Janet L. Miller

An Introduction to Janet L. Miller

        Janet L. Miller is a professor of English Education, as well as a Program Coordinator, at Columbia University’s Teachers College.  She is widely published in many curriculum journals, including, but not limited to: Curriculum Inquiry, Educational Theory, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Educational Foundations, English Journal, Journal of Curriculum Studies, English Education, and Journal of Curriculum Theorizing.  However, Miller is best known for her books: Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment; Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum; and A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation.  This award-winning author served as Managing Editor of The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing from its first publication in 1978 until 1998.  Alongside Pinar, she also helped to organize the Bergamo Annual Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice as Program Chair for many years, when it began in 1974.

        Miller grew up in Pittsburgh and then went on to complete an M.A. in English Education from the University of Rochester.  She then earned a Ph. D. in Humanities Education and Curriculum Theory from The Ohio State University.  After graduating, Janet Miller taught as a high school English teacher before becoming a university professor.  This award-winning curriculum scholar is best known for her specialization in English Education, School Reform and Restructuring, as well as Feminism. In 2007, Janet Miller was named a Fellow by the American Education Research Association for her work on "intersections of curriculum and feminist theories, constructions of teacher subjectivities in collaborative school reform and research efforts, and biography and autobiography as postmodern forms of qualitative inquiry."  She is considered a leader in the re-conceptualist curriculum movement and was recognized in 2008 by the American Education Research Association with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

       When analyzing the various works of Janet L. Miller, several themes arise. The section below provides a review of most recent works. These include: Curriculum and Pedagogy as Unpredictable Processes of Engagement (2004), The American Curriculum Field and Its Worldly Encounters (2005), and Curriculum Studies and Transnational Flows and Mobilities: Feminist Autobiographical Perspectives (2006). Within these reviews, themes from her book Sounds of Silence Breaking and article, What’s Left in the Field: A Curriculum Memoir, is also provided.

Curriculum and Pedagogy as Unpredictable Processes of Engagement

        Janet L. Miller argues that when the familiar categories used to conceptualize curriculum break down in the face of complexities, bureaucrats in the United States turn to the constructed category of ‘scientific research’. This is more comfortable and known, and is able to be quantified and measured in an age of accountability and standardization. However, there is a fundamental aspect not considered- the “complexities, the unknowable and the undecided, the ambiguities of lived lives that always frame our engagements with curriculum and pedagogy” (Miller 2005, p.43). This focus on high-stakes accountability can have a profound impact on the professional lives of teachers and the lived experiences of children whereby curriculum does not encourage individuals to share their own stories. Learning takes place on a subjective and personal level, therefore allowing discussions of student’s lived experiences is important has this shapes their interaction with curriculum and pedagogy.

        Over the last 30 years, researchers have begun to focus on the conflicted identities, and explosion of contradictory and competing knowledges. They have found that even science, like all human endeavors, is a cultural practice which is constantly evolving and changing. Here, Miller states that “perhaps, after all, there is hope” (p.44). Curriculum and pedagogy are not concrete situations, and their intertwined relations cannot be mandated in policy and curriculum across the United States, or anywhere for that matter. Instead, they are processes of engagement with the unpredictable and unknown. This may lead to tension and challenges in curriculum and pedagogy, when teachers in particular, feel the need to always have the right answer. Instead, teachers and students must embrace the complexities within their own lived experiences and discuss this tension within the classroom- even if this means that at the end of the conversation, students are left with more questions than answers.

        Miller lastly discusses her hope for The Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, whereby, “prescriptive mandates and categories can be challenged, broke down and even shattered by the tangled complexities of our students’, our colleagues’, and our own daily lived lives” (p.44). The journal provides a space for individuals to discuss their own engagements with curriculum and pedagogy, and the meaning attached to the processes. While it is important for researchers to have an international forum such as The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, one has to cognizant of the voices that are represented in the journal. Are the voices that are shared representative of diverse experiences and cultures?  Do they discuss the complexities, unknowable and ambiguities of lived lives? Which voices are silenced? How do ‘unconscious assumptions’ (Bhabha, 1988) shape our lived experiences that we share?

The American Curriculum Field and Its Wordly Encounters

            Janet L. Miller remains continuously aware of the need for curriculum theorists, teachers, administrators, students and their parents to “move beyond” what they are now and to be open to “new possibility for collective exchange” (Miller, p.1). Newness, openness and a desire to move forward are always her goal and this is at times difficult in the face of what she believes to be a “bifurcated, Balkanized, and insulated American curriculum field” (p.6). Miller is disheartened by the standardizing and technologizing of the US curriculum field, but warns against endless debates that don’t lead to progress.  She desires a curriculum field that is continually motivated by “worldliness”, without losing sight of the need for local and which is driven by encounters.

