Encountering the Minor Gesture in Processes of Curriculum-Making

• In Event: 54.026 - Troubling Colonial Dualisms in Curriculum-Making: Critical and Generative Encounters With the More-Than-Human World in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Objectives:
Recent developments in educational research have put into question research, data, and knowledge production. These developments are often taken up through critical posthumanist, new materialist, and/or more-than-human theories and methodologies that trouble colonial dualisms and unsettle human-centred research practices (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2014, 2008; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Manning, 2016; St. Pierre, 2013; Tsing, 2016). Contributing to this ongoing conversation, this paper focuses on relational, indeterminate, and more-than-human processes of researching, teaching, and learning. With the use of wearable technologies (GoPro video camera), I will explore improvisational moments of curriculum-making in an urban elementary school and grapple with the fragility of processual thought.

Theoretical Framework:
Attending to thought as that which is process-orientated is to think of curriculum as that which is in-the-making. When questions, problems, partial answers and ideas are crafted on the move, curriculum becomes an act of inquiry. The challenge of such a proposal, Manning (2016) writes, “involves crafting the conditions not to solve problems, or to resolve questions, but to illuminate regions of thought through which problems-without-solutions can be intuited” (p. 10). Drawing on Bergsonian (2007) intuition, Manning (2016) offers the concept of the ‘minor gesture’ to articulate an attentive mode and/or attunement to collective acts of inquiry. Inquiry in this mode does not ask the same questions, but rather invents “open problems” that disrupt colonial dualisms and generate new thought-processes (Manning, 2016, p. 10). Similar to the ‘minor gesture,’ Harney and Moten (2013) offer the concept of ‘study’ to argue that curriculum should not be an object of study in schools where the child “dissolves into the student” (p.109). To ‘study’ is to learn with more-than-human others through problematizing, re-forming, and refusing to accept pre-packaged knowledge. This paper is interested in the capacity of children to actively think and therefore collectively act in a more-than-human world that produces difference.

Modes of Inquiry and Data:
I turn to research-creation as a methodology. In 2012, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council – a Canadian governmental agency that funds academic and community-based research – formally established research-creation. Research-creation (also known as arts-based research) is an approach that combines creativity and academic research practices. The approach develops critically informed knowledge through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. The research project was conducted in an urban elementary school in Canada. I worked with a Grade 2-3 classroom (22 children). Particularly, I draw on the video-images that were generated with wearable technologies. The images offer a glimpse into the process of curriculum-making during research activities, including gardening and running.

Significance:
A considerable amount of educational research focuses on what was learned and/or what should be learned in schools. More-than-human theories and research practices are important as they consider the process of learning (i.e. what process does and how it affects what is learned). An emphasis on process-orientated learning disrupts forms of knowledge/curriculum construction that bifurcate experience as well as re-thinks knowledge production as that which is a more-than-human act.

Author

• Nikki Rotas, University of Alberta