CALL FOR PAPERS
Towards Childhood as Curriculum: Theory, Research, and Practice
Guest Editors: Neil T. Ramjewan and Julie C. Garlen
Submissions due August 31, 2026
Click here to download the CFP as a PDF
This year we mark the 10-year anniversary of a special issue published by Curriculum Inquiry (46[3]) titled “The Child in Question: Childhood Texts, Cultures, and Curricula” guest edited by Lisa Farley and Julie Garlen. That special issue asked a question of utmost significance to the field of curriculum studies, yet one that often is overlooked, along with the “subject” of its inquiry—What is a child? This question builds on decades of critical scholarship in childhood studies and early childhood education that rejects romantic, modernist, and developmentalist notions of childhood. Instead, the issue invited curriculum scholars to reject taken-for-granted notions of childhood and figures of the child as an innocent, nascent, and universal life stage that contests the “pedagogic epic” (Steedman, 1995) “that features a teacher who heroically drags the child into rationality” (Farley & Garlen, 2016). In this call, we seek to extend this body of work by inviting scholars to consider what it might mean to investigate childhood as curriculum, or as a mode of inquiry wherein “childhood” is treated as a category of analytic difference akin to race, gender, class, and so on.
“The Child in Question” is part of a small but important body of North American curriculum theorizing in which the social and discursive construction of childhood is centered. One important site is that of teacher education where childhood continues to be understood through the dominant discourse of (psychological) human development. Take for example Maria Kromidas’s (2019) piece, also published here in CI, which draws on Sylvia Wynter’s work to frame the figure of the developing child in teacher education curriculum as a biocentric, white, imperial, and colonial genre of the human. This normalized figure of the child is at the center of curricula and pedagogies that compel particular kinds of teacher subjectivities, namely the hero of the epic tasked with cultivating the child’s rational capacities towards its teleological end, white masculine adulthood. On yet another register, scholars have attended to preservice teachers’ memories of childhood, what can be thought of as a living curriculum, and one that shapes new teachers’ budding professional identities (Garlen et al., 2022). Despite these examples, childhood as a category of analytic difference has yet to permeate teacher education in terms of theory, research, and practice in significant ways and represent one possible inroad to this conversation.
While teacher education and its life in K-12 schooling is one important site of inquiry for this call, it is by no means the only one. After all, curriculum studies has extended its gaze far beyond the classroom (Malewski, 2010). In the same 2016 special issue, Erica Burman (2016) echoes this scope in the reminder that the child–adult dichotomy is akin to the student–teacher relationship and critical to understanding pedagogies of subjectification that mobilize deeply colonial and racist curricula of childhood. Numerous historical analyses have likewise placed the politics of childhood at the heart of colonial discourse and its manifestation in the modern nation-state wherein childhood has been a metaphor for exploitation and violence (Berlant, 1997/2020; Nandy, 1984). These dynamics are brutally evident in the contemporary genocide of Palestinians, in which reports place child victims at between 30–48% of those killed. As Shaloub-Kevorkian (2019) has detailed in her incisive analysis of Zionist settler colonialism, the Palestinian child through its condition of incarceration is expelled from the very category of childhood in a process of unchilding, or the production and treatment of the Palestinian child as a terrorist from the womb. In turn, Shaloub-Kevorkian (2019) attends to children’s agencies inviting theorizations of how a lived curriculum of Palestinian childhoods refuses a dominant colonial curriculum of carcerality, dependency, and helplessness. Garlen (2019) makes a similar claim but through a direct interrogation of childhood innocence itself. For Garlen (2019), childhood innocence is a kind of white property that is repeatedly enacted through discourse to exclude Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies. This is directly linked to recent histories of Transatlantic and settler colonial enslavement in which Black and Indigenous children were property, thereby evicting them from the category of innocence reserved for white children and their protection (Maynard, 2017/2025; Scribe, 2018). These racial capitalist structures invite analysis of childhood innocence and labour. Such an analysis might examine the paradoxical conditions in which (white) childhood innocence is fetishized as a phantasmic reprieve from labour (see Faulkner, 2010), while also opening questions about how nonwhite children are positioned as apolitical yet labouring beings in their immediate lives and within broader global labour markets (Balagopalan, 2014). Together, these examples invite inquiry from micro to macro scales, where multiple curricula of childhood are lived and enacted pedagogically, and thus politically.
The relationship between childhood and curriculum is long standing. Garlen (2021) reminds that the very emergence of North American curriculum studies is tied to a 19th-century shift in children’s role in society from indispensable agricultural labourers to innocent (and ignorant) beings to be protected and cultivated through education. The malleability of childhood continues to raise enduring questions not only of what the child is, but what it is to become—another salient critique in childhood studies. In terms of curriculum, this logic begs the question of how we want our students, positioned as childlike, to change in relation to global neoliberal capitalism and local context.
