To Event: Toward a Post‐Constructivist of Theorizing and Researching the Living Curriculum as Event*‐in‐the‐Making¹

Abstract

In this article, I (1) argue for approaching processes, events*‐in‐the‐making, by means of process categories—to learn, to teach—not by means of categories that denote differences in state and (2) exemplify doing and writing research consistent with process philosophy. To understand process we must not think, research, and write them in terms of categories (etymologically, things specified by predicates) but in terms of movement itself. The unfinished and inherently open‐ended event*‐in‐the‐making indicates such movement and is associated with the disappearance of possibilities in its actualization (the event), openness toward the future, unpredictability, and excess of intuition over intention. I use empirical materials from a mathematics classroom to exemplify (give a body to) these categories and to ground my discussion. I conclude by discussing several implications that arise from the fact of theorizing and researching the living curriculum as unfolding, yet‐to‐be completed event.

Notes

Notes

1. I follow Garfinkel (1991) using the asterisk “*” to mark provisional terms. The analysis has to show whether the provisional concept is actually appropriate. Thus, event* denotes that we do not know with certainty what kind of event we are witnessing; question* denotes that a locution might be a question, but only the detailed analysis can reveal what has happened.

2. In this article, I use the term moment in the dialectical sense of a constitutive part in its relation to the constituted whole and reserve the term instant to denote a period of time.

3. The entire Fragment 8.7 (Roth, , p. 220) of an account concerning the incarnate nature of mathematical knowing is taken up here.

4. A locution is one sided, whereas an utterance is two sided, involving an articulation and its social evaluation on the part of the listener (Vološinov, ).

5. Readers certainly are familiar with situations of this kind: A first speaker says something, the second says, “You are hurting/insulting me!” and the first one says, “I am sorry, I only meant to joke/say …” Here, too, the hurt/insult is available only in and through the second locution, and the third locution now has to address the unintended but nevertheless actual effect.

6. Using a simple (phenomenological) exercise, we can experience how eye movements make a “cube”; and without the eye movements, there is no cube but only indistinct grey (e.g., Roth, ).

7. Even grammar, the closing of classroom episodes, and other aspects of the living curriculum are collective achievements rather than things determined by this or that participant (Roth, ).

8. Nietzsche’s own example is the natural number sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.