Harry Potter’s World (part 2)

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

6.  Harry Potter’s World (part 2)

Power, wonder, and magic in an acquisitive culture

Power and violence are not always what they seem to be.  (p. 100)

An acquisitive culture is one that acquires; to acquire means to get things.  21st century America is an acquisitive culture, and children learn this acquisition through parents and school, primarily.  Appelbaum finds this troubling.  The corporatization of education is troubling on many levels.  Briefly, it means that kids are trained to purchase certain objects from certain corporate entities without questioning whether those objects are useful, efficient, “good,” or necessary.  Our kids are schooled to acquire.

I would suggest that Appelbaum’s findings from Harry Potter readers (“It is the morality to which they turn in applying ‘lessons learned’ to their own interaction with ‘real people’ in their lives,” p. 102) explain alot about why these books are so popular.  If children are not being taught at home or in classrooms how to distinguish between objects that are necessary and useful, but they do get to think critically in Harry Potter’s world, then these books serve an excellent purpose in readers’ lives.  When readers can distinguish between “fake violence” and gratuitous violence in computer games and movies, a useful purpose is served.  Appelbaum comments, “I suppose the question comes down to whether or not children can tell the difference between the games and the ‘real world'” (p. 102).  However, Appelbaum and others (Provenzo, 1991) suggest that violent images have a different meaning.

That is, the images that children play with tell us more about the fears and fantasies of the adults who provide the images, and the resources for making meaning that are available in our culture, than about what children are becoming or doing to themselves or our culture.  (p. 102)

Appelbaum puts to rest an adult fear that children will become interested in dark arts and magic in general by pointing to other popular television series and video games (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Final Fantasy, and Black and White).

Magic is strongly associated with experiences of wonder.  (p. 103)

Appelbaum points to John Dewey in that “many forms of youth technoculture reach into the realm of wonder in ways that establish these cultural commodities as educative experiences … that … promote growth” (p. 103).  But is it growth in the school-culture sense?  Is school so distinct from the world of wonder?  Should the kinds of interactions among readers that results in mass culture and peer interactions be kept separate from schooling?  “Should we try to create educational encounters that directly mirror the linking of magic, technology and wonder? … Or should educators establish science/technology/wonder as a critical examination of the popular?”  (p. 103).  Do children “gravitate to the wonder where it is” (p. 103)?  And if it is not in the school curriculum, will children find it “elsewhere, outside of school” (p. 103)?

Things dominate the life of children.  (p. 104)

Appelbaum explains, “for young people in the early twenty-first century, commodification [is] the final arbiter of identity and acquisition … intimately entwined with self” (p. 104).  Who has the coolest toy?  Who is the coolest kid?  Things, stuff, decide these questions.  In Harry Potter’s world such things as quidditch brooms, magical pets, and magical treats can determine whether a child is “in” or “out” of the status quo.  In this way the Harry Potter stories mimic the 21st century world (of developed countries).

Harry Potter’s world

Appelbaum emphasizes that his purpose is not to analyze the stories themselves but to make the point that the attraction to Harry Potter has to do with “magic as a commodified technology, just as video games, television cyborgs, and fantasy role-playing games in ‘our world’ treat technology as magic” (p. 105).  In addition, “we must understand morality and technology as mutually constitutive” (p. 106).

What the Potter books do is destabilize the tension between acquisitive coolness and nerdiness, because they take magic and turn it into the techniques that can be learned.  (p. 107)

However, in the information economy of the Potter books “everyone pays a premium rate for narrow expertise and short-lived skills” (p. 107).

Technology, in this sense, is nothing more than a trick, spell, or code:  it lets you do things other people do not yet know about.  (p. 107)

This plays into the ways that technology is an externalization of potential (Macdonald, 1995).

Curriculum and the technologies of morality

Throughout, my main curriculum argument is that educators need to learn from children what it is they are experiencing … children are the translators while adults are keepers of tradition.  (p. 109)

Appelbaum suggests that curriculum should not try to compete with technoculture, but to “develop organized experiences that respond to life in and with technoculture” (p. 110).

It would be more proactive for educators to work toward a biculturalism, and finally for a diversity that embraces both traditions and the multiplicities … [which] includes adult cultures and technocultures, mass and consumer cultures and youth subcultures, and cross-over memberships and participations in multiple cultures all at once.  (p. 110)

Magic provides new beginnings, unlimited and challenging, useful in the lives of the characters outside of school.

