Curriculum Theory and History 4002 - Spring 2023
The class where we ask...
What IS curriculum
WHERE is curriculum
WHO gets to make curriculum
(and always, who benefits?)

Using Herbert Kliebard to frame our understandings we wonder
• Is any of this still going on today?
• What am I teaching or experiencing (or have taught or experienced) that connects to these historical and theoretical frames
• What contexts am I in that continues to resonate with these models.
• Who has benefited, who continues to benefit, what voices are erased...

We then interrogated those models using:
Conflict or Neo-Marxist Theory
Critical Race Theory
Feminist Theories / Gender Studies
Queer theory
Disabilities Studies & and "cripping" the Curriculum

This is also the year the world welcomed ChatGPT - thus, we played around with constructing questions and annotating responses.
This was the question I fed ChatGPT:
• Using Kliebards humanist curriculum perspective how would neo-Marxism and critical race theory complicate that.

One week we addressed what it means to queer the curriculum and our pedagogies. We focused on theatre, movies, spaces in school and DISCO! (thank you to Kellyn who is an EdD dance student)

In the photos below, our CA, Nancy Tavárez, led a beautiful (and powerful) class helping us to think through Decolonization and Indigenous Epistemologies - every one of us LOVED this class

During the module: Queering the Curriculum, one student group chose to help us think this through using Disco. At the end of a thoughtful presentation we danced!

This past week we took a deep dive into The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. The students worked in groups and chose one of the Units housed on the Pulitzer Center website. They used their interrogative lenses and walked us through their chosen units. It was a really powerful example of how they are using these theoretical skills to look interrogatively at curriculum