Against Curriculum: Fall-Away Youth Interrupting Masterful Education

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how young people, considered as ‘fall-away’, engage with the ‘curriculum complex’, a set of relations of adult expert communities, transnational and international corporate and educational organisations, and legislations and policies, aimed at managing and containing the ‘wild’ student through the employment of correctional practices. This paper examines young people’s engagement with the curriculum complex through two inquiries: one in the U.S. Midwest; and another in the northern Philippines. By using vignettes and student conversations from these inquiries, this paper first asks how the curriculum complex figures in classrooms; second, how students respond to it through their bold, playful, and engaged classroom and school curriculum performances; and lastly, how young people through their acts of guileful ruse, widen the curricular opening, and at the same time, expose its illogic and mastery.

KEYWORDS:

• Moving images
• Indigenous education
• youth cultures
• curriculum complex
• prison industrial complex

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms.

2 All names in the first inquiry are self-selected pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the McKenzie Fellowship: [Grant Number McKenzie Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Ligia (Licho) López López

Ligia (Licho) López López is Caribbean, Queer and of Abiayala. She lives as an uninvited person alongside Kulin Country. Her work is committed to revaluing Black and Indigenous lives. She is a senior lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Her work has appeared in Race Ethnicity and Education, The British Journal of Sociology of Education, Discourse, and Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, among others. Her most recent and forthcoming books include Interrogating the relations between migration and education in the South: Migrating Americas (with Ivón Cepeda-Mayorga and Maria Emilia Tijoux) Routledge, 2022, and Growing up antiblack in Latin America and the Caribbean (with Gioconda Coello) Abya Yala, 2022.

Elizer Jay de los Reyes

Elizer Jay de los Reyes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Communications and New Media, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Jay's research is on gendered mobilities of women domestic workers from the northern Philippines and educational aspirations of their left-behind children. He is also a co-editor of the book Academic Resilience: Personal Stories and Lessons Learnt from the COVID-19 Experience (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2022).