Stud Philos Educ (2011) 30:285–301
DOI 10.1007/s11217-010-9210-y
What is ?Curriculum Theorizing: for a People
Yet to Come
Jason J. Wallin
Published online: 24 November 2010
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract What is ?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay
argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum
landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of
non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to
the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is ?Curriculum Theory argues that
these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference from the
a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist
commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer
choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people
for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is ?Curriculum Theory draws
upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that
breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of
representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the
possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a
manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual (what is) and the
virtual (what is not-yet).
Keywords Curriculum theory Educational philosophy Process ontology Deleuzian
philosophy
Introduction
Drawing from Deleuze’s rethinking of Bergson’s process ontology, this essay seeks to
produce a way of approaching the task of curriculum theorizing in a way that does not
J. J. Wallin (&)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
e-mail: jjwallin@shaw.ca
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begin with a ready-made concept of the curriculum. Put differently, while the field of
curriculum theorizing has made great strides to multiply the meaning of curriculum, the
task of contemporary curriculum theorizing has only begun to imagine a style of thought
capable of encountering the curriculum in terms of its unthought, non-identitarian potentials. Such a style of thinking is desperately needed today, for while the field has done
much to multiply the definition of curriculum, these definitions continue to carry latent
assumptions that unnecessarily constrain how a pedagogical life might go. Admittedly, this
realization is not new, and certainly, the function of hegemonic power is particularly well
documented in curriculum research. However, this essay plots an encounter of another
kind. That is, in the course of this essay, the reader will encounter a series of ontological
resources for thinking difference. Emerging from the work of Bergson and the particular
Bergsonism composed in the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, these resources will
orient the reader to a difference that is no longer oriented to the presumption of a prior
identity or structure. The task of this essay is hence to promulgate a way of thinking
difference that is not reducible to mere multiplication, but rather, the mobilization of a
radical unthought that does not yet fall back on any ready-made image of curriculum or the
image of pedagogical life it might presume. Toward the creation of a different image of
curriculum theorizing, I will draw upon particular tendencies and perhaps unfamiliar
conceptual personas at work in the scholarship of such curricularists as Aoki, Daignault,
and Pinar. Summarily, it is in relation to the unthought that this essay will work toward the
theorization of a non-identitarian? ‘‘curriculum theorizing’’ capable of counter-actualizing
the implicitly limiting notion of difference that continues to inhere the curriculum project.
Identitarian Thought in Curriculum Theory
In Legitimating Lived Curriculum: Toward a Curriculum Landscape of Multiplicity, Aoki
(2005a) asserts that the contemporary curriculum landscape is fettered to a structural image
of pedagogy. Such structuralism, Aoki asserts, is symptomatic of a field dominated by
identitarian thought, or rather, the a priori image of how a pedagogical life should go. At
numerous junctures in his work, Aoki (2005a, b, c, d) dubs this a priori image the curriculum-as-plan, that is, the territorializing bureaucratic schema in which he argues the
field of curriculum and instruction is today captured.
For Aoki (2005a), the contemporary curriculum landscape is itself structural, realized1
in the transcendent image of the curriculum-as-plan.2 ‘‘The inherent indefiniteness [of
curriculum]’’ Aoki writes, ‘‘has become definitive, so much so that we speak with ease of
the [C]urriculum,’’ (p. 204). The structural logic Aoki detects in the contemporary curriculum landscape presupposes the existence of a pedagogical image of life prior to
difference. In this vein, the field is drawn dangerously into the presupposition that
‘‘identity is a preexistent presence—a presence we can represent by careful scrutiny and
copy’’ (Aoki 2005a, p. 205). The dangers of such identitarian thinking manifest in the
ways pedagogical practice is given to habit, homogeneity, to normative scope, sequence,
1
The scope of this paper will explore the import of the possible, the real, the actual, and the virtual for
curriculum theory.
2
I argue throughout this essay that in much of educational theory and practice, the image of structurality
finds expression in the privilege notion of curriculum-as-plan, and further, in a reactive image of pedagogy
that determines in advance what students will know, how such knowledge will be delivered, and ultimately,
how it will be made recognizable through assessment.
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assessment, and to the controlled flows of desire which situate what is possible according
to the transcendent image of the curriculum-as-plan.
However, the problem of identitarian thought cannot simply be situated with the curriculum-as-plan. The material encounter with curriculum Aoki dubs the curriculum-aslived might also be organized by a representational image of thought. Take for example the
lauded institutional rhetoric of choice. While students might choose from a variety of
course offerings, the very organization of courses into discreet subject areas, assignable
blocks of time, and preset knowledge contents is itself derivative of the curriculum-asplan. Aoki (2005c) writes, ‘‘the seeming curricular diversity is an illusion because ‘‘they’’
are manifestations of a singular meaning of the curriculum’’ (p. 417). This critique might
be widened to implicate curriculum research that conflates the concept of multiplicity with
that of multiple identities. Aoki (2005a) writes, ‘‘to be noun oriented, thing-oriented, or
positivistically oriented is to be culturally conditioned to see multiplicity as multiple
identities’’ (p. 205). While the notion of multiple identities enables us to think in terms of
quantitative variety, it maintains an image of identitarian or representational thought
presupposing a namable thing or object preceding difference. While masquerading under
the guise of radical difference, the conflation of multiplicity with the philosophical principal of the multiple is the product of conformist thought. In this vein, multiplicity is
rendered non-philosophical, that is, incapable of thinking the unthought. Tethered to
representational models, the course of pedagogical life is separated from its powers of
becoming.
The Inadequacy of Thinking Difference by Degree and the Problem of Celebrating
Multiplicity in Curriculum Theory
Apropos this particular reading of Aoki, I contend that the conceptualization of difference
that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of
ontological experimentation or the creation of new ways for thinking pedagogical life.
Drawing upon the philosophical thought of Deleuze (1991), Aoki asserts that the concept
of difference is today overdetermined by quantitative terms of more or less, or rather, by
difference in degree. In Deleuzian terms, the difference between these two concepts is vast.
As Deleuze (1991) writes, ‘‘each time we think in terms of more or less, we have already
disregarded the differences in kind between the two orders, or between beings, between
existents’’ (p. 20). Take for example a lump of sugar. It has a particular material actuality
and specific spatial configuration. Approached by degree alone, however, the lump of sugar
might be apprehended only in terms of its difference to another thing. Simply, a lump of
sugar is not a lump of clay, or rather, x is not y. In this formulation, difference by degree
functions by a logic of non-contradiction. Following this logic, however, it becomes difficult to think heterogeneously. That is, the homogeneous relations presupposed by identitarian thought preclude the creation of connections and assemblages across heterodox
territories.
For Deleuze (1991), the error of this approach lies in its conflation of space and
duration. Against this homogeneous composite, Deleuze turns to the philosophical innovation of Bergson. Bergson (2004) decomposes the concept of multiplicity to reveal two
tendencies, one spatial and quantitative, differing in degree, while the other durational and
qualitative, differing in kind. In other words, while a lump of sugar might be quantitatively
extensive and actual, differing in degree from other extant lumps, this is for Bergson only
one way of approaching its potential. Drawing upon Bergson, Deleuze writes, ‘‘[the lump
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of sugar] also has a duration, a way of being in time that is … revealed in the process of its
dissolving, and that shows how this sugar differs in kind not only from other things, but
first and foremost from itself’’ (p. 32). The radical move of Bergsonism is in part the
decomposition of space and duration, for in this he suggests that difference is not a
degraded secondary movement, but rather, the character of substance itself.
Bergson puts this differently in the formulation ‘‘I must wait until the sugar dissolves’’
(cited in Deleuze 1991, p. 32). In this expression, Bergson reveals a qualitative difference
of duration, or rather, a difference in kind unfettered from some generalized sense of Being
(Deleuze 1991). Deleuze writes, ‘‘my own duration…as I live in the impatience of waiting…serves to reveal other durations that beat to other rhythms’’ (p. 32). While difference
in degree is quantitative and discontinuous, measurable by dint of a metric principal,
difference in kind is a multiplicity or heterogeneity irreducible to numerical equivalencies.
In Bergsonian terms, difference in kind is non-measurable, or rather, measurable only
insofar as the principal of measurement varies with each division, fusion, or durational
difference (Deleuze 1991).
While Bergson avers that an object can be divided in an infinite number of ways, he
remarks that such quantifiable variety or difference in degree is ‘‘already visible in the
image of the object’’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 41). Difference by degree begins with the
assumption of identity, or rather, the ontological bias of an underlying reality prior to
difference. In this image, difference is oriented to the actual and objective. Bergson (2004)
evokes the image of a flock of sheep to illustrate this idea. The flock is both quantitatively
extensive and spatially organized. Each sheep occupies a space discontinuous from an
other. Further, the flock is numerable insofar as there exists a particular homogeneity by
which they might constitute a spatial ‘set’. For Bergson, quantitative multiplicity relies on
each of these homogeneous and spatially discontinuous factors.
