The inspirited nature of mindful curricular enactment’s community (re)making

Abstract

Intertwining case study with practitioner inquiry, a research team seeks language for the conduct of mindful curricular enactment in an alternative public middle school. The school is committed to valuing students’ narratives of experience, the resources all bring to the school, and the given particularities of contexts, subject matter, and situations, as the makings comprising learning within and through community. A collaborative approach to inquiry that involves all team partners in the research process and engages the unique strengths that each brings focuses on how this alternative school provides a case for accessing how and why mindful curricular enactment orients accordingly. It is the makings forming this curricular movement, and the room found within these makings to reorganize and reconstruct thinking, that primary attention is oriented towards. Deweyan ‘roominess’ negotiated through such curricular enactment is documented as mindful attention to curriculum-making that fosters the needed room—the conditions and supports sustaining an individual/collective movement of thinking. Such movement is revealed as necessarily receptive, inciting community (re)making. Its inspirited nature is revealed through participatory modes of being and associated habits embracing knowledge-making as generative, elemental to being human, in need of other(s), assuming temporal/spatial agency, and interdependent with imagination, instilling embodied understandings.