From Hubris to Humility: Toward a Public Curricular Ethic of Becoming

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Confluential Moments in Curriculum Studies: Cosmopolitanism, Masculinity, and Critical Literacy

Abstract

In this essay, the author critically reflects on curriculum in the context of public discourses imbued with the certitude, hubris, violence, and spectacle. The analysis is contextualized in precepts of hegemonic masculinity embedded in media representations of Elliot Rodger’s rampage through Isla Vista, California in May 2014. Many media representations of Rodger’s violence reinforce the “commonsense” association between masculinity and violence, which reduced a complex tragedy to polemics rather than public curriculum as humble, complex conversation about the broader socio-cultural complexities of Rodger’s sense of masculine entitlement. I return to Pinar’s conceptualization of curriculum as meeting places in which “alterity structures and animates complicated conversation” to offer an alternative view of public curriculum as one of critical humility.

Author

• Jim Burns, Florida International University