key: cord-0057649-83lekkbv authors: Green, Bill; Brennan, Marie; Roberts, Philip title: Transnational Curriculum Inquiry in a Changing World date: 2021-03-19 journal: Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-61667-0_1 sha: e6ce533d9ff7e910ad43d5bc736ab3a2f0dfda90 doc_id: 57649 cord_uid: 83lekkbv The introduction to the edited book ‘Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World: Transnational Perspectives in Curriculum Inquiry’, this chapter introduces contemporary issues and debates in the transnational curriculum field, as engaged through the IAACS internationalisation project at the time of its recent triennial World Curriculum Studies Conference, held in Melbourne, Australia in late 2018. With a focus on the challenges and opportunities ahead for the field, the chapter outlines the changing circumstances the field finds itself in. Specific areas of focus include new work in decolonising the curriculum, knowledge questions and curriculum dilemmas, and enduring issues of nation and history in curriculum studies, as well as the concept of transnational curriculum inquiry itself. Opening the book and overviewing the book’s following 18 chapters, overall this introductory chapter encapsulates the field in its present form and proposes future directions for contemporary international curriculum scholarship. This Introduction is written within the 'lock-down' time of COVID-19, an unprecedented global pandemic which has already changed the world, irrevocably. In some ways, the pandemic is a particularly stark manifestation of globalisation, and perhaps a defining condition for education in the age of late modernity and late capitalism, realised in new regimes of testing and accountability, in 'traveling' policy formations, in new 'edu-scapes' and supra-national reform imperatives, in increasingly global-academic mobility. Each of us has been in some manifestation of 'lockdown' and 'social isolation' in recent months, like our contributors, our colleagues, with most of us engaged in writing curriculum inquiry, in one form or another, or otherwise 'doing' curriculum. The opportunity arises therefore, and the challenge, to consider what it is to be engaged in curriculum praxis and scholarship, in work that is imagined and realised under the sign of 'curriculum' at this time-to ask, again, what is curriculum? What is curriculum inquiry? What constitutes curriculum inquiry? What counts as curriculum inquiry? What makes it curriculum? Undoubtedly the curriculum field is a broad church, and as others have noted, there is little to be gained in setting too strict a limitation on what it refers to and contains. But there is real value, looking forward, in asking such questions, if only to promote a heightened reflexivity in our conduct and our sense of ourselves as a scholarly community-a 'discipline'. Here in Australia, for instance, a striking feature of this most recent period (April-June, 2020) has been formal government emphasis on keeping children and young people out of and away from schools. This has not meant closing schools, however, and the concomitant turn to various forms of home-schooling, distance education and online learning, as a means of providing for some measure of continuity in 'normal' curriculum and schooling, has meant new challenges for parents and for teachers. Little articulated, as yet, is that all this provides an excellent opportunity to rethink normative or institutionalised understandings of curriculum and schooling in their normal, 'grammatical' form-including the very coupling of curriculum and schooling. What does 'curriculum' do for and to teaching and learning? What do sequence, continuity and development mean in this regard? What 'boundaries' and 'thresholds' pertain to knowledges as they move from one context to another? Etc. These and other questions are directly pertinent to the distinctive professional and intellectual expertise of the curriculum specialist, or the curriculum scholar. And yet in Australia there is little recognition, as yet, of the challenge and the opportunity presented here for curriculum inquiry as a field of expertise and specialist knowledge. All the more reason, then, to encourage greater self-awareness on the part of curriculum scholars, not only in Australia but elsewhere as well, because it is more than likely that similar or related things are happening across the world, as Business as Usual is interrupted and perhaps even disrupted. Clearly, there are increasing debates, worldwide, about the purposes of education institutions, and of education itself as an institution. Concurrently, global protests around the Black Lives Matter crisis perhaps indicate that we may be entering a new phase of decoloniality in settler states such as the USA and Australia. All such shifts raise potential and probing questions for curriculum work and curriculum inquiry in universities and schools. All this is why, in such a changing and tumultuous context, this book seeks to provide a range of accounts