International Perspectives on Curriculum
Curriculum in its most fundamental form represents a site of power and knowledge production, where the limits of what constitutes legitimate knowledge are set. It is also a place for values, valorisations and norms (personal, epistemic, social, political, dispositional, spatial, temporal and ethical) and their central implication in our descriptions of the world, in the curricula that we are attempting to design and in our life-choices. There are two dimensions to this claim. The first is a claim that objects in the world and human beings are valued in relation to each other and to other object-types. A second dimension is that values are epistemological. If we accept that value-free knowledge is an impossibility, that we inevitably make prejudgements about the world in our investigations, then being in the world is understood as a practice, primed for investigation, but resistant to algorithmic and value-free methods for describing it. Knowledge as a concept and as a practice has ethical, political, social, decolonising, transcolonial and human consequences and implications. We view curriculum not merely as organised knowledge, but as a formative relationship, a structured encounter that cultivates moral discernment, epistemic responsibility, and sapience.
It is too easy to describe a decolonised curriculum as just being against misogyny, racism, genocide, homophobia, and the like, although in this series we will pay attention to these important types of knowledge. We also have to enframe these disfigurements and lacerations in a general theory of learning, identity-formation, knowledge and ethics, and consequently any knowledge claim is enframed by a meta-epistemic theory, the type of object or objects it makes reference to, and how it can be justified. This incorporates a theory of mind and therefore a theory of the relationship between mind or minds and the world, and conversely between the world and mind or minds. The series itself is set within a decolonial and transcolonial framework.
