Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 1/12 CHAPTER 1 F 1 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A8 A9 PR OO ED 5 Cristyne Hébert, Awad Ibrahim, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook and Bryan Smith How do we internationalize that which is deeply provincial and national? Situating our focus on and interest squarely within curriculum studies, how do we internationalize without imperializing or imposing old, colonial, and so-called “First World” conceptualizations of education on teaching, learning, and curriculum? Let us not anticipate simple answers to such complex questions. Being under no illusion that we hold Solomonic wisdom, we editors turned to the wisdom of others. A curricular response to such pedagogical questions is this edited volume. In it, we called on contributors CT 4 RR E 3 Internationalizing Curriculum Studies: Histories, Environments, and Critiques C. Hébert (*) Faculty of Education, University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada UN CO 2 A. Ibrahim · N. Ng-A-Fook Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: aibrahim@uOttawa.ca N. Ng-A-Fook e-mail: nngafook@uottawa.ca B. Smith James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hébert et al. (eds.), Internationalizing Curriculum Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01352-3_1 1 2 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 F 19 to speak and write from their cultural, linguistic, and national locations, from the places they know best. We invited them to grapple with these questions in an increasingly globalized world while also thinking through the general and particular tasks of curriculum theorists (Derrida 2000). We present this volume as a dialogic tapestry where our discursive exchanges are taken up as complicated conversations (Pinar et al. 1995). In turn, such conversations, as the chapters in the volume make clear, are suggestive of two dialogic frameworks. The first uses history to complicate local and global understandings of curriculum theorizing. The second involves a radical push of curriculum theorizing toward (re)imagining a better future that promises, without promise, bringing into existence that which is yet to come. Internationally oriented conversations start, as Pinar (2010) suggests elsewhere, at the national level where the “nation-state” continues to be a territorial and political domain from which important and consequential educational reforms are made and in turn need to be understood. For Pinar, the project of “internationalization denotes the possibility of nationally distinctive fields in complicated conversations with each other” (p. 3). But why understand the tasks of curriculum theorists in relation to internationalization versus globalization? In Curriculum Studies as an International Conversation, JohnsonMardones (2018) reminds us that the potential of thinking through the concept of internationalization “is not limited to ‘moving beyond the nation’ in order to reconstruct the national narrative or to reformulate a national cannon; it also includes the exploration of international conversations as in-between scholarly spaces” (p. 5). Despite the critiques, Hardt and Negri (2000) tell us, globalization cannot be reduced to not one thing. For them, “the multiple [curricular and pedagogical] processes that we recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal” (p. 219). With this in mind, this collection seeks to understand the local—with its history, environment, and critique—as the starting point for different disciplinary—vertical and horizontal—dimensions of an internationalization of curriculum studies in relation to globalization (Pinar 2015). How might we recognize the analytical and synthetical tensions and possibilities between internationalization and globalization, and how can we root (route) our differing international approaches for studying, or better yet understanding, a concept we call curriculum? This is what we are calling, to lean on Huebner’s term, “the task of the curriculum theorist”: to think through and re/direct the familiar into new, and more hopeful educational and societal directions. PR OO 18 C. HÉBERT ET AL. ED 17 Page: 2/12 CT 16 Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 RR E 15 Book ID: 461308_1_En Chapter No.: 1 UN CO 14 Layout: A5 HuSSci Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 3/12 1 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 F 58 PR OO 57 ED 56 In a time of uncertainty, as education becomes increasingly corporatized and monetized and as de-intellectualization, in the form of alt-right politics, continues to grow and be further embedded in public consciousness, the need to think through the task of the curriculum theorist is becoming more urgent than ever (Epstein 2016; Spring 2015). In light of (or sitting in the dark shadows caused by) Islamophobia, police brutality, hate-fueled attacks, and refusals to respond to the injustices that have been inflicted upon Indigenous communities across the globe, we began this work in careful consideration. We came together, from different parts of the world, to attend the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies Conference (IAACS) in May 2015. People spoke in their own accents, listened to one another with a sense of loving humility, and tried to rearticulate and reimagine what Huebner (1975/1999) calls language forms and their respective radical possibilities. It is worth noting that the Ottawa IAACS conference was the fifth iteration of our gathering together. The first iteration of this conference began 15 years ago at Louisiana State University. At that time, a community of curriculum scholars congregated to “talk about issues in curriculum, hearing what people do, how they do it, [and] how they think about things” with the hope that we could learn from each other (Trueit 2003, p. ix). Like Aoki (2000/2005) suggested then, the IAACS and its associated conference provided a potential space to “generate newness and hope” (p. 457). Then titled The Louisiana State University Conference on the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies, it was organized with the intention of both “encourag[ing] the internationalization of curriculum studies” and calling on curriculum theorists to “contribute to the formation of a world-wide field of curriculum studies” (Pinar 2003, p. 1). At this first gathering, Pinar (2003) offered the following cautionary note: CT 55 3 RR E 54 UN CO 53 INTERNATIONALIZING CURRICULUM STUDIES … Despite the bitterness and our despair over the development in the schools, many of us Americans still exude a naïve, if more than occasionally imperialistic, confidence that “the world is ours.” Of course this is nonsense, but somewhere in the American unconsciousness such nonsenses is it seems, always at work. (p. 4) Since then, the conference has been held triennially, hosted by universities in China (2003), Finland (2006), South Africa (2009), and Brazil (2012). In December of 2018, the conference will be held in Australia. 4 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 F 95 Forty-five years prior to this triennial gathering, in his groundbreaking article, Dwayne Huebner (1975/1999) first thought through The Tasks of the Curriculum Theorist. Huebner challenged readers to reconceptualize the field of curriculum studies as a space for multiplicity, recognizing the variety of shapes and forms various curricular phenomena, research about said phenomena, and the language we ascribe to them could assume. He stressed three areas as fields where our tasks as curriculum theorists lie: within history, the environment, and critique. This collection is organized around these three fields, and we expand upon each briefly. First, when it came to history, Huebner argued, process and continuity were at the forefront of our conversations. And in many ways, they still are. For Huebner, we always need to ground ourselves in a time and a place so that we know where we come from and where we are going. This is what we are calling “histories,” in the plural, because history can never be singular interpretation of our relationships with the past. Consequently, there are as many histories as there are interpreters and interpretations. Huebner stressed then, that what has begun is never quite finished, while at the same time reminding us of our allegiances to the past, in terms of tracing our intellectual histories within their particular and partial contextual states. Huebner (1975/1999) also warned against a tendency toward ahistorical curriculum studies, a proneness for being “messianic” in the adoption of “new and permanent vehicles of salvation” positioned as “the only and only best way to talk about curricular phenomena” (p. 218). “To be aware of our historical nature,” he continued, “is to be on top of our past, so we can use it as a base for projection into the future” (p. 218). Considering his comment in light of current global challenges, this projection need not be linear; tracing a clear line from past to present may not be possible, or indeed, desirable. Instead, projection might be interpreted as a metaphysical force, a movement or motion that disrupts certain ascendant historical logics while advancing alternative narratives. Here, we are looking not to “draw forth old solutions” but rather to be pushed as he put it, “to new levels of awareness” (p. 221). Second, beyond a more general grounding of curricular work, Huebner’s (1975/1999) tasks for curriculum theorists extend to an engagement with what he labels the “environment” of education, consisting of both the places of education—inside and outside of the school—and subjective experiences within these spaces. To fully understand Huebner’s approach to the “environment,” which is the second pillar of this book, we need to distinguish between the “school” (as the PR OO 94 C. HÉBERT ET AL. ED 93 Page: 4/12 CT 92 Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 RR E 91 Book ID: 461308_1_En Chapter No.: 1 UN CO 90 Layout: A5 HuSSci Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 5/12 1 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 F 134 PR OO 133 ED 132 CT 131 5 place, the geography, the building) and “schooling” (as the experiences people have in that place, what they do in it, and in turn what the place does to them). The building does not determine people’s lived experiences but rather is directly related to them. Situating curriculum theory, in part, within Huebner’s “environment” might help us understand and in many ways reverse the process of alienation that detaches “the individual from the history of the situation” and makes challenging the aforementioned process of change and growth (p. 223). Locating our selves in relation to others and spaces aids in the recognition of curriculum as a “form of human praxis, a shaping of the world” (p. 226) that requires reaching out, drawing from, and contributing to an active, political, and aesthetic community committed to imaging the world around us anew. The third and final pillar of the book is centered around what Huebner calls “critique.” Huebner (1975/1999) tasks curriculum theorists with a continued responsibility for conducting research as a means of determining the viability and vitality of institutions by “subjecting [them] to empirical and social criticism appropriate to given historical communities” (pp. 227–228). Apart from institutions, we might consider Huebner’s move toward research as an effort to ground the field in a type of critique, wherein its language, form, and function are placed under the microscope. As he explains, “the empirical critique determines the adequacy of the form for the facts [and] the social critique determines the adequacy of the form in terms of the logical, esthetic, economic, and political values of users” (p. 227). Today, such callings upon curriculum theorists may ground our curriculum inquiries, while also moving them toward a reconceptualization of our practices and policies in particular spaces, opening up larger theoretical questions of how we might create spaces, in curriculum studies, for new ways of sitting with and thinking through both general and particular curricular issues. Inspired by Huebner’s (1975/1999) call to reconsider the tasks of the curriculum theorist, the 2015 meeting of IAACS provided an opportunity for our community to examine more closely what it might mean to curriculum theorize in the present time, in a moment of crisis; to reconsider what it might mean to live hopefully, radically, ethically, and lovingly with one another, across borders that are becoming increasingly real and more difficult to traverse (Lear 2008); to imagine what it might mean to open up new spaces, and to “look at things as if could be otherwise” (Greene 1995, p. 19). These complicated conversations were conducted through a variety of ever-expanding interpretive traditions: RR E 130 UN CO 129 INTERNATIONALIZING CURRICULUM STUDIES … 6 Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 6/12 C. HÉBERT ET AL. 177 TURNING TO OTHERS: WHAT TO EXPECT IN WHAT FOLLOWS 174 175 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 PR OO 173 In the first section, “Grounding Curricular Histories,” the authors invite us to reconsider different historical conversations within the field of curriculum studies. Christou and De Luca offer a brief history of the movement in curriculum studies frequently referred to as reconceptualization. Identifying three tensions in the current state of the field—contemporaneity, discursive balkanization, and methodological diffusion—they challenge curriculum scholars to open up curricular spaces, to consider “who is able to participate in the conversation, how that conversation is referenced, the degree of coherence within the conversation, and the value and function of the conversation.” Quinn and Christodoulou unearth curriculum by constructing an alternative world devoid of curriculum theory, examining its presence through absence. Describing curriculum theory as “the interdisciplinary study of educational experience, involving [an] extraordinarily complicated conversation,” they recount their histories in curriculum theory, calling attention to both the historical roots that ground them in particular spaces and time and the fecund “cross-fertilizing” space between them. In so doing, curriculum theory becomes a generative force of nourishment, one that has the potential to both maintain and transform. Moreira and Ramos provide an important historical overview of the field of curriculum studies in Brazil that centers on the shift from educational transfer to mobility in light of internationalization. They draw on interviews from scholars in the USA, Canada, China, Finland, Great Britain, and Brazil to ground an inquiry into internationalization, arguing that scholars view internationalization as: a path toward homogenization, an attempt to understand how countries have grappled with globalization, and as a means for “changes and exchanges of ED 172 CT 171 RR E 170 UN CO 169 F 176 historical, political, racial, gendered, phenomenological, post-structural/ deconstructive/postmodern, (auto)biographical, aesthetic, theological, institutional, international, environmental, indigenous, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan. The chapters offered in this collection represent a move to ground curriculum studies as an international conversation. While grounding connotes a certain permanence when considering the etymology of the term— solidifying a foundation, constructing a firm basis, or rooting down—the chapters call attention to the possibilities for multiplicity suggested through rerouting (re-rooting) our conceptions of curriculum studies. 