Relational Mutuality: Implications for Curriculum Theory

• In Event: 58.083 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 58.083-14 - People of Curriculum: Gloria Ladson-Billings, William Pinar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jessica Benjamin

Abstract

This theoretical paper draws from contemporary psychoanalysis but intends a broader audience. It explains and uses particular relational understandings, especially those of Jessica Benjamin (1988, 1995, 1998), to interrogate curriculum theory’s role in the “promise of equal educational opportunity.”
Benjamin situates “masculine” domination in a gender polarity that conditions inequality and that underwrites master–slave complementarities: binaries rooted in Oedipal conflict (active/public/universal/rational/neutral/objective/signifying/subject vs passive/private/particular/irrational/emotional/subjective/signified/object). Importantly, she locates an alternative in the mutuality of earlier relationships. I use these notions to question curriculum theory’s refused implication in (neoliberal) protocols, such as, for teacher “training,” school leadership, and “curriculum design.” Might curriculum theorists be inhabiting one side of a complementarity? What would a position of mutuality entail?

Author

• Lissa M D'Amour, University of Calgary