Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

Material and Affective (Re)shapings within Unspeakable/Uninterrupted Territories of Violence

Bretton A Varga — 2023-11-10

How might we refuse historically censored, sustained, and whitewashed frames and forms of quotidian violence that drag our attention towards registers of inevitability and predictability? This conceptual article considers assemblages of violence in the context of historical and ongoing reverberations of antiblack racism in the United States. Specifically, the authors consider various material and affective intersections that produce movements with/around/under/through time, space, and human and more-than human bodies; the liminal texture of conscious knowing and subconscious feeling that is always-already in flux; and the incalculable and perhaps unfulfilled possibilities/futures that await all encounters within the more-than-human world. We tether our theoretical orientations to three contexts implicated in unspeakable/uninterrupted territories of violence: cotton plant and fear, computer and suspicion, and skateboard and joy.

Lesson Plans as Objects of Cruel Optimism and the Rhizome as a Way Out

Allyson Compton — 2023-11-10

The objective of this article is to use a theoretical framework to reconceptualize the process and purpose of lesson planning as a way to liberate teachers from systems that prevent educator and student flourishing. I argue that an attachment to lesson plans as static objects produces a state of “cruel optimism” that erodes both student and teacher satisfaction, development, and engagement. Conversations with two social studies teachers will ground theory in practice, and will help to illuminate the ways in which thinking with theory can be an effective way to reimagine pedagogical approaches.

Agential Schooling

Thomas Albright — 2023-11-10

This piece, a posthumanist analysis of schooling, agential schooling, puts forward a complex accounting of schooling that decenters the human acknowledging those agents – schooling discourses, clipboards, policies, handouts, etc. – that often go unacknowledged in purely humanist framings. This shifts away from dualism and linearity to repositioning educational phenomena as entanglements of multiplicities, situatedness (e.g., politics, power, material flows, etc.), becomings, and the more-than-human world. This work positions schooling as an agent rather than solely as an outcome or effect. Ethnographic entanglements, interviews, and diffraction, were mobilized to better understand the intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and discursive agents. A diffractive analysis of two phenomenon: (1) youth reproducing hierarchical schooling, and (2) the intra-action between school administration, clipboards, and classroom observations demonstrate how various apparatuses – policy, curriculum, hierarchical relations, adultism, prescriptive entanglements, discipline, and punishment – support the violence of agential schooling. Schooling, an agent, influences our ways of knowing and being.

Shaping Professional Hats

Alison Warren — 2023-11-10

This article argues that posthumanist thinking can frame early childhood curriculum and professionalism to productively attend to complex ways they constitute each other. Posthumanist perspectives on early childhood curriculum and professionalism encompass multiple human and non-human components co-/re-/constituting children and teachers, teaching and learning practices and processes, policies and procedures, values and beliefs, and materials and resources of early childhood settings. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki is envisaged as a woven mat; each early childhood setting weaves its own local curriculum from a set of principles and strands of learning. This article describes how a diffractive methodology employing four theoretical approaches can weave a complex and messy cartographic story of data from a research study into emotions in early childhood teaching. Early childhood teacher participants in focus group discussions used the imaginary ‘professional hat’ to describe how their expressions of emotions with children were constrained and enabled. This article affirmatively combines critique with creativity to explore early childhood professionalism within a specific localised enactment of curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand.