Stepping Outside the Barred Room: Building Coalitions to Advance Shared Principles

Abstract

For more than 45 years, Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice, spending her career as a scholar, artist, singer, and teacher to speak out against racism and organized inequities of all kinds. In this article, the author turns to the work of Reagon to surface a few possibilities for the curriculum studies field to productively work within and through the crisis and tensions that the field has experienced since its inception. The author focuses specifically on the importance Reagon placed on building coalitions for working through a crisis in constructive ways during a speech at the West Coast Women's Music Festival in 1981. Drawing on Reagon's understandings of coalition politics, the author argues that coalitions in the curriculum studies field are necessary to move toward a future that does not endlessly repeat the present and for creatively and productively working through and within crisis.

Notes

For the purposes of this article, I rely on Reagon's definition of home as a safe and nurturing space. Reagon defines home as a space where people feel most comfortable and empowered. This definition is consistent with other African American women (e.g., Hooks, 1990; Smith, 1983) who understand home as a space where one can find reprieve from an otherwise harsh world. It is important to acknowledge that this is a very narrow understanding of home that does not account for the fact that many do not find such relief from “being home.” As many have rightly pointed out, including other African American women (e.g., Walker, 1966), home is not always a safe and comfortable space (e.g., Whitlock, 2007) and can be, in fact, a quite dangerous space for people to be (e.g., Allison, 1995). Moreover, Wang (2004) reminds us,

• Home is nowhere … home is everywhere, wherever stranger/strangeness, other/ otherness, foreigner/foreignness are welcome, regardless of time and space. Home itself can be a third space. A space embracing the conflicting double, yet leading beyond the trap of the in-between (p. 9).

  In Wang's words, home can be “mobile” and not constant, stable, providing shelter from other/stranger/ foreigner, and safe as Reagon's definition suggests. Although I acknowledge that home is a contested concept, I rely on Reagon's definition to keep the discussion of coalition work presented in this article connected to her understandings.

I am not referring to the differences in theoretical positions in the curriculum studies field and the divisions and tensions created by these positions. I use the word political to emphasize Pinar's (2004a) point about the negative effects of relying on political means to sort out differences to the larger field as well as on the intellectual energy of individuals.

See Morris (2009) for an example of such confusion. Morris mistakes efforts toward coalition work between two curriculum studies professional organizations (i.e., the foundation that sponsors the Bergamo Conference/Journal of Curriculum Theorizing and the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group) with efforts toward consolidation.