Curriculum Becoming in the Assemblage of Lower Secondary Education in Ireland
The Junior Cycle Framework acts as a catalyst for major curriculum reform in lower secondary education in Ireland. This thesis is concerned with mapping the becoming of this new curriculum. It proffers the emerging changes through a focus on the following areas of interest: a. The assemblage of lower secondary education in Ireland. b. The purpose of education as desired by the assemblage. c. The ideology, framework and pedagogy of the Junior Cycle curriculum This study uses the concept of emergence from Complexity Theory which offers the ideas of how an educational system as an open, adaptive system, self-organises and changes. It blends these ideas with concepts from the work of Deleuze and Guattari in “A Thousand Plateaus” (2003), to offer the conceptual toolbox to help map the complexity of lower secondary education in Ireland. To gather a holistic and multi-perspectival understanding of the reform, the research engaged in: a. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews with policy stakeholders. b. Ten semi-structured interviews with four principals and six teachers. c. Six focus group interviews with 10 students in each of the 3 selected schools. The analytic process used was rhizo-analysis. The findings demonstrate that curriculum in lower secondary education is becoming as a multiplicity and rhizome. This is mapped through the following lines of flight: a. The assemblage is self-organising by arranging and fitting together a more ecological structure. b. The assemblage desires liberation and is becoming as a multiplicity, expanding, the ideas of knowledge, the human subject and values in a process of strong emergence and becoming. The teaching and learning encounter is the process through/within which the human being finds their home within the world c. Curriculum is viewed as a rhizome, incorporating an ideology, framework and pedagogy. The two roles that encourage becoming are those of curriculum creator and curriculum maker.
National University of Ireland - Maynooth
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