Technologies of self:  morality and magic

Appelbaum turns to Foucault’s concepts:  “A particularly powerful element of the Harry Potter books is the unification of Harry’s self-knowledge with his self-care” (p. 111).  As he grows in wizardry, he learns more and more about his family and himself.  He learns his limits, acquires new skills, encounters new challenges, and redefines himself along the way.  In this process Harry not only cares for himself, he values himself, but he cares for others.  His valuing of himself brings out his compassion for his friends.  There is a morality play here, and magic is at the center of it.  The technology of magic brings out the very best in Harry and stretches him to hero status.  Yet, he maintains a humility in the face of great danger and great expectation.

Macdonald, J.  (1995).  Theory as a prayerful act.  New York, NY:  Peter Lang.

Provenzo, E.  (1991).  Video kids.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Harry Potter’s world (part 1)

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

6.  Harry Potter’s World (part 1)

The second to the last Harry Potter movie came out about a month ago.  This series is still so popular that the final book had to be split into two movie parts.  Of course, this is probably simply a way to make more money from Harry Potter fans, but having re-read the final volume while viewing the new trailer repeatedly, ending this story is complicated; perhaps worthy of two movies!  The characters are almost “grown” now, and Voldemort has gathered his minions again.  The Ministry of Magic has fallen.  Darkness reigns.

In some ways a return to darkness describes 2010, the year of the dead queer (Lugg, 2010), the year of the tea party (Rayfield, 2010)—back to the 1950’s (or the 1700’s depending on your interpretation; Bell, 1989).  I situate myself as a radical social reconstructionist (Stone, 2003, p. 108), and all I see around me are essentialist ideas being promoted in education.  Where could Harry Potter possibly fit into this essentialist school culture?  “What is it about our culture that embraces the Harry Potter books and has turned Harry Potter into such a phenomenon?” (Appelbaum, 2008, p. 95).  Appelbaum debunks three “presumptions”:

Can we say that consumer culture has trumped all other possible manifestations of liberal democracy? … Do we want to say that children are passive, naive recipients of greedy corporate cultural products? … Can we understand the cultural meanings of Harry Potter stories (or any other popular cultural artifact) as a distance observer?  (p. 95-96)

How do readers utilize these stories to make sense of their lives?  Where does school fit into this process?

In both the Harry Potter books and in children’s lives, school functions to accentuate what constitutes technologies, what constitutes magic and wonder, and, finally, through consumer culture, what it means to become a human being.  In this way, I find the books and the culture that embraces them buttress each others’ postmodern efforts to fulfill an outdated enlightenment fantasy of utopia through technology.

The technoculture of consumer culture in and out of school

For children growing up in and with technoculture, concepts of cyborg imagery, biological monsters, fantasy characters, power, knowledge, magic, and prosthetic extensions of self are not categorical. (p. 97)

Children accept new ideas as part of their world more readily than adults.  Magic may be conceived as science, and vice versa.  Science may be perceived as technological, and vice versa.  Technology may be considered magic, and vice versa.  Knowledge and power are bestowed by each but with fewer boundaries or conflicts in the child’s world.

Technocentric utopianism for many children is really more aptly described as melancholic acceptance of responsibility.  (p. 97)

For Harry magic becomes a technology in the war between good and evil, amplifying human powers as a kind of cultural capital.  Similarly, science and technology function in the school curriculum as “techniques of progress” seldom questioned or interrogated (p. 99).

Educator’s responses

Teachers tend to feign disinterest in childhood experiences of cyberculture.  (p. 99)

School knowledge is assumed to be part of “high-status culture” while popular culture and mass media are considered “low-status,” which teachers want to keep out of school.  “When teachers preserve the in-school versus outside-of-school boundaries, they cut themselves off from relationships with children directly connected with the most pressing issues of self, identity, morality, power, and knowledge” (p. 99).

I suggest that our new technoculture requires teaching practices that facilitate an interrogation of this culture, and the facilitation of self-understanding necessary to unravel the intricacies of self-identity in a post-modern world.  The “new curriculum” should consider alternative visions of technology that move it away from the metaphor of prosthesis. … Curriculum, then, must speak fully to issues of identity and questions of what it means to be human in the face of re-engineering and cultural change.  (p. 100)

In the Harry Potter stories the challenges that matter occur outside the classroom.  Everything Harry and his friends learn help them survive greater and greater difficulties in the outside world.  What if this idea were practiced in school buildings today?  What kinds of paradigm shifts would have to happen for that to be the case?  Would schooling continue to be merely a reproduction of the dominant ideology?  Or could schooling take upon itself an innovative role?  How would that innovation affect the curriculum decisions made inside the classroom?

Bell, D.  (1989).  And we are not saved: The elusive quest for racial justice.  Cambridge, MA:  Basic Books.

Lugg, C.  (2010, September 30).  Bullying, harrassing, and beating queers in hope of self-extermination.  Thinking queerly (blog).  Retrieved from http://cath47.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/bullying-harassing-and-beating-queers-in-hopes-of-self-extermination/

Rayfield, J.  (2010, December 20).  Tea Party founder:  Let’s get rid of the ‘socialist’ Methodist church.  TPMMuckraker (online).  Retrieved from http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/tea_party_nation_founder_lets_get_rid_of_the_socia.php

Stone, F. A.  (2003).  Theodore Brameld’s educational reconstruction:  An intellectual biography.  San Francisco, CA:  Caddo Gap Press.

Feed

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

5.  Feed

In this chapter teacher education and curriculum theory overlap; using cultural studies, consumer culture and popular culture, to interrogate the purpose and value of technology.  In M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) younger citizens are implanted with a chip that constantly broadcasts; older citizens carry around a backpack feed that performs the same function(s) as the implanted chip.  The chip is integrated into the physiology of the body, and the corporation that controls the chip can decide whether to repair a chip or not based upon the consumer choices of the individual.  The primary character in this story decides that she will make consumer decisions outside of the norm, her chip malfunctions, and the corporation decides not to fix her chip.  The malfunction causes her death.

The analogy here is clear.  We are bombarded daily with consumer choices; students come into the classroom with electronic devices that are broadcasting constantly and which are considered distractions from the business of “education” and “learning”—Appelbaum questions these various points of view, including using Foucault’s technologies of self and care for self.

School(TM) is trademarked, of course.  In this world of constant, non-stop interconnectivity and marketplace ideology, school is a series of training exercises in using the feed, as there seems to be no need to “learn” anything.”  (p. 83)

How is our world the world of Feed?  First, teacher education is one of certification “in which all concerned imagine that we are achieving precise expectations in the refinement of technical skills” (p. 84).  Secondly, “the world of the feed raised for curriculum and teacher education has to do with technologies of vision” (p. 86).

…the feed is an amalgam of all technologies of vision, and thus stands in for the holistic totality of all technologies of vision.  As a key commodity and cultural resource, a technology of vision is the result of enculturation. (p. 86)

Appelbaum proposes, however, that “we want to declare important concepts of curriculum theory to be key discursive tools of teacher education” (p. 86):  currere, auto-ethnography, queering, and youth culture.  “Commodification and production of meaning through cultural resources are processes of education, much as counter-transference and splitting are processes of individual development” (p. 86).

Trapped in the feed

Core experiential encounters within an elementary pedagogy course might include on-campus discussions of assigned readings, workshops on alternative assessment, theater games focusing on student-selected “moments” of curriculum encounters, and semi-weekly “field experiences” (p. 87).  These activities give potential teachers “the sorts of curricular encounters we expect to be crucial elements of the ‘teaching/learning’ they will be engaged in as teachers some day” (p. 87). But do students buy into these encounters?  If students come to the course not having had these encounters previously, is this enough to influence what these students will do in their own classrooms?

Appelbaum claims that educational reform discussions imply a “deficit model” where teacher practices must shift before teacher ideology (p. 88).  For instance, an “assumption is that they can adopt the skills and practices of inquiry facilitation and participation, skills and conceptual understanding that they ‘lack,’ through the practice of such experiences” (p. 88).

What would it mean for prospective teachers to taste or consume “inquiry” or “alternative assessment,” as ideas, as objects of relation?  What would the educational encounter “be”?  What might it mean for people to breathe in and physically metabolize the fragrance, stench, aromas, and odors of inquiry or assessment, literally, to be “in-spired”?  (p. 89)

Complicity

Deleuze

nomadic epistemology

three “nomadic” opportunities:  youth leadership, voice and participation in democratic institutions

“Neither ‘selling out’ nor ‘buying in,’ such a political turn…” (p. 91)

difference, disparity and desire

“but are given outcomes to strive for” (p. 92)

“each field placement could be examined as a case study in action research” (p. 92)

Anderson, M. T.  (2002).  Feed.  Cambridge, MA:  Candlewick Press.

