Critically considering and conceptualizing social contexts as curriculum

In Canada and the United States, many students, teachers, and families eagerly await the arrival of summer. For many adults—in education and elsewhere—turning the proverbial calendar page can also offer them alternative opportunities for rest and renewal, particularly if they are privileged enough to anticipate previously planned vacations or other leisure. Adults in Canada and the US often position students as having a shared understanding of the sanctity of the season. Broadly, in mainstream and popular culture media, students are portrayed as watching the clock tick down as they look forward to the freedom summer may afford. While some students may appreciate a break from a routine typically structured by an academic or school calendar, others value the chance to engage in activities not dictated to them. Others still may favor summer’s warmer and brighter days or the opportunity to spend more time than usual outdoors.

In the earliest days of summer 2023, revelry and merriment appeared to reverberate worldwide as members of the Beyhive went “on mute” during Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour and as Swifties “Tay-gated” outside US football stadiums where Taylor Swift performed her Eras concert. Typically, shows such as these are marked by their ephemerality. However, thanks to concertgoers’ lifestreaming of the events on TikTok and Instagram, the celebratory vibes endured long after the cheers ended.

The networked sharing of attendees’ videos across social media feeds, however, also cast shadows on the women’s performances and their legions of fans as hateful rhetoric sometimes erupted in response. Often, one did not need to scroll deep on social media feeds to find examples of the negative discourse that plagued fans’ posts. Occasionally, the systemic nature of toxic masculinity was made evident in the comments posters used to undermine the vibrant success of the two superstars. At other times, responses to fan videos attacked the fans themselves, such as through targeted comments about fans’ physical appearances or their vocal habits.

Beyoncé’s and Taylor Swift’s prominence in pop culture, their storied fandoms, and the resulting hegemonic reactions that seemed to follow them are critical examples of how power and politics are woven into the social fabric of our everyday lives—both online and offline. The so-called culture wars are not limited to the nine months of the academic year. Instead, far- and alt-right entities persist in foregrounding assimilation and complacency as necessary solutions and justifying acts like the removal of curricular and social (hi)stories from classrooms across the summer months. Thus, the negative discourse surrounding the success of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift seemed to be a symptom of how cis white patriarchy and white supremacist settler coloniality exist and persist far beyond school walls.

Within this issue of Curriculum Inquiry, the four feature articles showcase how social contexts influence and inform individuals and communities in and out of school and across face-to-face and digital spaces. The authors make clear calls for educational researchers to better understand social context as delicate and dangerous. In turn, in their critical qualitative inquiries, the authors illuminate the necessity and the urgency of examining social contexts to evoke transformative social change. Drawing on contemporary and historical examples, each author provides readers with a different perspective for doing so. When read together, the four texts illustrate how an array of critical perspectives that center humanizing discourse and action can cumulatively shape an alternative future for schools and society.

In her piece titled “Curriculum as Endarkened Feminist Third Space: Alternative Possibilities, Revision, Reciprocity, and Surrender in Teacher Professional Development,” Tiffany Nyachae (2023) opens the issue by showcasing how she fostered an Endarkened Feminist Third Space with three in-service teachers in the northeastern United States. Specifically, Nyachae narrates how she created and facilitated a “Race Space” Critical Professional Development (RSCPD) series over eight months by adapting a practitioner inquiry stance. She notes that she initially developed the RSCPD as an alternative to traditional teacher development models she experienced that rarely foregrounded race. Nyachae intentionally planned to implement the RSCPD to support in-service teachers engaged in race talk and, ultimately, in social justice teaching. Nevertheless, she did not expect to actualize an Endarkened Feminist Third Space, “that is, a space composed of reciprocity, surrender, and a willingness to revise one’s performances of the present” while attending to “the ever-present and historical experiences of Black women” (pp. 301, 302).

Drawing on the work of Dillard (2006), hooks (1994), and others, Nyachae (2023) documents how her work with/in the professional development space as an active participant made clear to her the possibilities of an Endarkened Feminist Third Space for challenging commonplace narratives while affording alternative perspectives and possibilities. In particular, Nyachae outlines for readers how an RSCPD provides new opportunities for teachers to learn with and from one another while bringing “their whole selves” to the professional development space (p. 303). Such freedom, argues Nyachae, led to a new sense of vulnerability and agency amongst RSCPD participants.

