9:15 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Room 106
Humanism, Post, and Stillness
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/87924131235
Chair: Marla Morris, Georgia Southern University
Marla Morris, Georgia Southern University
A Call for a New Humanism
This paper concerns a call for a new humanism in the dialectical intersections of Jacques Derrida's short piece "The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University (Thanks to the "Humanities," What could take place Tomorrow) " and Marx's 1844 Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts. These specific texts (which form a curriculum dialogue) were chosen in order to examine how Marx's early text becomes useful in unpacking Derrida's problematizing the very foundation of the university and the professorate. Marx's idea of alienated labor is key to understanding the very foundering of the university and professorate. Unlike Heidegger's call for a new humanism or even Derrida's, this author adds to the conversation that a new humanism in the context of the alienated university and professorate must become more ecological in that anthropocentrism must be critiqued in the context of the very heart of curriculum work as inter-disciplinary. A New Humanism, thus, must critique humanism to begin with. Humanism in the cross-section of a Hegelian or Marxist dialectic might introduce the non- human object into the human, or even Lacan's "Petite Object a" which undermines any sense of rationality whatsoever as the unconscious and unrelenting never-to-be met desire of X is incorporated into a humanism that goes beyond the rational.
Mary Doll, emerita, Savannah College of Art and Design
In the Stillness of Time: Pandemic
Time experienced during the pandemic introduced me to myself all over again. At first I loved the distractions but realized soon enough that time can be a gift to revisit the self without distraction. This realization ushered in memory and dream, especially concerning my mother. For the first time, Time could offer a reexamination of difficulties of this relationship by focusing on an early memory of her departure from our home when I was three. This pivotal moment allowed me to re-visit the work of writers(Collette, Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett) whose focus on time as stillness generated an energy of its own: reimagining gender (Collette), reconfiguring innocence (Welty) and re-appreciating the backward cold look.
Robert Helfenbein, Mercer University
The Entanglements of Curriculum Theorizing: Posthumanism & Quantum Method
This paper brings new theoretical literatures broadly known as posthumanism to bear on curriculum studies and considers implications for future work. Putting the work of N. Katherine Hayles (2017) into conversation with new critical geographies that take seriously questions of race and intersectionality (McKittrick, 2006; Wynter, 2001), political economy (Ford, 2017; Bennett, 2010), quantum ontologies (Wendt, 2015) and scale (Authors, 2017), the effort here is to explore the implications of non-human agency and theoretical developments in method for curriculum studies. Hayles’ recent work considers contemporary discoveries in neuroscience in relation to various social theories, including the current grouping of scholarship referred to as New Materialism. She offers that what is asked of us in the new materialism is to consider spaces as filled with things possessed of agency or “thing-power” as Jane Bennett would call it. We are asked to hear “the call of things.” But what is most important in this rethinking, according to Hayles, is not thinking of parts of the larger whole of meaning-making but rather to consider the ways in which the human and the non-human are entangled or, following Karen Barad (2010), that “there is less an assemblage of agents that there is an entangled state of agencies” (p.23).
A Call for a New Humanism
This paper concerns a call for a new humanism in the dialectical intersections of Jacques Derrida's short piece "The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University (Thanks to the "Humanities," What could take place Tomorrow) " and Marx's 1844 Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts. These specific texts (which form a curriculum dialogue) were chosen in order to examine how Marx's early text becomes useful in unpacking Derrida's problematizing the very foundation of the university and the professorate. Marx's idea of alienated labor is key to understanding the very foundering of the university and professorate. Unlike Heidegger's call for a new humanism or even Derrida's, this author adds to the conversation that a new humanism in the context of the alienated university and professorate must become more ecological in that anthropocentrism must be critiqued in the context of the very heart of curriculum work as inter-disciplinary. A New Humanism, thus, must critique humanism to begin with. Humanism in the cross-section of a Hegelian or Marxist dialectic might introduce the non- human object into the human, or even Lacan's "Petite Object a" which undermines any sense of rationality whatsoever as the unconscious and unrelenting never-to-be met desire of X is incorporated into a humanism that goes beyond the rational.
Mary Doll, emerita, Savannah College of Art and Design
In the Stillness of Time: Pandemic
Time experienced during the pandemic introduced me to myself all over again. At first I loved the distractions but realized soon enough that time can be a gift to revisit the self without distraction. This realization ushered in memory and dream, especially concerning my mother. For the first time, Time could offer a reexamination of difficulties of this relationship by focusing on an early memory of her departure from our home when I was three. This pivotal moment allowed me to re-visit the work of writers(Collette, Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett) whose focus on time as stillness generated an energy of its own: reimagining gender (Collette), reconfiguring innocence (Welty) and re-appreciating the backward cold look.
Robert Helfenbein, Mercer University
The Entanglements of Curriculum Theorizing: Posthumanism & Quantum Method
This paper brings new theoretical literatures broadly known as posthumanism to bear on curriculum studies and considers implications for future work. Putting the work of N. Katherine Hayles (2017) into conversation with new critical geographies that take seriously questions of race and intersectionality (McKittrick, 2006; Wynter, 2001), political economy (Ford, 2017; Bennett, 2010), quantum ontologies (Wendt, 2015) and scale (Authors, 2017), the effort here is to explore the implications of non-human agency and theoretical developments in method for curriculum studies. Hayles’ recent work considers contemporary discoveries in neuroscience in relation to various social theories, including the current grouping of scholarship referred to as New Materialism. She offers that what is asked of us in the new materialism is to consider spaces as filled with things possessed of agency or “thing-power” as Jane Bennett would call it. We are asked to hear “the call of things.” But what is most important in this rethinking, according to Hayles, is not thinking of parts of the larger whole of meaning-making but rather to consider the ways in which the human and the non-human are entangled or, following Karen Barad (2010), that “there is less an assemblage of agents that there is an entangled state of agencies” (p.23).
Room 107
Curriculum in Asian Contexts
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/83029483228
Reyila Hadeer, Michigan State University
Curriculum of Cultural Artifacts in Transnational Educational Experiences
In this project, I explore my relationship with ethnic-cultural artifacts as an Uyghur woman across my transnational educational experiences. I left home at an early age and have lived in many different places in China and around the world. I move a lot, so I try to maintain a minimalist lifestyle. However, whenever I move, I always keep some things with me. In many instances, I have to leave some important things behind because of airlines’ weight restrictions on luggage. Still, there are objects I always keep with me. It is my relationship with these objects that drove me to return to the things I cannot let go of to engage in a conversation with them. Through photo essay and poetic storytelling, I interrogate what these collected artifacts have taught me about who I am, what my position in this world is, and what it means to be a human being in an ever-changing global landscape of higher education.
Tahreem Fatima, Miami (OH) University
Uncertain Future of Pakistani Single National Curriculum (SNC)
My proposal inquires on the uncertain future of those people whose voices get marginalized in the curriculum making. The problem statement is based on whether introducing the Single National Curriculum (SNC) is sufficient for creating uniform education in Pakistan. The SNC has recently been implemented in Pakistan in March 2021 for pre-class one to five across all provinces. The purpose of the government to introduce SNC is to create a high-quality education for everyone but there are other problems which SNC alone cannot solve. For example, around 22.8 million children in Pakistan are out of school; these kids will not study under SNC (UNICEF Pakistan). I am looking at SNC as a problem of top-down approach which compels me to think about a somewhat similar standard-based reform policy of the USA (United States of America) named No Child Left Behind (NCLB) where I can make some comparisons for possible successes and failures. In Pakistan, some provinces are resisting to implement SNC and this made me think whether US states have succeeded or failed in implementing those NCLB standards keeping in mind their capacity and local requirements. In my paper, I will provide a historical context of educational development in Pakistan followed by the analysis of SNC as a policy along with the elaboration of US standards-based reform of NCLB. In the end, I will compare SNC with NCLB and make predictions about the uncertain future of newly implemented SNC in Pakistan by keeping in mind NCLB approach.
Yining Zhang, Georgia Southern University
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Chinese International Teaching
This proposal is an attempt to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy into teaching Chinese language and culture in international contexts. It stays on the theme of CSSC 2022 “Vulnerable Presents/Uncertain Futures” by engaging students in the discussion of “Life and Death: An Inescapable Dialogue.” Taking Ladson-Billings’s (1995) culturally relevant pedagogy and
Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of socially mediated knowledge as the theoretical framework, this proposal aims to facilitate participants with multicultural backgrounds to maintain their own cultural integrity and understand cultures from other social groups, and to gain a positive attitude towards life in the mid of or even post-pandemic era.
