Navigating Tensions Between Curriculum as Lived and Curriculum as Planned

• In Event: We're Breathing! Black Female CritTeacher Educators in Historical Pandemic Moments

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the tensions experienced by a Black faculty member while she taught a doctoral writing class during the fall and summer 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the racial reckoning, shifted work expectations and engagements for many faculty. Additionally, Black faculty had to confront not only the current racial climate in their institutions, but also deal with the emotional trauma they were experiencing. Through an autoethnographic lens the author details her “teaching life” as she worked with her doctoral students to complete their review of literature for their dissertations. Drawing from journal entries, life notes, teaching notes and subject matter content, the author explored how she navigated the tensions related to making adjustments to the curriculum and her teaching while aspiring to meet institutional expectations as she dealt with the impact of the racial crisis.

Perspectives
Drawing from Freire’s (1998) pedagogical principles and Hyun’s (2004) perspectives on curriculum as negotiation, the author utilized these concepts to analyze and frame the complex ways she endeavored to make teaching and learning humanizing and liberatory during this historical moment. Viewed as a dialectical learning experience anchored in raising students ‘critical consciousness (Freire, 1998), she utilizes these concepts to offer reflexive accounts of her critical teaching moments. Additionally, the classroom experience took into account the everyday lives of students, thus knowledge production becoming a form of a lived curriculum (Aoki, 2004). In this case, a lived curriculum during COVID 19 and racial injustice reckoning. The planned curriculum had to be negotiated between the teacher and the student, to make room for the lived curriculum.

Methods
Autoethnography as a method of inquiry acknowledges the researcher as an “insider” in the research setting in one’s own context. In this regard an “inner knowing” or what Eisner (1991) referred to as the eye of the researcher, is understood as a human quality that gives attention, intention and purpose to frame multiple dimensions of meaning making (Duncan, 2004). Autoethnography as a reflexive personal narrative utilizes the author’s own experiences for cultural analysis and interpretation (Chang, 2016), in this case making meaning of the tensions experienced in teaching and learning during the COVID 19 pandemic and racial crisis. This inquiry was informed by the following questions: How can teaching and learning be humanizing and liberatory during a time of crisis?

Data Sources and Results
The detailed notes, journal entries, teaching notes became a source for recreating an autoethnographic story of curriculum and pedagogical negotiation and identity (re)formation. The retold story sought to counter the institutional and instructional arrangements infused with oppressive hegemonic undertones during a time of trauma, with stories of agency.

Scholarly Significance
Discussions of curriculum and pedagogy through an autoethnographic lens can provide possibilities for “writing the self” during a time of crisis, if we are willing to provide those spaces for “broadening what is know-able, do-able, and be-able. (Davis & Sumar, 2004, p. 28). This autoethnographic account deepens such an understanding of this possibility.

Author

• Christine Wanjiku Nganga, The George Washington University