Spatial and temporal tensions come to the fore in rural education where the artifice of contemporary education comes more into view—and is more stark in the absence of the urban ubiquity of institutional and administered life.
In rural places, educators are seen less able to conform education to its predicates (‘curriculum’ as something that requires schedules and prescribed checklists). Less able to accept education on its own (institutional) terms, they are forced to adapt education to something else. What that something else is an open question, the quintessential curricular question.
In this brief video we begin with five teachers and a teacher/administrator as they outline some of the terms of the tensions of curriculum as they live them. They live and work in four rural school districts in British Columbia, in the Kootenay and Peace River regions and the Islands of Lasqueti and Haida Gwaii. The interviews took place from 2012 to 2016.
Let’s begin with their own struggles to articulate and create on the bases of the tensions of curriculum made so clear in rural education, where necessitated instead is a search for something in the name of education that they allude to, of greater importance beyond:
Some questions to consider (we recommend brief small group discussions that can each then ‘compare notes’ about the different directions opened in how such ‘complicated’ conversations can go):
How do you respond to this video?
What does it bring to mind for you?
What questions do you have upon viewing this video?
What is ‘curriculum’ in the predominant view of the educators?
What are the implied constraints of curriculum on education as these educators practice it?
What are the tensions these educators articulate?
What do they do with the tensions? How do they live them?
Do they choose tensions about curriculum over conformity with it? For what reasons?
What is the place of curriculum, in their view?
In the name of what are these educators professing education?
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