Curriculum of Cultural Artifacts in Transnational Educational Experiences
In this project, I explore my relationship with ethnic-cultural artifacts as an Uyghur woman across my transnational educational experiences. I left home at an early age and have lived in many different places in China and around the world. I move a lot, so I try to maintain a minimalist lifestyle. However, whenever I move, I always keep some things with me. In many instances, I have to leave some important things behind because of airlines’ weight restrictions on luggage. Still, there are objects I always keep with me. It is my relationship with these objects that drove me to return to the things I cannot let go of to engage in a conversation with them. Through photo essay and poetic storytelling, I interrogate what these collected artifacts have taught me about who I am, what my position in this world is, and what it means to be a human being in an ever-changing global landscape of higher education.
Tahreem Fatima, Miami (OH) University
Uncertain Future of Pakistani Single National Curriculum (SNC)
My proposal inquires on the uncertain future of those people whose voices get marginalized in the curriculum making. The problem statement is based on whether introducing the Single National Curriculum (SNC) is sufficient for creating uniform education in Pakistan. The SNC has recently been implemented in Pakistan in March 2021 for pre-class one to five across all provinces. The purpose of the government to introduce SNC is to create a high-quality education for everyone but there are other problems which SNC alone cannot solve. For example, around 22.8 million children in Pakistan are out of school; these kids will not study under SNC (UNICEF Pakistan). I am looking at SNC as a problem of top-down approach which compels me to think about a somewhat similar standard-based reform policy of the USA (United States of America) named No Child Left Behind (NCLB) where I can make some comparisons for possible successes and failures. In Pakistan, some provinces are resisting to implement SNC and this made me think whether US states have succeeded or failed in implementing those NCLB standards keeping in mind their capacity and local requirements. In my paper, I will provide a historical context of educational development in Pakistan followed by the analysis of SNC as a policy along with the elaboration of US standards-based reform of NCLB. In the end, I will compare SNC with NCLB and make predictions about the uncertain future of newly implemented SNC in Pakistan by keeping in mind NCLB approach.
Yining Zhang, Georgia Southern University
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Chinese International Teaching
This proposal is an attempt to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy into teaching Chinese language and culture in international contexts. It stays on the theme of CSSC 2022 “Vulnerable Presents/Uncertain Futures” by engaging students in the discussion of “Life and Death: An Inescapable Dialogue.” Taking Ladson-Billings’s (1995) culturally relevant pedagogy and
Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of socially mediated knowledge as the theoretical framework, this proposal aims to facilitate participants with multicultural backgrounds to maintain their own cultural integrity and understand cultures from other social groups, and to gain a positive attitude towards life in the mid of or even post-pandemic era.
Room 109
Curriculum Beyond the Border: Language, Justice, and Learning
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/82652856627
Chair: Mayra Garcia-Diaz
Maria Migueliz Valcarlos, University of South Florida
Social Justice Manifest in a Dual-Language Elementary School
This presentation will showcase an ongoing research project about curriculum, social justice, and culture in a private dual-language (Spanish-English) elementary school in the Southeast region of the US. The purpose of the research was to investigate what the curriculum did to be socially just oriented, and how it advocated for historically marginalized knowledge and cultures (e.g., Latino, African American, Indigenous people) amidst a pandemic. The overarching questions guiding this study were: What social justice does the curriculum promote? How? Critical social theories around curriculum, language, and culture framed the research. Kumashiro’s (2000) theory of anti-oppressive education helped to explore how the "Other" was understood throughout the curriculum. And Schubert’s what is worthwhile guided the understanding of the curriculum, which was especially relevant in times of a pandemic. I followed a qualitative critical arts-based inquiry design combined with elements of participatory research and critical discourse analysis. I employed performing focus groups with teachers and the administrator to provide space to reflect, share, and analyze what the school managed to work through and what they feel they still need to work on. Findings speak about the extent to which the school's (social justice) mission was realized and about what was left behind, which relates to vulnerable presents/uncertain futures.
Raul Garza, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Jim Jupp, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Arrebato's Arc of Meaning: Chicana Preservice Teachers, Llano Grande, Aztlán
This research explores Chicana preservice teachers’ conscientization processes in working through a broad array of criticalities specifically contextualized within our bioregion. Framed through itinerant curriculum theory, we work through decolonial theory, ethnic studies curriculum, Chicanx studies, and Chicana feminist epistemologies, unified in Gloria Anzaldúa. Located within a Hispanic Serving Institution, we used plática as a culturally and linguistically sustainable research method. Our findings articulate what we call arrebato’s arc of meaning. Non-linear and dialectical, the arc works through emotionality, recognition of injustices, and communality/connection. Via qualitative transferability, we believe the arc has implications for EPP’s serving minoritized preservice teachers.
Mayra Garcia-Diaz, Georgia Southern University
Immigrants Latinx Mothers' Struggles for their Children’s Educational Success: A Critical Phenomenology Study of Parental Involvement in the South of Georgia.
To generate transformative knowledge and to demystify the nature of Immigrant Latinx mothers' struggles for their children’s educational success, this inquiry in progress, will work on a critical phenomenology study of parental involvement; looking to be a supportive tool for mothers to generate critical consciousness and an informative perspective article for those involved in education to generate cultural competence.
Social Justice Manifest in a Dual-Language Elementary School
This presentation will showcase an ongoing research project about curriculum, social justice, and culture in a private dual-language (Spanish-English) elementary school in the Southeast region of the US. The purpose of the research was to investigate what the curriculum did to be socially just oriented, and how it advocated for historically marginalized knowledge and cultures (e.g., Latino, African American, Indigenous people) amidst a pandemic. The overarching questions guiding this study were: What social justice does the curriculum promote? How? Critical social theories around curriculum, language, and culture framed the research. Kumashiro’s (2000) theory of anti-oppressive education helped to explore how the "Other" was understood throughout the curriculum. And Schubert’s what is worthwhile guided the understanding of the curriculum, which was especially relevant in times of a pandemic. I followed a qualitative critical arts-based inquiry design combined with elements of participatory research and critical discourse analysis. I employed performing focus groups with teachers and the administrator to provide space to reflect, share, and analyze what the school managed to work through and what they feel they still need to work on. Findings speak about the extent to which the school's (social justice) mission was realized and about what was left behind, which relates to vulnerable presents/uncertain futures.
Raul Garza, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Jim Jupp, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Arrebato's Arc of Meaning: Chicana Preservice Teachers, Llano Grande, Aztlán
This research explores Chicana preservice teachers’ conscientization processes in working through a broad array of criticalities specifically contextualized within our bioregion. Framed through itinerant curriculum theory, we work through decolonial theory, ethnic studies curriculum, Chicanx studies, and Chicana feminist epistemologies, unified in Gloria Anzaldúa. Located within a Hispanic Serving Institution, we used plática as a culturally and linguistically sustainable research method. Our findings articulate what we call arrebato’s arc of meaning. Non-linear and dialectical, the arc works through emotionality, recognition of injustices, and communality/connection. Via qualitative transferability, we believe the arc has implications for EPP’s serving minoritized preservice teachers.
Mayra Garcia-Diaz, Georgia Southern University
Immigrants Latinx Mothers' Struggles for their Children’s Educational Success: A Critical Phenomenology Study of Parental Involvement in the South of Georgia.
To generate transformative knowledge and to demystify the nature of Immigrant Latinx mothers' struggles for their children’s educational success, this inquiry in progress, will work on a critical phenomenology study of parental involvement; looking to be a supportive tool for mothers to generate critical consciousness and an informative perspective article for those involved in education to generate cultural competence.
10:30 a.m. -11:45 p.m.
Room 106
Multiple Challenges~Myriad Possibilities: Research on Language, Culture, Identity, and Power
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/87924131235
Chair: Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University
Discussants:
Peggy Shannon-Baker, Georgia Southern University
Dinny Risri Aletheiani, Yale University
Min Yu, Wayne State University
Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University
Presenters:
Bahar Mentch, Georgia Southern University
The Impact of Pandemics on Turkish American Families and Their Children’s Social, Academic, and Personal Success
Irina Tedrick, Savannah State University
Languages, Cultures, and Identities: Immersion Experiences of HBCU Students in a Study Abroad Program in Costa Rica
Ru Li, Georgia Southern University.
