Grappling with curricular and pedagogical entanglements

In re-reading the pieces that comprise this issue of the journal we were struck by the ways each piece grapples with, enacts, and/or navigates issues of entanglement. On a recent road trip to the far western New South Wales town of Menindee for a week-long indigenous cultural immersion trip (Hill & Mills, 2013), I (Will) was confronted with and thought deeply about my own entanglement in the enduring white settler colonial project, how it persists to the present, and how it continues to manifest. These issues were invoked, rehearsed, and challenged throughout a week that included whole-group yarning circles (dialogue circles), small group and one-on-one conversations with elders, excursions to significant cultural sites, chats around the campfire in the mornings and evenings, and plenty of time for solo contemplation and reflection. These challenges were not only historical and cultural, but fundamentally ontological and epistemological (Nolan, Hill, & Harris, 2010). The immediate effects of this experience were deeply personal, enabling me to be at ease with different paradigms for making sense of the world and accepting that there are some things that can't or don't need to be articulated in words, they just need to be experienced. In reflective conversation with a colleague on the twelve-and-a-half hour car journey home, we talked about how our own changed understandings could be manifest in our work. We thought of a range of ways that the spirit and intention of this cultural immersion trip could live on—encouraging colleagues to experience the trip, sharing how our conceptions of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous ways of knowing have evolved as a result of the experience, conceptualizing the indigenization of the curriculum as about something much more than merely adding particular bits of content, and acknowledging that this is a journey that will never have an end, and that's the joy of it!

I came to understand my challenge as not being about trying to un-knot the complexities of these intertwined issues, but rather to honor the entanglement of thoughts, emotions and issues and strive to learn more about and from it. For as Nathan Snaza (this issue) states, “We are, at every moment, caught up in—and indeed, made by—entanglements with others that are aleatory, contingent, and shifting. Education, for me, names any practice where different bodies—some of them will be human—come together in order to collectively attend or attune to these entanglements.” Each of the pieces in this issue focuses in some way on a moment or process of educational practice where individuals—human and nonhuman—come together to contend with their mutually constituted entanglements.

In the ABER piece for this issue, “‘I am nature’: Understanding the possibilities of currere in curriculum studies and aesthetics,” Patrick Slattery takes up an exploration of nature and aesthetics as currere, as he explores the ways in which aesthetic experiences involve the entanglements of self, other, nature, artist, art, education, learning, and more. These experiences are not “simply formative, informative, or transformative,” but rather they are “potential ruptures in psycho-social understandings of self and (inter)relationships leading to prolepsis”—or, that moment where various moments, individuals, selves, pasts, presents, and future become entangled.

In Joseph Baker's “Interpreting poetic inquiry: Authenticity realized from alumni performers' narratives,” he describes the process of utilizing poetic inquiry to provide insight into participants' individual and shared emotional experiences in high school speech and debate and the influences those experiences had on their lives after high school. The experience of participating in speech and debate, the methodological process of poetic inquiry, and the final poetic product all express various entanglements. The poem he constructed from the participant interviews highlights the entanglements participants experienced through undertaking speech and debate–they discuss their relationships with each other, with learning new perspectives and new ways of seeing the world, and with learning to listen and discuss controversial topics. The poem itself also constitutes a kind of entanglement, as it can be read as one poem or many poems, one account or multiple accounts, one voice or multiple voices. As a research process, poetic inquiry involves an entanglement with the very emotional humanity of participants. Baker argues that as researchers, the “strongest moments are not when we delete authenticity out of results, but when we find humanity in data.”

Cassie Brownell's piece, “Starting where you are, revisiting what you know: A letter to a first-year teacher addressing the hidden curriculum,” takes the form of a letter to a newly hired colleague that elaborates and illustrates aspects of a teacher's entanglement in and with the hidden curriculum. The aim of this informal historically-grounded text is to render accessible and intelligible the myriad of ways educational processes and experiences are entangled with all sorts of curricula– formal, informal, hidden, null, etc.—that aren't always readily recognizable, and how teachers can get tangled up in/by teaching. Brownell concludes the letter by providing her first-year colleague a set of questions to consider as they learn to discern the hidden curricula in their own classroom, in their practice and pedagogies, and in the world.

In “Reclaiming ‘self’ in teachers' images of ‘education’ through mindfulness as contemplative inquiry” Oren Ergas acknowledges that teachers are often tangled up in images and practices of education from their past experiences with it. In order to navigate this tangle of past and present, Ergas advocates for radical curricular-pedagogical solutions. This article canvasses one such solution as it, “describes and demonstrates the implementation of such approach in a teacher education course in which mindfulness was proposed as a way for investigating self as an explicit curriculum.” The article enunciates the challenges evoked and insights gleaned from using such a radical approach, and it examines how engaging such entanglement can contribute to articulating one's “teaching self.”

The final pieces in this issue are in conversation with one another as they attend and attune to their mutually-constituted entanglements. Hugo Letiche's “Response article: Bewildering pedagogy” engages directly with Snaza's 2013 article published in this journal this journal. Next, Snaza contributes to the conversation with “Aleatory entanglements: (Post)humanism, hospitality, and attunement—A response to Hugo Letiche”. And finally “third wheel” and “random Mexican guy” Sam Rocha contributes to the conversation with “Third wheel thoughts on method and the shitty curriculum—Response to the Letiche/Snaza exchange.” The Letiche-Snaza-Rocha trinity of pieces hold our interest on two levels. There are both interesting wonderings/wanderings about the content of the conversation—related to humanism, post-humanism, and conceptualizing one's scholarly oeuvre. But perhaps even more interesting are the discussions of the methodologies these authors use to engage in such curricular and pedagogical conversations, both individually and collectively.

We hope you have time to get tangled up in this issue of the journal—to attend and attune to these important and engaging issues, and maybe even to get lost.