Art conservation practices tend to adhere to Eurocentric reductionism and rationalism that have dominated Western sciences and education, negating subjectivity and experience as knowledge sources. Aoki called for mysterious and generative middles between planned and live(d) curriculum to be indwelled through meditation, expanding curriculum to include individual lifeworlds and relations. This study mobilizes Foucauldian death meditation to destabilize and further expand curriculum by indwelling on death in life from the mysterious middles between human art conservators and more-than-human art objects. Bringing together neo-materialist and Indigenous perspectives, we reconfigure current limits of art conservation to consider agency, intra-action and permeability of human and non-human lifedeath. In the care of artwork by conceptual artists Komar and Melamid—intentionally created to disintegrate—meditations of attending and mourning reach toward more response-able forms of art conservation practice and curriculum. We propose an art conservation curriculum of relational mystery using death meditation entangled with conundrums of art mourning to deepen students’ enchantment with unfathomable aspects of lifedeath, thereby invigorating teaching and conserving with mystery.
Curricula have traditionally been concerned with proposing intentions and expectations for the teaching and learning of knowledge. What if curriculum conversed not only with the known, but the unknowable—with mystery? In this work, I investigate mystic traditions to learn about mystery. I come to a characterization of mystery as the dialectical condition of knowing while at the same time not knowing. Mystery is also an epithet of ultimate reality—a wholeness, which, all the while not completely knowable, nonetheless, attracts the utmost attention in its possibility for wisdom and meaningful transformation. The mystic traditions remind that mystery is an ineluctable feature of any metaphysical theory that aims to explicate ultimate reality, and because of this, belief is an inherent aspect of any metaphysical understanding. Furthermore, because metaphysical belief underpins our understanding of knowledge, a curriculum that invites mystery invites exploring, discerning and acting on existential beliefs. The mystic traditions proffer a way to approach mystery, namely the contemplative pathway, which can be engaged as both epistemological model and method. Mystic traditions also demonstrate how to deal with paradox, one of which is engaging reason to prepare for revelation. Thus, I conclude my essay with a poetic inquiry.
Practitioner self-study narratives play an important role in the engagement of Mystery, particularly in neoliberal educational contexts, which tend to prioritize rational goal-settings and answers as compared to Mystery’s a-rational ways of knowing (i.e., ways beyond rational knowledge) that dwell in our Being. As two educators, we share our curricular and pedagogical dwellings “on” and “in” Mystery. This inquiry stems from our desire to create generative curricular spaces for students to explore Mystery within their Being, with the Whole of existence, and with respect to their interconnectivity to global-local contexts and currents of struggle. The study’s three thematic findings are communicated via a multi-voiced text of narrative, poetic and academic writing. First, we lament the insufficient engagement of Mystery in education, while coming to know the strengths of such lament for transformative educational work. Second, we narrate our diverse dwellings “on” Mystery, which articulate our understandings and practices of Mystery. Third, we explore the value of an existential-ontology of education as a means to enhance engagement in Mystery with students, within the complexity of their whole selves and the Whole of life.
This work explores the importance of including, in the curriculum, Indigenous teachings regarding making, creating, healing and mystery. Found in the teachings of many Indigenous peoples, mystery, or (not) knowing, is vital to coming to know how to be human in a good way and so it must be centred and honoured in our walk through this world. Drawing on what I have learned from my many life teachers, I humbly offer the suggestion that mystery is vital in our route to the healing of ourselves and our world. In this work of Indigenous métissage, offering up my own experiences, I narrate how, through making and creating practices such as beading, drumming, weaving, poetry and life writing, I, and the youth with whom I teach and learn, have been invited into spaces of (not) knowing, where we have been made available to joy and healing. In this essay, I bring forward poems, stories from my teaching and making life, and images of my beading and painting, as an offering of one path of surrendering to mystery in the search for mino bimaadiziwin—living in a good way for the good of All My Relations.
This paper delves into the phenomenon of being fully alive—aliveness—as a process for recognizing and attuning to holistic and ecological understandings. In the context of outdoor education, I narrate the experience of an initially reluctant hiker who expressed a profound sense of energy and connection during a backpacking trip. This story leads to a deeper inquiry into the meaning, ambivalence and potential of feeling fully alive for curriculum and pedagogy. I show how the sensation comes as and with mystery to offer counter-conventional insights rethinking paradigms of mastering skills and conquering nature. Then, I offer four pedagogical realizations to enhance ecological understandings through place-based experiences.
In this paper, we address mystery in curriculum development in a personal and storied way. We share our belief in the ongoing nature of mystery across time and situation, in the teaching life and beyond, into the worlds we inhabit in our daily lives with others. As self-study narrative researchers over many years, we turn to the work of Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, William Pinar, Ted Aoki and Maxine Greene to illustrate our perspective that mystery awaits us as we uncover new meaning in the seminal stories we have lived, and which inform us in present day learning and understanding in an ongoing way. We describe two theories that we utilize to guide our path to unearthing the mystery held in our stories—one is Connelly and Clandinin’s narrative inquiry and the other, Pinar’s currere. Both consider curriculum development to be an ongoing and circular course wherein it is always possible to find new meaning from experiences that can open one to new, present-day worlds, where one can live and share interactions with others.
