Curriculum, Memory, and the Puerto Rican Diaspora: Creating Futures Beyond Erasure

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session explores how curriculum can function as a restorative infrastructure that bridges erased histories and future educational possibilities. Grounded in Puerto Rican diaspora studies, the session highlights a curriculum designed for use across classroom, community, and self-directed learning settings, drawing from archival materials, community knowledge, and interdisciplinary theory. The session examines the role of community-based, cultural institutions in animating justice-oriented curriculum development, introduces a curriculum that centers diasporic histories, language, and identity, and offers a philosophical reflection on how the curriculum supports and affirms DiaspoRican life and futurity by challenging misconceptions and mobilizing archives. Together, the presentations model how curriculum can support critical inquiry and affirm diasporic memory, disrupt dominant narratives, and affirm the knowledge systems of nondominant communities.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies

Chair

• Francisco Medina, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Papers

• Placemaking Through and Beyond the Ivory Towers and Decolonial Curricular Possibilities for Diasporican Futurities - Daicy Diaz-Granados, Center for Puerto Rican Studies

• DiaspoFuturism through the Puerto Rican Archives: Unforgetting the Past to Build Alternative Futures in Education - Carmin Quijano, Hunter College

• Curriculum as Diasporican Continuity: Pedagogical Commitments Toward Educational Futurity - Francisco Medina, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Session Organizer

• Daicy Diaz-Granados, Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Discussant

• Jordan Bell, Erikson Institute