The unruly curricula of the ruling classes

The authors in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry contribute fresh insights and approaches to the study of how teaching and learning experiences at elite schools secure (or unsettle) ruling class dominance. The articles move between four continents: Europe (Farley and Ayling), Africa (Ayling), Asia (Lim) and the Americas (Swalwell). Each contribution analyzes techniques for consolidating class power in relation to the geographical, political and social contexts that form the particular conditions for the production of dominant groups. Together, Lisa Farley, Pere Ayling, Leonel Lim and Michael Apple, and Katy Swalwell hold up for analysis what is at stake within elite schooling, as well as within our investments in researching elite schools.

This essay draws on critical race feminism and anti-colonial theory to offer a heuristic – the unruly curricula of the ruling classes – as an entry point that opens a route through the four articles. In seeking to uncover curricular unruliness I am attuned to that which is “wayward,” “ungovernable” or “disorderly” (“Unruly”, 2015) in teaching and learning at elite schools. Thinking with Farley's article and the “wandering ideas” (p. 447) that educational researcher Marion Milner begins to follow (and gives up trying to master), my approach is to follow moments of curricular waywardness in order to consider what this unruliness tells us about the making of those groups that rule. I define elite schools very broadly as sites that institutionalize, reproduce and regulate economies of material and symbolic capital through educational experiences that further advantage dominant race-class groups.

The groups that Farley, Ayling, Lim and Apple, and Swalwell consider are diverse. In using the terms “ruling classes” and “ruling elites,” I intend a broad conception of rule that comprises two status groups. First, it refers to those who control what Robinson and Harris (2000) call in relation to the transnational capitalist class “the levers” of state apparatus and global decision-making (p. 11). It also refers to the strata that do the work of operationalizing the movement of these levers. These are the political, economic and cultural leaders whose work enables them to accrue vast advantages of material and symbolic capitals through the circuits of global racial capitalism. In the context of elite schooling, and drawing from Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard (2010), I position these groups as members of national and/or transnational ruling classes by virtue of a shared desire for and ability to access an intensely exclusive education. This educational experience consolidates class dominance for parents and their children through access to gated social and political networks and schooling experiences that strongly track towards (but cannot promise) corporate, political and cultural positions of power.

In her article, “The ‘Human Problem’ in Educational Research: Notes from the Psychoanalytic Archive,” Lisa Farley draws on Marion Milner's 1938 research study, together with historical documents that provide insight into the context of the study, to tell the story of how unconscious fantasies shaped Milner's construction of knowledge. Milner's study investigated a student achievement gap and administrative concern about graduation rates at the Girls' Public Day School Trust, a group of British independent schools. The “human problem,” as the Trust schools saw it, was the need to widen the circle of humanity to ensure that ruling class girls receive the same educational advantages as ruling class boys. These schools catered to families who could not afford “the significantly higher fees of the Grammar School” (p. 438), but who were sufficiently affluent to invest in what Farley aptly describes as “the fantasies of a class-based white colonial education that secured an ‘elite future’ for a select group of would-be-women and wives” (p. 440). As Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) writes, “the ability to envision an elite future” is a crucial part of the process of forming an elite subjectivity, a process that is facilitated throughout institutional life at elite schools (p. 212).

For this group of girls, the elite futures promised by the Trust schools come sharply into relief against the classed and raced futures that they are not, that is, both the futures of girls of the English lower classes learning to be housemaids, and, I would add, the shadows further afield of the futures of colonized girls in the British colonies. Here the relation of ruling works through a dialectic that requires both of these “savage” figures at the Trust schools. As Inderpal Grewal (1996) demonstrates, the logic of equating English lower classes with “savages” is well established by the nineteenth century. The class project to endow students with feminine civility is also a racial and colonial project that is contingent on material and symbolic economies of modern capitalism that demand land theft, extraction and labor exploitation for the accumulation of ruling class wealth.

Farley explores psychoanalysis both as Milner's methodology and for narrating Milner's study of elites. As part of the latter, Farley investigates the “human problem” of the unconscious, and follows two strata of fantasy that shape Milner's research. The first layer comprises the “cultural myths” that “construct and sustain borders of identity and belonging” (p. 440). The second is the “anxious and irrational” layer undergirding cultural myths that “emanates from and echoes through the unconscious” (p. 440). Farley traces how Milner's findings were fashioned through a dynamic tension between social and unconscious fantasies. The social fantasy of “a universal idea of ‘girl-ness’” (p. 440) articulates with Milner's attempts “to diagnose and fill lack with the right kind of knowledge” (p. 447).

Farley offers us a nuanced account of how Milner's research focus shifted from filling a lack and “rescuing” others, to accounting for the anxieties that animate the students' schooling experiences. Farley demonstrates how this shift involved, for example, conducting free-association exercises with students rather than focusing on test scores, and Milner transcending her own desire for “mastery over uncertainty through knowledge” (p. 441). Farley demonstrates how Milner began to narrate schooling anxieties rather than diagnose problems and prescribe solutions. As Farley beautifully reveals, it was this wandering, wayward approach to collecting and interpreting data that opened rich new dimensions in Milner's research and her recommendations to the Trust schools. At the same time, Farley notes that this leisurely approach to working with students was actively discouraged for poor students. We might describe this dominating perception of poor kids as one that positions them as unruly, a perception that may have conjured fears about ungovernable populations. For these ruling class girls, however, this sort of psychoanalytic unruliness of allowing students to freely explore the flow of their thoughts is a wandering approach to researching ruling class girls that both affirms their ruling class status and enables new insights about the educational experiences of this group.

Farley's analysis encourages us as educational researchers to question our investments in mastery and “fixing” research subjects and settings, however subtle (or overt) these investments may be. This impetus to “improve” is, as Sherene Razack (2015) reveals, deeply colonial and forms the core of both colonial and settler colonial civilizing missions. As Farley illustrates, Milner's initial desire for improvement situated Milner squarely within the project of empire that the Trust school girls engaged. We might read Farley's analysis as revealing that Milner's unruly approach to the study of educational experiences affirmed the students' ruling class belonging, enabled Milner to theorize the schooling anxieties of this particular group – anxieties that had remained hidden in an analysis of test scores – and shifted Milner away from her investments in using research as a technique of power over others.

The “human problem” that occupied Milner and the Trust schools, that is, the struggle over how the borders of the category of human are drawn, is one that Ayling approaches through the framework of distinction. Resonating with what I have called the “savage” figures that haunt the figure of the elite girl of the Trust schools, abjection is integral to the process of distinction. In her essay, “Embodying ‘Britishness’: The (Re) Making of the Contemporary Nigerian Elite Child,” Pere Ayling draws on Bourdieu and Fanon to fashion an analytical framework that integrates the sociology of elites with anticolonial theory and incorporates an account of the psychic dimensions of colonial power.

Ayling theorizes the increasing numbers of Nigerian elites (economic and political) who send their children to British boarding schools. Since not all of the families securely possess ruling class dispositions themselves, Ayling does not characterize these families as properly elite. Instead, she examines the parents' desire for an English boarding school education for their children as a desire for their children to acquire the dispositions that would secure their elite status. By contrast, I want to position this group somewhat more broadly in the field of power and within the category of ruling elites because they are able to mobilize the financial capital to buy this very particularly elite, classed and raced educational experience abroad for their children.

Ayling provides important insights into the aspirations of ruling class Nigerian parents in a globalizing education market. Her article identifies two parental desires. The first is for their children to belong to the category of global elites, a belonging that requires whiteness as the ability to move, in other words, to be unmarked and unencumbered by race (Mohanram, 1999). The second desire is for their children “to become political and business elites upon their return to Nigeria” (p. 467). Ayling theorizes these co-articulating desires for elite groups of white Britishness and Black Nigerianess.

Ayling's interview data suggests that parents perceive British boarding schools as the highest form of elite education because these schools are very successful at reproducing British ruling class power and the dispositions of whiteness that distinguish this class. Properly ruling class British whiteness is, for this group of parents, the best route to whiteness, a route that will open the door to belonging within the category of national and global ruling elites. Ayling's analysis reveals how the parental moves to leverage white supremacy aim to position their children for leadership roles at home and abroad. This is an elite school process of internalizing the “embodiment of Whiteness” (p. 468). In my own research on Canadian elite schools I argue that students of color often attempt to embody and deploy the dispositions required to achieve significant proximity to what Nirmal Puwar (2004) calls the somatic norm of whiteness (Angod, 2015). Yet the racial anxiety that these students' bodies provoke effects an institutional dissonance that stands in the way of the institutional (and race-class) family embrace. Paradoxically, the elite schools in my study depend on students of color to secure the moral distinction of multicultural status. The leveraging of white supremacy works in both directions.

