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Overview

Educational Studies 645: Curriculum: Provoking Inquiry questions common taken-for-granted practices of curriculum and focuses on the production of new and multiple subjectivities and possibilities.

In the arts, literature, and philosophy, new voices and visions are emerging, voices and visions no longer based on Cartesian or Newtonian assumptions. We have seen that technical expertise alone will not overcome inflation, hunger, or poverty, nor can it balance national budgets or stop the ongoing destruction of the environment.

In Curriculum: Provoking Inquiry, our focus will be on discussing and understanding societal issues and pedagogical developments over time through a critical and interdisciplinary lens. The course requires students to grapple with uncomfortable ideas and resist the temptation of easy answers.

Engaging in curriculum studies inquiry requires not only good reasoning and an understanding of the history of the field, but also personal development and embodied learning. This course invites students to explore the continuing significance of critical pedagogy and its call for a more dialogical, participatory approach to education.

Note that this course does not focus on artificial intelligence developments in curriculum studies. For a critical examination of AI’s role and the societal effects of digital technologies, see MAIS 624: Critical Approaches to Technology and Society.

Outline

Part I gives a historical overview of some of the major conversations in curriculum studies in the United States and Canada. The readings reveal a field in transition from modernity to postmodernity and illuminate curriculum studies as a contested terrain shaped by competing paradigms. Readings from Chambers, Dewey, and others will inform the first major assignment, in which students will articulate their own educational philosophy through either a Pedagogical Creed (after Dewey) or a Pedagogical Narrative (after Chambers).

Parts II and III of the course engage postmodern theory and examine its implications for curriculum theory and research, using key metaphors as generative points of departure for reimagining educational thought and practice.

Part II explores curriculum as cultural practice and cultivates a postcolonial/anti-colonial imagination. The readings critically examine the implications of Eurocentrism in areas of cultural production, representation, and dissemination in education and promote innovative, democratic, and ethical practices in curriculum design. They also take up Nussbaum’s concern with emotions and her questions about whether the aim of education is profit or freedom, among other issues. Students will have the opportunity to examine the current state of curricula through diverse perspectives.

Part III explores curriculum as cultural body and as emotions/voice, recognizing the body as the medium of our knowing, and examining how that recognition in/forms what we know and how we think about what we know. It addresses body as part of teaching, learning, and knowing toward/in a postmodern era. The textbooks and articles introduce and provoke discussions of re-visioning and re-imagining curriculum and teaching for the twenty-first century.

Part IV revisits the course as a whole with the goal of integrating what students have learned.

Learning outcomes

When students have completed this course, they should be able to

• discuss multiple definitions of curriculum and their implications.
• demonstrate familiarity with the body of knowledge and research commonly referred to as curriculum studies.
• identify and describe current curriculum conversations and outline some of the competing discourses over the last half century in Canada and the United States.
• explain how curriculum as cultural practice has been mediated through a colonial imagination and re-imagine and re-theorize this metaphor and its function in a postcolonial context.
• question a variety of assumptions made at the individual, academic, and political levels of analysis in the struggle for more democratic social relations and education (including equity issues).
• articulate what curriculum as cultural body means to the student personally and consider its implications for teaching, learning, and knowing.
• challenge assumptions about embodiment by suggesting new ways of understanding the location and (dis)location of the “body” in contemporary culture.
• propose and evaluate ways of revisioning and re/imagining curricular and teaching practices so that the ethical commitment to education that links knowledge to the subjectivities and identities of learners can be renewed.

Evaluation

To receive credit for this course, students must actively participate in the online activities, complete all assignments successfully, and achieve a final mark of at least 60 percent. Students should be familiar with the Master of Arts—Interdisciplinary Studies grading system. Please note that it is students' responsibility to maintain their program status. Any student who receives a grade of "F" in one course, or a grade of "C" in more than one course, may be required to withdraw from the program.

The following table summarizes the evaluation activities and the credit weights associated with them.

Activity	Weight
Assignment 1: (A) Pedagogical Creed or (B) Pedagogical Narrative	10%
Assignment 2: First Response Paper and Online Discussion Moderation	20%
Assignment 3: Second Response Paper and Online Discussion Moderation	20%
Assignment 4: Final Paper	30%
Online Participation	20%
Total	100%

Materials

Physical course materials

The following course materials are included in a course package that will be shipped to your home prior to your course’s start date:

Kanu, Yatta, ed. (2006). Curriculum as Cultural Practice: Postcolonial Imaginations. University of Toronto Press.

Springgay, Stephanie, and Debra Freedman, eds. (2007). Curriculum and the Cultural Body. Peter Lang Publishing.

All other course materials will be available through the course website.

Important links

• Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Focus Areas
• Courses
• Fees and Funding