Slipping around in curriculum studies: (Re)views from new scholars

There are multiple ways of apprehending the current state of an amorphous field-like curriculum studies. While none of them can give us a comprehensive view, some perspectives shed different light on where the field has been, where it is, or where it might be going. Views of the future are particularly fickle, and mostly reflect the hopes we cast on the basis of the present. As such, it matters whom we ask and from whose vantage points we draw conclusions about what directions curriculum scholars may be taking with their work. This special review issue of Curriculum Inquiry (CI) includes seven essay reviews written by “emerging scholars” of curriculum studies. The work of these “emerging scholars” provides a glimpse into the ideas that are perhaps shaping their work and where that work may be going in the future.

Following the parameters set by the editors of the 2011 special issue of CI dedicated to the work of new scholars, this issue is devoted exclusively to the works of scholars in the latter stages of, or who just recently completed, their doctoral studies (see Thiessen, Campbell, & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2011). Rather than asking senior scholars to nominate potential authors, for this issue, we circulated an open call for papers inviting students actively enrolled in a graduate program in curriculum studies or related fields at the time of submission, as well as individuals who had completed a graduate degree after January 2013. We decided to focus this special issue on essay reviews examining two or more books that could either be recent texts (published in or after 2012) or “classic” texts, published before 1990 and considered to have had a substantial impact on the field of curriculum studies, broadly defined. We asked prospective contributors to identify and critically examine key themes or issues raised by the books, in relation to other relevant sources and/or contemporary perspectives and debates in the field. In the case of “classic” books, we encouraged reviews that would highlight the historical significance of the books and their relevance to contemporary issues and perspectives in the field.

We invited new scholars to contribute to this special issue not only to shed some light on what directions are emerging within curriculum studies, but also to showcase their insights into contemporary curriculum issues and perhaps to influence current debates in the field. The 30 submission we received in response to our call for papers came from across the globe and represented a diverse range of interests and approaches to curriculum studies. The editorial team was pleased to see young scholars engaging in such a wide range of texts dealing with so many interesting topics, such as early childhood curriculum, peace education and mathematics for social justice. We were also intrigued by the range of authors whose work was addressed in the articles submitted, from the well-worn to the less familiar (at least in curriculum studies), including scholars like Peter Ramus, Jürgen Habermas and Vijay Prashad. The editors would like to thank everyone who submitted their work to CI for consideration in this issue and express our enthusiasm for the overall quality as well as the exciting new directions that their work suggests.

Although the seven essay reviews featured in this issue represent only a small – and most certainly biased – sample of the next generation of curriculum scholars, their “readings” of curriculum books provide valuable insights into the state of the field and its potential future direction. While classic texts such as Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed or Dewey's Experience and Nature have been reviewed countless times by numerous authors, the juxtapositions with recent work that the authors featured in this issue have chosen recast the relevance of these texts and suggest different ways in which new scholars take up their ideas. In many ways, reading such “classic” texts against the backdrop of current debates demands the question; when is reading? We ask this question as a way of introducing the reviews and inviting you to “read” them along with us. A temporal perspective on reading proves to be helpful because, as Bennett (1995) suggests,

The time involved in reading any particular text varies from one reader to another and from one reading to the next. Indeed, the relation between the text and the experiential time of reading may be said to be constituted by a series of slippages. (p. 13)

This notion of “slippages” as a way to talk about reading is a helpful heuristic. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, slippage refers to the condition of losing “one's footing and slid[ing] unintentionally for a short distance” (Slip, 2015). When one slides unintentionally and then tries to return to the original position, an obvious result is that the person brings with them qualitatively distinctive and new experiences, for example, physical pain, embarrassment or a broken leg. Due to such experiences, the person may not be able to return to their original relationship with the original space. Moreover, time that passes by between the slippage and the person's return to the original location may significantly affect the new relationship with the location. The original location of the person may become a new cultural site for the person. Yet, these slippages, both literally and metaphorically, characterize our everyday experiences. Educational contexts, and to some extent schools in particular, are especially “slippery” spaces, where the treacherous terrain of learning and teaching can significantly shift the meaning of the various texts that shape both personal and collective narratives.

