Curriculum Design in the Anthropocene: Challenges to Human Intentionality

New materialist and posthumanist thought present some key challenges for the imagined masculinist figure of the curriculum designer as rational planner. This chapter sketches the trajectory of this figure through curriculum theory and provides a feminist critique, drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad. With the aim of troubling the designer, the chapter contemplates whether he can be thought differently, or must be relinquished. In this process, Braidotti and Barad are invoked in a reconfiguration of design as assemblage, and the designer’s agency as part of a more complicated picture. Poetry offers a concrete example of how arts-based research can both enact and represent this task. Ultimately, the chapter provides a grounding for other scholars and researchers to move beyond humanism to a more lively and complex understanding of curriculum that is more responsive to the concerns of the Anthropocene. While this chapter is based on curriculum theory, it also has implications for systems that seek to reduce teachers to mere technicians, and offers teachers themselves ways to reconceptualise their work.