The Complex Pleasures of Curriculum Design

• In Event: Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Praxising Complexity

Abstract

It already seems like a guilty pleasure: Mostly female teachers—kept busy during the day tending to the multiple achievement gaps that too often and ambivalently shape our pedagogical work in a mostly Hispanic/Latin@ district located in one of the poorest counties on the U.S.-Mexico border—spending evenings engaging in the perceived curricular frivolity of thinking about this experience. According to recent critiques of teacher education, particularly master’s programs, this is the problem with today’s colleges of education: too much theory and not enough data-driven action (NCTQ (2013).
But more prurient and subversive still is the act of these same teachers and their professor luxuriating in front of computers with all of the rich, visceral pleasure the screen invites, using high theory to design elaborately animated and abstracted models of the hegemony-busting curriculum we want.
This paper takes inspiration from the Arts & Craft Movement (Boris, 1986; Clark, 1972; Kaplan, 1987; Morris, 1980), both as a critical response to industrialization and the commodification of women’s work—and as a progressive practice of reconceptualizing labor and revitalizing public imagination. I also draw from metaphors from chaos and complexity theory (Doll, 1993, 2008; Osberg, Biesta & Cillers, 2008; Semetsky, 2008). I then enlist a critical feminist perspective (Lather, 1991; 2007) to problematize both of these sources of curricular inspiration in order to suggest that in this educational moment (so dominated by the technocratic fantasy of data-driven everything), the process of a teacher creating a well designed curriculum model can serve as a subversive act of epistemological craft. This paper asks how might the visual models of these subversive sisters help us make sense of contemporary school practices and the educative experiences of students, teachers and administrators in a transnational setting?
Drawing from the processes and products of a master’s level curriculum development course on the Texas-Mexico border, this paper explores the sometimes-paradoxical ways the technocratic traditions of curriculum design as a process of representing foregone conclusions can function instead as a means of “re-voicing, re-working, and remeaning curriculum as a synaesthetic process of both representation and action” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2010, p. 604). The rich visual metaphors so abundant in theories of chaos and complexity serve as a point of departure for this work. They serve similarly in this paper. Gone are the swift and nifty straight lines of Tyler (1949) and his linear, fictive-kin Wiggins & McTighe (2005). In this paper, I invite you into our representations of curricular worlds characterized by “moving vortices” and “spiraling swirls,” worlds in which “growth, not stasis, is their defining feature [and] directionality, not centering, is their primary concern (Doll, 1993, p. 14). This is not your father’s curriculum design—or is it?

Author

• Laura M. Jewett, The University of Texas - Brownsville