Latinx curriculum theorizing is a constellation of curriculum scholarship rooted in the histories, knowledges, and everyday lives of peoples from across the Latin American diaspora. It is a framework that pushes back against demonizing stereotypes, caricatures, and colonial generalizations of an entire diaspora. Born out of resistance and liberation, it comes from the histories and practices of Latinx peoples in creating counternarratives, education reform, and activism. Specifically, Latinx curriculum theorizing includes the following: (a) Latinidad as a collective point of entry, (b) Latinx as a term, (c) history and circumstance as curricular knowledge, (d) counternarratives and testimonio as curriculum theorizing, (e) cultural knowledges of Latinx students and community as theory, (f) cultural knowledges of Latinx teachers, and (g) Latinx communities generating critical pedagogies and education initiatives.
Latinx curriculum theorizing draws from a variety of Latinx philosophical traditions, including critical race theory, Latina feminist philosophy, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and various strands of Latin American, Continental, Caribbean, and Africana philosophy. While scholars who do Latinx curriculum theorizing are trained in theories such as critical race theory, feminist theory, and post- and decolonial theories, because of the subject matter and the people, this framework is the next step up in putting such foundational theories into conversation with one another. It is therefore a newly emerging framework, in the early 21st century, because it draws upon all these perspectives to account for a very transitionary, contradictory, and messy Latinx experience.
What makes something distinctly Latinx curriculum is an engagement with a state of transition and liminal spaces, both pedagogically and epistemologically, with the varied and multilayered trajectories of Latin American-origin realities. Far from being a monolithic and static framework, Latinx curriculum theorizing is itself malleable, contested, and in transition. Just as Latinx itself is a contested term within academic and activist spaces, Latinx curriculum theorizing is a point of contestation that makes it a framework with porous boundaries that can explain and even redefine the Latinx educational experience. As such, Latinx curriculum lends itself to nuanced analysis and praxis for issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, migration, racial hierarchies, and colonial legacies. This type of curriculum theorizing also points to power structures from multiple social locations and offers pathways for social change and liberation.
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Latinx Curriculum Theorizing
Ganiva Reyes
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A Critical Examination of Mathematics Curriculum Studies
Theodore Savich, Evan Marquise Taylor, and Craig Willey
Where does one enact boundaries for what can be known systematically? Is mathematics one branch of knowledge, separate from, say, social justice or chemistry, or is it possible to understand mathematics, justice, and the physical sciences within one system of knowing? Early Habermas provides a typology of human interests that constitute different knowledge types, beginning with the empirical or analytic, traversing the hermeneutic or historical, and terminating with critical or emancipatory knowledge. Brandom’s reconstruction of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes three responsibilities that are the norms for systematicity as well as an “algebra of normativity,” which is a “mathematical” way of understanding recognitive communities. The stories that those recognitive communities tell and retell are curricula. Although Habermas is primarily understood as a sociologist, critical or emancipatory knowledge is very much about the unity of being and knowing that occurs within individuals as they act intentionally in the world, reflect on those actions, and become more through the process of self-actualization. This notion of criticality is more or less absent from mathematics education discourses but is a powerful organizing thread from Kant through Hegel, to Habermas. Instead, most mathematics educators are concerned with critical theory as it pertains to social critique, centering social justice through critical race theory, critical disabilities studies and other critical theories. The tension between understanding emancipation at the level of individuals compared with political emancipation of marginalized groups enforces an ambiguity about who is being emancipated, what they are being emancipated from, and what role mathematics plays as either liberating or oppressive. Moreover, this tension is related to deep epistemological questions about how people come to know and repeat anything at all.
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The Affective Turn in Educational Theory
Michalinos Zembylas
The “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences has developed some of the most innovative and productive theoretical ideas in recent years, bringing together psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity and subjection, theories of the body and embodiment, and political theories and critical analysis. Although there are clearly different approaches in the affective turn that range from psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, (post-)Deleuzian perspectives, theories of the body, and embodiment to affective politics, there is a substantial turn to the intersections of the social, cultural, and political with the psychic and the unconscious. The affective turn, then, marks a shift in thought in critical theory through an exploration of the complex interrelations of discursive practices, the human body, social and cultural forces, and individually experienced but historically situated affects and emotions. Work in this area has become known as “critical emotion studies” or “critical affect studies.”
Just as in other disciplinary areas, there has been a huge surge of interest in education concerning the study of affect and emotion. Affect and emotion have appeared and reappeared in educational theory and practice over the past several decades through a variety of theoretical lenses. For psychologists working with theories of cognition, for example, the meaning of these terms is very different compared to that of a sociologist or philosopher using social or political theories of power. In general, psychologists investigate emotional states and their impact on the body and mind/cognition, whereas “affect” is a much broader term denoting modes of influence, movement, intensity, and change. Within these two meanings—a more psychologized notion focused on the “emotions” as these are usually understood and a more wider perspective on “affect” highlighting difference, process, and force—the affective turn in education expands our thinking and research by attempting to enrich our understanding of how teachers and students are moved, what inspires or pains them, how feelings and memories play into teaching and learning. The affective turn, then, is a particular and particularly focused set of ideas well worth considering, especially because it enables power critiques of various kinds. What the affective turn contributes to education and other disciplines is that it draws attention to the entanglement of affects and emotions with everyday life in new ways. More importantly, the affective turn creates important ethical, political, and pedagogical openings in educators’ efforts to make transformative interventions in educational spaces.
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Childhood and Curriculum
Julie C. Garlen
Since the beginning of Western modernity, evolving perceptions of what childhood “should” be have shaped public discourse around what knowledge is of most worth and informed paradigms of curriculum development. Thus, “the child,” the discursive construct that emerges from dominant ideologies about the nature and purpose of childhood, is a critical artifact in understanding contemporary curriculum in the United States. Significantly, “the child” has operated as a key mechanism to reproduce and expand particular logics about who counts as fully human. In this way, curriculum is implicated in social injustices premised on the protection and futurity of “the child.” Tracing the history of conceptions of “the child” as they relate to curriculum development and theory illuminates the ways that childhood and curriculum are intertwined, and illustrates how childhood operates as a malleable social construct that is mobilized for diverse and sometimes contradictory political purposes.
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Critical Perspectives on Curriculum and Pedagogy
Ganiva Reyes, Racheal Banda, and Brian D. Schultz
Throughout the history of the United States there has been a long trajectory of dialogue within the field of education around curriculum and pedagogy. Scholars have centered questions such as: What is curriculum? What knowledge should count as curriculum? Who gets to decide? Who does not? And, in turn, what is the pedagogical process of organizing knowledge, subject matter, and skills into curriculum? While many scholars have worked on various approaches to curriculum, the work of Black intellectual scholar Anna Julia Cooper serves as an important point of departure that highlights how curriculum and pedagogy have long been immersed in broader sociopolitical issues such as citizenship, democracy, culture, race, and gender. Starting from the late 19th century, Cooper took up curricular and pedagogical questions such as: What is the purpose of education? What is the role of the educator? And what is the purpose of being student-centered? These are important questions that pull together various traditions and fields of work in education that offer different approaches to curriculum. For instance, the question of whether it’s best to center classical subjects versus striving for efficiency in the development of curriculum has been a debated issue. Across such historical debates, the work of mainstream education scholars such as John Dewey, Ralph Tyler, and Hilda Taba have long been recognized; however, voices from scholars of color, such as Cooper, have been left out or overlooked. Thus, the contributions of Black intellectual scholars such as Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and other critical scholars of color are brought to the forefront to provide deeper knowledge about the development of curriculum and pedagogy. The work of marginalized scholars is also connected with reconceptualist efforts in curriculum studies to consider current conceptual framings of schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy. Finally, critical theories of curriculum and pedagogy are further unpacked through research conducted with and alongside communities of color. This scholarship includes culturally responsive pedagogy, funds of knowledge, hip-hop pedagogy, reality pedagogy, critically compassionate intellectualism, barrio pedagogy, youth participatory action research (YPAR), and feminist of color pedagogies.
