ABSTRACT
This chapter contextualizes the present state of curriculum in the paradoxical time and place in which the curriculum studies field currently exists. The classroom of the twenty-first century is a place of highly prescribed and enforced learning and legislatively prescribed standards. Reducing curriculum to a stifling pedagogy of memorization, teaching to the test, and classroom practices that celebrate mindless repetition and conformity is what the authors have previously referred to as an “essentialized” audit culture. The authors invite the reader to “re-understand” early childhood curriculum by imagining what a humanizing curriculum might look like. This curriculum focused on the child and learning is about hope and possibility, about relationships and the process of becoming. However, the authors underscore that these possibilities are not prescriptive but their efforts to envision curriculum as a verb rather than predetermined performance tasks – an invitation to participate in the ongoing quest to open spaces for complicated conversations.