Further, and as Nyachae (2023) showcases in her findings, the actualization of an Endarkened Feminist Third Space resulted in teachers choosing to enact social justice in their local contexts in explicit and subversive ways. Through detailed descriptions of the focal teachers’ and her own challenges and choices, Nyachae underlines how their support of one another bolstered their willingness to dialogue about the racist logic of schooling and how this helped them to instantiate change related to injustices they witnessed in their local district.

Nyachae (2023) and her teacher colleagues’ work to actualize an Endarkened Feminist Third Space occurred outside school-mandated professional development; yet, the text provides essential lessons for fostering spaces of teacher learning that not only encourage but celebrate instances when teachers transgress oppressive “norms” that remain commonplace across formal and informal learning communities. As Nyachae highlights, this includes teachers’ investigations of their racialized practices and a critical reimagining of professional development pedagogies to focus more on how social contexts and political performances inherently intertwine with classroom happenings.

In the issue’s second article, “Unmuted: The Racial Politics of Silent Classrooms,” Antía González Ben (2023) similarly calls into question how seemingly neutral curricular guidelines perpetuate harmful “norms” of white culture. While Nyachae’s (2023) article sheds light on how traditional professional development remains silent on issues of race, González Ben (2023) amplifies how teacher-focused curricular guides in music education promote the notion “that teaching and learning must take place in silence” (p. 318) and asks readers to become more attuned to how silence is used as a (racialized) classroom management tool.

González Ben’s (2023) argument about the role of silence as a (racialized) classroom management tool promoted in music education teacher textbooks is interesting for several reasons. First, the social context of her inquiry is quite ripe for notable discussion insofar as few in US society or schools might think of silence when discussing music education; instead, most likely imagine the context of music classes to be one of the least quiet entities in a school.

Importantly, González Ben (2023) also considers the broader social context and time in which she completed her review of the commonplace music curriculum textbooks. In particular, she writes with an understanding that she must not only tend to how power intersects with culture and race but that she must position racism as an enduring social problem. To do so, she draws on literature from across the disciplines to contend that the assumptions that underlie the curricular textbooks actively work to justify the silence and marginalization of students of Color. For instance, she interrogates the role the seemingly innocuous “absence” of sound facilitates in music education classrooms and how it reinscribes what Stoever (2016) referred to as the sonic color line.

Second, González Ben (2023) uses discourse analysis to critically examine 20 years of published music education materials. Specifically, she emphasizes notions of what a “good” student and/or music classroom sound like across such documents. In doing so, she calls attention to how these long-held beliefs about “sound management” are built on a foundation of white supremacy. Through various examples, González Ben identifies how music education constructs white, middle-class ways of knowing as “normal” and how, almost by default, silence (read here as compliance) takes shape as a politically neutral (and necessary) entity.

However, González Ben (2023) argues silence is not “a neutral acoustic phenomenon” (p. 320). Rather, as she calls attention to, silence is a culturally specific and power-laden disciplinary tool that many teachers invoke to force compliance by unjustly positioning Black and other racialized students as “too loud” for school (and, often, society). In this way, teachers who assume silence to be the “default” volume—by normalizing judgment and “Othering” of varied sonic knowledges and participations—are perpetuating anti-Blackness and the sonic color line. Ultimately, González Ben’s conceptual argument about how the sonic color line is codified at school adds a new verse to the chorus of critical scholars who have long noted how social contexts and “the politics of silence, race, gender, and class co-constitute each other” (p. 322).

Critically, the texts by Nyachae (2023) and González Ben (2023) both invite readers to reflect on how diverse social contexts and power-laden institutional structures inform which individual and communal (hi)stories are written, refused, or erased. In this issue’s third article, “‘The Word “Getting Over” is Really Weird’: Storying Disability in Desired Futures,” Addie Shrodes (2023) unpacks how the four trans and queer disabled youth in their study strategically used digital artifacts to imagine the(ir) future. Whereas Nyachae (2023) and González Ben (2023) focused more centrally on how present and past moments influence daily experiences of (erasure in) school and society, Shrodes and the youth with whom she worked illuminate how they aimed to resist or deny such erasure by “insistently engag[ing] in imagination because of, and with, their illness or disability” (p. 342). However, like Nyachae and González Ben, Shrodes articulates the necessity of seeing the centering of marginalized (hi)stories and persons as an ongoing process grounded in a communal pursuit for collective liberation.

