Triple Takes on Curricular Worlds

Introduction

With Triple Takes on Curricular Worlds three educators representing three different academic disciplines write on a broad range of concepts not usually found in the field of curriculum studies: Boundaries, Disgrace, Distance, Fear, Forgiveness, Light, Mothers. Two chapters directly address curriculum issues: Teaching, and Curriculum. The concepts are considered separately by each educator, such that each is discussed from three distinct viewpoints, or “takes,” to form nine chapters in all. Delese Wear teaches medical education in a midwestern university system; Martha Whitaker teaches elementary education in a western university; and Mary Doll teaches liberal arts in a southern art college .The chapters allow each writer to reflect from her personal as well as professional background. Each articulates from her distinct perspective but in a way that occasionally overlaps with the other writers. The book is grounded in what Maxine Greene (1995) calls “perspectival sight,” arising from different domains, different bodies, different projects. An intriguing aspect of the book is that the concepts we write on are rarely addressed in curriculum theorizing. The worlds we inhabit individually and collectively with our students involve more than traditional curricular concerns. Like those cultural and feminist studies that inform our work, we draw on a wide range of fields—aesthetic, spiritual, political—to produce the knowledge required to teach, to live. We think that the book will offer new, sometimes startling understanding of the selves educators bring to work. We think, because it dares to write from night thought as well as from day 1 Introduction MARY ASWELL DOLL DELESE WEAR MARTHA L. WHITAKER thought, it is out of the bounds of traditional books on curriculum while yet being intricately associated with the teaching and learning moments that face students and teachers on a daily basis. And so we offer five unique aspects to this work. First, we are committed to the premise that curriculum theory is an interdisciplinary enterprise. The interdisciplinary structure of the field, and especially the strong influence of the humanities and the arts, makes curriculum theory a distinctive specialization within the broad field of education. Not only do the three of us represent three branches of education, but we draw on a wide variety of sources within those branches in discussing our topics. Delese focuses on health and doctor/patient issues that have important ramifications for educators in the social sciences. Martha bolsters her work with elementary teachers by references to philosophy and religion. Mary’s literary references provide her theoretical frame to demonstrate how the humanities, especially literature, address curricular concerns. It is our intention to suggest that the curricular worlds we inhabit through our interdisciplinary approaches will make education more accessible to a wide audience. Second, we think this book gives the promise to what Rorty (1989) means by “conversation” and what Pinar (1995, p. 848) means by “complicated conversation.” Our chapters web our various selves with the networks that surround us, not unlike a rhizomatic structure with connections growing ever outward. Perhaps our intertwining life stories will invite readers to interpret their own teaching, learning, and living. That, in any case, is our wish. The chapters deliberately employ an autobiographical method to complicate, enrich, and nuance the theories we endorse. Believing with Bill Pinar and Madeleine Grumet (1976) that the root of curriculum is currere, we see the tracing of our ideas as of a piece with the running of our own lives; consequently , we offer ourselves as part of our study. This autobiographical method asks us to slow down, to remember, but not to cling. Then, slowly, and in our own terms, we analyze our experiences of the past in order to understand more fully, with more complexity and subtlety, our submergences in the present. Without self-reflexivity, what coin is there in words? With the intention of examining our own voices, lest we become voyeurs of our students (Ellsworth, 1989), we write about our own motives, intentions, suspicions, hesitations, and lostnesses with the purpose of going beyond the bounds of such dry curriculum issues as assessment or classroom management. Our triple takes can be read as a kind of conversation that the reader is invited to listen in on as a necessary fourth component. Third, and related to the second point, is our interest in how each of us uses our work in memory and reflection to engage the serious issues of our time: terrorism, power, technology. Examining our own histories, as one way of confronting historical and contemporary dimensions of our country’s ideological...