Making the Learner-Explorer Through Curiosity

• In Event: 81.033 - MTCC Roundtable Session 38
  In Roundtable Session: 81.033-3 - Pedagogical Inquiry: Critical Practices

Abstract

The notion of curiosity has recently emerged as a catchword across different political, cultural, and educational initiatives, scientific articulations and popular accounts. The purpose of this paper is to consider some of the cultural and historical trajectories that are assembled in current discourses around curiosity. The paper brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from curriculum history, cultural studies, and geography to the study of education. The results suggest that current notions of curiosity mobilize discourses of learning and discourses of exploration that, in their convergence, produce the curious subject through ideals of authenticity that are inscribed in curiosity-related notions such as adventure, discovery, wonder, and experience. ‘Curiosity’ is thus caught up in the (re)making of epistemological territories, affective landscapes, and (post)colonial geographies.

Author

• Johanna Sitomaniemi-San, University of Oulu