Mise en scène curriculaire et réorientation de l’Éducation

Curricular enactment can be an educative medium for living well in the world with others. This is not new thinking, but it is bold thinking that schools and communities worldwide persist in avoiding and short-changing. In this article, matters concerning roles and relations across understandings of education, knowledge and curricular enactment are sketched, and in doing so, what ought to matter is foregrounded. Turning to traditions concerning the aesthetics of human understanding and to found kinships with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, curricular modes of being and habits of practice emerge. These modes and habits insist on educators, students and communities traversing the curricular terrain together, orienting towards growth and well-being, and re-thinking the world in-the-making. This article challenges all readers to envision the significances we can no longer ignore and to consider the research implications.Mis en scène collectivement, le curriculum peut servir de médium éducatif, incitant au bien vivre avec les autres, sur cette terre. Moins nouvelle qu’audacieuse, cette possibilité est continuellement évitée et court-circuitée par des écoles et des communautés de par le monde. Cet article dresse le portrait des questions qui se posent au sujet des rôles et des relations dans la construction du curriculum selon les différentes acceptations de l’Éducation et, de ce fait, témoigne de ce qui devrait être mis à l’avant-scène de nos réflexions. De nouveaux modes d’exister et de nouvelles pratiques habituelles par/dans le curriculum émergent lorsque nous nous tournons vers les traditions esthétiques de l’entendement humain et lorsque nous nous reconnaissons une affinité avec les façons d’être et de savoir autochtones. Ces modes et habitudes exigent que personnel éducatif, corps étudiant and communautés fassent collectivement la traversée du terrain curriculaire en s’orientant vers la croissance, le bien-être et la refonte du monde-en-émergence. Cet article veut lancer le défi à chaque lecteur et lectrice de se forger une image des significations qu’il est devenu impossible d’ignorer et d’en considérer les implications pour la recherche

Investing in the curricular lives of educators: narrative inquiry as pedagogical medium

This paper draws on the experiences of two graduate level curriculum theory classes taught at different teacher education institutions in the United States. As teacher educators and curriculum theorists, we invest in creating reflexive spaces for teachers to explore the complex terrain of lived curriculum. Narrative inquiry is chronicled as acting as an important pedagogical medium toward this aim. The purpose of the paper is to explore what practicing teachers’ narratives reveal about their curricular roles in relation to theory and practice. As participating educators consider their associated teaching identities, phenomenological notions of place are found to be fitting as they navigate understandings of lived curriculum as situated, thoughtful, and intentional. Insights generated through reflexive analysis manifest three thematic intersections: 1) Teachers confronting dissonance between theory and practice as teaching identity displacement; 2) Teachers negotiating greater implacement; and 3) Teachers moving toward embodying the creative space for teaching and learning. Renewed roles surface for teacher educators and curriculum theorists, challenging all involved to purposefully foster contexts for professional learning rather than subservience, and claim the responsibilities to provide the intellectual, emotional, and pragmatic spaces where teachers’ lived curriculum efforts can be developed and nurtured

Preparing to Teach: Redeeming the Potentialities of the Present Through Conversations of Practice

A prospective teacher and a teacher educator enter into a yearlong conversation seeking greater curricular physicality and materiality within its enactment. Dewey\u27s (1938) temporal educative relation of teaching and learning as an ever-present process is helpful, asking both parties to dwell mindfully at the intersections of teaching/learning situations and interactions. Attention turns to the lived curricular features and consequences of preparing teachers to teach as an ever-present process. The role and place of self-other negotiation is illuminated within curricular enactment, giving expression to teaching/learning as an ever-present process. Pedagogical significances are redeemed through greater teaching mindfulness of the temporality at play within the present

Expecting, Accepting, and Respecting Difference in Middle School

The curriculum need not fight young adolescents’ need to engage in identity formation. It can assist that process when students are given the opportunity to address issues that matter to them through their school work. Adolescence is a time when key questions of identity assume central importance in the lives of children (Brumberg, 1997). It is often a particularly traumatic time for girls as they negotiate through the quagmire of adolescent experience (Harper, 1997). During the time we spent researching and teaching in middle schools, we found that the voices of adolescent girls echoed this fragile and vulnerable sense of self. We were engaged in separate interpretive research studies in middle schools that allowed the depth and complexity of participants’ learning experiences to be explored. We approached the inquiry through participant observation and inter­viewing, where dialogue was the fundamental process through which meaning and understand­ing unfolded. Additionally, we each collected stu­dent work documenting responses to learning and wrote journals in which we noted emerging con­nections, analyses, and interpretations. Taken together, these research activities at three school sites involving 36 young adolescents provided us with evidence about multiple meanings of school­ing for adolescent girls. Honoring differences in individual’s opinions, thinking, and experiences allows teachers and students to reconsider and reformulate their beliefs. Educators ought not ignore the potential, power, and responsibility implicit in expecting, accepting, and respecting differences in our students

The Ed.D. as Investment in Professional Development: Cultivating Practitioner Knowledge

As teacher educators and participants in the US-based Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED) initiative to differentiate the Ed.D/Ph.D., we have programmatic commitments to the centrality of practitioner knowledge for shaping professional development. Through CPED, we structure opportunities for local educators to develop their professional practices within their graduate studies toward an Ed.D, while maintaining full-time educational work commitments. Concurrently, we examine and document how CPED creates room, alongside concrete practice, to cultivate, promote, and value the voices, sensibilities, and capacities of practitioners engaged in advanced practices. In doing so, we confront marginalization of practitioners’ perspectives in the field and seek conditions and supports that insist on educators’ primary role in the complex project of education worldwide

Accessing the Curricular Play of Critical and Creative Thinking

A three-year collaborative research project in a K–6 elementary school is underway. The collaboration entails participating educators and their students exploring curricular enactment that embraces critical and creative thinking within its conduct. This article reveals whole-school efforts over Year One to build educators’ and students’ confidence to do so, sustaining such curricular practices. Chronicled as a case study, narrative inquiry fittingly unfolds the particularities encountered within the specifics of the case during Year One. Educators’ belief in the worthiness of curricular play, as well as concretely negotiating critical and creative thinking with their students, arises as a necessary issue to address in order to invest in the research intents over three years. The integral role of participants’ commitments to professional growth through curricular play and experimentation, actively seeking resources, entering wholly into curricular-making efforts, conversing sincerely with colleagues through inquiry conversations, and seeking organizational structures that support and strengthen curricular-making efforts, are found to be key to fostering the pedagogically oriented context needed to grow and sustain project intents