Pre-Conference Seminar: Research as a Curriculum of Healing: Centering Doctoral Work in Current Contexts and Conditions (Day 2 of 2)

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

In this seminar, we will consider the work of research as a project of wisdom and
introspection. Seeking knowledge from our elders and those at various stages in their
researching lives, doctoral student participants will be guided to think deeply about the possibility of research as a healing curriculum in the current political context. The difficult task of interrogating and dismantling racialized, gendered, classed and other
intersected forms of subjective oppression -- including the colonial act of killing
knowledge, or ‘epistemicide’ -- requires participants in this seminar to explore ways that
creatively push methodological and representational boundaries, bring divided
communities in union, courageously write into contradictions and complexities, and use
their collaborative inquiries to challenge traditional ways of engaging, interpreting, and
writing about research in the academy.
Curriculum studies is a field wide-awake and faithful to the beauty that comes when
multiple and diverse forms of understanding and expression are defended. This
orientation can include a wide range of approaches, including curriculum theory, race
narrative inquiry, history, critical geography, critical dis/ability studies, postmodern and
postcolonial work, queer theory, multiracial/mixed racial auto/biographical inquiry, black
feminist scholarship, indigenous studies, international education, social justice
education, ecopedagogy, teacher education, the arts, aesthetics, popular culture, public
pedagogy, posthumanism, settler colonialism, animal studies, poetic studies, womanist
currere, portraiture, memoir, fiction, oral histories, spoken word, drama, dance, digital
story-telling, graphic novels, and multimedia representations and inquiries.
In light of this year’s conference theme, and respecting the historicity of culture, what
might it mean to learn sensitively and compassionately from one another’s experiences
and knowledges? How can we build together a commitment to defend the right to a
nurturing public education, to create new communal spaces that challenge exclusionist
borders, to dismantle targeted criminalization and the organized distribution of
vulnerabilities, in order to reimagine our purpose as educators, researchers, public
advocates in the fight for justice, here and around the world?
On the first day, a panel of intergenerational scholars will provide insight into the life of
a researcher and its role in the current context, where they see research to be heading
and how they imagine its future. At the end of this panel, students will have an
opportunity to work in small groups with facilitators who will share their thoughts and
advice on dissertation writing and research, and how their understandings have
changed over the years. At its end, there will be an exhibition of research practices.
The second day will be structured as a workshop. Working in small groups with a
facilitator, each participant will share one reading that really influenced their
dissertation research and a piece of their own writing that they are still puzzling over.
Students will use each other to work through any conflicts and dilemmas they are
experiencing, if any.
At its end, there will be a big group gathering and closing.
Facilitators
Denise Taliaferro Baszile is Associate Dean of Diversity and Student Experience and
Associate Professor of Curriculum & Cultural Studies in the Department of Educational
Leadership at Miami University. Her work focuses on understanding curriculum as
racial/gendered text with an emphasis on disrupting traditional modes of knowledge
production, validation and representation. Her scholarship draws on curriculum theory,
critical race theory, and Black feminist theory and seeks a fuller understanding rather
than a simply a legitimate understanding of the dynamic relationship between race,
gender and curriculum. Her current inquiry projects involve imagining pedagogies of
Black self-love and imagining curriculum studies as contentious movement building
work. She has published in various journals including Journals of Curriculum Theorizing,
Curriculum and Pedagogy, Educational Foundations, Race Ethnicity and Education, Urban
Education, Qualitative Inquiry and Knowledge Cultures . She has also published several
book chapters in key texts, such as Education and Epistemologies of Ignorance,
Curriculum Studies the Next Moment , and The Sage Guide to Curriculum in Education .
Her most recent publications include co-edited special issue with Gender and Education
entitled Theorizing Curriculum in Color and Curves and a co-edited book entitled Race,
Gender and Curriculum Theorizing: Working in Womanish Ways .
William Ayers, formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University
Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and founder of both the Small
Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, is a graduate of the University
of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers
College, Columbia University. Ayers has written extensively about social justice,
democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an
essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is a former Vice President of
the curriculum division of the American Educational Research Association and member
of the executive committee of the AERA Council. His books include A Kind and Just
Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive Days: A Memoir; On the Side of the Child;
Teaching the Personal and the Political; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics; Teaching
toward Democracy; Race Course: Against White Supremacy; Teaching with Conscience in
an Imperfect World: An Invitation; and Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto.
Debbie Sonu is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at
Hunter College and doctoral faculty in the Urban Education Program at the Graduate
Center, City University of New York. Her research interests include curriculum theory
and practice as it relates to urban schooling and social justice pedagogies in the United
States. Her work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Teacher
Education, and the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, among others. Her dissertation,
…(in)Justice for All?: Brooklyn Youth and the Question of Social Justice , explored youth
performances and the complications of teaching for social justice, and received the
2011 Division B Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award and the 2010 Critical
Educators for Social Justice SIG Distinguished Dissertation of the Year Award. In
addition, she works closely with elementary school teachers in the East Village and
Lower East Side of New York City, serving as university liaison within the clinically-rich
teacher education program. Currently, she a co-leader of the Public Engagement and
Collaborative Research Seminar, a two-year initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation that brings together researchers, teachers, artists and activists to create
publicly facing projects that explore and promote public education and racial justice.

Where to Send Applications:
Debbie Sonu (dsonu@huntersoe.org), Hunter College, CUNY

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies

Participants

• Denise M. Taliaferro Baszile, Miami University

• William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Debbie Sonu, City University of New York (CUNY)