Thinking about and Enacting Curriculum in “Frames of War”, edited by Rahat Naqvi and Hans Smits, responds to the challenges Judith Butler posed about the precariousness of life and questions about how we apprehend, and take up ethically, our responsibilities for those who are considered “Other.” The notion of enframing asks us to consider what conditions our understanding of others, and how we open up what curriculum concepts and theories mean in the contexts of complex conditions for educational practices, such as recent wars, which have brought to forefront critical questions of human recognition and the precariousness of the conditions in which human flourishing is possible.
An overarching objective of this book is the meaning of a call to ethics, and how discussion of framing and frames is a provocation to think about our responsibilities as curriculum scholars and practitioners. The authors take up the limits of knowledge, and present the challenge to curriculum theory to think in terms of not just understanding the frames through which we apprehend the Other, but also how we might re-frame our thinking as a radical call to responsibility. Each chapter in Smits and Naqvi’s Thinking about and Enacting Curriculum in “Frames of War” illustrates these concepts in diverse ways, but with common interest and concern, considering how curriculum is and ought to be fundamentally engaged with re-thinking our frames of apprehension.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
About the Cover
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The World on the Verge of a “Nervous Breakdown,” by Rahat Naqvi & Hans Smits
Chapter One: Challenging the Frames of Curriculum Hans Smits & Rahat Naqvi
Chapter Two: Facing the War in Afghanistan: A Curriculum Journey of a “Good Canadian”, by David Blades
Chapter Three: Re-Framing: Un-Neighbourly Love, Haunting Inquiry, Perfectibility, by Robert Nellis
Chapter Four: Sound Curriculum: Recognizing the Field, by Walter Gershon
Chapter Five: Running head: After the war Narrative Reconstructions, Broken Frames: Sendai Before and After the War, by Craig McDonald
Chapter Six: Depicting and Framing the Trauma of Another, by Patricia Kostouros
Chapter Seven: Teaching Social Justice in English Language Arts: Working Toward Transformative Learning, Karen Magro
Chapter Eight: Global Justice Education as a Pedagogy of Loss: Interrupting Frames of War, by Lisa Taylor
About the Authors
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Rahat Naqvi is an associate professor in the area of Language and Diversity Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. She holds a PhD in Didactics of Languages and Cultures from the Université de la Sorbonne, Paris. She has taught in various international settings that include the National Institute for Oriental Languages, Université de la Sorbonne, Paris and most recently at the University of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Naqvi is the Associate Director of the Language Research Center at the University of Calgary. Her focused fields of expertise are primarily in language and literacy pedagogy, identity issues and emergent literacy.
Hans Smits recently retired from the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary where he served as Associate Dean with responsibilities for teacher education. His areas of teaching and writing were in social studies education, curriculum theory, and teacher education.
Review :
Reframing the curricular challenge educators face after a decade of war, the contributors to this remarkable collection testify to the ethical demands of our time, our place, and our profession. What does it mean for us to teach now, in a time laced by hate, suffering, and trauma but professionally determined to find a very different future? Each of these essays provides provocative paths, theoretical and practical, to that future. In this resounding collection we hear once again the sound of silence breaking, supporting us to rearticulate our pedagogical convictions in this time of terrorism, reframing curriculum as committed to intercultural understanding and global justice.
Famously, Greek dramatist Aeschylus remarked that “in war, the first casualty is truth.” In this fine, original and timely collection, Rahat Naqvi and Hans Smits have provided a valuable forum in which curriculum scholars can ‘speak truth to power’ in the post-911 era and explore ways to understand and challenge how curriculum is enframed and enacted in contemporary classrooms.
