Theme: "(Re)Negotiating Nostalgia: Building Curriculum Communities Without Consensus"

In her keynote address, “Nostalgia for the Future: Imagining Histories of JCT and Bergamo,” delivered at last year’s 30th Anniversary Bergamo Conference, Professor Janet L. Miller, the founding organizer (with William F. Pinar) of Bergamo Conference and JCT, theorized nostalgia in a more nuanced way that has the potential to allow us to carry our pasts forward in transformative rather than restrictive ways. Traditional understandings of nostalgia (romanticized longings for the way we believe things were) may bind our scholarly communities to repeating stagnant discourses bound by the limitations of these perceived histories. She cautions curriculum scholars to avoid making imperialist nostalgic claims such as declaring the Reconceptualization a victory over the Tyler Rationale. Instead it is nostalgia for the future, what she describes as a “most modest form of nostalgia,” that we must collectively undertake. This year’s Bergamo Conference asks that we engage with our possible futures by pulling apart the slices of these histories and understanding these shifting memories as constantly in-the-making.

Our collective engagement in this memory work cannot lead to a monolithic curriculum field, beholden to what could only be a false collectivity. To this end, at this year’s Bergamo Conference we will continue to work toward creating curriculum communities without consensus. We must dwell in our differences and seek understandings that can only blossom from thoughtful engagement with these tensions. To actively cultivate the Bergamo Conference as a curriculum community without consensus we propose to: avoid temptations to seek resolution to our intellectual disputes; weave different theoretical perspectives together in order to develop new, tentative, partial understandings; and understand ourselves as interconnected, but necessarily independent thinkers engaged in the collective act of constantly remaking conceptions of curriculum.

We invite teachers, students, scholars, theorists, administrators, and cultural workers to join us in this endeavor at the 2010 Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice. Reflecting our commitment to diverse modes of understanding curriculum, this year’s conference features keynotes Therese Quinn, Sandy Grande, and Madeleine R. Grumet, and respondents whose work embodies the spirit of this call to community. We are offering the opportunity for scholars to participate in one of three pre-conference institutes hosted by accomplished scholars that will focus on post-colonial thought in education, feminist poststructural historical research and theories, and activisms in education. A new series of conference sessions titled “Provoking Dialogue(s)” will feature the authors of prominent and influential curriculum studies books with dialoguers who will provide their own take on these texts. The conference will also feature three diverse and dynamic all-conference spotlight sessions, nightly social and cultural events, and professional development opportunities for graduate students.

For more information about the Bergamo Conference, please visit the JCT's website here.