Teaching Bodies: Curriculum and Corporeality

I began thinking about the topic of this dissertation at first in 2003 when I found myself expecting a third child while teaching full-time and pursuing a doctoral degree, and in earnest later that year at Bergamo, where I began to see a connection between my own interest in desires and bodies as they relate to education and the work of several of my colleagues. I began to think about the role of the body in the curriculum. Every day that we enter the classroom we bring our bodies and our desires along with us. We educate and learn from gestating bodies, ill bodies, able and dis--abled bodies, bodies that shape who we are as students and teachers. And yet, it seems that in many ways, the body becomes unimportant, if not invisible, in the traditional classroom. What I hope to accomplish with this dissertation, then, is to examine what I perceive as the disembodiment of curriculum, and bring the body into the educational practice and discourse in a way that is meaningful to the everyday practice of teachers and relevant to the future of curriculum at large. This project is not an attempt to reconceptualize physical education, although the binary we have constructed between kinesthetic and academic education is relevant. This study is also not a rearticulation of kinesthetic learning theory; the decision to utilize bodily movement as a way of helping students internalize concepts might be considered an initiative to involve the body more in the curriculum, but this study is more about what we do to, and from, and in our bodies than with them. I want to understand in what ways the body and pedagogy are intertwined, to explore how the ways we have thought about the body have shaped how we are as students and teachers, and to imagine an embodied curriculum that reflects the ways that the postmodern, posthuman body and the curriculum act with/in, on and against each other

Digital Surveillance: Foucault, the Internet, and the Meaning for Democracy

In this paper, we discuss digital surveillance and ways it enhances and changes the surveillance society Foucault described. Digital technology often has positioned itself as being a new media formation that will enhance democracy through peer-to-peer networks that highlight user-generated content and user-generated prioritization. Often hidden, however, is the relationship between the user and the owner of the proprietary digital space. Here, we explore the ways that the phenomenon digital surveillance actually differs from Foucault\u27s interpretation as the social context has changed

A Brief History of the First 10 Years of the Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative

To mark the inaugural issue of the Curriculum Studies Collaborative Journal, it is important to acknowledge the history of its origins,as an outgrowth of The Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative (CSSC). The CSSC, which has grown into a successful international Collaborative, was our brainchild when we were just beginning our careers at Georgia Southern University. For years, Julie, an alumna ofthe Curriculum Studies program at Georgia Southern, had heard her mentors talk about the need for a conference that would both highlight Georgia Southern’s important contributions to the field of curriculum theory and provide opportunities for doctoral students, most of whom were practitioners, to gain more exposure to a diverse range of international curriculum scholars. Daniel, a graduate of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, recognized the unique, practitioner-oriented nature of the doctoral program at Georgia Southern and saw an opportunity to bring the more traditional conference experience most Ph.D. candidates have directly to his students. Together, Julie, a faculty member in the then-named Department of Teaching and Learning, and Daniel, a faculty member in the Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading, decided to organize a conference that emphasized collaboration – between the two departments; between the conference organizers; and between senior, junior and emerging scholars, as well as practitioners

Digital Surveillance: Foucault, the Internet, and the Meaning for Democracy

In this paper, we discuss digital surveillance and ways it enhances and changes the surveillance society Foucault described. Digital technology often has positioned itself as being a new media formation that will enhance democracy through peer-to-peer networks that highlight user-generated content and user-generated prioritization. Often hidden, however, is the relationship between the user and the owner of the proprietary digital space. Here, we explore the ways that the phenomenon digital surveillance actually differs from Foucault\u27s interpretation as the social context has changed

Agency as assemblage: Using childhood artefacts and memories to examine children’s relations with schooling

In this article, we explore how childhood artefacts and memories might help us think retrospectively about children’s agency and its relationship to schooling and teaching. Across four university sites in Canada and the United States, we asked undergraduate students in teacher education and childhood studies programs to choose an artefact or object that encapsulates contemporary conceptions of childhood and to discuss them in a focus group setting at each site. Building on three participants’ descriptions of how they remembered and reflected upon school-oriented objects – a progress report, a notebook, and a pencil sharpener – we explore how participants used their artefacts in ways that allow us to theorize children’s agencies as assemblages, where agency is relational and contingent on multiple social and cultural factors. Drawing on our participants’ interpretations, we consider how a reconceptualized concept of agency may expand our understanding of the possibilities of children’s agencies in school and raise new questions about the meaning of childhood within contexts of teacher education and childhood studies

