Although social studies education research has uncovered important insights about classroom-based learning, teaching, and curriculum, less attention has been paid to issues around web-based curricula outside formal classrooms, especially in seemingly "ordinary" places. Investigating such issues has the potential to clarify curricula's messages about race and racial power, particularly in local history contexts where learning is deeply tied to race, place, and space. This study addressed how one local history website, Wacohistory.org, engaged these topics. From a social studies lens, we analyzed this website, composed of 200 discrete, encyclopedia-like entries about Waco, Texas. We examined what the website, which we situated as a curriculum, revealed about a city's history and its residents' relationship to the area. Engaging critical race discourse analysis as our method and critical geographies of race as our theoretical lens, we asked: How does Wacohistory.org characterize the city of Waco and its history relative to systemic racial power? Ultimately, we reveal that Wacohistory.org produced an overwhelming discourse of denial that refused to account for the role racial power has played in the city's past, especially in discussions centered on white Wacoans, whom the website de-racializes. This contribution builds on scholarship related to critical geographies of race and critical race discourse analysis in social studies and curriculum studies research-powerful methodological and theoretical tools apt for excavating spatialized, discursive, and racialized messages. We conclude by offering implications for research and practice.
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.
