Provoking Curriculum Studies

Strong Poetry and Arts of the Possible in Education

Nicholas Ng-a-Fook, Awad Ibrahim, Giuliano Reis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317574279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Provoking Curriculum Studies pushes forward a strong reading of the theoretical and methodological innovations taking place within curriculum studies research. Addressing an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies—conceptualizing scholars as poets and the potential of the poetic in education—it offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Drawing on poetic inquiry, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, life writing, and several types of arts-based research methodologies, this diverse collection spotlights the intellectual genealogies of curriculum scholars such as Ted Aoki, Geoffrey Milburn and Roger Simon, whose provocations, inquiries, and recursive questioning link the writing and re-writing of curriculum theory to acts of strong poetry. Readers are urged to imagine alternative ways in which professors, teachers, and university students might not only engage with but disrupt, blur, and complicate curriculum theory across interdisciplinary topographies in order to seek out blind impresses —those areas of knowledge that are left over, unaddressed by 'mainstream' curriculum scholarship, and that instigate difficult questions about death, trauma, prejudice, poverty, colonization, and more.

PART I Thinking Through the Poetic

Nicholas Ng-A-Fook

We had taken our places at the table

For some words after the break, following

On various comings and goings.

And when—twice—the professor said, “hope,”

The celestial fireworks following the verb

Had us rocketing skywards too. I had always suspected

The poet’s powerful leanings, but now I reckoned

How few exchanges we had actually come to know

Between pedagogy, providence, and rain.

(Robertson, 2012, p. 135)

Thinking through the poetic work of curriculum theorizing requires us to shift imagining our writing ideographically (writing thoughts and ideas) toward indwelling within it calligraphically. Or, what Ted Aoki (1996/2005c) refers to as writing (thinking) artistically. Here we might dwell for a moment with Aoki’s memories of his wife June at her desk writing and rewriting calligraphically (brush sculpting), “repeating the same word or words 10, 20, and even more times” (p. 415). During such tensioned repetition she was not, Aoki explains, as, “concerned with what was being written but, rather, enraptured in a world of sculpturing in space with her brush and ink as partners” (p. 415). Is writing as sculpturing in space, Aoki asks, calligraphy? Thinking through the poetic, we suggest, is a form of sculpturing curriculum theory in a world enraptured and “yearning for new meanings” (p. 423). It is what we are calling strong poetry and arts of the possible within education.

Strong poetry inspires us to compose our life stories related to the curriculum-as-planned,-implemented, and -live(d) in creative ways that often teach against the grain (Simon, 1992). Envisaging the poetics of sculpturing such spaces involves, as Simon (1992) suggests, “loosening and refusing the hold that taken-for-granted-realities and routines have over” our imaginations (p. 3). Strong poetry provokes “new ways of decentering ourselves, of breaking out of confinements of privatism and self-regards into a space where we can come face to face with others and call out, ‘Here we are’” in the face of global corporate preoccupations (Greene, 1995, p. 31). The curriculum-as-planned, as Aoki reminds us, remains the master signifier, the single tree dominating the corporatized and privatized landscape of live(d) experiences within and outside the contexts of educational research, curriculum policymaking, teaching, and learning. And therefore for many, the word “curriculum typically conjures forth a conventional landscape of school curricula dotted with school subjects” (Aoki, 1996/2005c, p. 417). “Why is it,” Aoki asks, “that we seem to be caught up in a singular meaning of the word curriculum” (p. 417)? Strong poets and their poetry provoke us to playfully disturb, disrupt, and dispute such intrusive, institutionally, instituted master signifiers. Their powerful poetic learnings often provide a language that paints our celestial comings and goings amidst the tensioned landscape of the planned and live(d) curriculum.

In “Spinning Inspirited Images in the Midst of Planned and Live(d) Curriculum,” Aoki puts forth the live(d) curriculum as a legitimate signifier. By live(d) curriculum, Aoki means “the situated image of the live(d) curricular experiences of students and teachers” (p. 418). Thinking through the poetic ideographically and calligraphically, Aoki plays between the brackets and split character of curriculum as live(d) experiences. Here “the word experience,” he tells us, “is a hybrid including notions of ‘past experiences’ (lived experiences) and ‘ongoing experiences’ (lived or living experiences)” (p. 418). He invites us to play between and among the rhizomatic conjunctions and disjunctions within this bracketed curricular landscape of the curriculum-as-planned and not—planned, curriculum-as-living and-lived. For strong poets then, the poetic involves negotiating this ambivalent and difficult space where it “is no longer possible to cross smoothly and quickly from ‘planned curriculum’ to ‘live(d) curriculum’” (p. 420). In response, the strong poets and strong poetry in this section seek to play with a “poetic language” that creates “curriculum” in ways that lives and labors amid this tensioned landscape. They make visible the invisible.

