New Materialisms in Curriculum Theorizing: From Literacy to Sensibility

Abstract

This paper critiques the predominance of ‘literacy’ in contemporary education and, on the basis of new materialisms, advances ‘sensibility’ as an alternative. In analyzing several discourses of literacy, including debates around OECD literacy, new media literacy, and affective literacy, I describe the different ways in which literacies are theorized on the basis of knowledge. The paper calls attention to experience and relations other than knowledge by inviting the new materialist movement in social research into the scene. Current new materialisms are predominantly built upon the heritage of Deleuze’s philosophy, and I read them in relation to Rancière’s philosophy. My reading tests the limits of both Deleuzian affects and Rancièrian aesthetics. I argue the new materialist movement gives rise to the possibility to think of curriculum in terms of ‘sensibility’. Education cast in terms of ‘sensibility’ would be less reductive and more open to the new. To contribute to theorizing sensibility, I construct, compare, and contrast a Deleuzian theory of sensibility and a Rancièrian theory of sensibility to see the different ways in which they allow education to embrace discontinuity, events, and equality