of contemporary curriculum thinking and activity, as a demonstration of the informed, critical curriculum mindset, at a momentous time in global history. In what follows, we shall firstly outline the conference occasioning this book-bearing in mind that while it is not a 'conference proceedings', it continues conversations from that event. An exploration of some of the major issues emerging from these conversations, as well as from other recent developments and debates in the field at large, is then presented. Finally, we provide an overview of the book itself, across the various chapters, indicating some of the thematic links between them, and reviewing the project of the book as a whole. (2015). The Conference's formal title was 'Transnational Curriculum Inquiry: Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World'-as it turns out, a felicitous framing for the event as it played out. Three Keynotes and three Featured panels, as well as symposia and individual paper-presentations, were distributed over three days. The Keynotes were presented by Julie McLeod 1 (Australia), Zongyi Deng (Singapore) 2 and Crain Soudien (South Africa), as scholars of international standing, and these presentations were very enthusiastically received, with each speaker presenting from their own work in explicit dialogue with the designated theme of that particular day. An innovation at the conference was the Featured Panels, held over the three days, with invited panellists for each day drawn from a range of countries, including New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, China, Cyprus, Chile, Norway and the USA. The themes of the Panels were as follows: • 'National Curriculum: International Perspectives' • 'Teachers' Work/Lives and Curriculum Making' • 'Indigenous & Decolonising Challenges in/to Curriculum Theory' It was conceived from the outset that the conference overall would be structured in accordance with these topics, as meta-themes, under the umbrella of its focus on transnational curriculum inquiry in a changing world. This was not seen as a free-for-all-we wanted to take this thematic structure seriously, and we did 3 ; and so too did those who presented at the conference. The conference was conceived as not only an opportunity to showcase curriculum scholarship but also specifically as curriculum scholarship-in particular, extending lines of inquiry initiated two decades previously. Major traces of the Panels remain in the concept and organisation of this book. They clearly raised a number of important and even crucial issues in and for the field more generally. 4 Particularly significant in this regard, we believe, was the Panel on 'Indigenous and decolonising challenges in/to curriculum theory', which we saw as potentially very generative and especially appropriate for a conference of this kind held in Australia, where the state of Aboriginal education is surely a scandal, and an indictment of the nation as a whole. This is notwithstanding the point that other countries have histories just as troubled and as disturbing, regarding their indigenous people. This is truly a worldwide phenomenon, and a major curriculum challenge in and of itself. We were very keen therefore to highlight this issue at the conference and, more importantly, the perspectives and standpoints associated with it. While this was the first time that this triennial conference had been located in Australia (or the 'Antipodes'), it was the third time that it was held in the southern hemisphere. 5 This seems to us significant, in terms of what it means for recent interest in notions such as 'southern theory' and the 'Global South'. Practically, holding this international conference in Australia immediately raised issues of distance and travel, which clearly have an effect on participation, and hence on registration, and the financial and organisational struggles that bedevilled the conference from the outset-something perhaps worth re-considering in the future. A final point: the conference itself was well attended, in the end, and by all reports a successful academic-intellectual event. There were 242 registrations from all over the world, with 149 paper-presentations and 15 symposia (within which, a further 52 individual presentations 6 ). Participants came from 32 countries, including Australia, with not surprisingly the largest representation, followed by China. There was a significant contribution from South-East Asia, and also from South America, while attendance was relatively small from Europe, Africa, and fewer from North America than usual. Yet this was a truly multi-national conference, and an important moment in the transnational curriculum field. The scholarship on display was wide-ranging and illuminating, and often inspirational, from the Keynotes through the Panels to the symposia and the papers. This is clearly evident in the conference as text, in both its commodified and lived forms, although of course the latter lives on now simply as memory. That was a