Chapter 13: Open Your Windows… Window Shopper: (Re)Conceptualizing John I. Goodlad’s Curriculum Inquiry via Gil Scott Heron and Hip-Hop

I am going to begin this chapter in what most would probably assume is unorthodox and self-deprecating. I will start with an admission. My admission is that I am struggling mightily with writing this chapter. I am not struggling to articulate thoughts because the literary work is not understood or comprehended. It is not that the theoretical constructs that make up most curriculum texts overwhelm me. Yet, here I am at 11:34pm, drafting again. I am warring with making sure that I am respectful of a classic curriculum text that indeed still has value even three decades after it was written. My struggles entail making sure that my critical and “colorful” perspectives are voiced. This is probably my fourth version of this chapter, and I finally realized what is missing. My voice was missing. My very essence in the previous drafts was invisible. After going through almost twenty years of schooling, I denied the one element that I previously embedded in all of my academic work. I haphazardly overlooked the fact that my skin color and the experiences connected to this particular ebony vessel.