Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy

The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy invites abstract submissions for the special issue “Democratic Pedagogies: Practices, Challenges, and Visions of Democratic Futures in Education”. We seek contributions that explore what it entails to practice democracy in a diversity of learning environments, including the university classroom. The classroom is a space which exists within a complex co-constitutive web of intersectional structural, epistemic, material, and institutional hierarchies, including, and not limited to racial, gendered, class, and ability. Pedagogy itself was at the core of European colonialism and the ‘teacher’ has been described as an agent of imperialism (Inayatullah, 2022). Despite this, the classroom and education more generally are regarded as fundamental for fostering active and engaged citizenship within a democracy, and are sites of continued protest, power struggle, and decolonization around the world (Giroux, 1988, 2022, 2023 and UCT, 2019).

Following from this tension between educations critical role and aspirational promise for democratic practice on the one hand, and the challenges posed by colonial realities, neoliberal paradigms, fascism, and exclusionary institutions on the other, this special issue will explore the following questions; How do we build classroom communities of co-learners - not basic income units or consumers - that nurture belonging, community engagement, care, and the co-creation of pluriversal knowledge exchange based on non-Eurocentric democratic principles? In what ways are these classrooms and other learning settings, also sites of struggle for democracy and how do we produce democratic practices in classrooms that are located in environments that are anti-democratic? What becomes of the classroom and its possibilities when we live democratically in the classroom? How might we collectively imagine and co-design radically democratic and decolonized futures in education and beyond, given the history and ties of democracy itself with patriarchy and colonization?

The special issue seeks to engage with an extensive interdisciplinary literature on critical pedagogies, with a specific focus on democratic pedagogies as an emergent subsection of these. We wish to engage with the role of universities as they are and as we wish them to be. Drawn from heterogenous experiences and methods, the collection will highlight epistemic diversity in praxis, providing theoretical interventions and practical strategies/reflections to confront undemocratic educational spaces and curriculums.

We welcome theoretical-empirical contributions that engage thoughtfully with democratic pedagogies and their potential, through, but not limited to, the following topics;

• Teaching democracy inside/outside the classroom
• Democratizing the classroom
• Democratic learning outside the university
• Radical citation and syllabus development
• Community engaged learning
• Decolonizing the curriculum and pedagogy
• Abolishing the university (alternatives/afterlives)
• Design justice
• Pluriversal knowledge production
• Social justice approaches
• Anti-Fascist pedagogy
• Knowledge production and practitioner experience.

• Invitations to Contributing Authors: February 5, 2024
• Virtual Peer Workshop: April 2024
• Articles Due: July 30, 2024
• Peer Review: August-December 2024
• Reviews Sent to Authors: December 15, 2024
• Revisions Due if Needed: January 30, 2025
• Full Proposal Submission: February 15, 2025
• Estimated Publication Date: August 2026

Interested authors should send a title, 300-word abstract, and brief biographical note to [email protected] by January 19, 2024. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to any of the co-editors.

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article