ABSTRACT. Panelists in this symposium seek to reflect on the questions, What is the relationship between my pedagogical praxis and geopolitics? How does my pedagogical praxis transgress the coloniality of curriculum?

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, we rely on practices of thinking with and through theory to situate and analyze the discourses of three neoliberal educational reform initiatives. We researched public-facing material from these initiatives to surface how commonsense language and colorblindness is often used to disguise agendas that reaffirm the racial status quo in urban schools and society. We offer strategies for educators, teacher-educators, and administrators to critically respond when they encounter such neoliberal reforms.

ABSTRACT. This symposium-style presentation pushes back against the neoliberal educational focus of individualism and competition (Davies & Bansel, 2007; Foucault, 1994) with action steps on how to re-center care and community in early care and education programs. When care is central to the ECE curriculum (Greenberg & Kahn, 2018; NAEYC 2011; Noddings, 2013) practitioners, families, and students engage in learning through developmentally appropriate practice (NAEYC, 2011) with reduced stress and greater access to exploration, community, and social and emotional learning. A focus on children’s social, emotional, and personal development in ECE is a different definition of neoliberal “readiness” (Akaba et al., 2020) that often permeates traditional academic discussions.

ABSTRACT. First-generation college students (FGCSs) are defined as being the first person in their immediate family to attend college and are more likely to face socioeconomic hardships and hold other marginalized identities. FGCSs represent about 1/3 of the college student population but are underrepresented at 4-year colleges and universities in the U.S. (Forbes, 2020). They often lack family support, financial assistance, knowledge about higher education, and academic preparation (Davis et al., 2021; House et al., 2020; Jenkins et al., 2013; Soria et al; 2020). Given the nature of the pandemic exacerbating these circumstances, conversations around care for FGCSs are necessary to help these students. We conceptualize care as a relational phenomenon which centers the student as a multidimensional being (Caldwell & Sholtis, 2008; Owens & Ennis, 2005). We seek to answer the following two research questions: 1)What does trauma-informed pedagogy of care for first generation students consist of? 2)How do we carry this pedagogy of care out in the classroom? A semi-structured interview was conducted in May 2022 over Zoom with a recently graduated physics and applied mathematics student from a private Catholic women’s liberal arts college who identifies as an undocumented, Latine woman. Case study methodology described in Creswell & Poth (2008) was applied to this interview to analyze the student’s thoughts about the pandemic, schooling, mental health, and their experiences as a FGCS. Through our analysis we have determined that a pedagogy of care for FGCSs should include space for vulnerability, space for the body, as well as space for choice & agency. Space for vulnerability is needed because trauma is something that is part of many FGCS and marginalized students’ experiences. We think an important aspect of setting up a space of safety and belonging means being able to support the vulnerability of learning. Space for the body involves creating spaces for students to carry out emotions and feelings in safe, embracing spaces. Space for choice & agency must be included as FGCS typically accrue a lot of skills from their experiences that allow them to navigate systems more adequately; however, many times leaving difficult contexts and circumstances to attend an institution of higher education make it difficult for students to feel like they deserve to be there. Promoting choice and agency to live out their dreams and goals can help with developing a pedagogy of care. Students of color and other marginalized students are rarely centered in conversations around care. We seek to bolster a conversation around how we can better support FGCSs who often also hold other marginalized identities. Additionally, we seek to use this pedagogy of care as a site of emergent strategy (brown, 2017), resistance, and collective healing.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this presentation is to present video and photographic examples of citizen curatorial practices in the historic, ethic neighborhood of San Jose Japantown, a community affected by practices of redlining and the 1942 World War II Japanese American internment in prison camps. Working with the concepts of curation as curare (Latin root)—which means to care for—video data from a 4-year community narrative and walking research project will be discussed in relation to a few community members in the neighborhood who 1). generate public artworks directly related to immigration and the internment as a means of curating and generating a public pedagogy of racial politics; and 2) a local Japanese American store owner who hosts an informal museum as a means of preserving historical materials and educating the public. I will discuss the concept of citizen-based curatorial practices such as collecting, storytelling, and public art design in relation to public pedagogy, particularly as such pedagogy relates to racial and ethnic politics of visibility, agency, and cultural viewpoints.

ABSTRACT. This podcast is about critical issues related to language and identity in education. The idea emerged from conversations we engaged in regarding our lived experiences as multilingual students and educators in a world where white, mainstream English is dominant. The purpose of the project is to highlight those experiences in order to create larger conversation around language issues with a wider audience. Our hope is to continue a conversation that builds a critical community and solidarity across different places in the world.

ABSTRACT. This paper shares the experiences of a brown, female, Muslim professor and her two white students as they navigate content together in education courses on social justice and equity. Unpacking positionalities, confronting privilege, and making brave spaces.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, an Egyptian professor, a South Sudanese heritage student and a North Sudanese heritage student, discuss Black Arabic in the University Arabic curriculum in the US. Through the past couple of years, the three of us talked in and outside the classroom about race and language learning in the context of Arabic language education in the diaspora. We discussed our hyphenated identities and what our Africanness and Arabness mean to us in our daily and academic life. In this recorded conversation, the students discuss their experiences and the perception of Black Arabic in the language curriculum. The three of us contemplate on issues of perceptions of black language varieties as broken, having to unlearn one’s home language and notions of representation in the Arabic curriculum. This paper invites the educational community to listen to students in order to create a more inclusive Arabic curriculum. It aims at raising awareness of linguistic racism towards regional Arabic vernaculars that may affect students who do not come from a privileged variety of Arabic. Highlighting the experiences of Black Sudanese Students of Arabic, this discussion invites for a critical pedagogical response to Arabic language diversity. It looks to address the interconnectedness between language and race and language and power (Baker-Bell, 2013). Through examining the Sudanese heritage learners’ lived experience, we highlight the importance of discussing language ideologies and aim to place blackness in the forefront of our conversation about the Arabic language education. We call for a critical language pedagogy (Alim, 2007) in Arabic education that not only includes but also centers Black Arabic language varieties.

ABSTRACT. Art and music can be and have been powerful forms of protest. We will present a course of study for high school students about the art and music of the Black Lives Matter movement. The purpose of this unit is to immerse students in meaningful conversations about contemporary social activism through engagement in research, creating, performing, responding, and connecting with works of visual art and music. With this purpose in mind, we will engage participants in discussion through art viewing and listening activities throughout our presentation.

ABSTRACT. U.S. schools are racialized organizations built to show whiteness as a credential for success. Consequently, Black students engage in a racialized curriculum that pathologizes and surveilles blackness. Often, Black students tell me “they just don’t get it!” Thus, this paper shares the experiences of five Black students working to outmaneuver white supremacy at school by teaching. I also describe how the students enact ownership over their identities and experiences despite the racialized curricula telling them to give it up. To understand the students’ deliberate actions and teachings, I draw from Simone Browne’s work on dark sousveillance (outmaneuvering white supremacy).

ABSTRACT. In 1903, Du Bois argued that color lines would become a defining feature of American society. Despite the legalization of anti-racism laws long ago, racism and inequality still exist at all levels of American society. Therefore, this study aims to examine why and how white supremacists treat African Americans in a dehumanizing manner, and to examine their worldview and pedagogies that white supremacists pursue and act upon. Furthermore, this work provides a forum for discussion about “safe spaces” on the internet and in the real world when dealing with the dehumanizing behavior of white supremacists targeting minority groups.

