This article explores how curriculum can serve our methodological practice as we inquire into inclusive schooling with intellectually/developmentally disabled middle and high school students. Interweaving a theory of activist affordances (Dokumaci, ) with writings that emphasize the potentiality of transgressive actions via sensory contact, we analyze the curricular affordances of our research space, namely a series of art-making sessions in which 11 students with complex support needs participated during the 2023-2024 school year. Adopting a non-representational approach to the many video-recordings we made of the sessions, we identified a few broad structural movements, namely spaciousness and potentiality in human-object relations, intelligibility within fields of yearning, and a caring sociality for thinking-with. Through these curricular tendencies, we came to understand the potentiality of this space to invite forms of experimentation (for us and our student-participants) when we (re)turn to the sensing body. Collectively, they offer opportunities for exploding the grids of intelligibility on which curricular spaces-whether in schools or within research-are built, thereby worlding disability differently. We argue that by invoking sensation through arts-based approaches, we are invited into modes of knowing and being that exceed the scripts of medicalized discourses in which students with complex support needs are embedded in schools. Eschewing binary notions, the article moves towards understanding inclusion as an embodied fluid assemblage where no entity is immaterial to the emergence of another.
This article situates Geneva Gay's scholarship in the historical and contemporary contexts of multicultural education. Specifically, we discuss how Geneva Gay's scholarship in culturally responsive research has advanced the theory and praxis of multicultural education. Additionally, because Geneva Gay is an actor and a revolutionary, we share with readers our inquiries into the multiethnic curriculum she created for us all in scholarly and collegial spaces within organizations and associations.
How can educational research become liberatory if the discipline is rooted in the systemic oppression of communities of Color? Building on Dr. Geneva Gay's legacy of culturally responsive teaching, we, of Navajo/Din & eacute; (Melissa) and European (Emily) ancestries, theorize how culturally responsive research can act as an ongoing project of decolonizing research paradigms by rejecting deficit framings of racialized students, and instead engendering culturally accurate knowledge for and with communities of Color. Utilizing the creation of a Navajo sash belt as a physical bridge between the concepts, we illustrate links between culturally responsive and decolonizing research, with dreams for a more just, culturally and ecologically contextual, and equitable research praxis. We conclude with four overarching principles that overlay culturally responsive and decolonizing research: (1) relationships, (2) reflexivity, (3) reciprocity, and (4) reflection for accountability.
In this intergenerational dialogue, we discuss Geneva Gay's enduring impact on the field of education. We first trace how Geneva's life experiences shaped her educational trajectory and how her community influenced her resistance to systemic oppression. Next, we situate ideas from other articles in this special issue within Geneva Gay's scholarly contributions to curriculum studies, culturally responsive teaching, teacher preparation, and research, attending to how newer generations of scholars could advocate for culturally responsive educational reform in the current US sociopolitical context. In our conclusion, we explore the complex concept of returning to one's ancestral homeland for non-Indigenous people of Color in the United States and how their racialized diasporas could help envision more just scholarship.
Utilizing intersectional feminist theory, my analysis of US social studies standards in this article demonstrates that white women and their experiences are essentialized throughout US history standards in both language and content. The standards situate women's racialized and gendered identities as distinct while also using euphemisms and vague language to imply whiteness without naming it. Additionally, the narrow descriptions of labor and the emphasis on suffrage in the standards essentialize white women's experiences while presenting them as deracialized. Social studies standards often categorize Black and Indigenous women either as racialized or as women, and they rarely include Latina women or Asian American Pacific Islander women at all.
As life for Palestinians in Gaza is eviscerated, the ongoing effects of the historical events so neatly compressed into the pages of official history curricula are lived out in the present. This should compel curriculum inquiry scholarship to investigate how the distorted narratives and the historiography represented in curricula are shaped by asymmetrical power relations. In this article, I interrogate the Middle East as a history curriculum discourse in senior secondary Modern History curricula in the context of the ongoing Gaza crisis, which has been a politically sensitive topic in Australian schools and other settings. Building on the imperative to decolonise history education in settler-colonial Australia, I utilise Chen's (2010) Asia as method and Foucauldian-style discourse analysis to analyse eight Australian senior secondary history curriculum documents. I establish that the dominant Israel-centric approach in most, but not all, units occludes Palestinian perspectives and historiography. I also evaluate claims made in these documents that the study of history helps young people engage with contemporary issues and events. The article contributes a curriculum perspective to emerging literature on educative responses to the war, as well as existing research concerned with decolonising history education, historical justice, truth-telling, and difficult histories. Overall, I argue that as the occupation of Gaza and the toll of the resulting war crimes of Israeli and Hamas forces are officially evidenced, future curriculum making in Australia will need to commit to tackling truth-telling in relation to Palestine and Israel's past/present in tandem with reckoning with our own settler-colonial past/present.
