“Deconstructing” the curriculum

Perhaps the term “deconstruction” is in for a comeback, as the US White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon said, “That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” (CNN). He was talking about cutting back on government regulation, though he misused the term “deconstruction.”

Anti-Trump conservative US commentator Glenn Beck (YouTube) said Bannon’s philosophy is really about destruction of the state. It seems that the alt-right are following Aleksandr Dugin, Russian philosopher and apologist for Donald Trump, apparently pushing Lenin’s formula of chaos and a desire to burn down the system.

That’s not deconstruction, which is an intellectual move to challenge claims of certainty in literary texts, and that also has applications in architecture and education.

Flipped

The latest issue of the online Journal of Learning Design is just out. It’s a free, open source, online peer reviewed journal. Our paper on the “flipped classroom” is included.

The editor of the journal says, “The paper first tracks the idea of the ‘flipped classroom’ back to the seminal ideas of deconstruction from the 1980s. The authors then consider large groups of students and their experiences over a few years of learning in a flipped classroom which made use of distributed digital media. The authors conclude that being in a flipped classroom is an ‘initially alien’ experience and one that calls for further attention and refinement.”

The article is free to read here: https://www.jld.edu.au/article/view/281

Notes

• I recall seeing Dugin on tv a few times storming out during an interview.
• In The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin has a section headed “The deconstruction of civilisation.” Then we read it is about “the deconstruction of the concept of civilisation” (106).
• The image is a screenshot of a student version of Metropolis.
• Also see post on conservative hermeneutics.

Reference

• Coyne, R., J. Lee, et al. (2017). “Re-visiting the flipped classroom in a design context.” Journal of Learning Design 10(2): pp. 1-13.
• Dugin, A. (2012). The Fourth Political Theory. London: Arktos.