Lucinda McKnight

Still in the LEGO (LEGOS) room: female teachers designing curriculum around girls’ popular culture for the coeducational classroom in Australia

While the issue of boys’ dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls’ media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce and perform both individual gendered identities and plans for the identities of future student subjects, while negotiating subject positions made available to girls and women in broader social contexts. In this instance, negotiations that take place during the development of a unit of work on Mattels Barbie website form the basis of feminist discourse analysis, enabling us to ‘take stock’ in thinking about what curriculum design is, about where the past is situated in relation to the present, and to question why, within a discursive feminist/postfeminist entanglement, the heritage of feminist intellectual thought in this area seems absent.

Whiteout Writing Collaborative Online Poetry as Inquiry

This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and a...This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or deconstruct the poem, but thinks it in an alternative way, as a broader collaboration, or intra-action between entities, both human and non-human. We avoid determining how our purported individual voices merge to form any united voice. Rather, we are alert to agencies and flows that complicate understandings of us as three rational, discrete, fully formed human figures articulating coherent narratives. We therefore offer a response to theoretical calls to explore collaborative writing as inquiry, through sharing our practice.

The invisible hand: Designing curriculum in the afterward

Abstract This paper diffracts a curriculum design workshop via online collaboration of a collective emerging from that event. Through the workshop, involving theory, conceptual art, writing, photography and curriculum planning, and the subsequent sharing of words and images, we move beyond interrogating designs for future subjects to asking how the pedagogical imagination composes both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within ecologies continually transforming in the process of making. We complicate ‘delivery’ or ‘conduit’ metaphors of education and perceive ‘design’ in co-compositions of human and nonhuman elements, resisting stasis, resisting closure. This workshop paper positions design in the realm of the artist–activist, rather than that of the bureaucrat–technician, and shifts intentionality beyond the invisible and controlling hand of humanism, as curriculum design we might do in the afterwards, rejecting instrumentalism.

The fetish of the lens: persistent sexist and ableist metaphor in education research

Abstract The scientific metaphor of the lens remains widely used in qualitative education research, despite critiques of positivism. Informed by two recently completed empirical doctoral studies relying on Metaphors We Live By, we propose that the attachment to the lens is a fetish. We argue that this fetish, evident even in purportedly feminist, post-positivist and inclusive education research, emerges from fascination with masculinist and ableist power predicated on the othering of the feminine, and those with disabilities. Recourse to the language of power proves irresistible, if dangerous, for academics. We call for caution in the casual use of the lens and for new linguistic research repertoires that produce reality differently.

Swimming lessons : learning, new materialisms, posthumanism, and post qualitative research emerge through a pool poem

ABSTRACT This article shifts from the formal learning spaces of school and university to an Australian public swimming pool to playfully engage some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses for curriculum studies. The article enacts multiple diffractions (Barad, 2007) as theory becomes swimming and swimming becomes theory, and ideas and movements are themselves diffracted or changed by the writing of a poem. What does the pool teach us? What is learnt at the pool? How does learning emerge at the pool? Physics, chemistry, biology, and artistry combine, as multiple human and non-human bodies intra-act (Barad, 2007), calling each other into being in this exploration of how distributed agencies and fractal causalities (Bennett, 2010) change how learning might be thought, represented, and swum. The poem incorporated here serves as provocation and inspiration for other scholars struggling with these educational dilemmas and interested in arts-based research.

A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist

Abstract Following the identification of a gap in the literature around reasons for contemporary women’s self-identification as ‘feminist’, this paper discusses an empirical study of an intergenerational group of contemporary Australian female teachers collaboratively designing English curriculum around girls’ media. The paper explores the group’s shared conversations around feminism, over a series of meetings, as we (teachers and researcher) plan curriculum and negotiate broader subject positions possible for girls and women. These contexts include the competing discourses of feminism and postfeminism and how these mediate texts chosen for study, our pedagogical approaches, and the ways we experience our own lives. In this study, we struggle to find a shared language, across generations, with which to work collaboratively in a community of practice committed to the critical study of media, but involving different individual orientations to ‘feminism’. This is a space in which impediments to the feminist study of girls’ media quickly emerge. The paper also serves as a reminder that feminist scholarship takes place in schools, as well as in the academy, and that the gender studies work teachers do in schools is potentially whole population work, worthy of keen attention in the gender studies academic mainstream.

Curriculum as colour and curves: a synthesis of Black theory, design and creativity realised as critical curriculum writing

ABSTRACT This article looks to three inspirational Black women, bell hooks, Stacey McBride-Irby and Patricia Williams, in the pursuit of radical curriculum. While today curriculum is critiqued as racialised, gendered, sexualised and classed, the formats of curriculum documents such as text books, units of work and lesson plans have changed little. These documents are often conceived as linear sequences of steps leading to outcomes, and their voices are distanced and ‘neutral’. Drawing on a doctoral study of curriculum design in Australia, this article embraces a different approach by opening up a unit of work on girls’ popular culture to hooks’ invocations to teach to transgress, so that curriculum might be experienced as colour and curves, rather than a monochrome route to a pre-determined end point. Through this, along with hooks, I invite teachers to live pedagogy, rather than to deliver it.

Seven reasons to question the hegemony of Visible Learning

ABSTRACT The publication of John Hattie’s Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in 2009 has led to the widespread adoption of the Visible Learning program around the world. Critique of this program has been less widespread, especially in English, and has tended to centre on the mechanisms of meta-analysis. We consider what Visible Learning puts to work in relation to cultural politics and find it closely aligned with agendas of neoliberalism, sexism and ableism that operate to perform exclusion in schools and to de-professionalise teachers in feminised work. We argue that the metaphor of Visible Learning itself requires much more careful attention.

Arthro-coda: poetic notes (re)forming Patti Lather’s “Top ten+ list: (re)thinking ontology in (post) qualitative research"

This poem forms a diffraction of Patti Lather’s article listing ten learnings from the ontological turn. This work is intended to be read alongside Lather’s original article, so the reader can appreciate how poetry and prose form and entangle reciprocally. Ostensibly coalescing as notes from a face-to-face, simultaneously video-conferenced meeting to discuss Lather’s list, this poem pulls together fragments from multiple intra-actions and pushes meaning apart, as do the human and other speakers it calls into being. It avoids dramatic claims to making a difference, but suggests an infinitesimal, insect antennae shift via the ways it may brush against the reader’s skin and increase awareness of the more-than-human. This may even activate a tiny wriggle-release from a stuck place. Lather’s list emerges through the narrows of poetic inquiry as changed, alternatively accessible, more intensely affective, yet still resonant with her advice and spiky with further, many-legged, tangential questions.

Pathways and Praxis: Designing Curriculum for Aspirational Programs

As lecturer/researchers, we use documents mapping the design process, and our own reflections as the basis of a case study of curriculum design for the Associate Degrees of Arts and Education, pathways programs at Deakin University in Australia. In this way, we view curriculum as both personal and political, rather than as a package to be delivered. In this chapter, we share our inspirations, practices and constraints, so that other lecturers and researchers may use our insights in further thinking, teaching and learning in this area. We believe that reflexive attention to the curriculum design process, especially in neoliberal contexts in which a delivery model is foregrounded, highlights institutional challenges that complicate achieving the rhetoric of success for pathways students. We argue that these complexities need to be acknowledged, so that barriers to innovative curriculum design and enhanced student participation can be more fully understood before they can be tackled.