Curriculum for living structural crises towards socially just futures: bringing diverse funds of knowledge into participatory-democratic action around lifeworld problems that matter

Abstract

As crises unsettle lives across the globe, growing numbers of people, in diverse situations, encounter social and planetary futures in peril. Harder to grasp is how historical structures of unequal power underpin those perils. Building capacities to comprehend the lived effects of structural injustices, and proact to transform them, are ethical challenges for schooling, which this paper takes up. I initially focus not on school curriculum but ‘populist curriculum’: ideological messages that issue from power-forces and spread across societies. I draw conceptually on Antonio Gramsci to diagnose how, in current times, populist messages verge Extreme-Right as a hegemonically powerful minority wages culture wars that target marginalised groups to blame for ‘good-citizen’ sufferings. Such unjustly divisive efforts to hold power manifest a crisis of governance in chaos, I argue, symptomizing how structural underpinnings are at historic tipping points towards dangerous times ahead. Against the mis-educational tide of populist curriculum, I consider how school curriculum can build young people’s knowledge and agency to live present-day crises towards sustainable and socially-just futures. Taking conceptual tools from Paolo Freire, Lauren Berlant, and the Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach pioneered by Luis Moll and colleagues, I draw on a school FoK project I was part of, that suggested possibilities for participatory-democratic curriculum activity, but limited by system constraints. I then conceptualise ways to expand beyond the constraints through what I call a Problems That Matter approach, featuring collaboration among students, community people, teachers and academics in student-led action-research on lived problems in their communities.