You do not need to respond to all of the readings in your response, but where possible, you should make links between readings. You may also most certainly reference personal experiences. As these responses are meant to provoke discussion, they should lead you to a series of open-ended questions. I should preface this week’s discussion by pointing out the obvious, that Sara Ahmed (The author of Orientations), despite her occasional interest in questions of teaching and learning, is not a curriculum scholar. Though scholars in curriculum studies have certainly taken up her work, her ideas are mostly located in philosophy and social theory. However, I am certainly of the mind that curriculum studies, at times, involves the practice of taking ideas from other fields and applying them to educational questions. It is this practice that I am going to suggest you take up in your responses this week. So, starting with Ahmed’s article, and then moving into Sumara and Davis’, I suggest the following areas for discussion: 2) Ahmed discusses the object of the writing table (taken up by both Husserl and Heidegger) at length, what are some of the objects of curriculum studies, educational theory, classroom life, etc., whose “straightness” is taken for granted–“something that we are oriented around, even if it disappears from view” (p. 560)–but which, if we were to adopt a different position towards, might allow for a queer emergence of new desires, new voices, new paths, new hopes? As Ahmed writes, “The hope of changing directions is always that we do not know where some paths may take us: risking departure from the straight and narrow, makes new futures possible, which might involve going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer” (p. 554). 3) Noting that heternormativity establishes itself as the norm through practices of repetition and habituation, and that, “What bodies “tend to do” are effects of histories rather than being originary” (p. 553), what educational practices mask their straightness, and their vulnerability and contingency (and other “oblique” possibilities), as effects of history? What might it mean, and what are the implications, to queering such tendencies? 4) Thinking about often disavowed, neglected (and queer) desires and voices in educational spaces and curriculum theory, what does it mean “not … to search for permanence but to listen to the sound of the “what” that fleets … the very point of ‘disorientation’” (p. 565), and what Sumara and Davis might refer to as an interruption? 5) Using Ahmed’s framework, that “A queer phenomenology would involve an orientation toward queer, a way to inhabit the world that gives ‘support’ to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place,” what might be the focus of a “queer phenomenology” in relation to curriculum studies? 6) Both of the articles this week suggest that, rather than focusing strictly on queer bodies and desire, queer theory offers a lens through which to question the presuppositions of heteronormative culture; that straightness (as a sexual frame, as an orientation) isn’t a matter of being, but of becoming. Thinking about your own lives as educators and curriculum scholars, where have you noticed this tendency to assumptions of heteronormativity as a “natural” state of being, from which others are necessarily queer or slanted? 7) How might the identification of a “heterosexual closet” (since heteronormative culture disallows even heterosexuals from admitting the range of their desire) help to render a vision of education where authentic desire may truly flourish? 8) Since Sumara and Davis’ article was written almost two decades ago, it may seem safe to assume that some of their recommendations may have been achieved, and that some of their frames of reference may be dated. But, is this actually the case? Looking at their four “preliminary understandings” (p. 203) concerning a queer curriculum theory, where would you say we are in terms of achieving such “conceptual placeholders”?
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