Slow Curriculum: A Curriculum of Being

• In Event: Curriculum History as Lived Practices

Abstract

This paper examines the tenacity of curriculum theorizing during moments in which paradigm shifts are in the making. Certianly, this was the case in 2015-2019 when the political landscape engendered the reemergence of white supremacy, radical right militias, and the era of fake news. Socio-politically and historically, this was an era where the impacts of neoliberal policies, fueled by a perverse capitalism, manifested across the educational spectrum. There were efforts to consolidate universities, slashes to academic programs, reductions in state funding of education, and of course, the decline in teacher education programs. And the push to privatize public education with the Charter School movement really took hold in Louisiana, spurred and fueled by post-Katrina New Orleans (Buras, 2015). These neoliberal assault on education resulted in the increasing corporatization of education in which learning was measured by efficiency to degree completion, preferably in the sciences (Giroux, 2014). Humanities-based fields, like curriculum theory, were suspect because they did not translate into jobs, three figure salaries, grants, or patents.

Within the field of curriculum theory, and specifically within CTP, there were different sides to this story, greatly influenced by understandings of curriculum as the lived practice of being. This is a sort of academic, human, and more-than human activism against the onslaught of all this discordant violence and assault on humanity. Theoretical orientations that had been previously uninterrogated in education began to take shape. This included the emergence into the lexicon of curriculum theorists of posthumanisms (Barad, 2007), new materialisms (Coole and Frost, 2010), and critical geographies (Helfenbein,2021), to name but a few. These theories addressed a wide range of questions that were not so much “new,” as the movements name might imply, but renewed. Some of these questions sought to attend to the indeterminacy of the world – the radical possibilities of vibrant matter.

Students in CTP were provoked by these new ideas; giving them pause, breathing room, and space for being present in such unsettling times. Engaging with posthumanist thinking extended conversations, shifting our conversations to an explicit focus on what happens when we decenter the human in our focus and analysis; or, when we account for the changing conceptions of the human. The research examined in this paper draws on the manuscripts and published articles of CTP students in this precarious time to understand the role of theorizing as a form of becoming. In particular, study groups which emerged organically, provided spaces in which a slow curriculum emerged. This was characterized by listening deeply to words being spoken as a mode of being present to each other, offering each feedback, encouragement, love and the gift of being present! A slow curriculum resisted simplicity in thinking or notions of problem-solving. Alternatively, students focused on creation, possibility, becoming, artful intervention. With this inter- and trans-disciplinary emergence, students recognized the possibility of transgressing what they saw as the process of dehumanization through education by embracing precarity as an ever emerging process of being and becoming.

Author

• Petra Munro Hendry, Louisiana State University
  Presenting Author