Body Knowledge And Curriculum

Body Knowledge and Curriculum examines student understandings of body knowledge in the context of creating and interrogating visual art and culture. It illustrates a six-month research study conducted in an alternative secondary school in a large urban city. During the research project, students created a number of visual art works using a diversity of material explorations as a means to think through the body as a process of exchange and as a bodied encounter. The book engages with feminist theories of touch and inter-embodiment, questioning the materiality and lived experiences of the body in knowledge production, in order to provoke different ways of theorizing self/other relations in teaching and learning. This volume is important because it explores the ways in which youth understand the complex, textured, and often contradictory discourses of body knowledge, and seeks to intentionally create alternative pedagogical and curricular practices to ones that subscribe to a healthy body model. Additionally, enacting educational research as living inquiry, this book is an exemplar of the arts-based methodology, a/r/tography. Body Knowledge and Curriculum is a valuable text for courses in curriculum theory, art education, qualitative research methodologies, visual culture and pedagogies, and feminist theory. Appropriate for advanced undergraduate students, pre-service teacher education students, and graduate students, the book provides an interdisciplinary investigation into body research.

A must-read for parents and teachers, this major bestseller reveals how cultural literacy is the hidden key to effective education and presents 5000 facts that every literate American should know. In this forceful manifesto Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues that children in the United States are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. They lack cultural literacy: a grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their audience already has. Even if a student has a basic competence in the English language, he or she has little chance of entering the American mainstream without knowing what a silicon chip is, or when the Civil War was fought. An important work that has engendered a nationwide debate on our educational standards, Cultural Literacy is a required reading for anyone concerned with our future as a literate nation.

In the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK(R) Guide), the IEEE Computer Society establishes a baseline for the body of knowledge for the field of software engineering, and the work supports the Society's responsibility to promote the advancement of both theory and practice in this field. It should be noted that the Guide does not purport to define the body of knowledge but rather to serve as a compendium and guide to the knowledge that has been developing and evolving over the past four decades. Now in Version 3.0, the Guide's 15 knowledge areas summarize generally accepted topics and list references for detailed information. The editors for Version 3.0 of the SWEBOK(R) Guide are Pierre Bourque (Ecole de technologie superieure (ETS), Universite du Quebec) and Richard E. (Dick) Fairley (Software and Systems Engineering Associates (S2EA)).

This book aims to define new theoretical, practical, and methodological directions in educational research centered on the role of the body in teaching and learning. Based on our phenomenological experience of the world, it draws on perspectives from arts-education and aesthetics, as well as curriculum theory, cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology. These are arenas with a rich untapped cache of experience and inquiry that can be applied to the notions of schooling, teaching and learning. The book provides examples of state-of-the-art, empirical research on the body in a variety of educational settings. Diverse art forms, curricular settings, educational levels, and cultural traditions are selected to demonstrate the complexity and richness of embodied knowledge as they are manifested through institutional structures, disciplines, and specific practices.

The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.

This book presents a new way for educators at all levels - from early years to university - to think about curriculum priorities. It focuses on the curriculum as a form of specialised knowledge, optimally designed to enable students to gain access to the best knowledge available in any field. Papers jointly written by the authors over the last eight years are revised for this volume. It draws on the sociology of knowledge and in particular the work of Emile Durkheim and Basil Bernstein, opening up the possibilities for collaborative inter-disciplinary enquiry with historians, philosophers and psychologists. Although primarily directed to researchers, university teachers and graduate students, its arguments about specialised knowledge have profound implications for policy makers.

Today's society is obsessed with the body, its size, shape and healthiness. Governments, business and the popular media, spend and earn fortunes encouraging populations to get healthy, eat properly, exercise daily and get thin. But how are current social trends and attitudes towards the body reflected in the curriculum of schools, in the teaching of Physical Education and Health? How do teachers and health professionals influence young people's experiences of their own and others' bodies? Is health education liberating or merely another form of regulation and social control? Drawing together some of the latest research on the body and schooling, Body Knowledge and Control offers a sharp and challenging critique of (post) modern-day attitudes toward obesity, health, childhood and the mainstream science and business interests that promote narrow body-centred ways of thinking. Includes: * A critical history of notions of body, identity and health in schools. * Analysis of the 'obesity epidemic', eating disorders * Analysis of the influence of nurtured body image in racism, sexism, homophobia and body elitism in schools.

In 2008 the first in a series of symposia established a ‘social realist’ case for ‘knowledge’ as an alternative to the relativist tendencies of the constructivist, post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches dominant in the sociology of education. The second symposium focused on curriculum, and the development of a theoretical language grounded in social realism to talk about issues of knowledge and curriculum. Finally, the third symposium brought together researchers in a broad range of contexts to build on these ideas and arguments and, with a concerted empirical focus, bring these social realist ideas and arguments into conversation with data. Knowledge, Curriculum and Equity: Social Realist Perspectives contains the work of the third symposium, where the strengths and gaps in the social realist approach are identified and where there is critical recognition of the need to incrementally extend the theories through empirical study. Fundamentally, the problem that social realism is seeking to address is about understanding the social conditions of knowledge production and exchange as well as its structuring in the curriculum and in pedagogy. The central concern is with the on-going social reproduction of inequality through schooling, and exploring whether and how foregrounding specialised knowledge and its access holds the possibility for interrupting it. This book consists of 13 chapters by different authors working in Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. From very different vantage points the authors focus their theoretical and empirical sights on the assumptions about knowledge that underpin educational processes and the pursuit of more equitable schooling for all.

Written at a time of uncertainty about the implications of the English government's curriculum policies, Knowledge and the Future School engages with the debate between the government and large sections of the educational community. It provides a forward-looking framework for head teachers, their staff and those involved in training teachers to use when developing the curriculum of individual schools in the context of a national curriculum. While explaining recent ideas in the sociology of educational knowledge, the authors draw on Michael Young's earlier research with Johan Muller to distinguish three models of the curriculum in terms of their assumptions about knowledge, referred to in this book as Future 1, Future 2 and Future 3. They link Future 3 to the idea of 'powerful knowledge' for all pupils as a curriculum principle for any school, arguing that the question of knowledge is intimately linked to the issue of social justice and that access to 'powerful knowledge' is a necessary component of the education of all pupils. Knowledge and the Future School offers a new way of thinking about the problems that head teachers, their staff and curriculum designers face. In charting a course for schools that goes beyond current debates, it also provides a perspective that policy makers should not avoid.

The body matters, in practice. How then might we think about the body in our work in and on professional practice, learning and education? What value is there in realising and articulating the notion of the professional practitioner as crucially embodied? Beyond that, what of conceiving of the professional practice field itself as a living corporate body? How is the body implicated in understanding and researching professional practice, learning and education? Body/Practice is an extensive volume dedicated to exploring these and related questions, philosophically and empirically. It constitutes a rare but much needed reframing of scholarship relating to professional practice and its relation with professional learning and professional education more generally. It takes bodies seriously, developing theoretical frameworks, offering detailed analyses from empirical studies, and opening up questions of representation. The book is organized into four parts: I. ‘Introducing the Body in Professional Practice, Learning and Education’; II. ‘Thinking with the Body in Professional Practice’; III. ‘The Body in Question in Health Professional Education and Practice’; IV. ‘Concluding Reflections’. It brings together researchers from a range of disciplinary and professional practice fields, including particular reference to Health and Education. Across fifteen chapters, the authors explore a broad range of issues and challenges with regard to corporeality, practice theory and philosophy, and professional education, providing an innovative, coherent and richly informed account of what it means to bring the body back in, with regard to professional education and beyond.