ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Rita L. Irwin's work has focused for decades, on the integrated capacities of art for feelings of relational aliveness. Irwin's scholarship began in a time in twentieth century history, when curriculum theory had undergone a radical 10-year revolution. The revolution's rebels who dedicated their careers to the labour of moving curriculum in the 1970s, from a practical and bureaucratic field to one that augmented the relational subject, were particularly impactful. Irwin, Rogers and Farrell argue for the role of historical agreements between indigenous peoples and early European settlers in both Australian and Canadian multicultural policies. Curriculum reconceptualists profoundly challenged educational practice that anchored the self that was to be educated to an objective existence that was prior and exterior to the form of its expression.
