Table Of ContentCurriculum Work and Social
Justice Leadership in a
Post-Reconceptualist Era
This book urgently confronts systems of privilege and oppression within
education, and combines concepts including bifocality, currere, and
conscientização to highlight the role of dialogical and autobiographical
reflection in dismantling neoliberal and colonial logics at the level of
theory, policy, and practice.
The author purposefully connects methods and concepts from
curriculum, social studies and the arts, and offers insights into iden-
tity formation, social position, and social transformation. As such,
Jales Coutinho presents an opportunity for curricularists to evaluate
the connections between their lives and their work within and across
mutually- constitutive discursive and material contexts, and critically
analyze their agency, their relational encounters, and their position as
changemakers within unjust social realities. Focusing on the intersec-
tion of curriculum theory with educational policy and leadership, the
text calls for a mutual “becoming conscious” to illustrate how this can
affect a paradigmatic shift toward social justice education, lived curric-
ulum, and emancipatory pedagogy.
With the potential to expand and set the tone for a long-standing
curriculum conversation for curriculum theorists, educational leaders
and policymakers concerning the contours and dimensions of our work
in schools, research institutions, and policy circles, it crucially asks: what
does it mean to engage in the complicated conversation of curriculum
work in a post-reconceptualist era?
Allan Michel Jales Coutinho has earned his Bachelor of Arts in Interna-
tional Development in Education from Green Mountain College, USA,
and Nagoya University, Japan. He is also a graduate from the Interna-
tional Education Policy Program at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. Allan has engaged in pivotal scholarly work in the field of
Curriculum Studies in Canada, at the University of Toronto and at the
University of British Columbia.
Studies in Curriculum Theory Series
Series Editor: William F. Pinar, University of British
Columbia, Canada
In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students
may not be able to keep up with the proliferation of different topical,
trendy book series in the field of curriculum theory. It will be a relief to
know that one publisher offers a balanced, solid, forward-looking series
devoted to significant and enduring scholarship, as opposed to a narrow
range of topics or a single approach or point of view. This series is con-
ceived as the series busy scholars and students can trust and depend on
to deliver important scholarship in the various “discourses” that com-
prise the increasingly complex field of curriculum theory.
The range of the series is both broad (all of curriculum theory) and
limited (only important, lasting scholarship)—including but not con-
fined to historical, philosophical, critical, multicultural, feminist, com-
parative, international, aesthetic, and spiritual topics and approaches.
Books in this series are intended for scholars and for students at the
doctoral and, in some cases, master’s levels.
Engaging with Meditative Inquiry in Teaching, Learning, and Research
Realizing Transformative Potentials in Diverse Contexts
Edited by Ashwani Kumar
National and Religious Ideologies in the Construction of Educational
Historiography
The Case of Felbiger and the Normal Method in Nineteenth Century
Teacher Education
Jil Winandy
Curriculum Work and Social Justice Leadership in
a Post-Reconceptualist Era
Attaining Critical Consciousness and Learning to Become
Allan Michel Jales Coutinho
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.
routledge.com/Studies-in-Curriculum-Theory-Series/book-series/
LEASCTS
Curriculum Work and Social
Justice Leadership in a
Post-Reconceptualist Era
Attaining Critical Consciousness and
Learning to Become
Allan Michel Jales Coutinho
With a Foreword by William F. Pinar
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2022 Taylor & Francis
The right of Allan Michel Jales Coutinho to be identified as
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jales Coutinho, Allan Michel, author.
Title: Curriculum work and social justice leadership in a
post-reconceptualist era : attaining critical consciousness and
learning to become / Allan Michel Jales Coutinho ; with a
foreword by William F. Pinar.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Studies in
curriculum theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021054857 (print) | LCCN 2021054858 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032037110 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032037127 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003188629 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Education--Curricula--Social aspects. |
Social justice and education. | Critical pedagogy.
