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Articulating curriculum re-visioning experiences within an (inter)national college's experiential studies program

University of British Columbia

How shall we understand curriculum re-visioning in the Experiential Studies program? This study seeks to explore and constitute new understandings of curriculum revisioning in an (inter)national college setting where teachers work as a team, where change can occur in response to students and where the curriculum-as-live(d) and curriculum-as-plan are at play. Multifaceted questions and struggles emerge in the gaps between our experiences of planned curriculum and curriculum alive with student and teacher interactivity. The study attempts to actively engage in understanding (as a journeying into potentials) through retrieving, re-writing, constituting, re-creating and giving voice to curricular experiences, uncertainties, and possibilities. The text of the study listens to and rewrites the multiple voices of teachers' experiences and conversations emerging from interviews with five Experiential Studies teachers and from my journalized experiences as an Experiential Studies teacher. Adding to the teachers' voices are those of students in the form of short anonymous samples of students' writings and those of scholars as found in the literature. The aim and results of this inquiry are not situated in the production of patterns, answers or univocal meaning, but in the openings and spaces of possibilities and further questions. As the reader interacts with/in the text, re-searching into the myriad gaps and ambiguities becomes spaces of possibilities where new understandings and questions are constituted. Emerging from the multiple voices in these writings is a picture of Experiential Studies re-visioning as stammering, questioning, responsive, ongoing and interrelated conversations and activity. Grounded in and stirred by the interactive possibilities among teachers and students, uncertainty, questioning and dialogue generate everchanging curricular understandings and re-visions. "At the heart of teaching is an agony, not an essence" (Jardine, 1992, p. 190). The agony of pedagogy is a living through with others, with change, with uncertainty and with/in difference. Spaces of metonymic possibilities are present here and openings are created to allow movement in/to and between curricular signification and multiplicities.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-05-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8267

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace