JCT Online

Friends,

Thank you so much for your tremendous personal and professional support of The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing and the Bergamo Conference this past year. We started off with such great energy hosting our first conference as a team with you in Fall of 2019. It was a tremendous meeting, one of the best professional meetings I have ever been involved with. We celebrated our 40th anniversary, had a strong turnout of over 150 registrants, and heard stimulating and challenging papers and presentations along with powerful keynote speeches.

In 2019, building on the steady and great work of the previous editors, Rob Helfenbein and Gabe Huddleston, we published 5 journal issues and we worked through 2020 to publish 4 more outstanding issues of the journal. This required tremendous teamwork and support. We are especially grateful to Kelly Waldrop for her outstanding leadership as managing editor and for the section editors and reviewers who kept the work moving.  

Amid the challenges brought on by the pandemic and social upheaval, the cancellation of the 2020 meeting at Bergamo in October had a great impact on our community. We all missed our usual communications about the conference and coming together. The cancellation of the conference was further amplified as we faced challenges with getting reviews completed in a timely manner resulting in some manuscripts not moving as quickly as they should have through the review system. The strain on institutional resources this year has increased the workload for many and the mental stress of the year has affected us all in profound ways. Simply put, these factors impacted the time and energy many of our reviewers and staff were able to sustain for the work. As we move into the new year, we are working as hard and as quickly as we can to regroup and maintain an efficient and timely review process for manuscript submissions.

And no matter what, we will have a meeting in October of 2021! We hope it is in person in Dayton, under the theme “Curriculum as Luminous” as we had planned to execute last Fall. Even if we can’t meet in-person, we will hold a virtual meeting and do our best to capture the excitement and excellence of our Bergamo meetings. In the meantime, Cynthia Sanders, our conference program chair, and Kristan Barczak, our co-conference program chair, are working on and planning several Facebook Live and Podcast special programs for the coming year. Please look for announcements about these events in late January and plan to participate. We appreciate those of you who have made suggestions and stayed in touch.  Everyone’s effort is necessary to keep the work going. As we look forward to a new year, we ask you to consider investing in our community by volunteering to review manuscripts, writing and submitting your own work, and making plans to join us in 2021 for several new online programs and the annual meeting in October.

Be well and make 2021 a great year with us.  We really appreciate the opportunity to serve the field and look forward to many connections with you in the new year.

Best Regards, 

Tom Poetter, JCT Editor

Our latest Special Issue: The Orders of Cultural Production of JCT is ready for you to review and find inspiration in, so check it out https://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct

We also accept new manuscript submissions at this same link.

Dear Friends of the Bergamo Conference and JCT,

As you know, the Executive Board Members of the Foundation for Curriculum Theory and the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT) have been assessing the viability of holding the 2020 JCT Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice this October 2020. Health officials continue to stress the importance of social distancing practices, and that, coupled with the possibility that a second wave of the virus may occur in the Fall in tandem with the annual flu season, has led us to the unfortunate decision to cancel the JCT Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice for Fall 2020.

The possibility of another stay at home measure in Southwest Ohio in the Fall makes it tenuous at best that we would be able to hold our meeting. Cancellation later in the Summer or early Fall is not financially sound for JCT as we would then have incurred the costs for developing and deploying the submissions and registration portals and would have to sign a contract for the Bergamo Center space. We are also aware of the financial setbacks for many of you as your institutions and schools and community organizations make decisions about staffing and travel budgets in light of the pandemic. Should we experience a low turnout this year, it would be difficult to absorb the cost of the meeting, and it would not constitute good stewardship of the organization’s financial base.

However, we ask our longtime and new potential participants to engage in a year-long renewal of our shared commitment to the curriculum field by contributing to the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing with your talent and time. First, we want to review more manuscripts from you.  Let’s all commit to writing a piece for JCT to review this year. Send us something to read, ponder, work on, and share if at all possible.  Second, the journal is in need of enthusiastic and committed manuscript reviewers. Please join us in becoming a part of the team that continues making our journal cutting edge and a “must read”  in the field. Those who wish to volunteer to be reviewers can do so by logging in to their account (or by creating a new one!) on the JCT Journal page (https://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct), clicking on “My Profile” on the right hand side of the page, selecting the “Reviewer” box under the “Roles” heading, filling out the “reviewing interests” box, and clicking “save” at the bottom of the page.

Finally, let’s plan to have a tremendous 41st meeting with some great speakers and a record crowd of 200 at our next conference on October 7-9, 2021!  Please join us on the journey to 2021.  Many thanks for your understanding and for your commitment to the work at hand.

Many best regards, and with regret,

JCT Executive Leadership Team

Tom Poetter, President, Foundation for Curriculum Theory and Editor, JCT

Denise Baszile, Foundation Vice President/Treasurer and Associate Editor

Brian Schultz, Foundation Secretary and Associate Editor

Kelly Waldrop, Managing Editor, JCT

Cindy Sanders, Conference Program Chair

Call for Abstracts for a special issue of the JCT.

The Dreamwork of Transformation in Teacher Education.