When: Friday, December 14, 2018 | 12:30 pm – 02:00 pm
Where: Neville Scarfe Building, Room 1214
Doll’s Challenge to Educators: Ferrying the Ghost of Curricular Control to the Other Side, Awakening Inspiriting Curricular Practices
Host: Dr. William Pinar
Abstract
William Doll’s attention to what he termed the curricular “ghost of control” is a persistent haunting encounter that continues to thwart and betray a “livelier spirit of control” within curricular enactment across disciplines and interests of all kinds. This is not new thinking, but it is bold thinking that institutions, schools, and communities worldwide persist in avoiding and short-changing. In this presentation, the roles and relations across understandings of education, knowledge, and curricular enactment are revealed to foreground this matter alongside the lived consequences for all involved. Turning to traditions concerning the aesthetics of human understanding and found kinships with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, modes of being and habits of practice emerge that insist on educators, students, and communities traversing together the curricular terrain encountered, oriented towards individual/collective growth and well-being. Of course, such visions of co-curricular-making have been envisioned again and again throughout time, with the ghost of curricular control inevitably returning– thwarting and betraying moving modes of being with hauntings again and again. So, let’s consider together: Why and how to embrace Doll’s challenge to “ferry this spirit to the other side?” And, further consider if educators/education can ever liberate curriculum to be a passage or medium inspiriting participatory modes and habits towards learning/ living well in the world with others?
Bio
Margaret Macintyre Latta is currently Professor and Interim Director of the Okanagan School of Education, Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Dr. Macintyre Latta held an Endowed Professorship in Mentorship at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she assumed academic positions and leadership roles from 2000-2012. Throughout her career, scholarly and professional activities have been primarily concerned with how the aesthetics of human understanding (understood as attention to meaning-making processes) merit serious consideration as pragmatic and philosophical necessities within learning situations of all kinds. The impacts of her scholarship are found within the documented relationships across the aesthetic with curriculum-making—attending to qualities and differences in understandings, formative assessment, student thought processes, teacher planning processes, contextual and physical space considerations, ethics that connect thinking and doing, and implications for teacher education and professional development. Book projects and peer reviewed journal articles reflect how her research intersects with multiple disciplines and interests.