Just in the midst of reviewing Cynthia Chambers' 1999 article again: A Topography for Canadian Curriculum Theory. I am really enjoying how this specific piece of her work is helping me to conceptualize an understanding of my educational experiences up in Kapuskasing from 1975 until 1992. "The school curriculum was," in many ways as she reminds me, " a colonial curriculum in that home was either somewhere else or not worth consideration," in terms of what we were asked to learn at school (p. 137). In 1978, My parents enrolled me into the French Catholic schooling system in Kapuskasing. They thought it was important to learn the language of the other, in order to truly be considered Canadian--even though we only spoke English at home. Many of our textbooks were written by Quebec authors, and as a result, we read very little into the daily habits of Franco-Ontarian culture. Our curriculum indeed was always about somewhere else. In a sense we were always alienated outsiders within this rural logging town's school curriculum. Outside of the administrated urban curriculum implemented within our school-- one colonial Empire against an(other).
I wonder how I might, as Chambers suggests,
"cultivate a new kind of curricular imagination that not only honours the multitude of ways the Canadian landscape shapes how Canadians “see” things, but, more importantly, that explores how such shaping itself is an active process that cannot be simply described through the Eurocentric instrumentalities of previous generations. (pp. 142-143) ...in terms of re-membering such rural curricular experiences.
I wonder....
POSTED BY NICHOLAS NG-A-FOOK AT 12:56 PM