key reason, in fact, for why we were keen to follow up the event with a material record 7 of some kind, a marker, something manifested here in this book. While the Melbourne conference was its originating forum, the book is not simply a 'conference proceedings'. Rather, it comprises invited contributions from conference participants, based on both their abstracts and their presentations. Those who responded to these invitations then worked on writing their chapters, in accordance with the terms of reference of our book proposal. With the book understood in its own right, we were concerned that it be as inclusive and as representative as possible, hence a genuine exercise in transnational curriculum inquiry, as a contribution to the curriculum studies field. What is it to seek to understanding curriculum transnationally? This has been a central organising question for the IAACS project from the outset, and more particularly for Bill Pinar's curriculum research program over recent decades. That program has undoubtedly been a productive and important one, and directly formative for IAACS. This is not to say that they are identical-it is crucial, in fact that critical distinctions are made in this regard, not the least because of the need to insist on the specificity of the Association and the integrity of scholarship. Pinar's work here traces back at least to the first half of the 1990s and the monumental volume Understanding Curriculum (Pinar et al., 1995) , which contains a chapter entitled 'Understanding Curriculum as International Text'. The notion of 'curriculum-as-international-text' has become an important referencepoint for much subsequent work-including that of IAACS and especially its conference series. This focus has been described recently in terms of 'internationalism' as a "third paradigm (2000-present)" in US curriculum studies, following on from "curriculum development " as the first phase "and then reconceptualist curriculum " (Jupp, 2017, p. 22) . It should be noted that the reference here is to curriculum studies in the USA, as a nationally distinctive field (see also Pinar, 2013) . We need to differentiate between the view of curriculum studies historically identified or associated with North America and the view from elsewhere, variously conceived-a shift in perspective, and perhaps the emergence of a programmatic multiperspectivism in curriculum inquiry, and a concern with not just 'positionality' but 'situatedness' as well (Reynolds, 2017, p. 1) . Where in the world is one speaking from?-with all of these ('where', 'the world', 'speaking from', 'who') to be thematized. As is becoming increasingly recognised, it is important to distinguish between a more or less hegemonic (North) American 'voice' and the voices of others, from elsewhere. It matters greatly that curriculum is produced in multiple places and spaces. Hence it is useful to consider how internationalism is understood, and its relations with terms and concepts such as globalisation, cosmopolitanism and transnationality itself. A distinction has been made, strategically and operationally, between 'internationalisation' and 'globalisation', on the grounds that the latter seems to be associated with a tendency towards homogenisation and standardisation, whereas the former preserves and indeed affirms differences and particularities. Hence, from the outset the emphasis has been, for IAACS, on "support[ing] a worldwide-but not uniform-field of curriculum studies" (Gough, 2004, p. 7) . This has meant insisting, in practice, on the continuing relevance of the nation. Pinar (2010, p. 2) argues "the primacy of the nation in curriculum reform", proposing that "[p]rerequisite to understanding curriculum internationally is … the primacy of the particular case" (p. 14)-in this instance, the nation. Hence: "Internationalization denotes the possibility of nationally distinctive fields in complicated conversation with each other" (Pinar, 2010, p. 3) . The Australian curriculum scholar Noel Gough provides a particularly illuminating perspective on this matter. As he writes: Curriculum studies is itself a form of contemporary cultural production through which the transnational imaginary of globalization may be expressed and negotiated, although it is more common for curriculum scholars to speak of the 'internationalization' of the field. (Gough, 2000, p. 88) Elsewhere, he makes the point that "those of us who have been explicitly engaged in projects of internationalizing curriculum inquiry have addressed questions of how local knowledge traditions in curriculum inquiry can be performed together in a variety of ways" (Gough, 2014, p. 93 ). Within such a perspective, the question must be asked: What about the nation? Does the nation still matter? Do questions of nationhood, nationality and even nationalism continue to be worth asking in contemporary (transnational) curriculum inquiry? As scholars such as Pinar (2010) and Reid (2000) indicate, historically and traditionally curriculum work has been