Call for Abstracts
PROVOKING CURRICULUM STUDIES
The University of British Columbia
February 20 & 21, 2015
Break out! Break from all safe
comprehensive arrangements
never completely comprehended by
controllers or controlled.
(Margaret Avison)
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
(Mary Oliver)
The Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies and the Faculty of Education at the
University of British Columbia invite you to participate in the 7th Biennial Provoking
Curriculum Studies Conference to be held in Vancouver on February 20 and 21, 2015.
Clearly, 2015 will be a significant year for Curriculum Studies. In addition to Provoking
Curriculum Studies in Vancouver in February, 2015, the International Association for the
Advancement of Curriculum Studies and the Canadian Society for the Study of Education
are both meeting at the University of Ottawa in May, 2015. The 1st Provoking Curriculum
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 return to UBC for the next Provoking
Curriculum Studies Conference, we look forward to engaging 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, we invite educators 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.
We invite diverse kinds of proposals for presentations, performances, and participation.
First, we invite submissions for collaborative encounters. We encourage groups (perhaps
six to twelve participants) to choose a theme, and then collaborate to present on the theme
at the conference. Some groups might present in readers’ theater, visual art, dance,
drama, music, photography, video, and poetry. We encourage creative, interactive, and
imaginative performances. We are inspired by William E. Doll’s (2012) question in
“Complexity and the Culture of Curriculum”: “I ask of those I am privileged to teach,
‘Can you see another way to do/read/interpret what we have just done?’” (p. 27)
Second, we invite submissions for presentations that ask diverse questions about
curriculum studies by engaging with our long traditions of provoking and invoking and
evoking. Let’s embrace William F. 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).
While we invite a wide range of abstracts, we particularly welcome proposals that
promise to provoke curriculum studies, and we plan to organize the conference so there
will be opportunities for lively conversation among colleagues.
Possible words for provoking creative conversations about curriculum studies include:
Aesthetics
Art(s)
Astonishment
Balance
Breath/ing
Care
Cartography
Character
Class
Compassion
Complexity
Contemplation
Creativity
Dance
Dreams
Ecology
Embodiment
Emotion
Epistemology
Ethics
Ethos
Fiction
Foundations
Generativity
Genealogies
Healing
Heart
History
I
Identity
Ideology
Imagination
Inspiration
Interconnections
Joy
Journey
Knowing
Land
Literature
Living
Loving
Meditation
Memory
Métissage
Muses
Music
Multimodality
Nonsense
Ontology
Other
Passion
Performance
Philosophy(ies)
Play
Poetry
Postmodernism
Prayer
Questions
Relations
Race
Rapprochement
Roots
Rules
Sensuousness
Sexuality
Silence
Spirituality
Story-telling
Teaching
Technology
Topography
Tradition
Truth
Urgency
Voice
Wisdom
Wor(l)ds
X
You
Zeal
When submitting a proposal, please, include the following:
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Name & e-mail address for each participant involved in the proposal
Institutional affiliation
Title of the presentation
250-word abstract with a clear explanation of the presentation format
Please, send your proposals by October 15, 2014 to:
Carl Leggo, University of British Columbia, carl.leggo@ubc.ca
Note: The organizing committee has not yet determined the registration fee.
The Organizing Committee currently includes:
Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Peter Grimmett, Rita Irwin, Anita Sinner, Carl Leggo