The Use of Duoethnography in a Doctoral Curriculum Studies Course

• In Event: Advancing Curriculum Studies Through Duoethnography: Adapting a Research Methodology to a Form of Pedagogical Inquiry

Abstract

As a society we are facing a profound crisis of imagination, meaning, and democracy. Curriculum studies, a broad field of interdisciplinary scholarship which critiques and engenders curricular meanings within multiple contexts (e.g., personal, local, political, global), offers a response to this crisis. In its uncertain and humanitarian conversations, curriculum presents an embodied and transformative alternative to the deeply anti-democratic discourses attacking education around the world.
Related to this crisis of imagination, one evolving conversation in curriculum studies has been about the curriculum of personal and societal change. Over the years, this conversation has taken many turns, including, for example, the curriculum reconceptualization critique of the relationship between school curriculum and society (Pinar 1975), critical pedagogy’s critique of the relationship between knowledge, freedom, and power dynamics (Giroux, 2006), and, more recently, the dialogic, transformative curriculum found in “contingent communities without consensus” within an ethics of self-accountability (Miller, 2011). We place duoethnography within this tradition.
This proposal is not a discussion of teaching methods or a self-study of a particular course. Rather, it proposes to examine ways in which duoethnography adds a transformative and reflexive dimension to doctoral level curriculum courses—that is, how it may disrupt exclusive curricular meanings and engender a critical form of consciousness in relation to curriculum and curriculum studies. As potentially dialogic, reflexive spaces, classrooms hold the potential for students to live their examination of curriculum theory. To explore this process in the presentation, I partly draw from an arts based approach and give examples of classroom duoethnographies grounded in curriculum studies. Consistent with the view of meaning creation as an act of intersubjective interpretation (Schwandt, 2000), duoethnographies offer students dialogic “in-between” spaces-- unstable transactions--for their lived investigation of themes in curriculum studies. Engaging in duoethnography and working in contrasting dialogic pairs, they excavate their personal narratives and currere (Pinar, 1975) and share contrasting examples about their narrative formation of beliefs and values related to critical themes in curriculum studies. For example, in relation to the curriculum of globalization, students conducting a duoethnography can place themselves as agents into this process, examining how their beliefs are formed in relation to views of globalization--on the ground in their lives and their communities. For example, instead of studying the curriculum of globalization (an emerging emphasis in curriculum studies) as an abstraction, they live it as embodied curriculum, thus opening possibilities of personal and collective “conscientization” (Freire, 1970) and self-reflexivity.
I seek, then, in this presentation to examine how student-created duoethnographies, linked to themes in curriculum theory (e.g., narratives of globalization) and threaded throughout the course, present an emergent process for students in curriculum studies to experience curriculum theory as a means for personal and group praxis, that is, to live the promise of curriculum. This topic is important in that it (1) contributes to a particular tradition in curriculum studies (i.e., that of critical transformative and reflexive curriculum) and (2) allows students to transform their thinking about the relationship of curriculum to their lives.

Author

• Richard D. Sawyer, Washington State University - Vancouver