On February 20 and 21, 2015, the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies hosted the 7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference at UBC.
The 1st Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference took place at UBC in 2003. That first conference was dedicated to Ted Aoki, whose life and work continue to inspire us. As we returned to UBC for the 7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference, we engaged in further adventures and challenges of learning how to live well and wisely in the world. Acknowledging that curriculum studies are always plural and polyphonic, the Provoking Studies Conferences are always organized in order to provide opportunities for scholars to gather and discuss creative and critical approaches to curriculum studies. In the call for papers for the 7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference, participants were encouraged to provoke curriculum studies by attending to the multiple denotations of provoke: to stimulate, arouse, elicit, induce, excite, kindle, generate, instigate, goad, prick, sting, prod, infuriate, madden, ruffle, stir, and inflame. As the following found poem composed of a random selection of titles from the program indicates, participants enthusiastically responded to the call to provoke curriculum studies:
7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference
(found poem)
Sounding Curriculum Studies: Encountering, Echoing, and Evoking the Aokian Way
Provoking the (Not so?) Hidden Curriculum of Busy with a Feminist Ethic of JOY
Finding the ‘Write’ Balance: Our Journey Towards Becoming Seriously Creative
Older Adults Provoking the World: Life Writing, Life Reading, Life Weaving
Echos from the Hill: Gaza, Gaza, Don’t You Cry! Palestine Will Never Die!
A Pedagogy of Rhythm: Patterns of Comfort in the Early Primary Grades
Confucius, Conflict and Craft: In Conversation about Teacher Judgment
Changing Places: Teaching Stories In and Out of Dadaab Refugee Camp
Liminal Lingerings of Love: Auto/Biography and Life-Writing in Place
Provoking Self in the Face of the Other: A Duoethnographic Approach
Passing from Darkness into Light: A Daughter’s Journey of Mourning
Suite: Etude towards Re-imagining and Provoking Poetic Curriculum
Eros, Aesthetics And Education: Intersections of Life and Learning
“Let’s Talk about Sex (and Blogs)”: New Spaces, New Curriculum?
Provoking Pedagogies of Discomfort through Postcolonial Texts
Sensing Curriculum: Provoking the Sensuousness of Knowing
Haunted by ‘Real Life’: Art, Fashion and the Hungering Body
(Im)Potentiality and Play: Desacralizing Teacher Education
Embodying Microorganisms: Science through Guided Play
Mentoring Music Teachers: An Autoethnographic Duet
Resonances-Dissonances: The Subject is Indigenous
Murmurations: Curriculum Conversations in Motion
Storytelling in the Ecological Heart of Curriculum
Evoking Childhood in Teachers’ Memory Spaces
Métissage, Mouse Woman and Media Education
Embodying Wellness: A Four-Fold Encounter
Seeking Mindfulness across Time and Space
Journeying from the Head to the Heart
The Doing and Un-doing of a Lecture
A ‘Between’: Living in the Liminal
TechnoTheoCurriculum
Cooking up a Storm!
In the characteristic way of the Provoking Curriculum Studies Conferences, the 7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference provided singular opportunities for scholars from many universities and disciplines in education to engage in dialogue that will significantly shape the future of curriculum studies. Canadian scholars are the world leaders in curriculum studies informed by arts-based research, narrative inquiry, poetic inquiry, and life writing. The 7th Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference contributed significantly to sustaining this international role of scholarly leadership. The conference organizing committee (Carl Leggo, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Peter Grimmett, Rita Irwin, Anita Sinner, and Nané Jordan) received over 100 submissions from professors and graduate students across Canada and the United States. More than 200 scholars participated in the conference.
On Friday evening, February 20, we honoured a circle of ten Canadian curriculum scholars: Terry Carson, Cynthia Chambers, Bill Doll, Peter Grimmett, Rita Irwin, David Jardine, Ingrid Johnston, Karen Meyer, Antoinette Oberg, and Bill Pinar. In this gathering of eminent curriculum scholars we celebrated past accomplishments and generated new directions for the future, as we embraced Bill Pinar’s (2011) invitation in The Character of Curriculum Studies: “Perhaps we can allow ourselves to go into temporary exile, to undergo estrangement from what is familiar and everyday and enter a third space, neither home nor abroad, but in-between, a liminal or third space…” (p. 76). The evening was a joyful celebration of Canadian curriculum scholars as we recounted stories, accomplishments, and hopes. Will anyone ever forget the night that Antoinette Oberg danced a tango for Bill Doll?!
