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Our contemporary historical moment is often characterized by social, political, economic, technological, and educational complexities, as well as lived experiences of estrangement, isolation, insecurity, loss, threat, and trauma. Within this difficult context, conventional understandings of community which often rely upon assimilation or exclusion are devoid of hope, and new imaginations of community and community building are needed to cultivate generative, nurturing, sustaining experiences of life together. Through a multi-threaded exploration of the curriculum as embodied and emerging in a living ecosystem, new conceptualizations of community building may emerge. Drawing upon poststructural feminism, poetics, autobiography, and metaphors of the maternal body, this book explores the complicated intersections of difference, embodiment, emergence, and relationality within the curriculum, to reimagine the possibilities of building the other community, one inclusive of difference. Facing the challenges of our time with hope, grace, and creativity, this book is uniquely positioned in a middle space between the theoretical concerns of the academic community and the needs for accessibility by the practitioner within an instructional context.
List of contents
Acknowledgments - Introduction: Complicated Stories - Stories of Community - The Poetics of Difference - The Gifts and Works of the Body - Emergence - Relationality and the Desire to Encounter the Other - Reimagining Curriculum as Community Building - Index.
About the author
Liesa Griffin Smith earned her PhD in curriculum studies from Oklahoma State University. With more than 20 years lived experience as a teacher and school leader, Liesa currently serves as Lead High School Principal at Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences.
Summary
This book explores the complicated intersections of difference, embodiment, emergence, and relationality within the curriculum, to reimagine the possibilities of building the other community, one inclusive of difference.
Report
"As all great books do, Curriculum as Community Building introduced me to something I hadn't thought about before-the intersections between curriculum, community, and autobiography. Smith elegantly considers several motifs, weaving, hostess, soil, in order to help us understand how to move in the world-by returning to the/our/a past and becoming mindful of how curriculum can serve as community building. This view is an essential way to think about how to respond to the 'narratives of estrangement, exile, and trauma,' that exist in society today. Smith's book is a must-read for those interested in community building, service-learning, and curriculum."-Jacqueline Bach, Louisiana State University
