Curriculum, more than a journey on a map

In the contemporary world, systems and processes of state-sponsored and state-recognized mass education (henceforth, formal education) are based on ideas that liken curriculum to maps. According to such perspectives, one role of curriculum in formal education is to prescribe how large numbers of people might be oriented to regard and live in the world in ways that sustain the sovereignty, prosperity, and influence of the nation-states that govern their lives (Lima, 2007; Pathak, 2013; Ramirez & Boli, 1987). As such, curricula, like maps, validate generalized representations of what constitutes the reality of the world and prescribe desirable and appropriate ways for all its users to know about and navigate through it. Informed by such ideas, processes of formal education typically begin with the articulation of state-defined or state-approved curricular aims, followed by the enactment of systems and procedures to achieve them. This logic of how curriculum ought to (and does) structure formal education operates with striking similarity in modern nation-states across the world despite differences in political systems, socio-economic structures, and cultural practices (DeMarrais & LeCompte, 1999; Meyer et al., 1997). This is reflected in the global ubiquity of phenomena such as curriculum policies, curriculum boards, official syllabi and textbooks, and the various social-political roles and processes associated with them.

The notions of curriculum as maps that underpin formal education today were first generated by social and political elites in post-Enlightenment Western Europe. They applied these ideas to institute the first historical instances of mass schooling. In doing so, they sought to facilitate post-monarchic national integration and industrial capitalism at home, as well as resource extraction and colonial expansion abroad (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Subsequently, the ruling classes of settler colonial, post-colonial, and other transitional monarchic societies across the world adapted these ideas and applied them to enable the consolidation and development of new nation-states (Chilcote, 2002; Irogbe, 2005; Leroy, 2016; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Veracini, 2014). With their origins in these socio-historical processes, practices of creating and enacting curriculum for formal education in the modern era are deeply shaped by ruling class anxieties about holding on to power and social control in the context of nation-states. In choosing to approach curriculum in the spirit of drafting maps, social and political elites reveal their desires to define and enforce boundaries that constrain collective experiences in ways that help them secure legitimate power within the state apparatus and in society at large.

Conceived in this way, curriculum mandates how large populations must see, know, move through, and live in the world. In the ways that maps come to symbolize accurate representations of reality, curriculum assumes a position of truth that invalidates and delegitimizes ways of knowing and moving through the world that are inimical to the interests of the powerful. Not being familiar with the knowledge needed to make sense of and traverse the world in ways prescribed by these maps often leads to considerable hardship, injustice, and harm for vast numbers of already marginalized individuals and groups (Malewski, 2010; Meighan et al., 2007; Sadovnik, 2007). Furthermore, even in the rare instances when power changes hands as a consequence of broader socio-political action, the organization of social and economic life under the aegis of nation-states necessitates the deployment of ideas of curriculum as maps to ensure social cohesion. This idea has been explored in the pages of this journal by authors such as Errázuriz and García-González (2021), Hernando-Lloréns (2018), Lim and Apple (2018), López López (2020), Sanya et al. (2018), Snaza (2019), Syeed (2018), and Zhao (2020) in recent issues and also by Phyllis Kyei Mensah in the current issue.

Formal education then continues to be a site of exclusionary power struggles that promote inequitable, unjust, and hierarchical social relations. Given these links between formal education and the operation of power relations within nation-states, it becomes important for curriculum studies scholarship to identify, critique, and seek alternatives to the logic of curriculum as map and ideas and practices of collective living within nation-states associated with it. The articles published in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry offer points of departure and connection for such analysis and action.

In the article titled “Designing their Own Curriculum: How Youth Co-Constructed a Dance Team that Opposed Traditional Student–School Relationships,” Veena Vasudevan engages with Black and Brown students’ experiences of exclusion and agency in an urban school in the northeastern USA. The author presents ethnographic observations and reflections about how Black and Brown students created and sustained a dance team in one public high school. Using a conceptual framework that combines theories of multimodal literacy and notions of affinity spaces, Vasudevan makes sense of these experiences as a process of student-driven literacy education. In offering this analytical framing, she draws attention to how dominant understandings of literacy and competence used in urban schooling in the United States fail to recognize and build upon the funds of knowledge that students of Colour bring into schools, thereby exacerbating their social and educational marginalization. In contrast to broader trends of exclusion, discipline, and surveillance that characterize urban schooling, the journey of nurturing a dance team described and analyzed in this study reveals how three Black student leaders were able to embody and experience play, vulnerability, and collaboration within school spaces. Based on this analysis, Vasudevan argues that conscious efforts to define capability and achievement in ways that validate the knowledge, skills, and sensibilities that students of Colour bring into schools in the United States (such as capacities to compose a dance performance) can enable inclusive and affirming curriculum and pedagogy that counter marginalization and exclusion.

Vasudevan’s article is an explicit critique of the personal and social harms promoted by formal education based on the logic of curriculum as map. It demonstrates how active efforts by educators to suspend this logic can enable students from marginalized social backgrounds to experience agency, curiosity, and joy in school. In providing institutional space and backing for student-led initiatives like the dance team at the site of study, educators set aside the maps meant to guide students’ journeys at school along predetermined paths and created opportunities for them to explore the world on their own terms. This enabled the Black and Brown students studying at this school to experience education as a process of exploring and expressing their potential, rather than one of exclusion, discipline, and surveillance that typifies urban schooling in the United States. This analysis supports consideration of two alternatives to the dominant approach to curriculum in formal education. First, in situations where complete rejection of curriculum as map is difficult, it enables reflection on the possibilities created by: (1) carving out time and space to allow students to take unmapped journeys within the constraints of school; and (2) inviting students to make sense of and modify the map in affirming and empowering ways. Second, it allows exploration of notions of curriculum as artistic performance. Instead of marshaling fixed journeys in a predetermined world, it supports educators to consider how curriculum might be approached in the spirit of conceiving, choreographing, and rehearsing for a dance performance in the manner modeled by the students of Colour at Vasudevan’s site of study. The article supports reflection on what is enabled when curriculum is generated through relationships rooted in collaboration, vulnerability, and play and oriented towards embodied experiences of personal and cultural connection.

Phyllis Kyei Mensah’s article, titled “Collective Memory and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Remembering Education Towards New Diasporic Connections,” explores how formal education in Ghana engages with the history and legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It presents an instrumental case study of how the junior high school social studies curriculum in Ghana remembers the Transatlantic Slave Trade and considers the implications of this representation for collective healing and solidarity among continental Africans and the Diaspora created as a result of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The author combines theories of cultural trauma with understandings of public history as collective memory to justify the need for this inquiry. Kyei Mensah analyzes interview data collected from nine US-based Ghanaian university students about how their high school social studies education informs their present-day understanding of the history and legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and their perceptions about the African-American Diaspora. She makes sense of these reflections alongside analysis of the contents of the high school syllabi that these students studied (used in Ghana between 2007 and 2019).

Kyei Mensah’s analysis reveals that the Ghanaian high school social studies curriculum represents the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a minor historical event that occurred in the distant past and is in no way linked to contemporary social and political issues in the country. As such, the interviewed students make sense of their lives as Ghanaians through lenses of post-colonialism and international development and regard themselves as citizens of a Global South nation-state that is struggling to achieve socio-economic development. Informed by such an understanding, they regard African–American communities not as part of a global, pan-African Diaspora, but as citizens of a prosperous Global North nation-state. Kyei Mensah argues that this is problematic because it prevents solidarity within the global African Diaspora through shared analyses of the ongoing legacies of the harms promoted by the Transatlantic Slave Trade specifically and colonialism more broadly. She contends that this solidarity is a necessary condition for the kinds of collective healing necessary to enable substantive transformation of the ongoing material and social hardships and injustices that characterize life on the African continent and in the global African Diaspora. She advocates for the development of approaches to teaching about the Transatlantic Slave Trade that emphasize critical collective remembering. Such approaches centre practices of counter-storying, project-based learning, and multiple perspective-taking that are oriented towards restorative justice and forging reconnections within the global African Diaspora.

