The editorial for volume 10, number 1, 2012

Brushwood Rose, Chloe

Krasny, Karen A.

Tremblay, Taunya

English

Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)

Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies                                                           1	  Volume 10, Number 1, 2012 Claiming New Spaces for Curriculum Studies: Working to “unconceal what is hidden”     KAREN A. KRASNY, CHLOË BRUSHWOOD ROSE, AND TAUNYA TREMBLAY York University  During our tenure as editors, we have come to deeply value the compelling and unique forum the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies offers curriculum scholars. We set forth with a vision to make JCACS a space for the exploration of themes, issues and ideas, which are not always widely discussed in the field of education but remain at the core of our work as theorists, researchers, and educators.  Together we worked to further an understanding of curriculum studies as the complex study of educational experience through a commitment to interdisciplinarity, an attention to modes of representation, and an understanding of education as fundamentally unsettling.  As always, we are grateful to our authors and readers who have joined us in embracing this undertaking.   The work featured in JCACS suggests that the most productive of curricular relations require us to call into question accepted modes of thinking and seeing so that we might “work together to unconceal what is hidden, to contextualize what happens to us, to mediate the dialectic that keeps us on edge, that may be keeping us alive” (Greene, 1995, p. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 2 115).  In this current issue, we continue to explore these key problematics and frameworks for thinking. All of the articles in this issue consider the more implicit, hidden, or overlooked dimensions of the curricular and educational experience to make them explicit in the claim of new curricular spaces for enacting alternate modes of teaching and learning. This issue begins with Rebecca Jane Lloyd’s exploration of teacher candidates and Aboriginal students' experiences of “hoops” in teaching and learning. Hooping provides the grounds for an ethic, kinesthetic and energetic exploration of the body as characteristic of learning: vulnerable and interactive. By engaging in the physical joy of hooping, both teacher candidates and students reconsider poignant issues of cultural memory, difference and connection, and creativity -- all things inherent in, though often neglected by, the curriculum in formal education.  Gabrielle Richard’s article investigates the representation and under-representation of the homosexual body in Quebec’s high school curricula since its 1997 reform. She argues that the curriculum ignores complexities of pleasure and desire by relegating issues of homosexuality to courses on citizenship, ethics and religion. Within a curriculum framework that further obscures embodied and emotive experiences, gay and lesbians become political objects of moral debate rather than complicated and desiring subjects.  Through a braided narrative of theory and personal experience, Dwayne Donald, Florence Glanfield and Gladys Sterenberg explore how colonial logics actively obscure the relationality between Indigenous peoples and Canadians to shape particular conceptions of 'authority' in math education, and more broadly in curriculum research and culture. As university researchers working to re-conceptualize an Indigenous school's mathematics program, they describe their own attempts to disrupt colonial logics and to enact cultural relationality as a guiding ethic for their research.  Michelle Marie Hogue is similarly interested in cultivating new Claiming New Spaces for Curriculum Studies: Working to “unconceal what is hidden” KRASNY, BRUSHWOOD ROSE & TREMBLAY 3 modes of relationality in her article on inter-connecting Aboriginal and Western paradigms in science education. In order to take up focus group discussions with Aboriginal students, teachers, and community members, Hogue uses the frame of the Blackfoot medicine wheel, drawing on its metaphors for seasonal growth to think carefully about a disconnection between science curricula and Aboriginal students. The author argues that we must understand science education as a culture and the under-representation of Aboriginal people in science as a failure to bridge cultural understandings.  Finally, in our section on Curriculum Lives, Ingrid Johnston and George Richardson’s article on “Homi Bhabha and Canadian Curriculum Studies” draws attention to the potential of Bhabha’s work for spaces less attended to in education. In particular, they work through Bhabha’s concepts of cultural difference, hybridity, and the Third Space, and their importance for language arts, social studies, and teacher education. While they note that Bhabha’s work has been criticized for being verbose and unclear, they argue that it is precisely his dedication to difficult, un-elocutionary spaces of alterity that is useful for our theorization of experiences of ‘diversity’ in a Canadian context.     

Claiming New Spaces for Curriculum Studies: Working to “unconceal what is hidden”

https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/download/35708/32437

Claiming New Spaces for Curriculum Studies: Working to “unconceal what is hidden”

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