Beginning from broad notions of curriculum as educational experience and pedagogy as educational relationships, this special issue aims to curate a conversation that invites curriculum scholars to center childhood as a category of generational difference that intersects with nation, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and other modes of subjectification and identification. We seek contributors who examine their theorizing and pedagogical practice within and beyond the boundaries of schooling, to ask what childhood as curriculum might mean as a way to interrogate and reconceptualize dominant, official, null, and intended formations of childhood. As such, we encourage attention to the infinitude of lived curricula between child/adult–student/teacher hierarchies, the educational imperative to change the other, and the host of competing desires in the educational encounter.
Themes of Interest (but not limited to)
Engagements with critical theories of childhood development in teacher education
Post-developmental curricula and pedagogies in schools (K-12, higher education, and teacher education) and beyond (institutional and governmental policy, group homes, community programs, family settings, carceral contexts)
Historical, genealogical, and other critical analyses of childhood and its curricular manifestations
Reconceptualizations of dominant curricula of childhood in diverse cultural and geographic contexts (e.g., majority versus minority worlds theorizing)
Activist engagements (e.g., youth-led protest), artistic installations, and other modes of public pedagogies and curricula contesting, refusing, and imagining childhoods otherwise, whether embodied, digital, or virtual
Intersectional analyses across dimensions of class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationalism (but not limited to statehood), sexuality, ability, etc., as they are entangled with generational difference
Lived curricula of childhood as enacted by children and/or adults that are childified
Sustained theoretical engagement with salient debates in childhood studies in terms of curriculum and pedagogy (e.g., innocence, agency, futurity, etc.)
Submission Guidelines
This special issue invites full manuscript submissions that engage childhood as curriculum in relation to theory, research, and practice. Submissions should align with the aims and scope of Curriculum Inquiry (https://www.curriculuminquiry.org/about) and make a clear contribution to curriculum studies, broadly defined. Contributions may engage artistic, creative, activist, or public pedagogical work, provided that submissions also meet the journal’s expectations for scholarly argumentation and critical engagement.
Where submissions include artistic or creative materials (e.g., poetry, song lyrics, visual art, etc.), authors are responsible for ensuring that all materials are either original, in the public domain, used under a Creative Commons license that permits commercial reuse, or accompanied by written permission from the copyright holder. You can find our copyright guidelines through the following link: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/writing-your-paper/using-third-party-material/
Submissions must also adhere to the following requirements:
Manuscript length: 6000–7000 words, including references and endnotes
Submission deadline: August 31, 2026
Style guide: Curriculum Inquiry follows APA 7. We recommend consulting the APA website for further information (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines)
Submission system: Manuscripts should be submitted through Curriculum Inquiry’s online submission system (Submission Portal), which you can access via the following link: https://rp.tandfonline.com/
All submissions must also adhere to Curriculum Inquiry’s research article submission guidelines, including expectations regarding:
A clearly articulated purpose and contribution (i.e., significance)
Engagement with relevant scholarly literature in the field of curriculum studies
Coherent and well-supported claims and implications for curriculum studies
Engagement with theory in the analysis and work to advance existing theory
An explicit methodological or analytic approach appropriate to the aims of the paper
Clear organization and scholarly writing consistent with the journal’s style
When submitting your manuscript, you will be required to upload an anonymous version as well as a non-anonymized version. Because we conduct a double-anonymous peer review process, it is important that authors remove any information that could be used to identify you, including your name, institutional affiliation, and any self-citations. Authors are responsible for ensuring their submissions conform to the journal’s formatting and citation requirements prior to submission.
Should you have any questions about this process, we encourage you to reach out to us at curriculum.inquiry.oise@utoronto.ca
Guest Editors
Neil Ramjewan and Julie C. Garlen will be the guest editors for this issue. Neil’s scholarly expertise is at the intersections of childhood studies and curriculum studies. He is interested in both the critique of childhood as a colonial concept and decolonial pedagogies aimed at dismantling dominant curricula of childhood. He is also a teacher educator and is steeped in the developmental discourse that the issue aims to disrupt. Julie’s expertise lies at the intersections of cultural criticism, teacher education, curriculum studies, and childhood studies. She is also a teacher educator with commitments of bringing critical approaches to “the child” in the pedagogical relationship. Julie’s and Neil’s current scholarship is steeped in the problems and questions this issue seeks to invite for further investigation such as how post-developmentalist pedagogies can find their way into teacher education programs. As mentioned earlier, Julie was a guest editor of a CI issue on a similar topic almost a decade ago and also has extensive experience working with CI’s editorial team to manage the workflow of revisions and editorial writing. Finally, Neil and Julie recently co-edited the book Refusing the Limits of Contemporary Childhood: Beyond Innocence where they worked with an international group of authors to bring together a similar critical intervention to childhood studies.
References
Balagopalan, S. (2014). Inhabiting “childhood”: Children, labour and schooling in postcolonial India. Springer.