The Lowest Degree of Difference: the Identitarian Privilege of the Curriculum
Landscape
The very notion of multiple identities, multiple choices, or multiple meanings infers an
extant object or thing subject to quantitative or positional extension. In this image, the
curricular landscape becomes an object or thing recognizable by degrees of variation from
an identitarian model, that is, from actual identities, meanings, and spatial positions. While
the curriculum landscape might be populated by an extensive number of identities,
meanings, or choices, this image has yet to encounter difference in kind. Amidst contemporary appeals for the multiplication of meaning and identity in curriculum theory, the
thought of Deleuze offers a caveat. ‘‘Differences in degree’’ Deleuze writes, ‘‘are the
lowest degree of difference’’ (p. 93). It is this lowest degree of difference that is today
reproduced in the field of curriculum via the rhetoric of the possible.
What is the possible and why does it constitute the lowest degree of difference? While
not the real per se, Deleuze argues that the possible is subject to realization. In Bergsonian
terms, the process of realization follows two principals: those of resemblance and limitation. ‘‘The real is supposed to be in the image of the possible that it realizes’’ (Deleuze
1991, p. 97). That is, the real is reduced to the working out of what pre-exists as possible.
To the extent that the curriculum-as-plan constitutes the possible, institutional schooling
might aspire to ‘realize’ pedagogical life in its image. Contemporarily, such a tethering can
be witnessed in the drive toward standardization in schools. In Bergsonian terms, however,
an illusion is constituted in this movement, ‘‘for the possible is only the real with the
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addition of an act of mind that throws its image back into the past once it has been
enacted’’ (cited in Deleuze 1991, p. 17). In the extant realization of the curriculum-asplan, an error is committed through its retrograde organization as that which is possible.
For Deleuze, such a philosophical error obfuscates the creative act constituting the possible, thereby creating an identitarian matrix in which the possible and real are tethered in a
mirror play of representation. In this identitarian image, nothing novel or unanticipated can
be produced. Difference proceeds only by degrees from the a priori possible.
The Problematic of the Possible and Real in Curriculum Design
This philosophical error is intimate to the instrumental foundations of curriculum design.
Take for example Tyler’s (1949) Basic Principals of Curriculum and Instruction, a text so
foundational to the field Jackson (1992) dubs it ‘‘the Bible of curriculum making’’ (p. 24).
In this seminal text, Tyler gives primacy to the question of educational purposes and
institutional objectives, asking ‘‘What educational purposes should the school seek to
attain?’’ (cited in Jackson, p. 25). Put differently, the gambit of Basic Principals of Curriculum and Instruction is to organize the territory of the pedagogically possible. Tyler
(1949) writes, ‘‘all aspects of the educational program are really means to accomplish basic
educational purposes…hence, if we are to study an educational program systematically and
intelligently we must first be sure as to the educational objectives aimed at’’ (p. 3). Relative
to this image of pedagogy, Tyler advances his second curricular concern, that is, how
experience might best attain its pre-established purposes. In this formulation, Tyler fetters
the realization of the curriculum to its prior possibility. As Bergson critiques, this image of
thought purports the real as the working-out of the pre-existent possible, militating against
a creative difference in kind.
Deleuze comments that such identitarian mirror play avoids addressing the notion of
potential. Put differently, in the representational matrix of the Tylerian rational, we are
oriented to pedagogical life as an image of utility and not creation, repression and not
affirmation. To approach Tyler’s constitution of the possible as itself a creative act would
be to insist that it is but one image of how a pedagogical life might go. As an ineluctably
structural framework, however, the Tylerian marriage of possible and real reduces such
active lines of flight, reproducing instead a reactive3 image of pedagogy that separates
active forces from their powers of becoming. Circulated as ‘common sense’ and ‘popular
opinion’, it is this reactive image of pedagogical life that today dominates institutional
thinking. As Aoki (2005e) explicates, ‘‘ends-means…orientation has for the pragmatically
oriented a commonsensical ring that carries with it the validity of popular support’’ (p.
170). This development is drawn directly from Deleuze (1994), for whom common sense
‘‘contributes the form of the Same’’, that is, ‘‘the norm of identity…and the essential aspect
of recognition—namely, the model itself’’ (pp. 169–170). This reactive image of life fetters
the will, ultimately giving rise to resentment, suffering, and enslavement, for it suggests
that what might become is already figured by what is.
A more specific philosophical problem of the possible emerges at this juncture. ‘‘The
possible has no reality’’ Deleuze (1991) writes, ‘‘it simply has existence or reality added to
3
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast the active power of the concept against the reactive understanding of
the concept as simply a representation of knowledge ordered and employed according to the faculties of its
creation. The reactive treatment of the concept reduces its complexity by grounding difference within the
presupposed limits of popular opinion and a priori images of the world as it is.
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it, which is translated by saying that…there is no difference between the possible and the
real’’ (pp. 96–97). In itself, the possible is an empty category, lacking its own productive
powers. Simply, the possible does not exist, but rather, awaits the contingency of realization. As Deleuze (2004) questions ‘‘what difference can there be between the existent
and the non-existent if the non-existent is already possible…having all the characteristics
the concept confers upon it as a possibility’’? (p. 263). It is in this vein that Deleuze
critiques the idea of the possible as the affirmation of negation. In the image of the possible
and realized, difference is conceived in negative terms, enslaved to the determinations of
the image of thought in which it is captured. Yet, the problem of the possible inaugurates
the more insidious image of a lack at the heart of existence. The negative form of the
possible is affirmed as the organizing image of the real that it resembles. In this image, we
become tethered to the purely negative idea that existence derives from some pre-existent
possibility constantly erupting behind our backs (Deleuze 1994).
Against the image of life advanced by Bergson, the instrumental framework espoused in
the work of Tyler (1911) implicitly posits pedagogical life as a project of limitation and
resemblance. This approach favors a utilitarian image of life that evades Spinoza’s
philosophical provocation to think radical difference. Indeed, we do not yet know what a
body can do. However, the pedagogical rhetoric of the possible implicitly purports that we
already know of what a body is capable. This problematic image extends beyond the
instrumentalism of Tyler, into the very structural tendencies of contemporary curriculum
studies. Simply, the curriculum-as-possible must be given back to thought. This challenge
cannot simply be met by thinking in terms of quantitative extension, but rather, requires the
intervention of difference in kind. As Deleuze (2004) avers, ‘‘utility cannot ground what
makes it possible in the first place’’ (p. 34). This Deleuzian provocation insists that we
must give identity back to the substance of difference from which it was sliced.
The Being of Difference
This intervention is forecasted by Bergson, for who the question of existence is not ‘‘Why
something rather than nothing?’’, but rather, ‘‘Why this tension of duration? Why this
speed rather than another? Why this proportion? And why will a perception evoke a given
memory, or pick up on certain frequencies rather than others?’’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 25).
Bergson argues that we must not simply be weary of false solutions, but false problems. In
Bergsonian terms, the question ‘‘why something rather than nothing?’’ posits such a false
problem, obfuscating the Being of difference advanced in the question ‘‘why this rather
than something else?’’ (p. 25). It is along this line that Bergson advances an ontology of
difference in kind. For Bergson, Being is not an immovable metaphysical principal or
universal totality. Rather, Bergson conceptualizes Being in terms of nuance. That is, for
Bergson, Being is the ability to differ from itself, ‘‘the difference itself of the thing’’
(Deleuze 2004, p. 25). Take for example Bergson’s case of the sugar cube. Its difference
cannot simply be discovered in its spatial distribution from another thing, nor in contradiction to what it is not. Radical difference is to be found in neither the exterior relations of
distribution or the dialectic of contradiction. In other words, Bergsonian difference is
neither the product of scientific method nor the immutable principal assigned by metaphysics. The sugar cube has a Being that differs from itself, a duration that reveals internal
contrapuntal rhythms. Hence, qualitative difference is neither the multiple or the One. It is
neither a quantitative multiplicity nor a totalized composite. As an alternative to this
impasse, Bergson (2004) redeploys the Aristotelian concept of alteration as a way of
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thinking difference in kind. For Bergson, alteration is a qualitative or intensive movement.
In Bergsonian terms, alteration is not a thing, but life’s ability to differ. Simply, alteration
is difference. Such qualitative difference is neither determinate or overdetermined by an
identitarian signifier or universalized image. ‘‘[I]t is very much the opposite: it is indetermination itself…[a]nd in Bergson’s work, the unforeseeable, the indeterminate, is not
accidental; on the contrary, it is essential, the negation of the accident’’ (Deleuze 2004,
p. 40).
Bergson’s (2004) notion of Being hence does not fall back into identity but rather,
becomes expressed as a tendency. In this approach, Bergson repudiates the false problem
‘‘Why is there something rather than nothing’’, advancing instead an ontology of alteration, ‘‘Why this rather than something else?’’ Rather than a movement given by a preformed identity or image of the possible, Bergson advances the concept of alteration as
substance itself. In Bergsonian terms, such substance is not simply different, but that which
differentiates. In other words, substance has an otherness that is not quantifiably extensive,
but ‘‘differs from itself’’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 37). In this ontological conceptualization,
difference is no longer tethered to an identitarian a priori that repeats. That is, alteration
does not depend on a final representation. ‘‘When difference has become the thing itself,
there is no longer any basis for saying that the thing receives its difference from an end’’
(Deleuze 2004, p. 42). It is neither a plurality or dialectical composite, neither the multiple
or the One. Rather, alteration as substance is the tendency for both the multiple and the
One. In this vein, Bergson’s conceptualization of difference no longer proceeds by
negation. Rather, in Bergsonian terms, difference becomes a productive or affirmative
power intimate to the movement of a life.
