Becoming-Alive to Materiality: A Transcorporeal Approach to Slow Curriculum Design

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Slow Curricula for Transformative Higher Education

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper investigates how a trans-corporeal methodology (Alaimo, 2016) can be made useful to curriculum-making practices in higher-education. It argues that a trans-corporeal approach aligns with the aims of Slow scholarship, which endeavour to give educators as well as students the opportunity to explore novel, experimental, relational and ethical ways of engaging with their own practices.

Theoretical framework:
The Slow scholarship movement asks that educators be given time and opportunity to ‘respond more adequately to the urgent new realities both within the academy and beyond’ (Boyer 1990:3). This, as Karen Barad, writes, means cultivating a sense of “responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are part” (2007: 393). Such sentiments form the cornerstone of Stacey Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality, which asks educators to foreground the multiple interconnections between bodies, societies, cultural practices, substances and environments in teaching and learning practices as a way of merging social-justice and environmental-justice concerns. Curricular engagements, as Alaimo (2016:10) explains, should constitute ‘reflections into the nature of the public good … into what the world is becoming and for whom.’

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
I argue that taking a Slow approach to curriculum-making and teaching practices – one that seeks to engage realms of possibility and transformative potential via a direct engagement with a relational ethics – could benefit from new materialist practices. Although this paper primarily considers Slow scholarship via the relational trans-corporeal methodology developed by Stacey Alaimo (2016), I suggest ways in which to compliment, enrich and extend such an approach to curriculum-making via the diffractive methodology developed by Barad (2007) as well as the ‘writerly’ approach developed by Viv Bozalek (2016) and Sarah Truman (2016).

Data sources, evidence, objects or materials:
The paper will provide anecdotal examples of trans-corporeal approaches to curriculum-making and classroom practices from the perspective of an extended curriculum programme course taught at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. These examples and their relation to a practice of Slow scholarship in decolonial contexts will be elaborated on by reference to new materialist theory.


Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Trans-corporeality, as I argue, asks that curriculum-makers, policy-makers and pedagogues take the time to reflect on how teaching and learning practices can be made more alive to the material and relational world of bodies (both human and not) as well as to the enormous problems that are now besetting it. Such attentiveness to the theoretical choices that inform policy and pedagogy has enormous potential for enriching the public good in higher education curriculum studies.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance:
According to Bozalek (2016), Slow practices in the context of curriculum-studies “are those which encourage hesitation, thoughtfulness and new ways of relating”. This paper develops dialogs about Slow scholarship in context of new materialist theories that encourage a trans-corporeal relational ethics; one that urges facilitators and participants in academia to dissolve binaries between themselves and students, as well as between themselves and the subjects/topics being taught.

Author

• Delphi Carstens, University of the Western Cape, South Africa