"We Need a Saviour": An Irreconciling Conversation about Curriculum

Abstract

Our conversation began in two places of happenstance that, like many conversations and many happenstances, slowly wove together.

The first was in our graduate class on interpretive discourses in curriculum. There, we had been exploring how the industrial model that breaks things down into meaningless and detached bits and pieces had been inherited by schooling in the early 20 th century. The interpretive traditions were being discussed as an interruption of this inheritance and as a way of recasting the ontology of the topics entrusted to teachers and students in schools. We explored how the interpretive traditions, in multifaceted ways, are founded on the interdependence and interrelatedness of ideas, images, concepts, selves, identities, institutions, schools, and so on. Nothing, in fact, arises as a bit or a piece detached from everything else and simply amassed, post hoc, with other bits and pieces, even though many schools and many classroom practices are organized around this ontological falsehood.