The absent-present curriculum, or how to stop pretending not to know

That curriculum is far more than the policy documents and lesson plans that ostensibly guide the work that teachers do is a truism of curriculum studies. There is a plethora of concepts and frameworks for examining the many different aspects of what counts as curriculum and what shapes, in some way or another, educational experience. As editors, we are often struck not just by the range of concepts, but also by the range of definitions of concepts such as the “hidden” curriculum (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2017). This broad constellation of concepts and frameworks helps us to understand that there is more to curriculum than the curriculum, and that there are curricular forces that shape educational experience in far more profound ways than what is expressed in official documents and other written texts. As educators, however, we are often pressed by the exigencies of the institutions in which we work as well as by the political urgency of the work we do. Whether we work in universities or schools, or whether our work is situated in communities, or focused on global movements, attending to the absent presences of curriculum is often not just challenging, but at times beyond our capacities, resources, and time constraints. And thus, we often find ourselves working as if other forces were not having a profound effect on our work as educators, and even, to borrow from the title of the opening article in this issue, “pretending not to know” that such forces exist (see Okello, this issue).

The four articles in this issue of CI offer us a lens through which to consider dimensions of curriculum that are not just hidden from our usual approaches or perceptions, but that profoundly shape educational experience. These absent presences, like elephants in a room, are often so overwhelmingly powerful in shaping educational experience that to acknowledge them might lead us to give up on any attempt to counter or resist their force. Racism, sexism, genderism, ableism, labour exploitation, and colonialism, to name only a few of the ideologies and social processes that shape educational experiences, are so ubiquitous and yet often so stealth that as educators we can feel compelled to act as if they are not there; we might pretend that we don’t even know how they impact us and ignore their absent-presence. Whether for the sake of efficiency, practicality, or to manage the sheer feeling of powerlessness in the face of such forces, we might pretend not to know they are even there at all and proceed as if otherwise.

This urge to pretend not to know, to act as if only the (official) curriculum mattered, can be understood as an affective response to the carceral logic of educational institutions, as Wilson Kwamogi Okello argues in the article that opens this issue of Curriculum Inquiry. In his article, titled “‘What Are You Pretending Not to Know?’: Un/doing Internalized Carcerality Through Pedagogies of the Flesh,” Okello draws on the specificity of his experience enacting Black masculinity in relationship to schooling to show how “curriculum disciplines Black subjects into thinking and feeling registers that reinscribe and reinforce their dispossession” (p. 407). This carceral logic, Okello argues, is a function of whiteness, which organizes how educators engage students and make curricular choices, as well as their expectations of who can speak and act and their interpretations of what is said and how. These expectations and choices are internalized by students, who must learn to navigate the carceral logic of schooling in order, merely, to stay alive. While frequently forceful and explicit, the violence of carcerality is most often subtle and enforced through intimate encounters that shape how Black students come to see and feel about themselves. Deeply affecting the interiority of Black life, whiteness operates through carcerality to ensure “that Blackness and Black bodies remain exceptions to the naturalness of order and instruction through the perpetuation of whiteness in education contexts” (p. 410). Pretending not to know, argues Okello, is an internalized response to this logic, through which ignorance is projected onto Black subjects and then internalized and enacted, at best, as a survival strategy and, at worst, as a way of being.

Acknowledging the specificity of how carceral logics shape the formation of Black subjectivity, we can extend the analysis of how ideological formations operate institutionally to curtail dissent and that demand that educators, too, pretend not to know. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, instantiated a wide array of institutional responses that for many educators (indeed, for many caregivers/caretakers and students) would have been unthinkable under “normal” circumstances. For example, most teachers knew that a sudden move to online teaching would be incredibly disruptive and unsustainable, and that it would exacerbate existing inequalities. Yet, we proceeded to adapt our teaching to the online environment, pretending not to know the consequences. And now, as we respond to the call to “return to normal,” we once again are asked to pretend that we don’t know, on the one hand, that the pandemic is not over and thus “returning to normal” is not possible and, on the other, that there is nothing “normal” about the way schooling was before the pandemic. This is the argument that Maria Karmiris puts forward in the second article in this issue of CI, titled “Cripistemologies and Resisting the Calls to Return to Normal.” Karmiris focuses on the ways in which the calls to “return to normal” require that educators pretend not to know all the ways in which what is understood as “normal” is a profoundly unequal and exclusionary system. Suggesting that we should reject the call for normalcy, Karmiris invites us to ponder whether what we accepted as normal prior to the pandemic ever actually left, or if it is “merely manifesting in a new iteration of itself” (p. 427). In short, behind the call to “return to normal” amidst the COVID-19 pandemic is the absent presence of the unequal conditions and structural inequalities that constitute the very idea of what is “normal.”

