Diffracting curriculum theorizations: Is “knowledge” of “most worth?”

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Collaboration, Kinship, and Healing: Subversive Compliance in Curriculum Studies (Table 9)

Abstract

Purpose: This paper is part of an ongoing research project that seeks to diffract the “quasi- classical” theorizations of the US curriculum reconceptualization as well as the feminist relational ontologies of Judith Butler and Karen Barad. The focus here is on the concept, “knowledge,” as typical represented by authors as diverse as Michael Apple, William Pinar and William Schubert, as constituting the curriculum field.

Theoretical framework:
We start from the idea that curriculum is an event (Derrida, 2007) or a phenomenon (Barad, 2007), the performative functioning of theory in action (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022), which means that it takes place in the “re- signifying re-mark that makes the new (…) possible” (Haddock-Lobo, 2007, p.120). For Barad (2007), the phenomenon is “the ontological separability/entanglement of intra-acting agencies” (p.139), which do not pre-exist the relationships from which they emerge. Based on this reading, we have sought to diffract “almost quasi-classical” curricular texts – constructed from the perspective of a humanist epistemology that has the individual as its center – with the aim of producing a theorization that is more hospitable to the call of otherness.

Modes of inquiry:
The study is eminently theoretical, constituting an agential cut (Barad, 2007) in the entanglement of circulations of complexes of material-texts. This does not mean that we refuse to acknowledge “empirical data”, but that they are worked as traces or specters, in Derrida’s terms, that cannot ever be repeated. In this sense, re-memberings of curriculum texts are diffracted with conversations with teachers, seeking to produce a theorization committed to displace assaultive schemes of intelligibility (Butler, 2015) about school and curriculum.

Warrants of the arguments:
The question about the knowledge of the most worth that haunts both curricular theorizations and the speech of teachers assumes that some amount of knowledge must be acquired by the students for them to be considered educated. Pre-existing knowledge recognized as “of the most worth,” (Spencer, 1860) thus, becomes a commodity whose possession will ontologically define each and every individual subject as educated. In our theorization of curriculum as radically relational, knowledge is one of the ontological agencies that arise in the intra-action or event itself. In this sense, it would be an empty signifier that stimulates and excites the different voices constituted in curricular events.

Scholarly significance:
At a time when neoliberal rationality makes people's living conditions precarious, any curricular theorization that does not account for the unequal distribution of precariousness will itself be part of the outrageous schemes that throw people into zones of abjection and non-recognition (Butler, 2015). If theoretical discourse has agency, it is essential to continue interrogating its coercive domain. A curricular theorization centered on an individual who dominates/possesses knowledge/content [even supposedly, “of the most worth”] reenacts colonial regimes of private property and, thus, helps to block the recognition of the complexity that constitutes education. This paper is an attempt to enact our deconstructive desire in relation to such curriculum theorizations.

Authors

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Elizabeth Macedo, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro