Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

David Hare's (2006) Broadway play, The Vertical Hour turns on this: In combat medicine, there's this moment ... after a disaster, after a shooting--there's this moment, the vertical hour, when you can actually be of some use. (qtd., David...

One cannot build the house of the self to suit or kill the mother. One must detach. --Mary Aswell Doll, Like Letters in Running Water In 1969, a few months before my 15th birthday, I shut the bathroom door and very meticulously cut my wrists...

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. --Russell Banks Circus as Prologue All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their...

Introduction: A Little Intimate Intertext 'Intertext' reminds us that between the formal texts of curriculum is another kind of life, the life that mediates, announces, repudiates, or cajoles curriculum formalities. This is the life that...

All the questions I need to ask; the stories I have yet to hear. The heart's two chambers--everything I most desire, everything I most fear. (Keefer 291) What touched the human heart and intellect a thousand years ago, a decade ago, will touch them...

New York City's first-ever "Teen Slam" took place in April 1999. Thirty high-school aged poets competed in a mock-Olympic war of words, each poet's performance ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 by judges picked from the audience. In keeping with the principles...

My Welsh stepmother would instruct, "Press Button B" when I shouted from one room to another. Yelling, like chewing with my mouth open, was rude. "Button B" was the button in the red call box, in the British Isles of an era long before now. Then, one...

Plan B So I'm not a famous writer, which is what I always knew I would be. But at least I teach the novels and poems of famous writers, to students who may not spend a lot of energy dwelling on the scarlet letter's many shaded meanings, or on the...

FRHJ-Ed Werner Class of 1982 Quakertown Community High School The People are suffering, and are likely to suffer more; where is the poet who is the one [person] needful to rouse the nation to a sense of duty and inspire the people with hope?--Oscar...

You are a super sweet girl and a lot of fun. It was so fun sitting next to you in English. You are cute and nice. Thanks for the memories you pot smoker. In this article we excavate the meanings of our past identities, our memories, the...

We are coursing through the vicissitudes of a new millennium where epistemological certainty is no longer taken for granted, and yet, we must still have some empirical and conceptual foundations upon which to build knowledge after the paradigm of the...

Knowledge structures as "moments of learning" are the minimal parameters of what we know that legitimize knowledge. (1) Not only because the reality of a temporal disjunction engenders liminal perspectives on knowledge, but because the nature of episteme...

Philip Glass is a scandal in the classical music world. He publishes too much. His music is not intellectual enough. Over and over the same chordal progressions do not count as music. Glass is not a composer. Glass cannot write an opera or music for...

In the fall of 1985, I went off to college where I had the good fortune to meet many fascinating people, but none more captivating than Roni, Durban, and Abner, three South African students, each with his own stirring story of exile. I was attracted...

Since the fallout from September 11, 2001, curriculum studies in Canada has become more concerned with education and empire, and pedagogy in times of war. My concern is that without memory, without history we might imagine that empire and education,...

Long before Freud formulated a basic distinction between civilization and its discontents (1930/1961), Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses as a protest against the state and its social laws. Published in the eighth year of the Common Era (8 C.E.), The Metamorphoses...

Throughout this talk I will use the language of phenomenology to interrupt the language of schooling, to get back to the things themselves, you might say. (1) As I make this choice of this language for this talk, I must tell you that I am on a somewhat...

Pre-Facing the Situation Identity politics remains the dominant discourse in postmodern societies despite its many limitations. Historically, such a stance has been justified by the often quoted, but highly misunderstood concept "strategic essentialism,"...

I It is necessary that a man should dwell with solicitude on, and cleave with affection to, the things which he wishes to remember.--Thomas Aquinas, paraphrasing the Ad Herennium (cited in Yates 1974, 75) I've recently been reading Mary Carruthers'...

Preamble I first met David Jardine in 1993 as an undergraduate student at the University of Calgary. At the time, I was enrolled in a required course entitled "Methods in Early Childhood Education." Having heard that this class was typically quite...

As I sat and listened to an extraordinary assortment of paper presentations at the April 2006 AERA Annual Meeting, I could not help but notice the many conference denizens who spent their time multi-tasking throughout the sessions, listening to speakers...

Philosophy consists of offering reassurance to children. That is, if one prefers, of taking them out of childhood, of forgetting about the child, or, inversely, but by the same token, of speaking first and foremost for that little boy within us, of...

The child is ... both beginning and end, an initial and a terminal creature. The initial creature existed before man [sic] ... and the terminal creature will be when man is not.--C. G. Jung For the past few decades, educational theorists have looked...

How not to speak, today, of the university? ... it is impossible, now more than ever, to dissociate the work we do, within one discipline or several, from a reflection on the political and institutional conditions of that work. --Jacques Derrida,...

Say Cockney fire shooter. We bus' gun Cockney say tea leaf. We just say sticks man You know dem have a wedge while we have corn Say Cockney "Be my first son' we just say Gwaan! --Paul Gilroy, There Aint No Black in the Union Jack, p. 196 'the...

[T]he future of social foundations of education is already intertwined with cultural studies in education. (Steve Tozer, 2001, p. 304) This essay situates Cultural Studies in Education (CSE) as "in-the-making" (Ockman, 2000). Its tale is of contradictory...

It is time to recognize that the true tutors of our children are not schoolteachers or university professors but filmmakers, advertising executives, and pop culture purveyors. Disney does more than Duke, Spielberg outweighs Stanford, MTV trumps MIT....

In this art of study, each component of culture has a part to play, and every component of art, literature, science, and thought can be seen as educational in a rigorous sense. --Robert McClintock (1971, 165) The disciplinary specularity of the...

"And the number one sign that you're not the most popular guy in school?" "#1? How the heck would I know? I'm like the coolest kid in school. Gosh!" --Jon Heder, appearing as Napoleon Dynamite on The Late Show with David Letterman In the past...

This paper profiles research that developed out of an interest in youth, youth identity formation, and how people engage in the process of place-making (Massey, 1995). This project examines how students use the facilities of an after-school computer...

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Summer 2006 In his critical reflection on Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire proclaims in Pedagogy of Hope (1992), "I cannot understand human existence, and the struggle needed to improve it, apart from...

Challenges, posed by Darling-Hammond (1997), require that schools in America do something they have never done before--that is educate all children. Building a system of schools that can educate people for contemporary society requires two things...

Introduction In American social studies textbooks, the chapters about the critical period between 1861-1877 in our nation's history often characterizes life in the United States dichotomously between the northern states and the southern states....

Pulling with his left hand and pushing with his right, Arch Gunnard docked the hound's tail as quickly and as easily as if he were cutting a willow switch in the pasture to drive the cows home with. The dog sprang forward with the release...

New collective assemblages of enunciation are beginning to form an identity out of fragmentary ventures, at times risky initiatives, trial and error experiments; different ways of seeing and of making the world, different ways of being and...

Introduction If we acknowledge something like a postmodern turn, as Jameson (1981) and Lyotard (1984) do, then we must foreground the constructedness of culture and its manifestations in curriculum studies. Since at least the early 1970s, the crisis...

If there were no fold, or if the fold had a limit somewhere--a limit other than itself as a mark, margin, or march (threshold, limit, or border)--there would be no text. But if the text does not, to the letter, exist, then there is perhaps...

From this window seat, I can watch the large woodpecker as he circles the tree drilling holes in search of insects. I'm told that these birds are a natural enemy to the Pine Bark Beetles that are infesting the Ponderosa Pine Forests around Flagstaff....

Encyclopedia of Desire Encyclopedia of desire multi-syllabic interrogating soul flesh love of desire for desire's sake. Keenly alive ruptured yearning Split crevices open seep in juices twirling mystery. Apple bound. Loving the longing the page before written the...

Introduction I first presented a version of this article at the Bergamo Conference in October of 2000. I shared a session with a scholar whose paper addressed some of the controversial public issues that led to the now infamous Bergamo split. The...

Postindustrial society exhibits signs of postmodern culture. Not only because the reality of a temporal disjunction between past and present engenders liminal perspectives on knowedge, but because the nature of episteme becomes redefined in accordance...

As an international person, every time I fill out any official form, I am reminded of my status: an alien. Studying and teaching in a foreign country as an alien, I position myself in "a third space" (Wang, 2004) which embraces contradictions, ambiguity,...

A Song for occupations! In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find the developments, And find the eternal meanings. (Walt Whitman, p. 187) We live in a world that is more and more about the measurable productivity...

By the time I entered kindergarten my family had been without a home, but not homeless, for a year. We lived in a church basement located in a small poor community in Eastern Kentucky and survived on what churchgoers generously provided. Both of my...

"Postmodernism," as a loose collection of theoretical strategies, research methods, and political positions, has enjoyed a remarkably fast rise to prominence and a similarly remarkable range of influence within academia. Nearly every major discipline...

Spring semester always seems soooo long. I cannot recall what I was reading at the time, but something spoke to me of big cities and the longing for home. For me, home will always be the big city. But I live in Slooowvannah Georgia where everything...

1 At the end of each semester, my dear friend and colleague, Cowboy Mitch, (1) offers his class a choice. Standing before the classroom, he lifts his arms and opens his hands, palms up, and assumes the image of a balance scale. Bending to one side...

For archetypal psychology, the vertical direction refers to interiority as a capacity within all things.--James Hillman (1985, 29) Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.--William Shakespeare (MSND 3.2) My first epigraph (above) speaks of...

Laying Down Invisible Boundaries In the field of education, we tend to focus on three types of narratives: Narratives of despair (which usually describe deficit models of what one particular individual or group[s] of individuals is lacking or not...

Introduction In honor of Labor Day 2002, Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Blanco made an announcement that was carried by local media throughout the state publicizing the ongoing archeological research at the slave quarters site at Rosedown...

