Multiple resonances of curriculum as lived

“(T)here are many lived curricula,” Ted T. Aoki (1993) asserts, “as many as there are self and students, and possibly more” (p. 258). The articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry explore the “more” of the lived curriculum across a wide range of contexts—from the Pueblo communities of New Mexico, to local residents of southwestern Nicaragua’s coastal communities, to Pacific Indigenous communities in Canada’s west, and others. The authors in this issue further expose the “possibilities” of the multiplicity of curricula that teachers and students experience; for example, through insights from decolonial and new-materialist theories (The Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School and Sumida Huaman, this issue), through embracing Sara Ahmed’s (2010) notions of desire in the curriculum (Petrie and Darragh, this issue), and through deep inquiry into the complexities of dismantling settler colonialism (Schaefli, Godlewska & Rose, this issue) and anti-black racism (Nxumalo, Vintimilla, and Nelson, this issue). Aoki reinforces Deleuze’s insight that multiplicity grows “from the middle”—of experience, of practice, and of the landscapes inhabited by teachers and students. To hear the resonant sounds of the multiplicity of the lived curriculum in the midst of the landscapes of curriculum and instruction, Aoki (1993) invites scholars to listen to practicing educators who find themselves “in sites of openness between and among the multitude of curricula that grace the landscape” (p. 267). In turn, each of the contributions to this issue provide CI’s readers the opportunity to heed Aoki’s call by witnessing examples of lived curricula and its implications “from the middle” of theory and experience.

In this issue’s first article, “Indigenous core values and education: Community beliefs towards sustaining local knowledge,” The Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School and Elizabeth Sumida Huaman (Wanka/Quechua) write about the core values that are essential for the survival and wellbeing of Indigenous people with a focus on Pueblo communities. These values, or the curriculum of Pueblo life, are not static, but rather emerge in between multiple curricula. Specifically, as colonial pressures push against the borders of Indigenous land and life, Pueblo peoples draw upon the living curriculum through communal, familial, interpersonal, and personal life. They consolidate epistemologies and pathways of knowledge that sustain traditional values and resist settler colonial policies that have historically worked to erase these life ways.

Through a narrative approach, The Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School and Sumida Huaman collect individual and group interviews from the Community Institute held by the Leadership Institute (LI) to build a preliminary oral history of Pueblo core values. Established in 1997 by elders, community members, and intellectuals, the LI is a collective of 22 tribal nations, including 19 Pueblos in New Mexico, and is guided by themes of leadership, community service, public policy, and critical thinking. The Community Institute is shaped by Pueblo protocols that center a range of tribal issues through which participants are able to articulate Pueblo core values as part of Indigenous knowledge systems historically located in community practice. The discussion and insights gleaned from the institutes are utilized to inform education and policy in the present to give life to Pueblo values in the future.

The values that emerged from the narratives include love, respect, togetherness, reciprocity, gratitude, hard work, humility, and resiliency. Institute leaders further focussed discussion of core values in terms of “‘pathways’ as a reminder of both principles and sacrifices made by community members that involve core values and contribution” (p. 426). Two pathways of importance include Pueblo knowledge systems and retrieval pathways. Pueblo knowledge systems, itself a set of living curricula, are in between multiple curricula such as those of “culture, place, and language and are inextricable from the teacher—parents, grandparents, aunts, and extended family members” (p. 427). It is through this system multiple curricular relations Pueblo core values are materialized in this research. Retrieval pathways build on these knowledge systems to trace the relations of accessing knowledge. Understanding retrieval systems is of particular importance because they remember and are attentive to the external “colonial continuum” (p. 412) of assimilative practices that delimit Indigenous and Pueblo peoples reproduction of cultural values and community.

In the second article, pedagogistas Fikile Nxumalo, Cristina Vintimilla, and Narda Nelson examine the normalization of the concept of emergence across their respective early childhood educational contexts, all of which are influenced by Reggio Emilia constructivist curriculum and pedagogies. They problematize the concept of emergence as more than a humanist endeavour that follows the child, and consider the ethical and political commitments to curriculum and pedagogy. To accomplish this, they draw on Aoki’s (1993) concept of curriculum-as-lived and the project of decolonizing curriculum (Chilisa, 2012; Le Grange, 2016; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013), as a means of attending to the lived curriculum that does not emanate from children but nonetheless shapes the discourses of childhood. Specifically, in their respective contexts, they draw on “multiply located Indigenous knowledges” that bring to the fore the connectedness between the human and more-than-human worlds (Cajete, 2000; Le Grange, 2016; Watts, 2013), but they do so in ways that are attentive to the curricula of late capitalism, settler colonialism, and anti-Black racism.

