Designing Order: An Infra-Spectral Approach to Curriculum

• In Event: Cultivating Equitable Education Through Challenging the Status Quo of Curriculum

Abstract

The overwhelming focus in curriculum design on “how-to” procedures obscures the political of design itself. This paper offers a novel approach to examining the subjects, objects and modes of relating in curriculum design as historically contingent and therefore the political. To denaturalize the transcendental and lawlike aspects of design, the paper historically situates three “design orders”—organization, systematization, and datafication. These design orders are examined in terms of their classificatory principles, rules, and normativities that subtend the selection of disciplinary knowledges, learning psychologies, and pedagogical practices in curriculum. The paper argues that by attending to the infra-spectral turns attention to the rationales, procedures, and methods curricula employ in the management of life that embody fears of deviance, disharmony, and disorder.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison