Papers by Peter M Nelson
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2023
This article springs from our readings and re-readings of The Overstory (Powers, 2018), a text th... more This article springs from our readings and re-readings of The Overstory (Powers, 2018), a text that moved us and changed us. In this article, we conceive of The Overstory as an affective aesthetic text, agentic in its capacity to jolt readers awake and precipitate ontoepistemological swerves in new and unexpected directions. We build from visions of textual engagements that bring a reader to life, disclosing new pathways and possibilities for how to be, feel, and know one another in the world, a world replete with ethical responsibilities, matterings, and entanglements that stretch far beyond the human. Disassembling The Overstory, we string together particular threads with theory and our own engagements with the novel, offering speculative curriculum/classroom futures—visions of what agentic texts like The Overstory can quite literally do (open up, bind together, create, shape, and so on) in social studies education.
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2022
This essay seeks to trouble the binary of light and dark in the theorizing of curriculum. Through... more This essay seeks to trouble the binary of light and dark in the theorizing of curriculum. Through our play with shadows (as umbral, penumbral, and anteumbral), we seek to show how shadowy spaces—refuge—can emerge in curriculum. We do this by exploring social studies teaching and the digital ethics of shadowy spaces (Black Twitter, cancel ‘culture,’ and the dark web) to illustrate the differences between spaces of speaking back versus hiding from. We do so to critique the binary of light and dark both as a metaphor for official and unofficial curricula, but also seen and unseen in discourse.
Democracy & Education, 2022
In Re-centering Civics: A Framework for Building Dispositions and Action Opportunities, the autho... more In Re-centering Civics: A Framework for Building Dispositions and Action Opportunities, the authors presented a framework to help social studies teachers in any subject or grade level re-center civic education. The authors' article draws from the C3 Framework and C3Teachers .org to offer six civic dispositions teachers might focus on cultivating with their students, and the article highlights ways in which student engagements with any historical inquiry might be steered toward real-world civic action. In this response, we underscore the strengths of Re-centering Civics while also outlining a necessary, critical attention to the concepts undergirding the authors' framework. Our response builds from Re-centering Civics by offering examples of how the concepts at play in the initial article might be reconfigured, how teacher questioning can be made more critical, how issues of diversity and power can be more effectively attended to, and how the everyday, contextual limitations of teachers might affect their ability to carry out this framework. Our response aims to strengthen the authors' admirable project, one we are fully aligned with: integrating thoughtful, critical, and deliberate civic education-and meaningful action-into social studies education writ large.
Academic Rationalism, 2022
Academic rationalism is a centuries-old approach to school curriculum that values traditional con... more Academic rationalism is a centuries-old approach to school curriculum that values traditional content and classical Western conceptions of the role of curriculum. Academic rationalists propose that the purpose of education is inherently tied to sustaining and perpetuating the cultural heritage of a given society – its myths, histories, ethics, and valued knowledge. This kind of knowledge, often referred to as the liberal arts or a liberal education, is often represented by a canon (i.e. the literary canon or the Western canon). The curriculum serves as a vehicle of cultural transmission, one that moves from one generation to the next, preserving and handing down the wisdom, eternal truths, and cultural heritage of past generations to the young and uneducated members of society. Academic rationalists value intellectual, intuitive, and deductive reasoning as ways of knowing. Epistemologically, the approach contrasts with empiricism as a way of knowing; whereas empiricists rely on the senses, evidence, and inquiry to develop and justify knowledge, academic rationalists prioritise close reading and textual interpretations built from scholarly precedent.
Theory & Research in Social Education, 2021
This conceptual article uses new materialism, and its particular focus on material things, as a l... more This conceptual article uses new materialism, and its particular focus on material things, as a lens of analysis in social studies education in order to demonstrate alternative ways in which social studies education researchers and teachers might engage in inquiry. Historically, social studies curriculum and teaching have centered human agency and its domination of the material, natural world. However, this article argues that an attendance to things, and to the relational-material entanglements we find ourselves in, might guide us toward a reconsideration of how particular ideals and concepts are (and ought to be) represented in social studies curriculum, teaching, and learning. This article models how social studies analyses of material things in past and current events might take shape, exploring how natural things like Hurricane Maria and COVID-19, as well as human-made things like statues, parks, and textbooks, are both agentic and capable of impacting—diminishing or enhancing—the agency of human beings. We discuss how social studies teachers and teacher educators might enact such a focus in their classrooms, offering examples of how natural and human-made things might be integrated into social studies curriculum and teaching.