Vision stinks (part 2)

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

4.  Vision stinks (part 2)

Epistemology of smell and taste

Reliance upon vision and hearing (perception and listening) overpowers the senses of smell and taste.  Smelling out a solution, “I can just taste the answer on the tip of my tongue.”  The answer eludes but is close by; it is close enough to smell it, and the essence activates the tongue.  Computer programming and mathematics can be this confounding; I go to sleep almost having solved a coding problem; dream of the myriad of coding choices; and wake with the sweet smell of victory; the coding problem solved.  I’m not sure this is what Appelbaum means in this section, but I do relate to the necessity of using all of one’s senses to solve problems.

This ‘insensitivity’ is another dimension of the splitting crisis.  Mathematical knowledge includes a meta-knowledge of how one ‘does’ the mathematics; developing skills in writing requires a meta-knowledge of one’s personal, idiosyncratic ways of writing; working as a scientist is part of learning science beyond mere facts and models.  One’s relationship to the content knowledge of any discipline, and one’s understanding of how this influences the conclusions that are drawn/reached become important considerations in and out of school.  (p. 63)

So what would using all of the senses look like?  David Jardine (2003) proposes four characteristics:  generativity, intergenerationality, recursion, and relationship.  Without this integration “we are left with a student who can see but who sees nothing, who can hear but hears little, and who can feel but feels hardly anything at all.  Does this student taste or smell?  Not in school” (p. 63).

Still looking:  for a way out of the ideology

Appelbaum is searching for an “integrated perception epistemology that does not privilege some constellation of the senses over another” (p. 64).  Listening to one another, with the goal of understanding, “re-engineers us, mutates us into new and different beings” (p. 64).  Popular culture offers new insights into the cultural practices of school and schooling.

School content knowledge can embrace the larger realm of cultural processes that include this technical knowledge, but also the richer, more complex other knowledges that we start to feel, smell, and taste once we move away from vision as the primary model.  (p. 65)

Moving into the alternative universe of mediating processes, the school community becomes a cultural resource.

The Mhondoro of curriculum

In Nancy Farmer’s fantasy, the Mhondoro are the ancestors of old Zimbabwe, and in Appelbaum’s story, the spirit of postmodern newness—”a postmodern curriculum would encourage diversity, multiple perspectives, and exploration” (p. 66).  The postmodern curriculum would be “rich, recursive, relational, and rigorous” (Doll, 1993 cited by Appelbaum, p. 66) and would occur simultaneously with an “increase in being that arises when the intellectual and cultural inheritances of the curriculum are furthered through reading, study, analysis, and conversation” (Gadamer, 1989 cited by Appelbaum, p. 68).  Teachers are present to facilitate experience of the postmodern curriculum.

All a teacher would do is decide what perceptions the child is more like to have than others.  In this case, we see that a child sent off on their own, while a dangerous and frightening experience, also leads to just as many perceptions.  This clearly implies that perception in general is not the result of the teacher, and instead is a fact of life.  (p. 74)

Furthermore, Appelbaum stresses “it is the actual perceptions of the learner that form the substance of their experiences” (p. 74), the teacher may not even be necessary.

Whither technology?

In Farmer’s fantasy there are three episodes that more clearly define how technology is related to society and to intergenerationality:

1.  Dead Man’s Vlei is a wasteland where scarce non-biodegradable plastics are mined.

2.  Resthaven is a utopian community where traditionals live away from the rest of society.

3.  A post-colonial European enclave where the characters are held captive, but not given the benefit of Western medicine.

Doll, W.  (1993).  A post-modern perspective on curriculum.  New York:  Teachers College Press.

Gadamer, H. G.  (1989).  Truth and method.  New York:  Continuum.

Jardine, D., Friesen, S., & Clifford, P.  (2003).  Back to the basics of teaching and learning:  Thinking the learning together. Mahwah, NJ:  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Vision stinks (part 1)

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

4.  Vision stinks (part 1)

Having read ahead, I understand better what Appelbaum is trying to say in this chapter—education today is about perception—”you see”?  I say this all of the time to my students.  “Do you see that now?” as if the concept is seeable.  Appelbaum makes the case that perception is everything.  But I also get the feeling he is saying that perception isn’t exactly what we’re after.  I can’t quite figure out what he is proposing as the alternative.

One alternative I can think of is “doing”–can my students “do” math?  Well, some of them can; and some of them can’t.  However, the perception through homework, quizzing, and testing also produces mixed results.  If I only had my grade sheets to look at, that is, if I had not taught my students, if I had not gotten to know them, if I did not know what their future aspirations are, I might not be able to tell from homework, quizzes, and exams whether they could “do” math or not.  Many of my students are poor test-takers.  Because of this fact, I minimize testing and maximize “doing” in the classroom.  That is, we go to the board alot.  I get my students up out of their chairs and to the whiteboard in groups.  Then I “do” as much “nothing” as I can tolerate in myself (see Greenberg on the art of doing nothing at http://www.spinninglobe.net/hannanothing.htm).  When my students get stuck, I help them.  What I find is that as the semester proceeds, my students get better and better at instructing themselves once I’ve given them a start.

Using Nancy Farmer’s (1994) adventure characters in The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, Appelbaum explains

For teachers … we are told we have powers that others do not yet possess:  we can see what they do not yet see, we can hear what they do not yet hear, we can feel things that they cannot yet feel.  In some cases, we can smell and taste what our students cannot yet smell or taste….as long as educational practice is restrained by these epistemological assumptions, we will only be able to understand our job in one of two ways:  as training folks in the art of using special technologies of vision; or as metaphorically strapping prostheses onto our students so that they can see.  (p. 53-54)

I found this very curious, as well as compellingly accurate.  I had not thought of my phrases, “Now do you see?” or “Is that clear?,” as limiting my students’ learning or my own teaching pedagogy.  But as I reflect on this chapter, I am also reminded of the small lecture I give at the beginning of the semester about dendrites.  I point out that watching me work problems is growing “watching dendrites” while going to the board and doing math is growing the “learning dendrites.”  What we practice, we learn.  The brain literally grows the kind of neurons based upon what we are doing at the time.  Watching grows watching dendrites; doing math problems grows doing-math-problem dendrites in the brain.

Technology of vision

There is a saying—”there is nothing new under the sun”—that comes to mind as I read Appelbaum’s experiences with professional development.  He is asked to train math teachers how to use the Internet, how to utilize CD-ROMs in the classroom, how to do assessment with technology.  Yet teachers become very busy finding pre-packaged lesson plans that someone else has written.  Appelbaum proposes that professional development, “seeing better,” should be about questioning the curriculum, questioning the best way to enhance the curriculum with technology, questioning whether technology is needed to enhance the curriculum, questioning which parts of the curriculum can best be enhanced with technology, rather than doing the same things teachers have always done (gather materials from others) using a different source (technology).

Instead of reflecting on possibilities for educational experiences with their students, teachers are trained to search with their eyes for something somebody else has done. Practice sends teachers on a perpetual wild goose chase for the intangible answer to an unknown question:  the “answer,” it turns out, is just beyond our reach, in the realm of the almost grasped. (p. 56)

Appelbaum proposes that the issue in professional development is “culture in education:  the importance of the relationships among the pupil’s own judgment of an educational situation she is part of, how this affects her learning behavior, and how this relationship might inform the designing of the learning situation” (p. 57), whereas Appelbaum finds himself teaching technology skills.  “My entry into the institution of professional development proscribes my position with a cult of expertise that in turn thwarts the very notion of professional development….Can I construct alternative metaphors for the tasks of my profession and avoid the problematic job of mutation terrorist or prosthetic surgeon?” (p. 57).

Epistemology of vision

Perception, proposes Appelbaum, is not everything.  Evaluative listening, interpretive listening, and hermeneutic listening are three modes from the work of Brent Davis (1996, 1997) with pedagogical applications.  Evaluative listening is the kind of listening in which most teachers engage, whereas interpretive and hermeneutic listening are more common in collaborative group work.

I find myself placed repeatedly in such a position, in which participants bring expectations of evaluative listening to a workshop or graduate course that I anticipate as hopefully hermeneutic, at least interpretive, but never evaluative.  Here lies one example of how I am positioned by practice in a role that is doomed to failure if my aim is to engage in a project of unfolding possibilities.  (p. 60)

I believe I may have just recently experienced this at a major educational conference.  I wanted other educators to think with me about the use of a particular contemporary movie in teacher education programs; instead I got alot of questioning of why I used a particular theoretical framework to interpret the movie.  I wanted ideas for utilizing contemporary culture in asking the question:  How will I respond if this student comes into my classroom?  How can I provide this student with the best learning environment?  Instead I found myself defending writing decisions.

