This document summarizes key findings from a study that used multimodal journaling to examine how university instructors develop and enact academic curricula. It finds that curriculum work involves tracing, rewriting, and sharing texts from various sources to develop professional identities. Instructors personalize texts for students and their own contexts. Curricula are distributed and ephemeral, challenging distinctions between authorship and readership. Text transformations in curriculum design are sites of authorship and negotiation. Curriculum work involves academic identity work through engagement with texts over spaces and times.

1. Invisible practices and
the technologies of the
curriculum:
Exploring the enactment of the
academic self
Martin Oliver & Lesley Gourlay
Institute of Education, University of London
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk; l.gourlay@ioe.ac.uk

2. Invisible work
This paper is, rather, about just seeing what is there
in our everyday lives. It is, if you will forgive me the
cliché, about making visible to myself (and you?) the
ways that we do/perform/narrate our lives in a
teaching context. It is about what my work looks like
and how bringing these features into view can help
me to understand better how it is that the
surveillances and regulations around me do their
work.
(Millen, 1997: 10)

3. Curriculum

4. The neglected curriculum
All around the world, higher education is expanding
rapidly, governments are mounting enquiries into higher
education, more institutions are involved in running
courses of study and more money is being spent on
higher education, not least by students themselves. And
yet, despite all this growth and debate, there is very little
talk about the curriculum. What students should be
experiencing is barely a topic for debate. What the
building blocks of their courses might be and how they
should be put together are even more absent from the
general discussion. The very idea of curriculum is pretty
well missing altogether.
(Barnett & Coate, 2005: 1)

5. Conceptions of curricula
[Absent]
Content
Plan (intended pedagogy)
Hidden curriculum
‘Lived’ curriculum (understood as space,
performance)
(Oliver, 2003)

6. Curricula identity
I think that course outlines are also forms of self-writing in
particular because it is through them that we can put a
personal stamp on the courses that we are teaching. […]
That is to say – if I am personally and sometimes,
passionately, involved in the politics of resistance – I
might claim the writing of my version of a feminist
analysis through my course outline. This claim to
authorship stamps the activity as a political moment in
schooling. It can help to reveal the embedded politics of
schooling on all levels as we begin to reveal the
authorship of these formal and detached looking texts. I
have yet to see someone use a strong personal and
continuous ‘I’ in a course outline, but it might be an
interesting experiment.
(Millen, 1997:23)

7. Material curricula

8. Curricula live in hearts and minds, it might be said;
more formally speaking, in intentions. But curricula
also live in educational structures (courses,
programmes, and the like), in educational concepts
and in institutional and disciplinary structures.
(Barnett & Coate, 2005: 151)

9. Immutable: forms and
structures
The first important consequence of becoming attentive to the
material traceability of immutable mobiles is to help us locate
what has been so important with the sociology of the social
from its inception. […] If the social sciences per-form the
social, then those forms have to be followed with just as much
care as the controversies. This is especially the case now that
we no longer run the risk of confusing such a study of
formalism with its formalist description. Forms have not ‘lost’
anything. They have not ‘forgotten’ any sort of
human, concrete, lived-in dimension. They are neither ‘cold’ nor
‘heartless’, nor are they devoid of a ‘human face’. Following the
making, the fine-tuning, the dissemination, and upkeep of
immutable mobiles will not for one second take us away from
the narrow galleries of practice.
(Latour, 2005: 226-227)

10. Text trajectories
We should not restrict the notion of context
to what happens in specific communicative
events. […] A lot of what we perform in the
way of meaning-attributing practices is the
post-hoc recontextualization of earlier bits of
text that were produced […] in a different
contextualization process, at a different time,
by different people, and for different
purposes.
(Blommaert 2005: 46, emphasis in original)

11. Text trajectories
Texts and discourses move around and are
recontextualised into new interpretative spaces
In these transitions they undergo significant changes
in meaning (Blommaert 2005, Ehrlich 2012)
Entextualisation, where talk is lifted out of
interactional setting and becomes text (e.g.
Silverstein & Urban 1996)
‘Modes and media of communication carry meanings
between streams and flows that make up the texture
of the contemporary world, and historically literacy is
one of the most important channels through which
meanings have crossed space and time’ (Kell 2006)

12. The intersection of
trajectories and identity
There were differences that I first became really
conscious of when I realised that in order to ingratiate
myself to those who had the power to hire me, I was
writing course outlines that I hoped pleased them. In one
instance I actually copied the structure of the co-
ordinator’s outline, including in each week a section
called ‘lecture’ which I rarely do – because she had done
it. When I let this cowardice and misrepresentation, this
lying, the fact that I was so-to-speak ‘running scared’,
sink in, I realised that there were many more questions to
ask about how we learn to do this activity.
(Millen, 1997: 16)

13. The project

14. JISC-funded project on Digital Literacies
Student-focused year 1
Staff-focused study in year 2: 4 participants
Multimodal journaling and interviews
Device to capture images, video etc
Sketch maps of places where work is undertaken
Series of interviews (biographies, curriculum,
scholarship)
Thematic analysis

