The politics of curriculum reforms in Asia: Inter-referencing discourses of power, culture and knowledge

In recent decades, nations across Asia have gone through – indeed are going through – massive social, economic, and political transitions (Bell & Li, 2013; Chua, 2010; Lim & Apple, 2016). Governed until recently by either staunchly authoritarian and/or military governments, themselves often backed by colonial powers, many of these nations have since moved towards at least nominal forms of democracy and are embarking on “modernization” projects in response to the globalizing pressures of neoliberalism (Koh, 2010; Ong, 2006; Robison, 2012; Rodan & Jayasuriya, 2007). Indeed, undergoing what has been termed “compressed modernization” (Chang, 2010; Sato, 2011), a number of these countries have raised eyebrows by transforming themselves from “third world to first” within a generation (Lee, 2000; Mahbubani, 2008; Zakaria, 1997). Delivering many of these changes has been the work of education systems. In particular, through large-scale curriculum reforms engineered to “retool the productive capacities of the system” (Gopinathan, 2007, p. 59), many of these states have sought to singularly shape decisions over what counts as “official knowledge” (Apple, 2014; Bernstein, 2000), and over what goes into the work of schools and classrooms – all in ways that continue to chart out and legitimize the aspirations of dominant groups in society (Apple, Gandin, Liu, Meshulam, & Schirmer, 2018; Koh & Kenway, 2012; Lim & Apple, 2015).

At the same time, however, a range of global education policy discourses as well as the coming of age of the middle classes in Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many cities across China have fragmented the ability of states to hold on to a tight definition of what schools do. As a number of critical contestations in recent years have proven, and as the papers in this collection demonstrate, these emerging interests often do not cohere with those of the state. These developments suggest that new forms of social control will be needed for regimes to consolidate if not retain their strength (Rodan, 2012). To be sure, as much of the politics in Asia remains in a state of transition – or more accurately, because of this – curriculum reforms in these places involve considerable ideological work.

Given these circumstances, it becomes especially important to inquire into the processes of curriculum and education reforms in the region in non-reductive ways. Rather than presupposing states directing their educational apparatuses towards a set of a-priori outcomes, amidst these massive social transformations and the effervescence of a politically interested and active citizenry, such ends themselves are not – indeed, cannot be – predetermined. Understanding how these tensions and contestations are worked out, in and through the curriculum, becomes crucial to any analysis of the complex and often contradictory dynamics involved in educational reform across schools and classrooms in Asia. A good deal of the scholarship that focuses on curriculum reforms in Asia, however, has assumed a teleology of change that is linear and uni-dimensional. The discussions revolve around the institutional functions of education systems, the transformative potential of state-driven school improvement processes and research and policy agendas, and the relative instrumental successes, problems and/or limitations encountered in reforming schools and education systems to meet these goals (e.g. Edquist & Hommen, 2009; Gopinathan, 1996; King & Susana, 2005; Luke, Freebody, Shun, & Gopinathan, 2005; Mok, 2006). Consequently, as useful as these studies have been in identifying the shifts in knowledge forms across these societies, they also remain tacitly framed by a discourse of efficacy.

There is, then, a pressing need to foreground analyses that take seriously the complex postcolonial, historical, and cultural consciousnesses that many Asian societies experience, and that seek to bring these considerations to bear on the changing terrain of knowledge, subjectivities, and power relations constructed both within schools and across the public sphere. Focusing precisely on these themes, this special issue seeks to establish an understanding of the tensions and possibilities of educational change in Asia vis-a-vis the emergent global and local forces that are determined to challenge “official” knowledge and to offer alternative understandings of education and society.

Power, Culture, and Knowledge in Asia

To capture these dynamics, this special issue features contributions on a range of topics weaved around analyses of history, culture, politics, authority structures, state formation, power relations, ideology, social control, and epistemology. In doing so, contributors illuminate the interactions among ministries of education, state boards and agencies, schools, teachers and teacher unions, university departments of education, local interest groups, the media, international standards agencies, and global educational reform discourses. In documenting the multiple sites of conflict and contestation both between and within the state and these pedagogic agents, the articles foreground the ways in which the curriculum and its subjects have been put together, and how the rules of its construction, circulation, transmission and acquisition, are all deeply emblematic of particular visions of social order, particular identities and practices that are acceptable (or not) to dominant social relations, and particular agents who work at maintaining and legitimizing these complex forces.

The range of insights captured by such translations between “micro” and “macro” analyses becomes essential in understanding how dominance works through the curriculum to produce particular subjectivities. While previously much of the research around these themes has been concentrated in western contexts (e.g. Anyon, 2005; Apple, 1996, 2006), such work becomes especially significant in the context of Asia. As newly minted nations, these states have shown, often through a common national curriculum and various values education programs, a tendency to tightly embrace their citizens, incorporating them within a bounded “national” space and inscribing upon them a collective “national” identity (e.g. Hung, 2016; Lall & Vickers, 2009).

To be sure, in a region that is itself in flux, inquiries into the socialization practices through pedagogic means become crucial in exploring the complex open-ended dynamics of curriculum reforms. Some of the questions such a critical sociological perspective opens up include: What do emerging understandings of civil society in Asia tell us about the ability of states to hold on to a singular conception of legitimate knowledge? What are the discursive spaces created by democratic movements and what is their potential for counter-hegemonic educational work? What happens to “non-official,” popular and/or traditional knowledges and cultures, how are these positioned (if at all) and what sites of resistance do they create? What are the fields of power within which counter-hegemonic groups are working, what ideals and ideologies are they coalescing around and how does the state provide – or concede – spaces for some of these groups? In a region marked by the brutal histories of colonialism, how are new waves of education reforms emanating from the West and supra-national organizations such as the OECD negotiated and appropriated? Given the rising levels of education of its citizens and the democratization of new media, what tensions and challenges do states encounter in continuing to use the curriculum as a form of social control?

Addressing these questions in powerful, significant ways involve framing the issues they speak to from the sui generis perspectives of particular social formations, rather than assuming a sense of universality emerging from elsewhere. In thus speaking authentically, such forms of writing and engagement – found across all of the articles – often speak truth to power, and in societies where such forms of scholarship are less established, they involve political risks our authors must bear. While such risks provided much of the raison d'etre for critical scholarship in the West a generation ago (and indeed still does), they now constitute the unspoken realities of interrupting dominant discourses of power, culture, and knowledge in Asia, and continue to shape the limits of the sayable and thinkable.

For example, in taking up some of these questions, Aaron Koh's article, “Subterfuge Hegemony: The Simmering Politics of the Shelved Hong Kong Moral and National Education Debates in the Media,” points to the high stakes involved in curriculum struggles over citizenship and national education in postcolonial territories. The case of Hong Kong becomes even more pertinent in that it represents a society currently in transition, and one that is grappling with the residual discourses of liberalism and an imminent future characterized by illiberal governance and values. Drawing upon Stuart Hall's writings around the idea of supercession, Koh analyses the ideological work performed by the media in the aftermath of the Hong Kong government's failed attempt in 2012 to introduce what has been widely seen as a China-centric national education curriculum (Lam, 2016). Most studies that work with the notion of supersession develop it from the vantage point of the marginalized, exploring how less powerful groups engage in building counter-hegemonic work under conditions of domination. In contrast, Koh presents a notably refreshing perspective by providing an account of how dominant groups engage in what he calls “subterfuge hegemonic work” through the media, albeit from temporarily non-dominant positions.

Touching on similar themes, Cheng-Yu Hung's article, “Educators as Transformative Intellectuals: Taiwanese Teacher Activism during the National Curriculum Controversy,” documents the controversy and struggles over the Taiwanese state's imposition of a revised pro-reunification history and citizenship education curriculum. However, rather than focusing on the workings of dominance, Hung further develops Henry Giroux's ideas around teacher resistance to make sense of how teachers in Taiwan were engaging in what was an unprecedented display of opposition in the history of public schools. In the process of doing so, the paper argues that Giroux's ideas (for example, around teachers’ development of the languages of critique and possibility) yield only partial insights into the motivations and inhibitions around teacher activism in Taiwan. To be sure, limited attention has been paid to the cultural particularities of critical pedagogy and the forms it takes in non-Western contexts. Highlighting in particular the ways in which (neo)-Confucian discourses are deeply rooted in Taiwanese society, Hung makes the case for a more dynamic concept of the transformative educator, one in which notions such as resistance and liberation assume more nuanced forms and carry the potential for longer-lasting and deeper change in Taiwan. Hung's act of questioning and then correcting Giroux's ideas in order to deal in a more substantive manner with the realities of Taiwan provides a thoughtful example of the ways in which Western theories need to be reconstructed to deal more adequately with the multiple traditions that are present in Asian contexts.

