Epistemic Colonialism and the Transfer of Curriculum Knowledge across Borders

Applying a Historical Lens to Contest Unilateral Logics

Weili Zhao, Thomas S. Popkewitz, Tero Autio, Weili Zhao, Thomas S. Popkewitz, Tero Autio

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000541274
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Comparative Education

This volume uncovers the colonial epistemologies that have long dominated the transfer of curriculum knowledge within and across nation-states and demonstrates how a historical approach to uncovering epistemological colonialism can inform an alternative, relational mode of knowledge transfer and negotiation within curriculum studies research and praxis.

World leaders in the field of curriculum studies adopt a historical lens to map the negotiation, transfer, and confrontation of varied forms of cultural knowledge in curriculum studies and schooling. In doing so, they uniquely contextualize contemporary epistemes as historically embedded and politically produced and contest the unilateral logics of reason and thought which continue to dominate modern curriculum studies. Contesting the doxa of comparative reason, the politics of knowledge and identity, the making of twenty-first century educational subjects, and multiculturalism, this volume offers a relational onto-epistemic network as an alternative means to dissect and overcome epistemological colonialism.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in curriculum studies as well as the study of international and comparative education. Those interested in post-colonial discourses and the philosophy of education will also benefit from the volume.

Part IIntroduction

1Historicizing Curriculum Knowledge Translation and Onto-Epistemic Coloniality

Weili Zhao, Thomas S. Popkewitz, and Tero Autio

DOI: 10.4324/​9780429323027-2

Uniformation of Curriculum Studies and Onto-Epistemic Coloniality of Modernity

Modernization is a category that has different historical placements and debates about its focus and characteristics: an epoch and “age”, a mode of consciousness, and a form of institutional development (see, e.g., Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974; Bhambra, 2007; Popkewitz, 2005, 2009; Popkewitz, Khurshid & Zhao, 2014). As a particular characteristic of the past two centuries, modernization in non-Western countries, as King (2018) argues, is characterized as both a response to the intrusion of Western modernity (the “modern” Western civilization that has already achieved that position) and the renewal and further development of traditional local civilizations in the images of the Western modern. Our concern with modernity is intricately entangled with the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being. Coloniality refers to the memory or legacy of the colonialism, which defines the culture, labor, intersubjective relation, and knowledge production well beyond the limits of colonialism and long after the end of a colonial administration (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Andreotti (2011) argues that “colonialism is constitutive of, rather than derivative from, modernity” (p. 383), entangling nation-states’ modernization, globalization, and localization movement not only within a dynamic of power negotiation but also within an ideological and onto-epistemological confrontation.

Taking up these lines of thinking, our focus of analysis is the “onto-epistemic coloniality of modernity”. The mutually constitutive qualities of ontology and epistemology (onto-epistemic) are to undo the mode of reasoning embodied in coloniality that is often associated with notions of the West and Eurocentric; that is, the analytical modes of reason generated in contemporary philosophy, social science, and historiography that in the sense of a comparative logic that differentiates knowledge from the knower, theory from methods, and objectifications from practices of subjectification, among others.

The book is to dissect the happening and effects of onto-epistemological confrontations, translations, and negotiations in curriculum knowledge translation within and beyond nation-states as well as across academic disciplines. Our focus on onto-epistemology is to understand the comparative styles of reasoning that occur in curriculum studies and the practices of schools that create hierarchies of differences and their distributions.

This interest in onto-epistemic qualities of educational practices directs attention to issues of coloniality, the “legacies” of power/knowledge. Sometimes called “epistemicide” (Santos, 2007), epistemological confrontations, translations, and negotiations happen when globalizing West-centric discourses and practices dominate non-Western societies, suppressing and overwriting the latter’s cultural systems of knowledge production. Paraskeva (2016), for example, conceptualizes “curriculum epistemicide” as a form of Western imperialism, which he claims has reached a “quasi-irretrievable point” (p. 3) and continues to intersect with the daily praxis of schools in and beyond the West, overriding alternative forms of knowledge and being both within and beyond the West.

While epistemicide is often defined along the geographical categories of East and West, and South and North, we would like to argue that these geographical boundaries have already given their way to a more globalized and localized ordering due to the modernization and globalization of Western-Northern Eurocentric epistemic rules within and beyond the Western-Northern territories. Furthermore, the West itself has never been a monolithic category of reasoning and frameworks but a multiplicity that intersects and forms at the interstices of historical lines that are never merely the West. The European Enlightenment writers were in contact with Chinese thoughts that were brought back into European thought in a manner that is neither reductive nor additive (Statman, 2019). Our interest in this volume is a historicizing of epistemes, which provides new and, we believe, significant new questions of coloniality and imperialism as the continual need to recognize the entanglements of knowledge as a material force, which is elaborated on in the following sections.

