A Curriculum of Place: Who Are We? Southerners Beneath the Red Clay and the Black Dirt?

• In Event: Pushing Methodological Boundaries and Performing Dissertation Writing

Abstract

Pat Faulkner explores the South as a place where race, class, and gender are interconnected to language, culture, identity, education, and religion to develop Southern identities. Drawing upon a vast body of literature in critical consciousness (Freire, 1970, 1974), education and social change (Horton & Freire,1990), critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001), critical white studies (Delgado & Stefancic, 1997), Black womanist perspectives of race, class, and gender (hooks, 2000a, 2000b, 2009), interrelatedness and education (Reynolds, 2003), political cartography of Christianity (Reynolds & Webber, 2009), interconnectedness (Liston, 2001), and psychoanalysis (Morris, 2001, 2006) and drawing upon the autobiographical accounts and fictional writings of several prominent Southern authors such as Lillian Smith (1955, 1944/1992, 1949/1994), Eudora Welty (1980, 1995), Flannery O’Connor (1971/1955), Morrison (1992, 1993, 2000), and Alice Walker (2000, 2006, 2010), Pat Faulkner uses fictionalized autobiographical stories in which the persona of Ida Dunmore Good tells her story blended with the stories of friends, relatives, and acquaintances her childhood to her adult life as an educator.

Methodologically Pat Faulkner also draws upon the work of a wide array of curriculum theorists such Ugena Whitlock (2007), Brian Casemore (2008), Sabrina Ross (2007), Ming Fang He (2003, 2010), Ming Fang He, JoAnne Phillion, and a number of graduate students (He & Phillion, 2008), Marla Morris (2008), Mary Aswell Doll (1995, 2000, 2006), Martha L. Whitaker (2006), Delese Wear (2006) and bell hooks (2000a, 2000b, 2009). Pat Faulkner also draws upon Maxine Greene’s (1995) narrative imagination, the autobiographical works of Madeline Grumet (1988, 1999a, 1999b, 2006), Janet Miller (1990, 2005), and William Pinar (1994; Pinar & Grumet, 2006), particularly their use of phenomenology, autobiography, and currere as an autobiographical form of inquiry to study one’s experience in the past, present, and future and the impact of social milieu on experience.

Pat Faulkner illuminates that people resist changes in their received or inherited consciousness. Most meaningful social change, which takes place over time, is more evolutionary than revolutionary in most instances (Horton, Kohl, & Kohl, 1990, pp.80-81). Our identities are ever-changing (Wilkerson in Moya & Hames-Garcia, 2000, p. 263) with non-“irrevocable” (Freire, 2004, p. 65) situations and contexts in life. We constantly “improvise” (He, 2003, p. 51; also Bateson, 1989) who we were and how we become who we are. Critical self-examinations and reflections, spiritually, emotionally, ethically, logically, honestly, help evoke changes within oneself and others. Nevertheless, self-examinations and reflections are not enough. One must act upon changes and put changes into one’s daily walkings (Freire & Horton, 1990). The human element must be preserved without being essentialized, standardized, or profited (Nussbaum, 2010). People must make deliberate, compassionate, and critically-conscious personal connections with one another to develop the sense of interconnectedness and interrelatedness, to cultivate (Nussbaum, 1997, 2010) highest human potential, and to build the highest levels of social justice, equality, and equity for a better human condition for all.

Author

• Patsy D. Faulkner, Woodland High School/Georgia Southern University