Organizing curriculum and instruction in PK-12 public schools in relation to standardization practices presents us with the inherent paradox of limiting education to that which is already known and anticipated. Prescriptive standards, assessment-driven curricula, narrowly defined outcomes, and social efficiency-oriented scripted instruction only serve to shift teaching and learning away from the inexistent and "not yet" and toward preconceived knowledge (Dentith & Bronson, 2006; Pinar, 1998). Such strategies reveal a philosophical and intellectual (or, more accurately, anti-intellectual) worldview that imposes foundational pedagogical claims on a multiplicity of schools despite extensive social, cultural, economic, linguistic, personal and geographic differences that rupture assertions of a presumed universal norm. Paradigmatically linked to politico-economic and religious fundamentalisms, this pedagogical fundamentalism explicitly organizes educational systems according to the socio-economic interests of state bureaucracies and tends to view the ends and means of effective schooling as known and settled (Milligan, 2005). In contrast to pedagogical fundamentalism, I propose pedagogies of absence as the educative possibility for constituting alternate autobiographical and social imaginaries. My argument here is not for curricula devoid of the guidance offered by well-constructed standards and authentic assessment, but rather for a holistic educational practice that also engages the indeterminate, ambiguous, and unknown. Specifically, I wonder about nurturing students' and teachers' capacities to construct meaningful possibilities for themselves and their world beyond that which has already been delineated for them by received curriculum standards, educational policy, social norms, or cultural traditions--all of which interpret human experience from particular, limited vantage points. The concern for pedagogical practice, then, is the place of the absent and the "not yet" within the epistemological question that asks what knowledge is of the most worth. In order to explore this question and illuminate pedagogies of absence, I draw on insights from the artist Julie Mehretu.
