A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project provides a digital place where educators and graduate students can converse, contribute and showcase ongoing provincial, national, and transnational curriculum theory projects. In turn, this website seeks to support historical and intellectual pro/vocations of a Canadian theoretical topos (Chambers, 1999), where curriculum theorists can transnationally bridge their inter/disciplinary curricular terroirs of difference (Pinar 2008). What Chambers (1999) and Pinar (2007) call the vertical and horizontal topographies of the particular places and regions we both live and work within. Here verticality is, Pinar (2007) explains, the historical and intellectual topography of a discipline. Whereas horizontality, he suggests, refers to analyses of present circumstances, both in terms of internal intellectual trends as well as the external social and political milieus influencing the field of curriculum studies. Studying the verticality and horizontality of such inter/disciplinary topographies, as Pinar (2007) makes clear, affords us opportunities to understand a series of scholarly moves both outside and within what Chambers (1999, 2003) calls the topos of Canadian Curriculum Studies. Moreover, this (de)institutionalized virtual site, if there is such a thing, provides a space for experimenting with curriculum theorizing as an aesthetic form of educational research and writing.
The site showcases among other things graduate students’ research and writing in relation to the vertical and horizontal dynamics of our Canadian field of curriculum studies. The site also serves as a pedagogical resource for professors who teach courses on curriculum theory. Furthermore, this virtual project ties into Vision 2020 of the university of Ottawa in terms of building our future research capacity here in Canada and abroad.
Nicholas Ng-A-Fook is the founder of A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Theory within the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. His intellectual pilgrimage within the context of teacher education began in 1998 when he travelled via Rarotonga in the Cook Islands and then New Zealand to Australia. Once there, he began and completed his Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of Western Sydney. He returned the following year to teach as a newly qualified high school science and history teacher in Penrith, New South Wales. Then in 1999, he returned to Canada and took on a long-term occasional position at an inner-city high school teaching Grade 9 English and Geography youth who were in turn identified by the school administration of being “at risk” of being pushed/dropping out of the public schooling system. That same year Mike Harris implemented Bill 160. Consequently, during the summer of 2000 Nicholas Ng-A-Fook enrolled into the Master’s of Education program at York University. Then during the summer of 2001 he left for Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge to study within its unique Curriculum Theory Project with William F. Pinar and Petra Munro Hendry. At this southern institution, he also had the opportunity to study and collaborate on different curriculum theory projects with internationally renowned curriculum scholars like William Doll Jr., Denise Egéa-Kuehne, and Claudia Eppert.
In the Fall of 2001, with the guidance of Celia Haig-Brown he briefly returned from Baton Rouge Louisiana to Toronto in order to defend his Master’s in Education thesis Beginning Re-Search: Towards An Understanding of Vulnerable Education. Over the next four years, while pursuing his studies at LSU, he worked closely with the United Houma Nation, the largest Franco indigenous community in Louisiana. Just two weeks prior to Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005, and upon the invitation of Judith Robertson, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook accepted a visiting professor position at the Faculty of Education within the University of Ottawa. That Fall he returned to LSU to defend his doctoral dissertation which in turn focused among other things on how the Louisiana state apparatus historically dictated educational exclusion through its infamous Jim Crow policies of racial segregation. It has since been published as An Indigenous Curriculum of Place. Utilizing participatory and critical ethnographic and oral history research methodologies he examined the life histories of United Houma Nation elders who experienced firsthand the complexities and difficulties of institutional racism. In 2006 he graduated with a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a minor concentration in Women and Gender Studies. The Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa subsequently hired him as an assistant professor of Curriculum Theory.
As a curriculum theorist working with the Developing A Global Perspective for Educators (DGPE) extracurricular program and its cohort of students, he continues to collaborate with different indigenous communities, NGOs, teachers, and students. Together they create spaces for alternative historical narratives to speak within the Ontario curriculum. For the past two years, students and Nicholas travelled to Kitigan Zibi to work with Algonquin elders, teachers and students (see Reis & Ng-A-Fook, 2010). His unique experiences as a curriculum theorist working with various indigenous communities has afforded him invaluable opportunities to advance knowledge in relation to a place-based indigenous curriculum (Ng-A-Fook, 2011). Perhaps more importantly, such social action research has enabled Nicholas Ng-A-Fook to develop and advance important ethical protocols when collaborating on research projects with indigenous communities and marginalized youth.