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Cultures of Curriculum
Pamela Bolotin Joseph
The concept of cultures of curriculum is an iteration of the classification system known as curricular orientations. Intended as a framework for curriculum development and a heuristic for curriculum inquiry, a culture of curriculum is a philosophy-based curricular orientation supported by coherent practices. A curricular culture is characterized by a shared and unifying vision that guides articulation of goals, inspires consensus, and stimulates the desire for change. Diverse cultures of curriculum have existed historically and are enacted in contemporary schools and universities; they are not static. Societal change, scholarly discoveries, and political or ethical discourse influence educators’ knowledge and public beliefs about education. Essentially, this conceptual model involves perceiving curriculum through a cultural perspective, as a series of interwoven dynamics and not merely as explicit content. Curriculum theorized as culture attends to continuing dialogue, values, metaphors, the environment in which education takes place, power relationships, and the norms that affect educators’ and stakeholders’ convictions about right or appropriate education. Subsequently, the cultures of curriculum framework for curriculum inquiry comprises both analysis of beliefs and ethnographic study of lived curriculum. This conceptual model also casts light on curriculum transformation, viewed through the cultural lens as reculturing curriculum. The process begins with inquiry through the cultures of curriculum framework to investigate the extant curriculum in classrooms and schools. Such examination may result in awareness of ad hoc curriculum featuring a multitude of contradictory purposes and activities or the realization that authorized curriculum work conflicts with educators’ philosophies and moral purposes. Concurrently, the study of curricular cultures may stimulate curriculum leadership as educators imagine ways to change their own curriculum work, initiate conversations with colleagues and stakeholders, and eventually commit energies and resources to reculturing curriculum. Rather than making partial modifications to school structures or trying out the latest instructional methods, curriculum transformation informed by the concept of curricular cultures embodies profound change to values, norms, and practices, as well as to classroom and school cultures.
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Curriculum Studies, Critical Geography, and Critical Spatial Theory
Robert Helfenbein and Gabriel Huddleston
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, spatial terms have emerged and proliferated in academic circles, finding application in several disciplines extending beyond formal geography. Critical geography, a theoretical addition to the home discipline of geography as opposed to being a new discipline in itself, has seen application in many other disciplines, mostly represented by what is collectively called social theory (i.e., sociology, cultural studies, political science, and literature). The application of critical spatial theory to educational theory in general, and curriculum theorizing in particular, points to new trajectories for both critical geographers and curriculum theorists. The growth of these two formations have coincided with the changes in the curriculum studies field, especially as it relates to the Reconceptualization of that field during the 1970s. In terms of critical spatial theory especially, the exploration of how we conceptualize place and space differently has allowed curriculum studies scholars to think more expansively about education, schools, pedagogy, and curriculum. More specifically, it has allowed a more fluid understanding of how curriculum is formed and shaped over time by framing the spatial as something beyond a “taken-for-granted” fact of our lives. The combination of spatial theory and curriculum studies has produced a myriad of explorations to see how oppression works in everyday spaces. The hope inherent in this work is that if we can understand how space is (re)produced with inherent inequities, we can produce spaces, especially educative ones, that are more just and equitable.
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Literature and the Arts as a Basis for Curriculum in the Work of Maxine Greene
Janet L. Miller
Maxine Greene, internationally renowned educator, never regarded her work as situated within the field of curriculum studies per se. Rather, she consistently spoke of herself as an existential phenomenological philosopher of education working across multidisciplinary perspectives. Simultaneously, however, Greene persistently and passionately argued for all conceptions and enactments of curriculum as necessarily engaging with literature and the arts. She regarded these as vital in addressing the complexities of “curriculum” conceptualized as lived experience. Specifically, Greene regarded the arts and imaginative literature as able to enliven curriculum as lived experience, as aspects of persons’ expansive and inclusive learnings. Such learnings, for Greene, included the taking of necessary actions toward the creating of just and humane living and learning contexts for all. In particular, Greene supported her contentions via her theorizing of “social imagination” and its accompanying requisite, “wide-awakeness.”
Specifically, Greene refused curriculum conceived as totally “external” to persons who daily attempt to make sense of their life worlds. In rejecting any notion of curriculum as predetermined, decontextualized subject-matter content that could be simply and easily delivered by teachers and ingested by students, she consistently threaded examples from imaginative literature as well as from all manner of the visual and performing arts throughout her voluminous scholarship. She did so in support of her pleas for versions of curriculum that involve conscious acts of choosing to work in order not only to grasp “what is,” but also to envision persons, situations, and contexts as if they could be otherwise. Greene thus unfailingly contended that literature and the arts offer multiplicities of perspectives and contexts that could invite and even move individuals to engage in these active interpretations and constructions of meanings. Greene firmly believed that these interpretations and constructions not only involve persons’ lived experiences, but also can serve to prompt questions and the taking of actions to rectify contexts, circumstances, and conditions of those whose lived lives are constrained, muted, debased, or refused.