In this section, Carl Leggo, Cindy Clarke, Shaun Murphy, John Guiney Yallop, Carmen Shields, and Sean Wiebe are curriculum scholars, storytellers, and poets who take such pro/vocations seriously. They strive to understand what Aoki (1987/2005a) calls elsewhere “the secret places of the soul” (p. 363). The soulfulness of these poets’ works “consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable” (Rich, 2001, p. 150). Practicing arts based research at a deeper level, their poetry makes visible the invisible realities of “women and other marginalized subjects and … disempowered and colonized peoples generally” (p. 150). In turn, the poets and storytellers in this section invite readers to gather at the table and share in thinking through the poetics as the arts of the possible in education.

In Chapter 1, Carl Leggo reminds us that poetry can transform our pedagogic imaginations by creating possibilities for conversations about curriculum in the diverse communities that constitute our human living. In response to Ted Aoki’s (1993/2005b) call for “a playful singing in the midst of life” (p. 282), he writes poetry as a way to hear his voice and the voices of others, singing out with playful hearts and hopeful conviction. In this chapter, he shares ruminations, poems, stories, questions, and more poems that address experiences and themes of language, poetic living, desire, justice, hope, vocation, and curriculum composed comprehensively in connected circles of living and loving.

In Chapter 2, Cindy Clarke and Shaun Murphy make connections between the poetics of representation and narrative inquiry to explore the fluidity of identity. Drawing on the works of Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, they inquire into the ways in which poetic representation creates enriched opportunities for autobiographical positioning within a larger narrative inquiry into the life and learning that happens on the edges of community. Furthermore, by contrasting one poetic representation of a narrative beginning to an alternate perspective of a similar identity landscape, this chapter demonstrates how a poetic representation and the subsequent inquiry into the images and metaphors it pulls forward in relation to the edges of community shapes a personal and methodological justification for a multi-perspectival relational narrative inquiry.

In Chapter 3, John J. Guiney Yallop and Carmen Shields reflect on their relationship with each other as a location from which they can recognize some of the strong poets in their lives. Using the metaphor of the sojourner, as one who both journeys and rests from journey, through story and poetry they share these moments of recognition of strong poets, recognition made possible, and changed, from the vantage points of lived experience. While Shields shares her life stories, Guiney Yallop responds poetically. Their chapter is an example of what is possible when two people compose their life stories against the kinds of existential isolations that insulate us within the academy.

In Chapter 4, Sean Wiebe takes up the calls of strong poetry as a means for acknowledging the transgressive components of curriculum studies. He draws on the psychoanalytical theories of Lacan and poetics of Carl Leggo to provoke the Otherness that exists within socially constructed realities to liberate the very concept of “education” from overly substantiated conceptions of curriculum. For Lacan, he tells us, the uniqueness of a desire, compounded by the uniqueness of knowing one’s desire, will lead to a challenge with the status quo. For Leggo, how this is done is also a crucial question of curriculum. Leggo marks his curricular transgressions in poetry, confessing fear and professing love in ways that others might emulate. Throughout the chapter Wiebe employs the metaphor of mentorship, suggesting that as strong poets, both Lacan and Leggo have been his unconscious mentors.

Thinking through the poetic, it seems, is a call to write and re-write that which is mundane, the quotidian of our live(d) experiences as curriculum scholars, teachers, and human beings. Like Aoki (1996/2005c), the authors in this section remind us of the power of the lived when it is liberated, when it becomes legitimate. We should all heed Aoki’s direction: “I call o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Judith P. Robertson
• Introduction by Awad Ibrahim, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Giuliano Reis
• Part I Thinking Through the Poetic
• Part II Traumatizing Moments in Education: The Painfully Undesired
• Part III Narrating the Strong Poetry of the Unconscious
• Part IV Stories We Live By: Desiring Curricular Moments of Hope
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index