AERA DIV B BOOK AWARD LETTER OF REC -- João Paraskeva\'s Curriculum Epistemicides

College of Education Post Office Box 8134 Statesboro, Georgia 30460-8134 Telephone (912) 478-5203 Fax (912) 478-0026

Department of Teaching and Learning

December 19th, 2016 Re: AERA Division B’s Book Award for João Paraskeva’s Curriculum Epistemicides Dear Committee Members of the AERA Division B Book Award, I write this letter to nominate Dr. João Paraskeva’s Curriculum Epistemicides: Towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory for the AERA Division B Book Award for 2017. I recommend Dr. Paraskeva’s book for the following reasons: Curriculum Epistemicides (1) represents the culmination of Dr. Paraskeva’s trajectory of curriculum scholarship that combines curriculum history and theory, (2) introduces copious new racial epistemological-cognitive content to the field, and (3) suggests a key new division of labor for a field that is currently saturated in ornate “new” cultural studies’ discourses and refinements. First, I recommend Dr. Paraskeva’s Curriculum Epistemicides because it culminates a decolonizing line of research with more than a decade of effort. The first time I saw Dr. Paraskeva present his research was at the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (AAACS) and the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) annual conferences held in San Diego in 2009. In the AAACS presentation, Dr. Paraskeva laid out a bold plan for curriculum studies research that developed Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notions of and ecology of knowledge and curriculum epistemicides that was strikingly revolutionary, and since that time, I have followed the development of his work. Dr. Paraskeva’s trajectory of intellectual production, in both sole authored and edited books, culminates in his most recent book Curriculum Epistemicides, which I nominate for the award. In his first book Conflicts in Curriculum Theory, Dr. Paraskeva establishes himself as the most ambitious curriculum historian since Herbert Kliebard or William Schubert. In his subsequent edited books Curriculum: Decanonizing the Field and The Curriculum: Whose Internationalization?, he demonstrates his ability to lead a group of scholars – both emerging and senior scholars – toward a new field that goes beyond Europeanized, Anglophone, UnitedStatesian1, and whitened discourses and refinements toward an historicized field struggling to come to grips with its past of racialized exclusion and epistemological ignorance. Finally, in Curriculum Epistemicides discussed here, Paraskeva launches a tour de force of historical and contemporary social science and curriculum theory in advancing several new concepts including itinerant curriculum theory, curriculum epistemicides, abyssal thinking, and ecology of knowledges – all of which advance the field toward a new division of labor that I will return to in the final paragraph. Second, besides culminating more than a decade of scholarship, Dr. Paraskeva introduces copious historicized racialepistemological content to curriculum studies that changes the field. For too long, critical, phenomenological, poststructuralist, cultural studies, multicultural and even U.S.-centered race-based perspectives, have advanced a Europeanized, Anglophone, UnitedStatesian, and predominantly whitened field with little attention to epistemologicalcognitive traditions from the Global South. Within this configuration, UnitedStatesian readings and traditions have “led the way” in curriculum. Dr. Paraskeva’s intellectual production, in driving not a new discourse or discursive refinement, instead includes and understands the contributions of previous bureaucratic models and cultural studies discourses in curriculum. But in recognizing historical contributions of the field, Dr. Paraskeva seeks to push the field toward a greater encounter with racialized epistemological-cognitive traditions grounded in the African and Latin American Global South, with a key historicized focus on the Global South inside the U.S. Such an approach provides for an alter-critical cosmopolitan and decolonizing work that is required to combat globalizing and colonizing neoliberalism in the present. 1

In the present in which historical colonies and coloniality are fundamental for understanding the word and the world, the term UnitedStatesian is a term I find critically necessary in curriculum and other human science discussions. UnitedStatesian, as a term, refers to an invisible institutionalized educational blindness and associated intellectual habits that reorganize and privilege predominantly Europeanized, Anglophone, whitened, and U.S.-based professional organizations as “the field” and figure Englishspeaking, whitened, U.S. professors unproblematically as field “leaders.” The term UnitedStatesian is important for curriculum and other human science in what it seeks to make visible: the possibility of a decolonizing and transcontinental critical dialogue on georegional epistemological-cognitive traditions and activism, for example, in Latin American, Caribbean, Asian, or African historical, educational, and cultural archives. Decolonizing and transcontinental dialogue is a key feature of Dr. Paraskeva’s work that problematizes curriculum’s UnitedStatesian past.

College of Education Post Office Box 8134 Statesboro, Georgia 30460-8134 Telephone (912) 478-5203 Fax (912) 478-0026

Department of Teaching and Learning

Paraskeva’s work, in advancing African traditions, draws and recognizes key epistemological-cognitive traditions that feature Chinua Achebe, Kwame Appiah, Michael Abrams, Amical Cabral and others, and in advancing Latin American traditions, Paraskeva provides close readings of Bartolomé de las Casas, José Martí, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and others. This is all new ground for a predominately Europeanized, Anglophone, UnitedStatesian, and whitened field, so I challenge the AERA Division B Book Award Committee to press themselves here, and to veer away from the usual Anglophone and Europeanized cultural studies habits of mind that unconsciously predominate the field. Will the Committee be able to recognize Dr. Paraskeva’s decolonizing move that is already well underway in the field? I hope so, not only for the legitimacy of the field but also for the “international,” “intercultural,” or “multicultural” elements of curriculum studies scholarship which – through promising in some respects – have till now have demonstrated a strong tendency toward colonizing knowledge practices. Third, and continuing this note on challenging the field, I argue that Dr. Parakeva’s work merits the award because it provides an example of a radically different kind of decolonizing and transcontinental scholarship than the field is used to, and in doing so, it suggests a new division of labor. In working through Global South racialized epistemologicalcognitive traditions with an understanding of the South’s co-presence in the Global North, Dr. Paraskeva begins to set up a new division of labor for the curriculum that moves beyond the present and often obsequious relationship that exists between Europeanized, Anglophone, UnitedStatesian, and whitened cultural studies and the field of curriculum studies. Manifested by the transmissive intellectual habits of the U.S. field that regularly believes that U.S. curriculum studies invented and has continually “expanded” the field through its Reconceptualization, Dr. Paraskeva demonstrates that the U.S. has no singular lock on traditions of educational and cultural criticism inherently part of curriculum. Additionally, Dr. Paraskeva begins to suggest the necessary understandings of the Global South in the Global North to advance exchanges in a broader decolonizing and transcontinental educational movement perhaps best articulated in epistemological theory and practice today not in curriculum studies but rather in Chican@ feminist research epistemology by Dolores Delgado Bernal and her colleagues’ uses of testimonio. Finally, and most importantly, Dr. Paraskeva requires a vast reorganization of the curriculum archive that recognizes various decolonizing and transcontinental traditions of cultural and educational criticism heretofore ignored, eclipsed, or variously occluded. Dr. Paraskeva’s work asks scholars located in the Global South not how do you read and interpret the U.S. field? How can you expand the U.S. field? Both of those questions predominate existing understandings of the U.S.-based curriculum field’s internationalization and continued colonizing practices. Rather, Dr. Paraskeva’s work requires the U.S.-field to actually engage, collaborate, and read Global South racialized epistemological-cognitive traditions to be in authentic critical dialogue rather than the typical transmissive habit of “big name” U.S.-based scholars that provide state-of-the-field compendiums for transmission to “other nations” as if traditions of cultural and educational criticism were predominantly the property of Europeanized, Anglophone, UnitedStatesian, and whitened intellectual habits from the get go. In writing this recommendation, I ask the Committee to take a bold and different step with the field – one that challenges the way the field has done business. This is a step that looks to take the needed decolonizing direction required for renovation in the present moment. Sincerely,

James C. Jupp,

Director M.Ed. in Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students Associate Professor of Curriculum and Pedagogy Department of Teaching and Learning Georgia Southern University AAACS Program & Conference Committee, C&P Governing Council JAAACS Editor, JCP Associate Editor, NYARJ Associate Editor Educational Borderlands, Section Editor AERA Division B Historian & Communications Officer

College of Education Post Office Box 8134 Statesboro, Georgia 30460-8134 Telephone (912) 478-5203 Fax (912) 478-0026

Department of Teaching and Learning

Bio James C. Jupp works in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Georgia Southern University. He worked in rural and inner-city Title I settings for eighteen years before accepting a position working with teachers, administrators, and researchers at the university level. A public school teacher in diverse rural poor and innercity Title I schools, his first line of research focuses on White teachers’ understandings of race, class, language, and difference pedagogy in teaching across cultural and racial difference. Drawing on his experiences as teacher and researcher, he is currently the Lead Editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies on “Second-wave White Teacher Identity Studies,” and he recently published a review of literature on the same theme in Review of Educational Research, the top-ranked journal in education research by impact factor in 2015. Additionally, drawing on his experiences living and studying in Spanish language traditions in Mexico and Texas, his second line of research develops decolonizing and transcontinental in education with an emphasis on Latin@ curriculum targeted at informing education in Latin@ serving institutions, teacher education programs, and preservice and professional teacher education. Overall, Jupp has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles in a variety of journals including the Review of Educational Research, Curriculum Inquiry, Gender and Education, International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education, Multicultural Perspectives, Urban Education, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, the English Journal, and Multicultural Review. His second book, Becoming Teachers of Inner-city Students, was published on Sense Publishers in 2013.