Shaping Professional Hats: Posthumanist Affirmative Critique of Early Childhood Curriculum and Professionalism in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article argues that posthumanist thinking can frame early childhood curriculum and professionalism to productively attend to complex ways they constitute each other. Posthumanist perspectives on early childhood curriculum and professionalism encompass multiple human and non-human components co-/re-/constituting children and teachers, teaching and learning practices and processes, policies and procedures, values and beliefs, and materials and resources of early childhood settings. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki is envisaged as a woven mat; each early childhood setting weaves its own local curriculum from a set of principles and strands of learning. This article describes how a diffractive methodology employing four theoretical approaches can weave a complex and messy cartographic story of data from a research study into emotions in early childhood teaching. Early childhood teacher participants in focus group discussions used the imaginary ‘professional hat’ to describe how their expressions of emotions with children were constrained and enabled. This article affirmatively combines critique with creativity to explore early childhood professionalism within a specific localised enactment of curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand

Mobilizing citational practices as feminist curriculum-making in early childhood education

This article provides three propositions for thinking and doing citational practices as more than only technical, aggregating, or evidence to bolster a particular perspective in early childhood education. Collectively, we work to complexify our understanding of enacting citational practices in early childhood education and offer provocations for how we might build novel, accountable, pedagogical citational relations as we read and think together with early childhood educators. After offering speculative propositions for thinking citational practices otherwise, we turn to one example of a moment from practice and imagine how we might mobilize citational practices while thinking with this event. We argue for citational practices as a method of feminist curriculum-making; we offer an invitation to activate citational practices as a one engagement with feminist scholars and scholarship, and feminist methods of engaging in thoughtful, locally relevant dialogue that advances and answers for the consequences of the citational practices decisions we make

Agential Schooling: “Where Dreams Come To Die”

This piece, a posthumanist analysis of schooling, agential schooling, puts forward a complex accounting of schooling that decenters the human acknowledging those agents – schooling discourses, clipboards, policies, handouts, etc. – that often go unacknowledged in purely humanist framings. This shifts away from dualism and linearity to repositioning educational phenomena as entanglements of multiplicities, situatedness (e.g., politics, power, material flows, etc.), becomings, and the more-than-human world. This work positions schooling as an agent rather than solely as an outcome or effect. Ethnographic entanglements, interviews, and diffraction, were mobilized to better understand the intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and discursive agents. A diffractive analysis of two phenomenon: (1) youth reproducing hierarchical schooling, and (2) the intra-action between school administration, clipboards, and classroom observations demonstrate how various apparatuses – policy, curriculum, hierarchical relations, adultism, prescriptive entanglements, discipline, and punishment – support the violence of agential schooling. Schooling, an agent, influences our ways of knowing and being

Within and Beyond Religious Boundaries: Welcoming the ‘Uninvited Visitor’ through a Curriculum of Hospitality

Graduate students (who are also educators) sometimes make spontaneous statements regarding their religious identities. In making these declarations, they appear to invoke boundaries that exclude certain already marginalized groups. Another implication is that “liberal” education is divesting them of their religious faith. This paper suggests that while religions create boundaries, they also mandate the crossing of those boundaries to support others with whom they significantly differ and, further, that Derrida’s notion of “hospitality” offers possibilities for welcoming what he calls the “uninvited visitor,” for whose arrival we have not planned but whom we must embrace through acts of the impossible. A theoretical framework for fostering a curriculum of hospitality is offered and includes themes of deconstructing the Judeo-Christian narrative, difference as a human right, secularization, the welcoming experience, and forgiveness. The author’s pedagogical experiences in light of this framework are woven throughout.                   

