Remaining open to affirmations of difference

In our previous editorial note, we wrote about our commitment to cultivating curricula and pedagogies that are unbound. Scholarship and art that doesn’t follow scripts or templates. Improvisational work that challenges us to think and to behave differently. It seems worth returning to that commitment as we frame this issue. The summer of 2022 seems especially fraught. So much energy is being spent trying to bind what happens in schools and universities. Troubling laws are being passed in the United States and around the world that will limit the capacity for teachers, scholars, and activists to engage in dialogue or inquiry that speaks back to power. Powerful forces are at play that would suppress critical work that challenges the status quo. Spend 15 minutes on social media, and it’s hard to avoid the almost scripted debate about what is or what should be happening in schools and society. This is a hard time to be a teacher or scholar. This is especially true for those of us with commitments to criticality. Those of us who care about humanizing each other through our work to grapple with white supremacy, neoliberalism, and increasing scrutiny on the field of teaching and learning. We believe teaching and learning are always about becoming. Knowing more. Figuring out how to cultivate and live in a more peaceful, more just, more equitable reality. We believe such a task is always served best through the affirmation of difference. So many of the laws and discourses circulating right now would negate difference in favor of curricula and pedagogies that serve the status quo. Binding our schools and societies to histories of oppression rather than opening us up to not-yet-imagined futures. We remain grateful to serve the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. We are thankful to participate in the Curriculum and Pedagogy group. These are sites of possibility for us to remain in relation with difference. To be open to being changed by each other. The five pieces you’ll read in this issue are relevant, challenging, and it is our hope that they’ll help you remain open to the possibility of an unscripted future in our field. In our schools and society, too. *** “So my grandfather’s two tours meant nothing?”: Students struggle with the weight and responsibility of war by Brian Gibbs describes the implementation of a co-created (teacher and researcher) unit of instruction focused on the teaching of war that uses critical lens and emphasizes anti-war movements. This study focused on two essential questions—What is a just war and how do we end war?—and suggested that students gained insight into how to use their agency but felt overwhelmed and under practiced to create change in reality. In Talking complicity, breathing coloniality: Interrogating settler-centric pedagogy of teaching about white settler colonialism, Shaista Aziz Patel argues that teaching students to think about white settlers’ and racialized non-black people’s complicity in settler https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2022.2100671