In their article exploring the cultural politics of pedagogy in Singapore, titled “Culture, Pedagogy and Equity in a Meritocratic Education System: Teachers’ Work and the Politics of Culture in Singapore,” Leonel Lim and Michael Tan document the creative ways in which ideas about students’ home and family backgrounds and their relevance for teaching are interpreted, negotiated, and ultimately drawn upon by a group of teachers as they seek to engage their students from less advantaged social groups in an ostensibly meritocratic education system. Research on the relations between culture and pedagogy has received extensive attention in the West. In Singapore, however, the state's official discourse of meritocracy has for long remained silent on the role of culture in students’ learning. Appeals are made instead to meritocracy's principle of non-discrimination (especially in terms of ethnic differences) as being fundamental to the establishment of the education system's level playing field (Lim, 2016). The authors argue that in actively, if at times unconsciously, foregrounding “non-official” and “popular” knowledges, as well as experiences and interactions in their teaching, teachers can and often do challenge and resist dominant ideologies, even in education systems tightly riveted by the state.

Taking the case of how an elite high school in a cosmopolitan city in China “internationalizes” its curriculum, Shuning Liu's article, “Neoliberal Global Assemblages: The Emergence of “Public” International High School Curriculum Programs in China,” engages in network ethnography to reveal the global and local movement of neoliberal education policy practices and techniques. There is a good deal of critical educational research that explores the forms and functions of neoliberalism in developed countries in the West (Apple, 2006; Ball, 2012; Lipman, 2011). Deploying the conceptual tools around Collier and Ong's (2005) notion of global assemblage, what Liu instead attempts is an account that captures what makes neoliberalism the same and different at the same time as it travels around the globe – what Ong (2006) refers to as a mobile technology. In her thick description of how the Chinese state's policies around international schools and curricula seek to rearticulate both foreign pressures and domestic aspirations towards internationalization and also manage the tensions and contradictions these involve, Liu's article argues that these developments contribute to the larger project of understanding what constitutes “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” (Harvey, 2005, p. 120).

Drawing upon insights gained from Japanese national language curriculum experts on their involvement in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA's) test item development, Keita Takayama's article, “How to Mess with PISA: Learning from Japanese Kokugo Curriculum Experts,” mounts a compelling challenge to the supposed quasi-objectivity of PISA instruments. One central idea Takayama powerfully illustrates drawing from his interviews with the Japanese kokugo experts are the cultural differences between how literacy teaching is conceptualized and practiced in Japanese schools on the one hand and PISA's notion of reading literacy on the other. The paper thus not only raises questions of both fairness and justice of the global standard that PISA represents, but it also demonstrates how “peripheral” nations in Asia afford critical perspectives that challenge Eurocentric commitments and disrupt business-as-usual in global/national education policy.

At the same time as the critical analyses provided by the above authors document the situated politics of education, language, and culture, as well as the inherently political project of pedagogic recontextualization (Bernstein, 2000), it is also important to point to progressive developments and counter-hegemonic movements in the region. As Youl-Kwan Sung and Yoonmi Lee demonstrate in their article, “Politics and the Practice of School Change: The Hyukshin School Movement in South Korea,” the progressive school-change project known as the hyukshin school movement in South Korea grows out of the interactions between decentralization as a global form and local political pressures to democratize school governance. The authors report on the philosophy, practice, and politics of this recent movement, bringing readers to terms with the dilemmatic ideological terrain on which the movement threads. The authors note especially how the hyukshin school movement is uniquely positioned to counter both competition-based pedagogy, which is ubiquitous in a number of modernized East-Asian education systems, and also the pressures of neoliberal accountability regimes. Through this discussion, the article provides an assessment of its transformative potential and offers important lessons in democratic school reform in the region.

