This book explores possibilities for students to have a much greater role in curriculum than mere receivers of it. In fact, we suggest what happens when students are the curriculum. We draw upon our scholarship (theory, practice, and praxis) over the years to show how educational experiences can be invigorated and embodied when students ask the what’s worthwhile questions, joining teachers as fellow curricularists, action researchers, and practical inquirers, to engage in creative insubordination that refines the theories within (and among) them through lifelong education. Such educational experience stems from listening carefully to students and creates meaning because it is of and by students, and therefore more genuinely for them. It is cultural experience writ large because it draws on curricula of educational experience from many spheres of life (outside of school and in school) to continuously reconstruct who and what they are. It draws on teacher and student lore and is improvisational, pedagogically pivoting, adapting, and emerging. It finds new spaces, crevices, and cracks wherein students continuously re-create themselves – the curriculum that they are becoming. This book includes previously published articles and book chapters by William H. Schubert and Brian D. Schultz. The authors include dialogic interludes between chapters to introduce, reflect on, and connect the chapters and their theorizing.

William H. Schubert in Professor Emeritus and former University Scholar from the University of Illinois Chicago. He is recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies from American Educational Research Association, a Fellow of the International Academy of Education, former president of the John Dewey Society, and The Society for the Study of Curriculum History, and recently the Society of Professors of Education honored him by establishing the William H. Schubert Award for Curricular Speculation. His 20-plus books, over 200 articles and chapters, and related documents are available in the William H. Schubert Curriculum Studies Collection in the Zach S. Henderson Library of Georgia Southern University.

Brian D. Schultz is Professor and Virginia Todd Memorial Scholar of Curriculum Studies in the Department of Teaching, Curriculum & Educational Inquiry and Associate Dean in the College of Education, Health & Society at Miami University. Prior to joining Miami’s faculty, Brian was Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Inquiry & Curriculum Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Brian has served the field as president of Society of Professors of Education, factotum and treasurer of Professors of Curriculum, and in leadership roles with the American Educational Research Association. He is the author of Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way: Lessons from an Urban Classroom, and Teaching in the Cracks: Openings and Opportunities for Student-Centered, Action-Focused Curriculum.