Taking Responsibility for a Lived Curriculum as Complicated Conversation Mooted in Nomadic Thought

• In Event: Citizen-Scholars as Agentic Subjects in the University Curriculum Decolonising Initiative in South Africa

Abstract

The purpose of this paper stems from an acknowledgment of the responsibility invested in the decolonial moment to challenge a curriculum topography fundamentally informed by the lure of Western epistemology. This lure dictates our beliefs about knowing and knowledge, which gives our universities and schools a striated curricular landscape (Aoki, 1993:256). We have become so deeply infected by Western curricular landscapes that our preoccupation with structure and compliance has not entertained the much needed questioning of curriculum. Curriculum, “in spite of its inherent indefiniteness, has become definitive, so much so that we speak with ease of the curriculum” (Aoki, 1993:259). Privileging a single curriculum, in its arboreal (tree like) sense, sounds the “chiselled motif of the striated linear instrumentalism deeply inscribed into our [curriculum] landscape” (Aoki, 1993:259). For Aoki (1993:257) this evokes the “crisis of modernity in the Western world, a questioning of the way of life we have constituted as modernism”. We need to re-understand our curricular landscape by disturbing the landscape that holds faith in critical reason to apprehend and transform society. To disturb or trouble proffers the urgency to challenge deeply inscribed conceptions of curriculum such as traditional Curriculum Studies discourses that deny subjectivity.
Rosi Braidotti’s (2011) conception of nomadic subjectivity provides the theoretical framework of this paper. For her subjectivity involves a socially mediated process of entitlements to and negotiations with power. It is invested in a dissatisfaction with our advanced capitalist world dominated by phallocentric schemes of thought that create “hegemonic, fixed, unitary and exclusionary views of subjectivity” (Braidotti, 2011:58). Instead a non-phallocentric way of thinking, informed by feminist theory, attracts her as it stresses the limitations of logocentric approaches and shifts the emphasis to other ways and modes of representation (human and non-human). The desire is to leave behind linear modes of thinking ordained in teleological argumentation and to “start cultivating the art of disloyalty, or rather … healthy disrespect” that is needed to imagine affirmative representations of an embodied subject (Braidotti, 2011:24).
Through qualitative interviews, postgraduate Curriculum Studies students’ experiences of the 2015/2016 student protests in South African higher education institutions were unlocked to explore what they regarded as key agendas influencing curriculum transformation. The results revealed that alternative pathways to transformation could be possible through lived curriculum as complicated conversation. Complicated conversations of this nature hold significance in times where uncertainty is the only certainty. A time like the present where education remains infested and effected by the ills of manifestations resulting from, among other, environmental disasters (water depletion), rapid growth of technologies (fourth industrial revolution), communicable diseases (coronavirus) and social unrest (calls for decolonisation of the curriculum). This paper takes a scholarly stance for nomadic thought as central to this conception of curriculum as it is mooted in alternative visions of both the subject and the structure of knowledge.

Aoki, T. 1993. Legitimating lived curriculum: towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3):255-268.
Braidotti, R. 2011. Nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

Author

• Shan R. Simmonds, North-West University