Session Information
23 SES 08 E, Politics of Curriculum
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-30
08:30-10:00
Room:
HG, HS 45
Chair:
Palle Rasmussen
Contribution
A general background to this article is an interest in the “flexibility” that open, flexible and IT-mediated learning is said to, and eventually does, imply. According to relevant educational policies, these forms of educational set-ups with their very specific tools for improved learning become re-signified as boundless or boundary crossing and as challenging private/public dualities. The metaphor, or eventually also the metonym, of flexibility seems to suggest that some important time/space constrains could be conquered and what we traditionally have thought of as ‘places for learning’ thereby becomes challenged. However, learning still ‘takes place’ somewhere and classrooms, educational institutions, learning/teaching centers and so forth continue to have meaning and importance as places for learning. Additionally, these places will still be of importance for the making-up of modern citizens who, still, will have to make room for their studies in a world of no “easy living”.
Method
The institutional context of the article is Swedish Municipal Adult Education (MAE), and the empirical material draw literature reviews as well as on observations of two participants organizing and handling flexible coursework in their homes and in the ‘teaching centre’ organised for support. The data also includes narratives of the participants’ curricula’s as well as their hopes and plans for the future. The aim of the article is to analyse how the “lived” curricula of the participants re/organise the private/public borders of their lives, and what new time/space arrangements are involved in their different places of learning, e.g. at the teaching centre, in their homes or in other places. What, if any, challenges of public/private borders are we witnessing and what are, the eventual, costs of flexibility, and for whom?
Expected Outcomes
Gender is an important analytical category in the article, and Doreen Masses (1994) conceptions of space and place as socially constituted and open to contestation have been of special value, as has been her critical insights in the fallacies in widely spread uses of the concept of space itself (see Massey 1993).With this in mind, our attempt is to bring different conceptualisations of the constituencies of these lived curricula into focus, as they are told and narrated by the participants themselves and as they are accounted for in public discourses of job advertisement and in more general educational policies in Sweden. What are the conceptualisation of flexibility, of space, time and gender in use and what do these uses indicate about the present affairs of public/private boundaries?
References
Massey, Doreen (1993). Politics and space/time. In M. Keith and S. Pile (edss.). The Place and Politics of Identity: London: Routlege, pp. 141 – 161. Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, place and gender, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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