“Imagining and building what could be”: An intergenerational conversation inspired by Allan Luke's scholarship, teaching, and activism

As scholars, teachers, and activists, we write in challenging times. We have been confronted with a rising tide of populist nationalism globally and with increasing income inequality. We are responding to ethnic hate crimes, attacks on immigrants, refugees, and members of LGBTQ + and Indigenous communities, as well as racist commentaries and “post-truth” politics on various social media. In this context, rather than despair, Allan Luke offers us a way forward. In his preface to Critical Literacy, Schooling, and Social Justice, the first of two volumes of his selected works, Luke (2018) writes, “an education for critical literacies is an invitation to join an intergenerational, intercultural and peer conversation that is about imagining and building what could be” (p. xii). The articles in this special issue of Curriculum Inquiry in honour of Allan Luke offer responses to his invitation. In these articles, the authors acknowledge the many tributaries of Allan Luke’s life and work, and celebrate his influence on the fields of curriculum, educational policy, and literacy studies. Following Luke’s inspiration, the authors in this special issue refuse to accept the world as it is; they envision and work toward what could be. Each of the invited authors reimagines curriculum and critical literacy as a call to action across generations, geographies, and institutional borders.

Critical Literacy, Schooling, and Social Justice: The Selected Works of Allan Luke (2018), together with its companion volume Educational Policy, Narrative and Discourse (Luke, 2019), gather many of Luke’s seminal writings from over three decades of scholarship, teaching, and research. In a time when H-indexes, journal impact factors, and provocative new altimetric measurements impact contemporary academic life, there are precious few things still left un-marketized – not yet “weighed and measured, commodified and transmitted, verified and credentialed, indeed, bought and sold to educational consumers and clients” (Luke, 2019, p. xx) – or mobilized as the next neoliberal artifice in an ever-expanding repertoire of institutional and professorial branding. Challenging the idea that we can measure the impact of a lifetime of scholarship with bleak metrics, for this issue we have invited a group of scholars, teachers, and activists to reflect upon the influence of Allan Luke’s work. In editing this special issue, we have learned that the significance of Luke’s scholarship is perhaps better understood by reading the authors’ stories of Luke’s generous mentorship than it is by counts of citations, accolades, or titles.

In the spirit of Allan Luke’s collaborations over many years with community members and elders, teachers and community activists, youth and policy makers, this special issue is, then, a collective project and a shared conversation. Normative scholarship is typically situated within a genealogy of ideas, signified by the literature review, and citational practices that often foreground concepts over conversations. Here, we map an alternative genealogy: a conversation among three generations of scholars who have engaged with Allan Luke as a thesis supervisor, mentor, research colleague, and critical friend. Writing candidly about their personal and academic connections to Luke, the authors invite readers into the relational and personal dimensions of academic work. The authors also situate themselves in relation to each other, reflecting a conversation that is global as well as intergenerational, extending from Singapore and Hong Kong, to Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the US. Not coincidentally, this geography tracks Luke’s own trajectory as a teacher and researcher, which, apart from his many years in Queensland, Australia, “began in British Columbia, Canada in the mid-1970s … and landed, sometimes with difficulty, in Hong Kong, Singapore, and China in the past two decades” (Luke, 2018, p. xiv). This communal project thus transverses institutional as well as geographical borders, as contributors describe their engagements with collaborators and colleagues who are situated within and outside of educational institutions.

Across more than 300 articles, chapters, and reports, Luke has often written autobiographically on race, class, and culture in education. He has articulated the enduring legacies of place and race through his experience of growing up in 1950s Los Angeles and his lasting connections to his “LA Chinese-American fellowship” (2018, p. xvi). As he writes, this work draws on “hard-won lessons and experience of learning from the teachers, students, and communities where I live” (2018, p. xiv). Perhaps most famously in his article, “Genres of Power: Literacy Education and the Production of Capital” (Luke, 1997/2018a), and more recently in his Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Address at the 2016 Literacy Research Association annual conference in Nashville, USA, “No Grand Narrative in Sight: On Double Consciousness and Critical Literacy” (Luke, 2018b), Luke’s autobiographical scholarship presses us to acknowledge that

our work is always a matter of choosing where to stand, when, with whom, and towards what ends. Like all others before us, our generation has had to learn that this requires something more than pedigree and degree, more than method and science, however rigorous. For cultural wisdom, scholarship, and practical knowledge invariably depend on recognition of histories, places, and peoples – starting with our own. (Luke, 2019, p. ix)

The invited authors in this special issue do just that; through the gift of Luke’s writing, they articulate their own hard-won lessons of learning from the people and places that have animated their own lives and scholarship.