Proposals CNN reported that an 18-year-old man allegedly shot and killed 10 people on May 14th, a Saturday afternoon in Buffalo, New York. Experts on white supremacy said he was motivated by hate, targeting a supermarket in the predominantly Black community. The Washington Post described that Buffalo is essentially divided into a black-inhabited eastern part and a white-inhabited western part, and the landscapes of the city are quite different. On the west side, green areas are abundant and the roads are well maintained, in comparison, on the east, you can see empty spaces everywhere; the roads are not maintained, and there are few trees. The supermarket, where the incident took place, was the only grocery store in the area accessible by foot, and there are few public facilities on this side of town. Can we assume that this geographical disproportionality caused Gendron to choose this location because of its large African-American population? It’s not just the dehumanizing spatial segregation in the city; we need to look at the issue of the “dehumanization” of African Americans. According to a report from the Brookings Institute last month, the Washington Post (WP) reported that Buffalo, where the incident took place, is the seventh most racist area in the United States. The University of Buffalo analyzed that as of 2019, the median income of black households in the region was $28,320, and the poverty rate was 31%, while the median income of white households was $49,126, and the poverty rate was 9.1%. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that color lines would become defining features of American society (Applebaum, 2016), and he envision racism and inequality definitely exist at all levels of American society. Therefore, this study examines some reasons “why” African Americans experience racism and disproportionality in American society. Furthermore, this research intends to investigate how white supremacy is connected to racist complicity through the use of their unseen pedagogies for dehumanizing actions targeting large groups of minorities. This proposal will also debate the need for “safe spaces” in the virtual world. It was shocking that Gendron was able to broadcast the crime live on social media. Furthermore, this study will address how we can protect minorities from being targeted and exposed to dehumanizing behavior by white supremacists both online and in reality.

ABSTRACT. Twenty-odd years ago, members of the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group met for its second conference in Victoria, Canada, just about a month after 9/11. A group of Penn State graduate students studying in Curriculum and Instruction, Curriculum and Supervision, and Educational Leadership participated in the conference because we were studying with–amongst others–Dan Marshall, Jeanne Brady, Debra Freedman, and Miriam Espinosa-Dulanto who were and are foundational to C&P. In what ways have we lived in our different situated realities while also striving for what might yet be?

ABSTRACT. This session shares the outcomes from a curricular attempt at integrating the teaching of accent into an introduction to English linguistics course to students with a diverse language background at a majority Hispanic serving institution in Southern California. The project builds on the analogy of “a sound house” by Lippi-Green (2012) to refer to the phenomenon of accent defined here primarily as a way of speaking (Birner, 2022) to create an assignment that focuses on the learning outcome, “Understand and investigate why an individual user of the English language sounds the way they do, especially in their pronunciation of the typical American English”. Taught in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, the assignment requires students first to understand what an accent is especially with reference to the sound house analogy, and then to study someone else’s ‘sound house’ or accent by using the conceptual tools learned in class early in the project. Students become familiar with the IPA symbols, basics of phonetics (e.g., production of American English sounds, sound description in terms of modes, places, and manners of articulation; vowels and suprasegmentals) and phonology (e.g., phonotactic constraints and allophonic processes) (Dawson & Phelan, 2016) and then relate them to how an individual acquires their accents or, in metaphorical terms, builds their own unique sound houses that reflect who they are, where they grew up, who they interacted with, and what they do with their English, among others. As part of the assignment, the students interview a participant, learn about their language backgrounds, and collect enough speech samples to describe how they sound and then explain why they sound that way. The session also shares how the project not only allows the students, who are speakers of multiple languages and/or dialects, to apply their in-class understandings of linguistics to a real-life context but also enhances their awareness of their own phonology. The outcomes also include a critical transformation and a positive self-image for the students who often internalize the ideologies of the standard language and tend to distance themselves from the idea that they have an accent too just like everyone else.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses translanguaging pedagogies in Brazil, investigates the ideologies surrounding this topic, and finally, some implications for language and literacy educators. This paper provides empirical studies regarding language ideology, translingual practices from contact zone in Brazil, indigenous communities, then translingual practices regarding English teaching. Overall, empirical studies in the contact zone in the borderland of Brazil reported that schools are not prepared to welcome multiple cultures and languages. There is a need to develop critical multilingual awareness, as Garcia (2017) recommended. On the other hand, English teaching practices developed in public schools provided successful results with translanguaging pedagogy.

ABSTRACT. In L2 teacher emotion research, one concept that has gained prominence is “emotion labor” (Hochschild, 1983) or “emotional labor” (Benesch, 2018), which refers to regulating or managing emotions as part of one’s professional work-role. In this presentation, however, we argue for the importance of ideas from the South in understanding indigenous language teachers’ experiences of emotions in a post-colonial context. Drawing on Southern Epistemologies (de Sousa Santos, 2014, 2018), we conducted a qualitative study of Ecuadorian English-language and Kichwa-language teachers’ experiences of emotions during the pandemic. Two key concepts were “emotional labor” (Benesch, 2018) and “corazonar” (“thinking with the heart”) (Arias, 2012; de Sousa Santos, 2018). The concept of corazonar does not treat emotions as something to be managed but rather as holistic energy connected to one’s experience of life, promoting engagement with the social struggle of the oppressed. Guided by our overarching research question, the emotional challenges participant-teachers experienced, Zoom-based, semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with ten language teachers (5 English-language, 5 Kichwa teachers). Along with document analysis, the video-recordings of interviews were analyzed using analytical techniques of “institutional ethnography” (Rankin, 2017). Our comparative analysis revealed divergent experiences of emotions between the two groups. English-language teachers primarily reported intense experiences of emotional labor caused by the strain of physical isolation from the institution, colleagues, and students, as well as an emotionally taxing teaching to black screens. By contrast, it was found that Kichwa language-teachers were so marginalized socio-politically and institutionally that they did not have the privilege of engaging in emotional labor. Instead, Kichwa teachers described experiences that approximated realizations of corazonar. They not only utilized the virtual space fully, expanding Kichwa teaching opportunities, but also found joy in virtual teaching. We discuss these findings and suggest the need for pluralistic perspectives within language teacher emotion research.

ABSTRACT. In this article I connect the use of creative writing, specifically poetry to assist students to manage their present mental and emotional state. In the first sample, the student, then a senior in high school, was tasked with writing a freeform poem that reflected on their present state of emotional being. In the second sample written by the same student, then a college junior was asked to write what was driving them in the present moment. This presentation includes a personal response poem performance. By utilizing poetry, we create an emotional and verbal connection.

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores the interrelated productive problems of academic English writing pedagogy and English-medium instruction (EMI). Both have led to mis-educative experiences due to either-or thinking, especially in contexts where English is a lingua franca. Academic English writing pedagogical discourse has fluctuated among the production of standardized products, the reproduction of step-by-step mechanical processes, and the free play of genres for autonomous artistic expression. EMI has similarly swung between strict language immersion and loose translanguaging with locally dominant languages. I suggest a potential reframing: a playfully studious approach to academic English education that highlights inherent plasticities and invites broader reconstruction.

ABSTRACT. Accepting bodily ways of being and knowing in work with young children in performing arts classes opens a critical look at whose knowledge is privileged on a social and cultural level and allows children to participate in and contribute to their own learning. As I engage and extend the work of feminist and performance scholars into my classrooms, I explore what an attention to expressive body knowledge - dancing, acting, moving – can contribute to pedagogy and research. Children speak and express for themselves, and it is their perspectives and experiences that I seek as we dance, sing, act, and play.

ABSTRACT. I believe in looking into the past, to understand our present, and inform our future. I am an emerging holistic educator, curriculum theoriser, and curriculum developer. My journey of emergence is in its 25th year.

In 1989 a group of progressive educators and thinkers met to organise a gathering, that took place in June 1990, called the Exploring a Common Vision for Holistic Education Conference. The initial organising group comprised Philip Snow Gang. Ron Miller, Ed Clark, Nina Meyerhof, Joey Tanner, Lyn Stoddard, David Lehrman, and Linda McCrae Campbell. The 1990 gathering, however, comprised eighty holistic educators from various international contexts, and they met in Chicago, Illinois.

Out of this gathering came The Chicago Statement on Education which was widely disseminated around the world by Gang and others. The Chicago Statement was soon expanded and entitled EDUCATION 2000: A Holistic Perspective. This brief document came to my attention in 1997 when I was just starting to work in adult, vocational, and community education in Australia. I first discovered it through a now defunct Holistic Education Network of Tasmania website, and then through an e-book entitled Holistic education: Principles, perspectives and practices, a book of readings based on Education 2000: A holistic perspective, (Flake, 1998) first published in 1993. Around that time Philip Gang also formed the Global Alliance for Transforming Education (G.A.T.E.), and later The Institute for Educational Studies (TIES) e-campus was formed to enact these ideas. TIES model of hybrid learning subsequently influenced both Union Institute and University (UI&U) and The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). TIES also has a relationship with Endicott College whose focus on teacher-oriented research and experiential learning is reflective of TIES approach.

In this paper I will explore the full EDUCATION 2000: A Holistic Perspective statement, including the underpinning principles and the working assumptions, through the lens of social reconstructionism and curriculum reconceptualisation. I will then consider this material in relation to the potentialities for curriculum development.

ABSTRACT. In the last twenty years, curriculum professors have seen the impact of their programs decrease. In the midst of these challenges, many in curriculum studies work to re-align themselves to maintain complicated conversations at the risk of losing programs altogether. In this paper, we explore a critical narrative to understand the historical and organizational contexts of curriculum studies to offer strategic trajectories for the field to connect to society in new ways.

ABSTRACT. Using data from a previously conducted study that examined whiteness in early childhood, we explore how three young white children learned to conflate “love” with justice through the lens of their religious upbringing. We then theorize the evolutionary connections between this study’s findings and the religious ideologies that potentially shape the teachers who identify themselves as white Evangelical Christians - over one-third of the teaching force in the United States. Finally, we suggest how learning from Black theologies expand notions of love and justice to encompass those that are rooted in agency, social justice, and explicit attention to systematic oppression.

ABSTRACT. Tikkun olam is a concept from Jewish spirituality that literally means to repair or heal the world. Present in Judaism since the third century, tikkun olam underwent a radical change in the sixteenth century when Jewish mysticism gave it a spiritual dimension. Tikkun olam came to represent a person’s relationship with the cosmos as well as with human society. In the twentieth century, following the holocaust, tikkun olam became a mission, and it was broadened to include all people, not just Jews. The modern mission of tikkun olam is to heal the world through social justice. Drawing from the spiritual understanding of tikkun olam, it provides a framework for social justice education that is flexible and allows for the inclusion of a wide range of social justice-oriented pedagogies that are currently in use. The tikkun olam framework has three interdependent parts: the divine spark, acts of creation, and healing the world. All humans contain the divine spark, the intangible spirit within us that makes each of us unique. We must reveal that divine spark through self-reflection. Consequently, self-reflection is the basis for the tikkun olam framework, connecting students to their physical, mental, and emotional selves. Revealing the divine spark through self-reflection leads to acts of creation and engaging the world. Acts of creation involves the students in critically reflecting on themselves and the world around them in order to produce various kinds of creations. Naturally, this implies that students should engage in creating art. However, it also involves engaging in mathematics, the sciences, literature, and the humanities. In this sense, acts of creation and engaging with the world overlap each other. Engaging with the world deals expressly with relating to the human communities of which students are part: class, family, neighborhood, city, state, and world. It also involves the natural world and its preservation. This study argues that the flexible nature of the tikkun olam framework enables it to work together with other social justice pedagogies to educate the student as a whole person. In it, I compare critical spirituality, mindfulness, culturally relevant pedagogy, and social-emotional learning with the tikkun olam framework to show how they fit together with it. The biggest benefit to using the tikkun olam framework is that teachers can combine pedagogies to allow them to teach in ways that fit their style and their students’ express needs.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I argue that participating in collective laughter—carnival laughter—offers an embodied experience that makes possible other ways of being, knowing, and responding. With the help of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory, I interrogate the grounds on which collective laughter erupts during an out-of-school book group discussion of five Korean American adolescent males. To map the connections and movements preceding and proceeding each collective laughter, I think with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome to help me understand what my participants might have experienced. By conceptualizing a pedagogy of carnival laughter, I offer an onto-epistemological lens through which teachers can imagine different possibilities of meaning-making that may be open to their students.

ABSTRACT. Graduate students in my Fall 2022 course “Participatory Visual Inquiry in the Public Sphere,” will share their in-process projects of creating “augmented reality” layered on public spaces in and near the C&P conference site inspired from prior participatory arts-informing research of Wo/Manhouse 2022 and Augmented Encounters: Community-building, Inclusivity, & Sustainability 2021. Augment reality as encounters with art, architecture, and public spaces explore how augmented reality (AR) counternarratives raise critical consciousness of normalized whiteness and challenge heteropatriarchy. Further, we will engage with AR art pedagogy affectively to explore issues of power and privilege surrounding gender, sexuality, race, class, (dis)ability, subjectivity, agency, and embodiment.

ABSTRACT. Teaching and learning are profoundly personal experiences, yet systems of education often prioritize dehumanized approaches that continue the historical marginalization of the lives they ought to represent. Re/centring teachers and learners places individuals at the heart of education and, in so doing, re/positions knowledge as contextual and constructivist. This approach, at once pedagogical and practical, has the capacity to transform the classroom from a place too often characterized by what is missing to a place of presence. Through critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches, this book explores the co-curricular capacity of lived experience to re/humanize education.

ABSTRACT. The political expression of women’s anger has swept through U.S. popular culture, Starting from #Metoo and moving into other movements (Kay & Banet-Weiser, 2019). Although women’s anger has historically been pathologized, women’s collective anger from diverse backgrounds can change the political landscape of societal oppression (Lorde, 1997). The anger of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women, however, has often been silenced, as the U.S. popular culture has continuously distorted Asian women’s anger as apolitical anger based on racialized expectations of subordinate femininity. This racial stereotype has rendered AAPI women as emotionally inexpressive and invisible even though their anger against anti-Asian racism has the potential to resist the nation’s racialized landscape. This presentation illuminates the potential of articulating Asian women’s anger through zines to dismantle racial stereotypes of Asianness. Based on my chapter in the Curriculum and Pedagogy book series, I will focus on Asian women’s feminist anger (Kay & Banet-Weiser, 2019) and the efficacy of using zines in education by questioning the erasure of Asian women’s anger in current visual culture. Zines can be a great pedagogical avenue offering students various counter-narratives of Asian women’s feminist anger and inquiry into such anger. I, as an Asian woman researcher, claim that educators should facilitate students’ collective witnessing of Asian American women’s lived experiences and suffering through these medium. In particular, I will analyze a contemporary comic zine Koreangry (Jeong, 2019), which I believe encapsulates feminist anger against anti-AAPI racism. By encouraging collective witness of feminist anger through the pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2007), educators can help students to challenge the prevalent racial biases and discriminations against Asian women in U.S. society. Students will be able to realize their ethical responsibilities toward social justice and ultimately reconstruct counter-narratives towards racial solidarity through their zine-making. Ultimately, this presentation aims to center AAPI’s feminist anger through zines and achieve solidarity of BIPOC women against White supremacy through reimagining the educational role of collective witnessing of anger.

References Jeong, E. (2019). Koreangry #7. https://koreangry.gumroad.com/l/QXgAQ Kay, J. B., & Banet-Weiser, S. (2019). Feminist anger and feminist respair. Feminist Media Studies, 19(4), 603–609. Lorde, A. (1997). The uses of anger. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 25(1/2), 278–285. Zembylas, M. (2007). Mobilizing anger for social justice: The politicization of the emotions in education. Teaching Education, 18(1), 15–28. Zembylas, M. (2007). Mobilizing anger for social justice: The politicization of the emotions in education. Teaching Education, 18(1), 15–28.

