8:30 am
Breakfast - Armstrong Center Lobby (for those staying in university housing)
9:15 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Room 151
Life of a Scholar
Chair: John A. Weaver Georgia Southern University
Ming Fang He Georgia Southern University
Shirley Steinberg Georgia Southern University
Marla Morris, Georgia Southern University
Abstract:
One does not stop being a scholar, when one officially ends an career and retires, they never retire from
reading, writing, and thinking. These stop only the moment after we physically die. Yet, many in
academia have stoped being scholars. They get caught up in busy service work and rationalize no
longer writing, they spritually abandon their intellectual calling. Why? Why do some remain committed
to the scholars life in spite of the rise of a neoliberal university that purposefully mocks the scholar?
We will explore these issues and many more surrounding the life of a scholar and what comes comes
after.
Ming Fang He Georgia Southern University
Shirley Steinberg Georgia Southern University
Marla Morris, Georgia Southern University
Abstract:
One does not stop being a scholar, when one officially ends an career and retires, they never retire from
reading, writing, and thinking. These stop only the moment after we physically die. Yet, many in
academia have stoped being scholars. They get caught up in busy service work and rationalize no
longer writing, they spritually abandon their intellectual calling. Why? Why do some remain committed
to the scholars life in spite of the rise of a neoliberal university that purposefully mocks the scholar?
We will explore these issues and many more surrounding the life of a scholar and what comes comes
after.
Room 222
Pedagogies of Joyfulness and Nutrition for the Spirit
Anne Fraioli University of Wisconsin-Madison
Telling It Like It Is: Potlikker Narratives for Teaching Freedom
This chapter presents and examines antebellum African American Trickster tales and their application in school curricula as narratives of resistance, protest, and freedom. Through a critical lens, I illustrate how Trickster tales featuring Brer Rabbit and High John the Conquerer can be taught in the same way that critical race theory scholars use autobiographical narratives, storytelling, and parable as a way “to expose and challenge social constructions of race” (Edward Taylor 2009, 8). In this capacity, Black Trickster tales serve as counter stories to the “grand narratives” within school curricula and textbooks that “subtly, and not so subtly, serve to promulgate the dominance of the White mainstream” (King and Swartz 2014, 141).
Just as potlikker broth nourished the body, Trickster tales were salves for captive Africans in the New World. Not only were they sources of entertainment and relief from toil, but they also connected enslaved plantation hands to their ancestral roots, providing them with a means of cultural and spiritual survival.
Telling It Like It Is: Potlikker Narratives for Teaching Freedom
This chapter presents and examines antebellum African American Trickster tales and their application in school curricula as narratives of resistance, protest, and freedom. Through a critical lens, I illustrate how Trickster tales featuring Brer Rabbit and High John the Conquerer can be taught in the same way that critical race theory scholars use autobiographical narratives, storytelling, and parable as a way “to expose and challenge social constructions of race” (Edward Taylor 2009, 8). In this capacity, Black Trickster tales serve as counter stories to the “grand narratives” within school curricula and textbooks that “subtly, and not so subtly, serve to promulgate the dominance of the White mainstream” (King and Swartz 2014, 141).
Just as potlikker broth nourished the body, Trickster tales were salves for captive Africans in the New World. Not only were they sources of entertainment and relief from toil, but they also connected enslaved plantation hands to their ancestral roots, providing them with a means of cultural and spiritual survival.
Jonathan Tunstall University of Wisconsin-Madison
Joyful Consciousness: A Pedagogical Tool for Joy and Critical Conscious Learning
In order to be prepared for twenty-first century civic participation, students must learn to critically
analyze societal problems and examine them from different perspectives. Twenty first civic
participation requires an educated citizenry who understands the biases of media and politicians and
how they impact the beliefs and values of society, so they can work across differences for a healthy
democracy. The aptitudes needed for civic participation are referred to as civic reasoning skills. Civic
reasoning speaks to both naming the world and developing ideas about what changes students want to
see in the world. Critical consciousness of interlocking systems of oppression are a needed
prerequisite for civic reasoning, a central goal of social studies learning. An educated active citizenry
requires knowledge of both past and present inequities and necessitates deep dives into histories that
are difficult to process. New visions of equity-oriented educational research charges educators to
situate learning in joy. How can teachers do both? How can educators critically reflect on America’s
past of genocide, slavery, and colonialism while still situating learning in joy? The answer is in the arts,
Blacks arts to be specific. Through Black art, joy and conscious elevating learning work both in tandem
and in cycles undergirding each other. Joyful Consciousness is the term I coined that represents that
reciprocal nature of joy and critical conscious learning. Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy is a particularly
salient framework for facilitating critical civic learning grounded in Joyful Consciousness.
Linda Teran Tolman University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley
What to do when Tasked to Teach SEL (bonus “Suggested Self-Care Tips” included)
With current events being what they are, educators have been assigned the additional task of teaching a
social-emotional learning curriculum. Implementing this trending curriculum becomes challenging
since we often find ourselves pouring from an empty cup as educators. The challenge is not in applying
the curriculum but in encouraging teachers to instill these same lessons into their own lives. This task
begins by creating intentions that turn into actions. Within these intentions, they can establish
boundaries and begin to find the importance of setting a daily purpose to motivate, guide, and inspire,
not others but, more importantly, themselves.
Room 106
Digital Media and Curriculum
Andrew Kearley Georgia Southern University
Gender in Video Game Advertisements in the 1990’s
The arcade was a fantasy world where one could take on the persona of a street warrior one minute and transform into a
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle the next. How do games, media, and advertising associated with
gaming shape young males in the nineties. Adolescence is a time when young men struggle with
ideas of self and measuring one's worth against society's preconceived notion of masculinity.
Video game media, specifically advertising, reinforced the ideal of masculinity
and its association with power, control, and domination. Advertising in video games had a
hidden curriculum used to persuade, educate and mold adolescent players into lifelong
consumers. How did the branding of video games, consoles, and accessories influence a
generation of gamers during the nineties, a gaming era dominated by young male consumers?
Melissa Cooley Georgia Southern University
Social Media in the lives of fifth grade girls
Being an elementary educator has opened my eyes to the culture and influences
that young people experience in their daily lives. In my classroom, the conversations I
hear during homeroom, lunch, recess, and dismissal overwhelm me to the amount of
influence young people are experiencing just from utilizing their smartphones or
personal televisions to access different forms of pop culture. When my students
transition back to me at the end of each school day, as their homeroom teacher, the first
thing they have in their hands are their phones eager to immediately begin watching the
thread of viral TikTok’s, Snapchat-ing their friends in other classrooms, or “searching
up” their most recent crush online. How is this impacting today’s youth (specifically preteen
girls ages 10- to 12-year-olds)? How is this influencing their identities; sense of self; their
thought process of what to think, how to feel, and how to behave; how to be popular and
successful; how to conform to dominant norms, trends, and values; and their sense of
class, ethnicity, race, male vs. female, nationality, and of sexuality?
Megan Paulk Georgia Southern University
Podcast Methodology
What is the role of creating a podcast in academic research? Is it simply just for dissemination or
is there something more parallel and even beneficial in the creation of it that aids to the
development of research? In the construction of my dissertation, I will be utilizing a podcast
methodology. I promote that it is an inquiry that can be utilized to create a unique approach to
21 st century research. I have constructed my podcast White Woman in a Black Barbershop to
guide my inquiry into the shift of racial perspectives of white women raising biracial children
and who are or have been in interracial marriages/relationships.
10:45 a.m. - Noon
Room 106
Post Formal Autoethnographic Research Methods for Learning in a Divided Time.
Chair: Tricia Kress Molloy University
Robert Lake Georgia Southern University
Kelly Bare Molloy University
Eric Karahalis Molloy University
Carolyne Ali-Khan University of North Florida
Chair: Tricia Kress Molloy University
Robert Lake Georgia Southern University
Kelly Bare Molloy University
Eric Karahalis Molloy University
Carolyne Ali-Khan University of North Florida
Abstract:
After the 2020 executive order of former U.S. president Trump, “divisive concepts” like race and gender
difference were coded into and prohibited by official federal policy, opening the door to individual
states banning the discussion of social oppressions in schools and workplaces. Yet “divisive
concepts” like critical race theory or feminist theory are not by their nature divisive. A signifier has no
meaning without the signified, which is derived from context. Concepts become divisive because of the
polarized space-time in which they are enmeshed. Panelists in this session push the methodological
boundaries of educational research to unsettle such polarization. We propose postformal
autoethnography as a theory and methodology that allows for nuanced understanding of the complexity
and tentativeness of divisive concepts. Postformalism is a middle ground between modernist and
postmodernist thinking that rejects reductionism without falling into the nihilism of deconstruction. It
allows for movement across geo-political space-times while positioning context and circumstance as
drivers of meaning. Paper #1 details key features of postformal thought (e.g., etymology, pattern,
process, context, non-linear analysis) while problematizing time as a barrier to learning in schools.
Paper #2 demonstrates how embodied, arts-infused, collaborative inquiry might serve as community
building among adults at a diverse elementary school in a gentrifying neighborhood. Paper #3 explores
the transformative potential of experiential learning through co-auto-ethnography using artifacts,
dialogue, and music. Paper #4 connects teaching, autoethnography, and corporeality to explore ways
that narratives and experiences bind people to themselves and others.
After the 2020 executive order of former U.S. president Trump, “divisive concepts” like race and gender
difference were coded into and prohibited by official federal policy, opening the door to individual
states banning the discussion of social oppressions in schools and workplaces. Yet “divisive
concepts” like critical race theory or feminist theory are not by their nature divisive. A signifier has no
meaning without the signified, which is derived from context. Concepts become divisive because of the
polarized space-time in which they are enmeshed. Panelists in this session push the methodological
boundaries of educational research to unsettle such polarization. We propose postformal
autoethnography as a theory and methodology that allows for nuanced understanding of the complexity
and tentativeness of divisive concepts. Postformalism is a middle ground between modernist and
postmodernist thinking that rejects reductionism without falling into the nihilism of deconstruction. It
allows for movement across geo-political space-times while positioning context and circumstance as
drivers of meaning. Paper #1 details key features of postformal thought (e.g., etymology, pattern,
process, context, non-linear analysis) while problematizing time as a barrier to learning in schools.
Paper #2 demonstrates how embodied, arts-infused, collaborative inquiry might serve as community
building among adults at a diverse elementary school in a gentrifying neighborhood. Paper #3 explores
the transformative potential of experiential learning through co-auto-ethnography using artifacts,
dialogue, and music. Paper #4 connects teaching, autoethnography, and corporeality to explore ways
that narratives and experiences bind people to themselves and others.
Room 151
Antiracist and Critical Pedagogies in the Living History of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Alejandra Pajak University of South Carolina
Antiracist Pedagogies in Post-COVID Middle-Level Classrooms
Previous research indicates pandemics have a traumatic effect on individuals (Douglas, et al.,
2017; Kamara, et al., 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic has been traumatic for all students of all races
and socioeconomic households. The pandemic has, however, intensified racial trauma by exacerbating
racial disparities already existing in American society (CDC, 2020; LaFave & Anderson, 2020; NAACP,
2020; Ranschaert, 2022; Schneider, 2020). Racial trauma has been linked to poor socioemotional health
and academic performance in racial minority adolescents. For this reason, an examination of
classroom strategies to address racial trauma is imperative in the conversation about Youths of
Color’s (YOC) return to the classroom post-COVID-19. This paper reviews racial trauma within the
context of COVID-19 pandemic and posits antiracist pedagogies teachers may be an effective strategy
to support YOC in processing racial trauma exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Katherine Perrotta Mercer University
Katlynn Cross Mercer University
Same Storm, Different Boats: Student Research about the Living History of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Documenting youth experiences during the pandemic would be beneficial to not only preserving insights from our youngest citizens about how they were impacted by COVID-19, but also how student research about the causes and impact of the pandemic can promote historical empathy (HE). Funded by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Source grant, as well as an internal provost seed grant, The question that frames this study is as follows: Can high school students’ engagement in local history research about the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on their community promote their demonstration of historical empathy?
Antiracist Pedagogies in Post-COVID Middle-Level Classrooms
Previous research indicates pandemics have a traumatic effect on individuals (Douglas, et al.,
2017; Kamara, et al., 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic has been traumatic for all students of all races
and socioeconomic households. The pandemic has, however, intensified racial trauma by exacerbating
racial disparities already existing in American society (CDC, 2020; LaFave & Anderson, 2020; NAACP,
2020; Ranschaert, 2022; Schneider, 2020). Racial trauma has been linked to poor socioemotional health
and academic performance in racial minority adolescents. For this reason, an examination of
classroom strategies to address racial trauma is imperative in the conversation about Youths of
Color’s (YOC) return to the classroom post-COVID-19. This paper reviews racial trauma within the
context of COVID-19 pandemic and posits antiracist pedagogies teachers may be an effective strategy
to support YOC in processing racial trauma exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Katherine Perrotta Mercer University
Katlynn Cross Mercer University
Same Storm, Different Boats: Student Research about the Living History of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Documenting youth experiences during the pandemic would be beneficial to not only preserving insights from our youngest citizens about how they were impacted by COVID-19, but also how student research about the causes and impact of the pandemic can promote historical empathy (HE). Funded by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Source grant, as well as an internal provost seed grant, The question that frames this study is as follows: Can high school students’ engagement in local history research about the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on their community promote their demonstration of historical empathy?