White Light: the Problem of Commonality in Curriculum Theory
Articulating his ontological move, Bergson advances the question: ‘‘What do colours have
in common?’’ For Bergson (2004), there are two ways in which we might approach this
question. The first approach ‘‘[extracts a] general idea of color’’ that leaves us with ‘‘a
concept that is a genre, and many objects for one concept’’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 43). While
the generalized concept of the curriculum is quantitatively extensive, its material realizations (objects) defer to an a priori principle (the possible) in relation to which difference
proceeds only by degree. In this approach, the curriculum-as-plan constitutes an abstracted
image in which material life is realized. As Aoki argues, ‘‘in [the] structural landscape….’’
instruction, ‘‘‘‘teaching,’’ ‘‘pedagogy,’’ and ‘‘implementation’’ become derivatives in the
shadow of the curriculum-as-plan’’ (p. 204). Captured in such an image of arboreality,
pedagogical life becomes an object sublimated under the transcendent image of the curriculum. In such formulations as ‘‘teaching the curriculum’’, ‘‘implementing the curriculum’’, and ‘‘assessing the curriculum’’ then, difference is conceived as a movement
secondary to the thing itself (the curriculum). Following, while there might be a multiplicity of instructions, methods, teachings, or implementations, each remains wed to a
foundational presumption regarding the curriculum. This formulation advances a weak
sense of plurality that, however extensive, remains caught within the reproductive tendencies of identitarian thinking. Maintaining the binary opposition of multiple and One, the
generalized approach to Bergson’s problem effaces from each object what makes them
thus (Deleuze 1991). That is, it reduces their potential for difference by fettering their
possibility to a transcendent index such as, in Bergson’s example, color. This approach to
difference maintains the organization of the object under its concept. Hence, in Bergson’s
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example, difference remains external to the thing, or rather, red, blue, and yellow remain
external to the principal of color itself.
In contrast, Bergson’s second approach ‘‘concentrates [different colours] on the same
point…[of] ‘‘pure white light’’’’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 43). Bergson hence advances a way of
thinking in which colours are not ordered under a generalized principle, but rather, become
nuances of the concept itself (Deleuze 1991). Put differently, red, blue, and yellow are not
simply objects of white light, but potentials or tendencies of white light itself. While
Bergson’s second approach maintains the universal concept, this universal (white light)
might be called virtual, or rather, a multiplicity inhering an uncertain potential being
actualized. For Bergson (2004), white light is one way of thinking substance as that which
differs from itself. White light is not prior to difference, but is itself the potential to differ.
In this vein, the virtual (white light, in this example) is neither possible nor the realization
of the possible. More specifically, the differentiation of white light as red, blue, or yellow
no longer finds its potential for becoming fettered to identitarian thinking. Whereas possibility and realization are caught in a mirror game of representation, white light and red
for example, can no longer be said to resemble one another in an identitarian sense.
Further, they are neither separate substances or divisible into genus (white light) and object
(red). Rather, white light is intensive, differing from itself through processes of actualization, or rather, through the selection of particular components from a virtual multiplicity. For Deleuze (1991), such actualization is non-resemblant, and hence, a difference
in kind. For example, the virtuality of white light might be actualized as red, green, a shade
that includes both red and green, etc. In this vein, Bergson’s innovation is to think the
intensive potential of the virtual (white light) and its actualization(s) as neither resemblant
or quantitatively extensive.4 ‘‘It is our ignorance of the virtual’’ Deleuze remarks, ‘‘that
makes us believe in contradiction and negation’’ (p. 43).
The Possible and the Virtual
The problematic of the possible and virtual, Deleuze insists, is not simply a ‘‘verbal
dispute’’ but rather, ‘‘a question of existence itself’’ (p. 263). Virtuality is a question of
difference in kind, and further, the rejection of an a priori identity that would give rise to
one particular future and not another. It is in this way that Deleuze (2004) distinguishes
between the possible and the virtual. As I have discussed, the possible limits difference to
degrees of variation from a prior condition. In contrast, the virtual is an expression of
multiplicity non-identical with a prior identity, actualizing by way of ‘‘difference, divergence or differenciation’’ (p. 264). While the realization of the possible is bound by
resemblance, ‘‘[doubling] like with like’’, the actualization of the virtual is genuinely
creative, breaking from the ‘‘limitation of a pre-existing possibility’’ (p. 263). Deleuze
thinks the actual as a ‘‘local integration or…solution’’ immanent to its milieu. In this vein,
an organism might be thought to actualize solutions to such local problems as heat and
light. Microbial extremophiles for instance, have actualized solutions to the extreme
geochemical and physical conditions of their local milieus. The extremophile is hence not
oriented to realizing a prior identity, but rather, toward the creative actualization of the
virtual for which no priori representational matrix exists. Indeed, if the becoming of the
extremophile were tethered to an identitarian a priori, their singular solutions to the
4
Bergson’s vitalism is rethought in Essay 11 through the significance of techne for the theorization of
process ontology.
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problems of their milieu would be impossible. They simply could not survive. Such local
actualization is the nuance of Being, or rather, the impetus for life to diverge in a manner
that corresponds, but does not resemble the virtual multiplicity which it differenciates. The
actual is in this sense a difference in kind, or rather, the non-representational differenciation of a virtual multiplicity.
The Problematic of Multiplicity
Extending the work of Aoki, we might conceptualize the curriculum as a perplexion5
without absolute solution. ‘‘[T]he curriculum-as-lived’’ Aoki writes, is ‘‘a multiplicity of
curricula, as many as there are teachers and students’’ (p. 426). Aoki cites the material
struggles of teachers who create, in the midst of mandated plans and lived experience, the
planned and unplanned, and the predictable and unpredictable, an original currere. While
this conceptualization of curriculum maintains an identitarian presumption of both ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ as the basic units of pedagogy, it divests their identities from being
located under a prior plan. While Aoki avoids grappling with the manner in which the
subjectivities of teachers and students are themselves realizations of the possibility of
schooling, we might affirm the way in which he thinks the curriculum as a ‘‘practical
struggle [that] never proceeds by way of the negative but by the way of difference and its
power of affirmation’’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 260). In this vein, the idea of curriculum might be
thought in such a way as to preclude its resemblance to a prior object. Put differently, as a
virtual genetic field, the curriculum is not akin to the possible. Instead, the curriculum-aslive(d) posits a multiplicity of solutions for the actualization the virtual. Herein, I might
deploy the unthought within Aoki, postulating a curriculum capable of actualizing mutant
subjectivities and collective forms of production no longer requisite upon the molar categories of student and teacher. Such forms of alternative educational actualization have
been brilliantly elucidated by Genosko (2008), who has documented the influence of
Celestin Freinet and Jean Oury on the work of Deleuze’s collaborator, Felix Guattari.
Elsewhere, May and Semetsky (2008) have argued that the conceptualization of education
as actual-virtual enables educators and curriculum theorists to reengage with schooling as a
problematic that might be answered differently. This conceptualization, they argue, marks
an ethical engagement in educational thought capable of repudiating those habits and
clichés that would already suppose how a pedagogical life ought to go (morality).
Against the ethical commitment May and Semetsky (2008) advance for educational
thought, the negative and oppositional actualization of curriculum in such works as
Bobbitt’s The Curriculum (1918) serves to render a particular ‘‘image of thought’’ into
educational ‘‘fact’’. Intimate to Bobbitt’s image of the curriculum is the actualization of
currere (pedagogical life) as a preparatory vehicle for the demands of an adult world. Such
demands are themselves corollaries of an economic apparatus which determine in advance
the social placeholders necessary for sustained industrial production. Fettered to the
a priori ideals of effectiveness and efficiency intimate to the Western socio-economic
apparatus, the ‘fact’ of Bobbitt’s curriculum theorizing posits in advance a transcendent
model for the course of pedagogical life. In this vein, the foundations of curriculum theory
actualize the curriculum in a manner cut off from the virtual, hence, its ‘‘finite affirmations
5
Deleuze uses the term perplexion to signify the ‘‘multiple and virtual state of Ideas’’, hence bypassing the
connotation of ‘‘astonishment, doubt, or hesitation’’ association with the term ‘‘problem’’ (http://www.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/).
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appear limited in themselves’’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 258). Put differently, the seminal foundations of curriculum theory advanced by Bobbitt begins by solving the curriculum as the
curriculum-as-plan, hence ‘‘[hiding] the intensive nature of the morphogenetic processes
that gave rise to [it]’’ (Bonta & Protevi 2004, p. 49).
Born of opposition and negation, the curriculum-as-plan halts the lines of movement
between virtual (unthought) and actual, severing itself from the embryonic field of relations herein dubbed the curriculum. In this way, the curriculum-as-plan is synonymous
with the lauded institutional ideals of predictability, organization, and prescription (p. 426).
