Curriculum in Abundance

David W. Jardine, Patricia Clifford, Sharon Friesen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781136791987
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this text Jardine, Clifford, and Friesen set forth their concept of curriculum as abundance and illustrate its pedagogical applications through specific examples of classroom practices, the work of specific children, and specific dilemmas, images, and curricular practices that arise in concrete classroom events. The detailed classroom examples a

Preamble 1: From Scarcity
to Impoverishment

Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Poverty [comes to] refer to those who have fallen behind an advertised idea of consumption in some important respect.

—Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1972, p. 4)

Once we begin to think and speak about our curriculum inheritance in terms of regimes of scarcity, schools do not simply provide restricted access to, say, the Pythagorean theorem, or to the other curriculum topics that are entrusted to teachers and students. Not only does the institution of school create a new type of poverty—underachieving children, those who don’t have the means for continued access to education, those who are, in the contemporary buzz-words of the day, “left behind.” It has the power to spellbind our ability to question many of the unspoken effects of schooling itself, effects that shape and limit the questions that can be legitimately asked and answered about the theory and practice of schooling. Many urgent and heartfelt educational concerns and questions often unwittingly leave in place what school has to offer and then work on how to ensure that no child is left behind in the taking up of such schooled offerings.

But something has already been left behind in such questioning. As Illich notes (1972, p. 4), the very institutional transformation of education under regimes of scarcity does not simply involve a “translation” of the rich, generous, and contentious inheritance of human thought that has been entrusted to schools. Schools not only require a translation of our curriculum inheritance into the sort of manageable and assessable objects that they are able to control, monitor, manage, dispense, and assess. Such a translation necessarily involves a “degradation” (p. 2).

What has surreptitiously occurred is that not only do regimes of scarcity create a new type of poverty—those “left behind” in education. Under such regimes, the curriculum topics entrusted to schools become impoverished. What we mean here is this. A regime of scarcity can only be maintained to the extent that that which is deemed scarce is the sort of thing whose availability can be efficiently and effectively “controlled, predicted and manipulated” (Habermas, 1973, p. 133). Only to the extent that the Pythagorean theorem, for example, becomes reduced and restricted to the efficient memorization of its formula and the monitorable application of this formula on tests—only to that extent does it form part of the work of schooling based on scarcity. As such, the potent, troublesome, and compelling insights that might be had if we follow up that playground conversation about tree shadows and their constancy and change over the seasons—all this might be deemed a wonderful thing to pursue, but it cannot properly and warrantably “count” within the boundaries of schooling.

Therefore—and here is the most terrifying turn—the Pythagorean theorem, for example, becomes understood to be nothing more than that which can “count.” The conversations and questions and philosophical speculations become frills, unaccountable, unassessable, unwarrantable “extras.” What has happened here is that, at its heart, the pernicious idea of scarcity has come to define what is basic and necessary and essential and relevant to understanding the various curriculum topics that schools have inherited. Scarcity comes to define “the basics” (see Jardine et al., 2003).

In this way, that which one might receive if one is not left behind in school has itself already become impoverished under the regime of scarcity, such that not being left behind means being caught up in an intellectually and spiritually weak version of the world, stripped of its ancestries and histories, of its rootedness, in Pythagoras’ case, in ancient Greek worlds of secret cults and secret knowledge, its tethers to the rope stretchers of ancient Egypt who would resurvey the lands after the yearly flooding of the Nile. Lost is the warrant of ancient conversations about what changes and what remains the same in the passing of seasons and still contested place of the seeming “absoluteness” and “uncontestability” of mathematics in this ancestry (and this even though we are still easily spellbound by, and often silently beholden to, anyone who can produce “statistics” or “data” or “evidence” that is mathematically based).

Lost, too, are the great and beautiful geometries that unfold from Pythagoras’ work, as we see in detail in the chapter that follows.

It is clear from these hints that when we try to imagine what curriculum in abundance might mean, it is not as if we might now have an abundance of that which was once scarce—with our current example, lots of opportunities and time to memorize the formula for the Pythagorean theorem, lots of “real world” examples upon which to practice its correct application, lots of access to computers programmed with self-correcting practice sheets geared to individual students’ learning needs in this particular area, lots of examinations to test students’ knowledge, lots of resources on how to help students get better marks in such matters, better ways to monitor the results of our teaching and testing, clearer guidelines on how to assess teachers’ competencies at producing successful student outcomes, rank-ordering schools according to their achievement results, and so on. One doesn’t begin to happen upon curriculum in abundance by simply monitoring and testing more and therefore, in this already impoverished sense, getting more “results.”