Classification: LCC LB1570 .J35 2022 (print) |
LCC LB1570 (ebook) | DDC 375/.001--dc23/eng/20211213
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054857
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054858
ISBN: 978-1-032-03711-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-03712-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-18862-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188629
Typeset in Baskerville
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgements xv
1 Introduction 1
2 Engaging in the complicated conversation of curriculum
work in a post-reconceptualist era 9
2.1 Bifocalizing “Self” and “Work” as unfolding
lexis, within and across contexts 14
2.2 Disrupting single thoughts 17
2.3 Confronting fears 23
2.4 Forging nexus 36
2.5 Fortifying nexus 48
2.6 Working across differences 60
2.6.1 Refusing denials 67
2.6.2 Talking with 80
2.7 Confronting dangers 87
3 A short autobiographical account about conscientização:
Critically bifocalizing “self” and “work” to learn
to become 101
4 Reconceptualizing the concept of “informed dialogue”
in policy circles: Embracing curriculum “as lived” 110
4.1 Informed dialogue: perceiving curriculum
(and everything else) as objects 115
4.1.1 The case of the school uniform 122
vi Contents
4.2 Complicated conversation: perceiving curriculum as subject 127
4.2.1 The case of schools’ cameras, doors,
and soccer courts 131
4.2.1.1 School cameras 132
4.2.1.2 Schools’ doors 135
4.2.1.3 Schools’ soccer courts 140
4.3 A lingering note 145
5 Valorizing the autobiographical con(text) in curriculum
work to learn to become 158
6 Conclusion 171
Index 175
Foreword
Who would guess this book represents a debut? Such a sophisticated
synoptic text—surely the text was composed by a seasoned scholar, cer-
tainly an exceptional theoretician, maybe even at the end of his career.
But no: Allan Michel Jales Coutinho is a junior scholar, but— as you will
see—a sage well beyond his years. In this text, he may have midwifed
a new era of curriculum studies: the field as a collective public moral
enterprise.
Such a collective public moral enterprise—that curriculum studies
can become—represents the delicate determined labor of “nexus and
proximity”1 from which emerge “critical possibilities for curriculum work
in this divisive post-reconceptualist era,” an era marred by “structural
inequalities, egregious social disparities, and malicious discrimination.”
These crimes continue to leave scars in the “torn lived experiences of
students and teachers,” as they—all of us, actually—struggle to survive
“under the oppressive capitalist systems,” systems structured by “racial-
ization and subjugation.” Jales Coutinho confronts both racialization
and subjugation, his vision vividly bifocal, a concept that allows him to
keep his feet on the ground while his heart and mind remain focused
on the sky, a set of panoramic ideals leading affirming our “learning
to become.” Jales Coutinho knows that “autobiographical inquiry is the
heart of education,” that “it is the organ which bumps the necessary
oxygen to the body so that we can ‘do,’ ‘live’ and ‘learn’ with and from
others throughout the course.” That italicized conjunction is crucial:
“Autobiography, when departing from a nexus of love towards love and
justice, can provide the reoxygenation of democracy itself.”
How so? For starters, autobiography is one way “to set free our crit-
ical tongues, minds, and hearts in the pursuit of justice.” But—Jales
Coutinho qualifies—“instead of analyzing lives in a vacuum, as if lives
are only conditioned to the free will of individuals, critical bifocality
induces researchers to see lives within the contexts of history, structure,
and institutions, and to uncover circuits of privilege and power.” This
is a praxis of conscientização, a bifocality that brings into focus a “nexus
of love, hospitality, and solidarity.” From this exhilarating zone of
viii Foreword
convergence we are encouraged to “analyze our ‘selves’ and our ‘work’
within and across contexts, uncovering circuits of privilege and oppres-
sion while locating these elements in more expansive, liberating, and
veracious perspectives.”
Being bifocal means making “fearless interpretations and negotia-
tions” that support an ongoing “commitment to alterity from a stand-
point of love, hospitality, and solidarity, and justice—a liberating project
of knowing, doing and becoming in the world.” What blocks us from
such a commitment? Jales Coutinho perceptively appreciates that what
threatens us is not only external oppression—certainly the historical
process of hierarchization and competition catalyzed by capitalism—
but also that which is “within our ‘selves,’ that is, within humanity.” He
emphasizes this crucial point: “The threat is not only ‘out there,’ it
resides and exists inside each one of us.” Subjective and social recon-
struction are reciprocally related.
In Jales Coutinho’s provocative conception, the “running of the
course” becomes an opportunity to understand our human experi-
ences and achieve agency. Conceptualizing “curriculum as nexus” ena-
bles Jales Coutinho to emphasize relationship: ethical commitments to
oneself and others that structure curriculum work as a collective public
moral enterprise. When bifocalizing “self” and “work”—keeping them
distinct but juxtaposed and connected—one engenders “critical agency,”
self-study in service to collective struggle towards justice.
