Theorizing Transnational Flows and Mobilities

• In Event: Light in Bleak Times: Reflections on Janet Miller's Four Decades of Curriculum Theorizing and Praxis

Abstract

This presentation focuses on curriculum theorizing on subjectivity, transnationalism, and cross-cultural conversation about “important” knowledge. The authors explore the complicated meaning of the existence of “international” faculty using “working autobiography” as a mode of inquiry and representation (Miller, 2006, p. 33). Miller (2006) theorizes transnational flows and mobilities as a crucial, potential means to sustain various “perspectives on…phenomena in simultaneous yet often tension-filled relation to one another” (p. 33). Janet Miller encourages those living and working in a “foreign” space to defend challenging situations by highlighting a humanistic understanding of self/other and cultural differences. Janet Miller inspires us to look at subjectivity and experience differently, interrogating the subject discursively constructed within historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic moments particularly with/in transnational flows and mobilities and complicate identifiable, binary boundaries of national/international in shifting cultural contexts.

This presentation and dialogue with other presenters will draw upon the following background illustrated with anecdotes:

This major transformation in curriculum studies was facilitated by no scholar more than Janet Miller. She was the principal organizing force behind thirty years of curriculum conferences (Bergamo, its forerunners and offspring), and she was one of the most salient intellectual forces in those endeavors. The conferences may not have occurred without the influence of Janet Miller. It is highly unlikely that the history of diverse re-conceptualizations would have occurred without the impact of her leadership and scholarly insight. In the midst of all this work, Janet Miller made time to be long time editor and mentor behind the scenes for JCT, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing through its several incarnations. From 1978 through 1998, she served as Founding Managing Editor, and Co-Director of Bergamo Annual Conferences on Curriculum Theory & Classroom Practice. During this time (1988-1990), Janet Miller was elected Chairperson of the SIG on Critical Issues in Curriculum and continued to foster diversity of inquiry, which specifically included feminist grounding.

Janet Miller’s intellectual work opened new doors of feminist curriculum theorizing, and provided, through Creating Spaces and Finding Voices, a longitudinal, artistic rendition of serious teacher reflection and re-conceptualization. She advanced the active voice of curriculum, currere [as developed by Pinar (1975) and Pinar and Grumet (1976)]. Janet Miller’s articles, chapters, keynote addresses, and conference presentations over the years have advanced such lines of thinking in both English Education and Curriculum Studies. Her edited volume (A Light in Dark Times with Bill Ayers) acknowledges the formative influence (foreseen in Janet Miller’s own dissertation) of Maxine Greene on the transformation of curriculum studies, related philosophy of education, and the arts and aesthetics as a basis for curriculum theory and practice. Her Sounds of Silence Breaking is both a memoir-like portrayal of the history of this transformation of curriculum studies and a ground-breaking call to overcome the patriarchal silencing of women in curriculum studies, education, and in general. As Professor Emerita Janet Miller continues to contribute, we anticipate the publication of Curriculum, Collaboration and Communities without Consensus by Routledge, Maxine Greene and Education, an invited volume in the Routledge Key Ideas Series.

Authors

• Seungho Moon, Loyola University Chicago

• Yeji Kim, Teachers College, Columbia University