Flashpoints of an Immediate “Here”: A Genealogy of Locating the Child in Curricular Thought

Abstract

Abstract

This chapter examines how modern Western pedagogical and academic discourses have produced “the child” as a learning, knowing being through a normalized spatial order that rests on “here/there” and “proximate/distant” dichotomies. Drawing on and bringing together Said's and Foucault's insights on the fabrication of the self, the chapter offers a genealogical reading of two curricular instances or movements. The first is “home region education,” a Herbart-Ziller-influenced pedagogical principle as mobilized in Finnish educational thought at the turn of the 20th century. The second is childhood scholarship of a “global era” at the turn of the 21st century. Foucault's notion of heterotopia is engaged in pointing toward a muted onto-epistemological flashpoint: a methodological sedentarism in curricular thought around the child that forecloses other possibilities for imagining subjectivity geographically, spatially, and otherwise. The chapter argues that the enduring conceptualizations of the child's spaces of “immediacy” amount to a silence of Other spaces, to a silence of the experience of being in immediate and intimate space differently.