Woking Curriculum: Youth, popular cultures, and moving images matter!

In these intensified anti-Black, anti-Aboriginal, anti-LGBTQI times, this paper offers woking curriculum as an educational-political proposition. Schools are often places of rejection of young people’s investment in popular culture and their attuned sensibilities to moving images in videogames, cartoons, and popular movies. Through a spoken word poem this paper begins to respond to this disinvestment offering an analysis of why and how the popular moving images must be made curriculum. The paper draws from visual and classroom-based research in the United States, Australia, and Colombia

‘I don’t think you’re going to have any aborigines in your world’: Minecrafting terra nullius

The myth that justified the takeover of a continent lives on both in classrooms and popular media. Drawing from classroom observations in an urban primary school in Australia, this paper enters the technology in education conversation, more specifically through the use of videogames for learning. Based on classroom exchanges between teachers and students, we interrogate how the school’s use of Minecraft, a best-selling commercial videogame, continues to reproduce myths of settler colonialism in the 21st century. Specifically, the curriculum mobilizes structures inherent to both Minecraft and modern Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous populations. That is, both classroom and videogame interactions reproduced the myth of terra nullius: the doctrine that determined land, prior to colonization, was empty and unowned, and therefore available for settlement by the colonizer. We conclude that within videogames and classrooms students’ voices manage to inquire into and interrogate the curriculum, resisting reproduction of erasive coloniality in school.status: publishe

Provoking Dialogues: Worth Striking For

At the 36th Annual Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, a Provoking Dialogues session was held on Worth Striking For: Why Education Policy is Every Teacher’s Concern (Lessons from Chicago), written by Isabel Nuñez, Gregory Michie, and Pamela Konkol. Curriculum scholars took up various sections of the book as part of a larger discussion on School Reform: What is the current paradigm of neoliberal school reform that educators are working under, and what possibilities are there for undermining this paradigm in support of public schooling? The following essay is comprised of the thoughts of those scholars. We encourage you to continue to engage with these authors and each other to keep the fight going