Childhood Memories of Playful Antics and Punishable Acts Risking an Imperfect Future of Teaching and Learning

This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle ground of the teacher’s role as one of introducing children to a world of limits, while also limiting the force of this very effort

Early Childhood Disciplinary Practices and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

As a cultural curriculum theorist and early childhood teacher educator embarking on research around systemic racism and the institutionalization of whiteness in education and educational research, I am seeking to initiate and expand networks of scholars who might contribute to a deeper understanding of these issues. Therefore, in order to advance the understanding of this topic and promote future research around the emotional, social, and economic impacts of school discipline, the purpose of this informal roundtable discussion will be to explore the ways that early childhood disciplinary practices – including classroom management techniques, positive behavior intervention strategies, instructional models, and school-wide behavior policies – operate in ways that limit the educational opportunities of young children of color

The End of Innocence: Childhood and Schooling for a Post-Pandemic World

The global pandemic has dramatically impacted the lives of billions of children all over the world, creating a massive disruption in education and exacerbating existing multidimensional inequalities. Given the ubiquity of the virus’s reach, is COVID-19 the end of childhood innocence? Building on an understanding of childhood as social practice, I describe how childhood innocence has been enacted through, and pivotal to, education as a social practice since the late 19th century. I consider how the pandemic is challenging the normative views of childhood that have long informed teaching and learning and outline the possibilities for reimagining childhood and schooling in ways that could promote a radical transformation of public education for a post-pandemic world

Pop Culture Praxis: Cultural Production as Critical Pedagogy

In this SoTL research project, I engaged graduate early childhood education students in popular culture using a critical pedagogical approach in order to examine how it transformed their ideas about historical representations and teaching social studies in the P-5 classroom. Specifically, I explore whether critiquing Disney’s “ethnic” Princess films through creative writing and artmaking can help early childhood educators think more critically about historical representations of race, class, and gender in children’s popular culture and encourage the development of a social justice orientation toward teaching P-5 Social Studies

What You Do to Children Matters: Memory, Crisis and the Myth of Childhood Innocence

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways that the American myth of childhood innocence perpetuates the racist logics that inform early childhood education. As Joanne Faulkner (2013) notes, this narrative “attracts a great deal of cultural attention and energy, both positive and negative” as a “privileged site not only of concern, celebration, and protection, but also of anxiety” (p. 127). That anxiety, fueled by nostalgia for our remembered childhoods as well as our desire to protect our children from any traumas we might have endured, drives many parents to protect their children from harm and even mild discomfort, in turn constructing “innocence” as a marker of class privilege. The term “child” is a thus a contested one, as it operates as “a highly potent discursive tool that is invoked to shape, limit, or foreclose arguments about social and material relations between individuals and classes of people in this country” (Sammond, 2005, p. 3). Where education is concerned, the normative concept of the child as innocent and vulnerable has long driven the policies and practices that shape early childhood education, including what is taught and how and what topics are considered “appropriate.” And yet, just as educational opportunities have been historically and intentionally unequal, so too is access to the privilege of childhood innocence, which is assigned to some children and not others. Where was this assumption of innocence when 12-year old Tamir Rice was killed by a Cleveland police officer? And yet, the innocent child is prized, cherished, held up as a cultural icon, allowing us to assign greater value to those child bodies that can be protectively segregated from the harsh realities of adulthood, and enabling some children to escape an early awareness of injustice and human depravity. In this paper, I suggest that a radical reconceptualization of childhood innocence is necessary in order to advance more equitable and socially responsive early childhood policies and practices. I assert that childhood innocence operates as a cultural fetish, the value of which is to “obscure the real” and “keep matters unchallenging and uncomplicated” so that adults, as desiring subjects, can maintain an illusion of fulfillment (Faulkner, 2013, p. 128). To illustrate this psychology of innocence and its material consequences in contemporary America, I conduct a close reading of Toni Morrison’s (2015) most recent novel God Help the Child, which explores how memory, crisis, and the longing for innocence impact the lives of the two main characters, from the psychological and physical violence of childhood to the emotional crises of adulthood. Morrison’s novel offers a striking social commentary on the ways in which we are inevitably drawn toward the myth of innocence, in spite of its injustices. Ultimately, Morrison reminds us that the narratives of childhood – the stories that we tell ourselves about our child selves and the children we parent and teach – are important in shaping the decisions that we make as adults. As Morrison writes, “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.