A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project

What can a curriculum theory project be, here in Canada? In this expository chapter, we attempt to answer such kinds of situated curriculum inquiries. To do so, we begin our tracings of this story with an account of research that has emerged from our research at A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project and its associated collective of curriculum theorists at the University of Ottawa (see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca). We then provide some of our entanglements with the various transdisciplinary intellectual traditions that have influenced its theoretical formations, through to its past and present curriculum theory projects. We further examine its contextual situatedness amidst the community of curriculum scholarship in a settler colonial nation state that some of us call Canada. We offer situated and partial narrative snapshots of a Canadian field of curriculum studies in relation to unsettling settler colonial imaginaries and its affective turns toward ethical relationality in response to truth, and then reconciliation, as an emerging field of educational studies. We also discuss how understanding its curriculum-as-planned in relation to a curriculum-as-lived becomes, for us, intellectual, theoretical, and cultural processes of deconstructing and reconstructing the “isness” of “curriculum” (Aoki, 1992/2005; Ng-A-Fook, in press). We conclude with potential implications for our future work as curriculum theorists studying, theorizing, and collaborating with different community partners here in Canada, at the University of Ottawa, and on the traditional unceded and unsurrendered territories of the different Algonquin First Nations.