March 9, 2022
As we focus on these hands that are intertwined in our Task Force logo, how are our emotions and beliefs caught up today in the exploding suffering of our fellow human beings, friends, relatives and colleagues both in Ukraine and Russia? How do we help our students to make sense of this seemingly senseless invasion and war? What philosophies will be enjoined as explanatory or sensible?
Share your views HERE
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At the 2019 meeting of AAACS, this Task Force was established with its vision to capture, integrate, and reflect the ubiquitous essence and impact of ethics and spirituality in the curriculum across time and locality. Beginning with the premise that there is no valueless community, nation or peoples and consequently, our values, beliefs, attitudes, cognition, emotions, behaviors, norms, and practices, etc. find root and spring from our concept of God, Spirit, the Force, the good, the beautiful, the desirable, and the (Un)attainable among other ontological, epistemological and axiological notions. As such, our sense of right and wrong and associated expressions, however derived (for example, from virtue ethics, the affective domain, deontology, utilitarianism, natural law, moral law, Kholberg's theory, even Machiavellianism, etc.) percolate into the curriculum of our nations and peoples and account for the rich diversity of our discourses, scholarship, research and practice. Given this backdrop, AAACS—a scholarly Curriculum Studies organization—provides an opportunity to (re)incorporate into our repertoire an examination of this rich ethical and spiritual diversity that informs our self-awareness, self-management, curriculum content, curriculum practice, pedagogic stances, intentionalities, inter-relationalities, accountabilities, growth, progress, and change among other dimensions. If there ever was a time that it is needed, it is now with the rise of various forms of extremism, nationalism, and a questioning of what is real, valuable, and worth keeping.
This Task Force intends to build on the works of previous curriculum scholars who have taken these questions seriously through the lenses of spirituality, theology, and ethics (see Huebner, Macdonald, Aoki, Slattery, Block, Noddings, Kincheloe, Whitlock, Helfenbein, Palmer and others) as well as the frames of liberation theology, indigenous onto-epistemologies, and ethics in the posthuman.
The Taskforce on the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies was formed at the AAACS Conference in New Orleans, 2011. Its primary undertaking has been to survey, analyse, translate (where necessary), interpret and share on the work of curriculum theorists, scholars and contributors who work outside of the North American field. Since 2011, this task force has produced fifty (50) research presentations, three (3) publications and thirteen (13) special sessions.
The work of the taskforce has included voices and representations from places and cultures such as Jamaica, Indonesia, Cuba, China, South Korea, Japan, USA & West Indies, Portugal, and Brazil:
At the 2015 meeting of AAACS, members of the Ethics Task Force began brainstorming ideas for presentations and panels for 2016. One idea that emerged was a half-day pre-conference session focused on ethics-based activism. We also discussed organizing one or two panels that would present ethical theorizing from different wisdom traditions. In the future, we would like to showcase additional presenters to help us understand ethical theorizing from a wide variety of standpoints and traditions. We would also like to invite praxis presentations, those that show the implementation and impact of ethical theorizing in a variety of educational contexts.
Published Book (2016)
At the 2015 AAACS conference, the Task Force on Curriculum Work in Practice and Policy convened a special session entitled Neoliberal Conditions: Privatization, Marketization, Zero Tolerance, Audit Culture, Value-Added Measures, Technology and Social Efficiency:
Amidst this backdrop and given the pressing challenges of teaching and learning and study work going forward, it is the intention at the Washington D.C. AAACS conference this next year (2016) to put out a call for a special session, to regroup and collaborate as a Task Force on what it means for curriculum scholars to pick up policy work.