Curriculum proposals are sets of visionary statements intended to project what some person or group believes schools or school systems should adopt and utilize in formulating their actual curriculum policies and programs. Curriculum proposals are presented when there is a perceived need for change from curriculum that is currently in place. The specific changes stated in a curriculum proposal can be either quite limited or very comprehensive. If a totally restructured curriculum is recommended, particular prescriptions are necessarily based on some overall conception of what curriculum is by definition and what its constituent elements are, and therefore what topics are to be addressed in a curriculum proposal. Attempts have been made to conceptualize curriculum holistically, as an entity clearly distinguished from all other phenomena, but no agreed upon conception has emerged.
To provide a new theoretical and practically useful framework for how curriculum may be conceived, a 10-component conceptualization of curriculum has been stipulated, elucidated, and illustrated for use in designing curriculum policy, programmatic curriculum plans, or formal curriculum proposals. In this conceptualization, curriculum is defined as having the following interrelated components: (a) focal idea and intended purpose(s), (b) unique objective(s), (c) underlying assumptions and value commitments, (d) program organization, (e) substantive features, (f) the character of the student’s educational situation/activity/process, (g) unique approaches/methods for use by the teacher/educator, (h) program evaluation, (i) supportive arrangements, and (j) justifications/rationale for the whole curriculum. Any proposal for total curriculum change should make prescriptions related to all these components.
Discussion of other aspects related to curriculum proposals include how to locate existing curriculum proposals, how to analyze them in relation to this new conceptualization of curriculum, how to choose suitable ones among them for possible adoption, and how to translate a curriculum proposal into actual curriculum policies or plans.
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Article
Christopher B. Crowley
The study of the curriculum and educational knowledge is a study of ideology. The curriculum is never neutral. It always reflects or embodies ideological positions. Ideologies present within the curriculum are negotiated and formulated through multilayered processes of strategic compromise, assent, and resistance. And as such, the curriculum ideologies become operationalized in both overt and hidden means—constructing subjects and objects of knowledge in active as well as passive ways. Teaching is always a political act, and discussions and debates over curriculum ideologies have a long history within the field of curriculum studies. In terms of its function related to the organization and valuing of knowledge, it remains important to recognize not only the contested nature of the curriculum but also how such contestations have ideological dimensions in the framing of the curriculum.
Curriculum ideologies manifest in terms of what might be thought of as values, visions of the future, and venues or forms. This is to say, the curriculum is imbued with processes for valuing assumed choices related to its design, development, and implementation. These choices draw from ideologically based assumptions about the curriculum’s basis in political, economic, historical, sociocultural, psychological, and other realities—whether they be discursive or material in effect. Additionally, these curriculum choices also pertain to the means by which the curriculum achieves these goals or objectives through the formulation of designed experiences, activities, or other forms of learning opportunities.
The curriculum—in certain regards as finding principle in the conveying of knowledge through a system of organization related to an outset purpose—has, as a central component to some degree, a vision of a future. The curriculum is something simultaneously constructed and enacted in the present, with often the expressed purpose of having implications and ramifications for the future. The curriculum’s role and purpose in constructing both tested and untested or imagined feasibilities again has to do with some type of vision of learning inflected by ideology. This may even take the form of envisioning a future that is actually a vision of the past in some form, or perhaps a returning to a remembered time that may have existed for some but not others, or by extension a similarly romanticized remembering of a mythic past, for instance. Ultimately, the curriculum, whether translated into practice or in being developed conceptually, is in all likelihood never exclusively one of these, but instead is in all probability an amalgamation of such to differing degrees wherein a multitude of possibilities and combinations exist.
Among the key questions of curriculum studies that remain central in terms of both analyzing and theorizing the curriculum are: Whose knowledge counts and what is worthwhile? These questions help to raise to a level of concern the ideological underpinnings of all curricula in ways that through sustained critical dialog might work to collectively build a more sustainably just and equitable world.
Article
João M. Paraskeva
The article places the itinerant curriculum theory at the core of the struggle against the curriculum epistemicide and occidentosis. It unpacks the current contemporary global havoc as a result of the exhausted coloniality of power matrix of Modern Western Eurocentric modernity. In doing so, the piece dissects the challenges faced by a specific radical critical curriculum river framed by particular counter hegemonic approaches in the struggle against the curriculum epistemicide. It claims how counter hegemonic movements and groups, in such struggle against the epistemicide they ended up provoking a reversive epistemicide, by not pay attention to the validity and legitimacy of crucial onto-epistemological perspectives beyond Modern Western Eurocentric platform. Also, the article challenges such counter approaches to deterritorialize and delink from coloniality power matric, in order to open up their own Eurocentric canon and seek an itinerant curriculum theoretical commitment.
