Curriculum Studies in the Age of Covid-19: Stories of the Unbearable(24 Education and Struggle)

To think through history as it unfolds by engaging in “unbearable story-telling” is the task at hand in Curriculum Studies in the Age of Covid-19. The author documents stories of Covid-19 both from the perspective of a university professor and from the frontlines as a hospital chaplain, interweaving autobiography with philosophy, fiction, theology, history, and memory, in order to articulate what is beyond language and develop an archive. The archive is not only about the past but how future generations will understand the past. This book might be of interest to educationists, curriculum studies scholars, philosophers, theologians, literary scholars, historians, medical anthropologists, bioethicists, health humanities scholars, and hospital chaplains as well as palliative care physicians and psychoanalysts.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Metaphors of the Desert: A Curriculum of Crisis – Clinical Narratives and Stultification – Speculative Fabulation and Unbearable Stories – Jacques Derrida’s Concepts: Metaphors for Unbearable Stories – Thomas Merton’s Crisis of The Unspeakable – The Unbearable Stories of Terry Tempest Williams, Joan Didion and Derrick Jensen – The Unbearable Stories of Anton Boisen, Louise DeSalvo and John Gunther – Albert Camus’ Relevance for Unbearable Stories of the Covid Pandemic – Michel Serres’ Relevance for Unbearable Stories of the Covid Pandemic – References – Index.

About the Author :
Marla Morris received her PhD in education from Louisiana State University and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Morris is Professor of Education at Georgia Southern University, College of Education, in Statesboro, Georgia. Morris' select publications include Curriculum Studies Guidebooks: Concepts and Theoretical Frameworks, Vols. 1 & 2 (Peter Lang, 2016); On Not Being Able to Play: Scholars, Musicians and the Crisis of Psyche (2009); Teaching Through the Ill Body: A Spiritual and Aesthetic Approach to Pedagogy and Illness (2008); Jewish Intellectuals and the University (2006); and Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing Sites of Memory and Representation.

Review :
"Marla Morris has written a book that is a gift for all of us who live at the intersection of medicine, philosophy, literature, and being human. Drawing on an astonishing range of scholarship and an equally astonishing range of lived experience in the middle of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Morris manages to enliven the too-often abstract world of academic reflection on illness and death with clear-eyed witness to the agony at the heart of this crisis. In the evolution of her arguments about unbearable stories, she brings a sophisticated structure for interpretation of these stories in the often-chaotic realm of plague medicine. She does this with the wisdom of an experienced educator, the grace of an experienced chaplain, and the skilled eye of an experienced storyteller. I worked with her in the trenches of a hospital serving thirty-six southern rural counties during the worst of the COVID pandemic. I was grateful for her work as a chaplain in the rooms of our patients and I am ever-grateful to her as a philosopher who has given us a profound way of drilling down on complex lived experiences in this difficult season." —Raymond Barfield, MD, PhD, Palliative Care Physician, Memorial University Medical Center, Savannah, Georgia; Mercer Medical School, Savannah and Macon, Georgia “As a hospital chaplain in the era of Covid-19, Dr. Marla Morris provides care to the souls of patients, paying tribute to their untold stories inevitably marked by inexplicable suffering and sadness. Because such stories cannot be captured in the sterile language of the clinical chart, she turns to such writers as Terry Tempest Williams, John Gunther, and Louise DeSalvo to gain insights into the profound and contradictory experiences of illness she witnesses. But Dr. Morris is not only a chaplain. She is also a curriculum theorist who enacts currere, a way of viewing the world of Covid in deeply personal ways through her relationships with patients, their families, and their caregivers; and in larger sociopolitical, theological, and spiritual spheres. And there’s more: she is also a philosopher who turns to the theoretical frameworks of Derrida, Camus, and Serres among others to explore how their relevance illuminates the pandemic in ways not examined before. Curriculum Studies in the Age of Covid-19: Stories of the Unbearable is brilliant, far-reaching scholarship marked by the sensitivity and passion of Dr. Morris, a work that ultimately helps us all honor what she calls in these pages ‘the unbearable stories’ of Covid-19.” —Delese Wear, PhD, Professor Emerita, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Northeast Ohio Medical University