Microsoft Word - Commentary Kameniar.doc Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Commentaries and conversations on Barbara Kameniar’s ‘Dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom’ Editor: Noel Gough La Trobe University, Australia Introduction Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (TCI) is both a site for transnational scholarly conversations and a site for inquiry into the ways that electronic publishing procedures facilitate and/or constrain inclusive knowledge work in global virtual spaces. One of the ways in which we try to produce such conversations is by keeping TCI’s editorial policies and procedures flexible and refraining from imposing arbitrary standards and styles. For example, TCI does not have a fixed publication schedule: articles and book/media reviews will usually be published as soon as they are accepted for publication. Some issues might consist of just one article or one book/media review, other issues might contain several articles that we believe might be complementary. We will also be flexible in matters of layout and style. If authors go to the trouble of formatting their articles in a particular way, we will not change them to fit our templates. Similarly, we do not prescribe one single citation style. Authors are free to use whatever style they see as most appropriate for their work, provided that they use a style consistently and provide all of the bibliographic information we require. TCI’s review policies and procedures are also flexible. For example, although all articles published in TCI will be peer reviewed, they will not necessarily be ‘blind’ reviews. Authors can choose to anonymise their manuscripts, and the editors will respect their choice, but we will not impose anonymity on authors. Each manuscript is normally reviewed by three referees, two of whom, in most circumstances, will be of different nationalities from the author(s) and from each other (in this instance, the third referee did not deliver a review, despite constant promises that it was ‘on its way’; however, I judged that the convergence of the two reviews I received clearly warranted the manuscript’s acceptance for publication). In addition, the Editor may assign a consulting editor to liaise with the referees and the Editor in reaching a decision about publication. Each referee’s signed review will be circulated to the other referees. My experience, like that of many other journal editors, is that signed reviews are generally of a higher quality than unsigned reviews. However, the names of referees will not be divulged to authors of rejected manuscripts. At the Editor’s discretion, manuscripts accepted for publication may be published together with some or all of the referees’ reports and the author’s response, as is the case with Barbara Kameniar’s article. I thank Heesoon Bai and Robert Hattam for their thoughtful and engaging commentaries and questions. Kameniar writes: ‘I would like to thank the reviewers for their comments. I found all of the comments very useful in restructuring the paper’. Kameniar quotes from Bai’s and Hattam’s reviews below and provides her responses in the right hand column. I have deleted some comments concerned chiefly with technical and stylistic issues. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Commentaries and conversations on Barbara Kameniar’s ‘Dilemmas in providing hospitality to others’ Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 13 Comments by Heesoon Bai Recommendation: accept with revisions. This paper treats an important topic, and the paper does a good job of theoretically framing the case study. The use of Derrida’s work on hospitality and that of other writers (hooks, Foucault) is apropos and illuminating. Heesoon Bai’s comments Barbara Kameniar’s responses On page 5, the author states ‘In the next section of this paper I provide further detail on the complexities that exist between a foreigner and a host. I then illustrate some of the ways …’. This is good, except that the next section (‘Foreigners and hosts’) does not contain the promised illustration as it does not contain the case study/story. It turns out that this next section is most/all about Derrida’s notion of hospitality. The section after this, ‘Restless negotiations’, does contain the case study/story. Given this, it seems that the latter section ‘Restless …’ should come before ‘Foreigners and hosts’. I reversed the order as suggested by this reviewer. However, the section ‘Foreigners and hosts’ then appeared to provide the theory for analysis ‘after the event’. A colleague provided me with feedback on the revision which suggested I needed to rethink the ordering once again. As a result the section ‘Foreigners and hosts’ is now located directly after the ‘Introduction’. In this way it provides the reader with an introduction to the theory used in analysing Caroline’s negotiations. The section on page 5 referred to by the reviewer now appears later in the paper as the final part of a new section. ‘Dangerous visitations’. Another suggestion: I think that the case study/story section could start out with a more straightforward, descriptive account of the school, programs, Caroline’s class, what she teaches, what the issues and problems are that rose in her class, etc. After giving this account, the section can then evolve to contain more analytic and interpretive accounts. This way, the reader can have a clearer picture of what’s going on in this school for religious education. Also perhaps some accounts given in ‘Conclusion’ could be moved to the aforementioned descriptive section. In tact, I thought that ‘Conclusion’ was the clearest part of the paper, and I thought that if I could have read this part earlier in the paper, I would have had a better time comprehending it. At least, that’s my experience in reading this paper! More detail about the social, cultural and economic context of the class has been provided. A brief description of the rationale behind teaching about Buddhism in this context has been given. The Conclusion included a ‘postscript’ entitled: ‘Implications of this study in changing religio-political times’ which attempted to outline the importance of this work. This section was removed and placed in the new section ‘Dangerous Visitations’. Comments by Robert Hattam Recommendation: accept submission. We urgently need more papers that attempt to theorise the nature of (anti)racism in Australia, and especially in the field of education. This paper makes an innovative contribution to our thinking about that issue. I think the paper is innovative in a number of ways. Firstly, the author sensitively introduces Derrida’s notion of http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Commentaries and conversations on Barbara Kameniar’s ‘Dilemmas in providing hospitality to others’ Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 14 infinite hospitality and its (im)possibility as an horizon for thinking about the role of the religion teacher. The opening paragraphs provide a very insightful imagining of the ‘teacher’ in general: all teachers have to negotiate in that space between ‘host’ and ‘hostage’ but then the aporia is more intense for those whose curriculum involves cultural/religious difference. Secondly, the author engages her reading of Derrida with actual empirical ‘data’, which provides a case in which to apply/develop her theorising. I think this bit was courageous but I’m not convinced the author actually succeeded in using the case in question to make the point. Robert Hattam’s comments Barbara Kameniar’s responses I had trouble finding the exemplar of a teacher struggling with the aporia outlined in the opening move of the paper. Having said that, I’m not sure that would be possible in a paper of this length. I’m not sure how the example was a case of a teacher struggling with/against ‘white colonial tropes’. I revisited the ‘case’ and incorporated a more explicit discussion of the ways in which Caroline’s struggles could be understood in terms of the aporia of hospitality. The example had a lot of complexity and I would have appreciated a bit more contextual information (what’s a ‘co-educational denominational school’? And what year level is she teaching? … not sure who the ‘Others’ are in her class .. this seems quite important given the opening move in this paper. See above, more detail about the social, cultural and economic context of the class has been provided. A brief description of the rationale behind teaching about Buddhism in this context has been given. The paper was arguing for a particular complex form of reflexivity; maybe this could have been fore-grounded as the main theme of the paper. Although I do not use the term ‘reflexivity’, I do argue for teachers to ‘restlessly negotiate’ the ‘two contradictory and equally justified imperatives’ that being positioned as ‘host’ and ‘agents of the Host/s’ demands. I argue this throughout the paper. However, in re-writing the abstract I have included a note to this effect in the last sentence. This should signal to readers that this is a key argument of the paper. Reviewers Heesoon Bai is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Email: heesoon_bai@sfu.ca Robert Hattam is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of South Australia. Email: Robert.Hattam@unisa.edu.au http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci mailto:bai@sfu.ca mailto:Hattam@unisa.edu.au