"I See Them Differently -- I Get Them Now": Curriculum, Change, Us

The word imagination had a strong comeback in 2020. Calls to reimagine the classroom, curriculum, and teaching rushed in with Covid-19 and increased with the murder of George Floyd and the powerful resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections changed the landscape of how my students see American democracy, social solidarity, and their place amid it all. It also changed how I see my students in the classroom, in my city, in the world. I see them differently.This shift in vision calls for a shift in practices. The loud calls for imagination and re-imagination are exciting theoretically, but how do they translate to the work? Can curriculum, curriculum studies, my thinking, and my writing forge a stronger yet openly complicated connection to the work I do as a professor

How One Learning Community Approached Death

In this narrative piece, the author describes how a learning community was able to transfer their practices of care to support a colleague as he faced illness and death. The author chronicles how the learning community responded to support their team member, other members of the campus community, and the students. She reflects on this experience and explores how the learning community structure supported compassion during this challenging year

Authoethnographic Essay #1: You, School, Guttman

This is the first writing assignment I give fall semester freshmen. It not only allows me to gauge their writing levels, but it also gives me a sense of what sorts of educational experiences they have had prior to coming to Guttman. This essay assignment is purely autoethnograhic, however in later autoethnographic essays I will have them connect experience to various educational theories/concepts we study in class

Re-imagining Research Representation

A year into the pandemic and far-too-many years into the dominance of white supremacy within our academic lives, a question has moved from the back recesses of my mind to the forefront: why is educational research only considered valid when presented in the singular format of the research article within peer reviewed journals? Why can’t we--as creative scholars, educators, and thinkers--present our research in more imaginative ways that might, perhaps, reach a wider audience of readers? If inclusivity is what we strive for, the status quo of publication (as well as tenure and promotion) standards needs to be re-imagined. Drawing from texts such as Arts-Based Educational Research and Qualitative Inquiry by authors Thalia M. Mulvihill and Raji Swaminathan as well as Audre Lorde’s concise yet powerful call in her essay “Poetry is not a Luxury” and bell hooks’ concepts from Art on My Mind, I invite you to come think with me about how we might be able to bring creativity into our academic lives through the work of curriculum research we feel passionate about. Concrete examples will be provided to the participants as model texts so that they might work towards a creative interpretation of their own research results. In this workshop, we will discuss three topics: 1. The need for creativity in our lives as educational researchers and why it is important, 2. Various formats we can employ to present our research differently for publication (collage, research poems, short stories/vignettes), and 3. Where one might submit such creative pieces for publication