Rearranging the Assemblage of Curriculum

• In Event: 69.056 - Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 69.056-10 - (Re)Considerations and (Re)Configurations of Curriculum in the Contexts of Theory and Culture

Abstract

This paper begins thinking about curriculum with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of assemblage as an entry point into analyzing the authors’ experiences co-teaching a graduate seminar in curriculum theory. The paper theorizes how current curricular assemblages: evidenced in synoptic textbooks, interpretivist constructions, and neoliberal discourses of education, act as striations, territorializing curriculum in reductionist, dehumanizing ways. Thinking with theory is offered as a way of talking back to such discourses, experimenting with movement and new assemblages of curriculum (theory) that seek to complicate the conversation that is curriculum. While the authors are troubled by the dehumanizing discourses of neoliberalism, their thinking with theory offers a relational ethics of curriculum theorizing, in alignment with postqualitative, new materialist, and posthumanist philosophizing.

Authors

• Paul William Eaton, Sam Houston State University

• Petra Munro Hendry, Louisiana State University