Bergamo Conference Center, Dayton, Ohio
October 12–14, 2017
We invite teachers, students, scholars, theorists, administrators, and cultural workers to join us in this endeavor at the 2017 Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice. Reflecting our commitment to advance understandings of curriculum and practice, this year’s conference features speakers whose work challenges us to imagine new possibilities for curriculum and educational theorizing. The “Provoking Dialogue(s)” sessions return for a fifth year allowing for us to engage in communal discussion of new and classic curriculum texts. The conference also will feature diverse and dynamic all-conference sessions, nightly social and cultural events, and professional development opportunities targeted at current graduate students. Organizers invite a wide range of submissions that revolve around, but are not limited to, the following categories:
- Cultural Studies and Curriculum
- International/Transnational Curriculum Discourses
- Engaging Texts
- Higher Education and Curriculum Theorizing
- Curriculum Studies and Philosophical Perspectives
- Curriculum Theory, Classroom Practice, and Disciplinary Perspectives
Conference Theme: The Complicated Conversation of Curriculum Theory
In addition to the categories listed above, submissions can take guidance from this year’s theme: The Complicated Conversation of Curriculum Theory. By focusing on the work of curriculum as “complicated conversation,” the theme of the 2017 Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice invites the continued embracing and contestation of its past, present, and future. Pinar (2011) describes this work as conversation in which interlocutors are speaking not only among themselves but to those not present, not only to historical figures and unnamed peoples and places they may be studying, but to politicians and parents dead and alive, not to mention to the selves they have been, are in the process of becoming, and someday may become.
This year’s call seeks proposals that take up a reflective and relational approach involving not only historical positioning but also concerns of the self, place, the material, and the theoretical. Proposals are encouraged to simultaneously consider the past, present, and future in relation to each other or the aforementioned concerns. Participants should see this year’s theme as an opportunity to identify, critique, and, perhaps, reject barriers to new ways of knowing, being, and doing in curriculum scholarship. Lastly, submissions can consider what has been left out of the conversation thus far and expand the imaginary of what curriculum could be in a continuing state of becoming.