Article
Gabriel Huddleston and Robert Helfenbein
Curriculum theory is shaped and held within the larger field of curriculum studies, but its distinctive focus on understanding curriculum as opposed to developing it places it is stark contrast with other parts of the larger field. This focus is further distinctive when curriculum theory shifts to curriculum theorizing. Curriculum theorizing emerged in the United States, principally at Bergamo conferences and precursor conferences, in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT), and through scholars associated with the reconceptualization. It has spread internationally via the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and its subsidiaries in many different countries and cultures. Some scholars hold that curriculum theory includes curriculum theorizing as well as normative and analytic conceptualizations that justify or explain curriculum decisions and actions. Curriculum theorizing attempts to read broadly in social theory so as to embody those insights in dealing with issues of curriculum, and can take philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or cultural studies approaches to analyses, interpretations, criticisms, and improvements. This approach has built upon what has become known as the reconceptualization, which began in the late 1970s and continues into the early 21st century. Increasingly, the field has taken up analysis of contemporary education policy and sociopolitical contexts as an outgrowth of its work. Issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and dis/ability, and the ways in which their intersectionality impact the lived experience of schools, continue to motivate and direct the field of curriculum studies. In so doing, criticism, analysis, interpretation, and expansion of such issues have moved the focus of curriculum theorizing to include any aspects of social and psychological life that educate or shape the ways human beings reflect upon or interact with the world.
Article
Patrick Roberts
The application of curriculum theory and models of curriculum development to museum education helps inform the analysis of the representational, communicative, epistemological, and cognitive dimensions of the formal, informal, and nonformal learning that takes place in the museum setting. Museums and other in/nonformal learning environments implicitly and explicitly engage questions of worth inherent to curriculum inquiry. Within the Curriculum Studies field, such questions reflect both an historical and a contemporary concern with issues of diversity, accessibility, social justice, civic value, and human rights in school and non-school curriculum contexts. In addition to other curriculum analysis frameworks, international instances of museum education curricula can be understood through the lenses of three “human interests”: the technical, the practical, and the emancipatory.
A preference for designing educational materials and experiences around predetermined objectives reflects a technical interest in museum curricula. Within this technical approach, which can also be conceptualized as curriculum as product, the success or failure of a curriculum depends on the degree to which the intended objectives are achieved. Curriculum as practice reflects a practical interest in the way understanding and knowledge are created (rather than simply transmitted) through the dynamic social interactions between teacher and learner. A curriculum as practice orientation aligns with constructivist views on museum learning. Representing an emancipatory interest in human liberation and the overcoming of oppressive social structures is the curriculum as praxis orientation. This approach to museum curricula often assumes a social justice goal of community empowerment that seeks to translate understanding or consciousness-raising into action.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
John Rury and Susan Twombly
The American collegiate curriculum has undergone significant change in the past two centuries. From its beginning through much of the 19th century a classical curricular approach prevailed, focusing on ancient languages and the liberal arts, while favoring recitation and debate as instructional modalities. The rise of “land-grant” institutions with a focus on practical instruction in agriculture, engineering, and military sciences in the later 19th century was a harbinger of change. It was followed by the rise of research institutions and comprehensive universities that further emphasized the importance of practical and professional education. The adoption of an elective approach to course-taking and the development of college majors led to debates about core curricula and the need for general education. Following publication of the famous Harvard Red Book in 1948, a broad consensus regarding the need for a liberal arts core emerged in the postwar era and has broadly persisted.
Since the 1980s, new debates have emerged about the content of the core and curricular innovations intended to augment student learning. Older content representing a “canon” of received knowledge or wisdom has been challenged by proponents of non-Western, feminist, or oppressed minority perspectives, not always successfully. New instructional modalities, including online and “flipped” courses, have also impacted longstanding curricular practices. New models for assessing and planning collegiate curricula also have emerged. But if a particular theme has predominated in such changes, it is that student and societal demands for more practical and marketable learning outcomes have continued to exert an outsized influence on the ever evolving American collegiate curriculum.
