Teaching Against Hope Through a Curriculum of Positive Deviance

• In Event: Coconstructing Methodology and Curriculum: Blurring Boundaries Within the Classroom

Abstract

Contextualized in Peter Taubman’s (2000) "Teaching Without Hope," a psychoanalytic inquiry into the standards movement, we use collaborative auto-ethnography to offer our experience co-creating a university special topics course in which we abandoned hope through a curriculum of positive deviance. We view a positive deviance curriculum as one of education and social justice and offer a counter-narrative to sanitized curricular and pedagogical linearity. Our data reveal that we and our students embraced the vulnerability, disequilibrium, ambiguity, and paradox associated with deviating from a linear curricular path and moved toward a critical mestiza consciousness (Anzaldúa, 1987) and praxis. We thematically present our work in the form of a four-act “play” and through a short film containing metaphoric visual imagery and music.

Authors

• Jim Burns, South Dakota State University

• Jaime Nolan-Andrino, South Dakota State University