Curricular Hauntings: Confrontations with Ghosts in Pursuit of a Place of Freedom

Drawing from theories of racial and historical hauntings (Derrida, 1993; Gordon; 1997), affect studies (Ahmed, 2014; Berlant, 2011; Coleman, 2021; Stewart, 2004), the spaciocurricular (Helfenbein, 2021) and theorizations of agential assemblages (Barad, 2007; Wozolek, 2021), this paper explores possibilities for recovering solidarities, collectivities, and freedoms through considerations of place, history, and poetry. In particular, this paper will examine readings of place and poetry as curricular and methodological tools that resists narrative closures and help us stay with the remains, the uncertainties, and what cannot be spoken–the stories that “cannot be passed on” (Morrison, 1987, p. 274). In doing so, I hope to follow the call of postqualitative research to “engage more fully with the materiality of language” (MacLure, 2013, p. 663) and the work of im/possibilities in language and literature education in orienting ourselves to more just futures, and to each other

Pedagogies of Attending and Mourning: Posthumanism, Death, and Affirmative Ethics

In a 1992 chapter, “Cries and Whispers,” William Pinar called for conversations around death to become normative in education, but that call has largely been ignored in curriculum theory. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, this article engages death as a site of curriculum inquiry. The author begins by discussing the fragility of human life and the necessity of death to the ecological world and highlighting the interconnections between Western death-denying culture and the Anthropocene. The author then discusses the material facts of death (the corpse) in conversation with posthumanism, ultimately suggesting an emergent environmental ethic—attending to waste. The notion of attending is then presented and elaborated as a form of pedagogy through its close relationship to the concept of mourning. The author concludes by suggesting attending as an affirmative sort of pedagogy that denies the binaries of negativity and positivity through a discussion of Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics

Schools of the Walking Dead: Schools, Societies, Smartness, and Educational Sanctuary

Through a close reading of a moment of schooling in The Walking Dead, this paper explores the relationship between school and society. It engages with shifting notions of smartness and raises questions of why schools both change and stay the same. Ultimately, the paper turns to see the possibilities that emerge from school as a place of refuge

Doesn't Your Work Just Re-Center Whiteness? The Fallen Impossibilities of White Allyship

Our purpose is to engage performative dialogue incorporative of currere on a central question in critical White studies (CWS). After precautionary notes and positionalities, we frame our dialogue within second-wave CWS. As its main section, six CWS scholars respond to the central question: Doesn’t research on White identities re-center whiteness? Analyzing the scholars’ responses, the performative dialogue is followed by an analytical discussion of CWS’ epistemological, ontological, and axiological convolutions. Via these convolutions, we recognize the impossibilities of facile “White allyship” within antiracist scholarship, curriculum and pedagogy, and related social movements. Instead of White allyship, we propose situated, relational, and process-oriented notions of alliance-oriented antiracist work. @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}@font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:Cambria;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Cambria",serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:Cambria;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;

Freedom, Interconnectedness, and Curriculum Attunement: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Wang takes a detour through Daoism and the West’s history of freedom to approach the notion of freedom through the thread of interconnectedness in a cross-cultural perspective, Wang argues that, without being immersed in the life-affirmative stream of interdependence, freedom cannot elevate individuals or groups above the web of life. Zhuangzi’s teaching about free wandering in Chinese indigenous wisdom is about the possibility of being free only when attuned to the rhythm of the cosmos. Incorporating both freedom and interconnectedness, curriculum attunement in the daily practice of education requires attending to both the inner and outer work of teachers and students for new openings and new relationality. In the shadows of freedom, this paper invites the transformation of the red fire of rage inside of us into the blue fire of passion (Doll, 1995) that can sustain life, for us, for our students, and for the planet

The Curriculum of the Jester: An Examination of Hamilton, An American Musical

Relying on a curriculum theory and cultural studies lens, this paper examines the Broadway musical Hamilton and asks "What history is it teaching?".  Focusing on the cycle of cultural production, the paper further examines the lines of impact the musical has had culturally.  Using a curricular lens combined with the work of Sylvia Wynter and Anne Tsing, the analysis shifts away from only looking at the musical’s historical accuracy to include a consideration of it as something more complex, as something between domination and resistance.  Furthermore, this paper argues that whether the piece was written as an intentional act of resistance becomes less interesting and important when it is seen as site of friction between the hegemonic and counterhegemonic.  In other words, by viewing Hamilton curricularly, in terms of what Pinar (2004) calls “the complicated conversation,” this paper moves away from judging the play in terms of its inherent counterhegemony and instead examines it as a  site where the hegemonic and counterhegemonic intersect.