Article
Petra Munro Hendry
Within contemporary, conventional, interpretive, qualitative paradigms, narrative and curriculum theorizing have traditionally been understood as primary constructs through which educational researchers seek to explain, represent, and conduct inquiry about education. This article traces shifting understandings of Western constructs of narrative and curriculum theorizing from a modernist perspective, in which they were conceived primarily as methods central to the representation of knowledge, to postmodernist perspectives in which they are conceptualized not as epistemological constructs, but as ethical/ontological systems of becoming through/in relationships. Historically, the emergence of “curriculum” and “narrative” (as phenomena) within a modernist, technocratic paradigm, rooted in an epistemological worldview, were constructed as “technologies” whose purpose was to represent knowledge. Current critiques of narrative and curriculum theorizing from the perspective of postmodern, poststructural, feminist, and new materialist perspectives illuminate understandings of these constructs as ethical-ontological-epistemological phenomena. From this perspective, narrative and curriculum theorizing have shifted from being understood as grounded in epistemology in order to provide “better” understanding/knowledge of experience, and alternatively are understood as ethical obligations to “be” in a web of relationships/intra-actions.
Article
Zongyi Deng
In academic literature there is a multiplicity and proliferation of alternative curriculum definitions, and the matter of defining curriculum is in a state of disarray. Likewise, there are diverse ways of defining teaching in which curriculum is virtually invisible. Invoking Dewey’s idea of “reality as whole,” this article makes a case for rethinking curriculum and teaching as two interrelated concepts embedded in the societal, institutional, and instructional contexts of schooling. Curriculum is construed in terms of societal, policy, programmatic, and classroom curricula that give social meaning, normative and operational frameworks, and educational quality to the practice of teaching. Likewise, teaching is thought of as sociocultural, institutional, deliberative and curricular practice with a bearing on the societal, policy, programmatic, and classroom curricula. The article concludes by questioning the technicist and reductionist treatment of curriculum and teaching associated with the global neo-liberal movement toward standards and accountability and by calling for reenvisioning curriculum and teaching in view of the educational challenges of the 21st century.
Article
James C. Jupp and Pauli Badenhorst
Critical White studies (CWS) refers to an oppositional and interdisciplinary body of historical, social science, literary, and aesthetic intellectual production that critically examines White people’s individual, collective, social, and historical experiences. CWS reflexively assumes the embeddedness of researcher identities within the research, including the different positionalities of White researchers and researchers of Color within White supremacy writ large as well as whiteness in the social sciences and curriculum theory.
As an expression of the historical consciousness shift sparked by anglophone but also francophone African-Atlantic and pan-African intellectuals, CWS emerged within the 20th century’s emancipatory social sciences tied to Global South independence movements and Global North civil rights upheavals. Initiated by cultural studies theorists Stuart Hall and Dick Dyer in the early 80s, CWS has proliferated through two waves.
CWS’ first wave (1980–2000) advanced a race-evasive analytical arc with the following ontological and epistemological conceptual-empirical emphases: whiteness as hegemonic normativity, White identity and nation-building, White privilege and property, and White color-blind racism and race evasion. CWS’ second-wave (2000–2020) advanced an anti-essentializing analytical arc with pedagogical conceptual-empirical emphases: White materiality and place, White complexities and relationalities, Whiteness and ethics, and social psychoanalyses in whiteness pedagogies. Always controversial, CWS proliferated as a “hot topic” in social sciences throughout the 90s. Regarding catalytic validity, several CWS concepts entered mass media and popular discussions in 2020 to understand White police violence against Black people—violence of which George Floyd’s murder is emblematic.
In curriculum theory, CWS forged two main “in-ways.” In the 1990s, CWS entered the field through Henry Giroux, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and colleagues who advanced critical whiteness pedagogies. This line of research is differently continued by Tim Lensmire and his colleagues Sam Tanner, Zac Casey, Shannon Macmanimon, Erin Miller, and others. CWS also entered curriculum theory via the field of White teacher identity studies advanced by Sherry Marx and then further synthesized by Jim Jupp, Theodorea Berry, Tim Lensmire, Alisa Leckie, Nolan Cabrera, and Jamie Utt. White teacher identity studies is frequently applied to work on predominantly White teacher education programs.
Besides these in-ways, CWS’ conceptual production, especially the notion of “whiteness as hegemonic normativity” or whiteness, disrupted whitened business-as-usual in curriculum theory between 2006 and 2020. Scholars of Color supported by a few White scholars called out curriculum theory’s whiteness and demanded change in a field that centered on race-based epistemologies and indigenous cosmovisions in conferences and journals. CWS might play a role in working through the as-of-yet unresolved conflict over the futurity of curriculum theory as a predominantly White space.
A better historicized CWS that takes on questions of coloniality of power, being, and knowledge informed by feminist, decolonial, and psychoanalytic resources provides one possible futurity for CWS in curriculum theory. In this futurity, CWS is relocated as one dimension of a broad array of criticalities within curriculum theory’s critical pedagogies. This relocated CWS might advance psychoanalytically informed whiteness pedagogies that grapple with the overarching question: Can whiteness and White identities be decolonized? This field would include European critical psychoanalytic social sciences along with feminist and decolonial resources to advance a transformative shift in consciousness.
Article
Walter S. Gershon
Education is a sensory experience. This is the case regardless how a sensorium is constructed. A sensorium is how a group defines, categorizes, and conceptualizes the senses, a Western five-senses model for example. Regardless of the sociocultural norms and values a sensorium engenders, animals, human and nonhuman alike, experience their lives through the senses. From this perspective, anything that might be considered educational, regardless of context and irrespective of questions of what might “count” as schooling, is a sensory experience. Sensuous curriculum sits at the intersection of two transdisciplinary fields, curriculum and sensory studies. As its name suggests, sensuous curriculum is an expression of ongoing critical educational studies of, with, and through the senses. In so doing, sensuous curriculum brings to the fore the extraordinary nature of everyday experiences in educational ecologies, from entangled sociocultural norms and values to the ways that sensory input and interpretation inform every aspect of educational ways of being, knowing, and doing. Sensoria have always been tools for understandings, particularly for continually marginalized groups whose claims are often dismissed through Western, Eurocentric framings. For the notion and instantiation of framings require both a set of universally understood constructs and their applications as well as the necessity of the act: when framing, someone or something is always framed. Providing critical tools for the interruption of such constructs and their use, sensuous curriculum is a rich site of study in ways that are theoretically and materially significant, while offering often underutilized trajectories for the exploration of educational understandings.
Article
Queer theory is a tool that can be used to reconsider sociopolitical, historical, and cultural norms and values. Similarly, in qualitative research, queer theory tends to analyze the narratives of LGBTQ+ people and groups in ways that seek to queer everyday experiences. Both the theoretical framework and the narratives collected and analyzed in qualitative research are significant to unpacking business-as-usual in and across sociocultural contexts. This is especially true for systems of schooling, whereby LGBTQ+ people and groups are marginalized through schooling and schools, a process of exclusion that is detrimental to queer youth who are learning in spaces and places specifically designed against their ways of being and knowing. The significance of qualitative research as it meets the framework of queer theory is that it offers a practically and institutionally queered set of voices, perspectives, and understandings with which to think about the everyday in schools. This becomes increasingly important as schooling has historically been a place in which LGBTQ+ students and groups have resided at an intersection, where the sociopolitical and cultural marginalization that keeps the status quo in place crosses with contemporary values that both interrupt and reify such histories.
Article
Boni Wozolek
Critical geography, as it is studied in North America and parts of Europe, has been growing since the 1970s. However, focusing on gender, sexual orientation, race, home language, or the like, was not a primary concern of the field until the mid-1980s. As radical critical geography shifted toward cultural and critical geography, marginalized voices could be heard in and across the field in local and less-local contexts. As critical geography began to intersect with education in the mid-1990s, it became a tool for studying marginalization across layers of scale. Fields of geography are impacted as much by contemporary sociopolitical dialogues as they are by educational research and its related historical boundaries and borders. Finally, it is significant to consider what a critical gender-queer geography might mean as the field continues to grow.
Article
Boni Wozolek
Curriculum studies is a field that addresses the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural norms and values that impact the classrooms and corridors of schools and their interrelated systems of schooling. Questions of curricula, the formal (what is meant to be taught), the null (what is not taught), the enacted (what is learned through interactions), and the hidden (what is learned through cultural norms) are significant to curriculum studies and are entangled with local and less local histories, politics, and cultures. Sociocultural precepts such as race, gender, and sexual orientation are therefore enmeshed with these forms of curriculum. The study of how race, gender, and sexual orientation are related is therefore at once historical and contemporary in its significance. To understand the relationship between these ideas is to follow lines from Title IX, the Meriam Report, the exclusion of certain terms from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, redlining, and other significant national policies and practices that impact schools and the curriculum. Finally, while it may be easy to falsely split questions of race from questions of gender or sexual orientation, an attention to how intersectional identities impact the curriculum becomes especially significant to disrupting colonial, sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic norms and values that often render the fe-male body as property of the cis-hetero patriarchy. Within these intersectional dialogues, curriculum studies scholars often find the important tools for dismantling and discussing normalized marginalization in schools and across systems of schooling as they touch and are touched by local and less local communities.