Ayling identifies three modes of distinction that this group of ruling class Nigerian parents desire for their children. First, they seek a particular kind of minority status by being “one of the very few Nigerians” (p. 462) at a British boarding school, an exceptional achievement that suggests that they have “surpassed” Blackness and Nigerianess. Second, they desire for their children a properly ruling class English accent. Third, they hope their offspring will successfully perform gendered modes of dress that parents feel characterize the British ruling class. These parental aspirations point towards national status, language, and cultural capital as an important intersection in the (re)making of racial identities.

This is an intersection that I observed in the context of East Asian-Canadian and East Asian-international students (Angod, 2015). I found that teachers described as white those East Asian-Canadian students who possessed perfect fluency in English, wore popular clothing brands, and interacted seamlessly with other (white) Canadian students. Canadian citizenship, English language fluency and cultural capital converged to configure them as white. In contrast, an East Asian-international student with a passport from an East Asian country, a “foreign” accent, and tastes and dispositions that diverged from the dominant (white) norm, was described as “Asian.” In other words, this student's linguistic, national and cultural differences converged on her body to racialize her.

In an earlier, French colonial context, Fanon (1952/1967) writes in Black Skin, White Masks about language, race and the French colonial condition, “The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct relation to his mastery of the French language … mastery of language affords remarkable power” (p. 18). This mastery demands a particular French accent. Similarly, for the parents in Ayling's study, the particular English accent is crucial. This suggests race and class as an inextricable entanglement, and that English accents that fail to confer “aristocratic” status, as the parents describe it, are not properly white. The “wrong” accent, that is, a working class one from the wrong neighborhood, does not properly confer race or class status. For the parents in Ayling's study, race-class status looks and sounds like something very specific, and plenty of social and economic advantages are at stake in getting it right.

These parents' desire for British whiteness, however, is not straightforward. Rather, it arises together with a move towards “retaining some aspects of their children's Blackness/Nigerianess” in order to secure local/national elite status (p. 466). Ayling writes, “what has become clear nonetheless, is that these parents are selecting what they perceived as the most valuable aspects of different cultures in order to create the greatest value; thus highlighting the fluidity of identity construction” (p. 463). However, this fluidity has limits since, “no amount of the attributes of excellence gained from schooling in England can guarantee these parents' children entry into the global elite group” (p. 468).

We may read Ayling's analysis as pointing to a curricular ambivalence. Parents seek to attain race-class dominance for their children both through the curricular ruliness of mastering educational experiences that shore up white supremacy, as well as the curricular unruliness of appropriating these teaching and learning experiences for students who are excluded from the somatic norm, or rather, whose exclusion forms the somatic norm's condition of possibility. This strategic use of global education markets suggests an experience that Du Bois (1903/1996) famously describes as double-consciousness, which is the “strange experience” of “being a problem” (p. 4), that is, the experience of moving through a white world in a Black body. In a world where, as Rinaldo Walcott (2014) writes, “what it means to be Human is continually defined against Black people and Blackness” (p. 93), we might also read the Nigerian parents' colonial desire for white Britishness as a desire for their children to be fully included in the category of humanity.

Together, the articles by Ayling and Farley are in dialog with the articles published in a previous issue of this journal by authors De Freitas and Curinga, Roth and Maheux, Lawrence, and Brandt (see volume 45, issue 3, 2015). As Gaztambide-Fernández (2015) observes in his editorial, these authors do the important and seldom-engaged work in curriculum studies of “re-think[ing] the very notion of the human” in terms of how this figure is constituted in relation to that which is imagined as external to it (p. 245). Both Ayling and Farley demonstrate the racial and colonial dimensions of the liberal figuring of this human. Lisa Lowe (2015) brilliantly describes this process in relation to distinction:

it is the pronounced asymmetry of the colonial divisions of humanity that is the signature feature of liberal modes of distinction that privilege particular subjects and societies as rational, civilized, and human, and treat others as the laboring, replaceable, or disposable contexts that constitute that humanity. (p. 16)

We might consider the modes of distinction that Ayling theorizes within this liberal project, modes that are intensified and institutionalized at elite schools and constitute routes to becoming an elite subject. We might infer, then, from Ayling's article that elite schools are powerful sites for negotiating colonial divisions of humanity through modes of distinction.

