Abstract
I specify—referencing the 2010 Curriculum Studies Handbook: The Next Moment—the conceptual shifts that suggest that a second reconceptualization is now underway. Through the hybridization of concepts common in the reconceptualized field (1970–2000), a new generation of scholars is consolidating the conceptual gains made during those decades and now complicating them as they attune them to present circumstances. “Woman” remains as a concept, for instance, but now reformulated as “nonunitary, situated, and always in flux.” Technology intensifies, and concepts such as “the posthuman” emerge at the same time that historical and international studies are achieving greater importance, as the field’s past and its presence within nationally specific and globally situations demand increasing attention. I argue that the internationalization and coming reconceptualization of curriculum studies in the United States are reciprocally related.
Our responsibility as curriculum theorists is to “bring out” the dead—to “respond” and engage in conversation with the past.
Petra Munro Hendry (2011, 209)
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Notes
“Fifteen years ago it might have been appropriate t ? o identify discourses by way of gender” [etc.], Erik Malewski (2010, xiv) points out, underscoring the shift I am suggesting is now just underway. He continues: “Since then much has changed. Cultural studies, critical race theory, and critical geography have entered the field. Discourses that might in the past have been distinguishable have made their way into hybrid spaces that make their unique characteristics undeterminable. Queer theory, place, autobiography, and Southern studies combined to make the work of Ugena Whitlock, for example”(2010, xiv). Hybridity—a key concept in curriculum studies in Brazil—is a key marker, as Malewski suggests here.
Grumet (2010, 403) wonders whether she and I may have been “naï” in our emphasis on an “aesthetic” sense of subjectivity, evident in our regular referencing of Virginia Woolf and Jerzy Grotowski. In my view, it is the aesthetic enactment of agency (through creativity) that remains crucial in reconstructing the present moment. Such reconstruction relies on collective, even ritualized, forms of action that have to be threaded through individual subjectivity. Thirty-five years ago that emphasis upon particularity kept Grumet and me from preoccupation with the reproduction of power. It protected us from identity politics, although later, as Grumet (2010, 403) notes, we both concentrated on subjectivity’s debts to gender, race, and class. Curriculum theory, as Grumet (2010, 404) understood from the outset, contains questions that “lift the ideological drapes that hide these categories from consciousness.” In this sense our “naï” curriculum theory of many years ago installed decolonization as central in the project of self-understanding (Pinar 2011a, 39–48), even if we didn’t use the term. In the structural non-coincidence between subjectivity and subject position, then, is opportunity for creativity, originality, agency.
On occasion this “nonunitary” sense of identity threatens subjective dissolution and with it the disappearance of agency. Significantly, Hongyu Wang (2010, 379) points out: “While the center of the person is displaced, it is in this decentering that the possibility of personal freedom is situated.”
Uncritical and ahistorical acceptance of the call for “social justice” reinscribes the same instrumental relation between school and society that school reformers invoke to scapegoat teachers and sell schools to software companies. The “claim that the achievement gap constitutes the gravest threat facing the US today appears hyperbolic if not absurd,” Taubman (2009, 30) makes plain, “until, that is, we consider the number of educators who argue that if we had better teachers in schools and did a better job of educating our students, crime would go down, the economy would improve, and class divisions would disappear.” If ethics replaced politics as the centerpiece of curriculum studies, we would teach what knowledge is of most worth, not that which promises the greatest return on our investment, whether economic or social or cognitive.
“Education as archival text,” Marla Morris (2006, 76) points out, “is an active engagement with digging—digging through one’s multifaceted registers of self-understanding—ironically through studying the lives of others.” In addition to these instances—Woodson and Garvey—there are many more in the contemporary field: see, for instance Salvio 2007; Crocco, Munro and Weiler 1999. There is a resonance between Morris’ notion of education as “archival” and Fidyk’s (2010, 442) idea of “ancestral.” Absent of any obvious links to “self-understanding” (central in Morris’ idea), however, is Dimitriadis’ (2010, 465) juxtaposition of Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward Said. Also missing in his chapter are any links to the intellectual history of the US field, as Sartre—Nausea in particular (see Dimitriadis 2010, 471)—was central to the work of Madeleine Grumet (see 1978). In his response to the chapter, Tom Barone kindly ignores Dimitradis’ evident ignorance of Barone’s own referencing of Sartre (see, for instance, Barone 2000, 230–239), saying simply (and diplomatically) that “Like Dimitriadis, I too have found inspiration in the works of Sartre and Said.”
Gender and race also meet in Anthony L. Brown’s (2011) revealing research on images of black males in the social sciences.
Even these fields could be reconceptualized if formulated through the lens of curriculum theory: see Handa 2011. ai]8_“This prime myth of the soul’s connection with love, Psyche with Eros,” Mary Aswell Doll (2011, 74) reminds, “turns discussion away from the grand gesture toward a process of seeing through, seeing in to the inwardness of things.”
“Neoliberalism,” Grimmett and Young (2012, 51) point out, “creates the environment in which people tend to defer to fate and accept their current circumstances as the upper limit of possibility.” Like McKnight, if in different terms, Grimmett and Young (2012, 51) also emphasize activism in this instance “talking back” to policy-makers: “The purpose here would be to revision a sense of agency that interrupts a fatalistic view of teaching and teacher education as mere pawn in the neo-liberalist policy juggernaut. This would not mean being naî about the structural impediments to agency but it would involve fighting the tendency to see teacher education programs as victims of policy. Teacher educators would therefore have to reject passivity and engage the struggle to re-vision the work so that their practice is theoretically sensitive and grounded in moral purpose. They would have to work to sustain teacher education in a manner that spawns resilience within and among all practitioner ranks.” Resilience comes not from “resistance,” but, as they point out, from “moral purpose.” While hardly abandoning the political, Grimmett and Young recognize it is by itself not enough; politics must be informed by ethics.