Room 222
Critical Justice
Jim Jupp University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley
Pauli Badenhurst University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley
Why Antiracism and Critical Whiteness? A Conceptual (Self-)Geography of the Empire of Whiteness on-the-Rise
Our essay provides a conceptual (self-)geography answering the research question why antiracism and critical whiteness? In approaching the essay, we recognize ourselves within antiracism and critical whiteness studies’ ongoing contradictions. As authors, we revamp an existing critical language, ways of thinking and doing, that make our task always-already suspicious, in a word impossible within cultural and curriculum studies proliferative “critical frameworks” and academic economies. Nonetheless, we see a horrific empire of whiteness on-the-rise that makes demands of (self-) interpretation and truth-telling, which, do not allow us to be released from antiracism, critical whiteness, or most importantly, our ethical commitments to our communities and our- “ ‘selves’ ”. Positioned as White researchers and researchers of Color, we find this (self-)geography here as necessary ethical practice delineating our view of the empire of whiteness on the rise (Echeverría, 2010/2016; Harvey, 2005). The empire of whiteness refers to the tenaciously organized-yet-tenuous-and-contradictory relations between globalization, historical and neoliberal capital, and whiteness on a multinational scale that are never-quite-completed but articulate a complex web of elite, White, patriarchal, neofascism, increasingly apparent –we think – to anyone paying attention. In a phrase: this is the MAGA world’s White privilege final solution, but also exported and differently formulated according to terrains (Amin, 2014; Quijano, 2000, 2007)
Megan Paulk Georgia Southern University
White Mothers of Black Families
I remember walking into a black barbershop with my son for the first time. I was nervous and did not know what to expect. My thoughts prior to entering the establishment were about being judged by both black men and black women. I was worried they would see a white woman who knew little about the black culture and see me as an intruder. In no time the barber was finished,
I paid him, and we left. I wondered why I was so nervous, there was nothing to worry about. There were two things that I realized when later examining that experience. One, I was not fully prepared for raising a black son in America in more ways than hair, and two, I realized what a unique perspective I had. I had a perspective going into the shop, one that was conjured up from the news I watched growing up. I had the privilege of entering the barbershop and creating a perspective founded on a real-life interaction. At that moment, my preconceived notions changed. These awakening experiences happen many times throughout my interracial experiences. I am left wondering why white people find it so hard to acknowledge the oppression that people of color face. I wonder why I was in this position prior to my marriage and the Curriculum Studies program.
Amber Colechin Georgia Southern University
Justice for All… Except Maybe You: Mystifying Critical Pedagogy in Dominant Culture
Despite the cacophony of voices claiming equity exists, critical educators and scholars know that the world around our students is not just or equitable for all. We realize that marginalized and oppressed people regularly engage in practices that mystify their dehumanization and oppression, and further their acceptance of the dominant ideology often because they lack the tools necessary to voice their dissent. The application of critical theory and critical pedagogy, especially in schools, can provide the
dialogue necessary to review, reinterpret, and change the unjust realities of the oppressed, but what does it look like and is it in fact being offered to all? Contrary to what conservative efforts would have people believe, there is a need for critical pedagogy for all students. The confusion created by dominance, voicelessness, and false consciousness does not have to exist. Critical theory and critical pedagogy provide a way to awaken the possibility of hope and create a more just society for everyone, if only we would allow it.
Pauli Badenhurst University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley
Why Antiracism and Critical Whiteness? A Conceptual (Self-)Geography of the Empire of Whiteness on-the-Rise
Our essay provides a conceptual (self-)geography answering the research question why antiracism and critical whiteness? In approaching the essay, we recognize ourselves within antiracism and critical whiteness studies’ ongoing contradictions. As authors, we revamp an existing critical language, ways of thinking and doing, that make our task always-already suspicious, in a word impossible within cultural and curriculum studies proliferative “critical frameworks” and academic economies. Nonetheless, we see a horrific empire of whiteness on-the-rise that makes demands of (self-) interpretation and truth-telling, which, do not allow us to be released from antiracism, critical whiteness, or most importantly, our ethical commitments to our communities and our- “ ‘selves’ ”. Positioned as White researchers and researchers of Color, we find this (self-)geography here as necessary ethical practice delineating our view of the empire of whiteness on the rise (Echeverría, 2010/2016; Harvey, 2005). The empire of whiteness refers to the tenaciously organized-yet-tenuous-and-contradictory relations between globalization, historical and neoliberal capital, and whiteness on a multinational scale that are never-quite-completed but articulate a complex web of elite, White, patriarchal, neofascism, increasingly apparent –we think – to anyone paying attention. In a phrase: this is the MAGA world’s White privilege final solution, but also exported and differently formulated according to terrains (Amin, 2014; Quijano, 2000, 2007)
Megan Paulk Georgia Southern University
White Mothers of Black Families
I remember walking into a black barbershop with my son for the first time. I was nervous and did not know what to expect. My thoughts prior to entering the establishment were about being judged by both black men and black women. I was worried they would see a white woman who knew little about the black culture and see me as an intruder. In no time the barber was finished,
I paid him, and we left. I wondered why I was so nervous, there was nothing to worry about. There were two things that I realized when later examining that experience. One, I was not fully prepared for raising a black son in America in more ways than hair, and two, I realized what a unique perspective I had. I had a perspective going into the shop, one that was conjured up from the news I watched growing up. I had the privilege of entering the barbershop and creating a perspective founded on a real-life interaction. At that moment, my preconceived notions changed. These awakening experiences happen many times throughout my interracial experiences. I am left wondering why white people find it so hard to acknowledge the oppression that people of color face. I wonder why I was in this position prior to my marriage and the Curriculum Studies program.
