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Ways to Think about a Changing World: What
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry Says
Hugo Heleno Camilo Costa1
Federal University of Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso, Brazil
GREEN, B.; ROBERTS, P.; BRENNAN, M. (2021). Curriculum Challenges and
Opportunities in a Changing World: Transnational Perspectives in Curriculum Inquiry.
Palgrave Macmillan: New York.
Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational.
Homi Bhabha
The book edited by Bill Green, Philip Roberts, and Marie Brennan provides a rich intellectual
journey on different productions by researchers from different countries. Such contributions
provide opportunities for deepening the most recent discussions in the curriculum field for
researchers, teachers, and those interested in starting their studies. The work involves
provocations presented as answers to the central question proposed by the organizers: What
role does curriculum scholarship have to play in the strange and difficult times we find
ourselves in? The unique perspectives presented by the authors make up, at the same time, the
state of art and an agenda for the future of the curriculum field considering the challenges and
issues of our times as paths for curricular studies.
The work comprises a whole set of tensions involved in the meaning of the name
"curriculum" in the world, including the overload brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Such
a conflicting scenario poses a challenge to the field of curriculum, in a scenario in which new
educational dynamics are initiated and others are hindered by the impacts of the disease and
by so many other demands of our times. In this sense, the organizers of the collection propose
as a general problematization what the practice of the curriculum is, what is a curriculum,
what it means to make a curriculum in a current situation with so many issues, opportunities,
and challenges for reflecting on. The present nature of the work lends consistency to its
provocative tone, considering that, in addition to the pandemic, there is a great number of
social demands in effervescence, of struggles based on debates about race, coloniality,
knowledge, identity, teacher education, among many others. Seeking to provide the reader
with a dense dialogue on those central themes, the work is organized around four parts that
focus on the themes of decoloniality, knowledge and nation, in addition to innovative
interpretations of future challenges in the field of curriculum. In accordance with the structure
of the 6th World Curriculum Studies Conference (December 2018), the collection is
organized as follows: Part I - Decolonizing the Curriculum, Part II - Knowledge Questions
and Curriculum Dilemmas, Part III - History, Nation, Curriculum, and Part IV - Curriculum
Challenges for the Future.
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Despite the segmentation into parts, it is important to highlight the organicity of the
work, signaling an interesting internal dialogue with regard to possible interactions between
the chapters of the different parts. In this sense, the book is consolidated in an invitation or
provocation to the reader in order to get involved with what has been produced about
curriculum around the world and/or about how curriculum has been produced in what we call
our world. It is an interesting resource for understanding the different questions that produce a
curricular thought that is continually constituted by singular interpretations that converge in a
transnational conversation about curriculum.
It is a work marked by different perspectives, diverse theoretical traditions, innovative
approaches, alternative problematizations, and transnational interpretations that drive new
interactions and an understanding of how the curriculum field has been redesigned in a
changing world. It is through such intellectual dynamics that the book is energized comprising
the thought of authors from Aotearoa, New Zealand, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada,
Chile, England, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Africa, and the USA. Among the
motivations for the work is the inspiration from a perspective of "Curriculum-as-international-
text," whose focus is on a situatedness approach aimed at reflecting on how and in which part
of the world curriculum is being talked about and thinking about the curriculum, which is
assumed as a production mobilized in multiple spaces and places.
Part I begins with the chapter by Crain Soudien, which is called Development,
Colonization, and the Curriculum: New Directions for New Times?, and focuses on the
colonial character of the university in South Africa, as well as the questioning of its ability to
meet the demands of black students and its commitment to social development and the fight
against inequality. The purpose of the article is to critically discuss the current decolonial
moment of higher education in South Africa. Specifically, it addresses the effects of
decolonial theories on curriculum transformation, in addition to identifying four key positions
in this political scenario, namely Transformation by Detachment, Transformation by
Inclusion, Transformation by Enlargement, and Transformation by Critical Appropriation. In
his approach, the author highlights relations with the decolonial movement sustaining critical
perspectives on the arrogance that guides modernity, the premise of its inevitability, the
imperial role of the university in South Africa, and racialization as the core for the formation
of human subjects. It focuses on the thoughts of Sousa Santos, Essop, Prah, and Mbembe,
among others. The chapter concludes by pointing out that decolonial contributions allow the
recognition of racism as a signifier of imperial power and the idea of race as a means to
maintain a normativity for the conception of what it is to be human, whose effects can be
fought through an curriculum agenda that comprises contributions from Southern
decolonialists.