            Within this piece, Miller identifies the need for interactive discussion with the goal of redefining the American identity and paying particular attention to the current “contexts and conditions” in order to reinvent curriculum (p. 5).  She warns of the dangers of viewing the US curriculum as a text that is a “hermetically sealed cosmos” that is constructed as a “pre-ordained and sequenced systems of subject matter, disconnected from diverse persons”(p.5).  This concern over a stagnant curriculum that does not allow for more human elements is often a theme in Miller’s work.  She shares her autobiographical experiences in “What’s Left in the Field…A Curriculum Memoir” when she divulges her own personal teaching experience, where she herself found the “pre-packaged” nature of curriculum stifling (Miller, 2000).  She goes on to describe her experience with curriculum as a high school teacher who was determined to help her and her students make meaningful connections outside of the scope of the text, “I attempted to juggle the demands of a curriculum, conceived as a set of predetermined objectives for my high school English students to achieve, and my own need by now to make connections among works of art and the circumstances of our everyday lives” (Miller, 2000).

            It was these restrictive experiences that fuel Janet Miller to rethink US curriculum and see it as a “field always in-the-making” (p.4).  She remains hopeful and committed to the notion that being mindful of “worldliness”, encounters with persons whose passion is the reconceptualization of curriculum, as well as the inclusion of both local and international perspectives, will bring about newness “again and again” (p.7).  This author is most comfortable when disrupting the “traditional” and invites a myriad of voices and perspectives to participate in re-visioning US curriculum, in both text and practice.

Curriculum Studies and Transnational Flows and Mobilities: Feminist Autobiographical Perspectives

Janet L. Miller discusses the ways in which international flows and mobilities are at the essence of a worldwide curriculum field in the article, Curriculum Studies and Transnational Flows and Mobilities: Feminist Autobiographical Perspectives. She questions that given transnational flows and mobilities, what kinds of differing knowledges do divergent members of a worldwide curriculum studies field now need to construct in order to contribute to the intellectual advancement of a worldwide field? To help address this question, Miller first turns to the existing perspectives on global flows and mobilities that circulate among academic disciplines. One perspective that resonated with my views of transnational flows was Manual Castella's. Castella (2000) proposes the idea that there is a new spatial form characterized by social practices that dominate society: the space of flows. These flows can involve capital, information, technology, organizational intersections, images, sounds and symbols. All of these interactions and flows are supported and facilitated by innovative technology. Transnational connections are more easily made today with the use of the Internet, cellphone technology and the ability for individuals to physically travel more readily. These flows and mobilities are unavoidable today (Miller, 2006). 

The article also discusses the tension between the global and the local through these flows and mobilities. There is a need in curriculum and education today to address what is meant by “be global and local at once” (Miller, 2006). Miller argues that the increasing density of transnational connections gives us a global sense of the local, and allows for greater flows and mobilities of communication and association across diverse terrains and social locations. However, while there are global processes that affect education such as the globalization of the economy and the diminishing power of the nation state, there is a shared responsibility to look at the experience of the embodied person and their own local complex histories. This is supported by Miller’s use of autobiographical writing in her research. This is used to help situate her lived experiences and perspective on how these stories can be used to help facilitate a collective exchange within the context of a worldwide curriculum studies field. 

            Within a worldwide curriculum studies field, Miller discusses the fundamental role of feminist perspectives. She argues that these feminist interrogations could “contribute to curriculum scholars’ negotiations of cultural, geographical, linguistic, and theoretical differences across a worldwide curriculum studies field” (Miller, p. 31).  From her biography, Miller expresses her passion for collaborating with female graduate students from an international field, and her use of gender as a theoretical perspective speaks greatly to the field of curriculum studies. This collaboration with female counterparts shows Miller's commitment to transnational flows and mobilities in theory and practice. Miller's book Sounds of Silence Breaking also looks at the important role of gender in curriculum studies. Miller underscores how changing narrative and interpretive practices have framed and re-framed constructions of her gendered work (Columbia, 2012).

Conclusion

      Overall, Janet Miller's work on curriculum has greatly contributed to our understanding of gender and autobiography in curriculum studies. The articles we reviewed looked primarily at the role of autobiography, and that our own identities are constantly in flux. Her work has deliberately complicated our assumptions of Canadian curriculum studies, by stating that the tensions within our discussions are not necessarily going to be resolved. These tensions need to be discussed at a local and international level. This will help the international curriculum field specifically move toward "producing intercultural understanding and actively valuing cultural diversity so that it does not merely assimilate national (local) curriculum discourses-practices into an imperial (global) archive" (Gough, 2004). A limitation of Janet Miller's work is whether the theorizing that happens with her 'encounters', how does it influence the formal schooling curriculum within the United States. Are these conversations and theories limited to an international curriculum field, or are these intended to be applied to the learning of students in the United States and beyond?

