Janet L. Miller

Working Difference in Education

ABSTRACTWe are two educators who teach in graduate schools of education and who work issues of difference as they intersect with our teaching, writing, and daily lives. In this article we offer a reading of Patricia Williamss The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. This reading uses Williamss text for the purpose of exploring the meanings of “working difference” and “multiple and fluid identities” for educators. Specifically, we understand difference to be fluid and therefore able to be worked strategically against, for example, racist and sexist uses. We argue that Williams provides a much needed, detailed account of how she works the meanings and uses of her “oxymoronic” positionings as black woman, professor, Harvard-educated scholar/lawyer. With her account, Williams shows the work that it takes to resignify racist and sexist uses of such positionings in particular contexts. We suggest that by showing the work of working difference, Williams draws important implications for how tea...

Shifting the Boundaries: Teachers Challenge Contemporary Curriculum Thought

In the summer of 1986, I joined five graduate students in a picnic lunch to celebrate the end of our coursework together. During that extended lunch, we talked about a number of issues that had emerged in our various classes together in curriculum theory and qualitative research. By the close of that afternoon, with the summer sun burning low on our backs, we agreed to continue our conversations in an informal and unofficial way. We have been talking together now for 6 years.1 As we continue our meetings, discussions, and individual as well as dialogue journal writing, I am acutely aware of just how much I have learned from our interactions, reflections, and confrontations with one another. Here, I want to sketch some of those learnings and to discuss how aspects of contemporary curriculum discourses as well as our collaborative inquires have enabled those learnings to occur.