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Janet L. Miller (born January 16, 1945) is an American educator. Known for her work in curriculum theory, Miller is strongly associated with the reconceptual movement in curriculum theory, initiated during the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States.


 * I have my own version of a history of the U.S. curriculum theory movement, known as the reconceptualization (...). Of course, as I construct this version, I also must acknowledge that in all remembering, there is forgetting. Thus, this is a very partial history, partial in terms of preferences and commitments as well as gaps and silences.(...) I agree that what identifies 25 years of curriculum theorizing is not the term reconceptualization, per se, but rather collective although diverse approaches to resisting technologies of education that try to separate content, pedagogy, and learning into discrete, measurable, and observable units of behavior and products (Miller, JCT, 1998)

Professional Biography
Janet L Miller is Professor in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Faculty-At-Large, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Columbia University. She earned her M.A. in English & Education at the University of Rochester, NY, and her Ph.D. in Humanities Education-English and Curriculum Theory at The Ohio State University.

She began her academic career as an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA (1979-82). She taught as an Assistant and then Associate Professor at St. John’s University (NY) in a doctoral program in curriculum studies from 1982 through 1988. Accepting an offer to develop and direct a doctoral program in curriculum studies, she worked as an Associate and then Full Professor at Hofstra University (NY) from 1988-92, and then as a Full Professor at National-Louis University (WI and IL) from 1992-2000. She moved to Columbia University’s Teachers College in Fall of 2000.

In 2010, Professor Miller was elected a Fellow for “Sustained Achievement in Education Research” in the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and in 2008, received AERA’s Lifetime Achievement Award from Division B-Curriculum Studies. Active in AERA for many years, Dr. Miller was elected Vice President of AERA for Division B-Curriculum Studies for the 1997-1999 term. She was elected AERA Secretary of Division B for the 1990-1992 term, was 1994 Chair of the Division’s Dissertation Award Committee, and served as a Program Section Chair (for Curriculum Theorizing) for the Division’s 1996 Annual Meeting Program. She also served as Chair of the Nominating Committee for Division B for the 1999-2000 term as well as the 2007-08 term, as well as Chair of Division B’s Lifetime Achievement Award for the 2011-2012 term. In addition, she was elected Chair of the AERA Critical Issues in Curriculum Special Interest Group from 1988 through 1990.

In 2001, Professor Miller was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (AAACS); she was re-elected for a second term, completing her two terms of service in 2007. As Managing Editor of JCT: The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing since its inception in 1978 through 1998, Dr. Miller also served for many years as Program Chair of the JCT-sponsored Bergamo Annual Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice.

Research Interests
Her overarching research interests focus on conceptions and intersections of curriculum and feminist theories, on poststructural perspectives that inform autobiography and narrative as forms of qualitative educational inquiry, and on issues that frame and influence the internationalization of the curriculum field, writ large.


 * '' Here, then, I draw, in particular, from feminists’ transnational as well as poststructural, postcolonial, and queer theorizing and practices in order to articulate tensions as well as possibilities that overspill a notion of curriculum studies inflected by transnational flows and mobilities. I will argue for attempts to conceive of a worldwide field that does not rest on a universal notion of a curriculum studies field within which all national fields much comply, for example. Such attempts, I posit, might help us to recognize transnational flows and mobilities as one incentive for imagining new configurations of people, knowledges and potentials for collective exchange. At the same time, engaging with such configurations also marks an active refusal to construct a universal notion of “selves” or of curriculum studies through which one global field and its participants could emerge. Thus, I autobiographically utilize feminist poststructural troublings of any essentialized notion of uniform, stable, always coherent “selves” in order to highlight local/global tensions that permeate persons’ diversely embodied realities. As Hongyu Wang (2006) notes, “working at the intersections between the autobiographical and the global [and local] is an essentially educational task (Miller, TCI, 2006, p.32).

Publications
Her work has been published in a number of international refereed journals, including Journal of Curriculum Studies, Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, Curriculum Inquiry, Educational Theory, Educational Foundations, American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies Journal, Curriculum & Pedagogy, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, English Journal, English Education, and JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, among others. As well, she has authored over thirty book chapters.


 * Such a profound and dramatic perceptions of life and of our attempts to move beyond the implications of imposed prescription upon our lives may serve as impetus for us all to examine the dichotomies within ourselves. We share the juxtapositioning of youth and maturity, the subjective and objective selves, personal and political identities. As educators, our responsibilities extend beyond ourselves to the lives of those who will internalize and extend the foundational perception that we as teachers have helped to shape (Miller, JCT, 1979) .