The second chapter, Smoke and Mirrors: Indigenous Knowledge in the School
Curriculum by Georgina Tuari Stewart explores the inclusion of Māori knowledge into
policies and practices in Aotearoa, New Zealand. For the author, the theme is fraught with
complexity and requires an approach centered on specific situations. In order to think about
this scenario, it approaches the thought of Michael Young in order to challenge his conception
of powerful knowledge, considering it illusory and capable of reifying knowledge in a binary
way. In this sense, it develops an analysis of Young's most recent thought, highlighting limits
in his conceptions about the relationship between curriculum and knowledge. For the author,
Young's perspective is dissonant with the reality of multiple contexts and tends to reiterate
technicist logics in the school by assuming ways of knowing as presuppositions prior to
school culture and the demands of communities. On the other hand, it agrees with the idea
that, even from a bicultural education perspective, the curriculum should be based on
disciplinary knowledge, articulating systematized knowledge with knowledge produced in the
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daily lives of students. Curriculum should be also capable of being understood in the school
context.
The chapter The Mestizo Latinoamericano as Modernity's Dialectical Image: Critical
Perspectives on the Internationalization Project in Curriculum Studies by Daniel F. Johnson-
Mardones proposes a reflection on the possibility of building an interdisciplinary research
field based on an intercultural dialogue beyond the limits of Eurocentric modernity. At first, it
criticizes the modern educational project in view of the conception of the "Latin American
mestizo" as a dialectical image. Then, it relates the critique of modernity to the decolonization
project of the academic educational field taking into account the inclusion of Latin American
thought in the discussion on the internationalization of curriculum studies. For this, it
approaches the thought of authors such as Quijano, Walenstein, and Mignolo, among others,
with the objective of thinking about the identity dynamics involved in what he considers as
the "Latin American mestizo." Based on the singularities of this identification, the author
proposes the liberation of Latin American thought from pedagogies of domination, venting as
a possibility the idea that the hybrid construction that marks Latin American thought
highlights the unique character of each tradition, culture, or investigative field. For the author,
this helps to rethink a curriculum studies project as international, although not uniform, which
can be sustained through constant conversations and dialogues.
The chapter 5, Refusing Reconciliation in Indigenous Curriculum by Kevin Lowe,
Nikki Moodie, and Sara Weuffen draws attention to the reconciliation discourse involved in
the rise of indigenous content in the Australian curriculum. For the authors, the treatment
given to the representation of indigenous populations in the curriculum tends to focus on
colonial purposes of exclusion from ways of knowing, doing, and being indigenous people in
the school system. In this sense, they argue that one of the purposes of the increase in
indigenous themes in the curriculum is to make the Australian common good known to the
general population. They also emphasize that the identity logic of the Australian curriculum
tends to separate indigenous knowledge from indigenous learners, while at the same time it
presents perspectives such as maintaining the impossibility of sovereignty for indigenous
peoples and the rescue of "futures" through politics of reconciliation. The authors conclude by
stating that current Australian curriculum policies reiterate the logic that indigenous school
success is separate from social justice and a rights-based agenda, which tends to reiterate
processes of school exclusion.
Part II begins with the chapter by Zongyi Deng entitled Bringing Content Back in:
Perspectives from German Didaktik, American Curriculum Theory, and Chinese Education,
which focuses on the importance of knowledge for the curriculum debate, highlighting the
current disappearance of the approach to the theme of knowledge in curriculum studies. For
the author, current curricular trends have focused more on the discussion of generic
competences for the 21st century, in addition to results to be achieved, than on knowledge.
Such changes, according to the author, are also due to the influence of neo-Marxist, post-
modern, and post-structuralist studies, which would tend to make knowledge secondary in the
curriculum agenda. This would explain why curriculum theorists were being sidelined from
curriculum policy making. The chapter draws primarily on the studies of Michael Young, as
well as the contributions of American curriculum thought, German Didatik and Chinese
education. Based on these contributions, it concludes by inviting curriculum researchers to
reflect on new ways to think about knowledge and content in curriculum production with a
view to planning and teaching at school.