Returning to Fanon, political scientist Glen Coulthard writes in Red Skin, White Masks (2014) that one of Fanon's most important innovations is that any meaningful transformation must address the subjective realms of race and colonialism together with the material dimensions. Leonel Lim and Michael Apple's article, “Elite Rationalities and Curricular Form: Meritorious' Class Reproduction in the Elite Thinking Curriculum in Singapore,” theorizes the relation between these subjective and material realms. Lim and Apple consider the function of critical thinking in the reproduction of elites. The authors reveal how critical thinking, “one of the most high status forms of school knowledge” (p. 472) and a form that is emphasized by the Singapore Ministry of Education, is described using the same language but is facilitated very differently at a mainstream school versus an elite “independent” school in Singapore. Lim and Apple's profile of one of the elite schools suggests that these are luxurious, exceptionally well-resourced institutions that cater to corporate, government, and cultural leaders within Singapore's ruling class.

Lim and Apple's article powerfully reveals how the very concept of critical thinking re-inscribes elite identities and the fantasy of meritocracy that these identities require, which together undergird ruling class dominance. The “pervasive elitist bent” (p. 475) of policy and curriculum documents tracks select students towards intellectually rigorous and creative programs that map with the competencies required for leadership positions later on. This stratified tracking system re-inscribes and reinforces larger patterns of social stratification in Singapore. As Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) writes, “being ‘the best of the best’ involves authenticating the boundaries established through exclusion” (p. 212). The fantasy of meritocracy is an effective mechanism for authorizing and obscuring stratification.

Analytically, Lim and Apple deploy Basil Bernstein's (2000) notion of pedagogic codes, “rules for both the organization of knowledge (classification) as well as how that organization is communicated to acquirers in pedagogic interaction (frames)” (p. 477). At the mainstream schools, Lim and Apple find strong framing principles (critical thinking is linked to tests and comprises providing the correct answer to the teachers' questions), but weak classification (subjects are “infused” with critical thinking rather than immersing students in specialized classes). This pattern is flipped at elite schools, where Lim and Apple find weak framing principles (lessons “center less on the mastery of any academic content” than on “intellectual autonomy” and “inquiry” [p. 484]) but strong classification (critical thinking is taught through a “four-year philosophy program” that is not part of the national examinations [p. 482]). These differences between the schools have material effects that regulate knowledge and dispositions to re-inscribe class power and to encourage a misreading of class difference as meritocratic.

For an example of the weak framing principles and strong classification at elite schools, Lim and Apple describe an elite school philosophy class. This is a student-facilitated, seminar-style session where the teacher plays the role of facilitator. The circular seating arrangement and the so-called “Harkness” seminar tables that are at the center of many of these classrooms (and, I would add, the corporate school blazer and tie of many elite school uniforms) conjure the boardroom meetings that students are being groomed to lead (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009).

Lim and Apple reveal the central role of “digressions” in the seminar class: “rather than being disruptive, then, these numerous ‘digressions’ really need to be understood as constitutive features of a weak pedagogical framing, one premised on the elicitation of students' viewpoints and built around the dispositions of inquiry and critique” (p. 483). The authors go on to illustrate that these elite school “differences in curricular form are thus not inconsequential but really fundamental to the power relations maintained by the social distribution of knowledge” (p. 485). We might infer from Lim and Apple's analysis that curricular unruliness is an integral part of an elite school education, and that it is an important part of the process of producing elite identities. Intellectual unruliness, then, becomes a mark of distinction of ruling elites and a technique for re-inscribing class power that has material effects.

This analysis resonates with Farley's discussion of the wandering intellectual activities that Milner was able to pursue with the Trust school students, an approach that was discouraged with poor students. In Lim and Apple's analysis of these curricular digressions, unruliness becomes both the rule, as well as a route to ruling. Education for critical thinking becomes yet another opportunity for advantaged young people to accrue even more symbolic capitals, specifically, the competencies and dispositions of leadership.

Lim and Apple's analysis of the relationship between curricular form and future trajectories also resonates with Farley's discussion of the “elite future” of Trust school students. Lim and Apple write:

Wandering through the campus and finding the names and biographical profiles of these public figures on murals throughout the school walls, it is not difficult to see how present students are ingrained with a sense of the grandiose possibilities that await their futures. (p. 481)

For the students in Lim and Apple's study, the social fantasy of meritocracy helps to authorize the legitimacy of these futures. Thinking, too, with Ayling's analysis of elite schools as places of possibility in the pursuit of whiteness, it is important to emphasize how meritocracy articulates with the postracial politics of our contemporary moment.

