Seeking critical conversations: A look-in at the Curriculum Inquiry academic journal
Curriculum Inquiry, a leading international journal in the field of curriculum studies for about 60 years, seeks to have critical conversations about curriculum and curriculum studies broadly – as part of the larger umbrella that is education research.
With OISE faculty on the editorial team, Curriculum Inquiry (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 conceived.
“It is a little bit different than teacher education, pedagogy, education policy, and other things that we see under the education umbrella,” says Arlo Kempf, an Associate Professor with CTL and CI editor-in-chief. “It really is under the narrow umbrella of curriculum itself, which has its own subfields and foci. As you may know curriculum studies is the oldest division in the American Educational Research Association.
“Curriculum has a long history of doing its own thing, and we're one of a handful of journals in the North American context – and a couple in Europe – that focus English language work on curriculum, and a critical approach to the field is our entry point.”
CI takes a decidedly more critical approach to attend to knowledges and knowers and work that has historically been frozen out of curriculum studies, says Kempf, who attributes this direction originally to the previous Editor-in Chief, Professor Ruben Gaztambide Fernandez. CI tries to create and sustain a space that is, Kempf thinks, a prominent, well-known publishing context for scholarship that supports contributors and the reading audience.
“We try to take work that doesn't always make it to those traditional curriculum spaces and promote that,” says Kempf, who previously served as CI’s faculty editor.
CI has also fielded a special issue on Palestine and on abolition, among other areas, he says. “So, in that sense, I think we try to promote rather than translate critical work because the people doing the writing can speak for themselves. We try to lift that up and spread the word about that and support it and shape it when we can.”
Black and Indigenous futures in education
This important work of the journal was exemplified during a hybrid gathering of faculty and graduate students earlier this year, where several presentations took place to launch a special issue for Curriculum Inquiry, titled “Black and Indigenous futures in education: Thinking with interdisciplinary rebellious methodologies.”
This Curriculum Inquiry issue contains articles by members of the Afro-Diasporas Futures in Education Collective, which Dr. Fikile Nxumalo, CTL Associate Professor co-founded with Dr. Ligia (Licho) López López (formerly at the University of Melbourne and now at Universidad de Antioquia); funded by the University of Melbourne-University of Toronto Research Partnership Development Fund.
The Collective includes current and former OISE and University of Melbourne graduate students and faculty. Collective members and OISE faculty, Drs. Jennifer Brant and Sameena Eidoo, have articles in the special issue.
Nxumalo described the special issue launch as a lovely gathering, not only through the opportunity to share the work with online and in-person participants, but also because it was a reunion for the Collective who are dispersed across the world. She noted that “the gathering and the special issue were both ways in which a key goal of the Collective was met; to develop a mobile incubator that initiates, sustains, and multiplies transnational dialogues across disciplinary and institutional silos.”
The CI special issue articles emerged from the Collective’s virtual gatherings during the pandemic with artists and scholars who helped them think expansively about Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous methodologies. Nxumalo highlighted a talk by Brown University Professor Kevin Quashie on slowness as Black method alongside his work on Black aliveness as particularly inspiring for the special issue.
“An important question threaded through this beautiful special issue is what can it look like, sound like, and feel like, amidst the urgency of now, to intentionally enact Professor Quashie’s invitations to slowness in curriculum studies?” said Nxumalo. “In different ways, each of the articles have taken up this invitation, including, as Quashie asks us to do, attending to place and space, disrupting disciplinary boundaries in education, and deeply theorizing and reimagining what it means to be human “in the broken and breaking world.”
Dr. Nxumalo who co-edited this Special Issue with Dr. López López, is thankful to Curriculum Inquiry for making space for critical, anti-colonial curriculum studies work in the journal noting that the review process was generative and that the feedback provided by the CI team strengthened the editorial and the collection overall and further deepened alignment with the journal aims.
She expressed particular gratitude to the CI’s journal coordinator, Dr. AV Verhaeghe, for their care and attention “throughout the process of moving the articles through from review to copy editing to publication and then the beautiful work of sharing each article on social media.”