The chapter 8, Knowledge Beyond the Metropole: Curriculum, Rurality and the Global
South by Philip Roberts questions what kind of knowledge counts and how it can be involved
in a more meaningful curriculum for students in rural areas. For this, he makes use of
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contributions from Southern epistemologies in order to problematize curriculum research,
with a special attention to spatial-epistemic justice for rural spaces. It assumes that there is a
lack of recognition of the rural in contemporary Australian education, which leads to a
marginal understanding of what rural spaces are and, consequently, to spatial injustice. It
defends a conception of rural life opposed to the ingrained meanings of a metropolitan
worldview. After stressing the different logics involved in the rural-metropolis relationship, it
focuses on the case of the Australian curriculum to highlight the absence of the debate on
knowledge, which is supposed to have been resolved. The author concludes by stating that the
current curriculum privileges learning and acquisition of results, moving away from the nature
of the curriculum and knowledge. Such current logics would operate the marginalization of
different ways of knowing in favor of visions of progress marked by perspectives associated
with the city, the global and the metropolis, leading to the aggravation of social-spatial
injustice.
Then, the chapter Curriculum Making as Design Activity by Yew Leong Wong
considers the debate on curriculum formulation taking into account the intellectual production
of the field and proposes questions about how educators can develop and implement an
effective curriculum. The text proposes the design methodology as a useful possibility for
educators to develop curricula. In this sense, it discusses aspects, key concepts and social
problems associated with the design field, relating them to those related to the curriculum
field. For the author, in addition to design characteristics, curriculum development should
include various aspects, such as structure, operational elements, student learning demands,
teachers' professional development, experiences, meanings and beliefs. After understanding
the elements discussed, the article presents sketches of curriculum designs that involve
interpretive framing, design for deep meaning, and co-designing
with users. Finally, these methodological possibilities are considered as a set of tools capable
of supporting the work of educators in the continuous redefinition of their work in the school
context.
Silvia Morelli's chapter, Curriculum–Didaktik and Bildung: Is Language for
Teaching? draws attention to the relationships between the fields of didactics and curriculum
studies aiming to think of them as a unique field of studies and reflecting on their
contributions today. For this, the author proposes a discursive approach based on post-modern
theorizations mainly related to Lyotard's thought in defense of a re-signification of such
discursive encounters. Specifically, it focuses on the conception of Bildung to think of it from
a perspective outside of modernity and facing the possibility of re-reading ideas such as
content, schooling and knowledge in relation to the current educational demands. In her
conclusions, Morelli argues about the importance that a perspective of knowledge today needs
to consider its associations to culture, contexts, and identities constituted in them bearing in
mind the constant production of new translations of what knowledge is. In this sense,
everyday life, particular interpretations of the world, and personal stories constitute other
narrative forms of knowledge.
Ending Part II, the chapter 11, entitled Ethical Vexations that Haunt 'Knowledge
Questions' for Curriculum, by Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan, addresses the field of
curriculum studies taking into account the tensions between knowledge, being and ethics and
considering these three dimensions as intertwined in reflections on curriculum. For the
authors, there is a strong current trend in defense of a return to the centrality of knowledge in
the curriculum. However, they problematize this movement and propose that knowledge in
the curriculum, as well as its purposes, should be considered in relation to ethical principles.
Based on authors such as Nancy Fraser, they defend that knowledge is inseparable from
values, that there is no good knowledge for everyone, and then question the field based on
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concepts such as responsibility and justice regarding the way knowledge has been thought
about in relation to the performance of teachers and students. They conclude, supported by
Derrida's aporetic thought, by affirming the existence of an abyss between the defense of the
redistribution of knowledge/codes of power and the recognition of people's diverse values and
cultural representations. In this sense, they ponder the importance of teachers bringing these
two attitudes together in a process of continuous negotiation within this abyss.
