Supporting Aspirations Through Archiving Multimedia Curriculum Materials That Tap Into Local Community Funds of Knowledge About Past, Present, and Emergent Futures

• In Event: Researching Power-Marginalized Young People’s Aspirations and Strategies Toward Social-Educational Futures in Difficult Times

Abstract

Objectives
This paper retrieves aspects of Paper 1 in moving to the symposium objective of curriculum re-thinking. Based in the ARC2 project, which aims both to research and capacitate aspirations among power-marginalized learners, the paper articulates a rationale for developing curriculum materials that (a) tap into local community knowledges; (b) resource students to research change dynamics in their communities; and (c) develop learner capacities for agency to create and proactively pursue desirable social imaginaries (Taylor 2004; Appadurai 1996) for their own and community futures.

Theoretical perspectives
Meritocratic educational policy discourses tend to carry deficit assumptions bout ‘disadvantaged’ communities and young people (Apple 2001). Curriculum to interrupt such assumptions requires careful design, drawing on cross-disciplinary resources to open diverse historical narratives of presence and place, emphasizing community cultural assets for learning, or funds of knowledge (Gonzales et al 2005), including inter-generational perspectives that in turn can resource new future imaginaries (Hutchinson 1996).

Methods
ARC2 researchers seek materials encompassing diverse aspects of past, present and verging-future life in locales of the three project schools. Along with observing classroom uptake of materials, the selection process includes interactive feedback between researchers and participating teachers/students about what kinds of resonate as rich curricular resources. Archived materials are developed into a digital set made available to participating teachers through school libraries as well as cloud technology.

Data
The database includes innovative juxtapositions of (a) social-media materials—blog posts, Facebook and Twitter memes, photos of transient graffiti and street art, YouTube footage—and (b) traditional media, e.g. newspaper articles, photographs, Indigenous histories, maps, and statics and research reports on local demography, jobs, histories, memorabilia, etc. Topically, materials pertain to local jobs/economy; land use; transport; relations to other local/regional/global spaces; and local civic-social infrastructure, media, government, demography and more.

Results
Analyzing school use of the archival database, the paper develops a rationale for selecting materials serving curricular purposes of (a) facilitating students’ critical negotiation of deficit discourses about their capacities to aspire (implicating class, race, gender and other power relations); and (b) capacitating student agency to imagine, articulate and pursue emergent and desirable futures as social actors in-and-for communities. In containing multiple media and perspectives on historic and current interpretations of community life, the archive helps develop multiple literacies for addressing questions of past, present and possible futures.

Significance
In an era of standardized national curriculum in Australia and elsewhere, the approach articulated in this paper provides grounds for diverse curriculum developments to resource relevant learning based in locality. Richly resonant curricula incite power-marginalized learners to rise to challenges of research, imagination and intellectual growth. Multi-disciplinary resources, making local-global connections, support learner capacities to (a) recognize non-linear diversities; (b) create and pursue of imagined futures; and (b) navigate the present towards meaningful futures. The multi-layered partnership approach to developing curriculum—including students, teachers, families and academics—reconstructs schools as community spaces with archives that build across generations of further student research. This adds new dimensions to Funds of Knowledge approaches to curriculum development.

Authors

• Jessica Susan Bok, Deakin University

• Marie T. Brennan, Victoria University, Melbourne

• Kristy Davidson, University of Western Sydney