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2022
In a world facing climate crisis, a growing divide between rich and poor, racial strife, and a ri... more In a world facing climate crisis, a growing divide between rich and poor, racial strife, and a rise of xenophobic populism, social studies educators are obligated to investigate social issues in ways that might lead toward more just, less-destructive futures. This paper theorizes a new materialist social studies curriculum—a curriculum attentive to matter, nonhuman species, and anthropocentric representations of nature and the environment—with the aim of uncovering alternative inquiries and responsibilities that might help us flourish as teachers, students, and citizens. Throughout this paper, we argue that a new materialist lens can reconfigure and enliven social studies curriculum, and our corresponding analysis centers on particular events and concepts in the Michigan K-12 Social Studies Standards, considering how prevalent, normative representations reify damaging ways of being and knowing. This paper contributes to ongoing discourses regarding the boundaries, topics, and events that ought to comprise social studies curriculum, and we conclude by speculating new ethical futures for our field.
Home School Researcher, 2020
Parenting and teaching are relational acts; the relationship between a parent and child, a teache... more Parenting and teaching are relational acts; the relationship between a parent and child, a teacher and student—this is fertile ground, and some of our most meaningful and foundational experiences stem from these connections (van Manen, 2016). This paper aims to examine one such experience through a methodological lens that puts curriculum theory into conversation with the phenomenological (Rafferty, 2011): specifically, the lived-experience of children leaving, of the endings that are inevitably bound up with the practices of parenting and teaching. Reflecting upon our experiences as children and students might enrich our present-day practice as parents and teachers (Dewey, 1938/1997; Pinar, 1975); stemming from this, a phenomenological interview I conducted with my mother guides this paper, and my own experiences as a child and student are also brought to bear. This paper concludes with suggestions that diverge in two directions: (1) what an attunement to the phenomenon of children leaving might offer our practice as teachers, and (2) how this type of reflective and intentional self-analysis—a sort of qualitative research that is reflexive and open—might allow our work as parents and teachers to flourish in new and previously undisclosed ways.
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2019
A growing body of literature (e.g., McIntyre, 2018; Prado, 2018; Thurston, 2018) on “post-truth” ... more A growing body of literature (e.g., McIntyre, 2018; Prado, 2018; Thurston, 2018) on “post-truth” examines a marked decline in the value of objective facts and an increase in the value of personal belief, emotion, and subjective experience in the establishment of agreed-upon “truth” in society. Using empirical data from interviews and observations conducted with three social studies teachers, this project considers the disruptive potential of “post-truth” in social studies classrooms. The messy and opaque interplay between truth, emotion, and subjective experience is unpredictable within the project of learning, and this article takes it as a theoretical given that the “post-truth” emphasis on emotion and subjective experience demands a consideration of interiority—the inner-lives of teachers and students. An analysis of the interviews and observations suggests that the three teacher-participants are well-aware of the threat of disorder posed by “post-truth” discourses. In response, teachers resisted “post-truth” moments as a defense against the disorder that often accompanies emotional opinions, as well as the painful acknowledgement of truth’s inescapable discursivity. Additionally, this paper argues that many of the strategies and tactics teachers utilize to defend against “post-truth” moments suppress the emotional and psychical potentialities inherent to learning. This paper concludes by suggesting new ways forward within the “post-truth” quandary of facts, emotion, and interminable education (Felman, 1982).
Book Reviews by Peter M Nelson
Theory & Research in Social Education, 2017
Teachers College Record, 2017
British Journal of Educational Studies, 2021
Uploads
Papers by Peter M Nelson
Book Reviews by Peter M Nelson