Conceptualizing Curriculum Studies as Interdisciplinary, Aesthetic, and Unsettling: A Review of the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies

• In Event: Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS): Provoking Educational Research Across Canada: Knowledge, Dissemination, and the Public Good

Abstract

This paper reflects on the editorial approach of the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS) in an effort to distinguish the key frameworks it offers for thinking about and revitalizing curriculum studies in Canada and globally. A review of the journal’s recent content and editorial focus reveals three key themes: a commitment to interdisciplinarity, an attention to modes of representation, and an understanding of education as fundamentally unsettling.

JCACS features interdisciplinary scholarship and seeks to bring a range of fields to bear on theorization in Canadian curriculum studies. As the reconceptualists (Pinar, 1999; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 1995) once reminded us, the etymological root of curriculum is the Latin currere, meaning to run, to move, and to travel. Indeed, this orientation toward curriculum, not primarily as a set of object or texts but as the course of study or movement between them, might be described as an inherently interdisciplinary method: “truly interdisciplinary work changes the object, it changes the point of departure so that instead of ‘founding’ the object, we follow it” (Probyn, 1995, p. 7). The articles in JCACS demonstrate such a method of curriculum theorizing, which resists the establishment of foundations and foregrounds the question and the movement between fields (Kentel & Karrow, 2009; Ling, 2009; Farley, 2010).

If curriculum can be thought of as the ‘course’ through which we develop understandings of the world, how are we to think about the media and representations through which those understandings and those who understand are connected to one another? JCACS aims to foreground investigations into how representational technologies, both ‘new’ and old, are (re)shaping epistemological and ontological landscapes in education. For example, the journal features many scholars who explore the significance of aesthetic experience and conflict for curriculum studies (Di Paolantonio, 2008; Lewkowich, 2009; Matthews, 2009; Pente, 2009; Radford, 2009; Low, 2011; Springgay, 2011). Recently, Suzanne de Castell considers the ludic epistemology at stake in computer games and “the resuscitation of ‘play’ as inseparable from and indispensable for teaching, learning and the advancement of knowledge under unprecedented conditions of uncertainty” (2011, p. 23-24).

Finally, JCACS is interested in conversations about curriculum that consider the ways in which it both helps us to locate ourselves – in identity, in place – and also dislodges us from the familiar, from ourselves. The articles published in JCACS reveal an attention to education as a fundamentally unsettling experience and to curriculum studies as concerned with the challenges of being in relation to others and texts, of knowing differently, of reading and seeing differently, and ultimately of learning and teaching anew (Chambers, 2008; Haig-Brown, 2008; Iseke-Barnes, 2009; Ng-A-Fook, 2010).

Authors

• Chloe Brushwood Rose, York University

• Karen A. Krasny, York University