Examining the performative quality of a teacher's curriculum reform making through a metaphorical lens

Abstract

The focus of current literature on teachers’ failures in curriculum reform masks a deeper understanding on what is entailed in remaking a curriculum. In an empirical study, a U.S. specialized STEM schoolteacher described the curriculum reform he initiated as ‘walking a tight rope’. In order to unpack this metaphor, I use the construct, ‘performativity’, to analyze the performative process of a high-wire walker audacious act and illuminate the aesthetics of curriculum reform making, teacher identity, and agency. The comparative analysis of parallel narratives constructed from interviews with the teacher, lesson observations, and document artifacts, and narratives of a high-wire walker who illegally crossed the World Trade Center towers in New York illuminate the tension, excitement, confusion, fear, and weariness in the anticipation, construction, and enactment of change. Both agency and identity as leaders and risk takers are constantly contested and reconstructed. An embodied knowledge about curriculum reform making is constructed through the unifying experience offered through the metaleptic quality of performativity. This study is significant as it epistemologically departs from a normative conception of curriculum reform-as-implemented. Additionally, in first understanding what is entailed in curriculum reform making, a better understanding on why reform is challenging may be gained.

Keywords:

• performativity
• curriculum reform making
• high-wire walk
• agency
• identity
• STEM schoolteacher

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Erratum