Abstract
A collaboration between academics and a community arts group leads to a new geometry of curriculum development, implementation, and evaluation. The new concepts are fractal dimension, surface, depth, and recursion. Interweaving interdisciplinary curriculum and taking action projects, in and out of school, looks like recursive fractals where the surface contains its own depth when interpreted in terms of Euclidean geometry. Important characteristics include dimensional flow (the changing dimensionality in fractal space time) and the ease of recognizing the depth of hegemonic commonsense.
SAMBA, SAMBA SAMBA, Do you know what it means?
It’s not your favorite toothpaste; it’s not your favorite jeans.
SAMBA, SAMBA, SAMBA: DO YOU know what it means??
Science
Arts
Mathematics
Bio-sustainability
and
Action
!
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Notes
- 1.
Regime shifts typically happen when a smooth change in an internal process (feedback) or a single disturbance (external shocks) triggers a significantly different system behavior. Although such nonlinear changes have been widely studied in different disciplines, ranging from atoms to climate dynamics, regime shifts have gained particular power in ecology, because they can dramatically impact the flow of ecosystem services that societies depend on, such as food distribution, clean water, or climate regulation. Indeed, regime shifts are expected to increase as human influence on the planet increases (the ‘Anthropocene’), including human induced climate change and decreases in biodiversity.
- 2.
An unfortunate word choice that is demonstrative in two ways: (1) as an example of how the language of curriculum indicates a hegemonic depth of Euclidean geometry—even our way of conceiving of theory is steeped in images that place our thinking and being in a Euclidean space time field. We are approaching an object, the curriculum, located in our view from another point in space, our position. (2) The words we are using, the surface of curriculum theory and practice, contains within itself its own depth.
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Appelbaum, P. (2018). The Curricular Geometries of *SAMBA* Schools: Fractal Dimensions, Surface, Depth, and Recursion. In: Gerofsky, S. (eds) Contemporary Environmental and Mathematics Education Modelling Using New Geometric Approaches. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72523-9_5
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