conducted within the purview of the nation. This remains even now the case, as evidenced by the recent volume on the Australian Curriculum (Reid & Price, 2018) and a special issue of The Curriculum Journal on developing a new curriculum for Wales (Vol, 31, No. 2, 2020) , under the heading 'Educating the Nation'. Given Pinar's (2010, p. 2) assertion of "the primacy of the nation in curriculum reform", his focus has been on 'internationalization' rather than 'globalization': Not only does internationalization point to the national context in which global politics is enacted but, for my purposes, the term underlies the promise of the next stage… in curriculum studies. Internationalization denotes the possibility of nationally distinctive fields in complicated conversation with each other. (Pinar, 2010, pp. 2-3-his emphasis) As he writes: "Understanding the national distinctiveness of curriculum studies enables us to underscore how national history and culture influence our own research" (p. 14). It is worth noting here that mass-popular schooling, as a modernist-imperial project, was introduced into colonies and former colonies, often as part of 'civilising the natives'. So curriculum, even if not an official 'national curriculum', has been inevitably tied to the self-reflexive development of citizens ('in the national interest', so to speak). Similarly, universities in many countries, including across China, India, the continents of Africa, Australia and South America, grew largely along European post-Humboldtian lines which emphasised national cultures alongside the science subjects. Indeed, universities became symbols of 'modernity' and means of entry into nation status in many instances. Their curriculum, too, took on elements of the scientific 'world view', which flowered along with developing country-specific cultural practices-poetry traditions and political induction in China, for example. Indeed, if we accept that curriculum is one central mechanism whereby we tell ourselves who we are, then "[t]elling ourselves who we are involves many facets of identity, but the one that has been most clearly associated with the institution of curriculum is the question of what nation we belong to and what it means to belong to that nation" (Reid, 2000, p. 114) . Moreover: "[n]ational curriculums"-by which is meant, here, simply those formal curricula arising in different countries-"are cultural artifacts, in the same way that national songs, stories, and festivals are cultural artifacts", and "[e]ven if they use the same basic materials, what results from those materials has unique meaning for individual nations" (Reid, 2000, p. 114) . That view might be countered by observing that we live now in a global era, and that nations are no longer as seemingly monumental as once they were. Nonetheless, as Pinar and various others argue, nations still matter in and for curriculum inquiry. They continue to provide a bedrock for much of what is recognisable as curriculum and schooling, as situated selections from national culture. 'National curriculum' thus constructs the nation as much as being shaped by earlier forms of nation. Simultaneously, 'national curriculum', whether official policy or not, now enrols countries in new forms of globalism, through uses of 'big data'. Supra-national testing regimes establish the 'global' as a 'space' of comparison of nations, in a hierarchical stratification of performances of student 'achievement', tied to economic performance. Speaking from somewhere continues to matter, and this includes nations, among other 'places' 8 , within a complex, dynamic, global field of flows and spaces, 'scapes' (Appadurai, 2010 ). Yet speaking from somewhere implies not only, or simply, a geographic notion of place. Curriculum development for both schools and universities has long been associated with dominant forms of nationalism and national identity formation. While curriculum contestation in many sites has raised questions of which knowledges and whose knowledge is included, these remain problematic. The early 1970s debates in the edited collection Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971 ) highlighted this for England and France, through the sociology of knowledge via the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein. More recent contestation includes the 'decolonise the curriculum!' protests in South African universities from around 2015. The locus of enunciation has shifted. In particular, it becomes increasingly generative to take account of what, appropriating Gramsci, might be called the 'Southern Question'the notion of the Global South, as a new and perhaps necessary consideration in and for transnational curriculum inquiry. This is crucial to questions of power, positionality and situatedness, as well as 'enunciation' (Macedo, 2011) . There are two aspects of this. One is to acknowledge a longstanding historical view of the world in terms of a dominant North and a subaltern South, based in politico-ethical considerations