This lived curriculum, of course, is not the curriculum as laid out in a plan, but a plan more or less lived out. It deserves the label « curriculum » as much as the plan deserves the label « curriculum-as-plan. » (Aoki, 1993, p. 257)

Canadian curriculum studies is an intellectually dynamic and ever-changing field. For Canadian curriculum scholars engaging the processes of situating and defining “curriculum” theorizing as -planned, -implemented, and -lived remains a historically situated and contested “complicated conversation.” Each week we will try to “reactivate,” “reconceptualize,” “reconstruct” and “complicate” our historical, present, and future understandings of the discrepancies between various disciplinary discourses, which in turn may inform our lived experiences inside and outside the contexts of institutional forms of education (Pinar, 2019). Moreover, our weekly online conversations will critically examine how such discrepancies create tensions between both internal and external stakeholders to the field of curriculum studies, and the very concept of “curriculum” writ large. This course thus invites us to participate in a personal and communal dialogue, indeed a “complicated conversation,” in which we will be asked to recursively consider existing systemic and alternative approaches toward understanding our conceptions of the curriculum-as-planned, -implemented, and – lived in relation to the current contexts of the 2020 pandemic. Click here to view the course outline.