Contemplating Curriculum takes up world-renowned curricular scholar, teacher, and mentor Ted T. Aoki’s invitation to contemplate where curriculum scholars situate themselves in their work. At the same time it probes into the historical and present conditions that make it both possible and impossible to attend to this work in classrooms and communities in mindful, embodied, and aesthetic ways, both locally and globally. The book offers a strong representative sampling of contemporary thinking in the field with a focus on contemplative approaches to curriculum. In their theorizing, contributors call on literary and other mixed-genre formats, such as creative nonfiction, poetry, and essay. They acknowledge the importance of intergenerational dialogue and recognize the importance of time and place in curricular, pedagogical, and personal sense-making. These written and visual texts invite contemplation on notions of curriculum, both planned and lived, in an Aokian spirit of intertextuality.

Contemplating Curriculum takes up world-renowned curricular scholar, teacher, and mentor Ted T. Aoki’s invitation to contemplate where curriculum scholars situate themselves in their work. At the same time it probes into the historical and present conditions that make it both possible and impossible to attend to this work in classrooms and communities in mindful, embodied, and aesthetic ways, both locally and globally. The book offers a strong representative sampling of contemporary thinking in the field with a focus on contemplative approaches to curriculum. In their theorizing, contributors call on literary and other mixed-genre formats, such as creative nonfiction, poetry, and essay. They acknowledge the importance of intergenerational dialogue and recognize the importance of time and place in curricular, pedagogical, and personal sense-making. These written and visual texts invite contemplation on notions of curriculum, both planned and lived, in an Aokian spirit of intertextuality.

This book examines the historical context of African Americans' educational experiences, and it provides information that helps to assess the dominant discourse on education, which emphasises White middle-class cultural values and standardisation of students' outcomes. Curriculum violence is defined as the deliberate manipulation of academic programming in a manner that ignores or compromises the intellectual and psychological well being of learners. Related to this are the issues of assessment and the current focus on high-stakes standardised testing in schools, where most teachers are forced to teach for the test.

Reconceptualizing Curriculum Development provides accessible, clear guidance on curriculum problem solving and educational leadership through the practice of a synoptic curriculum study. This practice integrates three influential interpretations of curriculum—curriculum as deliberative artistry, curriculum as complicated conversation, and curriculum as currere—with John Dewey’s lifetime work on reflective inquiry. At its heart, the book advances a way of studying as a way of living with reference to the question: How might I live as a democratic educator? The study guidance is organized as an open-ended scaffolding of three embedded reflective inquiries informed by four deliberative conversations. Study recommendations are provided by a carefully selected team. The field-tested study-based approach is illustrated through a multi-layered, multi-voiced narrative collage of four experienced teachers’ personal journeys of understanding in a collegial study context. Applying William Pinar’s argument that a "conceptual montage" enabling teachers to lead complicated conversations should be the focus for curriculum development in the field’s current ‘post-reconceptualist’ moment, the book moves forward the educational aim of facilitating a holistic subject/self/social understanding through the practice of a balanced hermeneutics of suspicion and trust. It closes with a discussion of cross-cultural collaboration and advocacy, reflecting the interest of curriculum scholars in a wide range of countries in this study-based, lead-learning approach to curriculum development.

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.

The question at the heart of the book is what might an education with self-care and care-for-others look like? Juxtaposing self-understanding through the method of currere and the historical character of hakbeolism (a concept indigenous to Korea referring to a kind of social status people achieve based on a shared academic background), this book articulates how subjective reconstruction of self in conjunction with historical study can be transformative, and how this can be extended to social change. Articulating how having one’s own standard can be a way of making one’s life a work of art, the author looks at how Korean schooling exercises coercive care, disconfirmation, and the "whip of love" for the children’s own good. Emphasis is given to the internalized status of these practices in both students and teachers and to teachers’ and parents’ culpability not only in exercising but also in reproducing these practices through themselves. Going beyond describing and analysing the educational problem of academic (intellectual) achievement-oriented education based on aggressive competition, this book suggests ways to address these issues through autobiography (using the method of currere to reconstruct one’s subjectivity) and an ethic of care.

This book collects recent and creative theorizing emerging in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory, through an emphasis on provoking encounters. Drawn from a return to foundational texts, the emphasis on an ‘encountering’ curriculum highlights the often overlooked, pre-conceptual aspects of the educational experience; these aspects include the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning. The book highlights that immediate components of one’s encounters with education—across formal and informal settings—comprise a large part of the teaching and learning processes. Chapters offer both close readings of specific work from the curriculum theory archive, as well as engagements with cutting-edge conceptual issues across disciplinary lines, with contributions from leading and emerging scholars across the field of curriculum studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory.