ABSTRACT
In Toward a Poor Curriculum, Pinar and Grumet present an autobiographical and self-transformative theory of curriculum that (cl)aims to explore the complex relations between pedagogical encounters. Despite its focus on embodied experience and affective intensities, this developmental point of view remains wedded to a series of deep-seated assumptions wherein humans are positioned as a species that is not only categorically different than those non-human bodies with whom we share the planet, but also a species that is capable of controlling and transforming earthly encounters in concordance with all-too-human will and desires. In light of the impending social, political, ecological, and by extension, educational crises now gathering force and speed across the globe, how might curriculum discourse take seriously the challenge of dismantling, with humility, human species-supremacist planetary politics in order to attune to those encounters that extend beyond all-too-human regimes of representation and an all-knowing human subject? Taking off from this question, this theoretical exploration unfolds the potential for science fictioning to offer new intensities and charges, that is, speculative and fabulated alternatives to the what-already-is in the field of curriculum research. Drawing on the work of Pinar and Grumet, this chapter aims to relaunch curriculum discourse into strange futures in order to propose counterintuitive scenarios and incompossible worlds that might unsettle and singularize otherwise diminished conditions of pedagogical possibility.