At the intersection of critical disability and queer studies, Karmiris applies a cripistemological framework in order to reveal that which we otherwise have to ignore or pretend not to know—the ways in which what is deemed “normal” is always-already imbued with inequality and exclusion. Tracing “the ways normal and the calls for its return are a component part of how normal reforms itself and perpetually re-establishes its hegemony within modern schooling” (p. 428), Karmiris focuses on the ironic ways in which inclusion is expressed and mobilized as a key commitment of schooling, particularly within the context of calls to return to a kind of normal that was anything but inclusive. The practice of physical distancing, ubiquitous as a way to manage the spread of COVID-19, has always been part of the “normal” experience of students with disabilities, who often find themselves segregated within schools. Because the distance that disability marks is constitutive of what is deemed “normal,” it becomes an absent presence as we return to the institutional portioning of space and how bodies move (and feel) within the “normal” organization of school. This carceral logic disproportionally affects Black, Indigenous, and other youth of colour, who have always found themselves distanced—physically but also psychically and affectively, as Okello shows, from what is deemed as “normal” in schools. Karmiris shows that current approaches to inclusion, shaped by neoliberal policies that prioritize individual choice, do nothing to address the systemic structures that enforce exclusion, even in the absence of a crisis like a global pandemic. Indeed, as Karmiris suggests,

Even as there are calls for normalcy’s return, individuals and communities who disproportionately experience the everyday impacts of systemic racism, classism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy are acutely aware that normalcy thrives in times of crisis in a manner that reinforces the taken-for-granted assumption that some lives matter more than others. (p. 435)

In other words, while pretending not to know that the education system is exclusionary and exerts a profound violence on some students might be an option for those of us in privileged positions, for others, knowing and acting on that knowledge is a matter of life and death. Still, sometimes the actions taken in response to that violence are paradoxically a kind of lesser evil that might still require us to ignore, or at least learn to live with, the limitations of the available solutions. For instance, the move online during the pandemic laid bare the many limitations of virtual learning, which in many ways slowed the neoliberal urge to digitize schooling in the name of choice, individuation, and market profit. Yet, for entirely different reasons, some parents and caretakers/caregivers of racialized students and/or students with disabilities have found in virtual or hybrid learning a way of “keeping the school at a physical distance from their children” (p. 437). Such a strategy demonstrates that those who care for Black, Indigenous, and other students of colour and/or students with disabilities are keenly aware of the violence that schooling perpetrates on their children. At the same time, it also requires that caretakers/caregivers, in a sense, pretend not to know or at least partially ignore the significant limitations of online learning as well as how it produces its own exclusions and delimits the pathways that students can take through their learning experiences.

In the third article in this issue, titled “Curriculum Meets Platform: A Reconceptualisation of Flexible Pathways in Open and Higher Education,” authors Lanze Vanermen, Joris Vlieghe, and Mathias Decuypere take us behind the architecture of an online education platform and give us insight into the ways in which the platform itself directs how learning occurs. The authors give us a view behind the curtain to reveal how the platform wizard plays an active role in shaping the curriculum and the learning that takes place through the user’s navigation of the system. At the intersection between science and technology studies and curriculum theorizing, Vanermen, Vlieghe, and Decuypere reveal the active role of the “platform,” otherwise an absent presence that profoundly shapes curriculum. The authors counter the taken-for-granted assumption that online educational platforms are “natural, inactive tools that merely enable access to distance learning,” suggesting instead that such tools have “the potential to act and enact educational practices in multiple ways and with varying intensities” (p. 446).

The otherwise invisible role of the educational platform makes its absence present through five processes that shape how users navigate the learning process and that create their own forms of exclusion and inequality. First, Vanermen, Vlieghe, and Decuypere show how the system “prescribes” a curriculum that, while ostensibly flexible, in fact constrains what content users have access to and how they interact with it. Second, the authors describe how the system “enrolls” the user into a formalized learning trajectory that undermines the presumably “free” and “open” structures of the system. Third, the platform “mobilizes” educational resources in ways that are also prescriptive and that, in the end, emulate “the transmission-based and instructor-centred format of extended courses (xMOOCs) in which the learner takes a more passive role” (p. 457). Fourth, the platform “evaluates” the user’s performance through a set of automated feedback and accreditation systems that increasingly “normalize” what counts as success, producing exclusions rather than the inclusions that open online education promises. Based on the first four, the platform “bundles, un-bundles, and re-bundles” the educational resources available, constructing a curriculum based on a set of automated and depersonalized processes that are entirely distant from the user (p. 461). In the end, contrary to popular assumptions, “learners do not simply ‘choose’ resources to make a flexible curriculum, the platform equally makes learners choose and directs their running of one or more courses” (p. 463). In its absent presence, the platform constitutes a curriculum that is shaped as much by what it includes as by what it excludes, and its underlying architecture enforces a “hidden” logic that, as users, we must pretend not to know if we are to embrace its promise as a solution to educational problems.

