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COPYRIGHT 2005 Caddo Gap Press
When we ask another for recognition for ourselves, we are not
asking for that other to see us as we are, as we have always been, as we were prior to the encounter. Rather, in the asking, we are already becoming something new, since we are avowing a connection with the other, a need and desire for acknowledgment by the other, without which we could not be. This means that recognition does not freeze us in our place, our position, our various locations, but rather compels us to move beyond what we have been and to encounter a new possibility for collective exchange.
--Judith Butler, "Transformative Encounters"
The 25th Anniversary of the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice took place at the Bergamo Conference Center of the University of Dayton, Ohio, from October 21 through 24, 2004. As one of those who participated in the founding of both the conference and its journal, JCT: The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, I attended that anniversary conference--but I have to admit, not without some nervousness as well as some perhaps more understandable anticipation. I felt that the gathering itself could not help but become a site of encounter, of a "need and desire for acknowledgment by the other," for the Bergamo Conference in years past seemed to function as just such a site for a number of people engaged in the work of reconceptualizing US curriculum studies.
This 25th anniversary celebration was reuniting many of us who began our curriculum studies work together even before "Bergamo" became the designated namesake for this conference, which has been officially sponsored by JCT since 1979. (1) And so it seemed possible to me that this reunion also might function metaphorically as a site wherein long-term participants in the field of American curriculum studies might also be asking yet again for "recognition" of that very field, knowing that, in the very asking, the field itself, as well as its participants, must become something new. As I traveled to the conference, I felt nervous about prospects and possible manifestations of yet again "becoming something new," on both an individual and a collective level. Professionally, I had reasons for hoping that "becoming something new" might include focusing attention on implications of the US field's current move into international arenas of curriculum inquiry, theorizing, and practice. Personally--well, I just couldn't say yet.
Many of us at this anniversary celebration relished our re-connections as well as reminiscences about important work put forth during Bergamo conferences gone by, work that contributed to the reconceptualization of the American curriculum field. (2) As I greeted long-term friends and colleagues, I realized that I indeed was "avowing a connection" and thus asking for acknowledgment by these others--but asking for recognition, as Butler (2001b, 2004) constructs it, that does not "freeze me in my place" within the reconceptualization of curriculum studies and that compels me to "move beyond what I have been" so as to encounter a "new possibility for collective exchange."
And for some of us, I think that the 25th Anniversary Bergamo Conference did gesture toward possibilities that could move us as a field beyond "what we have always been" so that, together, "... we can re-create a counter educational culture that is curriculum studies" (Pinar, 2004b, p. 8). But following the conclusion of the conference, I wanted to further examine my anticipatory nervousness about this gathering--which I now think had to do, in part, with my worries about lapsing either into insulated nostalgia and desire to re-create exactly the exhilarating times during which we were able to accomplish a reconceptualization of the field, or into despair about current conditions in US education, in general, that appear to un-do much of what a reconceptualized curriculum field had championed. I thought that my either- or worries, if indeed manifested, could mitigate against creative and expansive curriculum theorizing and practices--against new possibilities for collective and generative exchange, if you will, not only with and among US-centered curricularists but also with and among curriculum scholars and practitioners world-wide.
Indeed, those of us who live and teach in the US are working in historical moments and contexts that differ greatly from those that framed the reconceptualization of the curriculum field during the 1970s and early 1980s. The US field, its conditions, and its contemporary constructions are not and cannot ever be "the same" as during the reconceptualist movement. In particular, current and volatile worldly events, including the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the most recent and ongoing war in Iraq, technological change and structural and material inequities based on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, national and religious identities in an age of globalization, now compel us to consider how the US curriculum field and its conceptions of scholarship, service, theory and practice both contribute to and attempt to disrupt Western and especially US-centric versions of knowledge and its constructions world-wide.
"So," I thought during my travel to the conference, "obviously we can't 'do' the reconceptualization in the same ways again, and we certainly can't expect one another to 'be' in the US curriculum field as we always have been." But, during the 25th Anniversary Bergamo Conference, none of my anticipatory worries were enacted. I didn't hear anyone sink into nostalgia for an idealized "reconceptualist" past that "only" had to attend to ways in which to move from a behaviorally and managerially oriented field to phenomenological and hermeneutical modes of "understanding" curriculum. And I didn't hear any of us claim (total) despair over current federal legislation and professional accreditation mandates that in effect deny educators any chances to create new possibilities for collective exchange among students and colleagues. Instead, in small informal clusters of conversation as well as in large conference sessions, many defiantly and generatively situated our field's future as necessarily located in both local and international conceptions and enactments of curriculum. Many thought we could be necessarily attending to deficits and distortions in our current federal education mandates by also addressing ways in which we might, as a field, encounter new possibilities for collective exchange. I thus departed the anniversary Bergamo Conference thinking that just as I "ask for recognition" that does not "freeze me in my place," so too are members of the US curriculum field acknowledging our collective need for "recognition" that does not freeze the field or its others in prescribed, isolated, hierarchical, impositional or deficit constructions, functions, or relationships.
The discussions at the Bergamo Conference thus buoyed my conviction that, as members of a US field in constant and often contentious flux, we need to create new possibilities for collective exchange in both US and international arenas of curriculum studies, possibilities that recognize both our involvement and our implicated status in contemporary worldly events and times. The challenge is to create such possibilities worldwide without replicating the current US administration's apparent determination to control (despite vigorous objections by numbers of US citizens as well as citizens across the globe) national as well as international...
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