Cross-Cultural Narrative Inquiry into the Experience of International Doctoral Students in a Rural University in the U. S. South
Peggy Shannon-Baker, Georgia Southern University
Dinny Risri Aletheiani, Yale University
Min Yu, Wayne State University
Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University
Presenters:
Bahar Mentch, Georgia Southern University
The Impact of Pandemics on Turkish American Families and Their Children’s Social, Academic, and Personal Success
Irina Tedrick, Savannah State University
Languages, Cultures, and Identities: Immersion Experiences of HBCU Students in a Study Abroad Program in Costa Rica
Ru Li, Georgia Southern University.
Cross-Cultural Narrative Inquiry into the Experience of International Doctoral Students in a Rural University in the U. S. South
Room 107
Curriculum in Historical Perspectives
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/83029483228
Chair: Caroline Whitcomb, Georgia Southern University
Katherine Perotta, Mercer University
Robert Helfenbein, Mercer University
They Were Here: Promoting Historical Empathy with Community Outreach and Student Local History Research
Historical empathy (HE) is a growing field in social studies education that has gained considerable scholarly attention over the past three decades. Endacott and Brooks (2018) contend that future HE research must focus on “prosocial civic behavior as an extension of the process of classroom-based exercise” (p. 220). As a result, developing a local history curriculum from an HE perspective may be beneficial in not only promoting engaged learning, but also fostering pro-social behavior through student participation in community outreach with conducting historical research about a community event, person, or site such as a historical cemetery. Therefore, the following research question frames this study: Can high school students’ participation in a local history research and community outreach project promote historical empathy? The purpose of this study, which was funded by a Georgia Humanities grant, is to ascertain perspectives from 24 public high school students who were enrolled in an extra-curricular leadership program about how conducting primary source research and oral history interviews to produce documentary films about the Macedonia African Methodist Church Cemetery, a historical Black cemetery located in a suburban area in the Southeast, promoted their engagement in HE. In alignment with the conference theme “Promoting Dialogue and Cooperative Action,” we hope this scholarship contributes to larger curricular discussions about how student engagement in local history research and community service on social justice issues can promote HE in the curriculum.
Raul Garza, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
Un Mundo Ráro: Transnational Students Teaching U. S. History in Transnational (Borderland) Spaces.
The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of pre-service teachers, educated in Mexico, in preparing to teach an American historical perspective. Research questions included: First, how are pre-service teachers who completed their primary and secondary schooling in Mexico preparing to teach a U.S. based social studies (history) curriculum? Second, how are these pre-service teachers reconciling the possible difference in historical narrative between the U.S. based curriculum and the Mexican curriculum? Living in borderland regions like the RGV, many people experience living in los intersticios, interstitial, or liminal spaces. Gloria Anzaldúa provides us with one of the more prominent, recurring theoretical conceptualizations of liminal space in Nepantla (Anzaldúa, 1987; 2015). This mini-ethnographic case study employs various methods of data collection that focus on obtaining “rich” data and relies on primary data collection techniques such as structured interviews and elements of plática. The data was analyzed using both, textual analysis of the interviews via printed copies of the interview transcripts and audio analysis of the actual interview recordings. Two themes presented themselves in the analysis. The first theme encompassed a variety of contextual factors that seemed to determine how confident the pre-service teachers felt about their ability to teach in the U. S. The second theme revolved around various curricular elements that contributed to the participants’ perceived ability to handle the possibility of conflicting narratives in the curriculum. Understanding what strengths and processes Mexican-educated students bring to the table, can help inform further programmatic changes in EPPs.
Caroline Whitcomb, Georgia Southern University
Ubuntu: A Nonviolence Philosophy/Pedagogical Practice
Mahatma Gandhi writes, "Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man" (Sharma, 2007, p. 23). The empowerment of the society's weakest is fundamental to Gandhi's Satyagraha. However, Gandhi's nonviolence is more than a tool for mass mobilization, it is a way of life. As our nation and world continue on a path of chaos, racism, and violence, it is time educators become catalysts of change. Ubuntu, a nonviolence philosophy/pedagogical practice, is a means toward that end. Combining the teachings of Gandhi, the Zulu philosophy of Ubuntu, and the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James M. Lawson, Jr., Whitcomb posits a nonviolence approach to life, education, pedagogical practice, and the classroom experience. Ubuntu guides both teachers and students towards lives dedicated to the active practice of nonviolence; a practice intent on overcoming oppression, seeking justice, and cultivating a democratic society.
Chair: Caroline Whitcomb, Georgia Southern University
Katherine Perotta, Mercer University
Robert Helfenbein, Mercer University
They Were Here: Promoting Historical Empathy with Community Outreach and Student Local History Research
Historical empathy (HE) is a growing field in social studies education that has gained considerable scholarly attention over the past three decades. Endacott and Brooks (2018) contend that future HE research must focus on “prosocial civic behavior as an extension of the process of classroom-based exercise” (p. 220). As a result, developing a local history curriculum from an HE perspective may be beneficial in not only promoting engaged learning, but also fostering pro-social behavior through student participation in community outreach with conducting historical research about a community event, person, or site such as a historical cemetery. Therefore, the following research question frames this study: Can high school students’ participation in a local history research and community outreach project promote historical empathy? The purpose of this study, which was funded by a Georgia Humanities grant, is to ascertain perspectives from 24 public high school students who were enrolled in an extra-curricular leadership program about how conducting primary source research and oral history interviews to produce documentary films about the Macedonia African Methodist Church Cemetery, a historical Black cemetery located in a suburban area in the Southeast, promoted their engagement in HE. In alignment with the conference theme “Promoting Dialogue and Cooperative Action,” we hope this scholarship contributes to larger curricular discussions about how student engagement in local history research and community service on social justice issues can promote HE in the curriculum.
Raul Garza, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
Un Mundo Ráro: Transnational Students Teaching U. S. History in Transnational (Borderland) Spaces.
The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of pre-service teachers, educated in Mexico, in preparing to teach an American historical perspective. Research questions included: First, how are pre-service teachers who completed their primary and secondary schooling in Mexico preparing to teach a U.S. based social studies (history) curriculum? Second, how are these pre-service teachers reconciling the possible difference in historical narrative between the U.S. based curriculum and the Mexican curriculum? Living in borderland regions like the RGV, many people experience living in los intersticios, interstitial, or liminal spaces. Gloria Anzaldúa provides us with one of the more prominent, recurring theoretical conceptualizations of liminal space in Nepantla (Anzaldúa, 1987; 2015). This mini-ethnographic case study employs various methods of data collection that focus on obtaining “rich” data and relies on primary data collection techniques such as structured interviews and elements of plática. The data was analyzed using both, textual analysis of the interviews via printed copies of the interview transcripts and audio analysis of the actual interview recordings. Two themes presented themselves in the analysis. The first theme encompassed a variety of contextual factors that seemed to determine how confident the pre-service teachers felt about their ability to teach in the U. S. The second theme revolved around various curricular elements that contributed to the participants’ perceived ability to handle the possibility of conflicting narratives in the curriculum. Understanding what strengths and processes Mexican-educated students bring to the table, can help inform further programmatic changes in EPPs.
Caroline Whitcomb, Georgia Southern University
Ubuntu: A Nonviolence Philosophy/Pedagogical Practice
Mahatma Gandhi writes, "Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man" (Sharma, 2007, p. 23). The empowerment of the society's weakest is fundamental to Gandhi's Satyagraha. However, Gandhi's nonviolence is more than a tool for mass mobilization, it is a way of life. As our nation and world continue on a path of chaos, racism, and violence, it is time educators become catalysts of change. Ubuntu, a nonviolence philosophy/pedagogical practice, is a means toward that end. Combining the teachings of Gandhi, the Zulu philosophy of Ubuntu, and the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James M. Lawson, Jr., Whitcomb posits a nonviolence approach to life, education, pedagogical practice, and the classroom experience. Ubuntu guides both teachers and students towards lives dedicated to the active practice of nonviolence; a practice intent on overcoming oppression, seeking justice, and cultivating a democratic society.
Room 109
Social and Emotional Curricula in the Classroom and the Workplace
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/82652856627
Chair: Janel Smith, Georgia Southern University
Carolyn McLeod, University of Calgary
Using HeartMath Biofeedback and Social-Emotional Learning to Promote Student Empowerment
Educational programs that incorporate social emotional learning (SEL) strategies and mindfulness practices using HeartMath sensors to provide biofeedback can help students improve emotional regulation, increase focus, and increase prosocial attitudes and behaviours. The current study is examining the efficacy of a SEL intervention (implemented into a grade nine option course) focused on social and emotional competencies and heart-focused breathing and its impact on student feelings of lowered stress, improved self-efficacy around self-management, increased focus associated with better academic performance, and improved communication and relationship skills. Integral theory, specifically Integral Methodological Pluralism, will allow the researcher to examine multiple phenomenological categories such as things, persons, people, and systems. Four quadrants of this model inform the methodology including examination of the interior individual subjective experience (phenomenology), interior collective (hermeneutics), exterior individual (empirical design), and exterior collective (systems theory). Instrumentation includes a student-opinion survey to measure social-emotional awareness, anxiety, and coping strategies. Additionally, reading comprehension tests will measure academic achievement before and after the intervention, utilizing another group with usual programming as a control group. This allows for observation and quantification of changes in student thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours. Further interaction and engagement with the student(s) through interviews and focus groups will provide a construction of meaning within the transformative experience. Interviews and policy examination of school and division systems will be added to gain understanding of the curricular placement of this program. An ethics application has been approved by the Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board (CHREB) informing issues of consent and confidentiality.
Janel Janiczek Smith, Georgia Southern University
Looking Backward to Move Forward: Continuing Conversations on Supporting First Generation Students
As a university faculty member, programs exist on campuses to recruit and support first generation students but are not widely accessed by students. As universities continue to attract a variety of diverse learners, we welcome first generation stuents to undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs. For each student, one navigates the sense of Self in one's family and community in a familiar way while finding disruptions and difficulties in the world of academia. This discussion brings attention to the term "First Generation" and my own experience in navigating both graduate school and the academic setting as a First Generation student while finding my own identity as a teacher and scholar.
Beth Pollock, Independent Scholar/Advocate Against Workplace Abuse
Shattering the Silence: An Autobiographical Account of Workplace Bullying/Abuse
In March of 2021, I was awarded the coveted Promotion and Tenure from a USG institution. In July of that same year, I walked away from the accolade as well as a twenty-year career in education, after becoming a target of workplace bullying/abuse. After I departed, I learned that workplace abuse was known as a "silent epidemic," as employee voices became muted due to fear of retaliation such as being "blacklisted" by institutions of higher learning. Unfortunately, I also learned that current employment and EEOC laws do not protect workers from workplace abuse, even when the target is considered a member of a protected class, such as I was. This paper explores particular patterns of behavior I have discovered in relation to workplace abuse by analyzing my own experience after being targeted, as well as other examples I have studied. Given the USG's current assault against academic freedom, discussions of workplace abuse is particularly prevalent as professors are being potentially positioned to become targets of their own workplace bullying/abuse story. Professors should know their rights. Interestingly, much has been discussed about bullying in schools, but the field of Curriculum Studies has been relatively silent regarding workplace bullying/abuse. It is time to shatter that silence and bring attention to an epidemic that shall remain silent no more.
Using HeartMath Biofeedback and Social-Emotional Learning to Promote Student Empowerment
Educational programs that incorporate social emotional learning (SEL) strategies and mindfulness practices using HeartMath sensors to provide biofeedback can help students improve emotional regulation, increase focus, and increase prosocial attitudes and behaviours. The current study is examining the efficacy of a SEL intervention (implemented into a grade nine option course) focused on social and emotional competencies and heart-focused breathing and its impact on student feelings of lowered stress, improved self-efficacy around self-management, increased focus associated with better academic performance, and improved communication and relationship skills. Integral theory, specifically Integral Methodological Pluralism, will allow the researcher to examine multiple phenomenological categories such as things, persons, people, and systems. Four quadrants of this model inform the methodology including examination of the interior individual subjective experience (phenomenology), interior collective (hermeneutics), exterior individual (empirical design), and exterior collective (systems theory). Instrumentation includes a student-opinion survey to measure social-emotional awareness, anxiety, and coping strategies. Additionally, reading comprehension tests will measure academic achievement before and after the intervention, utilizing another group with usual programming as a control group. This allows for observation and quantification of changes in student thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours. Further interaction and engagement with the student(s) through interviews and focus groups will provide a construction of meaning within the transformative experience. Interviews and policy examination of school and division systems will be added to gain understanding of the curricular placement of this program. An ethics application has been approved by the Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board (CHREB) informing issues of consent and confidentiality.
Janel Janiczek Smith, Georgia Southern University
Looking Backward to Move Forward: Continuing Conversations on Supporting First Generation Students
As a university faculty member, programs exist on campuses to recruit and support first generation students but are not widely accessed by students. As universities continue to attract a variety of diverse learners, we welcome first generation stuents to undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs. For each student, one navigates the sense of Self in one's family and community in a familiar way while finding disruptions and difficulties in the world of academia. This discussion brings attention to the term "First Generation" and my own experience in navigating both graduate school and the academic setting as a First Generation student while finding my own identity as a teacher and scholar.
Beth Pollock, Independent Scholar/Advocate Against Workplace Abuse
Shattering the Silence: An Autobiographical Account of Workplace Bullying/Abuse
In March of 2021, I was awarded the coveted Promotion and Tenure from a USG institution. In July of that same year, I walked away from the accolade as well as a twenty-year career in education, after becoming a target of workplace bullying/abuse. After I departed, I learned that workplace abuse was known as a "silent epidemic," as employee voices became muted due to fear of retaliation such as being "blacklisted" by institutions of higher learning. Unfortunately, I also learned that current employment and EEOC laws do not protect workers from workplace abuse, even when the target is considered a member of a protected class, such as I was. This paper explores particular patterns of behavior I have discovered in relation to workplace abuse by analyzing my own experience after being targeted, as well as other examples I have studied. Given the USG's current assault against academic freedom, discussions of workplace abuse is particularly prevalent as professors are being potentially positioned to become targets of their own workplace bullying/abuse story. Professors should know their rights. Interestingly, much has been discussed about bullying in schools, but the field of Curriculum Studies has been relatively silent regarding workplace bullying/abuse. It is time to shatter that silence and bring attention to an epidemic that shall remain silent no more.
12:00 -2:00 p.m.
Special Session (Program will start at 12:45)
Lunch Provided in Room 140
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/81725491091
Irami Osei-Frimpong, The Funky Academic
How Risk Makes the Individual
Jane Brownlee begins her course on the ethical instruction of children with a series of questions calibrated to clarify the relationship between the students’ minds and their bodies. [1] What begins as an inquiry into why the students must eat their own food to sustain themselves, and why nobody else can eat the students’ food for them, slides into treating considerations of why nobody can learn their lessons for them, nor do their thinking for them. The aim of this instruction is to clarify how the effort to achieve these ends must be the student’s own, and part of what it is to be the student is to expend the effort. In this way, there are certain ends and identities that cannot be alienated from the efforts expended by the affected individuals in achieving those ends and identities. Since the efforts must emerge from the individual, and the efforts are immediately connected to their end and identity, rendering the efforts a part of end and identity itself, the individuality required for the effort becomes a condition and property of achieving the end itself. For example, the effort expended by the individual in gathering resources to sustain that individual’s life becomes a quality of that individual life itself.[2] This effort develops along two distinct forms: work and risk. We have a rather robust discourse concerning an individual’s work ethic and the responsible division of work as a function of individual ethical merit, but we have a less robust account of how risk figures into the development of the concrete individual. This talk develops an account of the origin and function of risk in biological, social and political life.
2:00 - 3:15 p.m.
Room 106
Itinerants, Nomads, and Language Acquisition: Curriculum En Routes
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/87924131235
Chair: Caroline Whitcomb, Georgia Southern University
Jim Jupp, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
On Itinerant Curriculum Theory: Decolonial Praxes, Theories, and Histories -- An introduction to the theory.
This essay is the introduction to a new edited book on itinerant curriculum theory to be published by Peter Lang, perhaps a little after this conference. The essay historicizes ICT, provides a gloss of ICT's concepts, begins a reflection on translation, and ends on a note of critical cosmopolitan mutuality.
Blanca Ibarra, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
The Nomadic Curriculum: Transforming Curricular Experiences in Social Studies
The curriculum in social studies is “frozen” (Davies, 2019) on a linear trajectory to teach skills and facts in a standardized progression for pre-determined outcomes resulting in retrospective thinking (Williamson, 2013) rather than embracing the dynamic evolving nature of knowledge formation. The nomadic curriculum is an open and evolving complex adaptive system that aims to challenge all learners to think critically, conceptually, and reflectively by affording them the agency to choose the meaningful ideas and perspectives they learn in social studies. The processes of choice, critical thinking, dialogue, and reflection intersect to produce the nomadic shifting that drives the curricular transformation. The value of this transformation is that it results in connectedness among a community of learners who collectively and democratically generate new learning and understanding to make meaning of their curricular ideas. Embracing the nomadic curriculum involves “giving students ownership over their experiences” (Masta, 2018, p. 31) and relinquishing epistemological authority to develop learners’ consciousness and evolving epistemology.
Irina Tedrick, Georgia Southern University
Closing the Skills Gap: HBCU Experiences in Code Switching and Language Acquisition
This presentation tries to explore how the Encounter of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Standard English, and other languages taught in the classroom and elsewhere can be utilized as a tool for improving of the language learning outcomes at HBCUs. HBCUs are underrepresented in many educational venues, one of them being world language education. The development of the linguistic skills for students from HBCU is overlooked in the curriculum.
However, language code switching present in HBCU students seen as a Duality or twoness in languages and identity, could potentially enhance the world language acquisition effort. I showcase three experiences of my former HBCU students on the topic of code switching and language acquisition.
On Itinerant Curriculum Theory: Decolonial Praxes, Theories, and Histories -- An introduction to the theory.
This essay is the introduction to a new edited book on itinerant curriculum theory to be published by Peter Lang, perhaps a little after this conference. The essay historicizes ICT, provides a gloss of ICT's concepts, begins a reflection on translation, and ends on a note of critical cosmopolitan mutuality.
Blanca Ibarra, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
The Nomadic Curriculum: Transforming Curricular Experiences in Social Studies
The curriculum in social studies is “frozen” (Davies, 2019) on a linear trajectory to teach skills and facts in a standardized progression for pre-determined outcomes resulting in retrospective thinking (Williamson, 2013) rather than embracing the dynamic evolving nature of knowledge formation. The nomadic curriculum is an open and evolving complex adaptive system that aims to challenge all learners to think critically, conceptually, and reflectively by affording them the agency to choose the meaningful ideas and perspectives they learn in social studies. The processes of choice, critical thinking, dialogue, and reflection intersect to produce the nomadic shifting that drives the curricular transformation. The value of this transformation is that it results in connectedness among a community of learners who collectively and democratically generate new learning and understanding to make meaning of their curricular ideas. Embracing the nomadic curriculum involves “giving students ownership over their experiences” (Masta, 2018, p. 31) and relinquishing epistemological authority to develop learners’ consciousness and evolving epistemology.
Irina Tedrick, Georgia Southern University
Closing the Skills Gap: HBCU Experiences in Code Switching and Language Acquisition
This presentation tries to explore how the Encounter of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Standard English, and other languages taught in the classroom and elsewhere can be utilized as a tool for improving of the language learning outcomes at HBCUs. HBCUs are underrepresented in many educational venues, one of them being world language education. The development of the linguistic skills for students from HBCU is overlooked in the curriculum.
However, language code switching present in HBCU students seen as a Duality or twoness in languages and identity, could potentially enhance the world language acquisition effort. I showcase three experiences of my former HBCU students on the topic of code switching and language acquisition.
Room 107
African American Experiences in Education: Colonization, Freedom, and Music
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/83029483228
Chair: Janel J. Smith, Georgia Southern University
Shauna Martin, University of North Carolina Wilmington
The Implications of a Colonized Mindset in Today’s Education System
In my dissertation, I interviewed four black principals to gain a deeper understanding of how each of them grapples with the tension of living and working as a black person in a white-dominated education system. Using two tenets of Critical Race Theory as well as the backdrop of double consciousness, I found that each principal displayed evidence of a colonized mindset but at varying degrees of self awareness. I will discuss how insidious the colonized mindset can be leading to uncertain futures for people of color.
Katherine Perrotta, Mercer University
Emphatically Our Battle: A Content Analysis of the African Free School of New York City's Curriculum
The African Free School of New York City was established in in 1787 by the New York Manumission Society aimed at providing an education of moral uplift for the children of freedmen and former enslaved people after the American Revolution. This research examines their curriculum to ascertain whether the goal of the school was to serve the free community as a vehicle for civil rights, and political and economic emancipation, or, a tool for assimilation into white, segregated society.
Renee Jenkins, Georgia Southern University
“Gimme Dat Ole Time Ligion”- Tracing Music of the Gullah-Geechee Community from a Cultural Context: Continuity and Change.
Abstract:
African American communities on the east coast Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia provide a rare opportunity to study some of the extraordinary elements of African influence on African American culture in the United States (Beoku-Betts, 1994). Known as the Gullah or Geechee (used interchangeably), these communities are comprised of enslaved West African descendants who worked and settled on the islands. During the early 18th century, thousands of enslaved West Africans were seized and shipped to markets in Charleston (SC) and Savannah (GA). Captains of those ships facilitated the transmission of African culture and traditions by bringing authentic musical instruments onboard (Burnin & Maultsby, 2015). Crew members would force the enslaved to dance, sing, and play musical instruments for various reasons. Specifically sought out for expertise in the growing of certain crops including rice, the Gullah-Geechee have retained many ethnic traditions of their native homeland primarily due to geographic isolation along the coastal landscape and tropical conditions. African songs are the foundation for what is referred to as Gullah-Geechee music (Federal Point Historic Preservation Society, 2018). The influence and evolution of musical forms that emerged from this cultural perspective are reflected in many genres of music. Based on the time period of 1970s-Present (2022), the purpose of this study is to determine the role music plays in the lives of the Gullah-Geechee community members, the extent to which music has changed, and the extent to which music of the indigenous group has remained the same.
The Implications of a Colonized Mindset in Today’s Education System
In my dissertation, I interviewed four black principals to gain a deeper understanding of how each of them grapples with the tension of living and working as a black person in a white-dominated education system. Using two tenets of Critical Race Theory as well as the backdrop of double consciousness, I found that each principal displayed evidence of a colonized mindset but at varying degrees of self awareness. I will discuss how insidious the colonized mindset can be leading to uncertain futures for people of color.
Katherine Perrotta, Mercer University
Emphatically Our Battle: A Content Analysis of the African Free School of New York City's Curriculum
The African Free School of New York City was established in in 1787 by the New York Manumission Society aimed at providing an education of moral uplift for the children of freedmen and former enslaved people after the American Revolution. This research examines their curriculum to ascertain whether the goal of the school was to serve the free community as a vehicle for civil rights, and political and economic emancipation, or, a tool for assimilation into white, segregated society.
Renee Jenkins, Georgia Southern University
“Gimme Dat Ole Time Ligion”- Tracing Music of the Gullah-Geechee Community from a Cultural Context: Continuity and Change.
Abstract:
African American communities on the east coast Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia provide a rare opportunity to study some of the extraordinary elements of African influence on African American culture in the United States (Beoku-Betts, 1994). Known as the Gullah or Geechee (used interchangeably), these communities are comprised of enslaved West African descendants who worked and settled on the islands. During the early 18th century, thousands of enslaved West Africans were seized and shipped to markets in Charleston (SC) and Savannah (GA). Captains of those ships facilitated the transmission of African culture and traditions by bringing authentic musical instruments onboard (Burnin & Maultsby, 2015). Crew members would force the enslaved to dance, sing, and play musical instruments for various reasons. Specifically sought out for expertise in the growing of certain crops including rice, the Gullah-Geechee have retained many ethnic traditions of their native homeland primarily due to geographic isolation along the coastal landscape and tropical conditions. African songs are the foundation for what is referred to as Gullah-Geechee music (Federal Point Historic Preservation Society, 2018). The influence and evolution of musical forms that emerged from this cultural perspective are reflected in many genres of music. Based on the time period of 1970s-Present (2022), the purpose of this study is to determine the role music plays in the lives of the Gullah-Geechee community members, the extent to which music has changed, and the extent to which music of the indigenous group has remained the same.
Room 109
The Politics of Disruptions, Visibility, and Vulnerability: An Autobiographical Journey in Critical Media Literacy
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/82652856627
Chair: Daniel Chapman, Georgia Southern University
William Reynolds, Georgia Southern University
Bradley Porfilio, San Jose State University
Donna Alvermann, University of Georgia
Jennifer A. Beech, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Abstract:
This panel will present an historical, autobiographical and political analysis of the development of the International Critical Media Literacy Conference (ICML) and its connections to the development of curriculum studies. It will demonstrate the ways in which criticality in media raises the visibility of the conferences, journals and the participants and writers. Along with that, however, a certain type of political vulnerability is a consequence. The first presenter on the panel will discuss the emergence of the Critical Media Literacy Conference in 2012 at Lewis University and the move to Illinois State University. The difficulties and successes of that period will receive an in-depth analysis. The second presenter will discuss the change to Georgia Southern University and Savannah. The move toward internationalization, the creation of the International Journal of Critical Media Literacy and the book series Critical Media Literacies will be discussed. The first two presenters will also discuss the politics of the law and critical media literacy. The third presenter will discuss how as a newcomer to the ICML in 2018 she felt that she had found her professional home for years to come. She had heard that there was a group at Georgia Southern University that were hard-core critical media theorists and researchers. She discusses, however, stumbling on to the conference. This presenter will include a retrospective summary of her experiences in 2018. The fourth panelist addresses the importance of and obstacles to organizing and presenting during the Trump-inspired assault on education and intellectual freedom.
3:15-4:30 p.m.
Room 106
Alumni Venturing on the Contested Landscapes of Education: Creative Insubordination
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/87924131235
Chair: Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University
Discussants:
Dr. William Schubert, U of Illinois at Chicago
Dr. John Weaver, Georgia Southern
Dr. Daniel Chapman, Georgia Southern
Dr. Brian Schultz, Miami University, Oxford, OH
Dr. Dinny Risri Aletheiani, Yale University
Dr. Min Yu, Wayne State University
Dr. Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University
Panelists:
Dr. Otha J. Hall (Associate Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction), Laurens County School System
Dr. Hannah Kessler (Principal, Rincon Elementary), Effingham County Board of Education
Dr. Michel Pantin (Employment Services, Human Resources) Savannah-Chatham County Public School System
Dr. Sonia Janis, (Clinical Associate Professor) Department of Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies Education, University of Georgia
Dr. Yvette Ledford, (Master Educator, Trainer), Ron Clark Academy
Abstract:
In this session, a group of Georgia Southern Ed.D. in Curriculum Studies Program share their experience of inventing creative insubordination strategies during pandemics (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic of systemic racism, the economic crisis, and the climate crisis; Ladson-Billings, 2021) when white supremacy, anti-Black/anti-Latinx/anti-Indigeneity/anti-Asian/anti-People of Color/anti-diaspora racism and pandemic, xenophobia, misogyny, homobophia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism are perpetuated by hatred of differences. Such experience helps them to recognize implicit/explicit and internal/external bias, racism, colonialism, and purposefully invent creative insubordination strategies to overcome such bias, racism, and colonialism to create inclusive and equitable educational opportunities for all students. Such experience inspires them to invent creative insubordination strategies to engender culturally and linguistically relevant, responsive, sustaining, and empowering curricular knowledge and pedagogical strategies, and value funds of knowledge and community resources to envision curricular and pedagogical innovations as ways to cultivate inspirational learning environments, create equal opportunities to empower racially, culturally, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse students to reach their highest potential (Sidle-Walker, 1996), and dive into contradictions and live against oppressions in schools, families, and communities in the U. S. South. Multiple challenges and myriad possibilities for their creative teaching, leading, researching, and living are also discussed.
Dr. William Schubert, U of Illinois at Chicago
Dr. John Weaver, Georgia Southern
Dr. Daniel Chapman, Georgia Southern
Dr. Brian Schultz, Miami University, Oxford, OH
Dr. Dinny Risri Aletheiani, Yale University
Dr. Min Yu, Wayne State University
Dr. Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University
Panelists:
Dr. Otha J. Hall (Associate Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction), Laurens County School System
Dr. Hannah Kessler (Principal, Rincon Elementary), Effingham County Board of Education
Dr. Michel Pantin (Employment Services, Human Resources) Savannah-Chatham County Public School System
Dr. Sonia Janis, (Clinical Associate Professor) Department of Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies Education, University of Georgia
Dr. Yvette Ledford, (Master Educator, Trainer), Ron Clark Academy
Abstract:
In this session, a group of Georgia Southern Ed.D. in Curriculum Studies Program share their experience of inventing creative insubordination strategies during pandemics (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic of systemic racism, the economic crisis, and the climate crisis; Ladson-Billings, 2021) when white supremacy, anti-Black/anti-Latinx/anti-Indigeneity/anti-Asian/anti-People of Color/anti-diaspora racism and pandemic, xenophobia, misogyny, homobophia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism are perpetuated by hatred of differences. Such experience helps them to recognize implicit/explicit and internal/external bias, racism, colonialism, and purposefully invent creative insubordination strategies to overcome such bias, racism, and colonialism to create inclusive and equitable educational opportunities for all students. Such experience inspires them to invent creative insubordination strategies to engender culturally and linguistically relevant, responsive, sustaining, and empowering curricular knowledge and pedagogical strategies, and value funds of knowledge and community resources to envision curricular and pedagogical innovations as ways to cultivate inspirational learning environments, create equal opportunities to empower racially, culturally, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse students to reach their highest potential (Sidle-Walker, 1996), and dive into contradictions and live against oppressions in schools, families, and communities in the U. S. South. Multiple challenges and myriad possibilities for their creative teaching, leading, researching, and living are also discussed.
Room 107
Facing Uncertainty: Resilience, Intuition, and Purpose
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/83029483228
Chair: Daniel Chapman, Georgia Southern University
Julie Kimble, Brigham Young University - Hawaii
Far from Home and Forging New Patterns of Resilience through Trauma: The Diaspora of Tongan Students during COVID
The COVID crisis since January 2020 caused students from all over the Pacific Rim to be separated from their home, family, and culture, and they are still grappling with the continued disruption to their lives and education. This is particularly true for those students from Tonga, who have endured layers of trauma during from 2020-2022. The students had already been stranded away from Tonga for two years because of COVID restrictions when in January 2022, they watched helplessly as their island endured a tsunami. Because communications were down for weeks, they were not able to talk to their families to discover their status until long after the event. Additionally, for many who attend Pacific Island colleges abroad, there is an expectation to become educated and to return home to improve their own countries; however, they were prevented from achieving this goal by COVID restrictions at home in Tonga, who maintain some of the strictest border requirements in the Pacific Rim region. For some of these students, their homecoming was delayed for almost three years. Returning home for those who experience diaspora comes with its own challenges and adjustments to the perspective of their culture (Hall, 1996). How has this disruption impacted their academic performance, emotional growth, and sense of identity?
Sarah Gerth van den Berg, Teachers College, Columbia University
Sense-Methods: Cultivating Intuition in the Face of Uncertain Futures
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, through 2021, a group of curriculum designers met weekly to consider how they might respond to the ruptures the pandemic wrought to their curricular practices and what they needed from curriculum in the face of uncertain futures. They explored these questions through a variety of material, embodied practices—including a traveling box of curricular materials and habits of checking in with bodily sensations, emotions, and affective objects. I approach these practices as “sense-methods”, drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of how the body’s sense of time can be used as a technology for social cohesion—particularly forged against dominant temporalities—or control. Sense-methods make felt an affective, relational experience of temporality that is neither the uniform clock time, which orders so much of formal curricular documents nor the linear arc of progress that prevailed in public health discourses. I demonstrate how such sense-methods cultivate “intuition”, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s and Erin Manning’s Bergsonian use of that term. Intuition organizes such affective responses to the world: knowledge that lives amid the interface of the body meeting the social, material world. By considering how this group of curriculum theorists and designers marked and made time in ways counter to the dominant timelines of the pandemic and educational development, I argue that curriculum can prioritize such sensuous epistemologies. A curriculum concerned with how time makes itself felt finds wormholes—vulnerable, uncertain, and speculative—to other worlds.
Marion Pugh, Georgia Southern University
Purpose Driven Profession
This presentation will include a discussion on strategies professionals consider when opportunities in corporate and academic environments are no longer available because of circumstances that are out of their area of influence. Politics, economics, family circumstances, and the pandemic have forced professionals to change academic and entrepreneurial approaches in the last few years. Bring your ideas, triumphs, and pitfalls to the discussion so colleagues can provide clarity on your next steps in providing a level of certainty in an uncertain future.
