Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

29th Annual Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, October 16-18, 2008

2008 Call for Proposals (PDF version)

Final Conference Schedule (PDF version)

Online proposal submission is now closed. 

Conference Registration

• You may register online.
• Please note: We are unable to honor refund requests after October 1, 2008.
  

Accommodations

• For room reservation information, visit our accommodations page.
• All conference attendees, regardless of whether you are staying at the Bergamo Center, can purchase tickets for meals during the conference.

Location

Bergamo Conference Center Dayton, Ohio October 16-18, 2008
View Map and/or get directions.

Conference Theme

Complications, Connections, and Crossings: Curriculum in Motion

Call for Proposals

The field of education, in general, and curriculum studies, in particular, are currently facing tremendous challenges both externally and internally. The 2008 Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice will confront these challenges by renewing its commitment to complicated conversations, building connections across differences, and encouraging cross-fertilization of ideas to nurture new scholarship, generate fresh meanings, and enable personal and cultural transformation. Embedded in complications, advocating for connections, and calling for crossings, this conference invites you to participate in mobilizing curriculum and educational praxis for interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary creativity and social justice.

Under the external pressures for educational standardization, the internalized expectations for curriculum instrumentalism, and the isolated fragmentations within the field of curriculum, we ask critical questions: How can we move forward beyond such a state of difficulty? Can we passage between and among complex differences in local, national, and international contexts in order to revitalize educational and curriculum possibilities? Are there ways to initiate and sustain dynamic movement across complicated social, cultural, and curriculum networks hosting both interconnection and difference to give birth to new insights and new relationality? To address these issues, we need to engage in critical and polyphonic discussions.

The conference invites theorists/practitioners and practitioners/theorists, including teachers, students, scholars, administrators, cultural workers, from various perspectives and all walks of life, to join in dialogical and collaborative encounters. Committed to bringing different and diverse discourses into public conversations, the conference welcomes all viewpoints in forming a shared community of dissensus. Promoting new ideas in emergence, disseminating voices from the margin, and providing opportunities for mentoring graduate students, the conference’s new leadership team, chaired by Adam Howard, has made some changes to this year’s conference by inviting keynote speakers, organizing cultural and artistic performances, and reducing conference fees.

Keynote Speakers

Cameron McCarthy is Communications Scholar and University Scholar in theDepartment of Educational Policy Studies and the Institute of CommunicationResearch at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among the mostprominent postcolonial theorists of education today, McCarthy’s work has beengerminal to our understanding of the complex connections between race and thecurriculum. He is the author or editor of several books including The Uses of Culture (Routledge) and Race Identity and Representation in Education (Routledge).

Patti Lather is Professor of Education at The Ohio State University. Among her books are Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS (Westview Press) and Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward A Double(d) Science (SUNY Press). For over twenty years, Lather has been at the forefront of scholars drawing new and complex connections between critical theory, ethnography, and activism in education.

Kevin Kumashiro is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has published several books including Troubling Education (RoutledgeFalmer) and Against Common Sense (Routledge). At the forefront of a new generation of critical pedagogues, he is among the prominent and influential multiculturalists in education today.

Performances

The conference plans to feature a show of photography exhibit on Cuban culture by Dennie Eagleson, a professor of photography at Antioch College. The exhibition is titled “Cuba: Siempre Viva,” which has been touring nationally. It will also host a one act play about the cultural and educational significance of Hip Hop, performed by a Miami University group, Soul Survivors: An Urban Theater Collective.

Graduate Student Mentoring

The conference will offer exciting opportunities for promoting graduate students’ intellectual and professional growth in a stimulating and supportive community. There will be opportunities at the conference for graduate students to work with senior scholars through intellectual exchanges during paper sessions and in a how-to-publish session offered by invited journal editors. Graduate students will be invited to participate in formal and informal discussions to plan ongoing mentoring initiatives.

Proposal Submission

Proposal submission period is closed.

Proposals that do not directly address the conference theme are also encouraged.

Questions?

contact Adam Howard, Conference Chair

email: conference (at) jctonline.org

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