Ted Aoki’s

Notion of
Metonymic
Doubling
Dr O Koopman
Department of Curriculum Studies
GG Cilie Building, 3rd Floor (3010), Ryneveld Street
okoopman@sun.ac.za
Revision of term “Curriculum”

Curriculum is synonymous with

the Latin word “Currere” invoked
by William Pinar in 1975.

Curriculum here is the sum total

of all the teaching (instructional
Means running of a course
practices) and learning
wherein curriculum is
experiences in a school (syllabus)
experienced, enacted and re-
and the assessment . From stated
constructed.
broad goals and objectives of
learning, to assessment.
 1. Explicit curriculum - is the prescribed
knowledge and skills that are taught and
learnt in schools.
2. Hidden curriculum - everything that is learnt
in schools but which is not found in prescribed
Three kinds of texts. This relates to what learners learn from
the culture of schools and what schools do to

curriculum – reproduce the dominant values or beliefs of a

society. This might include what learners learn
from how school assemblies are conducted,
Eisner (1985) from wearing (or not wearing) school
uniforms, from separate activities for boys and
girls, etc.
3. Null curriculum is what schools exclude — the
stories not told to learners. Exclusion of
indigenous knowledge
 • Tensioned space between curriculum-as-
planned versus curriculum-as-lived.
• Not a replacement of curriculum as planned
with curriculum as lived but for its co-
Metonymic existence.
• Teachers dwell in this tensioned space of
Doubling planned/unplanned – textured site of lived
tension.
• This site of lived tension between the
planned and lived space Aoki refer to as a
metonymic space of doubling
 • “It looks like a simple oppositional binary space, but it
is not. It is a space of doubling, where we slip into the
language of ‘both this and that, but neither this nor
that.’ Our teachers slip into the language of ‘both
Aoki (1999, plannable and unplannable, but neither strictly
plannable nor strictly unplannable.’ Confusing? Yes.

p. 181) Confusingly complex? Yes. But it is nevertheless a site

that beckons pedagogic struggle, for such a human site
promises generative possibilities and hope. It is indeed,
a site of becoming, where newness can come into
being. The space moves and is alive! (1999: 181)”.