If the “platform curriculum,” as Vanermen, Vlieghe, and Decuypere propose, is an “effect” of socio-technical practices that “limits the learner’s engagement with educational materials” (p. 464), there are also wider, more systematic and violent forces that not only limit access to curriculum, but that in effect erase and aim to destroy entire bodies of knowledge. Colonial violence, in particular, which aims to destroy the ways of being of those being colonized, must also erase any archival traces, not just of the knowledge produced by a people, but of their very existence, in order to pretend not to know that they ever existed. In the fourth and final article in this issue, titled “Preserving Palestine: Visual Archives, Erased Curriculum, and Counter-Archiving Amid Archival Violence in the Post-Oslo Period,” authors Chandni Desai and Rula Shahwan draw attention to this colonial violence through what they call the “erased curriculum.” For Desai and Shahwan, the active and violent erasure of cultural artifacts, along with the histories and memories that are materialized through such artifacts, is a key strategy of the settler colonial state for making Native people disappear and producing the illusion that they were never there to begin with. And yet, even as the settler colonial state attempts to erase the cultural archive, cultural production persists as an absent (and often not so absent) presence that, precisely because it is difficult to pretend not to know, becomes a critical site for resistance.

This resistance, of course, is contested, particularly because Native people are not homogenous, and often there are multiple, competing, and even contradictory strategies for confronting settler violence. In Palestine, as Desai and Shahwan show, “although the ruling institutions of governance—the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas—claim to preserve Palestinian collective memory, they neglect to preserve materials that contradict or undermine their ideologies and their class and/or religious interests” (p. 470). As they compete for control over the narrative of Palestinian history, these factions have also recruited the cultural archive as an important source of politics and a strategy for maintaining their hegemony. In this way, political factions also produce curricular erasures, even as they seek to resist settler violence, creating their own absent presences and enforcing their own forgettings. Yet, in the face of the erasures produced by these competing political forces, as Desai and Shahwan also document, individuals and organizations on the ground “are enacting a politics of reclamation to trace, preserve, claim, and repatriate Palestinian archives, effectively practising a form of counter-archiving” (p. 470).

Drawing on narrative and oral-history interviews with individuals who have been directly involved in the struggle to protect the visual archive during the post-Oslo period, Desai and Shahwan trace the trajectories of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) National Archive and the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation. They pay special attention to local and international efforts, including a wide range of individuals who support the Palestinian cause, to locate, protect, and disseminate archival materials. These efforts to “decolonize” the archive, as the authors demonstrate, are curtailed not just by the sheer violence of the settler colonial state, but also by the ways in which neoliberal ideology shapes the ground of contestation, particularly among competing ruling elites. The authors decry,

the lack of political will to support archival projects, the absence of funding for archiving initiatives, the disunity among Palestinian political factions, the ongoing Israeli settler-colonial occupation of Palestine, and the lack of access to Israeli archives where Palestinian materials continue to be sequestered. (p. 485)

In light of these forces that attempt to enforce a willful forgetting—a pretending not to know—of the Palestinian visual archive, the authors insist on the need for “oral-history projects that document, preserve, and digitize Palestinian narratives and testimonials” (p. 485). They document some of these efforts, underscoring how these are becoming critical sites for countering curricular erasure.

Orality, in fact, is a crucial strategy for naming the presences that otherwise are meant to remain absent and silenced and, in that process, resisting the demand to pretend not to know. By speaking what is meant to be silent we can counter the enforcement of forgetting and thus a crucial operation of power (see Mills, 2014). In addition to shedding light on four different contexts and different aspects of what is least evident—yet perhaps most important—about how curriculum is made (or unmade) and how educational experience unfolds, each of the authors also invites us to stop pretending not to know. Each author offers both theoretical and pragmatic strategies not just to reveal and understand what is meant to remain invisible, but to act against the logics and orders that regulate learning and becoming.

The last two articles in the issue, while addressing entirely different processes in quite different contexts, both point to the importance of different kinds of archival work necessary for revealing the absent presences that shape curriculum. Desai and Shahwan demonstrate the importance of both oral narrative and visual archives for recovering and retelling histories that are otherwise slated for destruction, insisting on the urgency of counter-archival projects that seek to resist colonial erasure. “For those who work to reclaim, preserve, trace, and repatriate such materials,” Desai and Shahwan argue, “the knowledge that is of the ‘most worth’ is derived from the anti-colonial stories, memories, and histories that reject dominant colonial and imperial versions of history” (p. 485). They offer several examples of attempts to recover and recreate these archives and discuss the challenges of what they call “archival decolonization,” noting the centrality of the archive for struggles over land. Shifting context, Vanermen, Vlieghe, and Decuypere show us how the traces left when users navigate online learning resources create a digital archive that helps us understand how online platforms shape educational experience and “how technologies make curriculum alongside humans” (p. 463). Challenging the premise that online learning increases choice and encourages self-direction, the authors demonstrate instead that the platform itself works as an absent presence that directs the curriculum. Whether going behind the curtain of the platform wizard to examine the archive that we leave behind as digital users, or creating new counter-archives via oral histories and the recovery of visual materials, the authors of the last two articles in this issue insist that paying attention to the traces that both educational experience and cultural production leave behind is a crucial strategy to stop pretending not to know and to bring into relief the absent presences that shape curriculum.

