Curriculum Enablement and Posthumanism: Pathways for Creating and Implementing a Community Development Curriculum

Abstract

This article argues that the application of transcendent disciplinarism as a lens for critical inquiry and curriculum enablement is urgent in a posthuman era. The paper asserts that a curriculum must be responsive to societal needs by providing students with a "toolbox" for developing functional and productive societies. The community development degree is pedagogically premised on utilising multiple disciplinary synergies primed for analytically and practically improving the human condition. The article uses critical terms in posthumanism, such as relationality, resilience, and sustainable communities, to evoke a return to the local by analysing the creation and implementation of a responsive community development curriculum. Through pedagogical approaches that infuse collaborative and cooperative learning with active learning strategies, we argue that the community development curriculum should be structured to enhance the capabilities of students to assist communities in adapting and transcending to transformation. This paper followed a systematic literature review of journal articles extracted from SCOPUS, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and EBSCOhost electronic databases. A final sample of twenty-four articles was reviewed, analysed, and presented using ATLAS.ti flow chart diagrams. The study's findings revealed that posthumanism-inspired transformation normatively conceives the earth as a connected entity and places as entangled and interconnected. The article further interrogates how the posthuman approach can be used to create and implement pathways for curriculum enablement.