The nowhere of global curriculum

Abstract

In this article, I describe how a curriculum of dislocation produces subjectivities offered in discourses that centre “First World”/Eurocentric/developed subject positions through nation state frameworks. I knit stories of colonialism and imperialism with my lived experiences as a former student in the postcolonial context of Colombia and as a researcher in a new immigrant destination in USA. Using different forms of texts (vignettes, memories, drawings), I offer the reader stories, images, and scenarios to witness the ways in which the privileged spaces of international schools in the “Third World” and public schools in the “First World” are sites in which epistemic violence takes place. These are stories of dislocation, stories of how the embodiment of coloniality happens through the materialization of a Eurocentric modern curriculum of the global. This piece is not only a critique; it tells a story of healing. Based on the work of Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, I enter a new path to knowledge or conocimiento to create a different interpretation of my story. Weaving personal narratives, collective history, theories, and autobiographical vignettes into theoretical prose creates what Anzaldúa calls an/una autohistoria-teoría.

Keywords:

• Coloniality
• autohistoria-teoria
• modernity/modernities
• dislocation

Notes

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the reviewers and the Curriculum Inquiry Editorial Board for their encouraging, dedicated and thought-provoking feedback throughout this process. Thank you to Linnea Beckett for her support and feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 My translation.

2 Both terms criollo and mestizo have the purpose of connecting to a white European Spanish ascendance. Criollo here refers to individuals of Iberian descent born in America. Mestizo/a has both a racial and ethnic connotation in different periods in Colombian history. Initially the term mestizo/a refers to “mixed” blood individuals descendants of European and Amerindians.

3 A second German school was founded in Bogotá in 1920; Le Lycèe Français or Liceo Francés in 1934; US American school Colegio Nueva Granada in 1938; the Swiss school Colegio Helvetia in 1948; the Italian school Istitutzione Leonardo Da Vinci or Colegio Italiano Leonardo Da Vinci (1949); and the British school Colegio Anglo-Colombiano in 1956.

4 My translation

5 Junot Díaz is a Dominican American writer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Diaz won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008. Diaz engages topics such as race, masculinity, migration, language and Afro-Latinidad.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán

Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction with emphasis in Language, Culture and Society at The Pennsylvania State University. Ana is a Colombian curriculum and social studies scholar and a former social studies teacher. Her research focuses on what she has called the "lived global curriculum" or what individuals learn about themselves as global citizens through their lived experiences in the specificity of place(s). Her work is informed by Feminists of Color, Third World Feminism and Latin American decolonial theorists.