Description: Conversations of Curriculum Reform is a retelling and recapturing of the school lives of students whose dialogue with their teacher and with each other is a transformative and tentative attempt to express and define their school experiences, which were complicated by the loss of two classmates. Meeting as adults, the former classmates reconsider their past and reinterpret their work as the author engages in a critical discourse on the limitations and complications of dialogical methodology. Grounded in phenomenology and compelled interpretatively by poststructuralist autobiographical insight, this book moves toward troubling the familiar notions of the personal and the spaces of autobiography in curriculum research and theory.
Review Quotes: «Educational autobiography can be done poorly or well - Kathryn M. Benson does it very well in this book. Using autobiography, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, Benson takes us through a rich, well-informed, and enlightening exploration of her consciousness as a teacher in Louisiana. This is curriculum theorizing at its best and should serve as a model for subsequent work in explorations of the lifeworld of teaching.» (Joe L. Kincheloe, Canada Research Chair, Faculty of Education, McGill University)
«Kathryn M. Benson's work boldly inquires into the heart of educational life via the voices of those most impacted by it - students and their experiences of curriculum and schooling. Intrigued by the 'embodied possibilities that draw' her to the classroom and the 'existential relation experienced in the pedagogical' act, Benson locates the source of school reform, and educational transformation in the voice and agency of students and teachers as well as in their mutual quest for understanding. This provocative book eloquently illuminates the lives of teachers and students held by threads of desire and distancing' as together they 'wander the borders of meaning' in uncovering and recovering their educational lives through reading and rewriting the texts of their own lives.» (Molly Quinn, Lecturer, Teachers College, Columbia University)