Berlant, L. (2020). The queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on sex and citizenship. Duke University Press. (Original work published 1997)
Burman, E. (2016). Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation. Curriculum Inquiry, 46(3), 265–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2016.1168263
Farley, L., & Garlen, J. C. (2016). The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula. Curriculum Inquiry, 46(3), 221–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2016.1178497
Faulkner, J. (2010). The innocence fetish: The commodification and sexualisation of children in the media and popular culture. Media International Australia, 135(1), 106–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X1013500113
Garlen, J. C. (2019). Interrogating innocence: “Childhood” as exclusionary social practice. Childhood, 26(1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218811484
Garlen, J. C. (2021). Childhood and curriculum. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1128
Garlen, J. C., & Ramjewan, N. T. (Eds.). (2023). Refusing the limits of contemporary childhood: Beyond innocence. Bloomsbury Academic.
Garlen, J. C., Sonu, D., Farley, L., & Chang-Kredl, S. (2022). Agency as assemblage: Using childhood artefacts and memories to examine children’s relations with schooling. Journal of Childhood, Education & Society, 3(2), 152–164. https://doi.org/10.37291/2717638X.202232170
Kromidas, M. (2019). Towards the human, after the child of Man: Seeing the child differently in teacher education. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 65–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549924
Malewski, E. (Ed.). (2009). Curriculum studies handbook: The next moment. Routledge.
Maynard, R. (2025). Policing Black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present (Rev. ed.). Fernwood Publishing. (Original work published 2017)
Nandy, A. (1984). Reconstructing childhood: A critique of the ideology of adulthood. Alternatives, 10(3), 359–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/030437548401000303
Scribe, M. (2018). Pedagogy of indifference: State responses to violence against Indigenous girls. Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme, 32(1–2), 47–57. https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/view/37694
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2019). Incarcerated childhood and the politics of unchilding. Cambridge University Press.
Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and the idea of human interiority, 1780–1930. Harvard University Press.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR SPECIAL ISSUES
The Editors of Curriculum Inquiry (CI) invite guest editors who are interested in editing a special issue to submit a proposal. CI is a leading international journal in the field of curriculum studies. It is dedicated to studies of educational experience in schools, communities, families, and other local or transnational settings, using a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. CI brings together the work of both established and emerging scholars from a variety of academic fields and disciplines who theorize and examine curriculum and pedagogy, broadly defined, and whose work promotes conceptual debate and pushes beyond current understandings of educational research, theory, and practice.
The journal invites proposals for special issues that explore and critique contemporary ideas, issues, trends, and problems in education, particularly those relating to curriculum, teaching and learning, teacher education, cultural practice, and educational research and policy. We are interested in special issues that invite authors to tackle cutting edge issues or that bring new insight into some of the perennial questions and issues related to curriculum inquiry broadly defined.
Prospective guest editors are encouraged (but not required) to contact the editor-in-chief with a description of their special issue ideas and request feedback before submitting a full proposal (see contact information below).
The full proposal should include the following:
1. A brief prospectus for the special issue, of roughly 800–1000 words, outlining the purpose, relevance, and importance of the topic for Curriculum Inquiry readers. You may wish to refer to the aims and scope statement of the journal as a guide for what you might address. CI is interested in special issues that address “big questions” and that bring together articles that challenge common understandings of key ideas and issues and that present divergent and even competing perspectives. The prospectus should lay out the rationale for the special issue, outlining the topic, why the topic is important and represents a significant and “cutting edge” area of work in contemporary curriculum theory. You should also describe some of the subtopics that you hope the special issue will address, and perhaps discuss some of the questions that are driving current research, theorizing, and other kinds of work in the field. You may also consider naming some of the diverging perspectives that you hope will be represented in the special issue in some way. Prospective editors are encouraged to set parameters and criteria around particular frameworks or issues, rather than attempting to be all encompassing around a topic.
2. The proposal should indicate whether the prospective guest editor(s) already have a list of authors who will submit articles for the special issue, or whether a “Call for Proposals (or) Papers” will be issued to invite authors (including authors who the guest editors would like to invite specifically) to submit article proposals or articles for consideration in the special issue. If you choose the first, please include a list of authors and abstracts (about 250 words) for each of the articles you would like to consider for the special issue, along with a short bio (about 100 words) for each author. If you choose the second, you should also submit a draft of your call for papers/proposals as well as a list of potential authors who may be encouraged or invited to submit papers/proposals.
3. The proposal should include a brief summary of the prospective guest editors’ previous editorial experience with both academic journals as well as edited book projects and any other publication projects involving substantive editorial work. Submitters should also send a copy of their CVs along with the proposal. CI encourages collaboration between established scholars with ample editorial experience and emerging scholars.
4. The proposal should include a list of six scholars with expertise related to the topic of the special issue, which may include prospective authors.
The editorial team will review all proposals. Prospective guest editors will receive notification within three months of submission regarding the proposal.
If approved, the editorial team will work closely with the guest editors in all stages of the publication process, including peer review and revision of articles. The editorial team reserves the right to make final decisions regarding the publication of any given article. The final decision for publication rests with the editor-in-chief.
Prospective guest editors are encouraged to contact the journal with questions about the proposal review process, or to submit ideas for special issues. Please view our website or email the editorial office at curriculum.inquiry.oise@utoronto.ca for additional information.
Click here to download the proposal requirements as a PDF.
Arlo Kempf (curriculum.inquiry.oise@utoronto.ca)
Editor-in-Chief, Curriculum Inquiry