Samuel Jaye Tanner
Biographic Data
| ID | 5742200 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Samuel Jaye Tanner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Samuel Jaye |
| FAMILY NAME | Tanner |
| SIGNATURE | TANNER S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4998-5424 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The measure of this journal
Measuring the impact of a journal is a funny thing.Both of us (Sam and Erin) have written about the success of the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy in our statements for promotion and tenure. We’
Eat the fruit and strive for cosmic balance
Over the break, I (Erin) read an 800+-page fantasy novel called the Priory of the Orange Tree, written by Samantha Shannon. It was just the escape I needed as United States’ post-Trump realities me
Moving forward anyway
Recently we (Sam and Erin) had a discussion with a stakeholder in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. This person asked us what protection the journal offered for scholars who publish critical
Celebrating our bondedness
It is an honor to speak into the field of Curriculum Studies in these brief editorial notes. We’ve (Sam and Erin) been doing so for years, now.One of the more powerful things about our working rela
Dance Party: Vitality Instead of Neoliberalism in School
Storytelling and Improvisation as Anti-Racist Pedagogies: Challenging White Supremacy in Elementary Education
This book theorizes and describes the concept of transformative critical whiteness pedagogies that are rooted in theories and practices of improvisation. It shows how these pedagogies invite people, especially white people, into the urgent work of resisting the ongoing production and affirmation of white supremacy. Using the frameworks of storytelling and story analysis, this book uses narrative to invite the reader into ongoing work to design an…
A difficult moment
Erin and I (Sam) have been scholars and teachers for over 20 years. We’ve been editing the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy for nearly 6 years. I can say, after having worked with Erin for over a
A big deal: The beginning of us
I (Erin) was in casual conversation recently with an acquaintance who asked me about work. She remembered a book project I told her about a few months ago and wondered if I had finished it. I told
Wild things
In their piece in this issue, Bretton A. Varga and Sarah B. Shear ask what would happen if we quieted ourselves and listened in order to affirm the voices of more-than-human bodies who bear witness
Let’s do better next time: Anti-Blackness and whiteness in an improv workshop
In this paper, I consider evidence of how students of colour enact whiteness by being violent towards depictions of Black people even in spaces without Black people. I argue that people who engage in anti-racist pedagogy have to be vigilant – aware that anti-Black spaces will be created and ready to respond
We’ve Been Had: Neoliberal Initiatives in Urban Education
In this manuscript, we rely on practices of thinking with and through theory to situate and analyze the discourses of three neoliberal educational reform initiatives. We researched public-facing material from these initiatives to surface how commonsense language and colorblindness is often used to disguise agendas that reaffirm the racial status quo in urban schools and society. We offer strategies for educators, teacher-educators, and administra…
There’s No Way for This to End Well: Lesson Planning, Neoliberalism, and Whiteness
The author relies on practices of storytelling to consider how an unexamined and evaluative preoccupation with lesson planning in education supports neoliberalism, affirms whiteness, and limits democratic curriculum and pedagogy. The author theorizes ways that striving toward a nonevaluative stance in education can be used to resist complying with neoliberalism and whiteness in education
What are we
Lately we’ve been thinking about the different kinds of interactions we have with people when we talk about the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. We’ve had all sorts of conversations about the jo
Becoming differently
Last summer, I (Sam) led an improv workshop for high school students around the country. I facilitated four, 45-minute improv sessions with nearly 40 students who were enrolled in a month-long summ
Get uncomfortable
Sam has a long history of facilitating improv theater. His facilitations often invite people to stand together in circles and participate in theatrical activities that involve sharing energy. Sam h
Improv Theater and Whiteness in Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Improv theater has expanded beyond a popular American form of entertainment into an educational experience for students and teachers. It may be difficult to imagine that an interactive, joyful, and collaborative improv workshop might be harmful, but our own experiences as professional improvisers led us to observe that even well-intentioned, antiracist improv theater interventions tend to reflect Whiteness more than democratic values. We investig…
Reading Grand Theft Auto: Improvisational Urban Literacy
This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy pedagogy meant to locate and address issues of race and gender in a video game. This article calls for a broader view…
