Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

What Was, Is, and Can Be Pedagogically Possible?

2025-03-18T11:25:17+00:00

This speculative work explores an instructor’s two educational events that occurred in an undergraduate education methods course and a graduate research course. Drawing upon currere to sense-make of these educational events at the intersection of her pedagogical past, present, and future, this work illuminates the complexities both education students and instructors face while lodged between metanarratives of method/s, doing, capital accumulation, and instrumentality, and those of exploration, conceptual knowledge, thought-inquiry, and possibility. Consequently, based upon the instructor’s unexpected educational events, this work illuminates how we are subconsciously complicit in the very structures we attempt to short-circuit, demonstrating the importanceof currere’s role in meaning-making of curriculum, inquiry, and pedagogical possibility.

Becoming-Curriculum in Maria Speth’s Mr. Bachmann and His Class

2024-01-05T08:14:32+00:00

Mr. Bachmann and His Class delineates a sixth-grade class composed of child immigrants with a retiring teacher Dieter Bachmann in Germany. Although the protagonist of the film is the multicultural city where the school is located, the intimate portrait of Bachmann and his sixth-grade students in the documentary reveals Sellers’ becoming-curriculum. This paper examines the concept of becoming and Sellers’ becoming-curriculum and identifies how Bachmann’s classroom embodies becoming-curriculum from three perspectives: rhizome, lines of flight, and multiplicity. Like the three conceptions, Bachmann’s learning and teaching activity does not have a predetermined design or process nor a specific educational goal or outcome. He always encourages his students to improvise and embraces children’s ideas, thus leading to endless possibilities in the classroom. Becoming-curriculum is inexplicable, but Bachmann provides an explicit and valuable practice of becoming-curriculum.

Engaging Boldly to (Re)Think Methodology

2025-11-07T11:20:01+00:00

In Methodology and Praxis: Thinking with Patti Lather, editors Gabriel Huddleston and Robert Helfenbein and their contributing authors offer both academic and personal insights into the works, theories, and life of Patti Lather. As readers, we are invited to learn not only about Lather’s extensive contributions to qualitative methodologies but also her influence on the personal lives of fellow academics. Rarely do we get to peak behind the veil of academia to witness how intertwined scholarly work and the people behind them really are. This edited collection allows the reader to see the transformative nature of Patti Lather as both a scholar and as a friend to many in her field. By reading this book, we ask that you consider the value of theorizing with Patti Lather and what methodological assumptions within qualitative research can be destabilized.

Wrong Rocks Counterstorying a Curriculum of Erasure in Manahatta/n

2025-05-20T09:34:36+00:00

This study examines the public curriculum of settler colonial mythology told by monuments and memorials in New York City. We discuss the role these monuments play in the normalization of settler ignorance (Pewewardy et. al., 2018), of particular relevance now as teachers prepare to teach students in 2024 about what happened in 1624, celebrating Dutch settlement of New York City. Curriculum is not limited to schools and other sites of formal education, it exists in narratives that perpetrate Lenape erasure through public place based miseducation including ways in which a settler colonial curriculum of place is immortalized in the digital fabric of the internet that supports learning about these memorials by way of non-profit, and government-funded educational resources, and even video games. We center our work in these spaces, the public pedagogy that exists outside of formal school contexts. We curated these inherently pedagogical spaces (Simon, 2014) and through this curation, we aim to unsettle a dysconscious, settler colonial, public curriculum (Sandlin, 2010) which permeates many spaces in and near Manahatta/n.

Refusals as Access-Otherwise

2025-12-01T12:45:40+00:00

This article reframes student refusal not as a geography of disciplinary coercion but asaccess-otherwise: livable, consent-based ways of appearing, thinking, and learning. Drawing oncrip theory (compulsory able-bodymindedness, crip time, disability justice) and anarchic theory(destituent power, prefiguration, opacity), I read four classroom vignettes to grapple withrefusal’s terrains: epistemic, relational/non-relational (presence without capture),semiotic/modal, and spatial/presence. Across scenes, refusal renders compliance apparatusesinoperative while prefiguring more-aberrant relations/non-relations; in other words, such refusalsare not withdrawals from learning/becoming but the immanent design of conditions under whichstudy becomes more livableon differing terrains. Moreover, I articulate a teacher stance thatrefuses diagnostic capture and performative accountability, grappling with consent-paced andopaque practices amid various levels of risk. The conclusion contends that access should beorganized around use, consent, and the protection of opacity, not surveillance andstandardization. Implications include pedagogies that cultivate destituent moves, flexible temposand media, and administrative protections for opacity. My hopes are that thecoercivechoreography of standardized and authoritarian schooling spaces can more readily becomelivable environments that embody autonomy, difference, and love.

Co-Curricular-Making’s Lessons

2025-12-03T08:56:08+00:00

Drawing on one curricular reform effort underway, this paper documents the found intersections of Dewey’s (1934) notion of “roominess,” with valuing multiple learner/learning differences and paths, bringing many related curricular theorists’ voices to bear. Concepts emerge that become ongoing accompaniments for educators, breathing life into the lived terms of responsive co-curricular-making. These accompanying concepts value time and concrete practice living/learning within vulnerable, trust-building, and connected ways in classrooms. It is through such roomy curricular enactment that educators find language for responsive curricular enactment, mobilizing curricular reform efforts orienting teaching/learning towards individual/collective growth and well-being. Further, these understandings have been significantly enlarged and deepened through kinships with Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Dear New Teacher

2025-09-17T11:56:25+00:00

In this short essay, written as a letter to new teachers, I propose what I am calling Amate Praxis, a cycle of theory, action, and reflection based upon an ethic of love with four interconnected elements of Amate Praxis: care, connection, action, and hope. Drawing upon the work of bell hooks, William Schubert, and many other scholars of education, I invite new teachers to think and act with theory and love.

Curriculum Theorizing in a Time of Genocide, Scholasticide, and (Counter)Insurgency

2026-03-13T08:44:29+00:00

Bergamo Keynote 2025

Celebrating the Eclecticism and Urgency of Curriculum Theorizing

2026-03-13T08:50:41+00:00

Editorial, Issue 41(1)