168 Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 7/12 1 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 F 210 PR OO 209 ED 208 CT 207 7 experiences.” Fleming offers a history of second language education in contention, drawing on a disagreement between scholars to shed light on the second language education in relation to the hidden curriculum and as a complicated conversation, highlighting the active nature of the curriculum. Focusing on the Canadian Language Benchmarks in particular, Fleming argues for an expansion of curricular implementation models, noting that language curricula might be developed both relationally and in consideration of current classroom contexts. Ebenezer, Harden, Sseggobe-Kiruma, Pickell, and Hamden explore phenomenography and self-reflective journaling in the context of a doctoral seminar. After offering a comprehensive history of curriculum knowledge development, the authors turn to student voices to demonstrate how curriculum is conceptualized by doctoral students as a means of promoting openness and flexibility, listening to students’ voices, and engaging in reflective thinking. Their chapter calls on educators to think about curriculum as dispersion of theories existing at a given time in history rather than a progression of theories that is getting better and better and will ultimately lead to the most plausible theory as in science. Meyer, Nicol, Maalim, Olow, Ali, Nashon, Bulle, Hussein, Hussein, and Hassan bring an end to this first section by examining curriculum within the context of refugee camps, highlighting the tensions of working with students in long-term and yet also emergency situations, where “the opportunity for education in a long-term refugee situation but [working] with curriculum that has limitations, perhaps barriers, for transition and life after returning to their homeland.” The text offers a series of narratives that explore what it means to learn and teach in a refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. The authors call for curriculum theorists, to “rethink emphases and create pedagogical possibilities commensurate with: the exigency of time in long-term displacement situations; the implications of crossing physical, social, and cultural borders; the losses endured by marginalized communities; and the problematics of adaptation in lieu of choice in the daily life of displaced people.” In “Grounding Educational Environments,” the authors attempt to answer our opening questions in relation to Huebner’s conceptualization of “environment.” They investigate conceptions of selves, others, and place in relation to curriculum studies. Aitken and Radford call our attention to the subjectivities of future teachers, drawing on a psychoanalytic framework to consider how students in capstone course took up environmental stewardship. More specifically, they explore RR E 206 UN CO 205 INTERNATIONALIZING CURRICULUM STUDIES … 8 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 F 249 tensions that emerged as students grappled with socio-environmental equity, arguing for the value of “attending to psychic dynamics” that emerge within the classroom while challenging curriculum theorists to “renew attention to the significance of psychic dynamics in education.” Ropo takes up autobiographical narratives as a means of grounding the self in particular temporal and locational contexts. Reviewing identity through the lenses of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, he uses Cote’s epistemological and individual/social classifications to make a case of the significance of taking up identity in school contexts. Woven into the text is Ropo’s own autobiographical writing, offered as a way to demonstrate how narratives can serve as “tools for repositioning,” “anchor[ing] to place one’s life course in chronological time and contexts, geographical places and environments, and the conditions of everyday lives” while at the same time constructing new “reflected narratives [that] comprise the capital for identity repositioning as a resource for future life contexts.” Dernikos, Lesko, McCall, and Niccolini ground their curriculum theorizing within the psychic dimensions of affect. Beginning with the affective turn, they argue in favor of affect’s focus on the body, thus disrupting the ever-present legacy of dualism. Highlighting the “creative, unpredictable, and vital force” of affect as “a means of interrupting and remodulating dominant moves of power and rigid normativities,” Dernikos, Lesko, McCall, and Niccolini provide a series of vignettes as “affective encounters” that serve to “push against dominant configurations of power in schools.” Shields ends this second section through a self-study that works to “unpack … seminal experiences that inform and guide our definitions of curriculum.” Using both Pinar and Clandinin and Connelly’s work as a basis for her inquiry, she stresses the significance of “com[ing] to know the roots of our own perceptions about what is important to promote in our curriculum theorizing and teaching,” highlighting narrative as a place for inquiry, recovering and reconstructing meaning, and building personal power. In addition to uncovering her own roots through narrative writing, Shields also describes a series of methods used in teaching and supervising students that are helpful for thinking through how we might aid others, as curriculum scholars, in the process of collectively coming to know the grounding of our own ways of knowing and being in the world. We end our collection in the final section thinking through Huebner’s concept of “critique.” In this third section, “Grounding Curricular PR OO 248 C. HÉBERT ET AL. ED 247 Page: 8/12 CT 246 Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 RR E 245 Book ID: 461308_1_En Chapter No.: 1 UN CO 244 Layout: A5 HuSSci Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 9/12 1 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 F organic relationality that transcends dualism, non-instrumental engagement that engages students’ growth without trying to control the outcome, playfulness that decenters fixity and allows emergence in teaching and learning, the necessity