After the long labour of bringing a journal issue from idea to reality, an editorial gives the editors an opportunity to stand at the threshold and invite readers in. In this special issue, here’s what you will find: eight curriculum scholars, including the editors, wondering about “Mystery, World and Education”, as they ask themselves: What is mystery? How have I experienced it? What ways of knowing, teaching and/or learning does mystery suggest? This issue asserts no joint position. Rather, it tells eight unique stories, emerging from what the scholars are concerned about as educators, how and what they have learned from opening to mystery, and how this relates to their aspirations for curriculum. However, out of the diversity, commonalities emerge that speak to the nature of mystery. The scholars begin their inquiries wondering about mystery in terms of knowledge, qua the unknown and unknowable. Thinking about the unknowable is related to experiences of indeterminacy and enigma—mystery is found both in liminal spaces and as liminal. Significantly, the scholars experience mystery in and through their relations with more-thans—other persons, more-than-humans (animals, animate beings, agented things), Spirit Beings, Being itself and the Divine. Mystery develops from an epistemological to an existential concern. Theorizing mystery entails explicating one’s ontological (or metaphysical) beliefs. Come, tarry, experience what it is to dwell on, with and in mystery.
Common ways of thinking in education revolve around the purposes of science, curiosity and calculative modes of thought, resulting in instrumental methods and ends in education and teacher education. Mystery, defined as physis from ancient Greek metaphysics, which highlights both presence and absence, is typically left out of knowing, teaching and learning. Today’s education can benefit from unique approaches emphasizing mystery as presence and absence through “poetizing” or poetic engagement. Poetic knowledge, meditative thinking and awe provide new ways of experiencing curriculum and pedagogy. Borrowing from Martin Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, or “letting be”, and poetizing after this manner, provides a particular posture for encountering things differently in non-objectified ways. Curiosity and awe in curriculum, emotional responses related to mystery, give insight for showcasing the importance of non-objectification, a re-situated stance toward things in an increasingly technological era. For mystery to take its place in education, it will require a move from calculative thinking to meditative thinking, from curiosity to awe, by way of poetizing (qua Gelassenheit).
This retrospective of an extended inquiry into the phenomenon of mystery addresses three questions: What is mystery?, revealing through hermeneutic phenomenology an unknown flower within a forest resuscitating metaphysics as physis, a definition of mystery founded on secrecy and incomprehensibility, and a conception of mystery as the enigma of the counterplay between the ontological movements of presencing and absencing (Caputo, 1986; Heidegger, 1927/1962); Why distain toward mystery?, where, through a literature review, a typology of senses of mystery problematizes this distain and expands awareness towards mystery. Openness to mystery begins through awareness, which heightens the senses and emotions, kindling poetic knowledge, a foundational mode of being. Mystery also serves as a measure for our lives, through our consonant comportments and conceptions. The comportment of humility, among others, is highlighted as nurturing mystery; and How may receptivity toward mystery inform curriculum theory?, where the consideration of “what should be learned” (Petrina, 2004), supports a conception of education in which future generations recognize metaphysics as presence, while awakening to metaphysics as physis.
The changes in summative assessment because of COVID-19 initiated many reflections and discussions between students and teachers. In this article, we document the importance of student involvement in their summative assessments and show the importance of considering students, along with their teachers, as users of assessment. We investigate student views on assessment and how they gain agency by having choice and input into their summative assessments. Students identified four aspects of assessment as key: having agency and choice, making assessment "personal", experiencing authentic learning, and valuing classroom discussion as assessment. To address the concerns raised by students in this research, we identify ways in which curricula and assessment policies may need to change to accommodate students.
This issue defines a Canadian curriculum amid political pressures and colonial legacies, emphasizing ongoing relational and experiential processes that foreground equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization. Rather than treating curriculum as static content, contributors emphasize curriculum-as-encounter—approaching curriculum in ways that value ethical relationships, sustained engagement with colonial histories and the integration of Indigenous ways of knowing. Authors in this issue advocate for the unsettling of normalized settler colonial structures, and they invite new ways of living together in Canada. By upholding ethical responsibility, place and people, this issue advances a complex vision for Canadian curriculum rooted in reconciliation and authentic engagement.
This article examines discourses of land and place in Saskatchewan Grade 9 to 12 social studies and history curriculum from 1971 to 2009. As such, the study provides insight into the function of discourses about land and place and situates these discourses in the broader context of enduring and dominant myths at the intersections of place and identity in Canada. As modern urban living undermines our connections to the landscapes we inhabit, this study provides a timely examination of both the notion of place in Canadian identity, as well as its current conception in social studies curricula in Saskatchewan.
What does it mean to read, write and act towards reconciliation in curriculum and teacher education? To answer this question, I perform a situated literature review of Truth and Reconciliation teacher education research. I borrow from Lisa Farley’s (2010) concept of the reluctant pilgrim. While Farley reflects on a physical journey to understand how belief can withstand historical loss and immersion in ongoing systems of colonial power, I engage with her concept psychically; I attend to the words and listen for the implied hopes of the authors I read. Also attentive to my own beliefs and hopes as I read them, I become what I term a transeunt listener. I discuss how I became a transeunt listener through a form of reading-as-encounter and how it enabled me to understand how teacher education might address what I see as three tensions in truth and reconciliation teacher education discourse: 1) belonging; 2) disruption of settler consciousness; and 3) an expanded ethical capacity in teachers and curriculum theorists.
In 2019, 59% of applied English learners failed the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT), which is a requirement to graduate high school in Ontario. The authors of this paper wondered about the 41% who passed. We asked: What curricular connections are being made (or not made)? What is working well? With these questions in mind, the purpose of this article is to share findings from a thematic analysis of literature focusing on applied learners and the OSSLT. Discussions also include findings from a survey that shares the perspectives and experiences of English educators who support students in their applied classrooms on the OSSLT. Findings show a disconnect between curricular and OSSLT assessment expectations of what is considered and valued as literacy. This article highlights a greater need to find and develop best practices for teaching learners in applied English classrooms and for sharing these evidence-based strategies. Such best practices can help educators further support students in applied English classroom to better prepare for the OSSLT which might also inform curriculum development, literacy instruction and standardized testing.
Painted by Henry G. Glyde in 1951, the Alberta History mural has been a fixture in the University of Alberta’s Rutherford South Library Reading room for more than 70 years. In the last decade, it has come under scrutiny for its problematic representation of the province’s past, sparking public dialogue and a process of consultation to determine its future. This paper examines how the mural, as public art, contributes to a lived curriculum of settler colonialism at a time when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) asks that institutions “support, promote, and facilitate truth . . . [and demonstrate] a profound commitment to establishing new relationships embedded in mutual recognition and respect that will forge a brighter future” (p. 339). Drawing on understandings of public pedagogy, theories of settler geographical ignorance, ethical relationality and difficult knowledge, this paper questions the production of a settler colonial consciousness and its role in normalizing the settler experience while marginalizing, misrepresenting or making invisible the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous Peoples. By challenging dominant narratives of Canadian history that are part of the lived curriculum of place and public art, and by re-imagining them through the lens of ethical relationality, this paper aims to confront and disrupt colonial harm and settler colonial consciousness.
In this article, two PhD students from separate Canadian universities, both sharing an immigrant background, engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry, highlighting the importance of peer-support experiences during the pandemic. They explore their journeys as immigrants and PhD students, recounting their experiences in a virtual support group. This narrative illustrates the exchange of academic, mental health and personal support rooted in shared culture, language and ethnicity. The study provides insights into the benefits of peer support on virtual platforms and adds immigrant perspectives. It suggests that university administrators can find innovative ways to support marginalized students, fostering mutual support among them, particularly in the remote-learning context of COVID. This article highlights the potential for authentic and effective support systems that address the unique challenges faced by immigrant and marginalized students, enhancing their academic and personal development.
Grief shatters the body, at once collapsing inwards while simultaneously tearing apart. Is there room for grief in the neoliberal academic body? Is there space for small everyday losses as well as large life-changing losses? What do we do when our workspaces silence our grief? As academics, we are subject to a competitive, pressurized working culture resulting in increasing stress, anxiety, exhaustion. We have also experienced a devastating global pandemic. Yet, grief and loss are not emotions we readily acknowledge in our workspaces. Inspired by Shelton and Sieben (2020), we focus on this very topic and emotion, which has affected us in different ways. We bring grief (deep sorrow from death or loss) centre-stage as a way of speaking-back, stepping away from the competition and the success narratives. We use Hendry et al.’s (2018) notion of narrative as being which shifts methodology from a mode of production to a way of being in the world. Our narratives show that loss, even while experienced individually, is felt communally. Grief matters and in writing about grief, we resist neoliberal knowledge, an act which gives us hope.
This special issue initially arose from the 2019 Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference at the University of Regina. Shortly after the conference, the world was thrown into the COVID-19 pandemic. The papers in this special issue view the pandemic through a prism to consider existing practices within the academy and reflect upon and imagine new possibilities for academic work and lives. Author explorations include arts-based inquiry, grief, peer-to-peer support, Indigenous Métissage, poetic inquiry and diasporic bodies.
As two South Asians in the diaspora, we situate the significance of the body as a curriculum, where our lived experiences and stories supported us in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. We engage in the method of life writing to attend to specific narratives that have framed our diasporic identities. Through that engagement, we seek to demonstrate how we struggle with questions about belonging and dislocation, while also finding ways to overcome those challenges and realities in our everyday lives. Gripped by memories formed through phone calls and visits, with miles between us and the place we know as South Asia, we posit that the diasporic body forms a curriculum by way of a Brown(ing) body. We make the case that such a body has always had to refract in all its complexities and nuances—pandemic or not. Accordingly, we then consider how our lived experiences and subjective bodies informed the pedagogical possibilities of navigating the morbid pandemic as it touched the lives of the students we worked with. Our collaborative writing is therefore an offering of hope and sustenance that emerged during a pandemical time of grave uncertainty and profound loss.
