key: cord-0057612-8v76ab2q
authors: McLeod, Julie
title: Afterword
date: 2020-10-06
journal: Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-61667-0_20
sha: 60125cef2a9ea9e3292f395ca53b394c44a20d58
doc_id: 57612
cord_uid: 8v76ab2q

This provoking collection has both interrogated and advanced the field of curriculum inquiry. Framed by an international curriculum conference held in Melbourne, Australia (2018), yet looking further afield, the chapters taken together present a compelling argument for why questions about what counts as curriculum are fundamental to how we theorise, understand and engage with the purposes of education. But the book also does more, in its privileging of place and critical attention to the situated-ness of curriculum inquiry and practice. The importance of recognising the geo-politics of knowledge is both a well-known mantra and a statement that demands more substantial consideration than it is often accorded. This book speaks precisely to these matters through nuanced and insightful combinations of theorising and empirical research.

As the Editors observe, definitional and conceptual disputes characterise how processes of internationalisation and globalisation as well as cosmopolitan and transnational sensibilities are distinguished (or overlap) in curriculum research. While each has its own lineage and reference points, they all imply relationships beyond national, regional or local borders and bring these boundaries and layers of affiliation under scrutiny (McLeod, Sobe, & Seddon, 2018) . To these longstanding debates, this book brings into sharp view decolonising agendas that unsettle and reframe what advocacy for either an international or transnational view onto curriculum might entail (see too López López, 2018) . This is not only by attending to curriculum and theorising from the 'south' (as a corrective to the hegemony of the northern metropole) but by creating a space to examine the entangled histories of 'north/south', local/global and the cutting across histories and connected legacies of colonialism. In doing so, the book, and the conversations it builds from, invites a more hopeful sense of the possibilities of 'being international' than is usually evoked under the sign of either internationalisation or globalisation in education. These terms are frequently tethered to discussions of national or institutional ranking systems-e.g. PISA, university league tables, etc.-or the economics of education, such as capturing student markets, or to mobilities (of people, capital, ideas, policies). Even the language of policy borrowing, coined to describe the globalising movement of policy logics, seems couched in market hierarchies and suggests a reductive or thin sense of global connectivities.

Almost a century ago, interwar progressive education and experiential, child-centred curriculum flourished in the context of a cultural internationalism that prized intellectual cooperation among nations and optimistically looked to greater communication across borders, with hopes for better understanding between nations. The path to international peace was seen to lie in enhanced opportunities for cultural exchange and collaboration to enable a sense of shared values amid difference (Sluga & Clavin, 2016) . While these hopes may seem too distant from the educational politics of today, this collection of essays nevertheless has set out new directions and hopes for curriculum inquiry in the current era of internationalism, re-asserting the multiple dimensions of curriculum-knowledge, identity, ethics-and its transformative aspirations.

The book addresses themes of curriculum history across various chapters and in its inviting introductory essay. But history intrudes in other ways too. There is inevitably a temporal lag between reflection and writing, when ideas imagined in one time or the outcomes of completed research come to light in another time. For the most part, these timelags tend to be papered over in much of our work, perhaps because shifts in time are subtle, or cumulative, or less noticeable as we are immersed in what feels like the continuous familiarity of the present. However, the nature of the time-travel between the conception of this book (coinciding with the conference which informs it) the writing and editing of papers and then the curating of the whole, has been dramatic. This is not because of the passage of time but because of the massive differences in times as a result of the (social, economic, political, affective educational…) disruptions caused by the still unfolding consequences of the COVID-19 global pandemic. This same time, mid-2020, has also seen the rise of the global Back Lives Matter movement and greater prominence of anti-racist and decolonial struggles. These events will continue to matter for education and for curriculum inquiry, and demand an historically attuned response. This book, with its thoughtful and powerful contributions, will become an essential interlocuter in these dialogues.

Books, 'like words, are not fictitious, or even simply material, objects'. They are, Burton and Hofymer (2014, p. 9) continue, 'themselves material agents: path-makers for the circulation of ideas and discourses and, as such, makers of history in the bargain'. This book emerges at a critical time in world history and itself is poised to become an event, a 'maker of history', part of shaping the history of this educational present and our understandings of curriculum inquiry in a new transnational order.

Ten books that shaped the British empire: Creating an imperial commons

The making of indigeneity, curriculum history and the limits of diversity

World yearbook of education 2018: Uneven space-times of education: Historical sociologies of concepts, methods and practices. London: Routledge. Retrieved from https:// www.routledge.com/World-Yearbook-of-Education-2018-Uneven-Space-Times

Internationalisms: A twentiethcentury history