This issue opens with a poem by Korina Jocson titled “Because You Have Gifted Us.” As a creative preface to the other articles, and to thank Luke for all of the ways he has gifted a generation of scholars, Jocson offers a poem about growing up in California. She juxtaposes images from Luke’s childhood and youth with images of her own, which “Represent a common past, a future/Insisting on art and poetry as pedagogy” (p. 155). Jocson’s poem is the first piece in the issue to take up Luke’s work on “pedagogy as gift” (Luke, 2008/2018c), delicately weaving the poetics of shared autobiographical narratives to remind us that “Generational exchanges guide and push us/Toward new places we ought to go” (p. 155). Echoing Luke’s argument that “literacy [could be] … less about individuation and more about membership in community” (Luke, 2008/2018c, p. 290), Jocson’s poem signals to the generational exchanges that punctuate the remaining articles in this issue. At the same time, like Luke’s own writing, her poem reminds us of how scholarship ultimately comes from – and is sustained by – our experiences of geography and community, and of the shared, disparate, and troubling histories to which we are, together, heirs.

Following Jocson, in “Two More Takes on the Critical: Intersectional and Interdisciplinary Scholarship Grounded in Family Histories and the Asia-Pacific,” Benji Chang discusses how Luke’s autobiographical writing about his personal and family life opened up understandings of culture, race, ethnicity, and immigrant lives at a time when this “had not been done much (if at all)” and “equity issues for Asian American groups were rarely published in general” (p. 160). Chang extends Luke’s (2004/2018d) framing of the critical “as an intellectual, deconstructive, textual and cognitive analytic task – and as a form of embodied political anger, alienation and alterity” (p. 221). He suggests that Luke’s scholarship as a whole has made twinning contributions to education, “specifically through advancing an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to interrogating otherness in schooling, and through a transnational inclusion and interrogation of his own family’s history and experiences, as well as other communities from the Asia-Pacific region” (p. 158). Chang surfaces these contributions through his thorough overview of the impact of Luke’s scholarship on the field and on his own thinking as a scholar whose life and work has somewhat mimicked Luke’s, geographically and pedagogically.

Like Jocson, who uses poetry to illustrate her life and relationship to Allan Luke, Vivian Vasquez uses the structure of an “audit trail” to share artifacts representing significant moments in her life as a researcher. Through a carefully curated selection of personal and professional images, in her article titled “Game On,” Vasquez illustrates the influences of Luke’s writing on her thinking, research, and teaching practice over the past 25 years. Like Chang and others, Vasquez takes up Luke’s exhortation, in the face of challenging times, that it is “game on” (Luke, 1997/2018a, p. 25). Inspired by Luke, who theorized literacy and curriculum in relation to Bourdieusian sociology by drawing on his own family history, Vasquez explores the intersection of her personal, professional, and political identities. Vasquez describes her connections to Allan Luke, Hilary Janks, Barbara Comber, and others over time, presenting an image of a network of relationships that, in her words, amount to “something bigger and more meaningful than a scholarly community” (p. 183).

Writing at the locus of the practice of autobiography and the practice of critical literacy, Jessica Zacher Pandya and Aaron Koh each offer reflections on critical literacy research and teaching. Like Vasquez, Pandya discusses Luke’s influence on her own critical literacy research in her article titled “In the Weeds: Critical Literacy Conversations with Allan Luke.” Pandya writes that Luke’s writing captures “his continuous use of intense theoretical framings without excuse, demur or justification” (p. 191). Pandya observes that Luke “showed his audiences what he saw, and neither apologized nor over explained” (p. 191), and then charts the impact of Luke’s scholarship through past, present, and future conversations Luke has participated in or has inspired through his work. Pandya interweaves these conversations with her own personal correspondence and conversations with Luke over time and distance, resulting in a text that is powerfully candid and reminiscent of Luke’s own writing. Indeed, as she concludes, “it is not clear to me what my career might look like without Allan’s written work, or his personal influence; I am not sure I would like the shape of it” (p. 196).

Drawing on postcolonial theorist and literary critic Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theory,” Aaron Koh reflects on encountering critical literacy for the first time in Australia while working with Luke. In his article “Traveling with and Teaching Critical Literacy in Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong: A Call for Postcritique,” Koh describes the challenges he encountered in attempting to mobilize critical literacy in Singapore and Hong Kong. Koh documents how he “re-adapted critical literacy” (Koh, p. 204) to address local conditions and autochthonous critical perspectives, and directly invokes Luke’s call to reimagine critical literacy in collective conversation with others. He reminds us that, in spite of institutional or policy pressures that may attempt to reduce critical literacy to yet another instrumental approach to interpreting texts, educators need to hold fast to its radical roots and orientation to equity by means of social and pedagogical change.

In the next set of articles, Barbara Comber and Hilary Janks, like Jocson, take up Luke’s writing on “pedagogy as gift” (Luke, 2008/2018c). Comber begins her article, titled “Educative Encounters of a Different Kind: Pedagogies of Everyday Life,” by writing about the gift of Luke’s work on her growth as a thinker and a writer, focussing on the way Luke helped her apply Michel Foucault’s and Dorothy Smith’s ideas to literacy education. Comber shares some of the lessons she learned from Luke: be brave, but not “radical dumb;” be scholarly; and write with respect and humility (p. 223; cf. Luke, 2018, p. 9). Like Vasquez and other authors, Comber, inspired by Luke and critical feminist scholars, deftly argues for the necessity of not separating the personal from the political. She presents a more nuanced picture of scholarly life, one in which activism, education, and research are braided (cf. Boyer, 1990).

Also writing about the legacy of Luke’s gifts, Hilary Janks begins her article, titled “The Decolonization of Higher Education in South Africa: Luke’s Writing as Gift,” by telling us what Luke taught her about the importance of building up new researchers and helping others see where they might take their ideas. For Janks, “linking literacy to habitus is one of Luke’s inspired theoretical gifts” (p. 233; cf. Luke, 1997/2018a). She highlights this link as a way to foreground a forthright discussion of how Luke’s thinking has helped her to reflect on the challenges of being a white researcher and educator working in post-Apartheid South Africa, particularly in a moment when institutions of higher education are reflecting on their colonial pasts. The result is a provocative, critical, and introspective article that tracks Janks' own identity and the influence of Luke’s theoretical work on her scholarship and on present campus movements in South Africa.

Finally, we close this special issue with a dialogue between Courtney Cazden and Allan Luke about their shared experience through a research project evaluating Indigenous school reform in Australia, which took place between 2009 and 2013. The dialogue, titled “On Cultural Others Working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Educators and Communities: Courtney B. Cazden and Allan Luke in Conversation,” begins with an extended reflection by Cazden that details the work, “not to report substantive results, but to give one more example of how Allan's expressed ‘commitment to marginalized communities’ (Luke, 2018a, p. 7) played out in his professional action” (p. 244). In this rare behind-the-scenes snapshot of a major empirical research study, Cazden offers readers a humanizing view behind the pages of Cazden and Luke’s work in Australia. What follows from Cazden’s reflection is a dialogue between Cazden and Luke, providing a retrospective and insightful look at their comprehensive study now over five years since its publication (cf. Luke et al., 2013). Cazden and Luke have been engaged in a wide variety of conversations about education and research for over thirty years; we are grateful that they took the time to work together once again and share their insights on cultural others working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators and communities.

The contributors to this special issue of Curriculum Inquiry represent how individual scholars have taken up Allan Luke’s call to work collectively from what is toward what might be. Together, the authors join Luke to suggest how critical literacy, pedagogy, and curriculum may continue to feed countervailing and progressive politics. We invite readers to regard this collection as a starting point, representative of a broadening conversation. These articles are an invitation to pause and reflect on each of our relationships to communities and the individuals who have shaped our commitments as educators and scholars, as well as with those who have supported and made possible our work in the world; they invite us to imagine and build what could be with others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.