For John Weaver (2010, 191), the “posthuman condition reshapes human subjectivity, social justice, and human dignity.” He uses the term “posthuman” because “it is the best term to capture the diversity and complexity of the intersection between humans and technology since the 1980s” (2010, 193). Supplementing the concept of “cyborg” with fyborg (“any bodily enhancement/transformation through any temporary technological intrusion into the body” [2010, 193]), Weaver (2010, 194) worries that the human body will lose its “materiality.”
“[W]ithout a complex conception of love as a meaningful experience that contains what experience cannot master,” Deborah Britzman (2006, 63) explains, “there is no way of understanding our inner world and its passionate currents.” “Ethics,” Britzman (2000, 33) writes, “accompanies the ‘crafting’ of memory and working through loss.” It is our capacity to think through “instinctual conflict” and our relation to “reality” that allows us to formulate our sense of “ethical responsibility” (Britzman 2006, 50). That responsibility can be expressed, at least in part, through “hospitality” that Molly Quinn (2010, 101) positions as “central to the work of education.” For Quinn (2010, 104), hospitality communicates love in a spiritual sense (see also Edgerton 1996, 64), and sometimes through “laughter” (2010, 108), enabling “healing” (2010, 109). None of these concepts shows up in Snaza’s definitional formulae.
Baker (2009b, xxvi) reminds us of the “narcissism and prejudice that have been so central to the idea of community,” as well as its reliance on the non-rational for organizing its “rationalized groupings.”
Ferneding (2010, 179–183) does reference Macdonald as well as Huebner.
Ferneding references McLuhan (2010, 174) and Innis (2010, 176).
Referencing ancient Thai concepts of “space,” Baker (2009, xix) points out that the concept of space is not universal, that “there was not simply one way to represent the world but rather that there was more than one world, more than one imaginal domain.” Premodern mapping methods in South East Asia, she continues, were not devoted to locating specific sites within a larger whole. Indeed, Baker (2009, xx) shows that the modern map is an “indispensable mediator” in “conceptualizing such macrospace as though it is a totality, a function that none of the premodern maps never performed.” The very tendency toward totalization that accompanied the acceptance of power, identity, and discourse in the US field is at times reinscribed in the contemporary concept of “space.” For Robert Helfenbein (2010, 306, emphasis added), “space constructed through discursive, interpretive, lived, and imagined practices becomes place.” This assertion seems to acknowledge that history, culture, and lived experience structure a place, but does not the particularity of place disappear in the assertion that “space is everywhere” (Helfenbein 2010, 308)? The notion of “third space” (see Wang 2004) Helfenbein (2010, 309) depicts as “those spaces that speak, those spaces that lead and those spaces of possibility.” That last concept suggests the reinstallation of “agency” (2010, 314), a concept Lisa Cary (2006, 135) never uses but which seems implied in her assertion of “an ethical turn toward responsibility in research.”
“Students are reading in new ways,” Mary Aswell Doll (2011, 50) suggests, “concentrating on image rather than narration.... They must halt, stop, make haste slowly (an alchemical slogan) if they are to attend to the other of the image. Of course, this is a different rhythm from what cyberspace demands.... The speed of the cyber world has made its junkies jumpy.” But, Doll (2011, 50) points out, “the two rhythms need not be oppositional.”
As John Weaver (2010, 192) appreciates: “There is no other field within education that is more artistic than curriculum theory.” Arts-based research has become influential during the “next moment” and it, too, is registered in the Malewski Handbook (see Carpenter and Tavin 2010) as well as in recent work by Tom Barone and Elliot Eisner (2012) and Margaret Latta (in press). In Canada, a/r/t/ography studies the relations among artist-researcherteacher (see Irwin and de Cosson 2004; Springgay et al. 2008).
The great political economist and communications theorist also drew upon his experience teaching in one-room rural schools in Norwich, Ontario, and Landonville, Alberta (Watson 2007, 16). As a “marginal intellectual” Innis came to believe that “an individual from the periphery could sustain intense cultural training leading to an indigenous critical perspective without consequent deracination” (2007, 17). See also Pinar 2011a, 163 n. 29.
“In the Hegelian-Marxian tradition, and in Freire’s critical pedagogy,” Dennis Carlson (2010, 203) points out, “part of what it means to become fully self-conscious is to recognize that we play an active role in producing culture and self.” That “active role”—agency—was what was lost in the primacy of politics over ethics in US curriculum studies.
Complicating the concept of ?? “creative solidarity,” Janet L. Miller (2010, 97) writes: “nor do I think that ‘we’ can aim for one unitary version of ‘creative solidarity’.” She continues: “So, how might we take up the challenges of difference, wherein static conceptions of ‘identity’ or isolated cultures and educational practices cannot function as refuge, within a concept of creative solidarity?” (2010, 97).
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© 2013 William F. Pinar
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Pinar, W.F. (2013). Reconceptualization. In: Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstances, Intellectual Histories. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303424_4
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