Seeing double: design and enactments of a lesson on perspective-taking

ABSTRACT

This narrative inquiry of a lesson intended to develop perspective-taking links our understanding of teachers as curriculum makers with a sociomaterial attunement to the ways that materials, forms, and time are also actors in producing curriculum. We offer a close reading of three classroom enactments of the same lesson and discuss ways that these instances of curriculum-making expanded or diminished opportunities for elementary pupils to communicate shifts in perspective through personal narrative writing. We find temporal, spatial, and material resources, including schedules, technologies, and forms of assessment, to play key roles in shaping relations in curriculum making.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum making
• sociomaterial
• social topology
• narrative inquiry
• empathy
• assessment

Acknowledgments

This study is part of a Partnership Development Project with QWILL Media and Education, Inc. (QWILL), funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). The authors are grateful to QWILL for allowing us to work with their proprietary material so that we might study curriculum making, and to our teacher and pupil participants who generously experimented with us through their thinking and practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Names of teachers and students are pseudonyms.

2. Google Docs, a tool within Google Classroom, is a digital document-sharing and collaboration tool that allows multiple people to author, edit, and format a Microsoft Word document at the same time. https://www.google.com/docs/about/

Additional information

Funding

Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Notes on contributors

Mary Ott

Mary Ott is a PhD Candidate in Curriculum Studies at Western University. Her doctoral work investigates practices of assessing multimodal literacies in elementary classrooms, using narrative and sociomaterial methodologies. She is co-chair of the graduate student committee of The Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada (LLRC). As a research assistant, past and present curriculum projects involve co-developing mental health resources with teachers, and inquiries into 21st century learning. Recent publications include an article in the Canadian Journal of Education (A well place to be: The intersection of Canadian school-based mental health policy with student and teacher resiliency) and a contribution to ‘Assessment in Primary Education’ in the forthcoming international online resource, Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies.

Kelly-Ann MacAlpine

Kelly-Ann MacAlpine is a PhD student in Curriculum Studies at Western University. With particular attention to early childhood education, her area of interest focuses on a pedagogy of listening and the ethics of the encounter. By understanding the ever-evolving and complicated entanglement of human and non-human relationships in the process of meaning-making, she seeks to research the emerging role of pedagogical documentation as it intersects curriculum and pedagogical practice. Her recent publications include an article in the Journal of Childhood Studies (Through the looking glass: Interpreting ‘Growing Success, the Kindergarten Addendum’, Ontario's assessment, evaluation, and reporting policy document), and two professional pieces in the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory (A Pedagogy of thinking with, and Pedagogies of interpretive dance: Scenes from ‘dancing in the rain’).

Kathryn Hibbert

Kathy Hibbert, PhD, is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Western University, London, Canada with a specialization in curriculum. She is Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum as a Social Practice, and Chair of Curriculum Studies and Studies in Applied Linguistics. She is the Principal Investigator of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant investigating 21st C literacies. Recent publications include a co-edited book with Bloomsbury (Negotiating spaces for literacy learning: Multimodality and governmentality), a chapter in D. Kritt's Constructivist Education in an Age of Accountability, (Reconceptualizing accountability: The ethical importance of expanding understandings of literacy and assessment for 21st C learners) and an article in the European Journal of Curriculum Studies (Curriculum as social practice: The case of Fukushima).