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Light in Bleak Times offers a vivid tribute to the transformative influence of Janet Miller—scholar, teacher, mentor, and visionary in curriculum studies. Across four decades, Miller reshaped how educators think about curriculum, feminism, autobiography, collaboration, and the spaces where theory meets lived experience. In this book several of her former doctoral students reflect on how her work and her way of being continues to shape their inquiries, their teaching, and their lives.
Together, these contributors trace the reach of Miller’s feminist and post foundational curriculum theorizing, illuminating the intellectual provocations, ethical commitments, and pedagogical risks that defined her scholarship. Each chapter engages her ideas in its own distinctive way, yet all participate in the kind of dialogic and relational exchange that Miller herself championed.
In the spirit of what she calls “curriculum communities without consensus,” this book is a living conversation. It revisits Miller’s groundbreaking contributions, extends them across generations, and invites readers into a field imagined as broad, diverse, and multiply connected. Light in Bleak Times celebrates a legacy that continues to inspire educators to think critically, act courageously, and create with others in hopeful, transformative ways.
Seungho Moon is Professor of Curriculum Studies at Loyola University Chicago.
Mary Newbery is an adjunct Professor in the School of Education at Quinnipiac University and a school leader at Side by Side Charter School in Connecticut.
Jeana M. Hrepich is an educator with Seattle Public Schools.
Chapter 1. Conversations Among the three Editors; Seungho, Mary, Jeana Seungho Moon, Mary Newbery, and Jeana M. Hrepich
Chapter 2. Janet Miller & Gertrude Stein go for a Walk in the Woods for Four Decades and Return with a Map for their Walk in the Woods; Maya Pindyck
Chapter 3. The Curriculum Artist: Exploring Janet Miller’s Notions of Curriculum Theory, Pedagogy and Praxis through an Interrogation of her Entanglings; Joyce Maxwell
Chapter 4. Research-in-the-Making with String Figures; Sujung Um
Chapter 5. Walk with Rain: An Entangled Journey “in-the-making”; Naoko Akai-Dennis
Chapter 6. Living “In-the-Making”; Robin Collins
Chapter 7. “In-The-Making” of Antiracist English Education; Alexa Offenhauer
Chapter 8. Homage to “Mr. Brucker’s Good Girl”: An Autobiographical Journey to Learn How to Unlearn; Jungah Kim-Kiteishvili
Chapter 9. "Grappling with the “Good Girl”: Reclaiming the Early Childhood Teacher as Emotional Subject; Emmanuelle N. Fincham
Chapter 10. Another Impossible Endeavor: Considering Teacher Perception and My Work with Janet Miller; Sarah Perricone
Chapter 11. Disciplinary Discomfort: A Subaltern Speaks to (from within) Composition; Dorell Thomas
Chapter 12. Discipline of Curriculum Design: Interludes of Resisting Dominant Borders; Nora Aboali
Chapter 13. Disrupting the Unified Fixed Self: Utilizing Post-structural Lens on the Interpretations of Muslim American Female Immigrants’ English Educational Experiences; Azlina Abdul Aziz
Chapter 14. With Your Words, We Thee Love; Lorraine Cella 2005
Chapter 15. The Flows of Transnationalism, Shifting Identities, and Relationships In-the-Making; Seungho Moon
Chapter 16. “Private” Lessons in HM327: On Becoming A Reflexive Educator; En-Shu Robin Liao
Chapter 17. A Definition at Long Last? Evolving Understandings and Positions about “Empathy”; Alicia Lerman
Chapter 18. Still Unknown; Sara Brock
Chapter 19. Diffracting the “Mismatch: The 2017 Whitney Biennial, Schutz’s “Open Casket,” and Posthumanist Subjectivity; Mary Newbery
Epilogue: Light Forever Shining Through Generations of Curriculum Scholars; Ming Fang He