of the inner work simultaneous with the outer work, a radical denouncement of violence in all forms, and the feminist advocacy of peace are all important aspects of nonviolence. PR OO 287 Understanding nonviolence as engagement with self, relationship with difference, and as an essential task of the curriculum theorist, Wang suggests that nonviolence is “not a destination or ideal to reach, but an ongoing process of daily work to unlearn the mechanism of domination internally and relate compassionately externally to others and the world.” In this respect, grounding our critiques as nonviolence is both an inward and an outward move. Le Grange writes about the potential of the African concept of Ubuntu as a means for thinking through our becoming in relation to others, or others’ becoming in relation to us. After providing a history of education in South Africa, his text offers a skillful braiding of currere and Ubuntu, as Le Grange weaves the practices together, offering Ubuntu-currere as anti-humanist, relational, and post-anthropocentric critique of the very concept we call curriculum. In our collection’s concluding chapter, Whitlock situates her curriculum inquiries and critiques within theology. She examines the theological/theoretical works of Bonhoeffer through the lens of queer theology, alongside narrative accounts of a Southern place, Christian fundamentalism and losing one’s religion in order to return one’s self to theology and its respective study. Whitlock also proposes placing theology in conversation with education. She asks us to reconsider that “there is no human apart from the power-less, emptied, suffering God.” What Whitlock offers here is a means of thinking through curriculum in relation to God, a “theological curriculum framework [that] presents God as a lived curriculum, as radical love, as currere.” Thinking through the tasks of curriculum theorists, it seems, is a call to write and re-write our complicated international conversations, while also questioning the quotidian of our live(d) experiences as curriculum ED 286 CT 285 9 Critique,” authors call attention to a series of theoretical moves that might open up new spaces for working within/through curricular issues. Wang invites us to rethink nonviolence in relation to curriculum theorizing. She describes such thinking through as an: RR E 284 UN CO 283 INTERNATIONALIZING CURRICULUM STUDIES … Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 10/12 10 C. HÉBERT ET AL. 331 REFERENCES 326 327 328 329 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 PR OO 325 Aoki, T. (2005). Postscript. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted. T. Aoki. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Derrida, J. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Epstein, J. (2016). Here’s the proof of Donald Trump’s racism, sexism & anti-gay rhetoric you’ve been asking for, trolls. Retrieved from http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/joshuaepstein/trump. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huebner, D. (1975/1999). The tasks of the curricular theorist. In V. Hillis (Ed.), The lure of the transcendent: Collected essays by Dwayne E. Huebner (pp. 212–230). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Johnson-Mardones, D. F. (2018). Curriculum studies as an international conversation: Educational traditions and cosmopolitanism in Latin America. New York: Routledge. Lear, J. (2008). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinar, W. F. (2003). Toward the internationalization of curriculum studies. In D. Trueit, W. Doll, H. Wang, & W. Pinar (Eds.), The internationalization of curriculum studies (pp. 1–14). New York: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. F. (2010). Introduction. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum studies in South Africa: Intellectual histories and present circumstances (pp. 1–18). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. F. (2015). Educational experience as lived: Knowledge, history, alterity. New York, NY: Routledge. ED 324 CT 323 RR E 322 UN CO 321 F 330 scholars, teachers, and human beings. The authors in this collection therefore call on each of us, like Huebner (1999) before them, to use “the unformed to create form; as a focusing on the unconditioned in order to develop new conditions” (p. 227). Even as we face what some might call a world in political, environmental, economic, existential, and so on crisis, the “radical” concept of hope continues to sustain the conditions that inform are past, present, and future tasks as international curriculum theorists. To this curricular and pedagogical end, this collection represents an evocative conceptualization of the challenging histories, environments and critiques international curriculum theorists continue to take up in their groundbreaking intellectual work. 320 Layout: A5 HuSSci Book ID: 461308_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-030-01352-3 Chapter No.: 1 Date: 25 October 2018 19:49 Page: 11/12 1 364 F 363 PR OO 362 ED 361 CT 360 11 Pinar, W., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. Spring, J. (2015). Economization of education: Human capital, global corporation, skills-based schooling. New York: Routledge. Trueitt, D. (2003). Democracy and conversation. In D. Trueit, W. Doll, H. Wang, & W. Pinar (Eds.), The internationalization of curriculum studies (pp. ix–xvii). New York, NY: Peter Lang. RR E 359 UN CO 358 INTERNATIONALIZING CURRICULUM STUDIES …