ABSTRACT. How to understand violence and how to ameliorate it from early on is an urgent and highly debated question in education. This article tackles the issue of whether we are equipped with a resilient intellectual basis to address violence within and through education. Drawing insights from the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and the emergent sociological theory of femme theory, this article argues that femmephobia, which refers to the systematic devaluation of femininity as well as the regulation of patriarchal femininity, remains undetected as a contributing factor in anti-violence education.

ABSTRACT. My conceptual musings and teaching experiences stem from my experiences in an undergraduate class on the social, political and cultural functions of humor in disaster at the faculty of political sciences at UNAM in Mexico City where I was a visiting scholar for my dissertation work. These musings are placed in the wider work of a comic poetic dissertation that examines the pedagogical possibilities of humor in life and disaster. Inspired by my informal and formal pedagogical moments and Boler’s ideas of a pedagogy of discomfort, I conceived a comic pedagogy of discomfort which is about navigating the difficulty and discomfort involved in honest inquiry into values and beliefs through a comic worldview in a humor-oriented classroom. I conceptualized this classroom as a community of laughter in which teaching about humor is not dispassionately teaching about humor but about engaging the concept of living life as a comic being. In this community of laughter, I chose provocative humorous cartoons, videos, and quotes to encourage discussions on humor in social movements, in disasters, as violence and as reaction to social, political, and cultural events to illustrate these functions. From my classes and workshops with faculty and students, I then thought about the various embodied and emotional reactions to the comic including discomfort and offense and the sense of discomfort that some materials had caused in me and in others. Working through reactions of discomfort, offense, resistance, and anger, I consolidated a comic pedagogy of discomfort (my own and that of the students) that would allow us to dig deeper into the links of humor and its emergence from political, social, and cultural events. My aim was/ is foremost to enter into uncomfortable dialogues that may challenge concrete preconceived notions rather than aim for an abstract concept of social justice. Discomforting feelings are important in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits, and normative practices. Discomfort is to be unsettled; it is a moment of stop with a pebble in one's shoe that we need to attend to. Stops, based on David Applebaum’s notion, have a multitude of functions; they are not absolute endings rather openings for a shift of perspective, or a disruption. An opening of the eyes, a bringing into light what we need to yet see. Stops are lingerings, openings, moments of revel to shed light onto a particular aspect of the comic. In the best case they are pedagogical moments; maybe the moment just before we burst into laughter. There is an embodied and affective realm to discomfort. Students asked me how they would know if they were pushing their own limits and boundaries, so I suggested a physical check-in - look at the knot in your stomach and what the gut tells you because there we may access those deeply seated beliefs that we rarely challenge. It is about comic vulnerability and the courage to stand in plain sight in comic discomfort to challenge what constitutes ‘real’ knowledge, pedagogy, discomfort, and the seriousness/frivolity/entertainment of humor.

ABSTRACT. An articulate non-binary student enrolled in an undergraduate art education studio class I was teaching. The nature of the assignments in the course allowed the student to focus on gender issues and the experience showed me that I knew little about creating a studio classroom that was inclusive for non-binary students. A deep dive into the literature in addition to conversations with the student resulted in the realization that there is a paucity of both practical and theoretical information to guide instructors wishing to create broadly inclusive learning environments.

ABSTRACT. A short, one or two-sentence overview of the work:

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” Audre Lorde (1984)

Authors 1 and 2 share personal narratives as educators and students while living as white, queer, trans, fat, disabled bodies and the continued obstructions we face along with the joy of embracing our true selves.

Abstract:

Our roundtable presentation incorporates a collaborative autoethnography methodology (Chang et. al., 2016), narrating how both authors live in queer, trans, fat, disabled bodies in a Republican controlled state that continually makes efforts to legislate how we can and cannot exist, what we can and cannot share in our classrooms, and the constant emotional labor and cis hand holding that comes with us living fully as ourselves. More importantly, we consider how to continue having critical conversations that instead of silencing our voices, uplifts our stories. Our collaborative autoethnography provides cis and trans educators with theoretical and practical practices for K-12 and higher education classrooms to embrace a “critical trans pedagogy” even when current bills and laws continue to legislate the opposite (Keenan, 2017, p. 538).

As two queer and trans educators, Author 1 and Author 2 walk through a world that is continually tries to disparage who we are as people and as teachers. Author 1 is a white nonbinary, fat queer educator that recently taught an online, asynchronous sociology of gender class where students believed being non-binary is made up, that trans athletes were making it impossible for one student to win medals in races, and even while critiquing the Eurocentric beauty standards and how harmful they are to folks self esteem, still stated in a group discussion that being fat was gross. With each of these situations, Author 1 had to delicately but firmly show their sociology students through critical and caring feedback on assignments, emails, and informal conversations a different narrative than the one society, curriculum, and policy taught these students. Author 1 provides the strides they made with some students, while emotionally laboring with others but hopefully planting a seed for future growth.

Author 2 is a white nonbinary, transmasculine, disabled, queer graduate student and college instructor in applied linguistics. Looking over their experiences as both student and teacher, they have often noted the need for teachers, students, and even themself to prioritize which of their identities must be known in educational settings and which can fall by the wayside, their transness and gender-affirming language most often falling to the bottom of the pile after accessibility needs are won. They reflect on the frustrations of being consistently misgendered by their professors while simultaneously not talking about their gender or correct pronouns in their own classrooms, after learning to hide their queerness from students at a past religious university.

The classroom is and should be a brave space for meaning-making and learning for teachers and students of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, abilities and bodies. As Cedillo (2018) notes, while the expectation and the norm is whiteness and ableness, the embodiment of race, disability, and other visible differences like fatness unsettle expectations and exert rhetorical power, especially in the meaning-making space of the classroom. Together, our narratives show the emotional and physical heaviness of being fully who we are and at the same time offer important curriculum and school policy insight to the lives of educators who do not mold or conform to societal expectations.

ABSTRACT. This article aims to decolonize gender and sexuality in the school curriculum and pedagogies in Malawi. The existing curriculum conceptualizes gender and sexuality from a heteronormativity drawn from colonial legacy. Given that knowledge is produced in education spaces, disrupting ways in which the mainstream scholarship defines gender and sexuality is critical to enhancing inclusive education. Drawing from Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectionality, Shlasko’s (2005) queer theory/pedagogy, and Lugones’s (2010) theory of decoloniality, I specifically deconstruct the binarization of gender and sexuality and argues for a democratic curriculum and pedagogies. The paper is organized in the following sections. First, I describe the historical context associated with gender and sexuality issues dating from colonial rule to the dawn of democracy in Malawi. Second, I offer a detailed description of the theoretical frameworks underpinning the discourse of gender and sexuality. I conclude by arguing against the cultural normalcy that tends to binarize gender and sexuality and advocate for an inclusive curriculum and pedagogies in education.

ABSTRACT. Assemblage of Violence in Education questions normalized violence through two distant apart participants’ contexts, that is, queer middle school students of color in the US and survivors of domestic violence at a women shelter in India. Violence is a common phenomenon across places and spaces; however, sociocultural norms do not confront common forms of aggression. Curriculum of violence refer to the way that violence is normalized inside and outside schools. Sociopolitical implications of the curriculum of violence are insidious for the wellbeing of marginalized groups.

ABSTRACT. Recent political and social events have raised serious curricular questions about what should and should not be taught in today’s classrooms. There is a divide amongst scholars in regard to what the best practice for school curriculums should be. Academic rationalist argue that schools should focus on those subject matters most worthy of study, while a social reconstruction orientation argues that curriculum should include a focus on controversial issues such as; religion, sexual orientation and preference, politics, and race prejudice. This paper will examine both the possibilities and challenges posed by a social reconstruction orientation when creating curriculum.