These six original articles are followed by a commentary by Allan Luke. Throughout his career, Luke has made major contributions to our understanding of the complex dynamics of differential power in education, of ideological and discursive movements, and of the ways in which all of this plays out in both policy and practice. He has also been deeply involved in large-scale curriculum reform efforts in Asia and elsewhere. In his closing commentary, Luke brings these experiences – academic and also political – to reflect on the insights raised by the authors. Luke situates the work done in this special issue – what he calls a “new wave of critical educational studies by East Asian scholars” – within both the development of critical educational scholarship internationally as well as the political, historical, and cultural relations in Asia that at one and the same time challenge and motivate such forms of scholarship.

Inter-referencing Asia

In providing a common platform for examining the above questions, this special issue also contributes to the growing use of what the Taiwanese cultural studies critic Chen (2010) calls “Asia as method” in area studies (see also Takeuchi, 2005/1960). Articulated to interrogate how dominant “Western” discourses of culture and politics obfuscate a more authentic understanding of society and subjectivity in Asian contexts, Asia as method foregrounds a dialectical process of “inter-referencing,” where societies in Asia become each other's points of reference so as to develop ways of understanding themselves that go beyond Western imprimaturs. Rather than continuing to fear reproducing the West as the Other, Chen asks that we actively acknowledge it as bits and fragments that intervene in local social formations in a systematic, but never totalizing, way. On this perspective, the West is not simply cast as the dialectic Other, along with its implied antagonisms (see Mahbubani, 2008). Instead, in the form of fragmented pieces, internal to the local, the West sits as one cultural resource amongst others. Chen's (2010) own words are worth quoting:

Using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other's points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt. On this basis, the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives (p. 212).¹

Properly conceived then, Asia as method and the inter-referencing it calls for is not a specific research instrument or a particular inquiry method (Park, 2017). Rather, as Chen (2010) emphasizes, what is involved is an epistemological (re-)orientation, a research imagination that “begins with multiplying the sources of our readings to include those produced in other parts of Asia” (p. 255; see also Kenway & Fahey, 2009). On this view, the task for scholars interested in educational change in Asia is to mobilize the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of the region to offer alternative understandings of the past and possibilities for the future. Embedded in this strategy is an attempt to “provincialize” or “regionalize” the West, so that Western experiences and “universal” theories become limited to only one part of the globe (Lin, 2012; Takayama, 2016). For Chen and others operating in a similar vein, such a process of inter-referencing thus carries the potential not just to provide new ways of conceptualizing curricular/social change in Asia and the identity politics these involve, but also to advance Western theoretical insights through the negotiation, adaptation, and refinement of these conceptual tools as they are taken up in very different contexts.

Indeed, so attractive is Asia as method as a critical tool to highlight the Asian context, that in recent years it has often been taken up as a slogan in education research (e.g. Lin, 2012; Rhee, 2013; Zhang, Chan & Kenway, 2015). In a review of a number of these studies, however, Park (2017) reveals that they are largely unconnected to Asia as method and that “Chen's work has largely been used in education more as a descriptive/rhetorical tool than as a full-fledged research framework” (p. 771). As Park explains, even as these studies focus on critical issues in education in Asia (such as literacy and gender inequality), their theoretical frameworks are often drawn from and rehash Western assumptions without challenging or problematizing these.

These limitations notwithstanding, another crucial point to note is that the majority of research drawing upon Asia as method is made up of individual studies, developed and published discretely. It is thus difficult for them to provide – and we should not expect them to – the deep and sustained conversations necessary for the kinds of inter-referencing Chen alludes to and for which themed collections such as special issues in journals and edited book volumes are better suited. Indeed, such curated spaces – spaces that provide opportunities for societies to be inspired by and learn from how other societies with similar experiences as colonized nations, similar trajectories of modernization, and/or similar structural locations in the global capitalist system deal with problems like their own – seem to be what Chen has in mind in establishing the much-acclaimed Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project and its associated journal, conferences, and publications.²