Amber Colechin Georgia Southern University
Justice for All… Except Maybe You: Mystifying Critical Pedagogy in Dominant Culture
Despite the cacophony of voices claiming equity exists, critical educators and scholars know that the world around our students is not just or equitable for all. We realize that marginalized and oppressed people regularly engage in practices that mystify their dehumanization and oppression, and further their acceptance of the dominant ideology often because they lack the tools necessary to voice their dissent. The application of critical theory and critical pedagogy, especially in schools, can provide the
dialogue necessary to review, reinterpret, and change the unjust realities of the oppressed, but what does it look like and is it in fact being offered to all? Contrary to what conservative efforts would have people believe, there is a need for critical pedagogy for all students. The confusion created by dominance, voicelessness, and false consciousness does not have to exist. Critical theory and critical pedagogy provide a way to awaken the possibility of hope and create a more just society for everyone, if only we would allow it.
12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
2:15 - 3:30
Room 106
Creative Insubordination: Push Methodological Boundaries~Invigorating Dissertation Research~Liberating Academic Writing
Chair: Ming Fang He Georgia Southern University
Discussants:
William Schubert University of Illinois at Chicago
Brian Schultz Miami University, Oxford, OH
Boni Wozolek Penn State University, Abington
Ming Fang He Georgia Southern University
Presentations:
Carmen Baker Georgia Southern University
Where Honeysuckles and Azaleas Bloom: A Southern Black Woman Reclaiming Voice: A Memoir
Alethea Coleman Georgia Southern University
Shunned to Death: The Joys and Fears of a Black Mother Sending Her Sons to School in the South: A Memoir
Cynthia Smith Georgia Southern University
As the Tables Turn: A Black Woman Educator’s Journey of Becoming an Anti-Ableist--A Memoir
Lucia Benzor Georgia Southern University
Rethinking the 3rd Grade Social Studies Curriculum: An Ethnographic Inquiry
Khristian Cooper Georgia Southern University
Otherwise Futures Reimagined: Afrofuturism as Liberation for Black Women--A Speculative Fiction
Abstract
This is a continuation of dialogue on developing creative insubordination research by pushing methodological boundaries while engaging in research on the counternarratives of curriculum of schools/neighborhoods/communities in the contested U. S. South. In this session, multiethnic researchers present their dissertation works-in-progress as they use Black Feminist methodology/Black Feminist narrative, composite counterstories, speculative essays, speculative/memoir, oral histories, Black speculative writing (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and Afrofuturism), and ethnography with young children as forms of inquiry into a wide array of topics. These researchers explore creative ways to push methodological boundaries, perform dissertation writing and liberate academic writing by diving into life, writing into contradictions, and living against oppressions in schools, families, and communities in the U. S. South. Theoretical traditions and modes of expression will be explored. Innovative writings engendered from the inquiries will be demonstrated. Potentials, challenges, and future directions of creative inquiries and representations will be discussed.