ABSTRACT. An overview of the fundamental philosophies of social pedagogy and examples of how social pedagogy could be used to address real-life issues in the United States

ABSTRACT. In practice the conceptual and technical distinction between curriculum and pedagogy is usually hard to make out. There is a large literature which acknowledges this: on curriculum enactment (in the USA), curriculum making (in the UK) and in north European contexts, subject didactics (Deng, 2022). These literatures grapple with various forms of what we call the ‘twisted’ problem of curriculum: it is super-complex with multiple levels, fluid forms and not yielding easily to technical fixes. Furthermore, as if ‘the what and the how’ of teaching were not sufficiently complicated, there are additional prior questions, not least ‘the why’ question, taking us into the realm of curriculum aims, vision and purpose. Perhaps the fundamental question, however, is who are the young people we teach? The who question, which requires teachers to stop, be curious, look and listen, almost certainly shapes the why question. The way we understand why we teach a particular subject in turn shapes what we select to teach (and how we teach must then be fit for purpose.) In the intensified neoliberal work-place it is arguably the case that teachers tend to reverse this sequence in their day-to day work; indeed, they may never really get to the why or who questions beyond generic and pre-decided notions of student ‘need’, ‘wellbeing’ and ‘aspiration’. The what question is also, inevitably, subcontracted to others. Social realists have addressed this ‘crisis’ in curriculum (and of course teacher agency) through focusing on the knowledge question. Critical of approaches to curriculum that have been too relativistic and careless about the knowledge (and which, it is claimed, have settled on a universal neoliberal concern for learning processes) social realists have argued that both teachers and students engage with powerful knowledge (PK). Although dismissed by some as taking the curriculum literally back to the future, under the shadows of deeply conservative prejudice associated with western scientific knowledge, the proponents of PK cannot be ignored. For they have at least recognised the profound (social, cultural and economic) function of schools to introduce young people to knowledge that exists beyond their everyday social and cultural experience - an ever more serious concern when we acknowledge the Anthropocene. However, few of the proponents of PK have properly grasped the twisted problem of curriculum enactment and practical curriculum making. Our paper explores this conundrum. In addition to taking on the knowledge question, we take seriously who is being taught. The twist this gives to curriculum makers is wrapped up in the need to treat student as ‘subjects’ (or agents) in their own right: with knowledge, experience and access to ways of knowing or funds of knowledge that maybe unfamiliar to the teacher. This is more than merely a pedagogical problem. It is a curriculum problem for if PK cannot be shown to relate to other ways of knowing, then it may be left apart, ignored, rejected. It is in this context we then introduce the ‘three future scenarios’ (Young and Muller, 2010) heuristic to assist curriculum thinking. We shall briefly show how the ‘Future Three’ scenario is being developed in Morgan and Lambert’s book Race, Racism and the Geography Curriculum (2023) in the UK context, and its possible merits in relation to the introduction of Ethnic Studies into the high school curriculum in California.

ABSTRACT. Our perceptions and experiences of educational environments are deeply intertwined with efforts to reimagine curriculum and pedagogy in ways that disrupt sexism, racism, heterosexism, and so on. Climate research is a key tool for understanding how different groups understand educational sites and inform action processes that name injustices and identify opportunities for more just academic study. Climate research remains largely unexplored in curriculum studies. Additionally, curriculum studies concepts have not been utilized to examine climate research. This session will examine decades of Rankin Climate research utilizing curriculum lenses.

ABSTRACT. This panel is centered on art pedagogy and Chicana/x lived experiences, a testimonio act through autohistoria-teoría. Panelists will present an overview of three Chicana/x and borderlands teaching approaches. The first approach centers on mental health community collaborations with pre-service art teachers in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. Engaging in a culturally responsive painting pedagogy, the second approach is led by community and lived experiences. The final approach explores how to write an artist's statement using lived experiences through visual testimonios.

A testimonio is a catalyst for transformation and healing. A personal narrative that one witnesses through family memories, visual witnessing, or second-hand stories, a testimonio depicts a positive or negative moment and gives voice to collective struggles (Garcia, 2015). From a Chicana/x lens, testimonio is liberationist pedagogy influenced by Education Scholar, Paolo Freire (1970) and addresses lived experiences of racism and oppression in the US. (Reyes & Rodriguez, 2012). Testimonio is an “emerging power” and empowers actors of testimonio, as “agents of knowledge” and shows how knowledge is a tool of empowerment for the oppressed (Collins, 1991, p. 221). As "una herida abierta" (open wound), Anzaldúa (2015) situates testimonio as the Coyolauqui Imperative. Anzaldúa (2015) describes Coyolxauhqui as a process of crumbling into many pieces and becoming aware through each piece. She begins to see things from many different viewpoints. Therefore, she can do many different things - to sense, observe, feel, think - constantly changing consciousnesses from one minute to the next and she restructures herself returning to wholeness (Anzaldúa, 2015).

The term autohistoria-teoría is a testimonio act of theorizing lived experiences. As a guide to decolonizing educational spaces through emergent cultures of curricula, Anzaldúa’s (2015) theory of autohistoria-teoría examines various contexts of learning through multiple paths of socio-politicized content, value, and diverse environments for education. Autohistoria is the creation of one’s own story with agency. Anzaldúa, through her theory of autohistoria-teoría facilitates a coming together of fragmented lived experiences with a holistic perspective including the arts, which resists the traditional notion of art inhabiting a hierarchical privileged world. Autohistoria-teoría is a moving towards self and collective healing through wounds, pain, and trauma experienced in nepantla spaces. Through testimonio work, creative acts have the potential to re-frame our experiences and are a self-reflection and self-teaching and reveals itself as collective experiences (Sotomayor & Garcia, 2022).

While the US Latina/x community is over 20% of the population, most US higher education and K-12 curriculum is not focused on Latina/x artists or art practices. There are 559 higher education institutions in the US that are Hispanic-Serving (HSI). Under federal law, an HSI is defined as an accredited, degree-granting, public or private nonprofit institutions of higher education with 25%, or more, total undergraduate Hispanic full-time equivalent (FTE) student enrollment (Higher Education Opportunity Act, Title V, 2008). HSI’s represent 18% of all institutions of higher education and enroll 66% of all Latina/x undergraduates. Yet, higher education US curricula does not account for a Latina/x student body. For example, Critical Race Theory (including LatCrit) is not widely taught, and in some education institutions, is prohibited.

The target audience for this session includes students, K-12 teachers, higher education faculty, and all others interested in Latina/x teaching approaches. Presenters are Chicana/x identifying and work at a Hispanic Serving Institution (The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley located on in the borderlands of South Texas). They use their lived experiences in their teaching and research (creative and written). Below is an overview of the three presentations.

Gina Palacios: Culturally Responsive Art Teaching

Culturally responsive teaching allows for more engagement by the student, strengthens their sense of identity, and promotes self-confidence, inclusivity, and representation in the classroom. I empower learners to begin their own art practice by looking at their community, their elders, and themselves as an entry point. They begin building their technical skills in art by creating small, low-stakes paintings. These works allow for more focused investigation, risk taking, experimentation, and reflection on their local community and how it’s represented. As students begin to develop their creative problem-solving skills, I ask that they consider how they can use paint (or any medium) as a vital means of expression that can strengthen their artistic voice. This learner centered approach also includes one-on-one meetings, classroom discussions, meta-cognition, and productive persistence. In my presentation, I will discuss my pedagogy and what that looks like by sharing my course objectives, several assignments including a collaborative class project, what those activities look like, student work, and how students responded. Culturally responsive assignments like these, help start conversations and opens the door for students to critically think about their creative work, the power it has, and how they may want to share their voice and vision.