As Bonta and Protevi write, the process of actualization marks a ‘‘congealment of the
intensive and the burying of the virtual’’ (Bonta & Protevi 2004, p. 49). The actual is,
however, subject to lines of flight that subtract themselves from structure.6 Such lines of
flight are intimate to what I have herein conceptualized as the curriculum-as-live(d), or
perhaps more adequately, the actual-virtual character of currere. It is in this vein that I
might contend that the curriculum is that which already differs from itself, differenciating
along n-dimensions of its ‘‘genetic’’ multiplicity (Patton & Protevi 2003). In this manner,
one might begin to think both the curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived as born not
of difference by degree but by kinds of difference. Indeed, the curriculum-as-live(d) is itself
the tendency for the curriculum to become-other as a unique event subtracted from its prior
image. The curriculum-as-live(d) is already subtracted from the idea of the curriculum in
general. This posed, however, it would be erroneous to insist on the foundational actuality
of the curriculum-as-plan. Rather, as Colebrook (2008) implies, the curriculum-as-plan is
itself sliced from a myriad ways in which the course of a pedagogical life might go. It is
already the work of desire. It is in such a manner that we might think about curriculum as
the actual-virtual oscillation between what is and what is not yet.
What Can Curriculum Theory Do?
In What is Curriculum Theory? Pinar (2004) suggests that the task of curriculum theorizing
should be thought in a manner corollary that Deleuze and Guattari (1994) propose for
philosophy. Curriculum theory, Pinar writes in direct reference to the Deleuze and Guattari’s work in What is Philosophy?, might best be characterized by the ‘‘creation of
‘‘untimely’’ concepts’’ (p. 22). While Pinar places curriculum in relation to the task of
concept creation, however, this does not yet produce a passage for thinking such concepts
in a manner correspondent to the virtual. Contemporary curriculum theory must not only
task itself with the creation of new concepts for thinking, but further, the recuperation of a
space for the ‘‘non-thought within thought’’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, p. 59). This
insistence appears throughout the work of Daignault (1992, 2008), whose entreaty to think
difference might be understood as a challenge to resituate curricular thinking correlative to
the virtual (p. 199). By affirming the passage of difference, Daignault advances an
understanding of difference unfettered from a prior thing. In this vein, much of Daignault’s
curriculum theorizing works to release the ‘‘expressible’’ (the virtual) in the ‘‘expressed’’
(actual), or rather, to reterritorialize the actual upon virtual lines of differentiation, the
passage of difference itself.
6
Opposed to a process of addition whereby higher dimensions are added to prior structures, Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) advocate for the subtraction of ‘‘the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted’’ (p. 6).
Deleuze and Guattari aver that a rhizome might be made by way of subtraction (n-1), releasing set structural
points into productive flight.
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This tactic is made palpable in Daignault’s (1988) treatment of Frank O’Hara’s (1971)
poem, Why I am not a Painter. The poem recounts an exchange between O’Hara and an
artist friend (Mike Goldberg) in which O’Hara notes the representation of a can of sardines
in one of the artist’s compositions. Upon a subsequent visit, O’Hara notes the absence of
the sardines from the composition. Considering this transformation, Goldberg avers that
the sardines were simply ‘‘too much’’. Sometime thereafter, O’Hara begins thinking about
the colour orange and begins to unfold this thinking into prose. He composes twelve poems
in total and yet, in the course of composing his prose, O’Hara recounts that orange is never
mentioned. That is, O’Hara notes that the prosaic course of the poem makes no explicit
reference to its orienting signifier. ‘‘My poem is finished’’ O’Hara writes, ‘‘and I haven’t
mentioned orange yet’’. O’Hara entitles his twelve poems Oranges, yet none are identitarian or representational accounts of their namesake. Following the composition of
Oranges, O’Hara encounters Goldberg’s painting in a gallery. It is titled ‘‘Sardines’’.
Daignault’s (1988) use of O’Hara’s poem becomes a way to think difference in kind.
That is, O’Hara’s Why I am not a Painter introduces a way of thinking in which the thing
differs from itself. Preserving the passage of difference, O’Hara creates a way of thinking
Orange(s) unfettered from a prior transcendent or identitarian image. Simply, O’Hara is
able to compose twelve poems on orange without mentioning the colour, the fruit, the
turning hues of autumn leaves, or other representational trope. Instead, O’Hara introduces a
line of flight between signifier and signified opening into a virtual reservoir of linkages,
meshworks, and non-identitarian passages for thinking. Through this tactic, O’Hara subtracts (n - 1) from ‘‘orange’’ its conventional signifiers of colour and form, differentiating
it in a manner out of step with common sense and representational thinking. Creating a
passage for difference, O’Hara’s Oranges demonstrate the opening of the actual to its
virtual difference. In turn, he prosaically differenciates the oranges in a way that opens
thought to new modes of perception and relation. Through O’Hara’s tactic, Daignault
introduces a challenge to the field of curriculum theory.
Daignault implicitly asks how overdetermined curricular concepts might be given back
to thought. As Daignault writes, ‘‘thinking is the incarnation of curriculum as composition’’
(cited in Hwu 1993, p. 172). Such a praxis of composition is what Daignault refers to as
‘‘pedagogy’’ proper (Hwu 1993, p. 166). Daignault’s curriculum theorizing hence evades
the illusion of transcendence that would assert the primacy of the concept. Instead, Daignault argues that the actual is itself the temporary outcome of a creative movement to
which it might once again be released. There is a way, Daignault suggests via O’Hara, of
enunciating the curriculum without falling back into the habits of cliché or the tyranny of
master signifiers. It is in such a manner that Daignault’s challenge to curriculum theory is
redoubled in Colebrook’s (2008) thinking on education. For Colebrook, the ‘‘leading out’’
implied by the etymological origins of educare is a movement away from the habits of
common sense, opinion, and consensus. Evoking Deleuze’s (2001) brief commentary on
pedagogy in Proust and Signs, Colebrook avers that ‘‘learning to swim is not replicating
the movements of the swimming teacher; nor is it feeling the waves that the teacher herself
is responding to; it is imaging the response to new and other waves’’ (p. 42). What
Colebrook evokes in this pedagogical scenario is the necessarily actual-virtual character of
educare. That is, it is insufficient that education limit itself to what is, be it the words of our
teacher, or those contents that inform the work of classroom life. Rather, the curriculum
must be marked by an engagement with the virtual via which the lessons of the classroom
are continually brought to bear upon perplexions for which such lessons must necessarily
be reactivated through the creation of new thoughts and actions.
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What is ?Curriculum Theory?
Following Daignault, it is in error to continue to think the curriculum as either a plan or a
lived experience. That is, the enjoiner ‘‘as’’ reifies the existence of some thing subsisting
relative to another. Hence, to think the curriculum as lived or the curriculum as plan
maintains the illusion of the curriculum as a thing prior to its composition. In lieu of
thinking the curriculum as a thing prior to difference, it is crucial that we create a style of
thinking the curriculum as immanent to difference itself. Following, this essay concludes
with three propositions on a conceptual resource that we will, in the closing pages of this
essay, dub the? ‘curriculum’. In this concluding section, I will develop the concept of
?curriculum along three specific trajectories including non-signification, becoming, and
reterritorialization.
To begin, the ?curriculum is not simply a concept. Rather, it is a problematic to be
introduced into the field of curriculum theorizing. Following Daignault’s explication of
O’Hara’s poem oranges, what I dub the ?curriculum advances the question of how one might
engage in the act of creation without falling back onto previous territories of signification. Put
differently, to evade the trappings of representation and identity that dominate the field of
curriculum thinking, contemporary curricularists must find passages for expressing the
curriculum in terms of a difference in kind. This tactic is promulgated by Daignault, who
demonstrates the way in which O’Hara mobilizes a myriad of expressive resources for
thinking his particular problematic (that is, the creation of a poem about oranges) anew. Yet,
O’Hara does something even more profound. That is, if one is able to compose twelve poems
about oranges without falling back onto any familiar representational expression, this suggests that identity is not primary. Contrawise, Daignault demonstrates via O’Hara that the
actuality of oranges (their particular smells, colours, tastes, and association to times and
places) might be opened to their unthought virtuality. In this maneuver, Daignault points to a
way in which the thing might be subtracted (n - 1) from its semiotic and associative overdetermination. The provocation for curriculum theorizing might be thought similarly.
In an age in which the field of educational thought has become overdetermined by
increasingly instrumental and canonical thinking, how might the curriculum be given back
to its unthought expressive potentials? It is in this way that the concept of ?curriculum
theory is prefaced by the non-signifying feature of the question mark. I understand this
marker not simply in terms of a question, but rather, as a way in which we might begin to
think the representational indexes of the curriculum in relation to their virtual potential (?)
to exceed what is. This is not a matter of simply adding cases to a prior image (n ? 1), but
rather, of subtracting something from what is in order to let it flee (n - 1). As Colebrook
(2008) challenges, ‘‘the body is not reducible to the ideas or images we have of it’’ (p. 39).