When globalization of education and curriculum studies are concerned, one expression given to the modernity-coloniality is the inscription of neoliberalized education and curriculum knowledge in varied nation-states. These conceptual markers give attention to what appears as a universally predominant form and logic as expressed in the popularization of the following discourses that travel in international agencies and national policies: the Tyler Rationale for curriculum planning, outcome-based teaching and learning, students as self-directed learners and teachers as facilitators, number-based “objective” testing and evaluation, and a reorientation of education primarily around science and technology-based subjects like STEM. Often called “learnification of education” (Biesta, 2005), these managerial languages of curriculum are viewed as dehumanizing to the extent that students and teachers are becoming generic linguistic signifiers, with their idiosyncratic properties as human beings eclipsed as nonrelevant. That means students and teachers assume an identity respectively represented as individual and autonomous learners and knowledge-conveyers, with knowledge (and skills) as pre-given truth or objectives contained in textbooks or lifeworld to be acquired through memorization and application.

While this literature is important to make visible certain limits to the reason of contemporary educational knowledge, our argument on the onto-epistemic qualities of knowledge raises the caution of such universalizing structural categories as neo-liberalism in what Benjamin (1955/1985) has discussed as the emptying of history. That is, we are concerned with the danger of taking the objectifications of phenomena as having a semiotic realism, giving words a universal form and logic. This universalizing is the effect of coloniality through activating global signifiers and a metaphysics that elides historical sensitivities to the multiplicities and the entanglements that we discuss below, for example, related to Chinese educational reforms and methodologically through notions of the indigenous foreigner and traveling libraries.

The latest global curriculum reform movement around the agenda of core competency development is a case in point. Since the OECD outlined its core competencies definitions in the late 20th century as the indispensable knowledge, skills, and literacies that students are supposed to equip themselves with to survive and succeed in the 21st-century world, different nation-states have jumped the wagon, re-contextualizing and re-assembling the discourses and frameworks as they travel to be assembled and connected with(in) their local-national contexts. All these efforts strive to go global with the advanced West for fear that their students would fail in the 21st-century world competition (see Zhao & Tröhler, 2021). For example, China in 2016 finalized its Chinese Students’ Core Competency Framework and claimed it as more than a mere replica of Western models, also drawing upon Chinese Confucian educational wisdom. The Chinese characteristics are expressed, on the one hand, in reinvigorating the classical discourse of suyang as distinct from the previously commonly used term suzhi, an easy equivalent of the English notion quality. On the other hand, the semantic repertoire of suyang has been expanded to include not only knowledge and skills and literacies popular in the Western texts but also personal traits and characters that relate back to Confucian tones and textures. Nevertheless, as Zhao (2020) has argued elsewhere, these gestures intended by the Chinese policymakers and curriculum reformers are more of a linguistic trope that doesn’t go deep to counter the grip of the (Western) modernized and globalized discourses and learning logic.

In other words, the discourses of competencies, skills, and literacies do not travel around by as simple linguistic signifier but with an epistemic grounding expressed by a cluster of keywords like testing, assessment, evidence-based, efficiency, accountability, and datafication. The cluster of words gives intelligibility to the way of ordering education and curriculum that are expressed as global but have particular historical locations and styles of reasoning related to the art of governing in European and US social life since the early 20th century (see, e.g., Lindblad, Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2018). Put differently, the traveling of discourses are not merely discourses. They belie deeper epistemic structures and configurations that redefine, before people realize, what counts as teaching, learning, knowledge, truth, and educational subjects as making of special kinds of persons (see, Popkewitz, 2008, 2020; Popkewitz, Pettersson & Hsiao, 2021). For example, one way to distinguish the modern school is the inscriptions of science as principles for organizing pedagogy, the curriculum, and the child. These principles were in the use of the social and psychological discourses to think about what school did and the child’s learning and development. The sciences inscribed cultural and social rules and standards whose object was to rationalize the interior of the child through specialized techniques in the governing of self that are historically entangled in issues of colonialism and power.

In a word, the trans-national/cultural/disciplinary knowledge translation or remaking, which is constitutive of the traveling of discourses, is inherently entangled within an epistemological negotiation, confrontation, and colonialism. Yet, as Chakrabarty (2000) rightly argues, Western categories and frameworks are indispensable and yet insufficient in mapping out non-Western sensibilities.