Lilia Cabrera: Mental Health Interventions Within Higher Ed Institutions and Community Centers for the Elderly

The Rio Grande Valley of the Texas/Mexico border struggles to accept mental illness within their families. A group of art education pre-service teachers has initiated positive relationships with mental health communities. By approaching these workshops with experiential learning and project-based approaches, students can be more active with the community by applying their teaching abilities, start to shed some notes of intimidation and shyness, and proceed with their path of becoming educators in a confident way. The benefits of utilizing this approach with students allow us to gauge their performance by observing their level of reluctance when dealing with participants from varying ages and conditions. Just like in a regular public-school classroom, students are presented with problem solving scenarios on the spot. Deeper partnerships are developed with other university entities that cater around counseling and representatives from advocacy groups that address domestic violence and abuse. Pre-service teachers are being immersed in the challenges that their future students have endured. Examples of activities will be discussed in detail, along with imagery showing participants fully engaged with the thought processes, and the experience of utilizing art media with the assistance of pre-service teachers. A much deeper goal would be to encourage educators to explore other environments and people that would benefit from activities that focus on their lived experiences.

Christen Sperry García: Artist Statement as Visual Testimonio

The process of nepantlando combines nepantla, an ideological space of living in-between worlds with “ando” and action verb in Spanish that means “-ing” (Sotomayor & Garcia, 2022). Moving from ideology to action, nepantlando is a creative act of working through living in-between worlds. Through nepantlando, an artist engages in visual testimonio work through autohistoria-teoría. Sharing their story through visual and textual means, visual artists perform creative acts of nepantlando. This presentation offers an artist statement writing approach using testimonio and autohistoria-teoría. Historically, artist statement writing methodologies do not account for lived experiences and use words often to distance the artist’s self from their work. An artist statement is often an intellectual document devoid of emotion and feelings. In response to this, we share a methodology that encourages the telling of one’s story that comes directly from the artist. We provide an artist statement writing framework using testimonio techniques and share some artist statements as testimonio.

References

Anzaldúa, G., & Keating, A. (2015). Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality. Duke University Press

Collins, P. (1991). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. NewYork: Routledge.

García, M. T., & García, M. T. (2015). The chicano generation : Testimonios of the movement. University of California Press.

Reyes, K. B., & Rodríguez, J.E. (2012). Testimonio: Origins, terms, and resources. Equity & Excellence in Education, 45(3), 525-538. DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2012.698571

Sotomayor, L., & García, C. S. (Forthcoming- 2022). Nepantlando: Visual teaching through curadora methodology. In A. S. Alexander & M. Sharma (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft, and Visual Culture Education. Routledge.

ABSTRACT. COVID-19 has affected students’ mental-health and academic performance, bringing the nexus of these issues to the forefront of curricular discussions. This paper draws from a larger autoethnographic study looking at deepening understandings in order to explore meditation as an inclusionary practice that inhabits a similarly liminal curricular place, one which allows the restoration, reconstruction and transformation of social, emotional and academic learning.

ABSTRACT. Following the curricular approach of doubled readings (Lather, 2012), I examine critiques of Gandhi that read him as colonial sympathizer who reified gender roles and had questionable relationships with women. In these readings, Gandhi draws from the women around him to develop his notions of truth and active non-violence while largely failing to give them credit or advancing gender equality except for a few select occasions later in life. As a second move, I read studies of Gandhi that account for his passionate engagements with men and documentation that explores the ways in which Gandhi became more feminine in his thinking and behaviors over the arch of his life. In this move, Gandhi isn’t as much usurping womanly knowledge for personal gain but further associating with traditional feminine knowledge and ways of knowing and being and, as such, perfecting satyagraha. A third and final reading will explore the untidy, messiness of both readings as a way to queer curricular understanding.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this project is to qualitatively analyze school handbooks as racialized and gendered texts. Although school handbooks are often considered “neutral,” we argue that the texts themselves are both racialized and gendered in their application. We reviewed the school handbooks of twelve high schools in Indiana, representing a cross-section of school districts, to highlight how many rules serve to discipline, surveil, and regulate students within school spaces.

ABSTRACT. Many education students and professionals (K-12, Higher Education) understand the importance of inclusive campus communities; however, many fail to combat systems perpetuating inequality, marginalization, and oppression. Critical Consciousness is the ability to recognize and analyze systems of inequality and the commitment to act against these systems. Utilizing Critical Consciousness while implementing Social Justice Advocacy and Process Elements for Creating Inclusive Campus Communities, the presenter intends to assist attendees in establishing a sense of urgency in dismantling oppressive systems, creating more inclusivity humanizing the work we do as students, researchers, and educators.

ABSTRACT. Growth in Curriculum and Instruction doctoral program enrollment presents a need for more faculty involvement in and capacity for mentoring doctoral students through to successful completion of the dissertation, both as dissertation committee members and especially as chairs of dissertation committees. The intent of the proposed session aims to be an engaging discussion (of faculty and doctoral students) to explore the need for increasing faculty capacity, confidence, and structured support for chairing multiple dissertation committees, as well as gaining experience by serving on dissertation committees. The objectives of the proposed session are to: curate multiple perspectives and experiences from faculty at all stages of their careers and doctoral students across the field and from various institutions; document successful approaches, a range of effective dissertation models; and yield a foundation for an initiative to provide shared supportive structures with practical strategies and models of best-practice for mentoring students through their dissertation research—ultimately the next generation of curriculum and pedagogy scholars and faculty. The proposed collegial discussion session intends to support faculty and doctoral students and may in turn impact doctoral student timely progress to degree and success, higher quality dissertations, affirm impactful social justice research, works of story, art, research, theorizing, and accounts of curriculum and pedagogy, and increase faculty capacity for serving as dissertation chairs and committee members for multiple dissertations.

ABSTRACT. This study explores how Whiteness serves as the foundation for graduate admission policies and procedures. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT), the chapter offers recommendations for new practices within the admission practices.

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on including indigenous skills in Uganda's secondary curriculum using Ubuntu perspectives. Uganda's Secondary school curriculum set up by the colonialists and later handed over to the independent state of Uganda socialized her people to accept everything that was British as superior and everything that was Indigenous as inferior, including education. But Indigenous education in Uganda was skills-oriented, and its unwritten objectives focused on training the head, the heart, and the muscles for sustainable living. This paper identifies Indigenous knowledge in the form of skills as a quality embedded in Uganda's Secondary School curriculum to make it more contextual and relevant to the Ugandan community. The effectiveness of Indigenous methods in making curriculum contextually relevant in Uganda has primarily remained an area that is still untapped. This paper illustrates how curriculum agencies can successfully use Mbigi's Ubuntu Collective Fingers Theory to integrate Indigenous skills into the school curriculum. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussions about the value of Indigenous skills such as blacksmithing, cloth making, and other African applied arts using Ubuntu perspectives in decolonizing curriculum content via the concrete integration of Indigenous knowledges, skills, values, and practices.

ABSTRACT. This presentation examines frameworks of place-based education that currently exist in the scholarly literature. What is place-based education? How have different notions of PBE evolved over time? How have liberal, critical and indigenous worldviews played out in models of place-based education? In order to anchor PBE in relevant practices and experiences, this presentation will focus on the development and implementation of a new undergraduate certificate at the University of Vermont based on the principles and practices of place-based education.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, I introduce a pedagogy that honours the ideal purpose of Nahua education – to find belonging to one’s self, community and land. A pedagogy of belonging is centred on the resurgence of Indigenous knowledge systems, as a way to set forth a transformative (un)learning journey that subverts monocultural entrapments in education. In this presentation, I tell stories that guide a pedagogy of belonging to oppose dominant ideologies and unbind from colonial monocultural entrapments. A pedagogy to cultivate a place of sustenance in education through teachings that reflect an embodied relational and reciprocal sense of place.