This is to suggest that the image of curriculum might be made differently, as in the case of
Freinet’s introduction of the classroom printing-press or in the practices of collective
enunciation at A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School. Perhaps more radically, Colebrook’s
challenge suggests that the body of the curriculum, however, much it seems to anticipate
the subjects it is meant to coordinate, is always moved by the desire of the others (the
teachers and students) who compose an encounter with it. Further, the (?) mark that
proceeds the concept of ?curriculum finds resonance with the idea that institutional curricula are less an imperative to think in particular ways than a perplexion that might be
inhabited and solved in profoundly singular ways (Colebrook 2008). By thinking the
curriculum immanent to its virtual or immanent potentials for becoming, we might better
grapple with the problem of how the curriculum is composed (actualized) in the first place.
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It is at this juncture that the question of curriculum’s composition must be posed. The
notion of the ?curriculum is one that suggests that the curriculum is not a ready-made
actuality. Rather, I take the concept to suggest that the ?curriculum is a practical matter of
creation and connection, where the visual marker (?) suggests a potential contact point
through which the curriculum might enter into a composition with other machines (social
organizations, objects, bodies, etc.). To put this another way, what is required to ward
against the overdetermination of both the educational and curricular project is an untimely
interceder that represents neither the life of the subject, nor the life of the community
(bios). Rather, I want to advance a notion of ?curriculum that points to the prepersonal life
of the virtual, a life that is not yet his or hers, biographical or reflective, since these very
terms fall back upon the presumption of the subject as their basic term of reference. To
encounter a difference in kind, the ?curriculum must create a contact point to that which is
unthought, and in this way, productively fail to become the attribute of a pre-given subject.
An encounter with the untimely always suggests a becoming that cannot be apprehended by
the question ‘‘what is one becoming?’’. That is, as a process of entering into new relations
and times of living, becoming is not oriented toward its becoming some thing. At its best,
such a conceptualization remains tethered to difference by degree only. Rather, becoming
might more adequately be thought as the symbiotic encounter in which what is is drawn
into a potentially productive heterdox configuration with what it is not yet. In this way, the
?curriculum breaks from an interpretative tradition that relies upon backward identification
in lieu of an immanence that suggests, twisting Spinoza, that we do not yet know how a life
might go.
To approach ?curriculum as a practical matter of composition is concomitantly a
provocation to delink curricular thought from any a priori notion of the curriculum in
general. Put differently, the concept of ?curriculum begins with the question of how
curriculum is composed in the first place, or rather, of how curriculum becomes singular to
the specific perplexions in relation to which it is actualized. This is to recommence curricular thought upon the notion of individuation, or rather, the setting apart of a curriculum
from the representational generality of the curriculum. That is, where the curriculum
constitutes an all-too-generic order-word for describing the organization of classroom life,
what I would like to dub ?curriculum theorizing asks how curriculum becomes actualized
relative to ‘‘the different potential purposes [and functions] of education’’ I have elsewhere
dubbed the virtual (Biesta 2009, p. 41). In other words, what I would like to call ?curriculum theorizing not only recommences the question of how curriculum is composed, but
further, promulgates an approach that begins rethinking common sense images of contemporary schooling by opening the conditions of their composition and sedimentation
(Biesta 2009). Twisting May (2005), the mistake of education was to erect the curriculum
as a monolith, or rather, to believe that there was only one image under which classroom
life could labor. Commencing the concept of ?curriculum theorizing, I do not intend to
simply laud the diversification of curriculum. Rather, what I am advocating here is
a curriculum of another kind, or rather, a curriculum that no longer aspires to become
equivalent to an orthodox idea of curriculum in general.
It is here that we might think the curriculum as an act of improvisational composition
insofar as the improvisational act practices a becoming without-image (Holland 2004).
Distinct from the reproduction of a compositional score through which we might know in
advance what will become, musical improvisation is immanent to the virtual. That is, in the
improvisational act, we do not yet know how sounds will mesh, interlock, disperse, and
run-off. This relationship to the virtual applies not only to improvisational production
(which becomes without an a priori map), but perhaps more radically, to the musicians
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themselves. In improvisation, the musician ceases to be a basic unit inhering beneath
production. Instead, the improvisational group might more adequately be thought as a
swarm, pack, or abstract machine that cannot easily be reduced to its individual players. It
is in this manner that improvisation casts both its mode of production and the presumption
of its producer into productive flight. The improvisational challenge of the ?curriculum
forces educational theorists to begin imagining a style of pedagogical life no longer
tethered to the lofty position of the master teacher, the bureaucratic dictates of ends-means
production, or the standardized reduction of pedagogical life to the tracing of testable
criteria. This however is not recourse to frivolity or the dissolution of the public school.
Rather, the ?curriculum might more adequately be thought as a counter-image to the idea
of schooling in general. Put differently, the ?curriculum can only be thought in terms of
the alter-pedagogical singularities it becomes capable of composing. This is to reterritorialize the task of educating a molar ‘‘public’’ (of which we already have a statistical,
identitarian image) upon that of fabulating a people-yet-to come.
Yet, there is a danger herein that necessitates our attention. Specifically, while the
notion of ?curriculum theorizing requires a certain level of deterritorialization, or rather,
the breaking up of contemporary categories of thought, such deterritorialization is only one
aspect of its import. While the task of contemporary curriculum theorizing might very well
fall into the suicidal relativism Daignault (1988) attributes to continual displacement of
thought, it might more adequately be thought in terms of its potential for fabulating a
curriculum foundations without foundations. While deterritorialization becomes a process
crucial to thinking this foundational anti-foundation, it is in reterritorialization that we
might create a temporary plateau upon which to experiment in new, singular and sustainable ways. Hence, the notion of what I have called the ?curriculum is not simply an
entreaty to throw foundations into a continual, disruptive movement. Rather, the ?curriculum suggests that the field of curriculum theory might be reterritorialized upon a plane
that both ‘fails’ to represent what is and wards against a form of reterritorialization that
would simply recuperate the Same. As May and Semetsky (2008) advocate, ‘‘learning
cannot take place by means of representation’’ (p. 153). Rather, what is required for
learning is the fabulation of a perplexion that continually requires the recasting of
knowledge and action into new forms of organization.
As discussed earlier, the swimming student does not learn to swim by representing the
strokes of her teacher (Bogue 2008). Rather, it is with the introduction of new and other
waves that the student learns what it means to swim. Specifically, the student learns that
swimming entails becoming sensitive to the virtual—to waves of different intensities,
water of different temperatures, relations of the body to that of other swimmers, aquatic
animals, etc. This scenario is unequal to the banal application of knowledge to some readymade problem. Rather, learning to swim requires that the swimmer reorganize, modify, and
in certain cases, experiment with their knowledge and actions in order to meet the challenges of a particular situation. This necessitates a certain dilation of the already known
upon a virtuality of differentiated scenarios with which the swimmer might enter into
relation. Via such a simple case, we might begin to see the express importance of the
virtual to the educational process. That is, if learning is situated at the level of the actual
alone, the swimmer becomes ill equipped to leave the relatively closed-system of the pool.
The formula ?curriculum theorizing hence becomes a way of thinking the curriculum in
relation to those unforeseen problematics that educate, or in Colebrook’s conceptualization
of educare, ‘‘lead out’’ from the already known. This necessitates the fabulation of perplexions (?) for which our current knowledge is unequal. In this way, we might be forced to
rethink the image of the school as a closed-system. More adequately, to think in terms of
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the ?curriculum suggests that the very imaging of the school as a closed system marks a
cutting-off from the virtual (?/curriculum). It is this cutting-off from the virtual that has
made many schools impossible places to live. It is in reference to this point that ?curriculum theory marks an approach to curricular composition that attempts to maximize
what Guattari calls the therapeutic coefficient (2006) of the institution. Put differently,
?curriculum theorizing is an attempt to more adequately understand the potentials for
immanent transformation inhering the ‘‘trembling organization’’ of the institution (Thanem
and Linstead 2006). This said, I cannot say specifically for whom ?curriculum theory
might become a tool of analysis, since the concept is oriented to the creation of a future
people for whom orthodox images of education will become radically inadequate. Perhaps
I can say that what I have dubbed ?curriculum theory might become a resource for thinking
where we have not yet gone far enough. The problem herein is not one of abstraction, but
rather, that the conceptualization of curriculum has not become abstract enough.
Predominantly, the virtual remains the unthought in contemporary curriculum theory.
This leads me to an important caveat, however. In the case of the swimming student,
while some experimentation may be required or desired, too much experimentation in
certain circumstances might prove fatal. Hence, the desire for experimentation being
lauded in contemporary curriculum theorizing must be linked to the question of dosage. It
is this question of dose that has yet to emerge in curriculum theory’s consideration of how
much experimentation is adequate to the desedimentation of habit. As we have seen, too
little experimentation can be as deadly as too much, one leading to morbidity while the
other leading to extremes of schizophrenic deterritorializaton. On this point, it should be
reiterated that the form of experimentalism advocated by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is
one that must be entered into carefully. Indeed, if the task of ?curriculum theorizing
becomes oriented to the creation of spaces for a people yet to come, one must be careful to
avoid those microfascisms that would render the curriculum’s becoming-other into yet
another tyranny. Such tyranny might be figured through the reterritorialization of the
school in the image of the nation, an a priori public, or the celebration of the individual
student-consumer. It is herein that the ?curriculum’s emphasis on a people yet to come
challenges contemporary theorists to think of schooling as tethered to the question of how
subjectivity is produced, and further, how the production of subjectivity might be thought
in its most undogmatic formation (Guattari 2006). This is not simply to become responsible
for what students learn, but further, for the very processes involved in the production of
educated subjectivities. For ?curriculum theorists, this means thinking a subjectivity born
of processes and relations that do not fulminate in an image of transcendent knowledge, the
resemblance of what might be with what is, or an a priori moralism that would elide the
terms of judgment for a subject’s becoming. This would continue to fetter thinking to
difference by degree only.