The essay reviews included in this issue present us with a series of slippery readings of both “classic” as well as more recent or less well-known texts. At the risk of oversimplification, we describe our reading of these essays in relationship to four kinds of slippages: (1) the authors situate curriculum texts, in particular, cultural moments that in some way slip how we read these texts; (2) they review selected texts in order to respond to contemporary social and technological slippages; (3) they encourage us to slip into new pedagogical possibilities and (4) the authors attempt to slip between the so-called boundaries between curriculum studies and other fields, as well as within the field of curriculum studies itself. In this editorial, we take up each of these slippages and briefly comment on them as a way to introduce the essays featured in this issue.

Slipping Around

At various historical moments, there are a series of slippages that significantly shape how readers are oriented to, and therefore how we read, particular texts. Sara Clarke-Vivier and Shaleen Cassily (in this issue) refer to these moments of slippage as “cultural moments.” The recent killing of Michael Brown, for instance, ignited renewed conversations about racial injustice in the United States, altering the direction of discussions about race. For many, the killing of an unarmed black teen by a white police officer was more than symbolic. It unmasked the real current of race-based hatred running through the US society. Many people came forward, protested and took actions that have shifted the future direction of racial politics in the United States. Emancipatory politics took place both on the street and on the internet. One example of such politics was #FergusonSyllabus, a Twitter campaign launched by Marcia Chatelain, an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University. This campaign created a platform for educators to share ideas about how to engage – or how to “read” – the Ferguson incident in their classrooms.

The Ferguson incident and responses to it have provided a cultural moment for Clarke-Vivier and Cassily's essay, “A Pedagogy of Possibility: Reading Roger Simon in the Wake of Ferguson, Missouri.” In this essay, the authors review Roger Simon's Teaching Against the Grain, a book that has become standard reading in critical pedagogy, along with his posthumous publication A Pedagogy of Witnessing, the culmination of more than two decades exploring historical memory and museum exhibitions. With the purpose of exploring pedagogical possibilities for civic engagement and solidarity, the authors draw on Simon's work to show how #FergusonSyllabus has become a pedagogical site to “publicly curate” the experiences of injustice that black people have historically endured in the United States.

In a similar vein, Lucy El-Sherif revisits Muhammad Asad's (1954) The Road to Mecca in juxtaposition with Zareena Grewal's (2014) Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority. El-Sherif's focus is on the various slippages that shape Western Muslims' construction of subjecthood within the settler colonial state and the post 9/11 context, another “cultural moment” that can be examined for the kinds of slippage it causes in subjecthood. El-Sherif discusses some strategies of inclusion that Western Muslims have used in order to resist attacks on their Muslim identity. For example, Western Muslims often feel obligated to correct normative misconceptions in order to replace negative representations of Islam in the media and in society at large with positive ones. Her argument shows the slippery nature of identity texts and how groups actively engage in both producing and reproducing the narratives that shape their experience. Another strategy of inclusion that some Western Muslims use is to travel to the “Muslim world” to learn “true” knowledge about Islam so that they may contribute to the development of a more positive image of Islam in the West. Both of the texts that El-Sherif engages illustrate such strategies. In the implementation of these strategies, travel functions as a symbol for becoming Western; as a way to slip into a new version of what it means to be a Muslim person. However, taking a critical turn in her essay, El-Sherif argues that this kind of travel often becomes an enactment of a wished-for whiteness. It also distracts and forecloses genuine dialogues for solidarity both within the Muslim community and across various racialized communities, particularly within the context of settler colonial states.

Various authors in this special issue engage the slippages of such cultural moments in productive ways. As a second observation, we note that some authors engage texts in order to respond to and shift contemporary social and technological changes and challenges. For example, in her essay “Translanguaging and the Multilingual Turn: Epistemological Reconceptualization in the Fields of Language and Implications for Reframing Language in Curriculum Studies,” Sabrina Francesca Sembiante calls for a re-examination of the role of language in curriculum studies. This is important in a time when the increasing transnational movement of people has brought about unprecedented social challenges. One such challenge is to meet the educational needs of linguistically diverse students. To address this challenge, Sembiante puts into a conversation Stephen May's (2013) edited volume The Multilingual Turn and Ofelia García and Li Wei's (2013) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Sembiante's primary aim in this conversation is to conceptualize a critical language pedagogy, which endeavours “to reveal what and how language is used in the curriculum and to ensure that students of all language backgrounds have equitable opportunities to access and produce knowledge across the content areas”. Such proposals invite a slippage in the way that curriculum studies engage language and the role that multilingualism might play within curriculum scholarship.