Doesn't Your Work Just Re-Center Whiteness: The Fallen Impossibilities of White Allyship
Our purpose is to engage performative dialogue incorporative of currere on a central question in critical White studies (CWS). After precautionary notes and positionalities, we frame our dialogue within second-wave CWS. As its main section, six CWS scholars respond to the central question: Doesn’t research on White identities re-center whiteness? Analyzing the scholars’ responses, the performative dialogue is followed by an analytical discussion …
Curriculum and Pedagogy Unbound
These Strange Times Continue
These Strange Times ContinueThese strange times continue.And yet we (Sam and Erin) just did something that is not strange for college professors-we attended an academic conference.The 23rd annual meeting of the Curriculum and Pedagogy group was held in State College, Pennsylvania in October.This, of course, is the group responsible for the journal you are now looking at.Hopefully you've got a hard copy.These covers are fantastic.Shout out to Dr. …
Remaining open to affirmations of difference
More work is needed: Wrestling with Whiteness in education
I use racial storytelling to tell and interpret two stories that offer insight about why I feel the need to continue studying whiteness. I frame this writing through a second-wave of critical whiteness studies, and return to my experiences as a white person to consider my ongoing work to teach, study, and write about whiteness and white supremacy in education
Without closure
Urgent and dangerous work
Destructive domains: Rethinking teacher evaluation in the age of Charlotte Danielson
In this manuscript, we argue that the increasing use of reductive tools born out of neoliberal reforms in education, such as The Framework for Teaching, a tool for teacher evaluation credited to Charlotte Danielson, limits the possibilities for emergent, improvisational teaching. We consider the broader political landscape of the last 25 years to suggest that The Framework for Teaching illuminates a preoccupation in education with so-called measu…
We’ve Been Had: Neoliberal Initiatives in Urban Education
In this manuscript, we rely on practices of thinking with and through theory to situate and analyze the discourses of three neoliberal educational reform initiatives. We researched public-facing material from these initiatives to surface how commonsense language and colorblindness is often used to disguise agendas that reaffirm the racial status quo in urban schools and society. We offer strategies for educators, teacher-educators, and administra…
To Prevent the Existence of People Dedicated to ‘Causing Trouble’: Dirty Work, Social Control and Paramilitaries in Colombia
The activities of combatants in paramilitary groups in Colombia can be seen as ‘dirty work’ that acts as a form of social control. We study the experiences and representations of former combatants concerning violence perpetrated by their groups against ‘outsiders’, arguing that the rhetoric of paramilitary groups not only plays a role in denying crimes. It makes possible for combatants to dignify the dirty work of paramilitary activities, but als…
There’s No Way for This to End Well: Lesson Planning, Neoliberalism, and Whiteness
The author relies on practices of storytelling to consider how an unexamined and evaluative preoccupation with lesson planning in education supports neoliberalism, affirms whiteness, and limits democratic curriculum and pedagogy. The author theorizes ways that striving toward a nonevaluative stance in education can be used to resist complying with neoliberalism and whiteness in education
More work is needed: Wrestling with Whiteness in education
I use racial storytelling to tell and interpret two stories that offer insight about why I feel the need to continue studying whiteness. I frame this writing through a second-wave of critical whiteness studies, and return to my experiences as a white person to consider my ongoing work to teach, study, and write about whiteness and white supremacy in education
Dance Party: Vitality Instead of Neoliberalism in School
Reading Grand Theft Auto: Improvisational Urban Literacy
This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy pedagogy meant to locate and address issues of race and gender in a video game. This article calls for a broader view…
Destructive domains: Rethinking teacher evaluation in the age of Charlotte Danielson
In this manuscript, we argue that the increasing use of reductive tools born out of neoliberal reforms in education, such as The Framework for Teaching, a tool for teacher evaluation credited to Charlotte Danielson, limits the possibilities for emergent, improvisational teaching. We consider the broader political landscape of the last 25 years to suggest that The Framework for Teaching illuminates a preoccupation in education with so-called measu…
Killing Victoria: Improvisational and emergent teaching and learning
This manuscript uses narrative practices of autoethnography to consider the potential of improvisational, emergent pedagogy. The author explores this concept by examining the participation of a student in a yearlong, ethnographic teaching project. A group of mostly white high school students voluntarily engaged in practices of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in concert with playbuilding to investigate whiteness. The author positions th…