While the 7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference honoured the significant accomplishments of a circle of influential and generous mentors whose work will continue to shape and inform the future of curriculum studies, it was also noted by a number of senior curriculum scholars that the future of curriculum studies is bright and hopeful with the work of new curriculum scholars. Presentations at the conference were characterized by creativity, innovation, courage, wisdom, and conviction. New curriculum scholars are energetically taking up the work of continuing to reconceptualize curriculum studies with a focus on social justice and critical pedagogy, the individual subject in the cosmopolitan world, the ecology of all sentient and insentient beings, the wisdom of Indigenous traditions, and the centrality of the arts in all our research.
At the closing gathering on February 21, Robert Christopher Nellis, the Co-President of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, presented the following reflection:
The first Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference I had the pleasure to attend was also the first conference to which I had the opportunity to travel, and it was to Victoria in 2005. There was a lot of excitement within my Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta among the graduate students and faculty about coming to the conference—that it would be a place for much interesting, exciting, and innovative work and a space for conversation and collaboration not exactly like any other upon the landscape in Canada. As I recall, that year, the organizing committee had brilliantly offered the idea that within the program would only be listed the titles of papers and not the authors—a move to democratize and level the field of people’s decisions to attend sessions. I believe this provocative gesture remains very fondly remembered!
So, I arrived to the conference and felt simultaneously thrilled, terrified, and strangely welcome. At that time, it felt like a kind of coming home—admittedly a home that predated my dwelling within it.
Coming here to UBC for this most lovely PCS conference also feels like a rich and resonant coming home. The honoring of collegial elders and the open, generous conversation among all feels that way.
You know, I was at a conference a few years ago and was chatting with a very senior colleague and former professor of mine. Some people nearby saw each other and embraced in a warm hug. My colleague turned to me and lamented, “People seem so much nicer to each other when they’re at conferences.”
I’ve always remembered that. I seem to recall “conference”, or to confer, coming from the Latin conferre, to bring together. I don’t know that the term necessarily requires a bringing together from afar, but a bringing together nonetheless.
We come together here either geographically or socially, presumably from a space otherwise than that to which we arrive—we come to this place presumably otherwise than home; we come to a place that, through risk, sharing, and generosity, can become a home.
Pico Iyer, in travel books such as Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map, and Global Soul, writes of his own secular, erudite, and frequently hilarious experiences and observations traveling. His recent book The Art of Stillness seems to be a complementary waypoint along that journey. Through his encounters with Leonard Cohen, Matthieu Ricard, and others, he presents one writer’s appreciation for stillness in the frequently frenetic pace of traveling and movement. Of course, Iyer doesn’t claim to have discovered the virtue of this notion by any means, but really shares a story of his encounter within its horizon. He cultivates a notion of dwelling in a space perhaps richer and deeper than the everyday but not so different from it either—I guess as a kind of counterpoint to a presumably centrific sense of somewhere and its impossible dialectic tension with elsewhere, or maybe a kind of rethinking of the order of where?
As we conclude together these lovely few days, it may be that such experiences, memories, and conversations will remain for a time unrevisited—until two years from now at our next PCS, when we gather once again.
I’m looking forward to that…
Also, at the closing gathering for the 7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference, the organizing committee happily announced that the 8th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference will take place at McGill University under the leadership of incoming Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies Co-president Teresa Strong-Wilson.
We are grateful for the opportunity to gather and provoke curriculum studies. We offer hearty thanks to everyone who attended and presented at the conference. And we enthusiastically thank the co-hosts of the conference: the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (under the leadership of the Co-presidents, Erika Hasebe-Ludt and Rob Nellis) and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC (under the leadership of the Head, Peter Grimmett and the Deputy Head, Samson Nashon). Much of the success of the conference is due to the organizational skills and tireless commitment of the staff and volunteers of the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. The volunteers are all graduate students in the Department, and they wore their blue t-shirts with eager smiles as they guided conference participants. We offer our heartfelt thanks to the remarkable conference organizing team in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy: Saroj Chand, Kirsty Robbins, Robert Hapke, Scott Cartmill, and Nhi Dang. They are the “dream team” of conference organizers! Finally, we wish to thank Darlene St. Georges for her provocative and evocative art and poetry which inspirit the eloquent and inviting program that Kirsty Robbins designed.
Mary Oliver asks in the title of a wonderful poem, “Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?” May the dance never end. Instead may the dance continue in circles of conversation without end, as recommended in Carl Leggo’s poem dedicated to David Jardine:
Long Lines of Words
(for David Jardine)
like the breath of last autumn’s resigned sigh
nothing is forgotten, only stored
stories without beginning or ending,
we turn in an eternal return, a Mobius strip
but finding the lightness of being unbearable
with the abiding hope that we can anchor our hearts
in an elliptical orbit that always keeps us
tugging us with other lines we cannot see,
that can light the way or incinerate this poem
in the marrow of bones with no map
but never ceasing in the circles of conversation
might be sitting beside the fire with a cup of tea
Peter Grimmett, Rita Irwin, Anita Sinner, & Nané Jordan