Routledge Cultural Studies in Knowledge, Curriculum, and Education – serie

This text offers a comprehensive analysis of the concept of the modern creative and imaginative child in Western education. Drawing on archived sources and historical works, it reframes childhood creativity as a social, cultural, and scientific construction, asking how our thinking and acting toward the creative child have been produced historically. The text dissects the discursive construction of creativity as a natural and developmental attribute of the child. It argues that the idea of the White creative child, constructed through comparative reasoning, shaped by primitivism, and illustrated through botanical metaphors as close to nature and the senses, is a notion embedded with colonialities, forming part of a Western civilizing project and entrenched power-knowledge relations. A compelling and original account of childhood creativity, this text will appeal to researchers in arts education, early childhood education, curriculum studies, and the history of education.

With a focus on the role of discourse and language in education, this book examines China’s educational reform from an original perspective that avoids mapping on Westernized educational sensibilities to a Chinese environment. Zhao untangles the tradition-modernity division expressed in China’s educational language about the body and teacher-student difference. Exploring the historical and cultural implications of the ways China’s schooling is talked about and acted upon, Zhao argues that Chinese notion "wind" (feng) is a defining aspect of Chinese teaching and learning. Incorporating Western and Chinese literature, this book explores the language of education, curriculum, and knowledge on a cross-cultural landscape and as cultural inscriptions.

This volume inquires into student teachers’ “stuck moments”—moments of felt crisis—as they occur within the context of a university-based social justice teacher education (SJTE) program. The book complicates the notion that these stuck moments are primarily effects of a gap between theory and practice. Instead, Colmenares and Jarvie argue for a more robust conceptualization, drawing on affect theory, posthumanism, and Deleuzian scholarship. By considering what stuck moments do, and do to, student teachers, the book reimagines SJTE in ways that are both responsive to stuckness and disruptive of discourses of learning that dominate the field. Through a critique of the affective workings of learning, the authors consider how these discourses can prove counterproductive for the work of teaching for social justice. This insightful and stimulating volume will be of use to scholars, researchers, and students with interests in curriculum studies, affective approaches to education and SJTE.

This volume inquires into student teachers’ “stuck moments”—moments of felt crisis—as they occur within the context of a university-based social justice teacher education (SJTE) program. The book complicates the notion that these stuck moments are primarily effects of a gap between theory and practice. Instead, Colmenares and Jarvie argue for a more robust conceptualization, drawing on affect theory, posthumanism, and Deleuzian scholarship. By considering what stuck moments do, and do to, student teachers, the book reimagines SJTE in ways that are both responsive to stuckness and disruptive of discourses of learning that dominate the field. Through a critique of the affective workings of learning, the authors consider how these discourses can prove counterproductive for the work of teaching for social justice. This insightful and stimulating volume will be of use to scholars, researchers, and students with interests in curriculum studies, affective approaches to education and SJTE.

While many accept that math is a universal, culturally indifferent subject in school, this book demonstrates that this is anything but true. Building off of a historically conscious understanding of school reform, Diaz makes the case that the language of mathematics, and the symbols through which it is communicated, is not merely about the alleged cultural indifference of mathematical thinking; rather, mathematical teaching relates to historical, cultural, political, and social understandings of equality that order who the child is and should be. Focusing on elementary math for all education reforms in America since the mid-twentieth century, Diaz offers an alternative way of thinking about the subject that recognizes the historical making of contemporary notions of inequality and difference.

Challenging conventional ways of thinking about school reforms and teacher education, this book analyses how the "knowledge systems" which organize how teachers’ observe, supervise, and evaluate children produces norms that have the effect of excluding children who are poor and of color. Building on Struggling for the Soul (1998), his original study of the day-to-day life of new teachers in the Teach for America program, Popkewitz delves deeper into how the teaching and learning practices of urban and rural schools. Applying an ethnographic focus to how difference and divisions are produced to exclude despite efforts to include, he explores the complexities of educational change and raises important questions about the politics of schooling, knowledge and power. This book provides an original way of thinking about ethnography through a critical post-foundational approach. Conceptually focusing the ethnography of "the system of reason" that organizes teacher practices, the analysis offers a critical lens to understand the contemporary politics of school reform, the limits of teacher research, and suggests why current teacher and teacher education reforms may conserve the very conditions required for change. Beyond its relevance to U.S. schools, the conceptual and methodological resources of the book have relevance internationally, especially given the global important of education responding to cultural and social diversity through teacher and teacher education reforms.

