Diffracting Mismatch Subjectivities as Curriculum "Works in Progress"

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

Abstract

This presentation is an engagement with curriculum theorizing inspired by Janet Miller’s ongoing efforts to “[continue to] trouble the link between acts, categories, representations, desires and identities” (Miller, 2005, p. 220) by conceiving “curriculum, selves, identity…, gender, and race…as works in progress” (Miller, 2005, pp. 5-6). The author draws upon Janet Miller’s notion of “intra-subjectivity” as a “work in progress” project that inquiries into curriculum theorizing through feminist, post-qualitative, poststructural, and new materialist lenses, which disrupt humanist versions of narrative, autobiography and unitary subjectivity (Miller, 2005). Janet Miller encourages us to extend curriculum as an entanglement of “practices, structures, images, and experiences that can be identified and analyzed in various ways; i.e politically, racially, autobiographically, etc…” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995/2008, p. 16). Janet Miller invites us to “work” rather than “work through” (Ellsworth & Miller, 2005, p. 180) tensions to interrupt the inevitability of “mismatch” situations in U.S. public schools. She inspires us to trouble the obdurateness of “mismatch” discourses that constitute teacher/student collectivities and “unproblematized constructs of ‘teacher’ and ‘teacher stories’” (Miller, 2005, p. 51) by seeking to work difference differently (Barad, 2007, p. 82).

By diffracting Dr. Miller’s theorizing of autobiographical subjectivities as “works in progress,” Janet Miller invites us to theorize subjectivity as part of complicated conversations that help us to reflect, to explain, or to critique “the” world, toward theories perceived as participants in world-making (Barad, 2007). For Janet Miller, theories are not abstracted from the lived bodies of the knower/known, but rather, “overwhelmingly, theory is bodily, and theory is literal” (Haraway, 1992, p. 299). Thus, theories are not just thoughts, they are happenings, constituted via the material/discursive entanglements of thinking/being as practice. Curriculum theorizing as an engaging intra-subjective knowledge project with reconfiguring subjectivity might be considered as a form of world-making. Curriculum theorizing presumes that there is an ethical obligation to approach difference in schools in ways that acknowledge its complex manifestations, obligations and opportunities to do things differently.

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

As AERA Division B Vice President, Janet Miller represented curriculum scholars through her valuable voice on the AERA Council from 1997-2000. She has served on numerous Division B committees and exemplified the work of one who recognizes the importance of such participation, as she had done earlier as secretary from 1990-1992. Moreover, she augmented the work started by Jean Clandinin, to establish Graduate Student Seminars. She avidly supported the idea of book recognition awards to acknowledge a diverse array of excellent books within curriculum studies. Further, as curriculum studies moved to recognize the value of world-wide (international, transnational, counternational, trans-cultural, and more) perspectives, Professor Miller contributed immense leadership to the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies in linkages with the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies. Thus she has transcended national and international borders of curriculum theorizing, English education, qualitative research, and feminisms. Her work in English education has included being Teachers College’s Program Director in that area for seven years.

Authors

• Mary Newbery, Quinnipiac University

• Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides, Westfield State University