Most high school students in the United States will receive only minimal instruction in Black history. However, the College Board's new Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies (AAS) curriculum has made Black-centered curriculum accessible to more students. Using a Black critical theory (BlackCrit) framework, we used classroom assignments, interviews, and observational data from one West Coast school's pilot AP African American Studies course to explore how students experience the teaching of Black history in the course versus their other courses. We found that the pilot AP AAS course, when taught by an experienced and passionate Black studies teacher, emerged as a meaningful educational experience that fostered pride in Black identity, resilience in the face of antiblackness and healing from the harm it causes, and a deeper understanding of the global Black diaspora. We conclude by discussing our findings and the implications of AP AAS as a healing educational intervention, particularly for Black students navigating antiblack educational systems.
In this article, I demonstrate the ways in which dis/ability is constructed, produced, and maintained through the temporal regimes of schooling, which require surveilling, disciplining, and regulating children's bodyminds. This article shows how temporality can expand our analysis of how exclusion occurs and why it is important to consider the entanglements of time and embodiment in how we understand inclusion and exclusion in educational contexts. I draw on findings from ethnographic case studies carried out in India to expand scholarly conversations on how the legacies of colonialism inform our understandings of the temporal construction of disability and childhoods. I outline three ways children become "out of time": out of pace, out of sync, and out of age. Children become "out of time" because of the ways in which educational contexts focus on speed, the pressures of classroom and curriculum time, and the standardization of predetermined age-appropriate grade-related outcomes. These factors exist within a larger temporal context of international policy pressures to meet development targets, developmental biases within universalized measures of quality education, and the historical construction of intelligence. I offer crip time as a way to examine and reimagine the relationship between time, embodiment, and schooling.
In this article, I examine how power and control manifest through the censorship of the Palestinian curriculum following the Palestinian Authority's (PA) establishment and distribution of PA-created textbooks. I investigate the ongoing struggle over the Palestinian curriculum in East Jerusalem and explore the ways in which Israel exerts its power over the content that students will learn, with a specific focus on the textbooks implemented in the 2017-2018 academic year. I examine the impact of Israeli censorship, which includes altering educational materials by removing references to Palestinian narratives, heritage, and history. These modifications are intended to normalize Israeli perspectives and obscure the realities of occupation, raising concerns about violations of professional and academic standards. The research question guiding this study is: how do Palestinians and Israelis use textbooks as tools of power and control? I explore how Israeli authorities enact significant changes in Palestinian textbooks, which reflect broader power dynamics and efforts to normalize Israeli perspectives. At the same time, I show that Palestinian curricula include assertions of Palestinian historical and national identity, often in response to political pressures and efforts to preserve Palestinian heritage and resistance narratives. Through my thematic analysis of 28 social studies textbooks from grades 3 to 10 and interviews, I underscore the ongoing struggle over educational content, revealing far-reaching implications for Palestinian education and identity in East Jerusalem. The article highlights how textbooks serve as tools for asserting national narratives and shaping students' understanding of history and identity.
In this research article, we highlight the insights and reflections of eight Palestinian English language and literacy teachers as they navigated their ethical and educational responsibilities in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. In describing the socio-emotional challenges faced by their students and themselves, each participant made reference-either directly or indirectly-to the construct of existence itself as resistance, a familiar theme in Palestine, as well as to others facing adverse circumstances. A primary construct that emerged is the Palestinian Arabic term (sic) (sumud, "steadfastness"), with each participant giving voice to notions of existence, resiliency, and resistance, layered with a personal and collective sense of moral responsibility for their students. Implications of this study will be relevant to educational policy makers and practitioners who are working to strengthen and support the agency and well-being of teachers working in unjust, harsh, oppressive, and/or dangerous contexts.
In this article, we explore the possibilities of teaching about Palestine in US higher education. Since Israel's latest US-backed assault on Gaza in October 2023, widespread protest and global solidarity actions have transpired, along with significant crackdowns on dissent in educational settings, making teaching about Palestine particularly difficult. Drawing from over two decades of experience in diverse teaching and learning contexts, we consider how the broader sociopolitical climate at various historical moments has influenced pedagogies and praxes of possibility in teaching about Palestine. Using critical, abolitionist, and ethnic studies frameworks, we argue for the need for transgressive pedagogies. Specifically, we reflect on our own experiences teaching about Palestine-both as scholars who came of age under the weight of academic silencing and as educators in the present, when teaching about Palestine remains a transgressive (hooks, 1994) act in the academy. We present three pedagogical praxes from our teaching-(1) unsilencing Palestine; (2) nurturing relational resonances; and (3) building transnational solidarities-to contemplate the possibilities of this moment and how these practices might allow educators to reimagine teaching about Palestine as praxes of solidarity and liberation.