Article
Dale H. Schunk and Maria K. DiBenedetto
Cognitive regulation refers to the self-directed regulation of cognitions (thoughts, beliefs, affects) toward the attainment of goals. Cognitive regulation can occur before individuals engage in tasks, while they are working on them, and during pauses or when tasks are completed where individuals reflect on their performances. Researchers have addressed which cognitive regulation processes are used during various phases of task engagement, how these processes differ among individuals due to ability and achievement levels and due to development, how cognitive regulation processes operate during task engagement, and which interventions can effectively help persons become better cognitive regulators.
The implications of the research findings are that teachers and others can help learners improve their cognitive regulation skills. Some important processes are goal setting, strategy use and adaptation, monitoring of cognition and performance, motivation (e.g., self-efficacy), and self-evaluation. Effective interventions expose students to models displaying these skills and provide for practice with feedback. There are six limitations of the present research that should be addressed. This can be accomplished by conducting more intervention studies, examining fine-grained changes in cognitive regulation, conducting research in non-traditional contexts, integrating the educational and developmental literatures, exploring cognitive regulation across cultures, and investigating cognitive regulation during learning with technology.
Article
William H. Schubert
Curriculum studies can be characterized by dominant questions asked by those who have participated in the field over the years. Most of the questions that have dominated inquiry and praxis are variations on the central curriculum question: What is worthwhile? In the mid-19th century, the focus was on what knowledge was deemed most worthwhile, especially for elementary and secondary education, as nations began to take charge of what was taught and learned in schools. Most of the questions that characterize curriculum history continued to be debated and studied throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Arguments ensued about how developmental appropriateness, school and nonschool experience, and science or efficiency contributed to an understanding of what is worthwhile. Curriculum scholars and curriculum workers continue to address how to meet individual and social interests and needs and how curriculum of education should improve society. Curriculum studies offers guiding questions for studying, reflecting on, developing, or enacting curriculum derived from publications of curriculum scholars and policy makers. After the middle of the 20th century, many of the previously established questions were challenged by new generations of curriculum scholars who criticized the dominance of powerful political, racial, gender, and cultural groups in determining what should be taught and learned in schools; that is, the sources of what human beings should be and become. They questioned the capability of schools as institutions of nations that have become corporate states to guide this task for the benefit of all. Critiques have continued to proliferate regarding who benefits and who is harmed by questions that guide curriculum scholarship, policy, and practice in schools and all other societal institutions and relationships that educate. Much discrimination has been identified that provides markedly less educational benefit to those who are not part of the majority culture. The interests of wealthy White males are often privileged, and the needs of racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, those who have disabilities, and those who are otherwise different are harmed. Moreover, the purposes of education in schooling seem to be to advance the benefits accorded to powerful and privileged groups. To understand this situation, curriculum scholars have drawn upon questions derived from critical theory and cultural studies. Curriculum studies literature also offers ideas for creating curricula that benefit more of humanity throughout the world, as well as seeking insights from many different world cultures, including indigenous and grassroots ones. A larger question deals with the extent to which humans are able to construct educational opportunities wherein all are educated in worthwhile ways. Struggles over meanings of “worthwhile” continue to resound throughout curriculum studies scholarship and its influence on educational policy and practice and concomitant impacts on the world.
Article
Racheal Banda, Ganiva Reyes, and Blanca Caldas
Curricula of care and radical love encompass a collective and communal responsibility for education practitioners, leaders, and researchers to meet the needs of the historically marginalized communities they serve and of their work toward social change. These articulations are largely drawn from the ontologies, ways of knowing, communal practices, and traditions of the Global South as articulated by Black and Chicana/Latina women. Starting in the 1980s, Nel Noddings’ work around ethics of care sparked philosophical discussions of care within the education field. Educational scholars, including critical scholars of color, have been influenced by care theories that emphasize care as rooted in relationships and everyday interactions between educators and students. Feminists of color and critical education scholars have expanded theories of care in education by pointing out the ways in which race and other social identifiers impact interpretations of care. Even before the work of current care theorists, by the turn of the twentieth century, Anna Julia Cooper argued for a love-politic that decentered romantic love and instead centered a self-determining and emancipatory form of love. This opened a pathway for a radical, Black feminist conceptualization of love. Black feminist scholars have since further developed and expanded upon conceptualizations of a love-politic contributing to a more robust understanding of care and love.
Latina/Chicana feminists have also contributed to onto-theoretical insights that highlight how care is a necessity toward critical understandings, personal connections, self-work, and movement building. Concepts such as convivencia and cariño from Latina/Chicana feminists demonstrate how care is co-constructed through relationship building over time and through the sharing of life experiences. Moreover, practices like othermothering and radical love further reveal how intimate and personal interactions are necessary for critical self-growth and communal love toward liberation. From this view, to love and care in ways that advance justice in education requires an expansive approach to curriculum and pedagogy, which includes spaces beyond classroom walls like the home, families, communities, culture, and non-school organizations. Taken together, scholars, educators, and other stakeholders in education may find use in drawing upon feminist of color conceptions and literature of care and love to reimagine transformative possibilities for education research, policy, practice, and curriculum.
Article
Mike McLinden, Graeme Douglas, Rachel Hewett, Paul Lynch, and Jane Thistlethwaite
Vision impairment is a broad term that captures a wide range of reduction in visual function and includes ocular and cerebral conditions. Learners with vision impairment are a heterogeneous population within which there is a wide spectrum of characteristics, ability, and needs. The profile of these characteristics, including the nature and cause of the vision impairment, varies between countries: in high-income countries it is common for childhood vision impairment to coexist with other disabilities, including learning disabilities; in many low-income countries, higher numbers of children with vision impairment (where known) have either conditions associated with poverty and poor public health or refractive errors that could be corrected with corrective lenses. These differences have an important bearing upon the appropriate educational, social and/or health intervention.
Childhood vision impairment is associated with particular developmental and educational needs which are primarily linked to reduced access to learning opportunities, such as limited opportunities to explore their environment, learn through incidental experiences, and develop motor skills by observing and copying others. Key educational responses to these access needs suggest that educational input tends to be in two complementary forms: (a) access to learning emphasizes environment adjustment and accessible/universal approaches to teaching; (b) learning to access emphasizes targeted teaching provision supporting the child or young person to learn independence skills and develop personal agency to facilitate independent learning and social inclusion (and this includes specialist interventions such as mobility training, access technology, and low vison training).
It is recognized that practitioners involved in supporting this educational access must pay particular attention to balancing these approaches. Therefore, they must seek to target longer-term educational outcomes (associated with learning to access) as well as immediate access needs (associated with access to learning). Equitable teaching approaches for learners with vision impairment should explicitly focus on promoting a “balanced curriculum” throughout a given educational timeline to ensure that learners can participate within education as well as have opportunities to develop educational outcomes needed to succeed later in life. Specialist practitioners have a central role in overseeing such development, facilitating the progressive nature of curriculum access with an increased emphasis on promoting learning to access.
A bioecological systems perspective provides a powerful lens through which to analyze the various influences on achieving such a balance within different national and societal contexts. This perspective provides opportunities to consider implications within, and between, contexts and settings to ensure all learners with vision impairment have equitable opportunities to education through a holistic and lifelong learning perspective and are therefore suitably prepared for life within and outside school.
Article
Lisa Farley and Debbie Sonu
Childhood studies is an interdisciplinary area of theory and research comprised of intersecting fields that have evolved since the inception of childhood itself. Despite the pervasiveness of psychological frameworks that predominate early studies of childhood and that continue to dominate within teacher education programs, paradigmatic shifts within childhood studies have opened critical questions about the exclusive social norms, racial privileges, and unequal life chances maintained by the idea of childhood as a biologically determined and universal stage of life. Across a range of perspectives, critical scholarship in childhood studies begins with the idea that childhood is a social and historical construction tied to colonial discourses and ongoing injustices that have material effects on children’s lives. Drawing on the fields of history, sociology, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and educational theory, scholars of childhood show how childhood is inextricably bound to philosophical ideals, political forces, social constructs, and emotional conflicts. In identifying and interrogating the ways that race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality affect and limit meanings of childhood, scholars open new metaphors for rethinking social life, development, belonging, relationality, and existence as such.
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