Certainty Amid Uncertainty in the Future: Making Kinds of People

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium aims to critically explore how education makes kinds of people. By making kinds of people as objects of research, we explore unquestioned categories of students taken up as legitimate objects of study. Our papers investigate historical and current curriculum reforms such as Google Classrooms, national policies, and financial literacy. We explore how pedagogical practices and the technologies of research are not descriptions of “empirical” (material) things, but effects of imagined futures that educational practices are to activate. The panel brings cross-national education researchers, whose works interrogate the effects of power in global comparative education, in a conversation with post-modern approaches to think about the (im)possibilities of what kinds of people can be made in education.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 2: Exploring Past, Present, and Future Curricular Questions

Chair

• Christopher M. Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• Inventing the Future of France: The Academic Map and Making New Kinds of People - Britt-Marie Zeidler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Creating Forgetful Citizens: Kenya and Forgetting in the Curriculum - Meredith Whye, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Rethinking Agency in Digital Education: Creating Digital Citizens of "Making Kinds of People" - Younsun Choi, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Multiple Thinking Model in Financial Literacy Education: Finding Tao in Making Kinds of People - Jiarui Bai, East China Normal University

Discussants

• Dani Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University

• Noah W. Sobe, Loyola University Chicago