Proliferation as More and Other to Mutuality and Synthesis Within Curriculum Studies: A Response to Hlebowitsh

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Notes

Notes

1 Canonical knowledge refers to a comprehensive set of theories or ideas within a field of study. With each new generation of scholars, core precepts are often challenged or modified in some form or another as academics attempt to make contributions to their fields. Fields of study then might be described as having rules or principles that are undergoing continuous reconceptualization as ideas are established as central and then challenged in some form or fashion. Curriculum studies is no exception as various philosophical movements in thought are employed by curriculum scholars to redirect the field and therefore what are considered important or essential ideas and texts.

2 In Hlebowitsh’s essay, he focuses on drawing common connections between various theories to develop arguments for changing practices within school classrooms. My poststructurally informed concern here is in regard to issues of complicity and how to learn and produce from the pitfalls and breakdowns in our efforts toward social justice. Ellsworth’s (1989) “Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering?: Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,” published Harvard Educational Review, is a wonderful example of such work and forces a confrontation with oppressive classroom practices in spite of libratory intentions. Therefore, I argue that curriculum scholars must work within and against research practices in the field. By this I mean we must examine and account for how curriculum theories and practices reinscribe that which it is resisting while also resisting that inscription. Therefore, what I argue for stands in contrast to Hlebowitsh’s emphasis on finding common themes across curriculum scholarship.

3 In the introduction to the Curriculum Studies Handbook: The Next Moment, I discuss the problems with making claims toward whole or complete representation for what it does to conceal commitments and agendas. My concern is that by attempting to fully represent a contemporary field that cannot be in any way fully represented due to its complexity and divergence, scholars fail to acknowledge their positionality, situatedness, aims, and therefore their location. My interest is in naming agendas, commitments, and efforts toward interventions within curriculum as a site of debate, a site that is made and remade through established and emergent discourses vying for legitimacy. Accordingly, I take issue with Hlebowitsh’s claims regarding the capacity of The Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction to offer a comprehensive representation.

4 Here my interest is in what Derrida terms the “Ordeal of the Undecidable,” where one cannot find a satisfactory resolution to a problem, one does not surface more dilemmas or difficulties. In relation to praxis, such an ordeal can be located in the very undecidability over how to treat subjugated languages within the classroom. With no answer that does not engender additional dilemmas, teachers might recognize that for students from historically oppressed communities to have opportunities, they need to speak proper or Standard English. These teachers might also recognize that by placing an emphasis on Standard English for students who speak in subjugated language forms, they are reproducing the very conceptual oppositions that maintain Standard English as the dominant language form. In this sense, efforts toward emancipation in an immediate context might have the larger effect of promoting further subjugation and marginalization.

5 For me, ethics deals primarily with the relation of the self to the other. My claim is that the self does not exist without an other, or others, with whom there is an elemental or basically constituting relationship. Moreover, I follow Derrida’s line of thinking that attempts to generalize ethics by way of metaphysics threatens the sort of ethical demands made upon us as curriculum scholars. When we make generalized claims that lose their singularity, we lose the very features we need to uphold. What I sense should be preserved is “the otherness of the other.” The singular strangeness, unintelligible, and nonidentity with the self is what ethics should seek to nurture.