Today, it becomes imperative to begin thinking a ?curriculum project as one that
releases the curriculum from its prior images of thought, operating by ‘‘difference from the
determination[s] of habit, memory, routine, and the practices of recognition or identification within which we are caught’’ (Rajchman 2000, p. 86). In this vein, what I call the
?curriculum becomes a practical matter, something that one must make or do (Rajchman
2000). This introduces a practical problem for the field of curriculum theorizing. Specifically, how does one create the curriculum as a qualitative multiplicity? Or rather, how
does one make the curriculum strange to itself? In an age dominated by the often implicit
function of representational thought, this project becomes crucial not simply for contemporary curriculum theorists, but for a people who might differ from that which everyone
already knows. Articulating the stakes differently, ?curriculum theory asks how we might
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go about thinking a life when our contemporary representational resources are inadequate
for creation of a people different from the people in general. As a corollary, how might we
begin to think the ?curriculum in a way that does not reterritorialize in an image of the
curriculum in general. The question for curriculum theory is hence not ‘‘What possibilities
can be realized?’’ but rather, ‘‘What (unthought) potentials for thought and action populate
the actual?’’. Such a task is not simply novel, it is one in which radical difference might be
most joyously affirmed, preparing an opening for the untimely interceders who will cast
our arrows of thought in unforeseen directions and toward problematic that we cannot yet
fathom. As Mackay (2007) brilliantly puts it, ‘‘[t]he idea of the whole does come first, but
its expression is assured only through a painstaking process of experimental construction’’
(p. 10). Put differently ?curriculum theory might best demonstrate the virtual by altering
the very composition of curricular thought and hence, actualizing unthought forms of
expression immanent to what is (the actual). Yet, Mackay makes the terms of such
experimentation clear. For ?curriculum theory to become more than an anomaly, it must
become capable of commencing its experimental practice for the creation of new terrain
from which a future people might emerge.
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Pinar, W. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Rajchman, J. (2000). The Deleuze connections. Cambridge, MASS: The MIT Press.
Taylor, F. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York, NY: Harper.
Thanem, T., & Linstead, S. (2006). The trembling orginisation: Order, change, and the philosophy of the
virtual. In M. Fuglsang & B. M. Sorensen (Eds.), Deleuze and the social (pp. 39–57). Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Tyler, R. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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J. CURRICULUM STUDIES,
2009, VOL. 41, NO. 3, 301–319
Curriculum study, curriculum history, and curriculum
theory: the reason of reason
THOMAS S. POPKEWITZ
This paper explores the intersection of curriculum studies/curriculum history/curriculum
theory through the study of systems of reason that order reflection and action. Words about
‘learning’, ‘empowerment’, ‘problem-solving’, ‘self-realization’, ‘community’, and so on, are
not merely there in order that educators should ‘grasp’ some reality to act upon. The words
are made intelligible and ‘reasonable’ within historically-formed rules and standards that
order, classify, and divide what is ‘seen’ and acted on in schooling. These rules and standards of reason are effects of power and the political of schooling. The first section explores
this notion of the political and reason, considering curriculum as a double gesture. One
gesture is the hope of schooling. The gesture of hope embodies fears of dangers, and dangerous populations. The latter, dangerous children, are placed in in-between spaces—the immigrant, the poor, the disadvantaged who are to be included, yet defined as different and
abjected. The phrase ‘all children can learn’ illustrates the double gesture. The ‘all’ assumes
a unity of the whole that differentiates and divides the cosmopolitanism of the child (e.g. the
life-long learner) from the child ‘left behind’ who is different and can ‘never be of the
average’. Finally, it explores how the notion of research as finding ‘useful’ or ‘practical’
knowledge for changing the school inscribes this double gesture and, ironically and paradoxically, assumes a consensus that establishes a hierarchy that divides the researcher from those
to be shepherded. The exploration of the system of reason in curriculum studies makes
visible the limits of the present, and, through this critical engagement, makes possible other
futures.
Journal
10.1080/00220270902777021
TCUS_A_377872.sgm
0022-0272
Original
Taylor
02009
00
tspopkew@wisc.edu
ThomasPopkewitz
000002009
and
&
ofArticle
Francis
Curriculum
(print)/1366-5839
Francis
Studies(online)
Keywords: education sciences; politics of schooling; school reform; social
exclusion
Tom Popkewitz’s most important success as a scholar, and his contribution to
the curriculum field, lies in his ability to use postmodern and poststructural
theories as lenses for exploring curriculum issues, particularly those having to
do with questions of reform and educational research. What is particularly
noteworthy in this regard is the originally he has exhibited in developing
explanatory categories rooted in these postmodern and poststructural theories
Thomas S. Popkewitz is a professor and former Chair of the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 225 North Mills St., Madison, WI,
53705, USA; e-mail: tspopkew@wisc.edu. His studies focus on the systems of reason governing pedagogical reforms, research, and teacher education. His current book, Cosmopolitanism
and the Age of Reform: Science, Education and Making Society by Making the Child (New York:
Routledge, 2008) explores contemporary pedagogical reforms and sciences as practices that
produce exclusion and abjection in their impulses to include.
Barry M. Franklin is a professor of education and adjunct professor of history in the
School of Teacher Education and Leadership, Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and
Human Services, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA.
This paper is drawn from Thomas Popkewitz’s address when he received the American
Education Research Association Division B Lifetime Achievement Award (2008). The
introduction to Professor Popkewitz’s work is taken from Professor Barry Franklin’s letter
nominating Popkewitz for this award.
Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online ©2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/00220270902777021
302
T.S. POPKEWITZ
that advance understanding of a diverse array of educational issues. His notion
of social epistemology, which he spelled out most fully in his A Political Sociology of Educational Reform: Power/Knowledge in Teaching, Teacher Education, and
Research (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), offer a good example of
this approach. Another example involves his use of religious metaphors, particularly ‘soul’ and ‘salvation’, to examine issues of school reform in his Struggling
for the Soul: The Politics of Education and the Construction of the Teacher (New
York: Teachers College Press, 1998). His new book, Cosmopolitanism and the
Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the
Child (New York: Routledge, 2008), continues this line of work.
The area of Popkewitz’s work that I know best is his research in curriculum
history. His edited volume, The Formation of School Subjects: The Struggle for
Creating an American Institution (London: Falmer, 1987) played a major role
in the evolution of curriculum history as a discipline in North America by
focusing attention on the role that specific school subjects have played in
the evolution of curriculum thought and practice. While there have been studies of individual school subjects, Popkewitz brought a number of them
together in one volume, included within them areas such as the history of
special education that had up to that point been ignored, and situated those
subjects in a political and social lens that pointed to their overall role in the
curriculum.
One of Popkewitz’s important contributions to research in curriculum
history is to introduce postmodern concepts as interpretive lenses for looking
at issues in this arena. In his co-edited volume, Cultural History and Education:
Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (New York: RoutledgeFalmer,
2001), in which I had the privilege to participate, he brought together a
number of essays written from a postmodern perspective, and in the process
defined a new specialty within the broad area of educational history, the
cultural history of education. His new volume, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of
School Reform, also uses postmodern categories to consider the long-standing
regulative role of the curriculum as a carrier of Enlightenment ideas into the
modern period.
Another of Popkewitz’s important contributions to curriculum scholarship
has been his effort to explore the work of Michel Foucault and consider its
implications for understanding the curriculum. The volume that he co-edited
with Marie Brennan, Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in
Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), is, in my opinion, the
best collection of essays that demonstrate the applicability of Foucaultian ideas
to curriculum issues.
Tom Popkewitz is a well-known and honoured international scholar. He
has lectured and conducted research throughout the world. His receipt of
honorary doctorates from universities in Belgium, Finland, Portugal,
and Sweden and his election to membership in the Russian Academy of
Education is a testament to the high regard his scholarship is held throughout
the world.
Barry M. Franklin
The following discussion maps an intellectual project that focuses on curriculum as the study of systems of reason.1 This notion of ‘reason’ goes against
the grain. Reason is generally considered a property of the working of the
mind (psychology), or as a universal logic determining the truthfulness of
CURRICULUM STUDY, CURRICULUM HISTORY, AND CURRICULUM THEORY
303
statements. Yet there is nothing natural about, for example, ‘seeing’ the
child through conceptions of childhood, stages of growth, and development,
or to order school subjects such as literacy, science, and art as processes of
problem-solving—or as communities of learners.