15. Multimodal journalling data

16. Trajectories

17. It’s mostly sources that are coming from other
professional development courses that we work
on, whether they’re accredited or not accredited. And
they’re repurposed, I mean, a very small number of items
can just be repurposed, they can be left as they… as
they… as they are… as they are whole, and used
differently. Um, that’s a small number, most items are
edited, changed, worked into something
else, um, because this is, you know, a pretty unique
context that we’re working with. Um, so, yes, they do
have to become very bespoke for these particular
students, yes.
(Louise)

18. A document might be originated between myself and a
colleague because we are specially looking at one
activity or one bit of the module or something. So we
might generate that because that’s our background and
our knowledge. We’ll put it back and forth in a way that,
you know, is entirely conventional, through email
attachments. We’ll do things like track changes and
comments and stuff like that. Then when we’re happy
one of us will either upload it to Dropbox or, more usually,
will send it to [a co-ordinator] so that he’s got an
oversight immediately of everything that’s going on and
then he will send a notification to all the relevant people
that its gone into Dropbox ready to download as
appropriate.
(Louise)

20. I’ve had this, sort of, historically in like discussions with things like
Teachers TV […] a few years ago when the Teachers TV
producers were concerned that I was working on PGCE at that
time, why we weren’t using their programmes enough. Very high
quality, high production values and all the rest of it, why weren’t
we using their programmes enough? Great programmes in all
kinds of ways on our training programmes, new teachers. And it
was a really interesting debate about the problem that we had
about taking something which has been made for a specific other
purpose very well, or with a producer’s framing, the text maker’s
framing of what is valuable in it, trying to explain to them, well
actually all that I would want is about two minutes of film just
running in a classroom that you can take from and you can learn
so much from. I don’t want it framed, I don’t want it contextualised
by somebody else, you know, as a professional I want to be able
to make this work for my learners whether it’s a bit of film, whether
it’s a piece of written text a bit of research that I would pull out or
whatever it is.
(Louise)

21. Identities (and power)

22. I suppose people are developing bibliographies, um,
you know, as… in terms of their own professional
learning as part of doing the programmes.
(Louise)
Learning understood as familiarity with a growing
number of texts

23. What can I do to ensure that those three people are doing it in a
similar way and getting similar results so the students are getting a
similar experience. So, that's in effect what I was thinking through and
developing there. […] And at the heart of that there's a problem. At
the heart of that… and the problem is, um, a member of staff who's
not doing things in the way that I want them to be done. And
without… I don't want to go into that meeting and go, oi, you, you're
not doing it right, do it like this. It's about creating something within
that meeting that enables that member of staff to realise that maybe
there needs to be a shift or a change in that focus. […] That's one of
the reasons why I wanted to annotate those evaluations in a way that
was controlled and not publicly available because I wanted to choose
the bits that would enable me to create the case that I wanted to
create and put forward.
That makes me sound really manipulative.
(Gertrude)

24. Spaces and times

26. A lot of that stuff has been based in the office.
Also, I think it's, um, sometimes I use the office as a
bit of a test because everything works at home and I
think, well, I'm not quite sure if, you know… and so I
use my computer in the office because I figure if it
works on there… It will work anywhere. It will work
in Outer Mongolia.
(Gertrude)

27. Wanting more or less

28. We need more effective proxies or ways of inscribing it I
think because what we’re doing is very much not
understood… very much not understood. I mean, both
among the, you know, within ourselves as a team
because the vast majority of the team is extremely
inexperienced in this way of working, extremely. […]
What are we actually doing? You know, and it’s… and it’s
always only ever going to be an approximation of it, but
even that is… could be really valuable
(Louise)
It just strikes me maybe there’s a sense in which actually
you don’t want to create texts around that part of the
process because you do just want to forget it and get on
with the other stuff
(Louise)

29. Conclusions
Tracing the materiality of curricula provides new insights – although
not all experiences are inscribed
Curriculum work is academic identity work, and involves knowing,
finding, rewriting, sharing and presenting texts
Rewriting texts involves ‘personalising’ them (for the tutor, for the
students); some texts are easier to rewrite than others
These texts support the development and extension of professional
identities – but also their constraint
Examples of the temporality and spatiality of curriculum work – the
cycles and rhythms of design, practice and redesign
Blurs common-sense distinctions between authorship and
readership, text and ‘user’, human and nonhuman actors
Non-fixed, ephemeral, distributed nature of curricula where apparent
stability is always provisional
Text transformations and entextualisation as potent sites of
engagement, authorship and contestation?

30. References
Barnett, R. & Coate, K. (2005) Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education.
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ehrlich, S. (2012) Text trajectories: legal discourses and gendered inequalities.
Applied Linguistics Review 3(1), 47-73.
Kell, C. (2006) Crossing the margins: literacy, semiotics and the recontextualisation
of meanings. In Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies:
Instances of Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 147-171.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Millen, J. (1997) Par for the Course: Designing Course Outlines and Feminist
Freedoms. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 5 (1) 9–27.
Oliver, M. (2003) Curriculum Design as acquired social practice: a case study. Paper
presented at the 84th Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research
Association, Chicago.
Silverstein, M. & Urban, G. (Eds.)1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. London:
University of Chicago Press.