In one breath, a child-centred curriculum assumes a critical stance by constructing the child is an agentic subject in the process of meaning and knowledge making. However, like the ideology of childhood, the idea of emergence also assumes a certain innocence through its reliance on positivist evolutionary discourses that build upon existing knowledge towards more (presumed) sophisticated forms of knowing. Through their critique, Nxumalo, Vintimilla, and Nelson “cultivat[e] the conditions of emergence” (p. 435) through practices that interrupt managerial concerns for everyday practice, human-centred consumptive practice, and settler colonial and anti-blackness practices.

Methodologically, the authors of this second article take a diffractive approach to account for their disparate research context across three separate early childhood centres, all located in western Canada on Coast and Straits Salish territories. Instead of trying to make their individual experiences fit and speak together, they intentionally overlap narratives with the aim of generating “productive interferences” (p. 437). The results are three narratives that problematize the concept of emergence in relation to curriculum and pedagogy separately, yet cohesively, to make readers question where both the limits of emergence and childhood lie in terms what knowledge deserves inclusion into the pristine space of early childhood education and childhood more broadly.

First, Cristina Vintimilla inquiry centres on what they call larval ideas, or “ideas that spark, emerge and stay around; often materially lingering within particular curricular materials” (p. 438). Interestingly, Vintimilla calls our attention to the fact that these ideas that emerge from child centred inquiry based pedagogies often fade beneath the surface of the everyday. They interpret these disconnections and losses as a consequence of institutional imperatives that are more concerned with managing children’s behaviours in accordance with neoliberal subjectivities. Vintimilla encourages educators to interrupt this slow death of presences barely brought into being by living in the tensions of emergence, intentions (neoliberal and institutional), and the possibility for something new and unexpected to form. These unexpected forms also extend to the teachers own subjectivities, and in turn, those of the students who they teach.

Narda Nelson continues grapple with tension through an inquiry that utilized tape - sticky, tacky, clingy tape - and the hyper-individualized neoliberal discourse around the politics of waste. Returning to Aoki’s (1993) understanding of curriculum-as-lived as a site of relationality, they attend to the more-than-human relations and agencies of tape. By considering the life of tape after its usefulness, Nelson draws attention to “children’s radical relationality with the places and spaces of early childhood curriculum-making” (p. 446); thus, enabling a decolonizing ethic that addresses the impacts of neoliberal consumptive activities.

Finally, Fikile Nxumalo reflects on place while engaging conversations about race with young children. Nxumalo grapples with the settler colonial and the anti-Black spatial boundaries of their practice along with the dominant conception of emergent curriculum, which locates the educator as outside of curriculum making, merely chasing the child’s interest. The problem of this perspective is that it continues to imagine the concept of emergent curriculum (and in turn childhood) as apolitical through the production of active more-than-human relations (such as space and place) as passive things for children’s discovery and learning. Nxumalo, disrupts these normalizations in practice by centering both Indigenous and Black connections to land and the settler processes of dispossession, effectively pushing the boundaries of what defines emergence and childhood.

The first and second articles in this issue provide compelling visions of the multiple possibilities of a curriculum that forges new and emerging pathways for communities’ values and epistemologies to take hold. As much as we strive to listen from the middle of the multiple resonances of curriculum-as-lived, it is not always possible to disregard the formidable presence of what Aoki (1993) calls “curriculum-as-plan” (p. 257) in how the lived experience of teaching and learning is organized. In his vista of the landscape of curriculum-as-plan, Aoki (1993) describes a kind of “chiseled motif of the striated linear instrumentalism” (p. 259) reflected in the fabric of official subject areas, course designs, and supervision frameworks. Beyond whether-or-not curriculum can be aptly likened to an instrument, the question arises as to who is playing the instrument and for what purpose; is it the instrument for curriculum planners and supervisors, or is it played by the teachers and students living the experience of the instrument’s calibration and dynamics? While Aoki calls for a displacement of the primacy of curriculum-as-plan, in many contexts students and teachers still have to grapple with their topography. The next two articles look at two such subject areas—English and Social Studies—to probe the multiplicity of lived curricula in desire and in omission.

Desire is a powerful force in the lived curriculum, often having little regard for the curriculum-as-plan. In “Desiring English in southwestern Nicaragua,” Gina Petrie and Janine Darragh explore how residents in southwestern Nicaragua experience desire for English, what images they associate with the English language, and what these might suggest for an English curriculum. English takes a central role in Nicaraguan policy and media messages about economic development. English instruction has become a powerful industry, reshaping the social and economic landscape in southwestern Nicaragua, where beaches, resorts, and tourist attractions increasingly define the daily lives and patterns of local Nicaraguan residents. Petrie and Darragh look through the lens of desire to unpack the nuanced layers infused with colonial, neoliberal, and globalizing influences. They draw on Suhanthie Motha’s and Lin’s (2014) argument that:

• at the center of every English language learning moment lies desire: desire for the language; for the identities represented by particular accents and varieties of English; for capital, power, and images that are associated with English: for what is believed to lie beyond the doors that English unlocks. (p. 332)

Desire is a powerful force in subjects’ experiences; it transcends or even defies rationality in a range of sometimes unexpected pursuits. Sarah Ahmed’s (2010) conceptualization of desire as the association with a perceived lack along with the energy to pursue that lack further enables Petrie and Darragh to consider how their participants make sense of the English instruction industry’s role in their lives.

In their conversations and interviews with participants, Petrie and Darragh repeatedly heard references to a number of images that evoked some of the deeply-held attitudes and meta-narratives about English-speakers and English language learning in southwestern Nicaragua. Their analysis organizes these images. The trope of an open door, for example, speaks to common narratives that the ability to speak English opens doors to better employment opportunities in tourism, business, and shipping, both in Nicaragua and elsewhere. The participants’ own experiences belie the optimistic assumption that English learning leads to widespread economic development, as Nicaraguan communities are further marginalized, and as successful Nicaraguan English speakers feel disillusioned by the “linguistic factory labor” (p. 463) that they find in call centres and resorts. Petrie and Darragh examine other such images and tropes representing participants’ desires for English: the desire to see themselves as “ambassadors” for English-speaking visitors to Nicaragua; the desired image of “a family speaking English,” in which younger learners teach English to older relatives at home and strengthen bonds of family cohesion; the desire for international friendships and a different perspective of the world; and the desire for proximity to the spaces and citizenship of the Global North, symbolically represented in the image of “the beach.” Each of these images illustrate the powerful, layered and multiple operations of desire, from the acceptance of a perceived lack, to identifying the object that will fulfil that lack, to the specific strategies that participants pursue in learning English to attain their aims (Ahmed, 2010).

While the specifics of Petrie and Darragh’s article speak to the conditions of English language learning in southwestern Nicaragua, their findings echo broader concerns about the English language learning industry globally. Their turn towards the implications of their research for curriculum, then, is both fitting and fraught. On the one hand the authors posit that curriculum should respond to learners’ desires––learning English, in this case. On the other hand, however, Petrie and Darragh are aware of the dangers of extending the hegemony of English dominance and linguistic imperialism, noting that educators responding to desires for English can easily threaten damage, loss, and disappointment to their students and communities. In treading the precariousness of this educational conundrum, the authors respond to Lin’s (2013) call for Global South as method: “to discover a pathway to incorporate desires that originate from the experiences, realities, and wisdom of those teaching and learning in Nicaragua” (Petrie & Darragh, this issue, p. 469). Their suggestions for how to do this are creative and challenge existing trends in international English education. They advocate for a deeply situated approach to English curriculum, taking a more realistic exploration of the “perceived lack” that students are identifying in their lives, beyond accepting commonly held tropes at face value.

Social studies in curriculum-as-plan is often a precarious landscape, where monolithic topographical motifs are not only structural but epistemological. In historical and social meta-narratives, what is omitted from curriculum-as-plan can be just as effective as what is present. Ignorance is an active process that is taught and learned, reinforcing the living curricula of entrenched colonial mentalities. In the final article, Laura M. Schaefli, Anne M.C. Godlewska, and John Rose examine how curriculum can instil ignorance as a way of knowing in their article “Coming to know Indigeneity: Epistemologies of ignorance in the 2003–2015 Ontario, Canadian and World Studies curriculum.” The authors analyze representations of settler colonialism and Indigenous peoples in curricular documents and textbooks that constitute Ontario’s social studies, Canadian Studies, and World Studies stream. In response to calls to increase representations of Indigenous peoples in Ontario school curriculum, the province of Ontario’s Ministry of Education sought input from First Nations and Métis educators for the documents that the authors explore over this timeframe. Yet, as their analysis indicates, this input may not have been enough to counter the myriad ways in which Indigenous peoples are positioned, framed, or omitted through the Ontario Ministry of Education’s approved historical account.

