Curriculum, Poetic Inquiry, and the Unconscious

• In Event: Curriculum of the Soul: Poetics of the Unknown

Abstract

Ng-A-Fook (2015) addresses an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies―conceptualizing scholars as poets, which offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Doll associates the unconscious with being poetic, and argues that this poetic reality can be illuminated through myth, literary text and dreams, pointing to psychic reality, hidden in the unconscious. Thus, the work of the curriculum theorist should “tap this intense current within, that which courses through the inner person” (Doll, 2017, p. 49). Informed by Doll (2017) and other scholarly work, this paper illustrates the poetic inquiry of curriculum as revealing the unconscious dimension of one’s experience. Curriculum theorist “tap the current” (Doll, 2017) within oneself.

Author

• Wanying Wang