Discipline of Curriculum Design; Interludes of Resisting Dominant Borders

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the influence of Dr Janet Miller’s decades-long contributions to the field of curriculum and teaching on one public school teacher’s practice. To narrow the scope of that difficult task, the author specifically discusses Dr Miller’s tutelage in encouraging the rejection of the “taken for granted” and working against “normalized, dominant borders.” Miller fostered a learning culture where her doctoral students were urged to “learn to learn,” often asking students—sometimes with exasperated insistence—“yes, but do you have to?” She embodied the kind of educator her theorizing envisioned: one whose teaching was always “situated in culture, in race, in gender, in class, in historical moment” (Miller, 2005, p. xxiv). In so doing, she taught the author to question technocratic, prescribed curricular “solutions” and instead challenged her to lean into the messiness of curriculum, teaching, and learning. This chapter deals with the messiness lies in acknowledging the limitations of the rational, knowable self that supposedly remembers and retells with accuracy and objectivity. Recognizing these limits, Janet reminds students that “with remembering, there is always forgetting” (Miller, 2005, p. 27), and this chapter also acknowledges the inevitable limitations of memory. This chapter concludes with reflections emphasizing separation, segregation, borders, and the multiplicity of experiences, offered as one effort to “remember to resist.”