Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

Aesthetic Wreck - Diving

Angela Kraemer-Holland — 2026-09-01

Positioning the embodied as a legitimate knowledge source, this paper frames outlaw emotions as informative curricula for aesthetically understanding the self. Acknowledging the power in feminist poetry as linguistic and allegorical rejection of patriarchy and broad social exclusion, I utilize Adrienne Rich’s (1973) poem “Diving into the Wreck” as both anchoring organizational tool and feminist allegorical gateway into exploring integral outlaw emotion-information stemming from anger and rage, gendered emotions often framed as unwelcome. However, an aesthetic “pedagogy of discomfort” invites students to explore their settled emotion-myths as instructive, luminous opportunities to explore the intersections between education, the self, and feeling rules governing outlaw emotions in educational and social spaces.

Curriculum at the End of Time

Abraham P. DeLeon — 2026-09-01

Ecological collapse, political fragmentation, and existential crisis define our present. This paper theorizes “a curriculum at the end of time” that emerges from abjection and pointing towards the becoming apocalyptic body. I explore how curriculum and educational spaces replicate collapse through systemic realities, corporeal experiences, and ontological ruin. The apocalyptic body, excluded from traditional educational experiences, becomes a site of profound curricular significance where the failed promises of futurity are revealed. Engaging with a variety of critical theories, such as abjection, ruin epistemologies, and apocalyptic imagery, this paper proposes a curriculum that rejects salvation and reconstruction, embracing collapse, and learning through decay, mourning, and radical unmaking. I argue for a curriculum theory that embraces ruin and collapse to live and create amongst the unknowability of social life, allowing being and unbeing to coexist in the curricular spaces of the abject and its potential apocalyptic moments.

Am I Truly My Mother's Daughter?

Chelsea Lynne Murry — 2026-09-01

The following represents an autoethnographic exploration of identity, legacy, and sustainability through the lens of my mother’s educational pursuit, and my own experiences as an educator using the Currere Methodology (Pinar, 1975/1994) and Black Feminism Womanism (Collins, 2001; Walker, 1982). Autoethnography or racial autobiography in feminist and womanist thought has the power to facilitate an interrogation of racism, power, and privilege (Pratt-Clarke, 2012, p. 85). Through the analyzation of the education decisions of my mother, I wish to locate my “Currere of Stay” in K-12 education. I hope to uncover the intergenerational narratives that thread the journey of Black women in education and womanhood.

Honoring the OG’s: Centering Black Educators as Theorists in Teacher Education

Kisha Porcher — 2026-09-01

The Black Gaze Framework (BGF) is a liberating lens that centers and celebrates the multifacetedness of Blackness for liberation in teacher education. This manuscript interweaves our personal testimonies with Black educators as our OG’s to demonstrate the importance of centering Blackness in teacher education to disrupt anti-Blackness. We provide an overview of anti-Blackness within education, BGF, and apply it to teacher education. BGF has five tenets and we focus specifically on tenet one, Honoring the O.G.’s: Black History & Wisdom to advocate for looking to the wisdom of our O.G’s for guidance to center Blackness as liberation in teacher education. This tenet centers and teaches Black scholars, activists, and theorists as foundational knowledge in teacher education, to prepare preservice teachers to teach Black students. We focus specifically on Alice Dunbar Nelson and Septima Poinsette Clark as educational theorists for centering and celebrating Blackness in ELA Secondary & Social Students Teacher Education for liberation.

We Need Critical Hope

LaGarrett J. King — 2026-09-01

This paper examines the contemporary cultural wars surrounding Black history, racial literacy, and Critical Race Theory through the author’s personal experience of being targeted by conservative activists, legislators, and university administrators. It situates these events within a long history of policing Black history education and introduces the concept of the Black scare (Burden-Stelly, 2023), a coordinated effort to distort, criminalize, and suppress Black intellectual work. The author advances critical hope as an urgent framework for protecting Black history and sustaining liberatory futures, offering reflection, “not victimhood,” but resilience.

Selling School Safety

Brian D. Schultz — 2026-09-01

Reclamation, Resistance, and Curriculum Within the Tremors

Vanessa Winn — 2026-09-01