Thinking Curricularly: Podcasting as a Mode of Curriculum Inquiry and Pedagogical Imagination

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Podcasts as Public Scholarship: (Re)Imagining Theories in Everyday Life (Table 6)

Abstract

The word curriculum is often relegated to educational spaces. Even as decades of curriculum scholarship points to the significance of the informal and hidden curricula, these discussions rarely permeate dominant public discourses (Apple, 1971; Biesta, 2015; Eisner, 1990). The common sense notion of curriculum still recalls formal textbooks, syllabi, and planning documents (Wiggins & McTighe, 2009), reinforcing the popular understanding that rational and logical forms of knowledge prioritized in the formal curriculum are historically privileged and reinforces the belief that these are the only acceptable ways of knowing relevant for schooling or for the academy. Meanwhile, aesthetics, the senses, memory, emotion, and embodiment are rich sources for knowing that are not only intrinsically valuable but vital for creating modes of survival and imagining other futures that might unfold from this present moment (Basso, 1996; Cervenak, 2021; Gershon, 2017; Sonu, 2012). Breaking through public conversations about curriculum by highlighting the value of marginalized forms of knowledge is part of the repair work and responsibility of curriculum scholarship.

In the [BLINDED] podcast we strive to remedy this notion introduced by formal schooling that knowledge was ever separate from the places where we live and work. Scholars in all spaces need new modalities for sharing experiences, values, and histories in order to reinvigorate our imagination and action, and restore and repair our collective abilities to engage in political discourse and effective teacher education. The [BLINDED] podcast showcases methods designed through a research and design hub for exploring creative modalities that bridge curriculum theorizing with actual curriculum-making practices for learners in a wide range of learning contexts (Literat et al, p. 2018; Pahl et al, 2022). These strategies are grounded in spatial investigations (Springgay & Truman, 2018), attention to affect (Stewart, 2016), materiality (Snaza et al., 2016), and aesthetic inquiry (Eisner, 1985; Greene, 1977) to foster creation and curricular innovation. Art-making (Franklin-Phipps, 2016), sense walks (Pink, 2009; Springgay, 2011), movement (Ollis, 2012), emotional inquiry (Zembylas, 2013), and experimentation with digital technologies (Vasudevan, 2010) are examples of the kinds of unexpected prompts that might imbue intractable conversations with fresh possibility.

Throughout the first season, the podcast visits a college of teacher education to demonstrate multimodal activity prompts designed to foster rich engagements with the varied forms of knowledge encountered there. These curricular scenes are attentive to the kind of knowledge that sits in the body and might be surfaced through a memory; or knowledge that can be observed with the alternate senses such as smell; or knowledge held in spaces that carry their own wisdom as witnesses of human histories. In later seasons, these strategies bring us out of schools and into public spaces to explore art and cultural venues, sites of community cooperation and conflict, and personal memory. Such provocations can inspire new forms of activism and repair.

Authors

• Jacqueline A. Simmons, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Sarah M. Gerth van den Berg, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jen Lee, Teachers College, Columbia University