Light in Bleak Times
Reflections on Janet Miller’s Curriculum Theorizing and Praxis
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- Description
- Contents
- About
Light in Bleak Times offers a vivid tribute to the transformative influence of Janet Miller—scholar, teacher, mentor, and visionary in curriculum studies. Across four decades, Miller reshaped how educators think about curriculum, feminism, autobiography, collaboration, and the spaces where theory meets lived experience. In this book several of her former doctoral students reflect on how her work and her way of being continues to shape their inquiries, their teaching, and their lives.
Together, these contributors trace the reach of Miller’s feminist and post foundational curriculum theorizing, illuminating the intellectual provocations, ethical commitments, and pedagogical risks that defined her scholarship. Each chapter engages her ideas in its own distinctive way, yet all participate in the kind of dialogic and relational exchange that Miller herself championed.
In the spirit of what she calls “curriculum communities without consensus,” this book is a living conversation. It revisits Miller’s groundbreaking contributions, extends them across generations, and invites readers into a field imagined as broad, diverse, and multiply connected. Light in Bleak Times celebrates a legacy that continues to inspire educators to think critically, act courageously, and create with others in hopeful, transformative ways.
Chapter 1. Conversations Among the three Editors; Seungho, Mary, Jeana Seungho Moon, Mary Newbery, and Jeana M. Hrepich
- Chapter 2. Janet Miller & Gertrude Stein go for a Walk in the Woods for Four Decades and Return with a Map for their Walk in the Woods; Maya Pindyck
- Chapter 3. The Curriculum Artist: Exploring Janet Miller’s Notions of Curriculum Theory, Pedagogy and Praxis through an Interrogation of her Entanglings; Joyce Maxwell
- Chapter 4. Research-in-the-Making with String Figures; Sujung Um
- Chapter 5. Walk with Rain: An Entangled Journey “in-the-making”; Naoko Akai-Dennis
- Chapter 6. Living “In-the-Making”; Robin Collins
- Chapter 7. “In-The-Making” of Antiracist English Education; Alexa Offenhauer
- Chapter 8. Homage to “Mr. Brucker’s Good Girl”: An Autobiographical Journey to Learn How to Unlearn; Jungah Kim-Kiteishvili
- Chapter 9. "Grappling with the “Good Girl”: Reclaiming the Early Childhood Teacher as Emotional Subject; Emmanuelle N. Fincham
- Chapter 10. Another Impossible Endeavor: Considering Teacher Perception and My Work with Janet Miller; Sarah Perricone
- Chapter 11. Disciplinary Discomfort: A Subaltern Speaks to (from within) Composition; Dorell Thomas
- Chapter 12. Discipline of Curriculum Design: Interludes of Resisting Dominant Borders; Nora Aboali
- Chapter 13. Disrupting the Unified Fixed Self: Utilizing Post-structural Lens on the Interpretations of Muslim American Female Immigrants’ English Educational Experiences; Azlina Abdul Aziz
- Chapter 14. With Your Words, We Thee Love; Lorraine Cella 2005
- Chapter 15. The Flows of Transnationalism, Shifting Identities, and Relationships In-the-Making; Seungho Moon
- Chapter 16. “Private” Lessons in HM327: On Becoming A Reflexive Educator; En-Shu Robin Liao
- Chapter 17. A Definition at Long Last? Evolving Understandings and Positions about “Empathy”; Alicia Lerman
- Chapter 18. Still Unknown; Sara Brock
- Chapter 19. Diffracting the “Mismatch: The 2017 Whitney Biennial, Schutz’s “Open Casket,” and Posthumanist Subjectivity; Mary Newbery
- Epilogue: Light Forever Shining Through Generations of Curriculum Scholars; Ming Fang He
Seungho Moon is Professor of Curriculum Studies at Loyola University Chicago.
Mary Newbery is an adjunct Professor in the School of Education at Quinnipiac University and a school leader at Side by Side Charter School in Connecticut.
Jeana M. Hrepich is an educator with Seattle Public Schools.