Pursuing a problematic-based curriculum approach for the sake of

This article envisions, and argues for, what I call a problematic-based curriculum approach (PBCA) in which students work with/on knowledge in relation to local lifeworld problems that matter. In the process, students and teachers would extend curriculum work beyond school walls, engaging with diverse knowledgeable actors – ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ – in relation to mattering problems. In outlining PBCA, I draw significantly on Vygotskyan thought, including the Funds of Knowledge approach to curriculum design, and on Isabelle Stengers’ pragmatist arguments for a proactive politics of knowledge in which ‘expertise’ proliferates. The article also contrasts PBCA with the Social Realist approach to curriculum (SR) that underpins South Africa’s Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS). In this contrast, I argue that SR/CAPS is re-formative, whereas CPBA would be trans-formative in Nancy Fraser’s sense of “chang[ing] the deep grammar” that frames curriculum, towards robust and vitally needed social-educational justice

Conjuring optimism in dark times: Education, affect and human capital

This paper analyses how the discursive construction, valuation and subjective experience of human capital is evolving in parallel with crises of capital as a world-system. Ideology critique provides tools for analysing policy ‘fictions’ that aim to sustain investment in human capital through education. Foucauldian analytical tools enable analysis of how human capital has become a project of self-appreciation and cultivation of positive psychological traits. We argue that the work of Lauren Berlant provides an important complement to these approaches and enables us to analyse how crises of capital are being lived as the cruelling of optimism about social mobility through investment in oneself as human capital. The paper points to an educational politics and pedagogy for living through infrastructural breakdown in darkly uncertain historical times

Governing Australia's Universities: The Managerial Strong-Arming of Academic Agency

Through performance criteria tied to funding mechanisms, the Australian federal government exerts unprecedented degrees of control over resource-starved universities, submitting them to accountability demands and ‘market’ logics. A result has been severe decline in the autonomy not only of universities from external governance, but of academic staff from internal university governance. Ascending modes of managerial governance – associated with corporatising trends in many public sector institutions – are especially pernicious in the Australian university sector. As senior executives become more muscular, there is concomitant weakening of traditional governance bodies, such as academic boards, and even some powers of councils to whom managers are accountable. In consequence – as analysed in this article – academic working lives are regulated increasingly less by ‘representative’ bodies and processes, and more through everyday regimes of practice and relation that induce subconscious mentalities – tacitly internalised self-governing principles – which Foucault accordingly calls governmentalities. This paper explores how certain govern-mentalities emerge from strong-handed managerialism; how they are underpinned by institutionalised bullying; and how they operate to weaken the autonomy and agency of academics, channelling their practices and muting critical-ethical resistance

Pursuing a problematic-based curriculum approach for the sake of social justice

CITATION: Zipin, L. 2017. Pursuing a problematic-based curriculum approach for the sake of social justice. Journal of Education, 69:68-92.The original publication is available at https://journals.ukzn.ac.za/index.php/joe/This article envisions, and argues for, what I call a problematic-based curriculum approach (PBCA) in which students work with/on knowledge in relation to local lifeworld problems that matter. In the process, students and teachers would extend curriculum work beyond school walls, engaging with diverse knowledgeable actors – ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ – in relation to mattering problems. In outlining PBCA, I draw significantly on Vygotskyan thought, including the Funds of Knowledge approach to curriculum design, and on Isabelle Stengers’ pragmatist arguments for a proactive politics of knowledge in which ‘expertise’ proliferates. The article also contrasts PBCA with the Social Realist approach to curriculum (SR) that underpins South Africa’s Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS). In this contrast, I argue that SR/CAPS is re-formative, whereas CPBA would be trans-formative in Nancy Fraser’s sense of “chang[ing] the deep grammar” that frames curriculum, towards robust and vitally needed social-educational justice.https://journals.ukzn.ac.za/index.php/joe/article/view/426Publisher's versio

Engaging middle years learners by making their communities curricular: A Funds of Knowledge approach

AGAINST THE WELL-ANALYSED TENDENCY of school curriculum to reproduce social-structural inequalities, this paper counterposes a Funds of Knowledge approach that, since the early 1990s, has shown ways to build curriculum that furthers academic engagement and success among 'less advantaged' learners. The paper outlines how mainstream curriculum selects for the cultural capital of more powerful social positions, and how this significantly explains disengagement-particularly in the middle years of schooling-among less powerfully positioned learners: both because curriculum fails to resonate with their home/ community cultural lives, and because it transmits a deficit view of their life-based knowledge and capacities. The paper then elaborates an asset view that the life-worlds of less privileged students indeed endow them with valuable cultural resources- fimds of knowledge-for learning. The logic and practices for designing curriculum and pedagogy that make use of funds of knowledge as learning assets-thus engaging students' intelligence and enabling academic success-are elaborated. Across the paper, argument builds around an illustrative case study from an Australian action research project in which students working with an Art teacher in a high-poverty region drew on their funds of knowledge to create clay-animation stories about their life-worlds