Storying a white teacher
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the experience of a white teacher to attain greater understanding of racial identities, especially whiteness, and reconsider the current understandings of whiteness and whiteness pedagogy. The author argues that notions of whiteness are social constructions, and that reconstructions of conventional understandings of whiteness could provide more nuanced understandings of whiteness that might facilit…
Le génocide à l’épreuve des massacres de masse contemporains: Vers Une Rupture Paradigmatique
La violence de masse, considérée ici comme un ensemble d’agressions collectives et étendues, menées contre une population civile, constitue un enjeu majeur de sécurité au XXIesiècle. Dès lors, l’élaboration d’outils analytiques nous permettant d’en saisir la nature s’avère cruciale. Dans le contexte de cet article, nous proposons l’idée selon laquelle le génocide en tant que paradigme, jusqu’alors utilisé pour saisir ce phénomène, ne présente qu’…
Political Opportunities and Local Contingencies in Mass Crime Participation: Personal Experiences by Former Serbian Militiamen
Participation in mass crime is often approached from a top-down perspective that centralizes the actions of the masses under the order of elites and leaders. While there is some evidence to support this approach, a more complete assessment of participation in mass crime must also consider the grassroots contingencies that unite the collective motivation and capacity that induce such actions. Such a bottoms-up approach is developed in this article…
Saisir la violence de masse: Le nettoyage ethnique en Bosnie et l'apport d'une perspective locale et d'une approche de réseau
La compréhension de l’élimination d’une population est généralement envisagée comme résultant d’un plan intentionnel, «d’en haut», coordonné par une série d’institutions étatiques et constituant alors le crime et le paradigme de génocide. Cette perspective, héritage des études traitant l’Holocauste, est ici pondérée dans le contexte du nettoyage ethnique de Bosnie-Herzégovine entre 1992 et 1995 par une approche de réseau et une perspective de «te…
Le génocide à l’épreuve des massacres de masse contemporains: Vers Une Rupture Paradigmatique
La violence de masse, considérée ici comme un ensemble d’agressions collectives et étendues, menées contre une population civile, constitue un enjeu majeur de sécurité au XXIesiècle. Dès lors, l’élaboration d’outils analytiques nous permettant d’en saisir la nature s’avère cruciale. Dans le contexte de cet article, nous proposons l’idée selon laquelle le génocide en tant que paradigme, jusqu’alors utilisé pour saisir ce phénomène, ne présente qu’…
Accounting for whiteness through collaborative fiction
This arts-based, qualitative teacher-researcher study considers how a group of mostly white high school students worked with their white facilitators to consider whiteness using Youth Participatory Action Research in conjunction with playbuilding and drama pedagogy. First, the author locates his reflexive stance. Then, relying on critical race theory and critical whiteness theory, the author uses narrative inquiry to share an ethnographic vignett…
Storying a white teacher
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the experience of a white teacher to attain greater understanding of racial identities, especially whiteness, and reconsider the current understandings of whiteness and whiteness pedagogy. The author argues that notions of whiteness are social constructions, and that reconstructions of conventional understandings of whiteness could provide more nuanced understandings of whiteness that might facilit…
To Prevent the Existence of People Dedicated to ‘Causing Trouble’: Dirty Work, Social Control and Paramilitaries in Colombia
The activities of combatants in paramilitary groups in Colombia can be seen as ‘dirty work’ that acts as a form of social control. We study the experiences and representations of former combatants concerning violence perpetrated by their groups against ‘outsiders’, arguing that the rhetoric of paramilitary groups not only plays a role in denying crimes. It makes possible for combatants to dignify the dirty work of paramilitary activities, but als…
Killing Victoria: Improvisational and emergent teaching and learning
This manuscript uses narrative practices of autoethnography to consider the potential of improvisational, emergent pedagogy. The author explores this concept by examining the participation of a student in a yearlong, ethnographic teaching project. A group of mostly white high school students voluntarily engaged in practices of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in concert with playbuilding to investigate whiteness. The author positions th…
Filmer et être filmé: La nouvelle visibilité policière à l’ère de la sousveillance
Cet article envisage le travail policier sous l'angle de sa mise en images dans la rue et de la diffusion de ces documents (audio)visuels sur les plateformes de partage de l'Internet. Grâce à une enquête ethnographique dans une grande police urbaine nord-américaine, nous montrons comment la « sousveillance » de la police par ses publics marque fortement les perceptions professionnelles des agents en uniforme et modifie leur appréhension des situa…
We might play different parts: Theatrical improvisation and anti-racist pedagogy
This article reports on what three white critical whiteness scholars learned about the ways white supremacy was affirmed and resisted during a two-day improvisational, critical whiteness workshop. The authors relied on critical literacy to theorise the castle as a sign or text with implicit, racial meaning. Furthermore, the authors use improvisational theatre to design and make sense of critical pedagogy intended to disrupt the ongoing production…
Toward Vitality
Moving into impermanence
“Impermanence is the essence of everything.” – Pema Chodron Our last editorial, written in February 2020, feels distant. Like many of you reading this right now, we have been searching for ways to
Without closure
Urgent and dangerous work
Destructive domains: Rethinking teacher evaluation in the age of Charlotte Danielson
In this manuscript, we argue that the increasing use of reductive tools born out of neoliberal reforms in education, such as The Framework for Teaching, a tool for teacher evaluation credited to Charlotte Danielson, limits the possibilities for emergent, improvisational teaching. We consider the broader political landscape of the last 25 years to suggest that The Framework for Teaching illuminates a preoccupation in education with so-called measu…
Ways With Worlds: Bringing Improvisational Theater Into Play With Reading
The authors investigated improvisational theater and the possibilities that it presents for reconsidering reading pedagogy, with a focus on discussions of reading. The authors conducted empirical, qualitative studies of improvisational practice and instruction and analyzed improv through the construct of worlding. In this article, the authors explore different dimensions of worlding, a concept that generally describes how ensembles make present a…
Doesn't Your Work Just Re-Center Whiteness: The Fallen Impossibilities of White Allyship
Our purpose is to engage performative dialogue incorporative of currere on a central question in critical White studies (CWS). After precautionary notes and positionalities, we frame our dialogue within second-wave CWS. As its main section, six CWS scholars respond to the central question: Doesn’t research on White identities re-center whiteness? Analyzing the scholars’ responses, the performative dialogue is followed by an analytical discussion …
Curriculum and Pedagogy Unbound
These Strange Times Continue
These Strange Times ContinueThese strange times continue.And yet we (Sam and Erin) just did something that is not strange for college professors-we attended an academic conference.The 23rd annual meeting of the Curriculum and Pedagogy group was held in State College, Pennsylvania in October.This, of course, is the group responsible for the journal you are now looking at.Hopefully you've got a hard copy.These covers are fantastic.Shout out to Dr. …
Remaining open to affirmations of difference
More work is needed: Wrestling with Whiteness in education
I use racial storytelling to tell and interpret two stories that offer insight about why I feel the need to continue studying whiteness. I frame this writing through a second-wave of critical whiteness studies, and return to my experiences as a white person to consider my ongoing work to teach, study, and write about whiteness and white supremacy in education
What are we
Lately we’ve been thinking about the different kinds of interactions we have with people when we talk about the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. We’ve had all sorts of conversations about the jo
Becoming differently
Last summer, I (Sam) led an improv workshop for high school students around the country. I facilitated four, 45-minute improv sessions with nearly 40 students who were enrolled in a month-long summ
Get uncomfortable
Sam has a long history of facilitating improv theater. His facilitations often invite people to stand together in circles and participate in theatrical activities that involve sharing energy. Sam h
Improv Theater and Whiteness in Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Improv theater has expanded beyond a popular American form of entertainment into an educational experience for students and teachers. It may be difficult to imagine that an interactive, joyful, and collaborative improv workshop might be harmful, but our own experiences as professional improvisers led us to observe that even well-intentioned, antiracist improv theater interventions tend to reflect Whiteness more than democratic values. We investig…
Reading Grand Theft Auto: Improvisational Urban Literacy
This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy pedagogy meant to locate and address issues of race and gender in a video game. This article calls for a broader view…
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Pedagogy (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Critical Race Theory in Education (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works)