Conceiving Curriculum as Apparatus: Application to Antiracist Teaching

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Posthumanist Theory in the Service of Antiracist Curriculum Studies Scholarship

Abstract

Objectives: This paper offers a theoretical investigation of the nature of curriculum theories as they exist in relation to the researcher, the classroom, and the students.

Theoretical Framework: In this work I will investigate the agency of curriculum through the lens of Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism. I am interested specifically in her theory of the apparatus and whether the specific curriculum theory employed by researchers is an apparatus in that relationship.

Methods: I will begin this investigation by defining the concept of the apparatus as it is constructed in Barad’s work (2007). In her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad offers a framework for understanding ontology that reaffirms the existence and significance of matter in response to what has come to be known as the linguistic turn in social science research. Briefly, part of her work proposes that there are no inherently bounded objects and so the fundamental unit of analysis is not a single object or action but rather unbounded phenomena. What then bounds that phenomena making it intelligible is the apparatus through a process that Barad calls intra-action. What is significant for this paper is the concept of the apparatus and its bounding function.

Data Sources: In the second section of the paper I will discuss four general theories of curriculum that are often employed in one form or another in curriculum research: (1) the scholar academic theory; (2) the social efficiency theory (3) the learner-centered theory; and (4) the social reconstruction theory. These theories are described in detail in Michael Schiro’s 2013 book Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns. Each theorizes curriculum in a specific way that is incommensurable with the others. Each framework has the capacity to benefit students, and yet each can only make intelligible certain aspects of what is being taught.
Illustrations of this application will be drawn from my own experience as a teacher working in the Chicago Public School District. Specifically, I will focus on my experience seeking ways to offer life-affirming anti-racist curricula in a segregated schooling system subjected to extremely prescriptive and homogenized standardized curricula and testing systems.

Conclusions and Scholarly Significance: I conclude that the curriculum theory employed by researchers does operate as an apparatus in the way Barad describes and that understanding it in this way enables more nimble and adaptable anti-racist and equity focused teaching.
The final section of this paper will describe several implications of this theory for practice, one of which is that the researcher becomes a kind of broker of intra-action between the student and different curricular agents, fostering some connections and attempting to disrupt others both within and without the classroom. This grants significant influence and significant responsibility to the researcher. By conceiving of curriculum theory as a Baradian apparatus, a researcher is no longer able to claim that they are only observing and interpreting educational processes, nor only critiquing problematic representations of said processes. They are implicated as co-constituted participant in the educational intra-action.

Author

• Alexander B Pratt, University of Oregon