Some of the contributors to this volume have taken up similar projects elsewhere. For example, the recently published volume The Strong State and Curriculum Reform (Lim & Apple, 2016) brings together analyses of the state in Asia and explores the tensions, possibilities, and dynamics of educational change vis-a-vis the ideological and material hegemony of these institutions. Such work reconsiders the nature and assumptions of dominant Western constructions of the liberal state, turning the focus onto states that have a history of being or continue to be characterized as illiberal (Zakaria, 1997). Others amongst us have rallied research around the conditions and constraints of knowledge production in postcolonial spaces, both in and out of Asia (see Takayama, Heimans, Amazan, & Maniam, 2016; Takayama, Sriprakash, & Connell, 2016).

Finally, we would like to make a number of comments about the authors contributing to this special issue. Comprised of both early career and established scholars, almost all of the authors here have spent a good part of their academic training in Western universities. The intellectual traditions of the West have provided many of us multiple entry points for collaboration, not least through communicating in English, but also through other critical languages such as Marxism, structuralism, postcolonialism, etc. Some of us are currently based in universities in the West; others have taken up positions in Asia. Nevertheless, all of us continue to maintain deep and lasting connections to scholars and movements in Asia, constantly transcend geographical boundaries, draw on literature from both within and outside Asia, and/or have written and continue to write in multiple languages.

Many of the authors here are thus similar; we are bi-discoursal, bi-cultural, and bi-lingual, and are uniquely (although not exclusively) positioned to push the discursive boundaries of critical scholarship by provincializing and then de-provincializing “theories” developed elsewhere. Our simultaneous locations straddling both Western theoretical horizons and Asian realities afford a dialectic of comparison, one that transcends an understanding of curriculum politics based simply on Western interpretations and, at the same time, also transcends understandings of the politics of our own nation's curriculum based solely on localized histories. Not unlike critical scholars elsewhere, all of us write for a variety of audiences, and, perhaps most importantly, hold ourselves answerable to a diverse, often conflicting set of commitments across cultures, nations and institutions – schools, ministries and departments of education, unions and activist groups, etc.

All of us thus have much to gain by unifying our work around the need for “decentered unities” (Apple, 2013; Apple et al., 2018), both theoretically and politically. A large part of such efforts is carried out by a deliberate and critical engagement with published work in non-English languages. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, this attention to local scholarship and the lived experiences of communities in “peripheral” societies is critical not just in introducing a range of “novel,” hitherto undiscovered perspectives, but also and more importantly in introducing into the conversation previously silenced voices and non-dominant perspectives. All of the authors here remain committed to challenging these epistemological and as well as political boundaries. We hope that in its focus on understanding more deeply the power relations and resistances that shape both the production and reproduction of knowledge in Asia, this special issue contributes to ongoing efforts to internationalize curriculum studies, both in the scholarship writ large, and certainly in the present journal (see Gaztambide-Fernández & Thiessen, 2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonel Lim

Leonel Lim is an assistant professor at the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Singapore, where his research focuses on curriculum theory and the politics of education, with specific interests in the relations between ideology and curriculum, the socio-political assumptions of rationality, elite schooling and the sociology of curriculum. He is the author of Knowledge Control and Critical Thinking in Singapore (Routledge, 2016), and, together with Michael W. Apple, editor of the volume The Strong State and Curriculum Reform (Routledge, 2016).

Michael W. Apple

Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA and distinguished professor of education at the College of Education, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey, USA. A former primary and secondary school teacher and a past-president of a teachers union, he has worked with educators, unions, dissident groups, and governments throughout the world to democratize educational research, policy, and practice. Among his many books are Ideology and Curriculum, Education and Power, Teachers and Texts, Official Knowledge, and The State and the Politics of Knowledge and most recently The Struggle for Democracy in Education. He is also the series editor of the long-standing Routledge series Critical Social Thought. Michael is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential writers on education in the 20th century, and Ideology and Curriculum has been voted as one of the top twenty books in the history of western education.

Notes

1. See Mizoguchi (1996/1989) and Takeuchi (2005/1960) for original formulations of Asia as method.

2. See, for example the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, as well as Chen (1999) and Chen & Chua (2007).