In his book Are we all postracial yet? David Theo Goldberg (2015) describes the postracial move as “a mode of social magic: the alchemy of racism into nonracialism … it etherealizes racisms in the spirit of its overcoming” (p. 94, italics omitted). In the intense whiteness that characterizes elite schools, the fantasy of meritocracy is an effective mechanism both for dismissing institutionalized white supremacy at the level, for example, of curriculum, hiring, and admissions and for obscuring how elite schools re-inscribe and reinforce many of the circuits of global racial capitalism. Given Lim and Apple's findings, and given that critical thinking is an integral dimension of social justice education, how might critical thinking be structured for elite school social justice education?

Katy Swalwell's evocative article, “Mind the Civic Empowerment Gap: Economically Elite Students and Critical Civic Education” fashions tools for critical consciousness that “deepen democracy” for affluent students at elite schools. Swalwell aims to tackle this problem by “clos[ing] the civic empowerment gap” between affluent and marginalized, low-income youth (p. 491). This gap describes participation disparities in authorized forms of civic participation, as well as unauthorized forms such as riots, strikes, etc., with an emphasis on the former. Specifically, Swalwell is concerned with the curricular and pedagogical approaches for preparing socioeconomically advantaged youth “to be change agents in a democracy” (p. 491).

Swalwell recognizes that significant research and attention focuses on working with marginalized youth to close this gap, while affluent students have superior opportunities for civic learning. She argues, however, that there is still work to be done with affluent students to strengthen both their critical frameworks and their ability to take meaningful action in projects for social justice. The “‘activist ally’ curriculum” (p. 492) that Swalwell proposes enables students to “see injustice” by listening to others’ stories and becoming aware of the relay between structural inequities and their daily lives, reflect critically on injustice and become attuned to their feelings, and take action against injustice.

Swalwell considers “how this framework might be useful in practice” by examining a “community action” program at “Kent Academy” in the United States (p. 504). By participating in groups organized around social issues, students are expected “to become deeply knowledgeable about a particular social problem and to engage in direct action that attempts to remedy it with some emphasis on considering how students' own lives are directly related to these problems” (p. 504). As part of a student group working on critical approaches to the so-called “war on drugs,” Swalwell describes a field trip to “an alternative sentencing boot camp facility where drug offenders serve time” (p. 505). Swalwell describes how the field trip can be interpreted through two contrasting lenses. On the one hand, it can be described as “galvanizing,” as it “tapped into students' emotions more than any article they could read or guest speaker who could visit” (p. 505). On the other hand, it can also be described as “exploitative,” as it was voyeuristic in nature, and logistics prevented the teacher from facilitating any meaningful analysis of the experience. Swalwell emphasizes the complexities of “enacting” versus “envisioning a critical civic education” (p. 506). For example, Swalwell highlights the logistical, pedagogical and administrative challenges that many elite school teachers encounter when striving both to prepare students for positions of power, and engage them in critical civic education.

Swalwell's article engages the crucial problem of how to create curriculum for solidarity in intensely stratified schools. She suggests engaging the complexities rather than striving to eliminate them, a move that is not the same as the shift in Milner's approach as described by Farley, but one that resonates with it. But can teaching and learning for social justice at elite schools be unruly, in the sense of transforming relations of rule? I passionately agree with Swalwell that there is much more work to be done on this topic.

In thinking about unruly curricula in Swalwell's article, a few questions arise. First, both the ally framework and the Academy's program emphasize elite students' unruly emotional responses, and specifically in the case of the field trip, discomfort and horror. The ally framework encourages an engagement with emotion, an approach that has deep roots in Black feminism (Lorde, 1984) and critical and post-structural feminist pedagogies (Boler, 1999). However, even when framed together with learning to hear others' stories and developing an analysis of the structural nature of race-class power, elite students' emotion is a tricky site of emphasis to negotiate, particularly in our contemporary moment.

In her book The Ironic Spectator, Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) describes how a new emotionality of the self is at the heart of contemporary expressions of compassion for vulnerable others. Chouliaraki demonstrates that the global north is experiencing a cultural, epistemic shift away from increasingly critiqued expressions of pity and sympathy, and towards practices of self-reflection that emphasize an orientation of the self to the self. In her sophisticated analysis of several popular initiatives for solidarity with marginalized others, Chouliaraki reveals that the new emotionality of the self obscures and abandons justice.

