Imaging, imagining knowledge in higher education curricula: new visions and troubled thresholds

Parker, Janet (2013). Imaging, imagining knowledge in higher education curricula: new visions and troubled thresholds. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(8) pp. 958–970.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2013.827650

Abstract

My mind is full of images: of the curriculum as properly a parcours course with obstacles to learn to scramble over skilfully rather than fences at which painfully to fall; of higher education as shining a white light on the student as prism, who thereafter radiates all the colours of the rainbow; of reverse cone or inverse corkscrew curricula; of knowledge acquisition and damage in Plato’s Republic Sun, Line and Cave, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. All examples from two recent colloquia pre-occupied with the visualisation and modelling of knowledge and university knowledge-making; all illuminations of our way of seeing and thinking: our theoria (both our theory and the ground on which we stand to see and be seen); all making us focus, at this time of deregulated and open learning and multi-million dollar and euro open data hubs and portals, on what university knowledge-making is and should be. And all challenging the way we imagine, and image, knowledge and its incorporation and creation in university curricula.