Mapping Coloniality and Its Entanglements

One way to think of this mapping is through notions of an indigenous foreigner and traveling libraries (see, Popkewitz, 2005; Popkewitz, Pettersson & Hsiao, 2021). The two phrases are ways to think about what an epistemic starting point can be when we historicize the multiplicity of reasoning and frameworks, which intersects and forms at the interstices of historical lines that are never merely the West. The challenge is to maintain a sensitivity to how fields of thought are inscribed materially in different social and cultural spaces, yet to explore a particular transnational quality and coloniality of modernity as forms of “reasoning” about society, people, and education.

The phrase indigenous foreigner appears to be an oxymoron – opposites in conjunction that seem to identify different types of phenomena for understanding the human condition. “Indigenous” is about what seems to have a specificity and is generative of what is local and the original home of belonging. In this sense, indigeneity is often used politically to interrupt and disturb the colonial violence imposed on local cultures and traditions. The indigenous foreigner is to think about the practices of schooling that seem universal but that are historically specific. For example, we can think of the different authors of the edited book as indigenous foreigners. Seemingly, the authors, ideas, and narratives intersect with one another and move seamlessly in time and space. At one level are systems and notions concerned with the mainstream Northern-Western management of institutions and people. At a different level are the counter-narratives from non-Western-Northern nation-states theorized in a critique of existing relations of power/knowledge and educational subjects. The iconic authors are, as Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) suggest, conceptual personae, intermediaries in complex movements, sets of relations, and assemblages to enunciate particular solutions and plans for action.

The movements, traveling, and settlements of the practices of social science continually entail foreign authors (epistemes) that enter different historical spaces with different coordinates and relations than the places of origin. Karl Marx is one such epistemic foreigner who travels and produces multiple “Marks”. There is the Karl Marx who wrote in the 19th-century European industrialization and Enlightenment’s hope of the universalism, the Marx of a political movement and belonging in Soviet Leninism, the Marx of Maoist Marxism, and 1970s Eurocommunism. Russian Lev Vygotsky psychology, which fulfilled the moral agenda of Soviet Marxism, and the Calvinism reform psychology of John Dewey of early-20th-century US progressivism have become fellow travelers in contemporary US learning psychologies (Popkewitz, 1998). The authors and words are disconnected from their origins and activated elsewhere about what is natural or indigenous to experience and desire.

Seen this way, how can we explore the settlements that occur when indigenous foreigners, as particular sets of ideas and modes of reasoning, enter different historical, cultural, and social spaces? Traveling libraries is a phrase to direct attention to the tapestry of “thought” in which epistemes travel and become settlements to organize reflection and actions in different time/spaces. Things are not merely translated as replicas of their originary space of enunciation but are creative acts for producing new assemblages and connections. For example, after the Second World War, Sweden and the Soviet Union brought cybernetics theory that emerged in the United States into the planning of their welfare state and schooling. The theory was assembled in a grid of ideas and traditions as creative, vibrant historical practices rather than as reductive or additive that reproduces its place of origin. The systems theory was assembled with, in one case, the liberal welfare state norms of statistical administration, and in the other, translated as the settlement with Marxist–Leninist norms of historical materialism (see, e.g., Mikhalova & Pettersson, 2021). The diverse assembly and connections can be thought of, metaphorically, as different libraries.

Notions of the indigenous foreigner and traveling libraries methodologically direct attention to the entanglements, translations, and specificities of the historical activations of the epistemes in the governing of modernity. The history of the social sciences as well as curriculum histories, for example, entails understanding different spaces, tapestries, and rules and standards in the governing of society, people, and change. To map these intersections and assemblages as they form educational and cultural sensibilities is a major task of contemporary scholarship in its confrontations with the politics of modernity. It is this conversation that this book seeks to initiate without falling into the dominant Western-Northern epistemic trap in transnational and intercultural curriculum and educational studies.

Drawing upon a wide range of onto-epistemic landscapes as case studies, this book dissects the historical and contextualized happenings of curriculum knowledge translation and onto-epistemological clashes and negotiations across and within nations and cultures. It is to be noted again that we examine the onto-epistemic interstices beyond a geographical demarcation of East and West, South, and North. Instead, we adopt a more globalized and localized boundary as the modernization and globalization of Western-Northern Eurocentric epistemic rules are now both within and beyond the Western-Northern territories. Furthermore, “the West” has never been monolithic, always in contact with “others,” and, at the same time, nurturing varying epistemological forms, and the dominant categories and frameworks are also indispens...