Left: Wanying Wang, Ph.D., Visiting Professor | Right: Daniel Ness, Ph.D., Professor
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
March 2, 2026
Wanying Wang, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor and Daniel Ness, Ph.D., Professor, from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in The School of Education recently discussed their contribution to the new book, Understanding Curriculum Epistemicide: Possibilities and Complicated Conversations.
Drs. Wang and Ness, what inspired the initial concept for this book?
Dr. Wang: We were inspired to address the topics of the day, informed by a large number the academic disciplines. We believe that curriculum confronts and addresses reality, emphasizing the experience of human beings related to education.
Our book allows us, first, to reconsider the concept of epistemicide—erasure of multiple ways of knowing and thinking. As the editors, we are committed to furthering the important debate. We are not providing a doctrinal stance—an important concern that this edited book strongly opposes—but an invitation for in-depth understanding and possible unfolding geared toward broader, more open, apertures. Central themes to this book are opening, epistemicide otherwise, lingering, and aperture, a structure of our edited book.
What unfolded is a collection of thought pieces that converge around the erasure of different and unique ways of knowing, but diverge in relation to other questions, such as: What is epistemicide? Who gets to define it? How do we define it? Whose knowledge defines it? This forms connections and disconnections around specific themes or examples of the death of epistemologies, reverberations within schooling, and the inadequacy of language and theory to represent the depth of this tragedy.
Dr. Ness: Such convergence and divergence traverse across each other, embodied in their writing, in their ever-expanding encounter with various theories and perspectives, braided with each other, no threading theme needed, but a pursuit for more porous understanding, thus permitting readers to perceive one and same issue from different perspectives.
Consequently, in collaboration with Richard Sawyer, Ed.D., of Washington State University, we curated a successful special issue on curriculum epistemicide. The profound reception to this work prompted Shirley Steinberg, Ph.D., Editor, Counterpoints series at Peter Lang Publishing Group to invite us to develop an edited volume expanding upon these critical themes.
Dr. Wang, what aspects of writing your chapter, “Currere as Curriculum of Flowability,” did you find most challenging?
Dr. Wang: I put much emphasis on self-knowledge. I’ve proposed my own curriculum theory—guided by the idea of currere—a curriculum of flowability. My theory of curriculum emerges from my lived experience both as a student and a teacher—experiences being superimposed while flowing into each other and influencing each other, a fluid self that is situated within the influences of discourses however transcends it. Such a theory centralizes self-knowledge, in which each particular self emerges while “flowing” temporally and spatially, manifesting itself in each unique way, emphasizing the particularity of each self at the core. It is a personal epistemology, by which one enters a subjective space, entangled with various influences of discourses, embracing a fluid self while attuned to one’s awakening inwardness, by which the whole world unfolds itself in front of us.
Dr. Ness, what did you find most challenging in writing your chapter, “Standardized Violence Curriculum and the Turpitude of ‘Average Ability?’”
Dr. Ness: In this chapter, I have investigated how standardized education—through a “remedial factory, cram school mode” and “equivalence by leveling,” a term coined by my colleagues and me that refers to the corporate education assembly line’s role in squeezing all students, regardless of experience or understanding, into a monolithic mass of “average abilities”—constitutes a form of structural, standardized violence that marginalizes diverse intellects. The chapter argues that centering curriculum on a fictional “average” student leads to intellectual stasis and the erasure of unique, non-conforming ways of knowing, a concept defined as “curriculum violence.” What I found most challenging while preparing this chapter for the book, aside from the intense collection of primary sources as direct supporting evidence, was connecting the concept of equivalence by leveling with theories within psychoanalysis and phenomenology—core fields in curriculum studies and subjectivity.
Did you collaborate with any of your colleagues during the process? What are your thoughts on their contribution?
Dr. Ness: Absolutely. We invited Jim Wolfinger, Ph.D., Dean, The School of Education, to review our chapters alongside those of our contributors. In response, he provided a luminous endorsement that is featured among other opening accolades, immediately preceding the introduction. The intellectual momentum of this volume has catalyzed the inception of a new comprehensive curriculum handbook. Having secured publisher approval, we are now inviting colleagues from different universities to contribute their expertise to this expanding discourse.
Dr. Wang, in Chapter 2, you highlight the concept of currere. Can you expand on what currere means for the curriculum layperson?
Dr. Wang: Rather than viewing curriculum as planned, currere frames curriculum as a lived journey of self-understanding. It calls readers to turn inward to explore themselves in relation to others and the world, while situating within the entanglement of past, present, and future. Drawing on William Pinar’s work, this book provides an understanding of currere that is interwoven with cosmopolitanism, poetic inquiry, ethics, teacher education, and the idea of manifested punctuations—moments of pause, shift, or intensification that disrupt experience. Currere, here, becomes a lived guide for navigating the fluidity of life, engaging readers in feeling and thought, the given and the possible, the inner and outer worlds. Richly reflective and deeply empathic, currere offers a pathway toward a more embodied, attuned, and fluid sense of self, transforming curriculum into an ongoing journey of discovery.
Dr. Wang, the theme of Chapter 7, psychic speech, interpellation, and transcendence is quite thought-provoking. Would you mind unpacking this a bit? Possibly sharing with the reader how psychoanalysis is framed within the context of the curriculum?
Dr. Wang: Drawing on the psychoanalytic concepts from Jacques Lacan, Peter Taubman, and other scholarly work, I have written about how an understanding of the unconscious can contribute to how we make sense of teaching and learning. Emphasizing a synthesis of certain aspects of the unconscious at the core, I have proposed the concept of psychic speech as an “unaware lack” in oneself that is conveyancing and beyond rational grasp. My sense of psychic speech—aiming toward understanding the subject of the unconscious—sheds light on how the unconscious disrupts educational discourses, using the metaphors I referred to in the chapter as “remotes resonances” and “generative filters.” I ask: Is the psychic dimension one of the possible reasons for curriculum epistemicide?
Dr. Ness, in your chapter, you refer to the concept of “equivalence by leveling.” Could you elaborate on its meaning?
Dr. Ness: I, along with my colleagues in an earlier publication (Farenga, Ness, and Sawyer, 2015) define “equivalence by leveling” as a detrimental educational strategy that forces students into a static, “average” environment through a combination of creating stasis, using arbitrary standards, and restricting curriculum through the mandated use of rubrics. We argue that this approach, characterized as a “remedial mode” of education, stifles progress by prioritizing a uniform, consensus-driven outcome over individual intellectual growth.
By enforcing a “one-size-fits-all” metric, this framework—enforced not only across virtually all states but also internationally in various related forms—effectively institutionalizes mediocrity, treating the ceiling of student potential as a floor that must not be exceeded. Consequently, the learner’s odyssey is stunted, as the standardized rubric transforms the pursuit of excellence into a mere bureaucratic exercise in compliance. This systemic suppression ensures that intellectual outliers are pulled back toward a centered mean, sacrificing deep, divergent inquiry for the sake of measurable, yet superficial, administrative parity.
What was the most distinctive or unconventional research you conducted for your chapters?
Dr. Wang: We would say that the most distinctive, unconventional aspect of our chapters, and of the book as a whole, is the multiplicity of genres that can be identified in the different chapters. For instance, some chapters are currere studies, others grapple with issues related to education “deform,” while others serve as polemic and disagreement—essentially demonstrating alternative and opposing views on the issue of curriculum epistemicide.
Which themes or messages did you aim to explore or communicate through your contributions?
Dr. Ness: We implore our readers to interrogate the current state of education, not merely within the United States but across the global landscape. Since the mid-twentieth century, at least in the United States and Canada, the field has become increasingly mired in presentism—a pervasive apathy toward both our educational foundations that shackle teacher autonomy and student understanding, as well as our broader living environments. This condition is the progeny of several converging forces, most notably the exponentially burgeoning technologization of society and a pernicious, ravishing audit culture. These mechanisms effectively strip the student’s lived experience of its role as an essential conduit for deep understanding. Ultimately, we call upon educators to confront and dismantle the epistemological erasure that continues to marginalize and annihilate the diverse intellectual heritage of entire populations.
Are you currently editing or working on any other books?
Dr. Wang: Yes, thanks for the question. As we’ve discussed earlier, we are currently working on a handbook tentatively entitled Handbook of Curriculum Studies and Subjectivity, which explores numerous facets of these very important topics. As mentioned above, we are in the process of inviting colleagues to submit chapters on the many multifaceted themes of this handbook.
What are the key insights or takeaways you hope readers will gain from this book?
Dr. Ness: Embracing rigorously various perspectives, scholars of ethnic background, nationality, and gender have informed the writing of the book. Because of the book’s diversity, we are engaging in “creative tensionality” through antecedent stories, associated with the past, with the future, while situating in the present. However, we are not putting an end to it, and we are still lingering, contemplating, and reminiscing. We hope readers will, too.
Understanding Curriculum Epistemicide: Possibilities and Complicated Conversations is available on Amazon.