Toward an unsettling curriculum of care writing & care creation: A “complicated conversation”

While recent scholarly attention has been focused on deepening care ethics’ interdisciplinary conceptualizations, research has yet to attend to relationships between care and writing, and care and creation. This paper, cognizant also of a global devaluation of care in neoliberal times, thus originally introduces and conceptualizes possibilities toward a curriculum of “care writing” and “care creation.” We, three faculty members and three middle and secondary English language arts schoolteachers, share a year-long “complicated conversation” of online bimonthly dialogue, in which we envision care’s enactment in and through multimodal, multilingual, and plurilingual writing practices in educational sites of learning. Additionally, we introduce care creation as a research methodology informed by research creation. Our aim is to underscore the significance of bringing an ethics of care into writing and creation, and conversely, in bringing care to life and life to care in curriculum studies and school contexts in increasingly fraught times.