Kyei Mensah’s article demonstrates how the operation of the logic of curriculum as map in post-independence Ghana promotes not only exclusion and othering but also a failure to meaningfully redress past injustices. In choosing to create maps to facilitate future-oriented post-colonial journeys of national strength, prosperity, and progress, the Ghanaian curriculum forecloses possibilities for schooling to be a process of addressing links between complex collective traumas of the past- and present-day social problems. The interview data reveals how learning to see and move through the world with the aid of such a curricular map alienates Ghanaian school students from their own pasts and the wider global community of peoples harmed by the ongoing legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In making a case for formal education based on notions of critical collective remembering, Kyei Mensah offers an alternative logic for conceiving and enacting curriculum. It allows educators to consider how curriculum could be approached as a process of collective, commemorative, and restorative dialogue, oriented towards unpacking the burdens of the past to live well in the present.

Soo Bin Jang’s article, titled “Creating Entrepreneurs: National Curriculum Change in South Korea,” examines how neoliberalism has become the default ideology that guides curriculum policy for formal education in South Korea. To illustrate this, she critically analyzes the social, political, and economic forces that shaped the country’s 2015 national curriculum reform process. Drawing upon understandings of how neoliberalism shapes schooling in Western post-industrial societies and South Korea, respectively, she reflects on first-hand observations of the policy process and interview data collected from 21 policy actors. These empirical data revealed that the 2015 national curriculum reform process was shaped by and extended neoliberalism in three ways. First, governmental discourse about the role of education for society, voiced by elite bureaucrats, emphasized the development of capabilities for securing material prosperity through the effective functioning of a free market economy. This was reflected in their advocacy for entrepreneurship, collapsing general and vocational education, and integrating subject matter learning across disciplinary boundaries. Second, academic discourse about how to ensure educational success, advanced by education professors and researchers, emphasized the implementation of standards- and competence-oriented pedagogy and assessment (such as those seen in the United States and the UK) and a reduction of academic pressure linked to the older system of exam-oriented disciplinary learning. Their recommendations were largely aligned with those of the bureaucrats described above. Third, advocacy for equity, voiced by parent groups, which demanded the implementation of fair assessment practices, and reductions in academic workload to ensure that opportunities for academic success were not determined by socio-economic background. Jang observes that at one level, this advocacy did challenge the advocacy of bureaucrats and academics because it emphasized social equity. However, these assertions were grounded in broader neoliberal ideas about social mobility based on individual success and meritocracy, unencumbered by restrictive governmental regulations. As such they could easily be incorporated into the visions of more powerful policy actors without requiring them to fundamentally shift their thinking or action.

Based on this analysis, Jang argues that a combination of centralized state control over curriculum policy and two decades of neoliberal social and economic policies have resulted in a situation where formal education in South Korea is firmly rooted in neoliberal notions of human subjectivity, relationships, and social organization. As a result, notions of education as a process of state-led redistribution for social and material welfare have been decisively replaced by notions of education as the fostering of entrepreneurial individual responsibility for securing future well-being. In such a situation, the practice of education as a public good oriented toward fostering critical consciousness, solidarity, and justice becomes virtually impossible. Accordingly, Jang asserts that educators and curriculum scholars who are concerned about these issues need to make sense of and respond to the implications of these changes in South Korea and beyond.

Jang’s article demonstrates how curriculum policy becomes a site for social and political elites to consolidate their power and privilege. It illustrates how bureaucrats and politicians wield a disproportionate amount of power in deciding the course of formal education in South Korea based on their priorities and interests. Specifically, it points to how strong centralized state-control over formal education persists, despite an ideological change in policy orientation from state-led developmentalism to neoliberalism. As such, despite substantive changes to what occurs in formal education, it continues to be based on the logic of the map that involves powerful social actors seeking to regulate how large masses of people regard and live in the world. Interestingly, Jang’s analysis also allows us to see how social actors who contest and seek to reform curriculum policy rely on similar logics as those used by governing elites and end up advocating for reforms that do not fundamentally transform exclusive and unjust social conditions. In this way, Jang’s analysis highlights the need for educators to critique the logic of curriculum as map and the socio-political systems from which it emerges and that it serves to consolidate. It prompts us to ask if and how curriculum work can be rooted in thinking and practices that emphasize the sharing of material resources and social benefits and risks, rather than the cornering of power and resources, and to consider what kinds of political communities are needed to facilitate this.

