Curriculum reforms are increasingly becoming tied to a restricted image of what students should learn and, consequently, who students should become. As educational historian and curriculum theorist Tom Popkewitz (2010) remarks, school subjects are becoming less centred on developing disciplinary knowledge and more focused on generalized learning outcomes such as the ability to participate, to reason effectively, and to work collectively in groups. Although on the surface this skills-based view of curriculum would seem to offer 'transferable' skills and knowledge that are useful across the disciplines, what Popkewitz points to is that students are to learn to become a particular type of individual, a particular type of citizen, defined through the skills they learn. On this view, students are not depicted in these curricula as having subject-specific experiences through which they might be open to becoming in different ways, in different contexts, with different subject matter. This poses a danger on at least two levels: 1) that there is little room within these reforms for considering students' becoming as a creative process, one which is necessarily singular and unique; and 2) that it risks shaping the kind of language we use in researching classrooms, classifying and categorizing pedagogical relationships, for example, in terms that reflect the predominant culture of learning on offer: democratic participation, working in teams, etc.

This paper seeks to offer an alternative, philosophical language not only for critiquing the deadening effects of seeing students in terms of the skills they possess, but for reforming our vision of educational practice and research. I do so through exploring the notion of one's becoming as a pedagogical event using the heuristic of 'the breath' and draw on the work of Luce Irigaray as well as the yoga tradition.  

Irigaray writes that “breathing corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of the living human being. To come into the world supposes inhaling and exhaling by oneself.” (Irigaray 2002, 73). For her, and for the yoga tradition, one creates the opportunity to become, to experience a 'rebirth' through the breath. No breath is ever repeated twice. Each is unique and singular, amenable only to a here and now of lived experience, not to repetition. As the source of birth and creation, the breath is a continual renewal of the self in relation to others. Breath, on this view, is not a metaphor for pedagogical relations, about their impermanence and their uniqueness, but breath is, at its heart, a pedagogical event, one in which the singularity of each of us is born.

The paper will be drawing on concrete examples from curriculum reform at the upper secondary level in Sweden and the classroom practices that have been part of a research project investigating these reforms within actual school settings.

Feuerstein, Georg. 2008. The Yoga Tradition: It's History, Literature, Philosophy and Practice. Prescott, Arizona: Hohm Press. Irigaray, Luce. 2002. Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. Translated by Stephen Pluhácek. New York: Columbia University Press. Popkewitz, Tom. 2007. Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform. New York: Routledge