Bill Green's Chapter, Curriculum History and Progressive Education in Australia:
Prolegomenon opens Part III of the book with a focus on understanding the history of
curriculum as a broader context of transnational research. For the author, attention to culture
and education is important, however without disregarding issues such as internationalization
and cosmopolitanism. In this sense, it points out that issues such as neoliberalism or
progressivism need to be engaged historically, but also geospatially and comparatively. To
think about such tensions, Green approaches the history of curriculum in Australia in its
relations with international production. In his interpretation, he appropriates the thought of
Derrida and Foucault to think about the discursive production of the curriculum. From a
historical perspective, he draws attention to the influence of progressive conceptions on the
Australian schooling process. Among his conclusions is the defense of meeting national
cultures and local contexts, while reiterating the understanding of transnational research in
this scenario. The articulation of these dimensions in a discursive perspective makes it
possible to complement and enrich local research on schooling and curriculum development
without losing sight of factors such as uneven development, coloniality, governmentality, and
geography.
The following chapter, Curriculum and Literacy Policies in a Context of Curriculum
Centralization: The Case of Brazil, by Rita de Cássia Prazeres Frangella, draws attention to
the scenario of curriculum reform in Brazil considering the discourse of teacher education as a
means to improve the quality of national education. In this sense, the author focuses on
teacher education not as a topic related to reform and the curriculum, but as a moment of
curriculum production. For this, she approaches discursive theoretical conceptions related to
the thoughts of Derrida, Bhabha, and Laclau through which she argues for the conception of
curriculum policy as a discursive production. Specifically, she focuses on the National Pact
for Literacy at the Right Age (PNAIC) to discuss the interactions such policy constitutes with
broader political contexts. The author concludes by stressing the ambivalent nature of the
policy and points out that if, on the one hand, the right to continuing education for teachers is
affirmed, on the other hand, it aims to control the process of meaning and regulate school
practices. She ends by reiterating the perspective that, in addition to attempts to control, the
curriculum is produced through uncontrollable translation processes in multiple contexts.
Michael Corbett's chapter Relocating Curriculum and Reimagining Place under Settler
Capitalism draws attention to the debate about placeless curriculum and schooling developed
from within the local education movement and considering criticisms to that movement. For
his approach, the author draws on the works of Kincheloe, Pinar, and Reynolds. He takes on
the perspective of a sociologist and rural education researcher to think about the field of
curriculum. Theoretically, he appropriates contributions from Homi Bhabha with the aim of
approaching culture and/in space with a view to a discussion about place and curriculum.
Corbett concludes by stating that the challenge for the curriculum today is to develop
relational understandings of culture, communication and materiality, which requires an
understanding of new imaginaries, worldviews and new histories. This proposal aims to
reiterate the importance of dealing and reflecting in and with the spaces in which we operate,
with their challenges, singularities and relationships with broader contexts.
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The chapter 15, Reconceptualizing the Multilingual Child: Curriculum Construction in
Luxembourg, by Sabrina Sattler, addresses the issue of identity in the curriculum with the aim
of understanding which conceptions of identity are inscribed in the curriculum and how they
affect its creation. Taking the case of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the author draws
attention to the intimate relationship of identity with institutional multilingualism. She
discusses the process of cultural standardization, which has taken place through educational
planning, considering it as a cause of changes in linguistic identities. In this sense, she
highlights the impacts of such changes from the point of view of cultural history, highlighting
two important national educational laws for primary education, one from 1912 and the other
from 2009, with the purpose of demonstrating changes in the conceptions of linguistic
identity. She concludes by considering that the two legislations can be considered milestones
in the production of a collective linguistic awareness and that, currently, within the scope of
the mixed culture project, the concept of a trilingual child as something natural is supported.
For the author, the political tension around such a conception tends to be based on the
argument of equal opportunities for all children, an idea that is associated with knowledge of
languages.
The chapter Distal Confabulation and Transnational Literacy: Complicating
“Complicated Conversation” in Curriculum Inquiry, by Patrick Roberts, opens Part IV of the
collection by addressing the tension between the engagement of the intellectual field and the
reality of “post-truth” politics in the United States. Such policies would consist of resurgent
discourses of white nationalism, militarization of immigration policy, gun violence, abuse of
campaign funding, erosion of voting rights, increase in hate speech in mainstream politics,
and the destruction of environmental and consumer rights, among others. In order to think
about such conflicts, the author approaches transnational studies in curriculum seeking to
problematize the limits of Pinar's conception of curriculum as a complicated conversation. In
this sense, he appropriates the metaphor of "distal confabulation" to defend it as a powerful
approach to understanding the degradation of the public sphere, replacing cosmopolitan
conceptions, often represented by Pinar's conception, which tends to suggest forms of
stubborn blindness to an Anglo-Eurocentric expectation of reasonable and mutually
understandability, which is always distal and imaginative as to the truth itself.
