This insightful edited collection draws attention to multiple, different, and worthwhile ways in which the articulation of curriculum and pedagogy can promote a just society. Each chapter in the volume provides ways of thinking about the urgency at hand by providing sites, situations, and possibilities for disrupting colonizing scripts. Through their writing, the scholars, teachers, artists, and activists invoke diverse ways of thinking about, challenging, reflecting, and doing the curriculum work associated with justice through artistry, advocacy, and activism. These powerful essays serve as models, challenges, provocations, furthering conversations that embrace the urgencia of the present historical, political moment, and which support a new awakening. (Contributors include: Phyllis Burstein, Elizabeth S. Foster, Debra Freedman, Barbara Graham, Mei Wu Hoyt, M. Francyne Huckaby, Barbara Hollingshead, Lucy E. Larrison Sheri Leafgren, Jennifer Milam, Michael P. O’Malley, Maya A. Roth, Jennifer Sandlin, William H. Schubert, Brian D. Schultz, Stephanie Springgay, Peter Taubman, and Tommy Trantino).

Here are the papers from the 4th conference on Curriculum and Pedagogy.  The papers from this volume and the preceding conferences contribute to the curriculum field in an important way.  Curriculum and teaching are treated as an integral whole . . . and (it) advances a personally challenging and professionally demanding standard that encompasses a wide range of topics.  The articles in these volumes present pieces reflective of the on-going focuses: writing collaboratively, inquiring through the arts and expressing innovative means of initiating social action on matters of grave educational and cultural concern. In addition, it continues to further the belief that it is imperative that educators deepen their critical insights into the historical, political, personal, aesthetic, spiritual and institutional subtexts and contexts of curriculum that impact daily educational practices.

Arranged as a post-structural catechism, Complicated Conversations and Confirmed Commitments: Revitalizing Education for Democracy engages readers in dialogue around curricular and pedagogical problems via a series of posed queries and responses in the form of writing and imagery from emerging and experienced educational practitioners, artists, and curriculum scholars. Rather than seeking fixed truths, however, the authors in this collection instead offer problematic, poetic, and consciously irresolute responses to contemporary educational issues, responses that respect the need for a fluid conceptualization and enactment of democracy in pluralistic, complex cultural spaces. Collectively, these authors describe the im/possibilities inherent in attempting to reconceptualize curriculum and pedagogy towards more just and humane ends.

Forthcoming