Professor Miller is the author of the forthcoming (Routledge) Curriculum Studies: Communities without Consensus.

As well, she authored:


 *  Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment (State University of New York Press, 1990)


 * This book chronicles the shared journey of five classroom teachers and myself, a university professor, as we examine the possibilities and dilemmas of collaborative inquiry and teacher empowerment. The narrative focuses on explorations of our daily practice. Within those explorations, we attempt collaborative reflections on the contexts and assumptions that influence and frame our practice (Miller, 1990, p.ix)


 * We still raise questions about the possibilities of teachers becoming researchers of their own practice as well as of the institutions that frame and form that practice. We continue to explore forms of research that attempt to acknowledge the perspectives and participation of all those involved; yet to continue to be confronted by the separation of theory and practice, teaching and research, that signify the predominant end-product orientation of most of the educational settings in which we work. We wonder f the label, teacher-as-researcher, in fact contributes in subtle ways to those theoretical and practical distinctions that continue to obscure the ways in which teaching itself is a “quiet form of research” (Britton, 1987). We are concerned that the application of the label researcher still implies the bestowing of a greater status that that of “teacher”, and we worry that empowerment still is considered a reward by some, to be granted along with the rights and privileges encompassed by the title, researcher. While we grapple with all those issues, we also continue to acknowledge the tensions between our desire for community and support in these explorations and the dangers of a collective unity that might veil the differences among us (Miller, 1990, p.150) 


 *  Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum(Peter Lang Publishing, 2005)


 * Sounds of Silence Breaking attempts to articulate effects of exclusions, absences, stereotypes, disruptions, reconfigurations and generalizations within the very process of curriculum theorizing as well as within the very categories and constructions of "woman", "voice", "experience", "identity" and "curriculum". It does not do so in a linear, chronological, developmental or complete way. Nor do I mean to say that I automatically consider silence as that which must always be shattered. There are politically and personally charged silences - strategic silences - here too (Miller, 2005, p.5).


 * A notion of situated reform and research enables me to notice how the very categories of insider and outsider are themselves socially constructed and complicated by the ways power is defined (be the discourses available to students, teachers, researchers, administrators, parents and local community members) and used in particular schools. This shifts the focus or issue from "who is an insider and who is an outsider?" to "how will we exercise power" and "how will we define and use power in this school in relation to this reform effort? As a research, it shifts my work away from capturing the "lived experience" of school to examining and interrogating the processes of "materialization" that produces the stabilities and reiterations of already "known", determined, unwavering identities (Miller, 2005, p.176) 


 *  A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation, co-edited with William Ayers (Teachers College Press, 1998)


 * I am not arguing that autobiography as one form of educational inquiry be regarded as literature, per se. However, I do want to consider what might happen to forms and purposes of autobiography in education if they assumed the potentials of imaginative literature to disrupt rather than reinforce static versions of our "selves" and our work as educators. In fact, this may be the only reason to use autobiography as a form of educational inquiry. Just as informed encounters with literature can lead to what Maxine calls "a startling defamiliarization of the ordinary" (1995, p.4), so too can autobiography call into question both the notion of one "true," stable, and coherent self and the cultural scripts for that self. (...) Autobiography in education could become one means by which to "get us to someplace we otherwise couldn't get to" by providing both form and context for examining the surprises, juxtapositions, contradictions, and incomplete stories of our "selves"and our work. (Miller, 1998, p.151-52) 

Awards
2010: Elected AERA Research Fellow American Educational Research Association (AERA)

2008: Lifetime Achievement Award American Educational Research Association (AERA) for Division B (Curriculum Studies), March, 2008

2003 – 2004: Tenured Faculty Research Award, Teachers College, Columbia University For “Convergences: A Collaborative Biography of Maxine Greene.” (One semester release time from teaching and administrative duties).

2001 – 2008 (last year given at Teachers College): Excellence in Teaching Award, Teachers College, Columbia University

1998	: The University Faculty Excellence in Research Award, National-Louis University

1998: Achievement Award for Scholarly and Service Contributions to the Field of Curriculum Studies, Presented by JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing and the Bergamo Conference

1992: The James N. Britton Award for Inquiry in English Language Arts For Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment. Presented by the National Council of Teachers of English

1991: The Stessin Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication, Hofstra University For Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment