Mr. Bachmann and His Class delineates a sixth-grade class composed of child immigrants with a retiring teacher Dieter Bachmann in Germany. Although the protagonist of the film is the multicultural city where the school is located, the intimate portrait of Bachmann and his sixth-grade students in the documentary reveals Sellers’ becoming-curriculum. This paper examines the concept of becoming and Sellers’ becoming-curriculum and identifies how Bachmann’s classroom embodies becoming-curriculum from three perspectives: rhizome, lines of flight, and multiplicity. Like the three conceptions, Bachmann’s learning and teaching activity does not have a predetermined design or process nor a specific educational goal or outcome. He always encourages his students to improvise and embraces children’s ideas, thus leading to endless possibilities in the classroom. Becoming-curriculum is inexplicable, but Bachmann provides an explicit and valuable practice of becoming-curriculum.
The following represents an autoethnographic exploration of identity, legacy, and sustainability through the lens of my mother’s educational pursuit, and my own experiences as an educator using the Currere Methodology (Pinar, 1975/1994) and Black Feminism Womanism (Collins, 2001; Walker, 1982). Autoethnography or racial autobiography in feminist and womanist thought has the power to facilitate an interrogation of racism, power, and privilege (Pratt-Clarke, 2012, p. 85). Through the analyzation of the education decisions of my mother, I wish to locate my “Currere of Stay” in K-12 education. I hope to uncover the intergenerational narratives that thread the journey of Black women in education and womanhood.