Something else happens when we begin to treat curriculum in abundance. We do not now have an abundance of what was once scarce. Rather, we have to take on an honorable and not especially venerated venture. We have to learn how to begin to undo the curricular degradation that scarcity has engendered in our understanding of the curriculum topics entrusted to schools.

And so we introduce Anh Linh, who came upon the inner geometries of the Pythagorean theorem, and the risks that she, her classmates, and her teachers undertook (“understanding is an adventure and, like any adventure, it always involves some risk” [Gadamer 1983, p. 141]). This was a large class of over 60 Grade 9 students in what is recognized, in Calgary, Alberta, as one of the most “troubled” schools in the district—most “left behind” the regimes of schooling, one might say. As a caveat, however, we have to add one more note of preamble. When Anh Linh and her fellow students were allowed to explore the abundant and generous territories that surround Pythagoras and his cult and the shapes that blossom from its secrecies, these students were able to “practice” this theorem in robust and mathematically vital ways. In fact, the overall statistical performance of this group of 60 Grade 9 students on provincially mandated mathematics examinations improved dramatically over previous year’s results—a startling fact to many, especially because local education officials, in the local newspaper, called this setting “one of those schools.”

This is one of the great effects of treating curriculum in abundance: From rich explorations of the abundance found in Pythagoras, it became more likely that the students would do well when asked to restrict themselves, on the exams, to the correct application of the Pythagorean theorem to various real-world examples. We contend that, had they started with such a restricted mandate, the ghost of Pythagoras would have never shown up. We contend, therefore, that suggesting that such rich explorations are a luxury or a frill and that we need to slavishly “teach to the [upcoming Provincial] test” for our students to be properly prepared, are, in fact, nothing more than signs of the spellbinding, paranoid, frightened character that regimes of scarcity produce and sustain—powerful, deadening, dispiriting, panic-inducing mythologies about “the real world” of schooling.

And so, an example from the real world of schooling.

Chapter 1

Anh Linh's Shapes

Sharon Friesen
Patricia Clifford
David W. Jardine

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

—Immanuel Kant (1964/1787, from the “Introduction” to his Critique of Pure Reason)

This passage was originally written as a way to begin a critique of those forms of philosophical idealism that speculatively shun the resistance and troubles and lessons of the world, lessons that might, in their resistance to the flights of reason, help shape and strengthen and measure our philosophizing. It was written by Immanuel Kant as a critique of the perceived constructive freedom of human thinking (see chap. 8). Our constructs are not enough until they feel the resistance of “application.”

This invocation of an Earthly measure is not meant as an embarrassment to philosophizing per se, but as a reminder that the sense of reasonableness that our lives require—we think especially of the lives of teachers and students in school classrooms—require of reason that it maintain a sense of proportion, of properness, of having to work itself out here, and here, in the midst of the frail conditions of human existence.

We are especially taken with this image of the dove and its flight in two nearly contradictory ways. First of all, we have encountered countless situations in which constructivist, postmodernist, or “chaos theory” theorizing in education becomes so speculative that, as practicing teachers faced with the exigencies of everyday life, we become unable to recognize our own troubles in their philosophical flights. We have argued, with varying success, for the ways in which our thinking must find its thoughtfulness through the worldly work, in the fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Preamble 1: From Scarcity to Impoverishment
• Preamble 2: Signs of Abundance
• Preamble 3: On Play and Abundance
• Preamble 4: Do They or Don't They?
• Preamble 5: On Ontology and Epistemology
• Preamble 6: Getting Over the Great Humiliation
• Preamble 7: Monsters in Abundance
• Preamble 8: "Catch Only What You've Thrown Yourself ..."
• Preamble 9: Stepping Away From the Marriage of Knowledge and Production
• Preamble 10: "Within Each Dust Mote ..."
• Preamble 11: "Given Abundance ..."
• Preamble 12: Settling and Unsettling
• Preamble 13: Kai Enthautha Einai Theous
• Preamble 14: Abundant Webs
• Preamble 15: The Abundance of the Future
• Preamble 16: Covering the Curriculum
• Preamble 17: The Face of "The Real World"
• Preamble 18: Murmuring over Texts
• Preamble 19: On Emptiness and Abundance
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index