Musing Histories: Narrating Curriculum History With Janet Miller

• In Event: Sounds of Silences Still Breaking: A Celebration of Janet Louise Miller's Life and Her Contributions to the Field of Curriculum Studies

Abstract

While the prolific work of Janet Miller is most often associated with her ground-breaking contributions to feminist, poststructuralist curricular theorizing, her inquiry as a curriculum historian is often overlooked. As a co-founding member of Bergamo, first co-editor of JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing and ground-breaker in the reconceptualization, her contributions are vast. However, it is her theorizing of the complicated, complex, and “always in the making” narratives of curriculum history that this chapter takes up. The histories she explores across time and space are always partial, ambivalent, incomplete, and skeptical stories which refuse narrative satisfaction. The tenuous nature of these histories has always unsettled me with their incompleteness. But this historical ambiguity has been my muse, calling me to approach my own historical work as a practice through which to disrupt any unitary narrative and instead to always “keep the conversation going.” Throughout this essay, I examine moments in curricular history drawing on Janet’s writing to reimagine a curricular history without boundaries, full of leaks and always in motion.

Author

• Petra Munro Hendry, Louisiana State University
  Presenting Author