This book collects recent and creative theorizing emerging in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory, through an emphasis on provoking encounters. Drawn from a return to foundational texts, the emphasis on an 'encountering' curriculum highlights the often overlooked, pre-conceptual aspects of the educational experience; these aspects include the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning. The book highlights that immediate components of one's encounters with education-across formal and informal settings-comprise a large part of the teaching and learning processes. Chapters offer both close readings of specific work from the curriculum theory archive, as well as engagements with cutting-edge conceptual issues across disciplinary lines, with contributions from leading and emerging scholars across the field of curriculum studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory.

This book collects recent and creative theorizing emerging in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory, through an emphasis on provoking encounters. Drawn from a return to foundational texts, the emphasis on an 'encountering' curriculum highlights the often overlooked, pre-conceptual aspects of the educational experience; these aspects include the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning. The book highlights that immediate components of one's encounters with education-across formal and informal settings-comprise a large part of the teaching and learning processes. Chapters offer both close readings of specific work from the curriculum theory archive, as well as engagements with cutting-edge conceptual issues across disciplinary lines, with contributions from leading and emerging scholars across the field of curriculum studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory.

Children are inundated with popular character images that span across films, television shows, the Internet, clothes, lunchboxes, and toys. At the same time, parents and educators are urged to maintain an anxious distinction between "educational" toys and mass-marketed toys. This book reports on a study that integrates education and communication perspectives, examining the mechanisms of both pretend play and children's consumer culture. When children pretend play, they communicate - through enactment and storytelling - narratives and motifs from a variety of cultural sources. The study focuses on one narrative template: the promotional character toy, that is, replica models of characters seen in television and films. It explores the complex and often less discernable ways children use play to emulate or alter the roles they are offered through these toys.