James G. Henderson

Transformative Curriculum Leadership

Chapter 1 Introducing Transformative Curriculum Leadership SECTION I Two Fundamental Challenges Chapter 2 Reconceptualizing Subject Matter Standards Chapter 3 Cultivating Reflective Inquiry SECTION II Four Interrelated Decision-Making Processes Chapter 4 Designing and Planning for 3S Education Chapter 5 Teaching for 3S Understanding Chapter 6 Evaluating 3S Education Chapter 7 Organizing for 3S Education SECTION III Sustaining the Curriculum Wisdom Problem Solving Chapter 8 Building Local Learning Communities Chapter 9 Engaging the Broader Public Sphere

Deepening Democratic Curriculum Work

The longstanding argument between advocates of curriculum development and critical curriculum studies is examined from the perspective of democratic inquiry artistry. From this alternative vantage point, both advocacies possess certain strengths and limitations. A map of democratic inquiry artistry has been created to capitalize on the strengths of each position and to deepen democratic curriculum work. This map—an eclectic adaptation of seven ancient forms of inquiry—is designed to help educators negotiate the “terrain” of democratic wisdom, which is understood as a demanding professional challenge incorporating disciplined inquiry, democratic hermeneutics and human artistry. The daily enactment of democratic inquiry artistry can assist educational researchers by informing ethical-political decisions and by advancing the integration of the science and art of education.

Reconceptualizing Professional Development for Curriculum Leadership: Inspired by John Dewey and informed by Alain Badiou

Almost a hundred years ago, John Dewey clarified the relationship between democracy and education. However, the enactment of a ‘deeply democratic’ educational practice has proven elusive throughout the ensuing century, overridden by managerial approaches to schooling young people and to the standardized, technical preparation and professional development of teachers and educational leaders. A powerful counter‐narrative to this ‘standardized management paradigm’ exists in the field of curriculum studies, but is largely ignored by mainstream approaches to the professional development of educators. This paper argues for a reconceptualized, differentiated, and ‘disciplined’ approach to the professional development of educators in democratic societies that builds capacity for curriculum leadership. In support of this proposal, we amplify the tenets of Deweys pragmatic social and educational philosophy, which have long been at the heart of democratic educational thought, with Badious more contemporary thinking about the important relationships between truth as inspirational awakening, subjectification as existential commitment, and ethical fidelity as ‘for all’ action.

Positioned Reflective Practice: A Curriculum Discussion

The normative concept of positioned re flective practice is introduced by first pro viding a brief interpretive analysis of the relationship between language and meaning. Three discursive achieve ments associated with positioned reflec tive practice are identified and exemplified, and the application of this inquiry approach to preservice teacher education is discussed.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative: A Lead Professional Invitation?

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Teachers and Administrators as Lead Professionals for Democratic Ethics: From Course Design to Collaborative Journeys of Becoming

The heightened level of attention being afforded to “teacher leadership” is palpable in the United States. At a national level, proprietary organizations are receiving funds from large philanthropic organizations (e.g., the Gates and the Wallace Foundations) to promote the development of teacher leaders. State departments of education are accommodating the federal push finding various ways to incentivize the efforts of teachers to lead from the classroom. Our institutions of higher education are also adjusting and accommodating by taking up the charge of preparing teacher leaders, theorizing, and researching the potential of teacher leadership through academic study. As professors of education in the United States, we are mindful of the contextualizing neoliberalism infused throughout our policy environment and are deeply concerned about the habits of competition, rigidness, bureaucratization, and overspecialization. Not surprisingly, such ways of thinking, acting, and being infiltrate our educational institutions and can have a dehumanizing effect on local teachers, their pedagogies, and their students (Noddings 2007; Nussbaum 2010). Such habits of mind and body can additionally reinforce a sense of isolation between teachers and their profession (Eisner 2001), perhaps even a loss of vocational calling (Hansen 1995; Palmer 2007). Along with this can come a sense of alienation from colleagues and administrators (Macdonald and Shirley 2009) as well as a loss of individual and collective voice and autonomy (Apple 2006; Ayers 2010; Miller 1990). This chapter reports on an action research project designed focused on teacher leadership and reconceptualist curriculum theorizing as an alternative to the Tyler Rationale.

An Ethic of Democratic, Curriculum-Based Teacher Leadership

ABSTRACT This article opens with an overview of the current policy interest in “teacher leadership” with its particular challenges and opportunities. Teacher-leader interpretations based on standardized instructional management platforms grounded in neoliberalism are critically challenged. The referent for this critical questioning is a normative vision of teachers working as lead professionals for democratic ways of living. Eight key concepts guiding the collegial enactment of this vision are introduced, and the article concludes with the recognition that this understanding of teacher leadership is informed by a fluid, holistic hermeneutics that stands in contrast to value-neutral forms of technical rationality and dogmatic ideologies.

C&P Problem Solving Informed by Elliot Eisner's Scholarship

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Evaluating a Pragmatic Understanding of Artistry, Development, and Leadership

We begin this Editors’ Introduction with a set of self-evaluative questions. These questions emerge out of an ongoing series of pragmatic explanations and clarifications of the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group’s mission statement, which we initiated in the first Summer 2004 issue of this journal. For those who may have missed one or more of our nine essays or who may be reading this journal for the first time, we will provide a brief “map” of the territory we have covered. Our goal has been to examine the implications of democratic education for pedagogical artistry, professional development, and curriculum leadership; and we have pursued this goal by drawing on the North American pragmatic heritage, particularly as informed by John Dewey’s scholarship. With reference to pedagogical artistry, we have explored the linkage between democratic vocational callings and educational artistry as articulated by Dewey (1897/2004):

Identifying and Advancing Three Key Disciplinary Dimensions of Curriculum-Based Pedagogy

In our Editors’ Introduction for the Winter, 2007 issue of this journal (Volume 4, Number 2), we highlighted the curriculum leadership implications of our “Curriculum and Pedagogy” (C&P) mission. In succinct terms, this mission can be articulated as understanding, enacting and embodying the synergistic relationship between curriculum studies and pedagogical artistry. Since the very first issue of this journal, we have been working to unpack and explain the subtleties and parameters of this very professional and visionary end-inview in our Editors’ Introductions; and we invite readers of this journal to review the many points we have made since the initial Summer, 2004 issue (Volume 1, Number 1). In our Editors’ Introduction for this issue, we want to highlight a potentially powerful leadership tool associated with our C&P mission and to describe one success story associated with the use of this tool. With reference to the C&P mission, we identify at least three key disciplinary dimensions underlying curriculum-based pedagogy. Before introducing these three dimensions, we need to clarify our understanding of “professional discipline.” We are referring to a discipline that comes from within each person as a result of their professional calling and intentions. Such a discipline is both generative and generous in the spirit of Maxine Greene’s (1988) celebration of her “positive” freedom: