Script for Curricular Chitchat From a Mothered Road

• In Event: Engaging Praxis: Curriculum Studies in Classrooms and Communities

Abstract

This essay takes the form of a Pecha Kucha script to explore the academic road that Janet Miller mothered for me, and that I chose both to carry as a curriculum worker and to “break with” out of love, in the sense of what Julietta Singh (2021) describes in her essay to her daughter as a desire for “profound collective renewal” (23)—an invitation and call “to blaze alongside” (23) her daughter rather than an end, or a leaving behind.

The paper has three entangled objectives: 1. To explore an experimental approach to the Pecha-Kucha form as one way of thinking about curriculum informed by various poststructuralist, affect, and new materialist theories. 2. To see how this experimental form might work to unmake what I “know” about my subject and simultaneously put a moving reassemblage of memories of that subject into action. 3. To consider what “breaking with” (Singh, 2021) might offer educational practices and curriculum work.

Extending from Julietta Singh’s (2021) idea of “breaking with” as a movement away from what is not sustainable and toward “profound collective renewal” (23), I explore the ways my relationship with Janet Miller has affected my work as a scholar, artist, and worker of curriculum and engage the desires, tensions, and recognitions that are a part of that work and history. I also extend from Laurel Richardson’s (1997) poststructuralist notion of “refraction” as a way of acknowledging and activating various possibilities for representation and reflexive engagements; the form of this piece engages this theory.

This piece re-invents an existing form (the Pecha-Kucha) to put new ideas about curriculum into action and mobilize ideas about curriculum from the action of writing in this particular way. I do this by working the basic structure of the form (20 slides for 20 seconds each with an accompanying script) to see what these constraints might do, or what new forms of theorizing about curriculum they might make possible.

My data centers on “transgressive data,” primarily memories, sensations, associations, and emotions (St. Pierre, 1997)
surrounding my experiences with Janet Miller and the ways in which her work has affected my own. The materials I mobilize are language, memories, affects, concepts, imaginary slides, and the space of the page.

Through theorizations with, and experimental approaches to, the Pecha-Kucha form, I conclude that creative constraints can enable us to better think about and sense the histories, people, and ideas about curriculum that shape us. I argue, without presenting an argument, that theorizing curriculum is entangled with how one theorizes—or, as
Donna Haraway (2016) puts it, “what thoughts think thoughts” (p. 12).

The “affective turn” (Clough, 2007) and theories of the “posthuman” (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013) incite fresh understandings of how forms matter in relation to what and how we know and, as emphasized by this paper, how we come to be in relation to curriculum. Most importantly, the piece honors a significant worker and theorizer of curriculum, Janet Miller, paying tribute to her work while playing with what it means “break with” that work in hopefully generative, collaborative, and sustainable ways.

Author

• Maya Pindyck
  Presenting Author