Davis, B.  (1996).  Teaching mathematics: Towards a sound alternative.  New York:  Garland Press.

Davis, B.  (1997).  Listening for differences:  An evolving conception of mathematics teaching.  Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 28(3), 355-382.

Farmer, N.  (1994).  The ear, the eye, and the arm.  New York:  Puffin Books.

Weirding

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

3.  Weirding

Weirding is defined as the ways in which teachers twist or reconceive content in order to get students to pay attention.  In the vast array of things (ideas, friends, concepts, announcements, books, other content) to which a student could pay attention on any given school day, weirding is a way of getting and keeping student attention upon what the teacher wants to convey.

Weirding is both marginal and mainstream; yet if we dwell on those ways in which weirding is neither mainstream nor marginal, we can enter a new form of curriculum theorizing.  (p. 36)

Using the Lemony Snicket series as an example of weird storytelling, Appelbaum proposes the idea of weirding curriculum.

‘Weirding curriculum’ becomes a way to engage with everyday educational practice and action research on a theoretical level that in turn potentially affects those everyday practices and the meaning of words used to describe such practices….In weirding the experiencing of curriculum, one changes the practices of curriculum theorizing.  (p. 38)

Appelbaum asked specific questions in order to elucidate more clearly what it means to weird curriculum theorizing.

What is the difference between weirding knowledge and weirding curriculum?

Weirding knowledge is the language of the “wow” factor in science education and of maintaining engagement.  One down side to this method is that the student may be paying more attention to the technique of keeping his/her attention, rather than to the actual content.

Curriculum is different from curricular content.  Again, as we have understood for quite some time now, at least since the reconceptualists (Pinar 1978), curriculum has to do with currere, with the experience of the encounter, of the processes of teaching, learning, assessment, and ethical events in an educational environment.  Weirding curriculum entails an adjustment in the theorizing about the unfolding and enfolding experiences of those who are together called to relation in the educational processes.  (p. 40)

The weirding curriculum theorizer might construct new concepts.  The weirding curriculum developer might design curriculum materials.  “But both of these … tasks would be part of a larger project … that co-opts the discourses and practices … of common curriculum development, and uses it to deform such curriculum materials into new forms” (p. 40).

Why is weirding knowledge harmful while weirding curriculum is not?

Compulsory schooling as practiced in this country is about creating good citizens.  Being a good citizen as defined by the White patriarchal majority means that students are told what and how to think, rather than how to question what they are learning, and how to value skepticism.  Critical thinking is the enemy of the dominant hegemony.  Therefore, “weirding asks us to find a conception of curriculum that makes it possible for the child to use the educational environment” (p. 40). Placing curriculum theorizing at the heart of the daily work of teaching and learning decenters the everyday life of schools and focuses instead on pedagogy and curriculum.  Weirding allows us to walk the thin democratic line between domestication and emancipation.

How relevant is the possibly related literature on the uncanny, on queering curriculum, and on practices of “othering”?

“The uncanny, the queer, and critical multiculturalism share some useful strategies with the weird” (p. 43).  Mary Doll (1998) offers “four techniques of queering:  the way of shock, the way of the joke, the way of the myth, and the way of the perverse” (p. 45).  Othering practices “share the goal of ‘untelling’ the narratives of normativity with queering strategies” (p. 45).  Critical multiculturists advocate the fluidity of identity, possibilities of becoming.

A central feature of such curriculum work is a persistent effort on the part of teachers and students to always look at how people are represented as ‘types’ or categories, and to understand how these types and categories imply effects on their own identities.  This helps people think about how they perform their identities for others in varying contexts.  (p. 45)

In fact, how is this project different from these other, related projects, and, if it is different, can it be taken in a way that avoids critiques that it is colonizing these already existing intellectual terrains?

Weirding actually shares much in common with queering and the confrontation with the uncanny.  It shares a great deal with critical multiculturalism as well.  But its commonalities are most evident when queer theorists, students of the uncanny, and critical multiculturists are performing the practices of weirding.  (p. 47)

Doll, M. A.  (1998).  Queering the gaze.  In W. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. __-__).  Mahway, NJ:  Erlbaum.