“Won’t You Accompany Me”: Friction, Contact Zones, and Accompaniment Curriculum

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Speculative Fiction, Expansive Literacies, and Futurities

Abstract

We live in precarious times. Ghostly hauntings, remnants, and re-emergences of dictatorial rhetorics cloaked under the guise of patriotism, conspiracy theories and fictions articulated as truths or verified research, and far-right political fearmongering emphasizing safety and security only coming from power and domination, rather than through connectivity, community, and interdependence, attempt to suffocate social dialogue. This article theorizes around third-space teacher education and complexities of using friction and contact zone theorizing to re-imagine curriculum, teaching, and teacher education toward accompaniment, democratic waymaking. In proximity (e.g., school-university-community), there are possibilities for being otherwise, working with(in) friction and contact zones to move toward the school as a site that fuses the knowing-being-doing of democracy.

Author

• Thomas Albright, Georgia State University