The secret of ‘Will’ in new times: The affordances of a cloud curriculum.

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The Secret of ‘Will’ in new times: The affordances of a cloud curriculum.

Hibbert, K.

One of outcomes of a ‘knowledge economy’ and its corresponding surveillance mechanisms is the competitive anxiety it spawns amongst governments intent on seeing their schools outperform the others on international testing regimes. The challenge is figuring out how to integrate accountability without systematically dismantling the very essence of teaching and learning. Teachers largely enact the culture they live, and they have been living in a culture in which “teacher proof” materials proliferate, and curricular prescription abounds (Lofty, 2006). The literature on Governmentality offers us one way to talk about this phenomenon. Yet within governmentality, teachers have both the privilege and the responsibility to practice freedom. How might we break away from reductionist modes of assessment and capture learning in situ? How might experiences from interdisciplinary educational settings inform thinking about what we do in schools? How might changing the way teachers and students interact with one another (space, resources, form) translate teaching and learning? Actor network theory helps explain how participation in activities or networks mobilizes practices in particular ways. In this chapter, I explore the notion of freedom in the context of a nascent ‘cloud curriculum’ for teaching Shakespeare, leveraging multimodal affordances made visible through the efforts of New Literacy scholars.

In Hamilton, M., Heydon, R., Hibbert, K. and Stooke, R. (Eds)., Negotiating spaces for literacy: Multimodality and governmentality. London, UK: Bloomsbury.

See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/negotiating-spaces-for-literacy-learning-9781472587480/#sthash.3e5hgI9c.dpuf