In support of such contentions, Greene pointed out that persons’ necessarily dynamic engagements with interpreting works of art involved constant questionings. Such interrogations, she argued, could enable breaking with habitual assumptions and biases that dull willingness to imagine differently, to look at the world and its deleterious circumstances as able to be enacted otherwise. Greene’s ultimate rationale for such commitments hinged on her conviction that literature and the arts can serve to not only represent what “is” but also what “might be.” As such, then, literature and the arts as lived experiences of curriculum, writ large, too can impel desires to take action to repair myriad insufficiencies and injustices that saturate too many persons’ daily lives. To augment those chosen positionings, Greene drew extensively from both her personal and academic background and interests in philosophy, history, the arts, literature, and literary criticism.
Indeed, Greene’s overarching challenge to educators, throughout her prolonged and eminent career, was to think of curriculum as requiring that persons “do philosophy,” to think philosophically about what they are doing. Greene’s challenges to “do philosophy” in ways that acknowledge contingencies, complexities, and differences—especially as these multiplicities are proliferated via sustained participation with myriad versions of literature and the arts—have influenced generations of educators, students, teaching artists, curriculum theorists, teacher educators, and artists around the world.
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Narrative Inquiry: Story as a Basis for Curriculum Studies
Suniti Sharma and JoAnn Phillion
Since the 1970s, following the crisis of representation, narrative inquiry has opened educational research to story as a valuable source of knowledge production across the field, in general, and curriculum studies, in particular. While competing approaches continue to shift and expand how scholars understand narrative inquiry across curriculum studies, a common thread in the scholarship is the positioning of story at the heart of teaching, learning, and research. Narrative inquiry has pushed the field of curriculum studies toward exploration of story as a way of examining the master narrative and its construction of the universal human subject that privileges some discourses and marginalizes others. Scholars who engage with story as the basis for “doing” curriculum studies interrupt positivist methodologies, universal ontologies, and foundational epistemologies that inform educational policies and practices to shape the lived experience of exclusion. On the one hand, scholars of narrative inquiry use story to deconstruct exclusionary educational policies and practices and highlight the social, cultural, and political significance of the lived educational experience of those historically marginalized from traditional curriculum discourse. On the other hand, critics contest the limits of story as a research genre or pedagogical practice, arguing that narratives perpetuate ways of silencing or lose critical importance when personal stories do not connect with political action. Each side of the debate, in its way, generates spaces for new ways of thinking about the place of story in the production of educational knowledge, especially how curriculum scholars engage with the multiplicity of human experience within a network of changing and contextual relations. Reflective of diverse orientations, narrative inquiry in curriculum studies continues to be conceptualized, practiced, and contested in differing ways as methodology/form of inquiry; modes of expression; and, pedagogical and political practice for engaging with the telling, analyzing, and interpreting of story as a way of understanding lived experience.
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Peace and Curriculum Studies
Molly Quinn
To contemplate the question or concern of peace in curriculum studies, and as has been taken up in the field, is to traverse terrain neither simple nor singular. Peace as a concept, and an ideal, is itself complex and contested, elusory even, and approached in manifold ways, often in relation to other equally intricate and disputed ideas, like violence, war, justice, freedom, hope, and love (as well as human rights, hospitality, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism)—historically informed and context-specific as well. The challenges, too, in undertaking such a task are further compounded as concerning curriculum studies, where there is neither a clearly established nor a cohesive body of work upon which to turn or draw here, where no formalized attention has been given systematically to the study of peace, peace education, or peace studies in relation to such. Nevertheless, one could argue that the field of curriculum from its inception, and enduringly so, has been implicitly and integrally connected to the interest of peace and point to a diversity of work therein, of some breadth and depth, to support this claim and examine this interest. The contemporary scholarship that has emerged in the field and explicitly addressed matters of peace and nonviolence, as well as the work of peace advocates and educators, portends further advancement of this line of inquiry—particularly in response to the growing threats and realities of inequality, conflict, violence, war, ecological devastation, and genocide worldwide—in the hopes of creating a more beautiful world of justice, harmony, and human flourishing via education.