ABSTRACT. After the first week of his first science teaching methods course, Boaz believed SCIED 411 would, “completely flip my idea of what science teaching should look like.” He also said the class went against “every fiber of my being.” Central to his feeling was how central learning about race and white supremacy would be for SCIED 411. In Boaz’s words, “I have grown to learn the importance of respecting and integrating all races, creeds and backgrounds into whatever scenario in life. However, I don’t necessarily want to harp on it in a class designed to teach me about science instruction.” Boaz was adamant he was excited for the class, particularly learning Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2018), the core practices he would use to teach science, but Boaz was clear he did not understand why race was something worthy of discussion in a science methods course.

I open with the small vignette from Boaz’s first reflection journal in SCIED 411 because it reveals some of the white ambivalence experienced by Boaz throughout the entire year and half he spent in a secondary science program. Easily interpreted as Boaz invoking racist discourse akin to saying, “I’m not prejudiced, but…” (Bonilla-Silva, 2002, p. 46), I choose to understand Boaz’s statement above and his actions throughout the course as revealing a deeper ambivalence (Lensmire, 2010). For me, Boaz’s reflection and other actions over the year and half project, consisted of incoherent and/or contradictory talk that revealed a tension within White identities. A tension whereby White people long, believe, and strive for equality in America, when in reality, there is evidence of inequality everywhere (Ellison, 1995). Through white ambivalence Boaz expresses both an interest and belief in diversity, equality, and/or equity while simultaneously questioning and, at other times, resisting discussions about race in a science methods course. White ambivalence was integral to Boaz’s learning as he learned to be an anti-racist science teacher.

My goal is to show the “arduous, messy, and contradictory” (The Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017, p. 6) in Boaz’s learning. Using storytelling as a method (Barone, 1992; Johnson, 2017), in order to blend theory and practice (Lewis, 2011; Miller & Tanner, 2019), I tell the story of Boaz’s learning. By drawing upon second-wave critical whiteness studies (Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016), particularly around white ambivalence (Ellison, 1995; Lensmire, 2010, 2017; Shim, 2019), I tell the story of Boaz’s learning. I demonstrate the centrality of white ambivalence as Boaz learned to teach science in ways he perceived as anti-racist. In the end, Boaz did grow as a White anti-racist science teacher, but his learning over the year and a half was only the beginning. In fact, as I will show, Boaz’s white ambivalence never went away, Boaz had to be given constant opportunities to practice teaching science in anti-racist ways, and central to his learning to be a White anti-racist science teacher was learning how to navigate feelings of white ambivalence in addition to innovative science teaching.

ABSTRACT. While extant research shows that identity development represents a crucial component of learning within communities of practice (COPs), scholars have largely overlooked racial identity development within these spaces. In response, I address the following research question: how do participants in an experimental music community conceptualize anti-racist pedagogies within their COP? Drawing on findings from case study research, my analysis shows that participants in this study recognize opportunities to challenge and critically examine white supremacy across all three of Wenger’s (1998) dimensions of COPs, providing a potential framework for future studies into anti-racist pedagogies within informal arts education and other COPs.

ABSTRACT. With increasing diversity in rural places (Azano et al, 2021) combined with the current divisive political climate, there is great urgency to implement antiracist work in rural schools. However, rurality is largely silent within the empirical research on second-wave critical whiteness studies and pedagogies. The lack of research at the intersection of place and race in teacher education suggests that teacher candidates do not need specific preparation to teach about race and racism in rural schools. Rural schools have complex racial and spatial dynamics that present unique circumstances for teaching about race and racism. Intentionally exposing pre-service teachers to the challenges and affordances of rural schools by integrating place-consciousness into teacher education programs develops nuanced understandings of rurality (Azano et al, 2020; Azano & Stewart, 2015; Azano & Biddle, 2019; Eckert & Petrone, 2013; White & Reid, 2008).

In this conceptual paper, I argue for a placed approach to critical whiteness pedagogies that attends to the uniqueness of rural places and that challenges rural teachers to prepare for and commit to contextualizing antiracism in their classroom. In order to frame this vision of a placed approach to critical whiteness pedagogies, I explicitly draw from Gruenewald’s (2003) critical pedagogy of place in both reinhabitation, by identifying, recovering, and creating “material spaces that teach us how to live well in our total environments'', and decolonization, by identifying and changing “ways of thinking that injure and exploit other people and places” (p. 9). In doing so I ask the question: How might critical whiteness pedagogies be combined with a critical pedagogy of place in order to promote equity and antiracism in rural secondary classrooms?

Using tenets of both critical whiteness studies and critical pedagogy of place, I offer a vision of practice that highlights the possibilities and challenges of enacting critical whiteness pedagogies in rural, secondary classrooms. I suggest adding on a critical whiteness focus to Gruenewald’s (2013) argument that students ethically consider what should be remembered, restored, conserved, transformed, and created in their rural place as a starting point for potential inquiry and collective action toward justice. I conclude by offering implications for secondary teachers and teacher candidates who must first engage in their own preparation for placing critical whiteness by becoming community researchers and conducting ongoing critical self-reflection of racial and rural identities.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on our shared experiences as curators of The Ohio State University’s Kawsay Ukhunchay Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Research Collection, our panel discusses decolonial pedagogies and alternative methods informed by Andean and Amazonian Indigenous epistemologies. The emergent pedagogical approaches we present illustrate ways by which we foster critical questioning of Western categories and organizing principles as a basis for cultivating openness to alternative worldviews and meaning-making, and how we pair this with development of skill sets for “thinking otherwise,” as Brazilian theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it, in the alternative learning/unlearning space of this collection.

ABSTRACT. In watching this mini-documentary on the intergenerational schooling narratives of Black students, parents, and community activists in the local school district of State College, PA (place where the C&P 2022 conference will be held), the audience can learn about the ways in which community, institutional and schooling practices sustain or disrupt white supremacy in schools.

ABSTRACT. This presentation presents a critical examination of how decolonization as humanizing endeavor challenges/advances anti-Asian racial justice that fails to see complex settler colonial, imperial technologies accompanying racialized states of remembering and forgetting. The anti-Asian racial justice in pursuit of the community’s empowerment/inclusion significantly undergirds settler colonial construction while undermining decolonization and Indigenous survivance. A contemporary Asian immigrant artist’s site-specific media performance offers a critical space to reveal such settler colonial relations and logic that determine which lives are considered deserving of remembrance or amnesia and to restore the conflicting relation of Asian Americans/Indigenous encounters for unsettling settler racial hegemonies.

ABSTRACT. Despite calls for embedding justice-centered pedagogy into elementary teacher education, relatively little is known about the way pre-service teachers (PSTs) experience and apply their learning about social justice from their courses into classroom contexts. This study employs duoethnography as a self-study methodology to humanize elementary teacher education by sharing a tale of two teachers - one teacher educator and one PST. Drawing from a dataset of parallel and overlapping narratives, the findings of this study suggest duoethnography has the potential to humanize elementary teacher education research and pedagogy in the pursuit of social justice by centering the perspectives of PSTs.

ABSTRACT. At the 2021 C&P Conference, I discussed the process of designing a graduate course on scholar activism. At the time, the course was still in its initial formation stages. The course came to fruition in 2022 and turned out to be an influential and transformative experience for both myself and the students. In this paper, I provide a series of reflections (from myself and the students) on the role of the course in creating scholar activist identities, offer an overview of the final course design and implementation, and highlight what curricular activism looks like around the topic of scholar activism.

ABSTRACT. English Language Learners are the fastest growing group of students in the U.S. School leaders understanding and decisions influence the programs or services provided to ELL’s (Mavrogordato & White, 2020; DeMatthews, & Tarlau, 2019). Educators and educational leader’s attitudes, perceptions, and understandings of these students impact their learning (Murphy & Torff, 2018; & Garcia et al., 2019). This study examines English Language Learners, and the inequalities and lack of support presented to these diverse learners. This paper focuses on the importance of Social Justice in education and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy implemented by educators and educational leaders (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Bogotch, 2014).

