When I enrolled in CTL1000, Foundations of Curriculum and Pedagogy, I expected a methods course. Since it was mandatory and I had already worked as an education manager, I imagined we would discuss curriculum planning, assessment, instructional strategies, and the practical decisions educators make each day.
Instead, the course asked me to slow down.
Rather than beginning with how to design curriculum, we began by examining how educational knowledge is constructed. My professor introduced the course by reminding us that the history of education is not a quiet one. It is shaped by struggles over whose knowledge is valued, whose voices enter the educational canon, and who has the authority to define what learning should look like.
Initially, I was surprised by how different this felt from the application-based course I had anticipated. I wanted tools I could carry directly into educational practice. What I encountered first was a set of questions: Who created the systems in which those tools are used? What assumptions are hidden within apparently neutral practices? Who benefits from the way education is currently organized, and who is continually asked to adapt?
Curriculum is more than content
These questions changed how I understood curriculum. I had previously thought of curriculum primarily as the content and expectations that guide teaching. The course invited me to see it as something much larger. Curriculum also lives in what is omitted, whose histories are treated as foundational, which forms of knowledge are considered credible, and what students learn about themselves through their encounters with education.
Pedagogy, likewise, is more than the selection of effective teaching strategies. Every pedagogical decision carries assumptions about knowledge, intelligence, behaviour, authority, and belonging. Even when educators do not intend to take a political position, their choices still operate within institutions shaped by history and unequal relations of power.
Education is never neutral.
Standpoint as a form of accountability
Our curricular self-study and standpoint assignment brought these ideas closer to my own practice. It asked me to consider how my experiences and identities influence what I notice, value, and assume as an educator. Reflecting on my positionality as a Black Muslim woman helped me recognize that I do not enter educational spaces as a detached observer. My standpoint shapes the questions I ask, the students with whom I may instinctively identify, and the practices I am more likely to question.
This was not an invitation to make education entirely about myself. It was an invitation to become more accountable. If educators do not examine their own standpoint, they may mistake familiarity for neutrality and reproduce assumptions they have never learned to see.
Finding language for a developing practice
Several thinkers helped me find language for this developing understanding. Paulo Freire showed me that education can teach learners to accept the world as it is, or invite them to question and transform it. His critique of the banking model helped me reconsider classrooms in which knowledge is treated as something delivered by an authority and received passively by students.
bell hooks extended this idea through engaged pedagogy. Her work asks educators to recognize students as whole human beings whose identities, experiences, and voices belong within learning. From hooks, I began to see the classroom not only as a place where information is exchanged, but also as a space where freedom, dignity, and belonging can either be nurtured or restricted.
Maha Saleh’s curriculum of rahma was especially meaningful to me. Her framing of mercy, care, and justice challenged the idea that compassion is merely a personal quality possessed by a kind teacher. Care can be built into curriculum, relationships, expectations, and institutional structures. It should not appear only after a student is already struggling or has reached a crisis.
Critical race feminist currere also helped me understand lived experience as a legitimate source of educational knowledge. Personal reflection does not have to sit outside theory. It can reveal how larger structures are encountered, internalized, resisted, and reproduced through everyday life.
Together, these ideas encouraged me to look in two directions at once: outward at the systems shaping education, and inward at the assumptions I carry into my own practice.
Rethinking what makes practice practical
By the end of the course, I understood why we had not begun with a toolkit. Practical strategies are never separate from the values and power structures behind them. A curriculum can feature diverse authors while continuing to silence students. High expectations can encourage growth, but they can also become a justification for inflexibility. A classroom can appear orderly while teaching some students that acceptance depends on their compliance.
The course I initially experienced as less practical ultimately changed how I think about practice itself. I no longer want to ask only whether an educational approach is effective. I also want to ask: Effective for whom? Whose knowledge does it recognize? What does it assume about learners? Who is expected to change, and which structures are allowed to remain unquestioned?
I entered CTL1000 expecting to learn how to create better curriculum. I left understanding that curriculum and pedagogy are never simply technical tasks. They are choices about whose knowledge matters, whose humanity is recognized, and what kind of world education teaches us to accept or imagine differently.