The authors of the first two articles offer different yet complementary strategies, not just to reveal what is meant to remain hidden, but, like the counter-archival practices documented by Desai and Shahwan, to push against the violence that recruits us into pretending not to know. In the second article, Karmiris offers a cripistemological approach that rejects the call “to keep moving straight ahead and towards normal” (p. 428). Instead, drawing on the work of Ahmed (2006) and Hall (2021), Karmiris invites us to “queer our orientations” and “to learn with and from crip motions and movements” (p. 428). For Karmiris,

one of the most important aims of this crip reading is to invite and provoke a resistance to the calls to return to normal as a vitally important step in beginning the process of reimagining and transforming how we might teach and learn with each other outside of the confines of the current desire for the neoliberal iteration of normal/inclusive schools. (p. 428)

This moving “outside the confines,” away from the normalized violence that we are otherwise urged to pretend not to know, requires the kind of “improvisational tactics” that Okello notes have been employed by Black subjects in their encounters with anti-Black violence (p. 417). Okello underscores that “carcerality” is not just a material condition or a physical state; “it is a lasting psychological, spiritual, and emotional state of being that gets in the body and directs how one may move in and through the world” (p. 422). Without analogizing or suggesting an equivalence between the subjectifying effect of carcerality—qua whiteness—on the affective and embodied experience of Black students and other experiences of oppression and marginalization, we can consider how the impulse to pretend not to know manifests in a range of educational contexts and experiences. And we can learn from the particularity of how Black subjects confront this carceral logic and (following Okello) reckon with the absent presences that enforce “master ways of knowing” and taken-for-granted assumptions about what is “normal” (following Karmiris).

Okello draws insight from the story of Toni Cade Bambara’s (1999) Grandma Dorothy and how she refuses “to submit to the grip of rationality … [and] persists in creating a classroom site expansive enough to include dark children as human” (p. 418), resisting carcerality/whiteness. Like Grandma Dorothy, two of Okello’s peers and friends, Mashone and Ne’, make a direct intervention, observing Okello’s habit of claiming that he “doesn’t know,” even when it is clear that he does, in fact, know. This urge to pretend not to know is precisely the effect of carcerality on Black subjects, and Okello offers insight about how to resist this urge drawing on the interventions of Grandma Dorothy, Mashone, and Ne’. These interventions include what Okello calls: “epistemic confrontation”—an invitation to know otherwise and to resuscitate other ways of knowing; “corporeal visibility”—an invitation “to awaken the flesh to its generative possibilities to act upon the world and convey meaning between groups of people” (p. 417); and “legitimizing affect”—an invitation to integrate the knowledge registered through affective and emotional life and that animates what we do, in fact, know.

As educators, we are constantly faced with ethical dilemmas about how we proceed with our many pedagogical projects in light of the forces that shape and delimit what we can, at least in appearance, do. Yet, the authors in this issue show that we don’t have to proceed accepting these limits and offer us strategies to know, and to do, otherwise. Ultimately, the demand that we pretend not to know, as Okello demonstrates, is about the imposition of a carceral model of education and of the violence that shapes curriculum (see also Todd, 2001). Yet, as Okello remarks, “no matter how much one ‘pretends not to know,’ the type of learning [we] would need to move through this world intact, which is to say enfleshed, could only come by becoming undisciplined” (p. 419). Each article offers us strategies for understanding the forces that shape educational experience in ways that fundamentally affect subjectivity and, in the process, refusing to be disciplined by such forces. Like Grandma Dorothy, we can confront these forces with a “do tell” (see Okello, p. 417), an invitation to speak what is meant to remain occluded, or, in the case of cultural artifacts slated for erasure, as Desai and Shahwan insist, to actively create a counter-archive that enlivens what the colonizer seeks to destroy. Even when the traces of power are hidden behind the wizardly curtain of the digital platform, as Vanermen, Vlieghe, and Decuypere show in their article, we do not have to take for granted the neoliberal logic of choice and individualism, or, as Karmiris invites us to consider, the call to return to normal. Instead, we can move sideways, name and reveal the operations of what we do, in fact, know, and, following Grandma Dorothy, “make it lively” by telling stories, returning to our bodies, and animating the cultural artifacts that give us meaning in the face of carcerality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.