Bearing Witness Through Personal Experiences: Toward an Ontology and Epistemology of Experiential Curriculum as Resistance

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

The four papers in this session present work from emerging curriculum scholars drawing on experiential ways of knowing and being, pushing against the margins of the field of curriculum studies in specific, (inter)connected ways. The authors draw from their embodied experiences, and those of co-researchers, to re-ground curriculum studies with perspectives often decentralized or left outside of the academy. Drawing on the concept of bearing witness (Pillow, 2019; Villenas, 2019; Wynter, 1989), the authors foreground their shared ontological and epistemological commitments to experiential narratives as a form of resistance to the dominant curricula within academia and beyond. In doing so, they demonstrate the ongoing need to re-imagine the field of curriculum studies.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 3: Methodologies, Cosmologies, and Philosophies (The Shaping of Curriculum)

Chair

• Neil Ramjewan, University of Toronto

Papers

• Toward a Humane Pedagogy (or, On Why Teaching for Humanization Is Well-Meaning Condescension) - Muna Saleh, Concordia University of Edmonton

• They Think We Bad Kids: Restricted Educational Spaces as Disabling Sites of Possibility - Katherine Newhouse, Teachers College, Columbia University

• "Book Learnin' a Nuh Intelligence": Grandma Epistemologies as a Way of (Un)Knowing as a Granddaughter - Tianna Dowie-Chin, University of Florida

• Why So Few: The Seen and Unseen Afterlives of Black Women and Girls in STEM - ReAnna S. Roby, Vanderbilt University

Discussant

• Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, OISE/University of Toronto