Ted Tetsuo Aoki and Canadian Curriculum Studies

The work of Japanese Canadian teacher, administrator, educator, and theorist Ted Tetsuo Aoki (1919–2012) is both extraordinary and inextricably connected to who he was and who he became as curriculum theorist. Spanning over four decades, his scholarship is nothing less than uniquely Aoki(an) in form, meaning, and effect. Aoki’s contributions, deeply intellectual but seriously playful and creatively performative, continue as vital to the advancement of curriculum studies in Canada and internationally as well as to education in general. At the heart of Aoki’s ideas, thinking, and modes of theorizing are radical concepts such as: curriculum as plan(ned), curriculum as live(d), bridge-not-bridge, lingering, inspiriting, metaphor, and metonymy. These Aokian concepts when examined more closely reveal as ontologically grounded in and epistemologically arising from his life as a Japanese Canadian in Western Canada at the end of World War I, into the years of World War II, and through to the decade following the turn of the 21st century. Theoretically, the scholar’s work is often characterized as phenomenological and hermeneutic renderings of curriculum. Further study discloses Aoki’s scholarship as demonstrating greater intellectual breadth, also situated within critical, poststructural, postcolonial, postmodern, premodern, enactive, ecological, and cultural discourses including Zen Buddhism. Aoki’s studies expand notions of curriculum, but more fundamentally, they expose and bring into question entrenched ideologies and practices within education and its disciplinary areas. In these manners, Aokian theory prompts conceptual spaces for (re)new(ed) meanings of curriculum and ultimately what it means to be human. It is remarkable that Aoki’s decades-long theorizing has virtually gone without controversy or debate. While this attests to Aoki’s humility and brilliance as a scholar, it signals the need for continued engagement with Aokian concepts as well as deeper exploration into the scholar and his scholarship as a whole.