In their piece in this issue, Bretton A. Varga and Sarah B. Shear ask what would happen if we quieted ourselves and listened in order to affirm the voices of more-than-human bodies who bear witness to the actions of humans across time and space. What a wild and wonderful question to ask. That question guides a wild and wonderful article. And, before proceeding, let us assure you that all of the articles in this issue are wild and wonderful. At least we think they are. And we use wild and wonderful in the most complimentary way.
Wild lives as an adjective in the paragraph above, but wild can also be a noun. And here we’ll acknowledge that, though we are literacy scholars and Sam is an English major, we can’t pretend to be all that serious when writing about grammar. Too much power wrapped up in that game. Too much racism. Still, the dictionary suggests that wild, when used as a noun, refers to “a natural state or uncultivated or uninhabited region.” In other words, our natural state is our wildness and we worry that so much of what happens in traditional approaches to teaching and learning and yes, even research about teaching and learning would control, limit, or even tame our wildness. Varga and Shear’s article resists that taming in the field of social studies education. The other pieces in this issue, to some degree, resist the taming of wildness across a variety of other disciplines and contexts.
We have been scholars for a while now. Last year, at the 2023 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, somebody referred to us as midcareer scholars. That phrase sat heavy with us. What does it mean to be a midcareer scholar? Does it mean losing control of your calendar to meetings? Does it mean an email inbox never stops? Service, service, and more service? Less time to pay attention to research or teaching? A push toward committee work, and, dare we say it, administration? A slow malaise that helps us to ignore or even forget the reasons we became educators and educational researchers in the first place? One way to imagine these pushes are the slow and steady drumbeat of neoliberalism that push us along and, ultimately, serves to tame our wildness. To make us into things we aren’t so sure we want to be.
The articles in this issue—the research—remind us to be weary of the forces at work that tame our wildness. Namely, we notice the anti-coloniality, the microfascism, and the whiteness that, for us, are pointed out by the work you’ll encounter in this issue. Beware the things that would steal your wildness. That is a reminder for you as well as us.
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In “Childhoods as currere: The power of proleptic moments” by Julia Persky, the author uses poetic inquiry rooted in Pinar and Grumet’s theory of currere to consider childhoods as synthetical, proleptic, moments. Their stories, combined with stories of my former students, inspired this project to sort through life experiences and their relationships with knowledges and academic learning.
Bretton A. Varga and Sarah B. Shear’s article “Flows of anti-colonialism: (Re)configurations and emplotments of more-than-witness(es/ing) in the an(thropo/glo)cene” leans into into alterlife and connectivity ontologies to consider the implications of more-than-witness(es/ing) (their term) on social studies education. Taking a narrative approach, the authors engage with three more-than-human bodies (e.g., Boulder, Forest, Document(s)) in an effort to expand how act(or/ion)s of coloniality are registered, conceptualized, and disrupted. By opening their learning to the agency of more-than-humans and what they have witnessed, the authors ask: What might social studies be(come) if we (e.g. educators, students, researchers) affirmed the voices of more-than-human bodies in teaching and learning? And, what, if we quieted ourselves and listened, can we learn from more-than-human bodies who bear witness to the actions of humans across time and space?
“Exploring HBO’s Lovecraft Country as a model resource for developing speculative civic literacies” by Aaron Rabinowitz turns to HBO’s Lovecraft Country as a model resource for developing speculative civic literacies, which they argue are forms of meaning making aimed at helping students conceive of a more equitable democratic society. The author argues that, by engaging with subversive art, students learn to openly question dominant assumptions, including the sacred liberal assumption that democratic reform is sufficient to achieve genuine equity as a society. Finally, they offer that seeing how Lovecraft Country restories events with empowered Black protagonists, students can learn to engage in their own restorying, and thereby envision futures of equitable flourishing, while taking seriously the persistent challenges of social death in the present. Ultimately, Rabinowitz suggests that by honing their narrative tools through engagement with rich speculative fiction, students learn to create spaces where the possible can permeate into our democratic reality.
“Playfully studious teaching as a reparative affective replacement for microfascism” by Nick Kasparek is a post-qualitative inquiry that investigates the challenge of microfascism for curriculum and pedagogy. Contemporary schooling has been rightly implicated in the expression and production of microfascist desires for control, and the situation seems to demand a robust political response through curriculum and pedagogy. However, as this examination of the literature shows, any antifascist teaching finds itself in a bind: it can neither fully relinquish its designs on students nor directly confront microfascism with an opposing force. By synthesizing disparate lines of theory, Kasparek argues for one possibility of escape from this binary trap—not through a dramatic denial or a forceful shock to the system but through a gentle yielding to subversive affects already flowing through contemporary teaching. Building on concepts of studious play, toys, queer use, growing sideways, and drag pedagogy, Kasparek proposes the concept of playfully studious teaching. Kasparek illustrates how playfully studious teaching, as itself a queer use of schooling practices as toys, opens potential spaces for antifascist experimentation and different becoming.
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There are so many ways to create, share, and curate knowledge. Our journey as educators, researchers, and writers has led us to the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. We have served as editors for roughly 5 years now. In that time, this journal—and really the field of Curriculum Studies as a whole—has continued to help remind us about what matters to us as scholars. We’re grateful to the authors in this issue and all the other issues we’ve been able to guide for their work to challenge us and, to varying degrees, to remind us of our wildness. To help keep alive a hunger for something else in teaching, learning, and living that guides us to be a better path that the pressures of neoliberalism, whiteness, and microfascism would offer. A better way to be. A better way to live. A more wild way.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).