Curriculum History Is Queer History: Janet L. Miller’s Revolutionary Currere

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Histories in Practice: Revisioning Time, Space, and Place (Table 20)

Abstract

Historicism is the view that history or one’s past should be a field of study. It is important from this view that one’s past should be studied as a discipline “as it actually was” (Tosh, 2010, p. 1). This is a complicated task as historical awareness, how the past comes to be known, and potentially applied to the present moment or not requires a certain perspective. A sense of a “common past” is a challenging endeavor when we consider the past as coagulations of both aspects known versus those that are unknown, erased, forgotten, or just unavailable. Further complicating this picture is what becomes known as part of the historical record, such as what is considered crucial or important to understanding a history. What archival materials, which artifacts, who’s memories get selected to determine a common history or history “as it actually was” becomes really quite a complex process. Although most historians and scholars in general believe that knowing the history of a field and that studying history is a worthwhile endeavor, there has been very few consistencies in how a history should be done. Various approaches to doing historical research is guided by a certain epistemology. The Empiricists relied on an inductive method of reasoning to argue for the solidity and atemporality of historical facts independently of the historian’s mind or perceptions. The Annals School countered the Empiricists to include more of the multilayered analysis (Green & Troup, 1999). Over the course of the last century or so, a virtual avalanche of different types of historiographies have emerged in the field of historical studies trying to deal with the issue of what to do with one’s past.
The field of curriculum studies has been engaging in similar concerns over its history. How does curriculum history fit into the broader field of curriculum studies and from which perspectives should curriculum history try to make its past known. The work I am doing here is partial, but I am interested in combining the work done by curriculum studies scholars in the subfield of curriculum history (Baker, 1996;2005) and queer historian David Halperin (2004) to offer a nuanced reading of Janet L. Miller’s (1990; 1998; 2004) work in the field of curriculum study. I offer a nuanced history of Miller’s work as curriculum history to link the social history of LGBTQ rights with the curriculum history to argue for what I’m calling her revolutionary currere. It is the queer reading of her work that provides the revolutionary currere. The paper begins with a review of different types of historiography. Then it will review the work in curriculum history, and then it will use the work of David Halperin with a reading of Miller’s oeuvre to argue for her revolutionary currere. This paper is part social history, part historiography, part autobiography, and part close reading of Miller’s texts. It offers a new way to think about curriculum history and a new way to write or articulate history in the field of curriculum studies.

Author

• David L. Carlson, Arizona State University