Like the transnational movement of people, another profound change that we have experienced in recent decades is an unprecedented advancement in digital technology. Technologically mediated social spaces, advances in such areas as cybernetics and robotics and increased awareness of issues such as global climate change that are posing an existential threat to our planet have forced us to think beyond the human. The age-old focus on the human as the locus of control and concern is no longer “sustainable”; our very conception of the human is slipping around. We are now compelled to slip beyond the dualisms between nature--culture, human--animal, mind--body and organic and technological. The most recent body of scholarly work along this line of argument has been called posthumanism. Posthuman thinking reveals a paradox because, as Cary Wolfe (2010) explains in his “Introduction” to What is Posthumanism? posthumanism “comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world.” Yet, posthumanism also comes after humanism because it “names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrications in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore” (p. xv).

Such slippages in thinking about the subject are beginning to have a profound and still evolving effect on curriculum scholarship, as several of the essays in this special issue reveal. For example, it has reinvigorated debates about the current state and future role of the humanities in higher education. Jamila Raana Siddiqui takes up some of these debates in her essay “Restyling the Humanities Curriculum of Higher Education for Posthuman Times.” She points out that in the debates about the future of the humanities, what is often absent is a discussion of the very object of the humanities curriculum, that is, “the human.” Siddiqui engages Rosi Braidotti's (2013) The Posthuman and shines light on how the humanities curriculum may benefit from Braidotti's conceptualization of critical posthumanism. She then brings Braidotti's work into a conversation with none other than John Dewey and his work in the 1929 book Experience and Nature. Siddiqui provocatively invites a slippage in the way we read Dewey's work, going as far as suggesting that Dewey's text can be read as pointing in the direction of a critical posthumanism. She invites readers to take Dewey's empiricist conception of the nature of experience as an antecedent to how we conceptualize posthuman spaces, an invitation that also invites a certain slippage in time in the way we read these texts. As Siddiqui writes, “Braidotti's posthumanism updates Dewey's natural empiricism. Similarly, Dewey's natural empiricism complements and deepens Braidotti's advocacy for a posthuman turn in the humanities” (p. 64). She concludes the essay with the hope that humanities education will embrace the spirit of posthumanism, which envisions education as unbounded movements of experiences demanding a radical revision in humanities curriculum and pedagogy.

Furthermore, the advancement of science and technology has had a direct impact on how we use various media and interact with others. For example, a recent survey indicates that teens in the United States spend nearly nine hours per day consuming media (Tsukayama, 2015). What implications does this trend of ubiquitous media-use have for education? One of the most obvious implications is that we need to take a critical literacy approach to media education. Lance Mason addresses this need in his essay “McLuhan's Challenge to Critical Media Literacy: The City as Classroom Textbook,” pushing the boundaries of contemporary approaches to media education by slipping back to an earlier articulation of what precisely it means to engage media critically. Mason revisits the textbook The City as Classroom, which Marshall McLuhan and his colleagues published in 1977. Mason brings fresh perspectives to contemporary approaches to media literacy drawing on McLuhan's media theories and shows how McLuhan's broad approach to studying media can make valuable contributions to critical media literacy today. As Mason underscores, McLuhan's work is particularly helpful to understand “the ideological content and power relations behind the construction of media messages” (p. 79).

The third slippage evident in the essays in this special issue surrounds the imagining of new pedagogical possibilities. Before we proceed to illustrate this point, we must recognize that pedagogy is one of the most prolifically used terms in educational circles and yet its meanings vary markedly in the literature (see CI, volume 43, number 1). In the interest of space, we begin with one of many perspectives on pedagogy. According to this view, pedagogy is neither a science nor a technology, but rather it consists of normative actions. As Max van Manen (1991) has argued:

It shows how one is oriented to children and how one lives up (or fails to live up) to one's responsibilities. Pedagogical influence means not only that one is response-able but that in addition to this “ability to respond” one actually acts in a manner that is indeed responsible and thus morally accountable and defensible. (p. 15)

Thus, acts of pedagogy involve not only our philosophies of life, but also who we are and “how we actively and reflectively stand in the world” (p. 23). Such a perspective on pedagogy takes interest in what van Manen calls “the growth of the other” (p. 13). Another way of putting this is that pedagogy is always directed by particular aims and goals for an-other, and therefore, it is always an ethical endeavor (Gaztambide-Fernández & Arráiz Matute, 2013). As such, the task requires a critical examination of how and why we come to take interest in the growth of others without a paternalistic gaze.

