Term of Award

Spring 2000

Degree Name

Doctor of Education in Curriculum Studies

Document Type and Release Option

Dissertation (restricted to Georgia Southern)

Department

Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading

Committee Chair

William M. Reynolds

Committee Member 1

Jane A. Page

Committee Member 2

Bryan Deever

Committee Member 3

Angela Crow

Abstract

Wondering About a Future Generation: A Deleuzian Perspective on Curriculum is research that asks "what sort of curriculum inquiry is critically important to do today to prepare for our future generations?" This dissertation begins with predictions from futurists who portend that tomorrow's student will become substantially enhanced with devices that augment, and may eventually replace, the organic brain. These futurists point to recent technological advances that suggest that we are trending toward a future that will enable us to create multiple states of consciousness with real and virtual bodies. Understanding identity as the 'self in such reproductions will be problematic. Thus, this research wonders what sort of identity constructions one might assume when multiple states of consciousness are produced through infomatic and biologic technologies. The ways we have used to define ourselves in the past do not seem to be applicable for human-machine species of the future. Becoming a human-machine hybrid, or cyborg, changes the way in which we will think about ourselves and how we think about our identity.

Philosopher Gilles Deleuze rejected the idea that identity is the emergence of a natural self and he repudiated any notion that the body is the locus of consciousness. Curricular theorizing on the writings of Deleuze begins with the premise that everything is a social machine constructed by desire. Ergo, the curriculum of the future facilitates the production of dispositions that are free to be disposed, recycled and created within the momentary social milieu of the moment.

When grounded on the philosophies of Deleuze, the curriculum becomes a text that encourages learners to construct and produce as many performances as possible for society's review and consideration. The goal of the curriculum is to affect central power mechanisms, proliferate infinite political thoughts, and shatter the concepts of classes, sexes, gender, and race. A Deleuzian perspective on curriculum is a methodology that deconstructs present social structures to show how everything is indeed ambiguous and what has been created by people can also be uncreated by people.

Copyright

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