"Working" Narrative Productions: An Ongoing Embrace of Janet L. Miller

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: . . . In-the-Making: Generating Curricular Possibilities With Janet L. Miller

Abstract

Dr. Janet L. Miller figures significantly into the thoughts I compose, though I know my approximations of her do not come near to her actual person. Like Dr. Miller reminds us, human beings are unknowable, experience is made of excess which cannot be contained, and better theory and practice lies more in the questions by “working the ruins” than in declarative clauses. I have to remind myself that once I knew her only through her illustrious and prolific body of writing. Years after admiring her in this way, she would be the most important person in my life outside of my family, her contributions to fields of feminisms, post-structuralism, curriculum theory, and narrative and qualitative research a constant companion to my mind and my work.
Dr. Miller, one of our most important scholars in feminisms and curriculum studies, showed me how to consider myself, teaching, and thinking differently, and in that difference concern for the personal, the professional, and the political could not be unmarried. Put simply, as if I could, Dr. Miller’s influence on curriculum is like her influence on me personally; it is a taking into account that makes important exacting, intellectual interrogation and, at the same time, raw, personal intimacy. After sitting in a half dozen of her classes, considering notes that span nearly a decade of my drafting of various work, reading everything she has written that has been published, and sitting in cafes and our houses and our offices with too little time to discuss all the bits of life, no one has pushed my thinking, my writing, or my becoming more than Janet L. Miller. I came to Teachers College claiming identities of feminist and teacher, but I left with understandings of those claims that were troubled in a way that has made me both a better feminist and a better teacher. I owe this to my work with Dr. Miller.
Always becoming is the difference Dr. Miller brought to my field of vision, and it is a lesson that spans the personal, professional, and political divides. As Dr. Miller said in answer to the question “What’s left in the field?” -- “If indeed curriculum studies is a human project, it will never be fully conceived or realized. It will be obligated every day to reinvent itself” (Miller, 2005, p. 202). My personal/professional experience of being Dr. Miller’s student is a lesson in the avowal of constant reshaping to the contours of deep care, justice, and an embrace of ambiguity. A mighty scholar who teaches and writes as often with tenderness as with ferocity, Dr. Miller’s unparalleled legacy reaches across thousands of students, colleagues, and readers who have “learned to learn” by her hand, dancers, all of us, “continuing to fight for the project called education” (Miller, 2005, p. 203).

Author

• Jeana Marie Hrepich, Antioch University - Seattle