What's left in the field … a curriculum memoir

Multiple readings of 'What's left in the field' are juxtaposed in this paper in response to a recurring press for standardization of purpose for curriculum studies. Memoir provides a vehicle for positing, across a span of time, various perspectives on the debates in the curriculum field about what counts as curriculum research and theorizing and their relationships to practice. Memoir segments, contiguous with diverse analyses of 'what's left the field', draw attention to the incomplete and always interminable process of conceptualizing a self as well as a field. These segments also point to the intractable humanness of education that requires us to engage one another, regardless of differing discourses, ideologies, historical and cultural contexts, needs, or desires. Myriad readings of 'What's left in the field?' thus compel conceptualizations of curriculum studies as a human project, differing according to contexts and needs, never fully realized, yet obligated everyday to reinvent itself. I am experimenting with examining my life, with charting the course of my feelings, with giving my work purpose and direction, through remembering where I have been… . (Louise DeSalvo, Vertigo , p. 4).