In their piece, Shrodes (2023) works at the axes of disability justice and crip theories not only to understand how disability shapes the focal youth’s imagined futures but also to nuance the details of their imaginings. To do so, Shrodes used artifact-mediated interviews with the youth she came to know at a pediatric medical center in the midwestern United States. Shrodes also documents for readers how the young people’s (and their own) experiences with disability “give rise to valuable practices of meaning-making and imagination” (p. 354). Evidenced through interviews and an adapted approach to visual participatory research, Shrodes used her analysis to focus on how youth conceptualized more just social futures using digital artifacts.

For instance, in their findings, Shrodes emphasizes instances wherein the youth illuminated disability in ways that mainstream media and digital platforms actively appeared to erase or keep hidden. As she notes, for some youth, that meant relying on contemporary portrayals of collective joy and self-love amongst trans and queer folks, including Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. In another example, Shrodes describes how a youth highlights the influence and interplay of social contexts (including the climate crisis) on young people. Further, Shrodes foregrounds how the sociopolitical context propels conversations about social responsibility, online and offline.

In this issue’s final article, titled “Shitposting and Public Pedagogy,” Peter Woods (2023) also challenges readers to consider the possibilities and practicalities digital technologies might afford curriculum studies. Specifically, Woods forwards an argument that showcases how shitposts—discursive tools that seek to unsettle traditional digital rhetorics on social media, often through memes—should be seen as important communicative tools. Moreover, he posits that critical media literacy and public pedagogy scholars must contemplate how shitposts might offer alternative insights into examining social media posts as communicative acts. Further still, Woods suggests that rather than overlook seemingly “meaningless” shitposts, scholars should more closely examine how shitposts are used to replicate, unsettle, and critique traditional communicative practices. There is, as Woods suggests, much more to these shitposts than what meets the eye, particularly when considered alongside the social contexts in which they are produced and taken up.

To showcase his argument about the educative potential of shitposts, Woods (2023) draws on a handful of examples to illustrate four components common to shitposts: meaninglessness, discursive unsettlement, internet ugly aesthetic, and meta-languaging. By highlighting these four components, Woods invites readers to “read” the example memes with him and emphasizes how his own reactions and wonderings about whether or not he read the shitposts correctly stemmed from “the subtle challenge that shitposts present to social media discourses” (p. 364). In turn, he challenges the nonsensicality ascribed to shitposts by arguing that shitposts, in fact, “overtly reveal the constructed nature of online content,” including the ways power operates (p. 366).

Calling attention to the form, function, and uptake of shitposts, Woods (2023) ultimately demonstrates how shitposts do (and do not) embody a critical educational praxis while simultaneously showing how they might also do both at the same time. For instance, in the latter part of his article, Woods (2023) centers his argument on the potential of shitposts as public pedagogy by showcasing the rhetorical strategies used in focal shitposts. First, Woods calls attention to the establishment and evolution of social media user @dril’s concept of corncobbing. Then, he describes a corporate shitpost from the commercial juice product Sunny Delight (more commonly called Sunny D). However, across these examples, Woods also takes care to point out to readers how far-right and conservative groups also use shitposting, including how they use shitposts to reinscribe oppression. In doing so, Woods offers critical insights into the often-overlooked rhetorical sophistication and the underlying—sometimes unclear—cultural politics of shitposts.

The four articles in this issue reiterate the necessity of scholars attending to the social context in order to transform schools and society. Individually, each author showcases how sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts continuously influence everyday interactions, whether in compulsory professional development settings, mandated curricular materials, or digital texts produced and shared across an array of online spaces. Together, these articles articulate imaginative and critically urgent methods for addressing how power remains at play in the social world and the need to critically read not just the word but the world to do so.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.