Co-Curricular-Making’s Lessons

Deweyan Roominess Fostering the Needed Sense-Making Terrain for Constructing Educational Possibilities

Abstract

Drawing on one curricular reform effort underway, this paper documents the found intersections of Dewey’s (1934) notion of “roominess,” with valuing multiple learner/learning differences and paths, bringing many related curricular theorists’ voices to bear. Concepts emerge that become ongoing accompaniments for educators, breathing life into the lived terms of responsive co-curricular-making. These accompanying concepts value time and concrete practice living/learning within vulnerable, trust-building, and connected ways in classrooms. It is through such roomy curricular enactment that educators find language for responsive curricular enactment, mobilizing curricular reform efforts orienting teaching/learning towards individual/collective growth and well-being. Further, these understandings have been significantly enlarged and deepened through kinships with Indigenous ways of knowing and being.