Students as Curriculum

This book explores possibilities for students to have a much greater role in curriculum than mere receivers of it. In fact, we suggest what happens when students are the curriculum. We draw upon our scholarship (theory, practice, and praxis) over the years to show how educational experiences can be invigorated and embodied when students ask the what’s worthwhile questions, joining teachers as fellow curricularists, action researchers, and practical inquirers, to engage in creative insubordination that refines the theories within (and among) them through lifelong education. Such educational experience stems from listening carefully to students and creates meaning because it is of and by students, and therefore more genuinely for them. It is cultural experience writ large because it draws on curricula of educational experience from many spheres of life (outside of school and in school) to continuously reconstruct who and what they are. It draws on teacher and student lore and is improvisational, pedagogically pivoting, adapting, and emerging. It finds new spaces, crevices, and cracks wherein students continuously re-create themselves – the curriculum that they are becoming. This book includes previously published articles and book chapters by William H. Schubert and Brian D. Schultz. The authors include dialogic interludes between chapters to introduce, reflect on, and connect the chapters and their theorizing.