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Letters to the Field: Curriculum Scholars’ Stories for Future Generations encapsulates a generation of scholars who revitalized the field of Curriculum Studies across North America in the mid-1970s, as well as the generations of scholars who immediately followed, all of whom are now themselves senior scholars. Rather than another edited work of reprints or new monographs, this volume seeks to do something special by providing an opportunity for this group of scholars to speak to their field about understandings they believe to be of significance.
Acknowledgments
“These remarkable handwritten and personal letters addressed to curriculum studies provide a living archive of the movement of the field for the past fifty years. Told in the words of curriculum scholars and theorists, the letters highlight the profound link between histories of ideas and curriculum contained in individual and collective study. This unique collection of letters will engage students, teachers, and scholars in enduring questions posed to curriculum ranging from personal significance to the cultural politics of knowledge. The book demonstrates the pressing need to engage revitalizing curriculum in the world today.”
Aparna Mishra Tarc, Associate Professor, York University
“In this exhilarating volume, courageous and invigorating multigenerational curriculum thinkers and cultural workers illuminate their power of refusing oppressive anti-intellectual forces and exercise creative agencies through their innovative modes of expression and representation, which compel authors and readers to enact just and meaningful changes in schools, neighborhoods, communities, spaces, and places with their shared purposes and efforts to make the impossible possible in an increasingly contested and vulnerable world.”
Ming Fang He, Professor, Georgia Southern University
“In Letters to the Field: Curriculum Studies in Our Own Words, we are invited as readers to intimate and deeply personal exchanges of thank-you letters from established scholars in the field of curriculum studies. Each contributor, with over a decade of experience, offers not only their relational reflections on the field but also extends heartfelt gratitude to our community, acknowledging the intellectual, personal, and relational influences that have shaped their work. This long-awaited edited collection blends the aesthetic and emotional alphabetic contours of their ideas into a material form, of hand to pen, and of penning their ideas to paper. What sets this book apart is the decision to forego the standardized, impersonal typeface of most academic texts in favor of a distinctly personal and aesthetic approach. Each chapter is a handwritten and/or typed letter, where the contributors’ unique calligraphy, an extension of their embodied self, tells a different story. This unconventional format challenges readers to engage differently with the text. The often-invisible labor of academic writing becomes visible in the varied strokes of penmanship, from the elegant curves of well-practiced hands to the more hurried, almost frantic marks of those under pressure, provoking some of us to flashback and trace our first penned utterances with the 26 symbols of the Roman alphabet.
Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Professor, University of Ottawa
These letters, much like the field of curriculum studies itself, are shaped by the complex interplay of theory, practice, and personal history. The content of the letters speaks to the heart of curriculum studies. And, each author reflects on their journey, their struggles, contemporary issues, mentors, trauma, witnessing of international horrors, the impacts of a global pandemic, civil unrest, and concomitantly, their love and hopes for the future of the field. The letters often move beyond academic concerns, touching on personal relationships, unlearning, and the unknowable futures we are tasked with imagining otherwise. In turn, this deeply personal mode of life writing praxis offers enriching contemporary perspectives in relation to the very concept of “curriculum” as more than a set of instructional guidelines; it is a lived experience, a relationship, and a continuous negotiation of the messiness of our letters making meaning for ourselves and others. The contributors emphasize how the field of curriculum studies is not just about education as school policy, a lesson plan, or a best practice, but more so about fostering relational connections across time and space, particularly in terms of the broader societal challenges we face today, such as but not limited to, the ongoing global conflicts, truth before reconciliation, and the intergenerational legacies of settler colonialism.
Finally, Letters to the Field serves not only as a scholarly text but also as an artifact of the diverse voices that constitute our collective intellectual community always unfinished and in-the-making. For those of us committed to the ongoing evolution of the field, and our ethical relations with each other and the more-than-human worlds, Letters to the Field stands as both a reminder of where we’ve been and an inspiration for where we might go next together as a community.”