ABSTRACT. Growth mindset is the idea that it is possible to improve intelligence through effort. This is an asset-based idea that encourages a learner to work towards improving understanding and not accept a limit to what they can know. Helping students move from a fixed mindset, where they believe they are born with a set amount of intelligence, to a growth mindset helps improve their academic self-concept. While there have been conflicting studies on the effects of growth mindsets on academic achievement, studies focusing on mathematics have found a positive correlation. The US National Study of Learning Mindsets conducted a nationwide study that found providing a growth mindset intervention to ninth grade cause improvements in academic achievement in mathematics classes for the lowest achieving students (Student Experience Research Network, 2021). Hanushek et. al. (2019) found the achievement gap between high and low-socioeconomic students has neither improved nor worsened in the last 50 years. Because students of color are more likely to grow up in lower-socioeconomic homes, they are often on the lower achieving side of the gap. Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) provides strategies for teachers to help students connect to the material being taught and feel included in the classroom community. Anderson (2021) found three possible reasons why many math teachers have a hard time implementing culturally relevant pedagogy in their classrooms: (1) a misunderstanding of CRP makes them think that mathematics is cultureless, (2) teachers do not have a thorough enough understanding of the content, their students, and ways to connect the two, and (3) they are scared of possibly going against school policies (p. 378). I believe the best way to address these challenges for large groups of teachers is to change the culture of the classroom, not necessarily every lesson. Teachers can change the culture of their classroom by encouraging a growth mindset, ideally incorporating their particular students’ cultures to do so. In Multiplication is for White People, Delpit (2012) talks about how Michael Jordan and Beethoven did not start out extremely talented at basketball or music; they put in a lot of work and practice to get there (p. 150-1). Specifically, Jordan did not become amazing until he changed his way of thinking after not making the Varsity team his sophomore year. These are both great examples that show students that they can improve with hard work, but the example used should be determined by the students in the classroom. Johnson and Elliot (2020) studied some strategies to implement culturally relevant pedagogy in STEM departments at colleges and universities. One of the strategies they support is cultural competence, which “means creating an environment which students feel they belong and can be themselves” (Johnson & Elliot, 2020, p. 8). This safe environment allows students to try, fail, and learn and then be willing to do it over and over again.  Resources Anderson, C. R. (2021). From the Root to the SUM: Reflections on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Mathematics. The Educational Forum, 84(4), 377-390. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2021.1957635 Delpit, L. (2012). Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children. New Press. Hanushek, E. A., Peterson, P. E., Talpey, L. M., & Woessmann, L. (2019). The Achievement Gap Fails to Close. Education Next, 19(3), 8-17. Johnson, A. & Elliot, S. (2020). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: A Model To Guide Cultural Transformations in STEM Departments. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, 21(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v21i1.2097 Student Experience Research Network. (2021, July 28). National Study of Learning Mindsets. https://studentexperiencenetwork.org/national-mindset-study/#

ABSTRACT. In 1975, the United States established public law (P.L.) 94-142, also known as The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990. This law stated that every child with a disability had available to them free, appropriate public education (FAPE). It also introduced the concept of the IEP. Within this law was the assurance that students would have the opportunity to learn in the least restrictive environment (LRE). This proposal explores how Universal Design for Learning and Specially Design Instruction (written according to the IEP) works to achieve this goal inside an asset-based curriculum.

ABSTRACT. This conceptual paper builds upon Aníbal Quijano’s notion of coloniality of power to advance the analytical concept of coloniality of curriculum. The latter concept is understood as an imperial/colonial doctrine, a pedagogical mode of imperial domination aimed at producing colonial subjectivities. Coloniality of curriculum reveals the relationship between colonialism, discourse, and curriculum, and it contributes to the understanding of how dominant knowledges and ways of knowing are propagated discursively to constitute an imperial/colonial sense of being indifferent toward the suffering of colonized and negatively racialized others. Hermeneutically, the coloniality of curriculum enables the reading, interpretation, and interrogation of curricular discourses and pedagogical practices that reproduce Euro- American ways of being (ontological violence), individualist ways of knowing (epistemic violence), and racialized affective grammars. I conclude by suggesting that the coloniality of curriculum, when employed analytically and hermeneutically, enables the examination of reactionary discourses and policies aiming to restructure the curriculum according to the rhetoric of modernity and the racist logics of colonialism.

ABSTRACT. Since 2021, 35 states have passed 137 bills aiming to restrict what schools and educators can teach and discuss in the classroom in regards to race, sexual orientation, gender identity, politics, and history (Gross, 2022). In an effort to keep students’ minds from being “poisoned,'' more legislation is passed in an attempt to silence critical literacies and critical thoughts. This paper seeks to shed light on the context in which critical literacies are being silenced, explicate the relevance of using decolonial theory to read, analyze, and interpret this context, and discuss ways in which educators can critically engage particular topics with students.

ABSTRACT. Perpetual hopelessness and disempowerment characterize curriculum theory and critical pedagogy: insights describe things, yet fail to create change. Embrace dystopia instead of circumventing it! Marshall Sahlins joked, plus c'est la même chose plus ça change. Three orientations offer social movement affiliations that generate suggestions for action: Eco-Environmental-Justice; Geopolitical Conflicts, Refugees, and Mass Migration; and Alternative Modes of Thought. Each embraces dystopia in order to preserve life on Earth through recognizing things that would have to change in order to keep cherished aspects of human existence as part of reality.

ABSTRACT. Community Dialogues, was an initiative led by a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate students and two facilitators intended to provide space for people of Color and White allies/co-conspirators to speak and socially dream (Gutiérrez, 2008; 2018; Love, 2019) about their experiences in and around the local community at a large, rural predominately white institution in the mid-Atlantic. Over three approximately 90-minute dialogues, participants described their lived racialized experiences and imagined multiple possible futures. What resulted were “recommendations” or articulations of the kind of world the participants wanted to live in. Therefore, the goal of this presentation/demonstration will be to highlight the potential of dialogue facilitation as a way to create opportunities for people to make sense of their lives and imagine what they could and often should be as a means of activism and social justice.

Facilitated dialogue is a distinct way of communicating. Facilitated dialogue has participants self-reflect and build interpersonal relationships as they think about systems and structures (Dessel et al., 2006). Wanting to create a more intimate and comfortable space from which to explore racialized experiences and imagine possible futures (Obear & martinez, 2013; Varghese et al., 2019), we used race-based caucuses to structure the facilitated dialogues. This means dialogues were organized based on how participants identified racially, with one exception. Three dialogues were held for people who identified as Black, Latine, Asian, White, and International. We did not hold dialogues for Indigenous identifying people because of the lack of participation. Drawing from the work of Bettina Love (2019) and Kris Gutiérrez (2008; 2018), the facilitated dialogues were designed to have people participate in “collective problem-solving” (Gutiérrez, 2018, p. 99) in order to look beyond current circumstances that are informed by structures and history to imagine, “being free” (Love, 2019, p. 102).

Preliminary analysis (Saldaña, 2014; Williams & Moser, 2019) of the dialogues suggest facilitated dialogue in race-based caucuses created unique communities that were meaningful and specific to each race-based caucus. For example, the dialogues for International people focused on issues the participants felt went ignored or were invisible to leadership at the university and in the surrounding community. The dialogues for Black people explicitly dissected the lack of community within the university and surrounding community as a result of hegemonic whiteness in both the majority White community and their own Black community. This community even directly supported a singular person who was debating dropping out of their graduate program due to lack of community and support. For the White people who participated, they had the opportunity to think deeply about their own identity in ways they perceived as deviant without the fear of offending, dismissing, or harming colleagues, peers, and friends of Color. If we present this as a presentation, we will expand upon the value of facilitated dialogue as a form of pedagogy and praxis. If given more time and space, we hope to provide C&P members the opportunity to participate in a facilitated dialogue that mirrors the Community Dialogues experience.