The purpose of this article is to engage crip theory in a critical analysis of the calls within elementary education for a return to normalcy. I seek to question the ways COVID-19 has reinforced orientations towards normalcy by asking where normalcy went and how the calls for its return reveal the fundamental limits of inclusion within schools.…

Beginning with a storied moment of encounter at an academic conference in which several scholars confidently asserted the need to "humanize those who have been dehumanized", I engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry into my tensions with this seemingly "common sense" pedagogical belief and curricular approach. I do so by…

Curriculum change involves struggles among political actors and interest groups, and those efforts related to sex education have been noted for their particularly vexatious character. When Doug Ford was elected Premier of Ontario, Canada in 2018, he immediately repealed the comprehensive health curriculum of 2015 and attempted to muzzle teachers…

In my second year teaching at the elementary level, two biracial first graders told a Black child that she could not play because her skin was too dark. I found myself, a white female teacher, using the language of the bullying prevention programme to ignore the racialized nature of the incident and ultimately enact a hidden curriculum of white…

The currents of elitism surging through curriculum studies in the United States have long been of chief concern to critical scholars in the field. Elements of this elitism running along racialized, gendered, classed and other such lines elide to marginalize knowledge generated by and about the "other." For this racialized, gendered,…

This paper explores nostalgia as both a limiting cultural force in the lives of school librarians and a practice that can be used to more accurately portray library work. The stereotype of the shushing, lone school librarian, based on restorative nostalgia, is related to a nostalgic oversimplification of the school librarian's historical role.…

In this paper, the authors focus on everyday narrations of the nation as they are taken up by educators "in schools" in the United States, Denmark and Spain. As the primary institutions within which children from im/migrant communities are incorporated into the nation-state, schools are the key sites within which young people learn the…