BLAZE

Finished! Well, almost finished. Just final edits to go. I hand it in tomorrow around 10. I'm happy — and now I have a few weeks to proofread thoroughly before binding.

Ottawa was SO beautiful. Saw the Parliament buildings and the National Arts Centre. Walked around a lot listening to both of Canada's official languages, sometimes within the same utterance. So cool. I was proud to be a Canadian. And we were indeed made co-chairs of Active Voice, the national newsletter. Yay!

Now reading:The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke and The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron.

Favourite headline this week: School board rejects books with gay parents for bad grammar (from the CBC.ca news). Now that's an advocacy group! What's next, step-sisters for random punctuation?

As promised, the "thesis" of my project (the introductory statement, etc.) follows. Enjoy!

Love to all,
Leslie

Formal education is perhaps society's most efficient and most effective ideological apparatus. One visible manifestation of the ideological relationship between state and school is curriculum; indeed, as Michael Apple (1990) observes, curriculum and ideology are vitally linked. In Canada curriculum is set by the provincial education authority; in Alberta this body is called Alberta Learning. Curriculum development is based on the premise that, within a grade or subject area, teachers must teach students something; curriculum is the document that outlines what that something will be and how student apprehension of that something will be evaluated. But curriculum is more than a large set of goals and objectives: it is a catechism of the knowledge that a particular society deems valuable and worthy of transmitting to future generations. And more: it represents the institutional architecture that determines whether a child succeeds or fails in the enterprise of schooling. Through the operation of the manifest curriculum — and through the subtler manoeuvres of the hidden curriculum — those who hold power work to conserve it and those who lack power struggle to gain it. Within this climate of overt and covert contestation, the ordinary work of the school proceeds.
At schools around the world every day, teachers teach and students learn. This ordinary teaching/learning exchange is inscribed by power relations: that is, what is taught and what is learned may not be the same content. Through the machinations of cultural hegemony, teachers enact the social reproductive work of the curriculum. Such a conservative gesture is clearly apparent in Alberta's revised curriculum for high school English, introduced in 2001 and being implemented in full in September 2003. Yet at the same time, there exists within this curriculum the potential to create a lexicon of opposition. In this paper I will explain how high school English has been yoked into the sorting and selecting functions of the institution through the shifting matrices of literacy and literature; further, I will interrogate the assumptions of Alberta's new English curriculum; and finally, I will propose a mechanism to subvert the ideological work of the new curriculum by exploiting the aporia it presents.

et voila... a master's degree is awarded!