To focus on systems of reason is to consider the rules and standards that
order the practices of curriculum and teaching. These rules and standards
are historically produced, and function as cultural theses about how the
child is, and should live. To talk about the child as, for example, a ‘problemsolver’ or as ‘disadvantaged’ invokes not merely categories to help children
become better and more successful. These categories embody particular
principles about what is seen, thought about, and acted on in schooling. The
‘political’ of schooling lies here: in the shaping and fashioning of what is
(im)possible. The ‘reason’ of schooling embodies a style of comparative
thought that differentiates, distinguishes, and divides. If I take the phrase ‘all
children can learn’, it embodies inequality in the impulse for equality. The
phrase generates a cultural thesis about who are the ‘all children’ that simultaneously differentiates and generates comparative cultural theses about
who is not that child. The study of ‘reason’ as the historical event of curriculum studies draws schooling into a conversation with Foucault’s (1991)
‘governmentality’ and Rancière’s (2004) ‘partitioning of sensibilities’.
I outline here five themes for thinking about the intersection of curriculum studies, curriculum history, and curriculum theory. First, I explore
‘reason’ as the ‘political’ of schooling.2 Second, I discuss the notion of
cosmopolitanism as an analytic ‘tool’ to consider the politics of curriculum.
Curriculum embodies, I argue, cultural theses that differentiate the child
who embodies the cosmopolitan hope of the future from the child feared as
threatening that future. The phrase ‘all children can learn’ is an exemplar
that simultaneously inscribes a cosmopolitan cultural thesis of the life-long
learner with that of the child ‘left behind’ who is different and abjected, or
cast out. Third, and ironically, I consider the ‘reason’ of curriculum reforms
and educational research as double gestures: the reform impulses for
equity embodies and produces inequities and exclusions. Fourth, I examine
historically the notion of research as finding ‘useful knowledge’, focusing
on the politics of the ‘designing people’ that circulates in US progressive
and contemporary urban reforms. Again I raise the issues of hope and fear
in theories of schooling and its sciences. Finally, I attend to a curriculum
studies that crosses geographical spaces to think about its different
commonsenses.
The critical engagement with schooling is paradoxically a theory about
agency embodying a cautious optimism about change, albeit located in
different spaces from that of contemporary policy and curriculum research.
I argue, borrowing from Foucault (1991: 75), that the object of research is:
[the] matter of shaking this false self-evidence, of demonstrating its precariousness, of making visible not its arbitrariness, but its complex interconnection with a multiplicity of historical processes, many of them of recent
date.
The historicizing of what seems self-evident is a practice of resistance and
counter-praxis, to borrow from Lather (2007). Making visible the authority
304
T.S. POPKEWITZ
of existing systems of reason is a strategy to open to the future the possibilities of alternatives other than those already present.
The political #1: Curriculum studies and systems of reason
The idea of reason as historical and as an object of study is easily grasped if
we look at the notions of reason in Ancient Greece. Reason was tied to a
cyclical history, with no notion of cause or development. The past was the
most truthful for giving guidance to the present as its wisdom came from the
Gods. Looking to the ‘future’ was to engage in hubris as people sought
something that only the Gods could give. The mediaeval church placed
‘reason’ in finding God. History was universal and, as God owned time,
outside the province of humans. People who sought to control development
were engaging in heresy. Chinese reason, in contrast, embodied narratives
and images of things in motion and of relations in which people had no privileged position. There are no conceptions of the metaphysics or representation so dear to Western philosophy. Jullien (2006) pursues these differences
between Western and Chinese ‘reason’ by asking why is the nude figure not
possible in Chinese painting as the latter has none of the essentializing qualities given to human life found in Western painting?3
The historicizing of different principles of ‘reason’ helps to temper the
mesmerizing and romantic qualities of educational words about ‘learning’,
‘empowerment’, ‘problem-solving’, ‘self-realization’, ‘community’, and so
on. These words are not merely there for educators to ‘grasp’ some reality to
act on and, to take a common phrase, ‘to get desired outcomes’. The words
appear within historically formed rules and standards that shape and fashion
reflection and action.
Take the notion of problem-solving: problem-solving embodies salvation themes about the future; the child’s problem-solving is to enable
successful living in the future ‘learning’ or ‘information’ society as the
cosmopolitan citizen, with self-realization and self-fulfillment. The salvation
themes function in the curriculum as cultural theses about how one should
live as a particular kind of ‘modern’ person.4 The kinds of problem-solving
person being offered brings together, assembles, and connects different principles about who the child is and should be. These principles entail, for
example, notions of agency in which the individual calculates, orders, and
directs actions, conceptions of time that bring actions into a flow of development and growth that enables planning for the future, and the taming of
change so that the uncertainties of life can be problem-solved, that is put into
a regulated process. To develop curricula and undertake research on problem-solving is to theorize, regularize and rationalize processes to change
people. The insertion of theories of problem-solving into the curriculum is
an inscription device to order and classify conduct. The cultural theses of the
problem-solver are not only about what a child is. They are also practices of
governing what a child should become.
The notion of the political emerges in the instantiation of the cultural
theses of curriculum and research. The rules and standards of the ‘reason’ of
schooling partition what is sensible to hope for, reflect on, and do. The
CURRICULUM STUDY, CURRICULUM HISTORY, AND CURRICULUM THEORY
305
partitioning of the sensible through the distinctions and differentiations of
pedagogy are also practices of dividing and excluding. What counts as reason
and ‘reasonable people’ who problem-solve, to continue with the early
example, differentiate the qualities and characteristics of the problem-solver
from that which falls outside of its borders of normalcy: the children who are
‘at-risk’, ‘disadvantaged’, have ‘low self-esteem’ or ‘attention deficit disorders’, who are inscribed as dangerous to ‘the reason’ and its envisioned
futures of ‘reasonable people’.
The comparative style of thought within schooling is not intentional or
bad faith, but is inscribed in the very rules and standards of reason that order
schooling and much of modern life, at least from the European enlightenments to its present mutations (Popkewitz 2008). The comparative mode of
‘thought’ has been important in the formation of modern sciences and medicine by enabling the ‘seeing’ of things as parts related to each other, in forming the whole through which pathologies could be identified. When applied
to social affairs and people, however, the style of thought made possible the
comparisons that differentiated ‘civilizations’ through inserting hierarchies
about the qualities of how people lived and ‘reasoned’ about life itself
(‘advanced’, ‘less advanced’, ‘savages’), the inventions of modern eugenics,
and the social and educational science that planned people through identifying what is different.
The political #2: Inclusion/abjection/exclusion in
curriculum studies
In a European project on educational governance and social inclusion,
Sverker Lindblad and I (Lindblad and Popkewitz 1999, Popkewitz and
Lindblad 2000) explored how social inclusion and exclusion are embedded
in each other—as parts of the same phenomenon—rather than being dichotomies, or binaries of logic. Issues of equity are premised, we argued, on the
assumption that the right mixture of policies and programmes can eliminate
exclusions and, at least theoretically, produce an inclusionary society. Our
argument was that the very maps that target populations for rescue are also
boundaries that differentiate, divide, and cast out particular kinds of humans
into unlivable spaces.
Thus, while it seems counter-intuitive, the logic of inclusion/abjection/
exclusion is embodied in the phrase ‘all children can learn’. The recognition
of ‘all’ children assumes a unity and consensus about the whole from which
difference is established. Furthermore, if I take contemporary US and European reforms that call for an education that produces ‘the life-long learner’,
a cultural thesis is generated about life itself: life is, to paraphrase its
language, one of continuous learning and flexibility through constructing
meaning, problem-solving, and making choices to innovate while participating in ‘communities’. The only thing not a choice is the life of making
choices! ‘Standards’ reform movements, benchmarks, achievement ‘gaps’,
and professional teacher education reforms deploy the qualities and characteristics of the life-long learner as the unspoken thesis of the child occupying
the space of ‘all children’.
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T.S. POPKEWITZ
The lifelong learner as a cultural thesis embodies the transmogrification
of particular principles of the northern European Enlightenments’ cosmopolitanism: a radical cultural thesis about life organized through human
agency, guided by ‘reason’ and science, respectful of diversity, with hospitality
and compassion for ‘Others’. The cosmopolitanism was to create a unity
through ascribing universal principles of reason and science that would bring
a progressive and an inclusive humanity. The contemporary discourses about
the life-long learner embody these generalized hopes of the future and
progress guided by universal principles of reason and rationality. The historical particularity of the cosmopolitanism is, ironically, made to seem as
universal and ahistorical. Isn’t the very notion of life-long learner about an
individual whose universal qualities of life seem to transcend history and
social location as ‘all’ children and adults will be free and empowered if only
enabled to continuously make choices?
The universality of the cultural thesis of the life-long learners simultaneously inscribes its opposite, the child who does not ‘fit’ into its space and
is thus abjected into other unlivable spaces. When I read policy and research
around contemporary US curriculum reforms, for example, the phrase ‘all
children can learn’ inscribes comparative spaces: The life-long learner whose
cosmopolitanism enables agency, problem-solving, and participation; alongside the pronouncements of the hope of the cosmopolitan child are fears
about the child who threatens that future. The fears do not seem at first
about the dangers and dangerous populations. The fears appear as the hope
of rescue and saving the ‘child left behind’ from the ‘achievement gap’. The
hope that arises from fear is also about the dangers of the child left behind,
who is different from ‘all children’. The dangerous populations are particular ‘human kinds’ or particular categorizations of people, drawing on Hacking (1986), recognized and made different from the unspoken norms of
others interned in the spaces of the narrative of ‘all children’—the ‘urban’ or
‘disadvantaged’ child, for example, who is not cosmopolitan and in need of
rescue and redemption.
The recognition of particular populations for inclusion, it is important to
recognize, are responses to commitments about correcting wrongs; yet the
very desire to include is inscribed in systems of thought that create continuums of value that differentiate, divide, and abject. This is evident in studying
curriculum and teacher education reforms and research centred on the problem of equity. The salvation theme about ‘all children can learn’ is one about
providing for a ‘just society’, that ironically entails narratives and images
almost entirely focused on the kind of the child who does not belong in the
spaces of ‘all children’. Policy and research about standards of curriculum,
for example, direct attention to the qualities and characteristics of ‘the child
left behind’; psychological distinctions about the child who lacks selfesteem, does not participate in the construction of knowledge, has ‘low’
expectations, lacks motivation, is not confident and/or is passive, and has
different learning styles from the unspoken ‘others’. The psychological
classifications are discursively joined with sociological categories of, for
example, dysfunctional families, juvenile delinquency, single-parent families, teenage pregnancy, and poverty. The psychological and sociological
categories form as cultural theses about dangerous modes of life.
CURRICULUM STUDY, CURRICULUM HISTORY, AND CURRICULUM THEORY
307
Who is this abjected child? What is the cultural thesis about its mode of
living? If I use an examination of the different research programmes that
describe ‘scientific evidence’ for successful reforms reported on the US
Department of Education’s ‘What Works Clearinghouse’ 5 website, the
cultural thesis of the child ‘left behind’ and the ‘urban child’ merge as the
child recognized as to be saved so as to be included, yet as different and thus
never possible to be ‘of the average’. In an ethnographic study of Teach for
America (Popkewitz 1998), an alternative teacher-education programme for
urban and rural schools, the distinctions and differentiations that classified
the urban child had little to do with geography. Children who live in the
high-rise apartments and the renovated brownstones of US cities were not
‘urban’, but ‘urbane’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. Children living in suburbs and
rural areas join with the children living in ‘the inner city’ who have ‘low
expectations’, ‘low self-esteem’, ‘family dysfunctions’, and ‘poverty’. The
urban child occupied a double position in the pedagogical reforms: there was
recognition that programmes needed to be created to rescue and save that
urban child—and the establishment of difference that made it never possible
for the child to be ‘of the average’.
Working with Kowalcyzk and Popkewitz (2006) on Italian intercultural
education6 helps me consider the inscription of difference and its erasures
through the notion of abjection, redrawn from feminist psychoanalytic theories into a cultural theory to direct attention to the complex relation about
inclusion, exclusion, and its in-between spaces. Abjection directs attention
to the ‘child left behind’ as occupying multiple cultural spaces: the child
recognized as in need of special programmes of remediation and to be
‘included’; at the same time the child’s recognition produces difference, and
the child’s qualities of living are cast out into unlivable spaces. The categories of ‘immigrant’ and the ‘urban’ child are examples of the in-between
spaces—not ready to inhabit the spaces of ‘all children’, recognized for inclusion but excluded by the instantiation of difference.
As I have noted, the inscription of comparative qualities is not to suggest
intention or bad faith on the reformers’ part. Nor is it merely an aberration
that is to be fixed by better, more effective theories, better empirical studies,
or more useful knowledge. What I am focusing on are the complex patterns
that circulate in the ordering of what is said, done, and acted on as practices
of rectification, what I have called ‘systems of reason’. If I take the work of
Tröhler (2005) about, for example, pragmatism, it requires understanding
the complex ways that historical structuring of problems, defining the
objects ‘seen’ and talked about that circulate through individual biographies. Tröhler (2005) explores, for example, the epistemological constructions through which Jane Addams and John Dewey’s (US progressive
reformers) notions of social democracy are produced. He argues that the
formulations of democracy and education embody reformed Protestant (i.e.
Calvinist) ideas of unity and social harmony, the individual and society as
an organism, and the missionary purpose of education. The epistemological
ordering of the self and society was brought into the University of Chicago’s
sociology, philosophy, and social psychology to define ways of thinking
about urban reforms and the immigrant, and the African American family
and child.
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T.S. POPKEWITZ
The Political #3: Inequity as equality in school subjects
and pedagogical knowledge reforms
The construction of difference and abjection entails the inscription of inequity as equality.7 If I use the exemplar of reform in teacher education in the
US, it is asserted that teachers need more subject-matter content, better
pedagogical skills, and collaboration. The calls for action are seen as sensible and common sense: if you know more content, of course you should
have a better understanding in teaching; and if you have more pedagogical
skills in implementing that knowledge, even better. Finally, subject-matter
knowledge and pedagogical knowledge are linked to equity through collaborative programmes of university teacher education, local communities, and
schools to make subject matter accessible for ‘all children’ from diverse
populations.
This common sense may, however, not be as sensible as it seems. The
acquiring of more subject knowledge and pedagogical skills is not merely
teachers learning more about how to teach. How one ‘knows’ a school
subject entails participatory structures through which principles are generated about what constitutes disciplinary knowledge, how that knowledge is
made knowable and acted on, and the distinctions through which difference
and diversity are recognized. Learning more ‘content’ knowledge, then, is
never merely that. It is learning principles generated about who the child is
and should be.
The principles generated in school subjects can be thought of as
alchemic processes (see Popkewitz 2004). Analogous to the 16 th- and 17thcentury alchemists and occult practitioners who sought to move ‘things’
from one space (base metals) into another space (pure gold), 8 school
subjects require transportation and translation ‘tools’ to move academic
machinery (labs, university science buildings, historical society archives,
etc.) and cultural practices into the school curriculum (e.g. theories of
child development, selecting and organizing ‘content’ by age levels, and
didactic practices to effect teaching, among others). The translation ‘tools’
of pedagogy are not copies of original disciplinary practices replicated in
schools. Pedagogy entails systems of recognition and enactment that are acts of
creation.
What constitutes school subjects is directed by psychological eyes, such
as constructivist or communication theories. Psychologies of instruction are
not, to draw on Bakhtin (1981: 294):
a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the
speaker’s intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of
others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and
accents, is a difficult and complicated process.
The distinctions and categories of pedagogy are ordering principles to
constitute problems, and enunciate particular solutions and plans for action.
The notion of alchemy, then, directs attention to the principles of knowing and how to know produced with pedagogical translation tools. ‘Learning’ more subject and pedagogical knowledge is an act of creation structured
through the pedagogical psychologies that order what is ‘seen’ and acted on.
CURRICULUM STUDY, CURRICULUM HISTORY, AND CURRICULUM THEORY
309
It is not merely taking more disciplinary courses or applying some preordained disciplinary knowledge into children’s learning activities.
What are the limits, then, of the alchemy? I will list three that have
emerged through studies of curriculum:
(1) The pedagogical psychologies are not historically concerned with or
intended to translate disciplinary practices about, for example, how
scientific judgements are made, conclusions drawn, rectification
proposed, and the fields of existence made manageable and predictable. They were developed as pedagogies concerned with ordering
conduct.
(2) The translation models of curriculum take for granted the comparativeness of the reason of curriculum and the unity of the whole that
installs and erases difference. To return to an earlier discussion, the
foci on ‘all children’, and the distinctions of those outside of its
spaces, are assumed as natural in the making of the object of school
reform.9
(3) The alchemy of school subject inscribes a hierarchy between the
iconic authority of the expertise of scientific knowledge and the activities of children’s ‘learning’.
This hierarchy, drawing on Rancière (2004), entails a fear of democracy that
installs inequality as equality. For example, the science curriculum and
scientific literacy entails internationally an increased attention to student
participation that has a double-sided quality (McEneaney 2003a). The
increased participation is to signal greater activity and involvement of the
child, and thus to make the school more democratic. However, that participation entails the increased and wider scientific authority over claims about
the management of the natural world. Children’s participation and problemsolving are applied to learning the majesty of the procedures, styles of
argument, and symbolic systems that assert the truthfulness of the expertise
of science. Furthermore, when scientific literacy is considered, it has more
to do with cultural theses about modes of living linked to collective belonging
and the nation than with the knowledge that constitutes the literate in science
(McEneaney 2003b).
The inequality appears in the knowledge of science as constituting ‘the
real’ through which children are to organize their lives. Science is to shepherd the child’s possibilities in the world. Pedagogical knowledge is to enable
the learning and the shepherding. Paradoxically, the watch-word required of
the psychologies about ‘constructing’ knowledge, if we draw on mathematics
education, is inscribed in curriculum to serve as modeling practices.
Children are to use mathematics to model, predict, and test what is given as
reality.
The flexibility of children finding answers or constructing knowledge is
bounded by the fear (at least in the epistemological ordering of school
subjects) of democracy. There is a divide between what science ‘tells’, and
its truth-tellers, and the problem-solving of the child in the school. School
subjects act as shepherds in ordering the boundaries by which experiences
are acted upon, diversity is lived, and the self is located as an actor in the
world. The language of teaching is about participation and empowerment;
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T.S. POPKEWITZ
the epistemology is of the child’s learning about the majesty of science to
‘tell’ what...
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