Room 222
1619 Project Resistance
Chair: Dr. Meca Williams-Johnson Georgia Southern University
Calvin Walton Georgia Southern University
Brantley Simmons Langston Chapel Middle School
Robert Helfenbein Mercer University
Katherine Perrotta Mercer University
Abstract:
Members of the Georgia Board of Education recently voted 11-2 to pass a resolution, joining several states and school systems looking to ban teaching on race. This is in response to Governor Brian Kemp’s letter urging the board to keep Critical Race Theory out of Georgia’s curriculums. More specifically, school board curriculum developers are dutifully working avoiding issues of the 1619 project. The 1619 Project is a journalism project by The New York Times that aims to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the national narrative. The project is named after the year 1619 when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the North American colony of Virginia. Some schools are resistant to teaching the 1619 Project because it challenges traditional narratives of American history that focus on the accomplishments of white men and downplay or ignore the experiences and contributions of other groups, such as enslaved Africans, Indigenous peoples, and women. This can be uncomfortable for people who may feel that their own sense of identity or pride in their country is threatened by this reframing. In addition, the 1619 Project has been criticized by some conservative politicians and commentators who argue that it promotes a divisive and inaccurate view of American history that emphasizes racial conflict and victimization over national unity and progress. These critics pushed back against the project and argue to prevent it from being taught in schools. However, many educators, scholars, and activists argue that the 1619 Project is an important and necessary effort to broaden and deepen our understanding of American history, and to acknowledge the ongoing legacy of slavery and racism in our society. They believe that teaching the project can help students to develop a more nuanced and critical perspective on American history, and to become more engaged and informed citizens. This panel will discuss their experiences with 1619 project and the crossroads that are before us. Our current reality must not be to stand and watch a white washing of history as we continue in a state of naïve idealism. We must not underestimate the deviousness and pertinacity of the forces that are still against our progress, peace, and prosperity.
Room 151
Centering Vs Decentering
Dr. Shirley R. Steinberg, University of Calgary
Dr. Erin Milkulec, Illinois State University
Abstract:
Centering vs Decentering: An Interactive Session on Figuring Out Safe Pedagogical Ways of Being in an Unsafe time. The audience is invited to contribute to dialogic session discussing the traps and issues within growing fascist waves in North America. How do we make sense of our positionalities without creating fear and retreat?
Centering Vs Decentering
Dr. Shirley R. Steinberg, University of Calgary
Dr. Erin Milkulec, Illinois State University
Abstract:
Centering vs Decentering: An Interactive Session on Figuring Out Safe Pedagogical Ways of Being in an Unsafe time. The audience is invited to contribute to dialogic session discussing the traps and issues within growing fascist waves in North America. How do we make sense of our positionalities without creating fear and retreat?
3:45 - 5 PM
Room 106
Dissertation Studies: Speculative Essays~Speculative Memoir~Black Speculative Writing
Chair: Ming Fang He Georgia Southern University
Discussants:
William Schubert University of Illinois at Chicago
Brian Schultz Miami University, Oxford, OH
Ming Fang He Georgia Southern University
Presentations:
Amanda Gonzales Georgia Southern University
Freedom’s Song: Cultivating Creativity and Releasing Imagination Through Music--Speculative Memoir
Andrea Cramsey Georgia Southern University
Speculating a Curriculum of Empowerment, Imagination, Creativity, and Wonder Amidst the Sabotaging Confines of Education Standardization
Juan R. Mora Georgia Southern University
Culturally Empowering Curriculum for Latinx--Speculative Essays
Sharifa Ned Georgia Southern University
EcoFear: Blacks in the South's Relationship with Nature--Speculative Essays
Khristian Cooper Georgia Southern University
Otherwise Futures Reimagined: Afrofuturism as Liberation for Black Women--A Speculative Fiction
Abstract:
In this session on pushing methodological boundaries, a group of researchers present their
dissertation studies. These researchers use speculative essays (Schubert, 1991; also Foy, 2021; Negley,
2021; Schmidt, 2021), speculative memoir, Black speculative writing (e.g., science fiction, fantasy,
magical realism, and Afrofuturism; Allen & Cherelle, 2019; Cooper, in progress) as forms of curriculum
inquiry into a wide array of topics such as Freedom’s song: cultivating creativity and releasing
imagination through music--speculative memoir; speculating a curriculum of empowerment,
imagination, creativity, and wonder amidst the sabotaging confines of education standardization;
otherwise futures reimagined: Afrofuturism as liberation for Black women--a speculative fiction;
culturally empowering curriculum for Latinx-- speculative essays; and ecofear: Blacks in the South's
relationship with nature--speculative essays. These researchers explore creative ways to push
methodological boundaries, perform dissertation writing and liberate academic writing by diving into
life, writing into contradictions, and living against oppressions in schools, families, and communities in
the U. S. South. Theoretical traditions and modes of expression are particularly explored. Innovative
writings engendered from composing speculative essays, speculative memoir, and Black speculative
fiction are demonstrated. Potentials, challenges, and future directions of speculative essays,
speculative memoir, and Black speculative fiction and its representations are discussed.
