Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference

The Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference is a small North American conference with the stated goal of bringing together curriculum theory with curriculum practice, academic discourse with the discourse of K–12 school practitioners, and teacher educators with teachers, school administrators, and graduate students and doing so through larger themes of the arts, social justice, and public moral leadership. In addition to these goals for the content of the conference, organizers also sought to ensure that the process of running the conference reflected democratic values through elections, transparency of finances, and procedures. It was organized by a small group of curriculum scholars including James Sears, Dan Marshall, Jim Henderson, Kathleen Kesson, Patrick Slattery, Kris Sloan, Louise Allen, Tom Kelly, and Susan Edgerton, as an outgrowth of the Conference for Curriculum Theorizing (also known as Bergamo Conference) and in collaboration with the Arts-Based Research in Education special interest group from the American Educational Research Association, Division B, Curriculum.

The first conference took place in October 2000 and was held at Camp Balcones Springs Retreat and Conference Center outside of Austin, Texas. Since that time it has been held annually at several different locations, usually in October. The conference moves to a new location every other year. Revenue comes from registration and membership fees, which include the price of the published proceedings, and from sponsorship of various academic institutions that change from year to year.

Each year the conference selects a theme. For example, the title for 2001 was “In(Ex)clusion: (Re)visioning the Democratic Ideal.” Each year's conference is further organized into strands, with the 2001 strands being collaborative writing project, social action project, and arts-based research project. The title for 2008 was “Complicated Conversations and Confirmed Commitments: Revitalizing Education for Democracy,” which was concerned, in part, with the conflict between discourses of standardization and the values of progressive education for democratic values. Strands that accompanied this theme were arts and [Page 190]alternative inquiry for social change, mentoring, public moral leadership, social action then and now, theory in motion, transformative curriculum development, and making meaning of research, measurement, and assessment.

The conference has also published a book each year with Educators International Press consisting of selected, peer-reviewed papers or presentations based on the year's conference theme. An elected governing council selects the coeditors of the book each year on the basis of submitted proposals. A new peer review committee is also selected each year. The conference also sponsors the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, which has been published twice a year since 2004.