Formative Space: Literacy Practices in 21st Century Curriculum Making
Abstract
Partnerships for 21st Century learning support curricular reforms for global, cross-disciplinary competencies that will leverage and benefit education technologies. However, this research partnership with a literacy program developer occasioned an opportunity to study curriculum making in the 21st century that did not make assumptions about technologies and competencies. The integrated thesis based on this project pushes boundaries on how assessment and curriculum making are conceptualized by exploring broader questions of inquiry and participation through literacy and assessment practices in six junior elementary classrooms in Ontario, Canada, over a two-year period. Chapter 1 provides the background and purpose of the study in inviting teachers to re-design the literacy program with the students and pedagogical resources in their classrooms. Chapter 2 details the methodology of video inquiry, making contributions to narrative, collaborative, multimodal, and sociomaterial approaches to researching practice. Chapter 3 explores the participation of space, time, and material in curriculum making through the concept of spatial topology. Chapter 4 extends this consideration of relational space to literacy and assessment practices. This paper challenges and adds complexity to the discourse on 21st Century learning regarding cross-disciplinary competencies, by showing how closed and open questions in assessment and literacy practices perform disciplinary spaces for making meaning. While Chapters 3 and 4 focus more on intentionality and materiality in curricular design and enactment, Chapter 5 studies the immateriality of affect in curriculum making, and how agencies of the unintended effect emergent practices. The integrated work has implications for curriculum makers to attend to and participate with more than human actors in practices of curriculum making, and the role of inquiry and improvisation in making space for disciplinary practices.