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TELLING AND LIVING THE TRUTH: SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSALS DECLARED AND EMBODIED IN EARLY CHILDHOOD CURRICULUM NARRATIVES

Castner, Daniel J
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428348627

Abstract Details

2015, PHD, Kent State University, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies.
There are numerous challenges faced by early childhood educators striving to think, speak and act democratically within the context of American public schools. Not least of which are the dogmatic thought traditions, mastery oriented discourses, and authoritarian structures of management that have become engrained into our cultures of curriculum. For a teacher of young children to engage in practices that are ethically consistent with the democratic rhetoric of their institutional mission statements, they must think, voice and act upon non-dogmatic and thus counter-cultural ideas. The focus of this research is to shed light upon the ethical commitments expressed through the truth telling stories of six public school early childhood teachers’ who work with and against the grains of their cultures of curriculum. Structured by Pinar’s (2012) notion of currere, a collective narrative was composed utilizing a critical bricolage methodology with six early childhood teachers’ accounts, including my own. Simultaneously deconstructing mastery oriented discourses and reconstructing discourses of event, this research embraces an immediate empiricism that is more germane to the everyday life happenings of public school early childhood teachers in the United States. As such, a transactional process of knowing is employed for analyzing the teachers’ narratives, which is put in dialogue with a democratic ontology and enacted through Alain Badiou’s (2001) notion of ethical fidelity. Data analysis first underscored teachers’ truth telling stories, which constituted their encounters with events that invoked them to think against the conventions of dogmatism and voice ideas that challenge dominant discourse. Situated within their cultures of curriculum, early childhood curriculum workers’ truth telling narratives served as invocations for them to express their various stories of becoming subjects to truth processes. Expressed as “subjective universals”, teachers’ reflections and their articulations of significant events exhibited qualities of democratic justice. Further, the teachers provided liberating accounts of their ethical fidelity to carry out these enunciated democratic virtues in the realities of their daily curriculum practices. A subjective universalism generated from truth processes recognizes early childhood curriculum workers’ historical agency and appreciates their capacity to think, speak and act with a humble commitment to justice for all in their irreplaceably open ended and evolving artistries of curriculum problem solving.
James Henderson, EdD (Committee Co-Chair)
Martha Lash, PhD (Committee Co-Chair)
Frank Ryan, PhD (Committee Member)
327 p.
Curriculum Development; Early Childhood Education; Education; Teacher Education; Teaching
Early Childhood Teacher Education, Curriculum Development, Ethical Fideltiy, Transactional Pedagogy, Alain Badiou, John Dewey, Curriculum Leadership, Teacher Leaders

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Castner, D. J. (2015). TELLING AND LIVING THE TRUTH: SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSALS DECLARED AND EMBODIED IN EARLY CHILDHOOD CURRICULUM NARRATIVES [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428348627

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Castner, Daniel. TELLING AND LIVING THE TRUTH: SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSALS DECLARED AND EMBODIED IN EARLY CHILDHOOD CURRICULUM NARRATIVES. 2015. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428348627.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Castner, Daniel. "TELLING AND LIVING THE TRUTH: SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSALS DECLARED AND EMBODIED IN EARLY CHILDHOOD CURRICULUM NARRATIVES." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428348627

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1428348627
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© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.