In concert with special issue editors Morna McDermott McNulty and Chris Osmond, I am pleased to announce the publication of the final 2019 issue of JCT, which is entitled “Curriculum of the Monstrous.” The work on this special issue began with a 2018 Bergamo panel on the curricular richness to be found in all things monster, which was organized by Morna and by which I became fascinated or maybe bewitched is a better term. Morna and I began at that conference to discuss the possibility of turning the work into a special issue and were pleased to win Tom Poetter’s approval and Chris Osmond’s agreement to come on board as Morna’s co-editor. The issue focuses on the question of what it means to be a monster and, as a result, what monsters have to teach us about what it means to be human. In the issue, you can find discussions of the wealth of curricular thought that can be derived from examining works of popular culture, from the present and extending back to the origins of the Western Gothic (see separate essays by Janiki, O’Hara, Waldrop, Kelley, and Helfenbein), conceptions of how we may use the monstrous to forge new ground in our understanding of currere (see essays by McDermott McNulty and Huddleston), and unique explorations of what it means to learn and to teach (see essays by Osmond and Huddleston). We had a lot of fun putting this issue together, and I think that enthusiasm comes through in the writing, making the issue an engaging entry into the literature of modern curriculum thought. I hope that its readers may find it to be useful in helping them to consider all of the things we may learn from that which goes bump in the night.
-Respectfully submitted, Kelly Waldrop, Managing Editor JCT