Madeleine R. Grumet

The poet's life as a teacher.Winner of the 2008 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who confessed the unrelenting anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was also a dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton's classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the personal could also be plural. Looking at how Sexton framed and used the personal in teaching and learning, Salvio considers the extent to which our histories-both personal and social-exert their influence on teaching. In doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of some of the key problems and questions in feminist teaching: navigating the appropriate distance between teacher and student, the relationship between writer and poetic subject, and the relationship between emotional life and knowledge. Examining Sexton's pedagogy, with its "weird abundance" of tactics and strategies, Salvio argues that Sexton's use of the autobiographical "I" is as much a literary identity as a literal identity, one that can speak with great force to educators who recognize its vital role in the humanities classroom.

50 years since the publication of Toward a Poor Curriculum, William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet reflect on the ongoing need for a poor curriculum – one stripped of distractions such as technology to allow for the reflection and self-questioning at the heart of the book’s central methodology of currere. Featuring a brand-new preface cowritten by William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet, as well as revised chapters and a never-before included chapter on the four phases of currere, this anniversary edition invites scholars of curriculum theory and teaching methods to revisit the original essays and reconsider their relevance in light of present educational and political challenges.

50 years since the publication of Toward a Poor Curriculum, William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet reflect on the ongoing need for a poor curriculum – one stripped of distractions such as technology to allow for the reflection and self-questioning at the heart of the book’s central methodology of currere. Featuring a brand-new preface cowritten by William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet, as well as revised chapters and a never-before included chapter on the four phases of currere, this anniversary edition invites scholars of curriculum theory and teaching methods to revisit the original essays and reconsider their relevance in light of present educational and political challenges.

The title of this collection of Madeleine Grumet’s key writings, The Unbearable Lightness of Curriculum, captures what she takes to be the anxiety and ambivalence that accompany our visions of what is possible in our lives and the lives of our children. Her work explores the tension that pervades curriculum, drenched in the material and cultural realities of our lives, yet aiming toward the horizon of what might be possible. The essays are organized in three sections. Situated Subjectivity, The Art of Curriculum, Subjectivity and its Discontents. The introduction to each section frames its issues in the situation from which they sprang, both acknowledging the relation of situation and subjectivity expressed in their writing, and, using this opportunity to bring in the politics of education as Grumet experienced them as a professor and as a dean of schools of education.