–14 Willinsky, John 218 Without Sanctuary 140 woman 26, 32, 73, 95–97, 100, 140, 180, 201–203, 222; womanhood 199; womanly 196; see also women women 8, 95–97; black 193, 195–196, 227; teachers 193, 195–196, 227; white 202; see also woman Wood, Amy Louise 138, 142 Woolf, Virginia 2, 74, 120–121, 153–154, 157, 209

Woolman, John 136 working from within 99 Wright, Richard 142–144 writing 8–11, 15, 61, 63–64, 66–67, 69, 77–79, 81, 109, 113, 143, 165–166, 195, 197, 211, 214, 223–7; rewriting 4, 131 Yoder, Amarou 5, 8, 219, 228 Young, Robert 176 young 95, 133, 167, 177–178, 188, 198–199, 201, 212, 225; people 58 Youngblood Henderson, James 91–92 Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud 121 Zaydism 117 Zembylas, Michalinos 60, 180