William Schubert University of Illinois at Chicago
Brian Schultz Miami University, Oxford, OH
Ming Fang He Georgia Southern University
Presentations:
Amanda Gonzales Georgia Southern University
Freedom’s Song: Cultivating Creativity and Releasing Imagination Through Music--Speculative Memoir
Andrea Cramsey Georgia Southern University
Speculating a Curriculum of Empowerment, Imagination, Creativity, and Wonder Amidst the Sabotaging Confines of Education Standardization
Juan R. Mora Georgia Southern University
Culturally Empowering Curriculum for Latinx--Speculative Essays
Sharifa Ned Georgia Southern University
EcoFear: Blacks in the South's Relationship with Nature--Speculative Essays
Khristian Cooper Georgia Southern University
Otherwise Futures Reimagined: Afrofuturism as Liberation for Black Women--A Speculative Fiction
Abstract:
In this session on pushing methodological boundaries, a group of researchers present their
dissertation studies. These researchers use speculative essays (Schubert, 1991; also Foy, 2021; Negley,
2021; Schmidt, 2021), speculative memoir, Black speculative writing (e.g., science fiction, fantasy,
magical realism, and Afrofuturism; Allen & Cherelle, 2019; Cooper, in progress) as forms of curriculum
inquiry into a wide array of topics such as Freedom’s song: cultivating creativity and releasing
imagination through music--speculative memoir; speculating a curriculum of empowerment,
imagination, creativity, and wonder amidst the sabotaging confines of education standardization;
otherwise futures reimagined: Afrofuturism as liberation for Black women--a speculative fiction;
culturally empowering curriculum for Latinx-- speculative essays; and ecofear: Blacks in the South's
relationship with nature--speculative essays. These researchers explore creative ways to push
methodological boundaries, perform dissertation writing and liberate academic writing by diving into
life, writing into contradictions, and living against oppressions in schools, families, and communities in
the U. S. South. Theoretical traditions and modes of expression are particularly explored. Innovative
writings engendered from composing speculative essays, speculative memoir, and Black speculative
fiction are demonstrated. Potentials, challenges, and future directions of speculative essays,
speculative memoir, and Black speculative fiction and its representations are discussed.
Room 151
Curriculum Reform in the Face of Resistance
Curriculum Reform in the Face of Resistance
Erik Malewski and Nathalia Jaramillo Kennesaw State University
Habits of Whiteness: Epistemologies of Ignorance and Curriculum Reform in the Age of Racial Hysteria
In this paper we examine habits of whiteness in relation to curriculum reform in the United States. What is a habit? A settled or regular practice that is routine and often engaged in without conscious recognition. That is, habits are what we do in thought, being, and action without thinking much at all. Habits are crucial to epistemologies of ignorance for they help explain much of our not knowing and the ways in which we function as individuals and communities through etiquette, routine, and embodied repetitions.
Jasmyne K. Rogers University of Alabama
Reimagining Curriculum Reform: Examining the Effectiveness of Hip Hop-Based Curriculum
Curriculum reform highlights deficits and disadvantages in education while advocating to improve teaching and learning. History plays an instrumental role in curriculum design, implementation, and reform. Thus, the paper discusses the historical, social, and cultural contents of curriculum reform. The aim of this paper is to argue that Hip Hop-based curriculum challenges early curriculum thought orientations and aligns with educational objectives
Grace Livingston
Facing Our Wake Work at the Seat of Our Trouble
I am drawn by this Call’s representation of our current public atmosphere of establishmentarian and
to some degree, also quotidian driven challenges and moral panic, over the presence and role of
particular critical knowledge forms, languages, and practices in education, as carrying a “once again”
“and there will be more times” visceral quality. This paper approaches the growing through-line
sensation of contentiousness over education and the intersectionally racialized conjunctures that
compose this structural sensation, not as a state of exception but rather as a steady state” in Hortense
Spillers’ conceptualization (Spillers 2018, p. 26, italics in original), “given historical pressures that
bear in on it” (p. 26). The contentions are positioned as part of the long haunting of enslavement
and genocidal histories and their agonizing legacies – still without fulsome accounting and reckoning
– functioning as part of what Saidiya Hartman would call their “afterlives” (Hartman, 2007, p. 6).
To work through possible modes of reading and responding as critical educators, I offer the
following directions. By arguing that “there would be no lynching if it did not start in the
schoolroom,” Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 text urges us to (re)turn to the “Seat of the Trouble (pp. 3
& 6) as a signal site for excavating the logics of “miseducation” orienting our moment, and for
exercising an epistemological humility to ask what we may be missing and not being accountable
about in terms of institutional and curricular structures, and in the knowing and being work that we
do. In the spirit of this kind of ethical disposition, Christina Sharpe’s 2016 text insists that there is
much “wake work” for us to do, especially in terms of creating different conditions for the
imperative of “coming to consciousness.” Finally, Eddie Glaude’s 2020 text graphs the immensity
of the challenge of this kind of labor due to the “broad and powerful architecture of false
assumption,” “deep in the American psyche,” “at the heart of the country’s founding” – “the lie”
(pp. 7-9) – which requires a praxis of “beginning again” in national and educational terms.
