Curriculum co-presences and an ecology of knowledges

Curriculum scholarship is beset with unhelpful binaries. Lines are drawn between dominant and counter-dominant views that become stuck in a dichotomous relationship. Whether it is progressivism versus traditionalism, or critical versus normative approaches to curriculum, the binaries become entrenched, and the conversations stagnant. Questions over the liberatory possibilities of critical approaches to curriculum stretch back at least to Ellsworth’s (1989) important feminist critique of critical pedagogy. More recently, decolonial curriculum scholar João M. Paraskeva (2018), building on the work of sociologist Sousa Santos (2007), has taken this conversation in a new direction arguing that we need to imagine an alternative to the taken for granted binaries.

Paraskeva (2018) argues that the “critical river” of curriculum theory is still, paradoxically, premised on Western epistemological frameworks that offer only two ways of thinking. One that exists and is comprehensible (the West) and one that is non-existent, non-comprehensible, or invisible (the Rest). Sousa Santos (2007) writes that what most characterizes this mode of modern Western thinking “is the impossibility of co-presences of the two sides of the line” (p. 45). Paraskeva (2016) suggests that emphasizing these co-presences and exploring their possibilities is a radical move that puts forward “an alternative way to thinking about alternatives” (p. 225). Emphasizing co-presences is not about reconciling dominant and counter-dominant perspectives, but rather looking beyond these Western epistemological frameworks toward an ecology of knowledges.

The authors in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry illustrate how theorizing co-presences in curriculum thinking is a welcome and fruitful move. Co-presences can challenge the often taken for granted assumption that critical alternatives are by their nature liberatory or hopeful, when most often they are based in the same lineage of thinking that divides social realities into comprehensible and incomprehensible. Including examples from Australia, Canada, China, and the United States, the authors in this issue point us to productive directions that go beyond critical or normative approaches to curriculum that promote unhelpful binaries, constraining linearities, or other approaches that do harm by foreclosing spaces to seriously consider alternative ways of thinking.

After carefully unpacking the consequences of Eurocentric, colonial, and racist discourses in each of their educational contexts, the authors present us with works that carefully pry open curriculum alternatives that recognize, contend with, or embrace a complex “ecology of knowledges” (Sousa Santos, 2007). The issue begins with Weili Zhao suggesting a “body thinking episteme” in China followed by Rebecca Cairns pointing us to “Asia as method.” Next, Kisha McPherson challenges the liberatory nature of #Blackgirlmagic, and the issue concludes with Sarah Switzer proposing the power of youth non-participation as a tool that can disrupt hegemonic thinking around theories of social change.

In her article “Problematizing ‘Epistemicide’ in Transnational Curriculum Knowledge Production: China’s Suyang Curriculum Reform as an Example,” Weili Zhao explores how Chinese policy makers and academics are transplanting Western-centric discourses, policies, and practices in China’s ongoing curriculum reform process. Zhao argues that while China has been adapting and introducing Western educational theories for decades, the more recent suyang curriculum reforms represent a significant transformation of Chinese curriculum towards neoliberal values. Zhao suggests that these changes reflect the Chinese government’s aim to develop citizens who are both “globally competitive workers and nationally patriotic citizens” (p. 107). For her analytical framework, Zhao draws on the concept of “curricular epistemicide” as developed by Paraskeva (2016) to problematize how the newly introduced suyang curriculum embodies a Western modernity–coloniality episteme. By examining how the term suyang is being used by educational policy makers in China, Zhao demonstrates one way that curricular epistemicide takes place. Zhao explains that the term suyang comes from the Chinese characters su meaning “pure, unpolished, or authentic” and yang meaning “nurturing/bringing up” (p. 112). However, in recent curriculum reforms suyang has become an “empty signifier” and has been filled up with Western discourses such as “skills, competencies and literacies” (p. 111).

Zhao’s close attention to the importance of language used in curriculum policy under the Western “modernity–coloniality episteme” has important implications for curriculum development across non-Western and Indigenous contexts. Her analysis of the case of Chinese reforms demonstrates how a neoliberal logic that emphasizes economic outcomes can infiltrate curriculum and become naturalized and accepted. In response to this linguistic and cultural epistemicide, Zhao offers an alternative that draws from traditional Chinese holistic “body-thinking” and aims to disrupt the hegemony of Western discourses. Building on Paraskeva’s (2016) Itinerary Curriculum Theory, Zhao makes a case for cognitive justice in the form of transnational curriculum knowledge that both avoids “relativist nationalism and Western modernity–coloniality” (p. 105). By invoking the idea of a “body-thinking episteme” Zhao upholds Paraskeva’s (2016) argument that “language does play a key role in the decolonial turn” (p. 237). She concludes by suggesting that a perspective that emphasizes decolonial language provides academics and policy makers with an awareness of their complicity in epistemicidal processes that are interwoven in drives for globalization and modernization in non-Western settings.

Similar to Zhao, Rebecca Cairns considers how Australian history curriculum reflects, represents, and embodies colonial ways of thinking and Western discourses. In her article “Deimperialising Asia-Related History: An Australian Case Study,” Cairns considers how Asia has been imagined in Australian history curriculum over the last three decades. To guide her analysis, Cairns applies Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) concepts of Asia as method and deimperialisation to show how Western discourses of Asia have been replicated in Australia’s history curriculum. Like Zhao, Cairns begins from the position that discourses found in Western centric curricula raise epistemological issues, in particular the problem of imperial binary thinking that divides the world into the West and the rest, and promotes an understanding of Asia as envisioned through Western eyes.

Cairns proposes that Chen’s (2010) concepts of Asia as method and deimperialization provide curriculum scholarship important tools for rethinking imperial binaries, especially in settler colonial states such as Australia. Cairns quotes Chen (2010) to demonstrate the potential of Asia as method: “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” (p. 212). In other words, Asia as method aims to move analyses away from how Asia is understood through a Western lens and towards an understanding that is framed in relation to other Asian nations and peoples. Cairns also makes clear that such an approach must be careful to recognize “decolonisation and deimperialisation as ongoing concerns for both formerly colonised societies and former colonising societies” (p. 131).

In her analysis, Cairns demonstrates how reforms to Australia’s history curriculum have both moved away and toward deimperialization in the past thirty years. This has important implications for claims from politicians and media that Australia’s curriculum reflects national political desires for multiculturalism and aims to meet the needs of Australia’s culturally diverse student population. Cairns suggests that one approach for moving towards deimperialization is to encourage a greater emphasis on the historiography of history curriculum in order to demonstrate how it is “organized according to its own disciplinary logic” (p. 142). She suggests that an emphasis on how history curriculum relates to historiographical debates would bring attention to imperialistic discourses of empire, nation, and civilization found in the curriculum. Cairns concludes by positioning transnational approaches that emphasize multiperspectivity as containing important possibilities for challenging the epistemological dominance of Western discourses found in history curriculum in Australia and around the world.

Kisha McPherson takes these conversations into the North American context with her article, “Black Girls are not Magic; They are Human: Intersectionality and Inequity in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Schools.” Here, she outlines how the viral narrative of #Blackgirlmagic might unassumingly set up an unhelpful binary that positions it as the only viable alternative available to Black girls in the face of anti-Black racism in schools. This is an important area of study in the field of curriculum studies, which has only minimally engaged the topic of Black girls’ educational experiences. As McPherson highlights, policy and curricular approaches to anti-Black racism are often unresponsive or minimally effective in addressing Black girls’ experiences of racism and sexism in school. Countering this reality is a discourse of #Blackgirlmagic, a term that refers to the seemingly superhuman ability of Black girls to withstand any form of struggle. This narrative, which has been popularized on social media, emerges amidst a landscape that perpetuates negative constructions around Black female identity. However, through compelling ethnographic work, McPherson offers us an important invitation to rethink the liberatory nature of #Blackgirlmagic by underscoring how such counter-dominant discourses on Black girls may in fact reinforce a harmful expectation that they must face structural oppression on their own.

McPherson unpacks these ideas through the use of data collected through focus groups and interviews to dive deep into the experiences of 11 Black girls attending high school in the Greater Toronto Area. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), McPherson walks the readers through a careful analysis of a troubling landscape: amidst the strong discourse of equity and anti-racism in education in Ontario, McPherson finds that Black girls continually face teacher microaggressions and differential treatment in schooling on the basis of race and gender. Moreover, McPherson concludes that Black girls have normalized these experiences to the extent that they fear and distrust the school system. She argues that they ultimately feel they must overcome these obstacles by themselves because “there [is] no point in speaking up” (p. 164). In theorizing the commonalities amongst Black girls’ experiences of schooling, McPherson uses Black feminist epistemology, intersectionality, and theories of Black girlhood to theorize Black women’s “collective standpoint” (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989). McPherson’s analyses work towards nuanced understandings of Black girlhood that make clear that #Blackgirlmagic cannot be an all-encompassing counter-dominant narrative that stands in place of policy and curricular approaches that keep teachers and school systems accountable to addressing anti-Black racism. McPherson makes clear that the binary set up between the discourse of #Blackgirlmagic and the lived experiences of anti-Black racism in schooling puts Black girls in an impossible position to manage and overcome systemic racial barriers on their own.