Similarly, in her article “Unsettling the Privilege of Self-Reflexivity,” Andrea Smith (2013) notes that self-reflexivity often becomes another mechanism that positions the white subject as the knower, “and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity” (p. 264). Similarly, I have argued that it is the very intensity of emotional experience that elite school students have available to them that becomes the mark of distinction of a feeling self (Angod, 2015). Quoting Bernstein, Lim and Apple call these “particular ways of being a critical thinker ‘narcissistic’” (p. 472); that is, they create elite subjectivities that acquire form through processes of distinction, in this case, the moral distinction of being a good, feeling subject.

Social justice education, as in the example of Kent Academy's field trip, frequently requires racial encounters, encounters that have long, colonial histories and tendencies towards the objectification of Black people as what Saidiya Hartman (1997) calls sentimental resources. Hartman's brilliant phrase points us towards the larger economies of global racial capitalism in which these racial encounters take shape, suggesting a resonance between material and symbolic economies. Within these racial encounters, it is often the vulnerability of the elite subject, rather than the marginalized person, that becomes the focus of the social justice project. It is important to note, too, that the mobility that race and class power afford these students and the ability to move freely between spaces of extreme affluence and incarceration is in itself a form of power that calls to be analyzed by the students.

I wonder, too, about the unruly possibilities of the activist ally framework. Swalwell poses the question of how elites may use civic education to maintain political dominance, and Lim and Apple point to how particular curricular forms of elite school critical thinking accomplish this. Swalwell's goal of deepening democracy is also a liberal concept that, like “the problem of the human,” I find extremely complex. Jodi Byrd (2011) writes about the concept of democracy:

one reason why a “postracial” and just democratic society is a lost cause in the United States is that it is always already conceived through the prior disavowed and misremembered colonization of indigenous lands that cannot be ended by further inclusion or more participation. (p. xxvi)

What are the settler colonial conditions of possibility of the radical democratic egalitarianism that Swalwell describes? What are the relationships between colonialisms and democracy?

Accordingly, I wonder about the kinds of action (the desired futures) that Swalwell has in mind for affluent students to effect a deepening of democracy. Coulthard (2014) demonstrates that Indigenous people have very skillfully deployed legitimate forms of legal and political engagement with the Canadian state for 40 years, and that while this continued engagement is imperative, liberal forms of recognition and participation are not enough. In the context of this issue of Curriculum Inquiry, and keeping Coulthard's analysis in mind, what does it mean to work towards a model of social justice education that is inscribed by a liberal framework of democracy, that deems less-desirable those interventions that are disruptive to capitalism, interventions that are also less effective in granting the moral virtue of being a good citizen? Is unruly activism even possible in elite school settings?

In seeking throughout this essay to trace the ways in which Farley, Ayling, Lim and Apple, and Swalwell theorize the relationship between unruly curricular forms and ruling class power, I followed a few different flows of symbolic and material capitals. I also considered how the authors engage the symbolic and material violence that affluence, elite status and inclusion require. Thinking about the themes of exclusion and distinction that thread through the four articles, how might we continue this work of theorizing capitals together with the material and symbolic violence that they require and/or effect? Are our analyses unruly enough to theorize the (re)productive function of elite schools together with processes of violence including, for example, ongoing settler colonial dispossession, colonial economies of extraction and the Syrian refugee crisis? Are our analyses unruly enough to unsettle these processes of violence?

Certainly, this issue forges pathways in that direction. Farley and Ayling's contributions offer insights into the various kinds of explusion at work in moves to mastery. Revealing the normative character of intellectual inquiry and critique, Lim and Apple illustrate how a curricular formation that we might expect to challenge ruling class dominance actually serves to reinforce it. And Swalwell discusses the creative possibilities and perils of doing social justice education that cultivates an awareness of structural oppression in relation to students' daily lives. Together, the authors in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry guide us toward theoretical and methodological approaches to imagining the possibilities of unruliness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leila Angod

Leila Angod is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis, “Behind and beyond the ivy: How schools produce elites through the bodies of racial others,” is an analysis of the racial and gendered logics through which elite subjects are constituted at elite Canadian independent schools. Angod's study reveals how schools sell whiteness through multiculturalism and volunteer abroad programs. Her current project is a youth participatory action research study of equity at an elite secondary school.