Habits of Whiteness: Epistemologies of Ignorance and Curriculum Reform in the Age of Racial Hysteria
In this paper we examine habits of whiteness in relation to curriculum reform in the United States. What is a habit? A settled or regular practice that is routine and often engaged in without conscious recognition. That is, habits are what we do in thought, being, and action without thinking much at all. Habits are crucial to epistemologies of ignorance for they help explain much of our not knowing and the ways in which we function as individuals and communities through etiquette, routine, and embodied repetitions.
Jasmyne K. Rogers University of Alabama
Reimagining Curriculum Reform: Examining the Effectiveness of Hip Hop-Based Curriculum
Curriculum reform highlights deficits and disadvantages in education while advocating to improve teaching and learning. History plays an instrumental role in curriculum design, implementation, and reform. Thus, the paper discusses the historical, social, and cultural contents of curriculum reform. The aim of this paper is to argue that Hip Hop-based curriculum challenges early curriculum thought orientations and aligns with educational objectives
Grace Livingston
Facing Our Wake Work at the Seat of Our Trouble
I am drawn by this Call’s representation of our current public atmosphere of establishmentarian and
to some degree, also quotidian driven challenges and moral panic, over the presence and role of
particular critical knowledge forms, languages, and practices in education, as carrying a “once again”
“and there will be more times” visceral quality. This paper approaches the growing through-line
sensation of contentiousness over education and the intersectionally racialized conjunctures that
compose this structural sensation, not as a state of exception but rather as a steady state” in Hortense
Spillers’ conceptualization (Spillers 2018, p. 26, italics in original), “given historical pressures that
bear in on it” (p. 26). The contentions are positioned as part of the long haunting of enslavement
and genocidal histories and their agonizing legacies – still without fulsome accounting and reckoning
– functioning as part of what Saidiya Hartman would call their “afterlives” (Hartman, 2007, p. 6).
To work through possible modes of reading and responding as critical educators, I offer the
following directions. By arguing that “there would be no lynching if it did not start in the
schoolroom,” Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 text urges us to (re)turn to the “Seat of the Trouble (pp. 3
& 6) as a signal site for excavating the logics of “miseducation” orienting our moment, and for
exercising an epistemological humility to ask what we may be missing and not being accountable
about in terms of institutional and curricular structures, and in the knowing and being work that we
do. In the spirit of this kind of ethical disposition, Christina Sharpe’s 2016 text insists that there is
much “wake work” for us to do, especially in terms of creating different conditions for the
imperative of “coming to consciousness.” Finally, Eddie Glaude’s 2020 text graphs the immensity
of the challenge of this kind of labor due to the “broad and powerful architecture of false
assumption,” “deep in the American psyche,” “at the heart of the country’s founding” – “the lie”
(pp. 7-9) – which requires a praxis of “beginning again” in national and educational terms.
5:15-6:30
Room 106
WWJD/What Would Joe Do? An Analysis of the Fear of the Future
Shirley Steinberg University of Calgary
Roymieco Carter North Carolina A&T University
Daniel Chapman Georgia Southern University
John Weaver Georgia Southern University
Dr. Leila Villaverde University of North Carolina-Greensboro
Abstract:
Jon Stewart stated recently, speaking about the right… "inconvenience is not the same as infringement and your fear of some dystopian authoritarian future is making it impossible for the rest of us to make life better in our dystopian present". As an avid student of the present, curriculum scholar Joe L. Kincheloe was immersed in the milieu, and ever cognizant of the past and mobilized toward the future. In this panel, each scholar will discuss their etymology and connection to Joe and discuss how Joe would have met with the past three years in the US.
Roymieco Carter North Carolina A&T University
Daniel Chapman Georgia Southern University
John Weaver Georgia Southern University
Dr. Leila Villaverde University of North Carolina-Greensboro
Abstract:
Jon Stewart stated recently, speaking about the right… "inconvenience is not the same as infringement and your fear of some dystopian authoritarian future is making it impossible for the rest of us to make life better in our dystopian present". As an avid student of the present, curriculum scholar Joe L. Kincheloe was immersed in the milieu, and ever cognizant of the past and mobilized toward the future. In this panel, each scholar will discuss their etymology and connection to Joe and discuss how Joe would have met with the past three years in the US.