This year’s AERA conference theme, “Accepting Educational Responsibility,” calls on education scholars, practitioners, and policy makers across education contexts to accept greater responsibility for social problems. From the inadequate preparation of teachers to work with culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse populations, to the lack of knowledge and action by professionals and leaders to work against injustice, educators in pk-12 schooling and higher education are asked to acknowledge our responsibility in the reproduction of social and educational inequities. This is despite schooling conditions that constrain caring and justice-driven teaching and curriculum. Moreover, education scholars are also asked to think about how to make our findings actionable to address sites of symbolic and material violence in a range of educational contexts, both in and out of school.

The Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies (CICCS) SIG builds on this year’s conference theme by considering collective and systemic questions of responsibility. We ask participants to think about what it looks like to shift the onus of responsibility from the individual to systems of oppression. For example, schooling structures, pedagogy, and curriculum are heavily governed by high-stakes accountability, standardization, and bureaucracy. Such models and practices of efficiency foster impersonal schooling and classroom experiences that make it difficult for educators to be accountable to historically marginalized students and communities. In this sense, educational responsibility is happening, however this responsibility may be to constituencies in power and bureaucratic processes, rather than to people (students, teachers, parents), communities, and social well-being. So, after acknowledging systemic oppression, what does it look like when educators and researchers do take on educational responsibility in ways that address injustice and social inequities? What does it look like when educators and researchers take on responsibility to the people, communities, and social well-being? We also ask: how can education systems be held accountable to support educators and researchers who work against the grain? Additionally, we posit these questions with cultural studies and curriculum studies critical frames in mind and ask submitting scholars to do the same in submissions that respond to them.

• Related questions to address in our SIG presentations include:
• What counts as educational responsibility? How is it defined and by whom?
• What gets in the way of our efforts to be responsible to and with others?
• If there’s a lack of accepting educational responsibility, who or what is lacking responsibility and why?
• What does it look like to take on responsibility in a system that does not acknowledge these efforts?
• For those who do take on responsibility in ethical, moral, and justice oriented ways, what does this look like? Who are these actors? Who are in turn supporting them in their work?
• Is there misrecognition of responsibility? And when we ask individuals to take on responsibility, how are they being supported in their work? Is it fair to ask individuals to take on responsibility that goes against institutional logics?
• How can curriculum theorizing and other interdisciplinary theories of care and ethics expand notions of education responsibility?
• How can historically disenfranchised communities and families be acknowledged as already taking on educational responsibility and providing care?
• How can students also show care for each other, their teachers, and be part of a community of care?
• Within higher education, what does it mean when one group of faculty teaches about culturally relevant practices and social justice, while others do not have to worry about it?
• Within higher education, what does it mean when one group of researchers do research that is responsible/accountable to the people and communities (rather than tier 1 journals)?
• What if educational responsibility is unequally distributed along class, race, and gender lines?
• In what ways can education scholars and leaders hold themselves accountable in working with people of color to co-construct pedagogies, curriculum, and solutions that are rooted in the knowledges and traditions of the local community?
• How does access to resources; school funding at local, state, and federal levels; and other material inequities affect our understanding of individual responsibility?

Proposals that are not tailored to these specific questions are also welcomed. The CICCS SIG supports interdisciplinary research that draws from critical perspectives to pursue curriculum inquiry, cultural studies, and educational studies. CICCS sessions and papers often work within cultural studies (both broadly conceived and/or specific to the trajectory of study that originated from the University of Birmingham) and/or curriculum studies (both broadly conceived and/or work aligned with the Reconceptualization of the field).

Deadline for submission: July 22, 2020