2017 Curriculum Inquiry Writing Fellows
Read more about the 2017 Curriculum Inquiry Writing Fellows
Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán
Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán is a doctoral candidate of Curriculum and Instruction at Penn State and a former social studies teacher. Ana is working on a paper called the (Now)here of global curriculum, an autoethnographic inquiry on her lived experiences of global curriculum. Ana takes a critical stance towards global curricular projects that solely use Western epistemologies to think about the world. She argues these promote a curriculum of (dis)location and reproduce colonial relations of power/knowledge. Her project offers initial thoughts towards a healing curriculum of the global, a curriculum of (re)location. Ana’s work is influenced by feminists of color, Third World feminists and Latin American scholarship.
Tamara Butler
Tamara Butler is a South Carolina Geechee girl who focuses on the stories, memories and lives of Black women. During the retreat, she is developing a manuscript about how Black women’s memoirs, testimonies and autobiographies are incorporated into a ninth grade Humanities classroom. She hopes that the paper will serve as a meditation on the possibilities of learning when students deliberately engage with Black women’s stories. Tamara is an Assistant Professor of Critical Literacies in the Department of English at Michigan State University, where she also serves as core faculty with the African American and African Studies program. When she is not writing with the Curriculum Inquiry Fellows, she is listening to Black women living on the South Carolina Sea Islands. Using Black feminist thought as methodology (Patterson, Kinloch, Burkhard & Howard, 2016), she visits with women to hear how they connect to and remember land.
Joe Curnow
Joe Curnow is an organizer and researcher at the University of Toronto. Her work explores how social movements can be sites of learning and politicization around relations of racialization, settler colonialism, and gender. Joe's writing project, written with Lila Asher and Amil Davis, examines territorial acknowledgments, their pedagogical potential, and the threat of land recognitions becoming settler moves to innocence rather than expressions of solidarity and decolonial governance.
Dominique C. Hill
Dominique C. Hill is an ethnographer, body-lyricist, and disrupter committed to socially just and artistic practices. Her work situates the body as a pivotal vessel for research, teaching/learning processes, and generating collective action. Dominique’s interdisciplinary scholarship engages the nexus of Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies, Black Studies, Critical Education Studies, and Performance, and incites questions that foreground voices, bodies, and knowledges of often disappeared and/or silenced populations. Specifically, her life’s work is dedicated to documenting and reimagining Black life with a focus on Black girls and women. As a Curriculum Inquiry (CI) Fellow, she is currently devising a paper on being “Black girl reliable.” Reflecting upon data from a multi-sited performance autoethnography with self-identified Black girls ages 14-17. This manuscript ruminates upon dimensions of reliability and elucidates its dialectical relationship with paradox. In the fall, Dominique will be joining the faculty in Black Studies at Amherst College.
Rhiannon Maton
Rhiannon Maton, Ph.D is an Assistant Professor in the department of Foundations and Social Advocacy at State University of New York College at Cortland. She holds a Ph.D from University of Pennsylvania and a M.Ed from Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. She is also a former Toronto public school teacher. Maton’s current research examines teacher learning and leadership in restrictive policy contexts, with a specific focus on how teachers understand and mobilize social justice frameworks. Maton’s CI writing fellowship paper is titled Neoliberalism to Racial Justice: Perspective Transformation in a Teacher-Led Activist Organization. It examines how one activist social justice unionist organization, Philadelphia’s Caucus of Working Educators, understands and articulates current tensions in American public education. The paper tracks how the organization draws upon diverse ideological frameworks—neoliberalism and racial justice—as it engages in problem framing processes over a three year period.
Oscar Navarro
Oscar Navarro is an Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California. His experience as a high school teacher and involvement in teacher activism inform his research on educators sustained and enhanced social justice teaching through a teacher-led inquiry group (TIG). The TIG was housed and operated by the People’s Education Movement in Los Angeles and guided by a decolonizing pedagogy. A qualitative case study methodology and critical inquiry group design were utilized to investigate participants across the teaching experience spectrum. Findings suggest that the TIG validated and inspired social justice teaching through what he described as a community of transformative praxis (CTP). CTP is a social justice process that engages individuals in developing politically and pedagogically, within a like-minded community. The participants were involved in CTP through 1) pedagogical goals, 2) intellectualizing teaching, and 3) practicing social justice teaching.
Leilani Sabzalian
Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq) is a Postdoctoral Scholar of Indigenous Studies Education at the University of Oregon. Broadly, her research examines the settler colonial context of Indigenous education in public schools and uses counterstorytelling methodologies to denaturalize those contexts in order to imagine and enact more promising alternatives. In this paper, she puts Native feminisms in conversation with Wayne Au’s conception of curricular standpoint theory in order to think through how curriculum theories can remain attentive to and responsible for the specific legacies of heteropatriarchal settler colonialism which mark the context of the politics of knowledge production.
Linnea K. Beckett
Linnea Beckett’s research interests include critical pedagogy, feminist perspectives, and community-based educational reform and informal learning. Her current research examines a school and community reform effort that produces and uses digital stories as curriculum to engage the community in critical dialogue and action around issues community members face every day.
2017 Curriculum Inquiry Faculty Mentors
Michelle J. Bellino, University of Michigan
Indigo Esmonde, University of Toronto
Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, University of Toronto
Nathalia Jaramillo, Kennesaw State University
Sabrina Ross, Georgia Southern University
Roland Sintos-Coloma, Miami University
Aparna Tarc, York University
Eve Tuck, University of Toronto
2017 Curriculum Inquiry Editorial Board
Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández (Editor-in-Chief)
Alexandra Arraiz Matute (Editor), Neil Ramjewan (Associate Editor), Christy Guthrie (Assistant Editor), Elena Toukan (Assistant Editor), Jason Brennan (Assistant Editor)
Gabrielle de Montmollin (Editorial Assistant)