References

Butler, J. (2001b).  Transformative Encounters.  In E. Beck-Gernsheim, J. Butler, & L. Puigvert. Women and Social Transformation (1-28).  New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Gough, N. (2004). Editorial: A vision for transnational curriculum inquiry. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 1(1).

Miller, J.L. (2006). Curriculum studies and transnational flows and mobilities: Feminist autobiographical perspectives. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry. 3(2): 32-50.

Miller, J. L. (2005).  The American Curriculum Field and its Worldly Encounters.  Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 21, (2), 1-11.

Miller, J. L. (2005). Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang.

Miller, J. L. (2000). What's left in the field .... A curriculum memoir. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32, (2), 253-266.

Columbia University (2012). Janet Miller Academics. Retrieve June 20, 2012 from http://www.tc.columbia.edu/academics/?facid=jm1397d.

Autobiographical Elements

Janet Miller’s Use of Autobiography

As a child, Janet Miller was deeply moved by this painting of Picasso’s entitled, Guernica.  This painting became a symbol for Miller of helping students make connections beyond the “pre-packaged curriculum” because this was an opportunity that she herself experienced.  The image of Picasso’s Guernica, as well as an autobiographical passage from Miller’s article, “What's left in the field .... A curriculum memoir” is featured below:

I first saw Picasso’s Guernica when I was a junior (i.e. grade 11) in high school. As I stared at the huge painting, I felt as though life itself had been squashed, twisted, contorted- destroyed for reasons that I neither understood nor could forgive. I remember that I felt frozen by this painting, unable to speak even after I had backed away from the canvas, in retreat from the pain that emanated from Picasso’ s vision of the wanton destruction of war. As I struggled to make sense of the electric light bulb hanging above the shredded newsprint and the convoluted forms of humans and animals, the sounds of my friends’ voices and the explications of our guide remained muted to me. I was aware only of my bewilderment and the immensity of my outrage.

As our group was gently nudged into movement by our class chaperones , I recall that, even as I was able to slowly re-enter the chattering world of my peers, I was pondering the intensity of my reaction to Guernica. However, as we made our way through the crowds at the Museum of Modern Art [in New York City], I was not even dimly conscious of the changes that had immediately and irrevocably taken place in my ways of seeing my own and others’ lives. What I primarily felt at that moment, but could not articulate, was that all the colour had been drained from the world.

Earlier, my friends and I had lurched up and down the aisles of the train that was meandering through the hills of Pennsylvania, hauling us on our junior class trip from Pittsburgh to New York City. We had laughingly prioritized our tourist stops and had made pacts with one another about seating arrangements on the myriad bus tours that had been arranged for us.

This was a first trip to New York for most of us, and we were excited about seeing the lights of Broadway and Times Square. I knew that we would be touring the museums too, and I looked forward to actually seeing some of the paintings that our teachers had discussed in our art and English classes. However, as we voted on our absolutes for this trip, the mandatory snapshot for our group included waving from the crown of the Statue of Liberty and hugging one of the New York Public Library stone lions. Art was something that our teachers had put on our itinerary, something that we would talk about in class upon our return. Although I secretly was pleased about our museum stops, I also was caught up in being a tourist. As I entered the whirlwind of our city tours, and even after we had exited the Museum of Modern Art, I could not have anticipated that the force of my response to one particular painting would mark a turning point in my understandings of the connections among curriculum, the arts, my work, and my life.

Before I saw Guernica, the visual arts had been removed from the everyday for me. Paintings existed as images, colour, and light melded together as representations of life as it should or could be, and hung on walls of museums located miles from the south hills of Pittsburgh, where I lived. As a child growing up on the cusp between the steel mill towns and the burgeoning suburbs of Pittsburgh, I always looked forward to our elementary school `art and music’ field trips into the city or to the galleries in Shadyside or to exhibitions and concerts at the University of Pittsburgh or what was then Carnegie Tech. I remember that, even in fourth grade, when the emphasis among my friends was on kickball games and bike rides after school, I loved clambering onto the school bus to be carted o€ to the symphony or the planetarium or the museums. Returning home, amidst the singing and jostling of my fellow classmates, I sometimes tried to envision myself within the frames of the paintings that we had viewed of bucolic landscapes or of serene dignitaries whose portraits appeared to attest to their importance and bearing in the world. Such paintings represented a life foreign to me, appealing in its apparent serenity, beauty, and dignity, yet separated from my world not only in dimensions of time and space, but also in terms of wealth, power, and circumstance.

Always, as we returned from these outings, the school bus would lumber past the steel mills as it rolled us away from the city, crossed the Liberty Bridge and returned us to the south hills. Often, on darkening winter afternoons, we stared out the bus windows at wavering red skies that reflected the glow of molten steel being dumped down mountainous slag heaps. Some of my friends waved at the steel mills as we bounced by, sending symbolic salutes to their fathers who were just beginning the night shift. And as the driver wedged our bus into its parking place next to the school gate, those paintings that I had viewed during the afternoon at the museum faded, replaced by the grey air and the familiar faces of the people who lived and worked in my neighbourhood. Art was remote for me, distanced by the idealization of form and content to which I, even as a fourth grader, had attributed its function.

Although I continued to be drawn to art and music, by my junior year in high school I knew that I wanted to become an English teacher. Literature was at the centre of my academic interests, and I thought that I was lucky to have been able to decide so easily and quickly on a career. What could be better than getting paid for loving to read and sharing that love with one’s students? It was easy to be a high school romantic.

In my junior year, too, I was in¯ influenced by my favourite high school English teacher, who could quote extensively from [the US poets] Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, and Irving, but who also introduced us to the verse of Whitman and Dickinson and Lanier and to the regionalists and realists. Miss Beidler talked about these authors as among those who revolutionized the forms and intentions of literature in the United States. She often would make connections among painters, artists, and musicians whose works represented similar challenges to notions of a romantic idealism or an aesthetic purity.

Although I was interested in these challenges, I was connected to words, to written expression, as the primary means of creating meaning and eliciting response from others. I was learning about literature as a discipline, as a separate entity, and although Miss Beidler made countless connections for us, way before interdisciplinary studies and response-centred curriculum had hit the high schools, I still saw my art and music classes as auxiliary in my awkward attempts to interpret the meaning of life. I, of course, felt confident that this was the primary function of literature, and, by extension, of the English teacher. I was sure that novels and poems and short stories and plays were the direct connections to Truth, and I was just as certain that there was Truth to be found, if one could just learn how to interpret those symbols. What’s scary about all of this is that I continued to learn about literature and its functions and its genres in this segmented and definitive manner throughout my college years as an English major. And, as I began to teach eleventh and twelfth grade English, just as I had hoped to do since my own junior year in high school, I could feel in my teaching, in my skin and bones, the further splintering of the disciplines into discrete subject matter areas.

As a high school English teacher, I was expected to emphasize my students’ mastery of factual details, such as the elements of a short story or the parts of speech or the characteristics of a tragic hero (nevermind the heroine). My colleagues and I all taught furiously, as if in a race to cover the canon before it could enlarge and encroach upon our established grade-level content. We also taught as though there were one agreed upon interpretation of [the US novel] T he Scarlet Letter, the main choice for a novel selection among all the eleventh grade English teachers in my department who were preparing our students for the New York State Regents’ exams.

Throughout my college studies, I had felt that there was more to literature than the facts surrounding its creation or the categories into which we constantly placed each selection. And, as I taught high school English, I constantly wondered how Miss Beidler had found the room in her curriculum to even mention the connections she saw among music, art, and the literature that we were studying at the time. I attempted to juggle the demands of a curriculum, conceived as a set of predetermined objectives for my high school English students to achieve, and my own need by now to make connections among works of art and the circumstances of our everyday lives. I also began to wonder how I might possibly encourage students to make their own connections, given the structures of schooling that encouraged them only to replicate mine. And I thought of Guernica.

After taking that junior class trip to New York, I had spent many hours talking with Miss Beidler and my classmates about our reactions to Guernica, which, of course, were varied in their intensity and focus. I chose to read more about the Spanish Civil War and tried to figure out Picasso’s political stance by learning more about the historical and political circumstances that impelled Picasso to paint Guernica. I did this research, not as an assignment, but as a form of questioning about my own passionate response to the painting. I did not especially want to know into what period of Picasso’s work we might classify this particular piece, or what techniques he borrowed or rejected from Cubism in order to create his angry and anguished response to the destruction of a small Spanish town and its people. Still, I think that I fell back on the traditional ways that I already had learned were means to understanding because I did not know how to trust my own responses.

But even as I pursued these traditional routes to knowledge about myself as well as about the circumstances that evoked Picasso’ s fervid response to the senseless murder of innocent people, I found myself remembering foremost my reactions when I first saw Guernica. I knew, after that initial encounter, that words were not necessary to evoke or to express response to work of art or to a human condition. And ultimately, Guernica shattered my learned and limited ways of seeing, forced me to consider new ways of looking at life and death, demanded that I encounter, confront, and, most importantly, respond to competing visions of the world.