Schooling as an institution has long been looked to as sites that construct and reproduce social inequities. This work of schooling as an institution is partly rooted in the reproduction of cultural memory, especially that of whiteness, capitalist patriarchy, and settler colonialism as a way to justify ongoing settler presence. In this paper, one such example is examined to illustrate the ways in which Oklahoma elementary school Land Run re-enactments do particular work to reify whiteness and settler colonial memory. I draw on Bruyneel’s conceptual framing of 'settler memory' to understand how adults who participated in Land Run re-enactments as children remember and make meaning of this event now, particularly in the storying of land. In utilizing a critical ethnographic inquiry with adult Oklahomans’ experiences and meaning-making, I find that adults 1) look to the ways this curricular experience instilled an affective belonging or othering rooted in white spatialization, 2) make meaning from Indigenous erasure, and 3) make connections around land theft rooted in whiteness. The Oklahoma Land Run re-enactments serve as one contextual example of a larger narrative of Indigenous dispossession, producing particular narratives in the storying of land and settler presence that call for greater interrogation.
This feminist case study explores how the shift to virtual education during the COVID-19 pandemic restructured the boundaries between public and private life for women teachers in Iran. Drawing on informal, in-depth conversations with ten married, middle-class secondary school teachers in East Tehran, this study examines the emotional, relational, and labor-based consequences of teaching from home. The research question guiding this inquiry is: How did the move to virtual teaching during the pandemic entangle professional responsibilities with domestic expectations in the lives of Iranian women educators? Grounded in feminist standpoint epistemology and supported by the work of Fraser (2017) on progressive neoliberalism, the study highlights how gendered labor expectations intensified under the conditions of lockdown. Teachers reported experiences of increased domestic burden, blurred boundaries between work and family life, emotional exhaustion, and the internalization of patriarchal norms. The findings are grouped into three thematic areas: (1) the entanglement of professional and domestic responsibilities, (2) internalized gender roles in the home, and (3) the social devaluation of teaching as feminine labor. These narratives reveal how neoliberal and patriarchal forces coalesced to privatize risk and responsibilize women during a time of national crisis. This study contributes to feminist scholarship by illustrating how women’s voices from a particular socio-political context speak to broader global patterns of gendered inequity. It concludes with implications for educational policy, social justice advocacy, and the moral imperative to center the lived experiences of women educators in future emergency planning and pedagogical reform.
The author writes a reflective letter to Rey, her earlier self as a first-year classroom teacher, exploring how her understanding of curriculum has evolved. In a warm and conversational tone, she revisits the basic notion of curriculum before introducing the ideas of American scholar Madeleine R. Grumet and her expansive view of curriculum. Through this dialogue, she explores whether broadening the concept of curriculum makes teaching clearer or more complex, while also acknowledging insights from non-Western traditions. This essay invites beginning teachers to consider a more expansive, relational approach to curriculum, emphasizing how theory and practice intertwine in the everyday work of teaching.
The current milieu feels dreadful and full of that dread: gun violence and cis-heterosexism in the United States (and elsewhere), as well as the global climate crisis. Given our dread-full situation, what might we do to “keep going” from an ethical standpoint? On our minds is what we are calling a curriculum of illusion and the miraculous, which weaves together Jean Baudrillard’s illusion with Robert Orsi’s call to reclaim the language of immanence—the miraculous. This theoretical piece suggests that the loss of illusion and immanence forecloses the possibilities of imagination, and that repairing that loss is a pressing educational endeavour. Curriculum is the story we tell about the past and present that shapes our impressions of reality and possible futures, and consequently a curriculum of illusion and the miraculous helps tell a story that encourages persistence in the face of dread, but without being rigid in conceptualization or implementation.
This article looks at the place of curriculum in the maintenance of the concretized myth of white supremacy. Curriculum is positioned as political, social, and economic tool that is inseparable from the establishment and maintenance of the various modes of white supremacy, rather than a neutral document. Curriculum is a historical, and historically white supremacist document.
From early childhood, picture books have captivated us with a spectrum of characters playing out plot lines in places both far and near. More specifically, many of these books, with their aesthetic and efferent elements of words and images, have come together to evoke and inspire our love of Nature and respect the potential role Nature can play in our daily lives—formally known as biophilia. In a back and forth sequence within the pages that follow, each of us presents and responds with both word and image, to 3 picture books that have all played roles in reaffirming our love and respect of the natural world. In particular, our work will be theoretically grounded in Rosenblatt’s reader response, methodologically supported by auto-bibliography as a form of narrative inquiry, and grounded in biophilia.
This work attends to sounds that are sounded by human actors and the echoes of human actors in the lifeworlds and places where sounds are composed and consumed. The multidirectional vibrations of sounds are examined through the stories of three youth, Miriam, Sheldon, and Nellie, to understand how false communities found within schooling and familial spaces reduce listening to passive assimilation into hierarchical relationships that reify capitalistic purposes for listening, bodies, and (un)responses to sound. Within affective relationships, we explore how the youth restoried their engagements with sounds and the producers of sounds to explore and resist compliance, make agentive decisions to heal from coercive linguistic power relations, and create an otherwise sonic place of belonging.
How Can We Live Freer? I examine existing theories to refocus and support educators to avoid victimizing ourselves in our current age of excessive surveillance. Psychologist Dr. Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and author and practitioner of his notion of spirituality and self- actualization discovered while a concentration camp prisoner. I revisit other scholars to support ourselves to remain free within a presently difficult space: The Will To Meaning; To Examine; and To Tarry and Adopt Nonviolence. The use of scholarship is key for educators that we might resist the urge to console ourselves in what remains an inconsolable place.