In the fourth article in this issue, titled “Elite Universities: Their Monstrous Promises and Promising Monsters,” Jane Kenway and Adam Howard present a critical conceptual analysis of notions of eliteness in university education. The authors problematize how the simultaneous use of the term “elite” both as an object of criticism and as an analytical referent, prevents critical analysis and action that truly disrupts the power structures implicated in the working of these universities. Accordingly, Kenway and Howard develop analytical metaphors of monsters and monstrosities in order to describe and make sense of the goings-on in these spaces. Drawing upon theories and analyses from Marxist sociology and cultural studies, they use tropes of vampires, werewolves, and zombies to critique the broader processes of social-political reproduction at play in the workings of “elite” universities. They analyze how elite universities in the United States and the UK emerged from vampiric processes of chattel slavery, capitalism, and colonialism and sustain themselves and ongoing neo-colonial global capitalism by creating zombie-like staff and students. In a similar vein, they point to how universities in South Africa were also created to enhance the colonial-Apartheid project and indicate how, even in the post-Apartheid era, these institutions find themselves caught between the drive to perpetuate these monstrous social systems and resistance to them from politically conscious students and staff. In this way, they offer an innovative critique of elite higher education and make a compelling case for the use of analytical metaphors that disrupt the use of dominant terminologies that inform debate, discourse, and analysis in the field of education.

Kenway and Howard’s article shifts our focus from school education to higher education. It illustrates how in both Global North and Global South contexts, universities that are accorded elite status were setup with the express purpose of protecting and extending ruling class interests. Driven by this imperative, the curriculum that informs teaching and learning within these institutions is oriented towards the creation of experts who will deploy knowledge through a range of social institutions, including schools, to secure these interests. Although the authors do not discuss this directly, one can extend their analysis to reflect on how the knowledgeable experts who emerge from elite universities go on create the curricular maps that underpin formal education in non-elite schools and higher education institutions, thereby perpetuating injustice, exclusion, and control. In applying monster methodologies to critique elite university education, Kenway and Howard allow us to make sense of how enacting curricula as maps involves monstrosities at individual, interpersonal, and social systemic levels. The article prompts us to reckon with the ways in which curriculum as map is a product and enabler of monstrosities and encourages us to consider how it might be conceived and realized to promote care, flourishing, and justice. In addition to this, the article also points to the utility of analytical metaphors to identify and disrupt harmful and unacceptable practices in education. Just like the use of metaphors of monsters and monstrosities work to disrupt positive connotations of “eliteness” implied in discussions about “elite education,” the metaphor of curriculum as map can serve to disrupt connotations of benevolent authority and knowledgeability associated with curriculum. By working with this metaphor, one can consider the ways in which curriculum is restrictive and forecloses possibilities for justice and freedom.

The articles published in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry point to how logics of exclusion and control underpin curriculum enactment in formal education and offer alternative ideas and practices. Despite the differences in their contextual engagement, thematic foci, theoretical orientations, and analytical approaches, all four of them highlight the role of curriculum in the reproduction and extension of power structures within modern nation-states. In offering the analytical metaphor of curriculum as map, I have attempted to highlight these similarities and suggest an avenue to bring together the pursuit of alternatives. Taken together, these articles offer educators and curriculum scholars multiple theoretical, methodological, and analytical tools to critique how formal education protects and reproduces ruling class interests across national-social contexts and to start working towards alternatives. They also demonstrate how critiques of formal education need to be accompanied by critical analysis and reflection about the limitations and harms associated with political communities like nation-states that excessively centralize power and resources. They offer multiple points of departure and connection for ongoing curriculum scholarship that engages with the relationship between formal education, political economy, and social reproduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.