Far from Home and Forging New Patterns of Resilience through Trauma: The Diaspora of Tongan Students during COVID
The COVID crisis since January 2020 caused students from all over the Pacific Rim to be separated from their home, family, and culture, and they are still grappling with the continued disruption to their lives and education. This is particularly true for those students from Tonga, who have endured layers of trauma during from 2020-2022. The students had already been stranded away from Tonga for two years because of COVID restrictions when in January 2022, they watched helplessly as their island endured a tsunami. Because communications were down for weeks, they were not able to talk to their families to discover their status until long after the event. Additionally, for many who attend Pacific Island colleges abroad, there is an expectation to become educated and to return home to improve their own countries; however, they were prevented from achieving this goal by COVID restrictions at home in Tonga, who maintain some of the strictest border requirements in the Pacific Rim region. For some of these students, their homecoming was delayed for almost three years. Returning home for those who experience diaspora comes with its own challenges and adjustments to the perspective of their culture (Hall, 1996). How has this disruption impacted their academic performance, emotional growth, and sense of identity?
Sarah Gerth van den Berg, Teachers College, Columbia University
Sense-Methods: Cultivating Intuition in the Face of Uncertain Futures
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, through 2021, a group of curriculum designers met weekly to consider how they might respond to the ruptures the pandemic wrought to their curricular practices and what they needed from curriculum in the face of uncertain futures. They explored these questions through a variety of material, embodied practices—including a traveling box of curricular materials and habits of checking in with bodily sensations, emotions, and affective objects. I approach these practices as “sense-methods”, drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of how the body’s sense of time can be used as a technology for social cohesion—particularly forged against dominant temporalities—or control. Sense-methods make felt an affective, relational experience of temporality that is neither the uniform clock time, which orders so much of formal curricular documents nor the linear arc of progress that prevailed in public health discourses. I demonstrate how such sense-methods cultivate “intuition”, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s and Erin Manning’s Bergsonian use of that term. Intuition organizes such affective responses to the world: knowledge that lives amid the interface of the body meeting the social, material world. By considering how this group of curriculum theorists and designers marked and made time in ways counter to the dominant timelines of the pandemic and educational development, I argue that curriculum can prioritize such sensuous epistemologies. A curriculum concerned with how time makes itself felt finds wormholes—vulnerable, uncertain, and speculative—to other worlds.
Marion Pugh, Georgia Southern University
Purpose Driven Profession
This presentation will include a discussion on strategies professionals consider when opportunities in corporate and academic environments are no longer available because of circumstances that are out of their area of influence. Politics, economics, family circumstances, and the pandemic have forced professionals to change academic and entrepreneurial approaches in the last few years. Bring your ideas, triumphs, and pitfalls to the discussion so colleagues can provide clarity on your next steps in providing a level of certainty in an uncertain future.
Room 109
Are We Preparing Them to Lead?: Examining Principal Preparation Curriculum for Equity and Social Justice during Turbulent Times
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/82652856627
Chair: Patricia Virella, Montclair State University
Patricia Virella, Montclair State University
Abigale Almerido, San Jose State University
Marissa De Hoyos, Texas State University
April Mouton,Texas State University
Ramya Subramanian, San Jose State University
Nathan Tanner, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Darin Thompson, Regent University
Abstract:
The novelty and longevity of COVID-19 have also upended schools across the country. Thus, we are left at the moment when although many graduate students are preparing to become school leaders, those preparing them are not expected to stay. This means that aspiring principals will be entering schools in large numbers, under crisis conditions, expected to lead in ways research has shown does not prepare them for the principalship. Authors in this session examine how aspiring school principals in educational leadership preparation programs are experiencing their simultaneous preparation for leadership roles in the K-12 setting while working in schools in several districts across the United States. Individual papers explore: 1) abolitionist teaching and leadership, 2) the fallacy of a return to “normal”, 3) re-defining progress, and 4) being on the brink of departure from the profession. To capture the complexity of this moment in time and its inherent social justice and equity issues, we draw on an oral history approach and capturing the stories of aspiring school leaders through the Black Intellectual Tradition of storytelling as signposts of change. Together, we discuss how, if at all, principal preparation program curriculum is preparing aspiring leaders through a social justice lens during these turbulent times.
Are We Preparing Them to Lead?: Examining Principal Preparation Curriculum for Equity and Social Justice during Turbulent Times
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/82652856627
Chair: Patricia Virella, Montclair State University
Patricia Virella, Montclair State University
Abigale Almerido, San Jose State University
Marissa De Hoyos, Texas State University
April Mouton,Texas State University
Ramya Subramanian, San Jose State University
Nathan Tanner, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Darin Thompson, Regent University
Abstract:
The novelty and longevity of COVID-19 have also upended schools across the country. Thus, we are left at the moment when although many graduate students are preparing to become school leaders, those preparing them are not expected to stay. This means that aspiring principals will be entering schools in large numbers, under crisis conditions, expected to lead in ways research has shown does not prepare them for the principalship. Authors in this session examine how aspiring school principals in educational leadership preparation programs are experiencing their simultaneous preparation for leadership roles in the K-12 setting while working in schools in several districts across the United States. Individual papers explore: 1) abolitionist teaching and leadership, 2) the fallacy of a return to “normal”, 3) re-defining progress, and 4) being on the brink of departure from the profession. To capture the complexity of this moment in time and its inherent social justice and equity issues, we draw on an oral history approach and capturing the stories of aspiring school leaders through the Black Intellectual Tradition of storytelling as signposts of change. Together, we discuss how, if at all, principal preparation program curriculum is preparing aspiring leaders through a social justice lens during these turbulent times.
4:45-6:00 p.m.
Room 106
Hope, Holism, Democracy, and Imaginings
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/87924131235
Chair: Caroline Whitcomb, Georgia Southern University
Peggy Shannon-Baker, Georgia Southern University
Sabrina Ross, Georgia Southern University
Seabon Davis, Georgia Southern University
It Takes a Village: Cultivating Educators’ Hope in the Midst of Uncertain Futures
This presentation engages the topic of teachers as curriculum (Schubert & Schultz, 2015) through an exploration of ways that educators cultivate hope for culturally relevant teaching practices in spite of daunting circumstances. This presentation is based on the experiences of nine k-12, community, and university educators who participated in an intensive, two-week summer institute hosted by the Deep Writing Project (DWP). These educators faced new policies and practices to protect their own and students’ health, teach online or both in-person and online, and meet the needs of students during an international health crisis: COVID-19. As a community site for the National Writing Project, the DWP aimed to build educators’ capacity to write, write publicly, build community through writing, and lead and advocate for social justice issues. Despite the struggles they faced, qualitative and quantitative data collected from the DWP highlighted ways that this supportive and collaborative environment inspired relational hope, promoted motivation, and provided practical culturally relevant and socially just teaching practices. In this presentation, we will share data collected from pre- and post-survey responses to an Educator Hope Scale, and transcriptions and notes from participants’ discussions about the impact of the DWP after three months. We will discuss aspects of hope these educators showcased: sense of agency, pathways to achieving goals, and relational hope. By highlighting connections between group-based learning and support, educator hope, and culturally relevant teaching practices, this study sheds light on the significance of collaborative learning spaces for cultivating educator hope during challenging and uncertain times.
Daniel Raphael, Independent Scholar
Manifesto for Designing Self-Sustaining Democratic Societies
Jared Diamond has written extensively on the demise of many dozens of societies and past civilizations, yet there is no record of the collapse and demise of a global civilization. If the global social, political, and economic crises continue and the viral pandemic, environmental, geophysical, and meteorological cataclysms continue, we can anticipate that our global civilization today will soon join the numbers of past societies, nations, cultures, empires, and civilizations that have risen, crested, declined, collapsed and disintegrated. For those of us who remain, will we choose to rebuild what has collapsed or will we rebuild using new social, political, and economic designs that will support social stability, social sustainability, and peace? And if those who remain choose to use self-sustaining designs, where will they get them? Not everyone is aware that our nations and civilization are now in the process of failing, and very few have thought it would be necessary to plan for recovery BEFORE the collapse is fully underway. What you will discover in these pages are the thoughts of historian and futurist Daniel Raphael who has given many decades of his life to the study and design of self-sustaining social systems that could be modified to suit the conditions of the future. “Self-sustaining” literally means that social systems do not have any inherent self-defeating processes in their designs in order to create socially stable and peaceful societies and nations. Readers will discover a high degree of cognitive dissonance as they read through the pages, as there has never existed anything similar in the 20,000-year organizational history of humankind. What is provided here is not utopian. It is a wake-up call to humanity at a time when it is far too late to halt or deflect the coming collapse. The “tipping point” has passed a long time ago. There is one inventive option that is provided, the necessary step to reformulate the concept of social institutions as actionable associations of related organizations.
