The Practice of Communities: Curriculum Histories Always in the Making

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Histories in Practice: Revisioning Time, Space, and Place (Table 20)

Abstract

Histories of the field of curriculum have proliferated across time as a means to make sense not only of the purposes of education, but to advance a unified vision of the field (Bobbit, 1918; Hamilton, 1990; Kleibard, 1992; Schubert, 1986; Pinar, 2000) These histories often trace the ideological and theoretical discourses that shape constructs of curriculum with the aim of delineating unified periods, paradigms, and philosophies. Often, the plots of these histories focus on the “struggle” (Kliebard, 1986) between conflicting factions to control the curriculum. Produced within the narratives of these macro-histories are the assumptions that curriculum theorizing proceeds in a linear, incremental fashion through time to develop better, more sophisticated understandings of what it means to theorize curriculum. Alternatively, this paper draws on the recent book, Curriculum Histories in Place, in Person, in Practice: Louisiana State University Curriculum Theory Project (2022) to imagine a practicing of history that theorizes the narratives of curriculum histories as dis/continuities, indeterminacies, tangles of relations, hauntological multiplicities, never resting, and always in the making. Curriculum histories become spaces not of representation but spaces for continually “un-making” and “re-making” histories of the field (Miller, 2005: 201).
When history is reconfigured as a “practice”, rather than a “discourse,” “past” and “future” are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through one another: phenomena are material entanglements that “extend” across different spaces and times (Karen Barad, 2007: 383). Conceiving and enacting histories as always recurrent and yet always changing requires that curriculum histories work to create complex portraits of phenomena/re-tellings/re-turnings that generate re-openings, re-inventions, and unsettlings that never let histories rest. The constitution of phenomena through the iterative intra-active practices which collapse, folding past and future, are material entanglements which deterritorialize modernist, linear notions of time and space. This paper discusses how Curriculum Histories in Place, in Person, in Practice explores curriculum theorizing via the everyday practices (de Certeau, 1984) of one community of academics, namely students and faculty of the Curriculum Theory Project (1995-2021) at LSU. The practice of curriculum theorizing explored includes that which is illuminated via reflection upon the lived experiences and articulated memories of those who have participated in the project.
Curriculum Histories in Place, in Person, in Practice is not a history of the field, it is a history of entangled relationalities. Curriculum histories are written from the perspective not of an individual or an ideology, but as a community history. The book illuminates’ practices which have sustained the scholarship, graduate programs, mentorship, and networking that have been critical to maintaining a web of relationships though space, place, and time. These entangled relationships, communities upon communities, are delineated in the book as emerging from seven specific practices: the practice of living curriculum theory, of prophetic hope, of place, of resilience, of engaging doubt, of being and becoming and of practice. This network of communities based in relational connectivity are curriculum histories that are dynamic, fluid, and nonlinear. Histories are understood as webs of relationships that can never be anticipated, planned, or predicted, but are always in the making.

Authors

• Petra Munro Hendry, Louisiana State University

• Molly Quinn, Louisiana State University

• Roland W. Mitchell, Louisiana State University

• Jacqueline Bach, Louisiana State University