The Journey of Becoming an International Educator
Curriculum in International Contexts: Understanding Colonial, Ideological, and Neoliberal Influences has emerged from two decades of my engagement with various aspects of international themes and issues. My introduction to the notion of the “international” formally happened when I joined Kirori Mal College of the University of Delhi as an honours student of the discipline of geography in 1996. Given the expansive and global character of geography, I learned to appreciate how physical, political, economic, and cultural processes operate locally, regionally, and globally, and how these are intimately connected. I also learned how the diverse, yet indivisible, world of nature has been divided among various nation states, how Earth’s harmonious and delicate balance has been disturbed by the ideas of growth-driven economic models, and how colonialism and neocolonialism have undermined thousands of years old cultural groups and their sacred and spiritual relationship to their geographical environment. Throughout those years, I often questioned why there were economic disparities among countries and whether it was possible to have a world full of diversities but free of antagonisms and divisions.
I completed three degrees in geography 1 and studied the discipline for about eight years. Within these degrees, three subjects that deeply informed my understanding of the world, and later contributed to my work on international curriculum studies , were geography of development , political geography , and geographical thought . I studied political geography and geographical thought with late Professor K. K. Mojumdar who was a great teacher and mentor to me for about ten years until I left India in 2007 to attend the doctoral programme at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. His spontaneity, creativity, and playfulness in teaching, and his knowledge of geographical thought , politics , religion , philosophy, education, and psychology, always amazed me. Geographical thought , which covers the history and philosophy of geography, was my first introduction to a philosophical subject matter. This subject was my favourite; it opened my mind to the world of concepts, insights, and perceptions which allowed me to study and understand how human beings across the globe have come to relate with and connect with nature, and how this interaction has brought about a diverse, unique, and rich cultural heritage around the globe. This relationship between human beings and their environment has been studied and interpreted using a variety of worldviews and philosophical discourses , including positivism , behaviourism , Marxism , phenomenology , existentialism , environmentalism , possibilism , and postmodernism. These discourses influenced geographers as they did curriculum scholars around the world, as we will see in the chapters to follow. 2
Political geography allowed me to see how the world has been divided into power blocks and how geopolitics has been used as a way to create conflicting power centres regionally and globally. Professor Mojumdar’s deep interest in international boundaries and conflicts ignited my own interests in understanding how history , politics , religion , culture, as well as psychology underpin the conflicts between nation states—a theme that I explore in Chapter 5 of this book. 3 Geography of development , which I studied with Professor Kaushal Kumar Sharma, introduced me to how hundreds of years of (neo) colonialism and imperialism have brought about a world where the so-called “north” or “the core” has come to establish an exploitative relationship with “the south” or “the periphery” and how the Indigenous and native cultures around the world have been displaced and uprooted and their views of knowledge, education, work, and living have been suppressed by colonial and imperial worldviews (see Butlin , 2009; Godlewska & Smith , 1994). 4 Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this volume illustrate how colonial and imperial—and now neoliberal—influences have left their mark on the notions of curriculum, teaching, and learning in South Africa , Brazil, and Mexico .
During my graduate studies, I wrote a thesis under the supervision of Professor B. Khan that combined political and development geographies. It was titled “A Geographical Interpretation of the Evolutionary Nature of the Contemporary World Order ” (A. Kumar, 2003). I argued that the contemporary world order has evolved through a cyclic change from multipolar through bipolar and unipolar, to a multipolar world. During the late 19th century, political and economic power started diffusing from Europe to other parts of the world, especially USA and Japan, allowing the global power structures to shift from being Eurocentric to multipolar. This multipolarity continued up to 1945, when, after the Second World War, European supremacy was replaced by the emergence of USA and USSR as world powers, leading to the formation of antagonistic ideological, political, and economic systems. The disintegration of USSR in 1991 ended bipolar power structures leaving behind politico-military supremacy of the USA and multiple new economic powers centres including the European Union, China , Japan , and India . Towards the end of writing this thesis, my mind began to shift from geopolitics to geopacifics, from the geography of politics to geography of peace . 5 In the light of my growing interest in spirituality and meditation, I began to question the notions of nationalism , war, nuclear armament, and the growth-based model of economic development from spiritual perspectives. Based on my studies of Indian spiritual philosophers like Kabir, Krishnamurti , and Osho , 6 I became more interested in understanding the crisis of human consciousness and the ways in which it has created chaos in every sphere of human life, locally as well globally.
After completing three degrees in geography, I moved to the discipline of education, where, based on my study of Krishnamurti and the famous Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire , I developed an interest in conceptualizing a notion of global citizenship which would integrate self-reflection and critical thinking (A. Kumar , 2007). I argued:
It is significant to point out that the ideas of Krishnamurti and those of Freire and Giroux are different but not contradictory; rather, they are complimentary. For Freire and Giroux, what is significant is the development of critical consciousness to understand and change oppressive social reality , w...