Walking Away

Refusing and Resisting Reactionary Curriculum Movements

Edited by:
Alexander B. Pratt, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona
Kevin Donley, Georgetown University
Sage Hatch, University of Oregon
Staci L. Tharp, Texas Tech University
Freyca Calderon-Berumen, Pennsylvania State University

A volume in the series: Curriculum and Pedagogy. Editor(s): The Curriculum and Pedagogy Group.

Published 2024

Walking away is both refusal and production (Tuck & Yang, 2014), a seeming paradox taken up in work on fugitivity and marronage (Diouf, 2021; Grant, Woodson, & Dumas, 2021; Harney & Moten, 2013; Hartman, 2007), survivance (Powell, 2002; Sabzalian, 2019; Vizenor, 2008), testimonios (Calderon-Berumen, 2021; Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001), and other forms of critical pedagogy and curriculum. In other words, walking away presumes both the rejection of a form of status quo (walking away from something) and a new direction taken (a walking toward something else). In the context of education, many teachers and researchers have reached that breaking point where/when no more curricular/pedagogic violence can be survived, and it is in that moment that those researchers and teachers actively remove themselves from those systems and assert new courses with new possibilities.

This edited volume is a collection of works chronicling acts of refusal that manifest as walking away. In some cases what is walked away from is the erasure of experience in curriculum while in others it is a fundamentalist religious experience. In still other cases what is walked away from is the carceral nature of school discipline policies. In each case walking away is resistance, refusal, and re/co-producing new possibilities and agencies. What is walked toward is a new curriculum/pedagogy of resistance sometimes within and sometimes without that place

ENDORSEMENTS:
"Walking Away provides a window into what it is for educators to form a new world: Enter Walking Away and walk into..." — Leonard Harris , Purdue University

"Walking away is sure to inspire pre-service educators, practicing teachers, and others to participate in the construction of more just and equitable worlds." — Tristan Gleason, Cal Poly Humbolt

"Ultimately, Walking Away represents the capacious thinking that emerges from the various connections, conversations, and profound contributions of each author." — Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University, Abington Campus

"This important book insists that we, as curriculum scholars, seriously ask ourselves what our roles and responsibilities are as academics, researchers, and educators in these dire times." — Jennifer A. Sandlin, Arizona State University

CONTENTS
Meditation: Leaving, Lee A. McBride III. Historian’s Notes, Jake Burdick. Introduction. Acknowledgments. PART I: RESISTING THROUGH REPRESENTATION. Meditation: Why It Is So Hard to Walk Away, Wayne Au. Meditation: Worrying, Wording, and Worlding, Lisa A Mazzei. Gathering No Moss: Walking Away From the Principalship to Improve Policy and Practice, Erin K West. Walking Away: A Joyful Resistance, Galicia Solon Theresa Blackman. Walking Away From Macro-Institutional Identity Through Curriculum as Activism, Pin-Hsuan Tseng, Ling-yu Chou, and Hung-Chi Chu. A Discussion on How the Morning Announcements Are Harming Black Children, Michael J. Seaberry. Critical american Language Praxis: Rechazar las lo gicas de Global English & afastar-se da hegemonia monolingue, Grupo CaLP. Pain and Paradox: A Diffractive Analysis of Refusal and Resistance in Urban Education, Alexander B. Pratt and Charles Lenoir. PART II: ENGAGING WITH CRITICAL REFUSALS. Meditation: Academia’s Silence and Complicity in the Midst of a Genocide, Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores. Meditation: Gandhi’s Walking Away: Materialisms, Complicities, and the Stuck Places of Curriculum Studies, Erik Malewski. Developing a Confluence of Identity: A Reflexive Ethnography of Reading Literature as Rhetoric, Staci L. Tharp. The Coloniality of Curriculum and the Silencing of Critical Literacies, Erin Boiles and Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores. Willful Refusal: Beyond the Illusory Guise of Diversity Work in the Neoliberal Institution, Alycia Elfreich and Kirsten Robbins. Queer Refusals: Walking Away From Curricular Purities, MaryJohn R. Adkins-Cartee. Dissenting Voices From Within: A Teacher Educator Account, Freyca Calderon-Berumen. Refusing Settler Grammars: Engaging Survivance to Create Possibilities, Sage Hatch. PART III: CREATING SPACES FOR CULTURAL AUTONOMY. Meditation: On Refusing to Stay in a Designated Place, Fikile Nxumalo. Meditation: Walking Away to Collaboratively Create Exceptions, Asilia Franklin-Phipps. Curricul-Arte: Artist Acts of Autohistoria-teorí a Within Borderlands Espacios, Christen Sperry García, Andres Alejandro Rangel, Laia Ivanna Vite, Kim Sandoval, Nathaniel Cano, Michel Flores Tavizón, and Kimberly Grimaldo. Walking Toward Indigenous Pedagogies: Kәnim a Teaching Tool to Enrich All, Rachel L. Cushman. For Us This Is Not New: Deliberate Black Educational Strategies in a Rhetorical Democracy During Jim Crow, Miyoshi Juergensen, Sheryl J. Croft, and Tiffany D. Pogue. Standing In: A Pedagogy Built on Contemplative, Embodied, and Womanists’ Spiritual Practices, Carla Wilson. PART IV: WALKING TOWARD TRANSFORMATION. Meditation: Responsibilities and Liberations: Acts of Fugitivity in Fascism’s Face, Reagan P. Mitchell. Meditation: Tension, Stephanie Masta. A Reflection on Walking Away From an Inauthentic Indigenous Language Curriculum: Implications of Sustaining Linguistic Reclamation in a Rural Hoche Community, Jue Wang. A Reflection on Colonial Classrooms and a Prayer for Messiness, Anushri Rastogi and Manu Sharma. Positionality Stories as Acts of Walking Away: A Critical Pedagogy in Academic Literacies, Brian Sibanda and Dineo Babili. and we might be something else, Samuel Jaye Tanner. About the Authors.