Agency and Counter-Agency in Curriculum Studies: Teacher Work Against the Grain of Settler Futurities

This essay examines an episode of teaching in which the inclusion of content about Indigenous history, contemporary presence, and culture triggered protean social and material resistance. This leads to an inference that the curricula of settler colonialism cannot be thought of only in terms of textbooks, state standards, and lesson plans. It also includes agentic assemblages involving communities, habits of thought and feeling, career anxieties, and more. These shape-shifting assemblages of material and discursive forces actively erase Indigenous truths, lives, and futurities. Learning to teach against the grain of settler colonialism, therefore, requires preparing teachers to engage with the whole of this dynamic, not just the ideas that are left out of mandated school curricula. Drawing on the personal experiences of the lead author and a variety of conceptual resources, this essay offers both an illustration and a theorization of what substantively teaching against the grain of settler futurities entails.