Nicholas Ng-A-Fook continues to work collaboratively on a well established and ongoing internationalization of curriculum studies project between the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa and Developing A Global Perspective for Educators. His specific research interests for this project seek to study how students are able to integrate a global perspective throughout their curriculum planning, implementation, and assessment while also addressing the Ontario Ministry of Education’s mandated curricular expectations in a course called Curriculum Design and Evaluation. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook is interested in how students develop critical perspectives of, as well as negotiate socio-culturally responsive strategies toward addressing such curricular absences within their present and future course programming.
Part of this project also involves the development of a permanent pre-service teacher candidate online newsletter and radio show for the website. The content for both the newsletter and radio show are developed in a foundations course called Schooling and Society. As a result, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook is currently researching how students are developing various curricular and pedagogical resources for this organization’s website, and in turn how their engagement with these projects then informs what Aoki calls their curriculum-as-planned, -implemented, and -lived with regards to developing a global perspective and working toward integrating social justice issues within their future teaching.
This website now features all of the Developing a Global Perspective for Educator’s activities over the course of the academic year, as well as pre-service candidates’ curriculum contributions on themes of development and peace making. In addition, the constructive critiques of NGO resources, along with the resources themselves are posted on the website. As part of his course requirements pre-service teacher candidates are required to create a newsletter for the website which in turn addresses issues of child poverty, human rights, environmental sustainability, peace-making curricula, etc. Students are also required to engage in various Community Service Learning projects.
Nicholas Ng-A-Fook is currently working with DGPE cohorts through the Curriculum Design and Evaluation course on the following two projects: 1) Mobilizing A Global Citizenship Perspective with Educators: Curriculum Development, Equity and Community Partnerships (funded by KNAER); and 2) Community Service Learning Science Fair project with grade 5/6 teachers and students at the Kikinamadinan elementary and high school within the Kitigan Zibi’s Anishinabeg School Board.
Research Interests within Graduate Program
Nicholas Ng-A-Fook continues to study the intellectual history of curriculum studies. He recently published Provoking Curriculum Theorizing: A Question of/for Currere, Denkbild and Aesthetics. This article considers how curriculum theorists can draw upon autobiographical writing strategies and emergent 2.0 technologies (Comic Life, Googling, etc.) to understand the aesthetic processes for surfing, screen capturing, and provoking a virtual narrative landscape. To do so, this article provokes the inter/disciplinary digital topographies of Canadian curriculum studies anew while remaining unfaithfully faithful to the concept of an old name like currere, in terms of its discursive narrative genealogies. As such, the article begins by tracing the vertical and horizontal autobiographical relationship to the vertical and horizontal digital narrative genealogy of the Provoking Curriculum Studies conference. The article then situates the tracing of such autobiographical and digital narrative snapshots to the theoretical concepts of currere and Denkbild. In turn, the article asks curriculum theorists to consider how they might frame future digital experimentations with curriculum theorizing as an aesthetic form of Denkbild, to provoke an uncommon countenance within the larger recurring narrative movements of Canadian curriculum studies.
He also recently co-published Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies with Kate Robayo-Sheridan and Steve Noble. Together they published this paper in the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies. As part of this curriculum theory project, they sought to trace the emergence of curriculum theory in the United States. In turn, they reread its situated historical movements both against and with Frederick Wiseman’s 1968 documentary film High School. Moreover, this specific research project afforded them an opportunity to understand how the historical and often complicated conversations taking place within an American field of study might in turn provoke and inform their present understanding of the different curriculum reform movements taking place within Canada.
As a curriculum theorist, such recursive theorizing (praxis) enables him to develop and innovate new theoretical concepts and respective applications for the field of curriculum studies (see Lewkowich, 2009, 2010; Ng-A-Fook, 2009; Yu, 2010). In response to his work, Nahachewsky and Johnston (2009) write:
Ng-a-Fook’s autobiographical writing maps his search for a method of understanding Derrida’s curriculum on inhabiting and being inhabited by languages of the “other.” Through his autobiographical writing, he demonstrates how reflecting critically on the historical significance of one’s past helps to challenge the shadows of White colonialism perpetuated within the spaces of many Canadian classrooms. (p. x).
This research further contributes to the complexities of our understandings in terms of how Anglophone immigrant students experience the French language within French Catholic schooling system here in Canada. More importantly, his ongoing work in this area illustrates how studying such lived experiences autobiographically informs our understandings of philosophical and curricular concepts like language appropriation, alienation, and ex-appropriation within various instituted contexts such as the school curriculum.
He is currently the project lead on the two following research projects: 1) Mobilizing A Global Citizenship Perspective with Educators: Curriculum Development, Equity and Community Partnerships (funded by KNAER); and 2) Making Digital Histories: Virtual Historians, Historical Literacies, and Education (SSHRC).