Such self-study triggers what Jales Coutinho calls the “quest”—
enacted through inter and intragenerational conversations—that is
“learning to become.” He not only affirms such a running of the course,
he also enacts it, providing us searing autobiographical vignettes that
constitute a “dialogical encounter with readers.” He reports that it was
“longing to engage in this complicated conversation of curriculum work
as a collective public moral enterprise [that] galvanized me to get liber-
ated in the unknown and become vulnerable.” To this profound self-re-
flexive process—one of self-awakening while running the course—he
testifies in this text, enabling him to envision “futures of radical hope
for this troubling post-reconceptualist era.”
Such testimony is structured by several scenarios, including school uni-
forms, school cameras, school doors and school soccer courts, through
which he portrays how “policymakers, social justice educators and curric-
ularists can think about schooling and curricula.” Jales Coutinho’s anal-
ysis of these scenarios become propositions that “turn the relationship
between policy studies and curriculum work less contentious and colonial
and more relational and dialectical,” determined to “dismantle school-
ing’s obliviating circuits of privilege and oppression in our neoliberal
democracies, circuits whose modus operandi promotes self- aggrandizing
absorptivity while burying racialized, non-conforming, disabled bodies
in life-threatening limbos of precarity and dispossession.”
Foreword ix
Attentive to his own lived experience, Jales Coutinho acknowledges
that his home country—Brazil—continues to face “challenges” in com-
batting Covid-19, challenges exacerbated by the “ignoble policies under
the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.” Bolsonaro’s policies have also “pre-
cluded the inclusion of topics such as gender and racism in textbooks,”
policies that miseducate as they ensure injustice. Recent anti-Black and
anti-Asian racist hate crimes leave Jales Coutinho wondering whether
we as a species even have a future, wondering whether the tragedy of
the Commons is in fact an “irreversible event.” His—our—hope is rekin-
dled by Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, a text that proves “love, hospi-
tality, and solidarity are possible.” Love, hospitality, and solidarity he
actualizes by casting curriculum as a “collective public moral enterprise
within the nexus of theory, policy, and practice.”
“Bifocalization” is both a “yearning and a move that allows us to find
new situated and relational meanings for ‘self’ and ‘work’ in one’s
autobiographical lexis so that bonds of friendship and companionship
across differences become possible.” Bifocalization, then, requires us
to “seek multiple discursive and material contexts, even those that are
not conspicuously a part of one’s own,” affirming the “unfolding of the
relational and contextual “self,” an “attunement” with “what is beyond
[us].” Bifocalization encourages “the seeking and unfolding of a ‘multi-
dimensional’ consciousness, one that surpasses the present and the past,
the concrete and the abstract,” thereby supporting collective curriculum
work as “a locus for seekers, people who continuously strive to disrupt
single thoughts and set the tone for this post-reconceptualist conversa-
tion towards justice.” Bifocalization calls upon curriculum scholars to
“embrace criticality and name the circuits of privilege and oppression
that have led them to engage in the complicated conversation in the first
place.” Bifocalization “may support novel contextual and relational con-
ceptualizations of agency across spectrums of diversity,” affirming “the
forging of relationships.” Bifocalization may be the key concept in under-
standing curriculum as a collective public moral enterprise.
Given the primacy of relationships across difference, statements of
self-positioning are welcome but insufficient, as they fail to “dismantle
asymmetrical circuits of power constituted of oppressive and privileged
realities,” realities that undermine “relations of trust with those with
whom one does not, consciously or unconsciously, relate.” Moreover,
“contextual and relational autobiographical understandings of/for/
about ‘self’ and ‘work’ are necessary if we are to become consciente.” Jales
Coutinho knows that, “as a white-passing cis-male curricularist who is
now engaged in ongoing relations of becoming, I too have to look at my
past in order to make sense of my present moment.” Jales Coutinho con-
fides that, at first, he felt “ambivalent feelings” concerning his “agency,
maleness, whiteness, queerness, spirituality, rationality.” In fact, “it took
me a while to look regressively in my autobiography to see my ‘self’ and