German education plays a huge role in the development of education sciences and modern universities internationally. It is influenced by the educational concept of Bildung, which defines Germany ‘s theoretical and curricular ventures. This concept is famously untranslatable into other languages and is often misinterpreted as education, instruction, training, upbringing and other terms which don’t encompass its cultural ambitions. Despite this hurdle, Bildung is now being recognized in current discussions of education issues such as standardization, teaching to the test, evidence-based policy and high stakes testing. This volume clears up the confusion and misunderstandings surrounding Bildung by examining the origins of the concept and how it has been applied throughout history. It paves the way for educators to fully understand and benefit from this model and all it has to offer.

With a focus on the role of discourse and language in education, this book examines China’s educational reform from an original perspective that avoids mapping on Westernized educational sensibilities to a Chinese environment. Zhao untangles the tradition-modernity division expressed in China’s educational language about the body and teacher-student difference. Exploring the historical and cultural implications of the ways China’s schooling is talked about and acted upon, Zhao argues that Chinese notion "wind" (feng) is a defining aspect of Chinese teaching and learning. Incorporating Western and Chinese literature, this book explores the language of education, curriculum, and knowledge on a cross-cultural landscape and as cultural inscriptions.

By repositioning democratic education not as something that can be achieved by following a certain, proven process, but as an inherently paradoxical enterprise in its dealings with the tension between schooling as the intentional production of citizens and the uncertainties of democracy, an alternative way of reading the curriculum emerges. This book aims not at arriving at the right combination of theory, policy and praxis that will provide the democratic utopia, but at historicizing the discourses that have shaped the ways in which we think and act in the field of education.

This text offers a comprehensive analysis of the concept of the modern creative and imaginative child in Western education. Drawing on archived sources and historical works, it reframes childhood creativity as a social, cultural, and scientific construction, asking how our thinking and acting toward the creative child have been produced historically. The text dissects the discursive construction of creativity as a natural and developmental attribute of the child. It argues that the idea of the White creative child, constructed through comparative reasoning, shaped by primitivism, and illustrated through botanical metaphors as close to nature and the senses, is a notion embedded with colonialities, forming part of a Western civilizing project and entrenched power-knowledge relations. A compelling and original account of childhood creativity, this text will appeal to researchers in arts education, early childhood education, curriculum studies, and the history of education.

German education plays a huge role in the development of education sciences and modern universities internationally. It is influenced by the educational concept of Bildung, which defines Germany ‘s theoretical and curricular ventures. This concept is famously untranslatable into other languages and is often misinterpreted as education, instruction, training, upbringing and other terms which don’t encompass its cultural ambitions. Despite this hurdle, Bildung is now being recognized in current discussions of education issues such as standardization, teaching to the test, evidence-based policy and high stakes testing. This volume clears up the confusion and misunderstandings surrounding Bildung by examining the origins of the concept and how it has been applied throughout history. It paves the way for educators to fully understand and benefit from this model and all it has to offer.

Challenging conventional ways of thinking about school reforms and teacher education, this book analyses how the "knowledge systems" which organize how teachers’ observe, supervise, and evaluate children produces norms that have the effect of excluding children who are poor and of color. Building on Struggling for the Soul (1998), his original study of the day-to-day life of new teachers in the Teach for America program, Popkewitz delves deeper into how the teaching and learning practices of urban and rural schools. Applying an ethnographic focus to how difference and divisions are produced to exclude despite efforts to include, he explores the complexities of educational change and raises important questions about the politics of schooling, knowledge and power. This book provides an original way of thinking about ethnography through a critical post-foundational approach. Conceptually focusing the ethnography of "the system of reason" that organizes teacher practices, the analysis offers a critical lens to understand the contemporary politics of school reform, the limits of teacher research, and suggests why current teacher and teacher education reforms may conserve the very conditions required for change. Beyond its relevance to U.S. schools, the conceptual and methodological resources of the book have relevance internationally, especially given the global important of education responding to cultural and social diversity through teacher and teacher education reforms.

By repositioning democratic education not as something that can be achieved by following a certain, proven process, but as an inherently paradoxical enterprise in its dealings with the tension between schooling as the intentional production of citizens and the uncertainties of democracy, an alternative way of reading the curriculum emerges. This book aims not at arriving at the right combination of theory, policy and praxis that will provide the democratic utopia, but at historicizing the discourses that have shaped the ways in which we think and act in the field of education.