The lessons learned through Covid-19 school disruptions have amplified calls to envision education in ways that respond to unpredictable crises and finally redress educational inequities that have been further complicated by the pandemic (Pinar, 2020). This blog is based on our contribution to the imagining of such an education with the findings of our collective biography of ‘household curriculum’ in Ontario, Canada conducted during the early days of the pandemic (see Zhang et al., 2023).
Building on a sociomaterial orientation to curriculum-making as a relational effect (see for example Heydon et al., 2015), the term household curriculum refers to the in-the-moment enactments of teaching, learning and knowledge production occurring in kinship households. Our study was concerned with documenting and analysing the production, constituents and opportunities of these curricula across seven diverse parent-co-researcher households.
The parent-co-researchers were education professors, graduate students and/or school/community educators who were also parents to children aged 2–15 years. The households varied in composition, culture and language, socioeconomic status, and school choice. Parent-co-researchers documented and shared with each other what they saw as their household curricula through images, videos and written vignettes. The concepts of ‘striated’ and ‘smooth’ spaces (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) helped the study attend to how and what constituents assembled to enable or constrain knowing, doing and becoming.
Structured activities within a specific timeframe and in accordance with predetermined curricular expectations are characteristic of striated spaces. Here, learners’ movements are predetermined by normative and hierarchical structures such as timetables, schedules, classificatory placements and tracking practices. Smooth spaces, however, are dynamic spaces that invite the unexpected through learners’ exploration and collective knowledge production.