The mechanisms that Schaefli, Godlewska and Rose reveal to perpetuate an epistemology of ignorance, in this case, range from the subtle to the overt. For example, in the documents under examination, the settler voice is naturalized through the omission of Indigenous territories, philosophies, and perspectives, privileging modern and capitalist narratives of progress. European settlers are treated as active agents in history, while First Nations peoples are presented as passive sufferers of destruction and loss wrought by the Europeans, implying a lopsided hierarchy of cultures. In this curricular meta-narrative, multiculturalism is framed as the endpoint of justice in the modern nation-state and in the world. Among these and other examples, the authors also make observations about how textbook content that does address Indigenous peoples is often framed as optional, relegated to pull-out boxes, end-of-chapter extensions, and image captions.

Certainly, these movements towards innocence, oversimplification, and omission are nothing new in North American history curricula (Calderon, 2014). Yet in this case, the Ministry of Education’s ostensible inclusion of First Nations and Métis voices in various stages of curriculum development seems to have only scratched the surface. As noted by the authors, “that these strategies are expressed most clearly in textbooks reviewed by Indigenous educators suggests the depth of investments in settler innocence” (p. 492). Clearly, deeper and sustained involvement of First Nations and Métis communities, underlaid with profound respect for Indigenous perspectives, is required to dismantle the entrenched colonial mentalities in Ontario social studies. Educators who engage these – or similar – social studies curricula would benefit from carefully considering Schaefli, Godlewska and Rose’s suggestions for re-centering Indigenous content and questioning the past and present treatment of relevant practices, policies, places, and peoples.

Listening for the Resonances of Multiple Futures Now

As the articles in this issue of CI demonstrate, the pedagogical encounter is inherently a state of living in tension between social structures that shape everyday relations of living with others. These relational spaces of multiple competing and convening intentions and desires create the tensions that Aoki (1993) says produce the very “aliveness of the situation” (p. 162). This living locus is one of despair, hope, and significantly, the place of futurity––or, as Tuck and Guess (2017) put it, a “henceforward [that] is the start of the future now” (p. 54, cited in Nxumalo, Vintimilla, & Nelson, this issue). What then does it mean to listen for and practice with the resonances of multiple futures now? What does it mean to live Indigenous, Black, Brown, feminist, disabled, and queer futures now through curriculum and pedagogy?

The articles in this collection are exemplars of living multiple futures through research now. Take for instance The Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School and Sumida Huaman’s (this issue) oral history project, which identifies a range of core values from the middle of the colonial continuum and in between tribes, communities, land, traditional stories, and individuals. These values are used by institute members to create a future for Indigenous and Pueblo epistemologies and people in the now, against a present and future of colonization. Similarly, Nxumalo, Vintimilla, and Nelson (this issue) draw directly on Aoki (1993) and the relational coming-into-being of curriculum-as-lived by creating the conditions of emergence that directly challenge a normalized conception of emergent curriculum with humanism's child at the centre. Across multiple yet overlapping living sites they disrupt neoliberal, settler colonial, and anti-Black curricula normalized by the faceless entity of the child to imagine and practice emergence as a set of ethico-political relations that move in between human and more-than-human relations.

Relatedly, Schaefli, Godlewska and Rose’s (this issue) work interrogates how the institutionalized curriculum-as-plan works to subsume the multiplicity of the lived, which in fact delimits particular futures. This happens when the voices of Indigenous peoples are included though a logic of colonial recognition that often views multiculturalism as the end goal of just society building (Richardson, 2011). This practice is further complicated and depicted as wholly unethical when viewed through a lens of epistemological ignorance in which settlers actively choose to forget Indigenous presence. However, Schaefli, Godlewska and Rose offer their critical narrative from in between their researcher positionalities as settlers and their commitments to Indigenous futurity by critiquing the continued erasure of Indigenous presence amidst the ongoing effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Finally, for Petrie and Darragh the middle is located at the level of the psychic and cultural registers in which desire for English is fantasized as able to fulfil the linguistic lack “inherent” to their Nicaraguan participants. This lack of course is not inherent, but rather it is constructed at the level of the subject through colonial processes and ongoing linguistic imperialism. In turn, they attend to yet another tomorrow - today - by seeking a “global South as method,” which we think of as finding a new localized middle from which to grow curriculum that is both resistive to imperialism and has the potential to bring into being new forms of life.

The narratives in this collection all emerge from the middle of participants lives, researchers’ positionalities and research contexts. They remain in the middle of discourse, scholarship and critical inquiry. We hope this issue continues to produce “productive interferences” (p. 437) for readers as they grapple with the tensions of researching and teaching for a more just tomorrow, today. As Aoki (1993) reminds us, the aim of pedagogy is not to overcome the tensions of the curriculum. Rather, it is from in-between these multiple tensions that we are called to dwell in difficult pedagogies that work diligently to remember existing and forge new critical pathways of living and being in the world.