In her article, “‘People Give and Take a lot in Order to Participate in Things:’ Youth Talk Back – Making a Case for Non-Participation,” Sarah Switzer challenges the taken for granted binary and associated values between participation and “non-participation” in youth research. The latter, she argues, can in fact engender new thinking on participatory processes. This is an important theorization amidst a research landscape driven by a growing rise in youth-led funding calls. Switzer argues that this reality makes youth programming “a unique site for investigating the tensions and opportunities of participatory processes” (p. 169). In this article, Switzer invites readers not only to critique common typologies that frame youth participation as something that is hierarchical or linear, but also to consider how young people interpret and articulate discourses of “non-participation” as a conceptual tool that disrupts and refuses hegemonic, linear theories of change.

Switzer draws her key findings from a larger study entitled Picturing Participation, a photovoice study where she asked youth stakeholders at a youth-led HIV prevention and harm reduction peer-education program to take photographs and discuss their ideas about engagement. Among other findings, Switzer outlines the hidden costs of participation, what it means to “act engaged,” and how youth participants view non-participation as an act that is compatible with the belief that youth-led programming can be personally and socially transformative.

Switzer specifically focuses on how youth conceptualize constrained participation and what it means to not participate or participate on their own terms. These ideas, Switzer argues, elevate the work of those who theorize the limits of “voluntary” participation (Ahmed, 2014), and further help scholars deconstruct what role participatory processes hold in advancing neoliberal and settler colonial agendas. Further, Switzer draws from an Indigenous politics of refusal to theorize how young people’s refusal to participate can be understood as an act of resistance (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2014). Amidst a context where some young people already have their lives surveilled, regulated, and targeted by the state (Cruz, 2013; Kwon, 2013), Switzer carefully lays out how the logics of participation operate to position individuals who choose not to participate (or fail to participate “properly”) as irresponsible, deviant, or acting outside of their own or community’s best interests. This logic operates despite the many valid reasons young people choose not to participate and despite knowing how the costs and benefits of participation fall differentially along the lines of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ability. Switzer makes clear that differential power dynamics complicate youth participation research and common typologies of participation that position non-participation as negative, when it is theorized at all.

Switzer’s compelling work offers some productive possibilities in theorizing how educators, researchers, and youth workers can approach non-participation and consider the implications these acts may have when designing frameworks or enacting participatory processes. Indeed, such theorizations push against taken-for-granted binaries and frameworks of knowledge which close the parameters on what “counts” as participation. In closing, Switzer asks a number of important and provocative questions for readers to sit with when considering the ethics and politics of doing participatory-based research work.

The authors in this issue make clear that even the most liberatory and critical curriculum discourses are limited and, in some cases, even harmful for young people. Each of the authors in this issue push back against binary thinking and taken for granted frameworks of knowledge: Weili Zhao critiques the suyang curriculum reforms, Rebecca Cairns critiques imperial binary thinking found in Australian history curriculum, Kisha McPherson critiques the binary between the discourse of #Blackgirlmagic and anti-Black racism, and Sarah Switzer critiques the binary of participation vs. “non-participation” in youth research. By pushing back against these binaries and complicating the Western frameworks they are derived from, the authors situate their research as bodies of curriculum work that embrace an “ecology of knowledges.” These authors show us that when rigid binary thinking is indeed put into question or shaken up, new language, new discourse, and new methods of “doing” curriculum are made possible: Zhao brings forward a “body-thinking episteme,” Cairns repositions “Asia as method” as a tool to counter imperial binaries, McPherson nuances theorizations on Black girlhood, and Switzer positions “non-participation” as a conceptual tool to resist linear theories of change. These new theories, tools, and frameworks emerge when researchers engage in ongoing critique of dominant and counter-dominant approaches to curriculum. This type of engagement with “co-presences” is no easy feat; enacting it through curriculum even less so. This issue of Curriculum Inquiry is, hopefully, pointing us to some rich possibilities on how to engage in this critical work and make space for imagining radical alternatives.