Contact Information
Office: Lamoureux 428, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa
Telephone: 613-562-5800 ext.: 2239
Email: nngafook@uOttawa.ca
Publications & Technical Reports
Books:
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2007). An Indigenous Curriculum of Place: The United Houma Nation’s Contentious Relationship with Louisiana’s Educational Institutions. New York: Peter Lang, pp. i-232.
Refereed Book Chapters:
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2012). Navigating M/other-Son Plots as a Migrant Act: Autobiography, Currere, and Gender. In Stephanie Springgay and Deborah Freedman (Eds.), M/othering a bodied curriculum. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2011). Decolonizing Narrative Strands of our Eco-civic Responsibilities: Curriculum, Social Action, and Indigenous Communities. In Kelly Young & Darren Stanley (Eds.), Contemporary Studies in Canadian Curriculum: Principles, Portraits, and Practices. Calgary, Alberta: Detselig Enterprises Ltd.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2009). Inhabiting the Hyphenated Spaces of Alienation and Appropriation: Currere, Language, and Postcolonial Migrant Subjectivities. In James Nahachewsky and Ingrid Johnson (Eds.), Beyond Presentism, pp. 87-103. Rotterdam The Netherlands: Sense publishers.
Refereed Journals Articles:
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2011, July). Provoking A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project: A Question of/for Currere, Denkbild and Aesthetics. Media: Culture: Pedagogy, 15 (2), (pp. 1-26).
Ng-A-Fook, N. & Robayo-Sheridan, K. & Noble, S. (2011, Feb). Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies. Journal for the American Association for Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 1 (1), (pp. 1-27).
Reis, G. & Ng-A-Fook, N. (2010). TEK talk: so what? Language and the decolonization of narrative gatekeepers of science education curriculum. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 5 (4), (pp. 1009-1026).
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2010). An/other Bell Ringing in the Sky: Greenwashing, Curriculum, and Ecojustice. Journal for the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, 8 (1), pp. 41-67.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2009). Understanding A Postcolonial Curriculum of Being Inhabited by the Language of the Other. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry Journal, 6 (2), pp. 3-20.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2009). Bridging a response within the watercoursings of empty places. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry Journal, 6 (2), pp. 51-53.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2005). A Curriculum of Mother-Son Plots on Education’s Center Stage, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 21 (4), pp. 43-58.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2003). A Curriculum Behind the Boys’ Locker Room Doors: Bodies, Desires, and Perpetuating Patriarchy. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 19 (4), pp. 65-72.
Book Reviews
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2004). Tough Fronts: The Impacts of Street Culture on Schooling. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36 (6), pp. 747-752.
Consultancies & Workshops
Ng-A-Fook, N. & Radford, L. & Midwood, K. (2010, May). Networking within a Forbidden City: Pedagogy, Cyber identities and 2.0 literacies. Multimedia workshop presented at the Ministry of Education/Faculties of Education Forum, Toronto, ON.
Ng-A-Fook, N. & Dao, K., Horsewood, I. (2009, June). A Culture of Peace Curriculum: Developing A Global Perspective for Educators. Multimedia workshop presented at the UNESCO Culture of Peace Conference at Queen’s University, Kingston, On.
Ng-A-Fook, N., & Katrine Cuillerier, & Norris. T. (2009, May). Engaging Youth Activism Through a Media Studies Curriculum. Multimedia workshop presented at the Ministry of Education/Faculties of Education Forum, Toronto, ON.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2009, March). Schooling and Society: Social Action, Citizenship, and Education. Multimedia workshop presented to teacher candidates at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2009, March). Accessing and Developing Global Perspectives with Educators: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Emergent Technologies. Multimedia workshop presented at Transition to Practice Conference at University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2008, September). Building a praxis of peace: integrating global education into Ontario curricula. Multimedia workshop presented to teacher candidates at the Peace and Global Citizenship: Conversations, Pedagogy and Curriculum Institute. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.
Ng-A-Fook, N. & Galvin, K. (2008, May). Inside the Teacher Candidate Studio. Multimedia workshop presented to teacher candidates at the Transition to Practice Conference. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.
Ng-A-Fook, N. & Matthews, S. (2007, May). Building a praxis of peace: integrating peace education into Ontario curricula. Multimedia workshop presented at the Ministry of Education/Faculties of Education Forum, Toronto, ON.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2005). Weaving American Indian Education into the Curriculum. A one-day workshop for pre-service teachers at Louisiana State University.
Ng-A-Fook, N. (2003, November) Teaching Houma Culture and History from The Bayous Margins. Workshop presented at the annual meeting of National Indian Education Association. Greensboro, NC.