Letters to the Field

“These remarkable handwritten and personal letters addressed to curriculum studies provide a living archive of the movement of the field for the past fifty years. Told in the words of curriculum scholars and theorists, the letters highlight the profound link between histories of ideas and curriculum contained in individual and collective study. This unique collection of letters will engage students, teachers, and scholars in enduring questions posed to curriculum ranging from personal significance to the cultural politics of knowledge. The book demonstrates the pressing need to engage revitalizing curriculum in the world today.”

Aparna Mishra Tarc, Associate Professor, York University

“In this exhilarating volume, courageous and invigorating multigenerational curriculum thinkers and cultural workers illuminate their power of refusing oppressive anti-intellectual forces and exercise creative agencies through their innovative modes of expression and representation, which compel authors and readers to enact just and meaningful changes in schools, neighborhoods, communities, spaces, and places with their shared purposes and efforts to make the impossible possible in an increasingly contested and vulnerable world.”

Ming Fang He, Professor, Georgia Southern University

“In Letters to the Field: Curriculum Studies in Our Own Words, we are invited as readers to intimate and deeply personal exchanges of thank-you letters from established scholars in the field of curriculum studies. Each contributor, with over a decade of experience, offers not only their relational reflections on the field but also extends heartfelt gratitude to our community, acknowledging the intellectual, personal, and relational influences that have shaped their work. This long-awaited edited collection blends the aesthetic and emotional alphabetic contours of their ideas into a material form, of hand to pen, and of penning their ideas to paper. What sets this book apart is the decision to forego the standardized, impersonal typeface of most academic texts in favor of a distinctly personal and aesthetic approach. Each chapter is a handwritten and/or typed letter, where the contributors’ unique calligraphy, an extension of their embodied self, tells a different story. This unconventional format challenges readers to engage differently with the text. The often-invisible labor of academic writing becomes visible in the varied strokes of penmanship, from the elegant curves of well-practiced hands to the more hurried, almost frantic marks of those under pressure, provoking some of us to flashback and trace our first penned utterances with the 26 symbols of the Roman alphabet.
 These letters, much like the field of curriculum studies itself, are shaped by the complex interplay of theory, practice, and personal history. The content of the letters speaks to the heart of curriculum studies. And, each author reflects on their journey, their struggles, contemporary issues, mentors, trauma, witnessing of international horrors, the impacts of a global pandemic, civil unrest, and concomitantly, their love and hopes for the future of the field. The letters often move beyond academic concerns, touching on personal relationships, unlearning, and the unknowable futures we are tasked with imagining otherwise. In turn, this deeply personal mode of life writing praxis offers enriching contemporary perspectives in relation to the very concept of “curriculum” as more than a set of instructional guidelines; it is a lived experience, a relationship, and a continuous negotiation of the messiness of our letters making meaning for ourselves and others. The contributors emphasize how the field of curriculum studies is not just about education as school policy, a lesson plan, or a best practice, but more so about fostering relational connections across time and space, particularly in terms of the broader societal challenges we face today, such as but not limited to, the ongoing global conflicts, truth before reconciliation, and the intergenerational legacies of settler colonialism.
 Finally, Letters to the Field serves not only as a scholarly text but also as an artifact of the diverse voices that constitute our collective intellectual community always unfinished and in-the-making. For those of us committed to the ongoing evolution of the field, and our ethical relations with each other and the more-than-human worlds, Letters to the Field stands as both a reminder of where we’ve been and an inspiration for where we might go next together as a community.”

Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Professor, University of Ottawa

Acknowledgments

Foreword — Bernadette Baker

Introduction — Walter Gershon, Boni Wozolek, Roland Mitchell

Natalie Adams
Peter Appelbaum
Nina Asher
Wayne Au
Theodorea Regina Berry
James P. Burns
Silvia Edling
Walter S. Gershon
Andy Gilbert
Jen Gilbert
Nichole Guillory
Robert Helfenbein
James G. Henderson and Daniel J. Castner
Rita Irwin
Elizabeth Macedo
Erik Malewski
Janet Miller
Isabel Nunez
João M Paraskeva
William F. Pinar
Molly Quinn
Jennifer Sandlin
Brian Schultz
William H. Shubert
Wade Tillet
Hongyu Wang
John Weaver
Ugena Whitlock

About the Editors

About the Contributors

Boni Wozolek

Dr. Boni Wozolek is currently the Director of Inclusive Excellence and an Associate Professor of Education at Penn State University, Abington College. Her work examines race, sexual orientations, and gender identities through qualitative research methods and teaching practices across educational contexts. Dr. Wozolek’s recent publications include two monographs, Assemblages of Violence in Education: Everyday Trajectories of Oppression (Routledge, 2021) and Educational Necropolitics: A Sonic Ethnography of Everyday Racisms in US Schools (Routledge, 2023), and two edited volumes, Black Lives Matter in US Schools: Race, Education, and Resistance (SUNY, 2022) and Queer Battle Fatigue: Education, Exhaustion, and Everyday Oppressions (Routledge, 2023). Dr. Wozolek has received multiple awards for her scholarship, including two book awards (AESA and AERA), a best article of the year award (Educational Studies), and early career award (AERA) and local awards that recognize her commitment to communities and activist work that foregrounds equity, access, and inclusion.

Walter S. Gershon

Walter S. Gershon (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Critical Foundations of Education at Rowan University (New Jersey, United States). Dr. Gershon’s scholarly interests focus on a) questions of justice, dignity, and access about how people make sense, b) the sociocultural processes that inform their sensibilities, and c) the qualitative methods used to study educational ecologies. Walter’s work uses critical understandings in sound and the senses to consider everyday experiences of race, class, gender, and sexualities with disenfranchised city children and youth. In addition to traditional pathways for scholarship and more publicly oriented soundworks, Dr. Gershon’s awards include national recognition for single-authored books Sound Curriculum: Educational Sonic Studies in Theory, Method, and Practice (Routledge) and Curriculum and Students in Classrooms: Everyday Urban Education in an Era of Standardization (Lexington Books). Forthcoming work includes an additional two monographs, one on sonic qualitative methodologies (Routledge) and another that uses a genre-defying combination of sound and text that documents everyday urban education with responding images from Jorge Lucero (MIT Press).

Roland Mitchell

Dr. Roland Mitchell is the E.B. “Ted” Robert Endowed Professor and Dean of the College of Human Sciences and Education at Louisiana State University. His research interests include theorizing the impact of historical and communal knowledge on pedagogy. Roland has authored seven coedited books and numerous other scholarly works that have appeared in leading scholarly journals. He is Co-Editor of the Lexington Press of Rowman and Littlefield book series Race and Education in the 21st Century and Higher Education section editor of the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. Roland has a deep passion for impactful community service as evidenced through his membership on the advisory boards of the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, Campus Federal Credit Union, and the Louisiana Governor’s Taskforce on Community Policing and Reform. He has a B.A. in History from Fisk University, a M.Ed. in Higher Education from Vanderbilt University, and a Ph.D. in Educational Research from The University of Alabama.