Kyo Maclear responds to this question in her essay “Pedagogy of an Empty Hand: What are the Goods of Education? What is Teaching Good for?” Maclear argues that in times of acute crisis, pedagogy often becomes a vehicle for “false generosity,” which itself acts as an oppressive mechanism. Maclear's reflective journey through the slippages of pedagogy begins with the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Drawing inspiration from Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, especially his notion of “true generosity,” Maclear reviews Philippe Falardeau's (2011) film Monsieur Lazhar. Using the film as illustration, she identifies the pedagogical slippage that arises when both the teacher and the students are caught up in the complexity of emotional relationality. Monsieur Lazhar, the teacher in the film, realizes the suffering of his students. He grapples with the human wish to end suffering as soon as possible, but he also realizes that at times an effort to end suffering can itself be harmful. Recognizing such dilemmas and uncertainties, Maclear proposes a pedagogy of an empty hand. Such a pedagogy aims for what Freire would call “true generosity.” Maclear complements this view of generosity by slipping Derrida's notion of unconditional hospitality into her reading of Freire. She accomplishes this through another slippery reading of Derrida's text as it is applied in Jen Gilbert's (2014) Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education.

As a fourth and final insight we draw from reading the essays in this special issue, we note the recurrence of the tendency to slip between the boundaries, not only between curriculum studies and other fields, but also among various “camps” within curriculum studies itself. These slippages confront the orthodoxy of a field that has at times remained rigid in terms of the boundaries between ideological, and at times personal, commitments to particular lines of thought. Indeed, if there is one thing that all the authors in this special issue seem more than eager to embrace is the desire to slip around such boundaries in a kind of “promiscuous” theorizing that brings the work to life. Sembiante, for example, underscores how curriculum studies may benefit from slipping into applied linguistics. El-Sherif's essay shines light on complex identity processes through a slippery reading of texts at the intersection of religious/cultural studies and curriculum work. Maclear's work draws inspiration from incidents of environmental collapse to provoke a slippage between curriculum and pedagogy. Mason draws a connection between the curriculum of critical media literacy education, theories of media studies, and the recent developments in science and technology studies. The works of these new scholars of curriculum studies collectively point to a departure from insulatory thinking and a journey toward a more generative way of thinking. In this way, new scholars challenge the intellectual orthodoxy that has characterized some aspects of curriculum studies. Such an orthodoxy stifled curriculum discourses “by polarizing potentially complementary groups of curriculum scholars” and by fueling “scholarly conflicts that have little praxeological significance” (Sears, 1992, p. 211).

Such an attempt to reject intellectual orthodoxy is perhaps best captured in Thiago Ranniery Moreira de Oliveira and Danielle Bastos Lopes's essay “On the Limits of the Human in the Field of Curriculum.” Oliveira and Lopes reject intellectual orthodoxy through their critical analysis of the posthuman turn in the field of education. They engage Paulo Freire's (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Nathan Snaza and John Weaver's (2014) edited collection Posthumanism in Educational Research. They argue that these two books begin to meet at a point where the message is for re-envisioning another kind of education that may prepare us for the challenges of teaching and learning in the present moment. While posthuman thinking seems to insist on the apparent need to get rid of an obsolete conceptualization of the “human,” Oliveira and Lopes caution that one-dimensional criticism of the anthropocentric feature of education may open doors to other epistemological and normative paradigms that can be equally harmful. As such, they conclude that “it is necessary to question the centrality of the humanist ‘man’ that Freire defended, but it is also relevant to question the centrality of modern Western cosmology in providing post-humanist reconceptualizations of the human and nonhuman in curriculum studies”. Taking such an “hospitable” approach, Oliveira and Lopes as well as other authors featured in this issue of CI have engaged diverse curriculum texts and their readings of the texts have been shaped by slippages in cultural moments. Together, they have not only helped us see the state of curriculum studies, but also illuminated a new critical direction, one in which slipping around the boundaries between texts opens up a repositioning of curriculum itself as a field of practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.