Reimagining Literature as Curriculum and Revisiting Its Place Within Curriculum Studies

• In Event: Affects, Intimate Literacies, and (Re)Imagined Curricular Possibilities

Abstract

As an aesthetic tool for thinking, reflecting, meaning-making, and assessing the ambiguities, conflicts, and possibilities of living worthwhile lives within and beyond the classroom, literature has a unique capacity to validate the lives, identities, and values of students and teachers as critical pieces of the larger curricula of human experience. The pandemic crisis and recent outcries for social justice have increased the import and urgency to expand our understanding of what is pedagogically possible and welcome an increasingly expansive landscape of political, racial, gendered, autobiographical, and global concerns, perspectives, and understandings. In what ways can literature facilitate this movement past the outer landscape of education toward the realities, values, and struggles relevant to our lived experiences?

Author

• Edward Podsiadlik, University of Illinois at Chicago