A common educational assumption is that coherence is a pre-requisite for a “good” curriculum. Indeed, in mathematics education this perspective has persisted both nationally and internationally as a foundational principle for curriculum design, reform, and evaluation. While curricular coherence is often unquestioningly accepted as desirable for student learning, some researchers have urged caution, arguing that “curricular coherence” is loosely defined with no widespread agreement over its meaning. Yet, disciplinary, logico-rational forms of coherence (i.e., retrospective expert perspectives) tend to dominate curricular discourses in mathematics education, often in ways that position these disciplinary forms of coherence as objective evaluations of curricula. Other perspectives on what it means for curricula to be “coherent”—particularly those of students—are rarely centered, which has epistemological as well as ethical consequences for who/what is positioned as coherent (i.e., “ideal”) and who/what is positioned as incoherent (i.e., abnormal, aberrant, incomplete). This binary imposes a distribution of “sensible” mathematics learning, thereby perpetuating a harmful culture of exclusion in mathematics education. In this dissertation, I critically investigate curricular coherence in mathematics education by interrogating the notion of coherence itself and problematizing the dominance of a singular perspective on coherence. To do so, I conceptualize curriculum as a storied artform and view coherence as an individual’s holistic aesthetic judgement of curricular stories. These judgements are highly subjective and may vary from person to person as well as discipline to discipline, destabilizing the myth that curricular coherence is an objective evaluation with a singular definition. Rather, I contend that curricular coherence must be defined kaleidoscopically via a plurality of disciplinary and stakeholder perspectives. To this end, I investigate three interrelated questions: (1) Ontologically, what is coherence in its many forms? In other words, what does “coherence” refer to in both mathematics and science education, as well as in other disciplines? Additionally, according to these ontologies, who is positioned with the authority to make judgements or evaluations of (in)coherence? (2) What are the aesthetic, ethical, and onto-epistemological foundations behind the common (and often implicit) assumption that coherence (in its many forms) is desirable? What are the consequences of these philosophical assumptions for curriculum? For learning? For how learners as positioned? In other words, I question curricular coherence for what purpose? (3) Finally, what are the flexible possibilities (and tensions) for conceptualizing curriculum using an aesthetic curriculum-as-story metaphor to investigate various forms of curricular (in)coherence from multiple stakeholder perspectives? I inquire about these overarching questions through three interrelated studies—one theoretical and the other two empirical—situated within an arts-based research paradigm. These investigations serve as a type of disciplinary-cultural analysis and artistic critique from both my own and students’ perspectives with the overriding goal of interrogating and shifting the normative value of (curricular) coherence in mathematics education. More broadly, this dissertation spotlights the aesthetic dimension of learning mathematics as well as the danger of divisive and dehumanizing politics of aesthetics inherent to uncritical conceptualizations of so-called “desirable” modes of teaching and learning, such as the privileged logico-rational definition of curricular coherence that is the current status quo.
Read