Paul Eaton, Sam Houston State University
Digitizing Higher Education: Speculative Fiction and Curricular Imaginings
In 2019, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies published a special section on speculative fictions/science fiction in curriculum studies. Appelbaum (2019) asserted that speculative writing is a necessary act toward imagining, understanding, and thinking through problems of the future. Additionally, speculative writing affords spaces for building new futures. Tomin (2019) argued that today’s educational spaces – with their technocratic, rote approaches to learning, leave little space for hopeful futures. The future itself is actually not often discussed. Drawing on the work of Noel Gough, N. Katherine Hayles, Sarah Truman, and Boni Wozolek, John Weaver discusses the necessity of speculative fiction in our present approaches to education. Polyvocality, in particular – the centering of voices not often heard in imaginings of the future – is an important aim of speculative writing for Weaver and others. We are in a space-time where speculative writing, thinking, and creating in the public imagination and conversation is not only strong, but I would argue central. Writers such as N.K. Jemisin, Ken Liu, and Samanta Schweblin are frequently on the top of best seller lists. Octavia Butler is a household name. Musicians such as Lil Nas X and Janelle Monae are taking up the mantle of their predecessors like Sun Ra. We want to imagine the future – with all its possibilities, limitations, hopes, and potentials. In this paper, I take up the call of curriculum theorists above, and others, such as Toby Daspit, Morna McDermott McNulty, and critical sociologists like Ruha Benjamin and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer to build more speculative fiction into the space of teaching and learning. Specifically, I examine a speculative fiction writing project I developed for a Master’s Level Seminar on Digitizing Higher Education in Autumn 2021. The aim of this seminar was not only to address the many issues impacting an increasingly digitized higher education system – everything from teaching and learning to student services and surveillance capitalism – but to also help students orient toward the future. The speculative fiction writing project opened space for student imagining of a future higher education. I will examine the range of utopian and dystopian stories, poems, and plays written by scholars in this course. What do these speculative writings tell us? How can they prepare us for a future yet unseen?
Rupert Collister, Yorkville University, University of New Brunswick, and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Reconsidering the Chicago Group’s Education 2000: A Holistic Perspective Vision (1990) through the Lens of Curriculum Reconceptualisation and Reconstructionism
In 1989 a group of progressive educators and thinkers met to organise a gathering, that took place in June 1990, called Exploring a Common Vision for Holistic Education Conference. The 1990 gathering comprised eighty international holistic educators 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. It came to my attention in 1997 when I was just starting to work in adult and vocational education in Australia. I discovered it 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. Although the Chicago gathering was 32 years ago and it’s been 25 years since I first became aware of it and the notion of holistic education, and the possibilities for holistic curriculum, it has informed my philosophy and pedagogy ever since. In this paper I will explore the full EDUCATION 2000: A Holistic Perspective statement including the underpinning principles and these working assumptions through the lens of curriculum reconceptualisation and reconstructionism. I will then consider this material in relation to the potentialities for curriculum development.
Chair: Daniel Chapman, Georgia Southern University
Regina McCurdy, Georgia Southern University
The Science Relevancy Bridge: Connecting Studnets' Intersectionality and Science Identity
Both the content and instruction of science can be perceived as being challenging and disconnected from students’ lives. Therefore, I propose the need to rethink what it means for science teaching and learning to be relevant to all science learners. I introduce a framework, The Science Relevancy Bridge, to better connect students’ varied intersecting sociocultural identities, or their intersectionality, to their developing science identities. Students’ societal identities intersect outside and inside the classroom, framing how students experience their science learning in meaningful ways. How science is taught in the classroom traditionally does not offer pathways for students with diverse multicultural backgrounds to view science as a beneficial resource for their worldview, values, and funds of knowledge. How students identify with science also plays a role in their current and future view of science in general and science’s purpose in their lived experiences, decisions, and critical issues. While research calls for science teaching to be made relevant to K-16 learners, the idea of what makes science relevant to students remains somewhat undefined and nebulous. Additionally, the connectedness between the role of students’ intersectionality and their developing science identities needs to be better understood and concretized in research and in practice. The Science Relevancy Bridge, composed of the four dimensions: science learning preparedness, science and society, science for everyday life, and foundations of scientific thinking, aims to reshape K-16 science education and curriculum by developing a useful dialogue between students’ intersectionality and their identity as science-minded individuals in the world.
Stephanie Hudson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Viral Cyborgs, Viruses, and Virtual Technologies
This presentation has roots in cyborg feminism of Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1983), which theorized bodies as biological and technological hybrids and blurred the boundaries between human and non/human. I explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the ways in which technoscience produces, what Schneider (2012) describes as, viral cyborgs out of us all. I am interested in how bodies materialize in and with the viral and how the viral materializes in and with our bodies—biologically, technologically, and pedagogically. I am most interested in how virtual technologies have been used to shape how we make sense or nonsense of the science of how these biomedical technologies can be used to protect against, prevent, and treat COVID-19. I am concerned with exploring the relationship between virtual and material bodies, given that our interconnections with technology, as a tool for combating the viral spread of disease while simultaneously spreading viral dis/information, have been central to our embodied experience in the pandemic. The curricular intervention I offer is grounded in feminist technoscience and new materialist approaches that call for engaging with scientific knowledge about the biological effects of viruses while simultaneously exploring the material consequences of virtual technologies as a way to critically read a technoscientific world.
Sarah Holliday, Kennesaw State University
Queering the Stem Classroom
Many collegiate level STEM students do not feel engaged or successful before, during, or after the courses, leading to disenfranchisement, particularly of students from underrepresented groups. Using principles from Queer Theory, we can disrupt the cycles that prevent students from reaching full potential.
Room 109
Engaging Pedagogies of Relationality to Reimagine Educational Leadership
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/82652856627
Engaging Pedagogies of Relationality to Reimagine Educational Leadership
https://georgiasouthern.zoom.us/j/82652856627
Chair: Laura Rychly, Augusta University
e alexander, The University of Kansas (virtual)
Locating Themselves: Black Womxn’s Geographies of Professional Socialization
Donna DeGennaro, University of North Carolina Greensboro (in person)
Embracing Reciprocity through Indigenous Youth-Led Video Ethnographies
Ishman Anderson, San Francisco State University (virtual)
Thug Life as a Framework for Stages of Consciousness: Examining How Black Male MOB Youth Navigate Processes of Alienation
Abstract:
From 2020-2022, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare many of the failings of worldwide, neoliberal, socio-political and economic institutions as the world halted, pivoted to a “new normal”, and then attempted to re-engage in pre-pandemic “life as usual”. As educators and young people return to learning spaces, young people are experiencing mental health challenges at greater rates than in years past (Mental Health America, 2022) and educators are experiencing intense burnout and fatigue, triggering many to choose to leave the profession (Kamenetz, 2022). These phenomena indicate massive institutional fall-out from a system that has been designed to ignore the needs of the very people it is ostensibly meant to serve. Papers in this session acknowledge the broad failings of neoliberal technorationalist institutions to support teachers and learners in becoming more fully themselves. In response, authors in this session provide alternate visions of what is possible in education when students and educators claim their own humanity and reject dehumanizing neoliberal, institutional visions of education. Paper #1 describes how Black womxn (co-)construct geographies for their professional growth that retain Black womxnhood at their centers – and in doing so challenge academia’s dominant discourses about students’ socialization processes and outcomes. Paper #2 describes the collective practices of youth leaders who facilitate education and technology workshops in two Indigenous youth organizations, Pachemama’s Path and Unlocking Silent Histories and how the youth leaders contribute to sustaining these programs and holding outside partners accountable to reciprocity. Paper #3 invokes Tupac Shakur’s construct of thug life as a theoretical and analytical lens to examine how Black male youth in the community organization, My Other Brother in Oakland, CA, develop political consciousness by recognizing 1) individual and structural oppression, 2) pride and solidarity in community struggle, and 3) political praxis and resisting structural racism as a function of Black male success.