In chapter 17, Curriculum for Teacher Formation: Antagonism and Discursive
Interpellations, by Veronica Borges and Alice Casimiro Lopes, focuses on the Brazilian
context of teacher education from a discursive perspective supported by the thoughts of
Derrida and Laclau. In this sense, the authors draw attention to the continuous disputes over
meaning in curriculum policy, with special attention to the meanings mobilized by the
productions of the National Association for the Training of Education (ANFOPE) from the
2000s, as well as highlight articles that address signifiers such as teacher professionalization,
teaching professionalism, teaching work, teaching profession, teaching occupation.
Throughout the discussion, they draw attention to key ideas that circulate in the discursive
field under analysis, such as “reflective teacher” and “the teacher as an agent of social
change”, in their expectations of controlling the subject/teacher. They conclude by
considering that the dissemination that guides the discursive dynamic challenges the
expectation of control of the subject in politics, which makes any struggle for control of the
other vain, while at the same time they emphasize the dispute over the meaning of teacher
education as a permanent horizon.
The chapter 18, Curriculum Design in the Anthropocene: Challenges to Human
Intentionality, by Lucinda McKnight, problematizes curriculum design under different logics
and theoretical perspectives and questions what exists beyond planning for the production of
better humans. Thus, she explores the history of the curriculum designer, drawing attention to
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issues of interest to curriculum research. In this movement, she addresses the thoughts of Rosi
Braidotti on the post-human and of Karen Barad on the belief that humans can find the
material universe halfway. The articulation of such contributions aims to provide interpretive
possibilities on theory and practice in curriculum production, taking into account the
opportunity to think of new curricular perspectives in terms of new materialism and post-
human studies. The author concludes by defending that the figure of the designer remains in
the curricular thought, but that it starts to be conceived as part of several agencies no longer
guided by technical or scientific univocalities. She emphasizes that post-humanism and the
new materialism, with their rejection of binarisms and Cartesianism, help to reconceptualize
the curriculum in a perspective of plural production.
The chapter 19, titled From the Fossil Curriculum to the Post-Carbon Curriculum:
Histories and Dilemmas, by John Morgan, closes the book taking as inspiration the thought of
Timothy Mitchell, from which he speculates on how the fossil fuels era led to a “fossil
curriculum”. Thus, also considering the school context, it problematizes developmental logics
separated from an ecological reflection in their relations with the curriculum. Specifically, he
draws attention to the relationships between society and nature considering them as means by
which different perspectives have been constituted in the curriculum. He also analyzes the
curricular implications of contemporary discussions on the subject, with special attention to
the Marxist view, which tends to defend the analytical separation between society and nature,
and constructionist studies, which seek to consider such dimensions as entangled. After
mapping this discussion around the topic, he concludes by pointing out the importance of
reflection and investment in more studies on the transition from a world based on fossil
energy to a post-carbon society considering the implications of such changes on what is
taught at schools.
At the end of the trajectories constituted by the work, it can be concluded that its
content reiterates the importance of the transnational curriculum inquiry, the primordial role
of the IAACS in this sense, and the constitutive plurality of the curriculum field. Divergences,
convergences, and interpretative alternatives cross the collection, especially the wealth of
different contributions brought by the authors involved, as well as (part of) the breadth of
curricular thinking today. I think that the invitation to which the work is intended is audacious
precisely because it provokes the opening of channels and conversations on such different
themes and approaches lined up under the noun "curriculum". The invitation to interact with
this name is, at the same time, an invitation to its re-signification, to the translatory and
constitutive interlocution of other narratives, landscapes, theories, and meaning contexts of
what curriculum is, how we can produce it, certain that its meaning rests on a furtive horizon
towards which we move with every reference we make.
Notes
1 hugoguimel@gmail.com
References
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
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mailto:hugoguimel@yahoo.com.br
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Submitted: June, 20th, 2021.
Approved: July, 03rd, 2021.
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