We have been taught the holy doctrine that democracy lies in the rule of law, that the general interest "sublimates" particular interests, that the constitutional functions of the State are responsible before the generality, and so many other similar...

When I was a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, I learned from my parents what was acceptable and unacceptable in our home. One message I received among many was clear: anger, yelling, fighting, and even disagreements were forbidden. Voices were never...

Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 50s created a revolution in the visual art world through an exploration of the subconscious, new creative approaches to painting, and a reliance on spontaneity-the very things that can breathe life into contemporary...

For 15 to 20 years the field of Early Childhood Education has engaged with postmodern, poststructural, feminist identity issues. Many of us would even propose that the field has followed the lead of the curriculum theorists toward reconceptualization...

The concerns of this paper regard the content of coursework for Masters degree students in Early Childhood Education in Norway. This has developed from a local site of otherness to Anglo-American practices and theories. By considering Norwegian curriculum,...

A glance at the table of contents might suggest thematic disarray. Worldly encounters, passionate attachments to subjection, Chick-fil-A, the public good and "government," "thugs" and "gangstas," transnational queers, and globalized identities inhabit...

When we ask another for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for that other to see us as we are, as we have always been, as we were prior to the encounter. Rather, in the asking, we are already becoming something new, since we are...

Within and outside educational settings the heterosexual/homosexual binary continues to be sustained by those who identify as straight and those who identify as non-heterosexual. This binary tends to reinscribe the familiar "knowledge" that there are...

"Character education" represents a long-standing staple of U.S.A. schools. From the "Old Deluder Satan" Law of 1647 to The New England Primer in the 18th century to McGuffey Readers from the late 1830s (and well into the 1920s), the idea of transmitting...

The movements to privatize American public education are justified and contested by renewed calls for the "public good." The public good, and its derivatives, the "common good" or the "public interest," are deemed to benefit from the privatization...

Introduction So the street becomes the arena where the 'growing up' game is played out, a social space and time of apparent freedom from the more insidious forms of parental control and consent. Here the peer group assembles itself to...

Back in the late 1980s, as a student teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) to immigrants, refugees and international students in the United States, I was eager to read something, anything, to help me think through the intriguing teaching dilemmas...

Until working on this article, I had not thought about the ways in which both metaphorically and quite literally, I am a product of globalization. When my parents met in Jakarta, my mother was an executive secretary for an American firm located in...

In this issue of JCT, The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, we begin in the company of Henry David Thoreau (2000). Thoreau remarks, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see...

Introduction Feminist scholars and social activists have, over the past decade, noted the world wide antifeminist backlash aimed at clawing back the gains toward equity and social participation that women had made over the thirty years since the...

Even though common use of the term may suggest the opposite--that resistance is a response or reaction--resistance is primary with respect to power. --Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude. It is alarming and nauseating to see...

Can we now perhaps find the place where strangeness was present, the place where a person succeeded in setting himself free? --Paul Celan Background We and our children are living at the point in human history where, within perhaps...

I. Introduction Curricularists' thinking is evolving from a focUS on curriculum as a phenomenon of schooling to curriculum as a more pervasive social and cultural phenomenon. As a result, the curriculum field has largely relinquished its...

The digital image is all around us in the most obvious places. Every time we enter into the movie theater or turn on the DVD player, the digital image is present. Vin Diesel that master of elocution and complex conversations would not have a lucrative...

Julian of Norwich (1342-1413) the medieval English mystic and anchoress was a profound and radical thinker. Her book the Divine Revelations of Love, written in 1373, refuses any linear or quick reading. Meanings are not in her text, but in the experience...

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I present two images for you, so you may see for yourselves that our success in Iraq is indeed that: the images speak for themselves. Image one: This one is on the cover of your morning paper, if you will just take...

Words, slogans, sentences, which were selected from daily newspapers and especially from advertisements in them, formed the basis of [Hugo Ball's cutup] poems in 1917 ... and curiously enough, the ... inspired vocabules conceived and gave...

Dear Reader: I propose to consider the nature of aesthetics through the perspectives of three contemporaries of early 20th century England (Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941, Clive Bell, 1881-1964, and Sylvia Gosse, 1881-1968), with claim to an intimate...

The latest election cycle is over. No more incessant smear campaigns, no more macho discussions over who should be proud of their purple hearts and who is fit for command. Now we are only left with serious questions. Can our democracy survive when...

Introduction I just got your virus baby so sad to see you rot away what in the world is this peeling catch a breath and leave me seething It'll get you in the end, it's god's revenge Oh I know I'm getting really lean But I prefer...

Paul was my student. Like any good student, Paul has developed his own identity as an academic. He has taken Michel Serres' words to heart when the French philosopher/scientist wrote that "formerly, the slave who took the noble child to school was...

On a wild goose chase Laws of nature they just can't face Ambition is to mash up the place Who shall save the human race? These times of science and technology This world is an unconscious lavatory Using my people as guinea pigs ...