of modernity and colonialism. Connell (2007) has provided a provocative and somewhat controversial argument in this regard, organised around the motif of 'southern theory'. This is appropriately referenced here, as an avowedly Australian perspective on knowledge and social theory. "[S]ocial thought happens in particular places" (Connell, 2007, p. ix) : it is produced somewhere, and it is directed and oriented somewhereoften somewhere else. Connell's Australian location remains significant, even if the audience is potentially a worldwide one, especially if that location is understood biographically and historically-as it was for Connell (e.g. p. 203), and it is for us, as curriculum scholars. Curriculum inquiry happens in particular places, too. Of course, writing from the Antipodes, as we do, does not definitively shape and inform our account, or give it any particular epistemological warrant. What it does do is indicate where we are speaking from, i.e. the periphery of the curriculum field, worldwide. This is partly why the issue of the 'South' is relevant here. 9 We understand the project of transnational curriculum inquiry as an attempt to re-balance the scene, to allow for and indeed to actively promote voices and perspectives from elsewhere, as a matter of principle. It is important, nonetheless, not to misrecognise the 'South' as a literal geo-political reference. Rather, it is a metaphor. Hence: "… 'the South' and 'the Antipodes' are more of a state-of-mind or condition, rather than a place" (Stewart et al., 2017, p. 62) . As de Sousa Santos (2018, p. 1) points out, with particular relevance to curriculum: It is an epistemological nongeographical South, composed of many epistemological souths having in common the fact that they are all knowledges born in struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. They are produced wherever such struggles occur, in both the geographical North and the geographical South. That is, recognising the 'South' is a political statement. In this regard, de Sousa Santos (2014 , 2018 has pointed to the ways in which knowledges other than the Euro-centric have been excluded and refused: what he terms the construction of an "abyssal line", dividing the world. On one side is 'reality' and the existence or invisibility of anything beyond the 'abyss'. As this plays out in curriculum terms, knowledges from the colonised cannot be recognised, or seen, let alone included. Hence, de Sousa Santos develops the term 'epistemicide', marking the violence of that exclusion, which he sees as built into the institutions of the colonies and of new nations-including their schools and universities. In Australia, the deplorable treatment of indigenous peoples, killing off hundreds of languages and rich cultural knowledges, is still very much an open issue, a 'wound' (Grant, 2016) . Australia's more recent geo-economic relations with Asia adds to the sharp irony, historically, of its White Australia Policy, so long a centrepiece of its national identity. de Sousa Santos' (2014, 2018) concern for the recovery of and reconstructions of "epistemologies of the South" thus become a means of, and opportunity for, curriculum renewal for schools and universities, and for communities, more broadly. In discussing the necessary moves towards cognitive justice through educational institutions, De Sousa Santos points to new ecologies of knowledges-not to gain new generalisations or universalisations but rather, to engage in pluriversities, erasing the abyssal line in the process of engagement across knowledges (de Sousa Santos, 2018). There is, of course, much more involved in curriculum renewal along such lines, as Paraskeva (2016) intimates. A further aspect of the 'Southern' question is pertinent here is the issue of language, or more particularly, of 'English' as the means by which transnational curriculum inquiry has largely (hegemonically?) been conducted to date. What problems emerge when this is problematised?when what is sometimes called 'anglification' is reckoned into account, in considering matters of globalisation and internationalisation? Paraskeva (2016, p. 209 ) is sharply emphatic in this regard, referring to "… the linguistic imperialism framed by the English language and culture as an aspect of [curriculum] genocide". As Jupp (2017, p. 7) writes: "Through to the present, efforts to internationalize curriculum studies have generally advanced the coloniality of knowledge through using 'international' English as lingua franca". He further notes: "This use of English emphasizes the assumption that curriculum studies' internationalization represents an expansion of the US-centered and Anglophone field's third paradigm" (p. 7). Here he points to the more constrained understanding of 'internationalisation' as part of the 'advancement' of American curriculum studies, which has been already alluded to. This has been a marked feature of the IAACS program as well, with the conferences all conducted in and through English as the primary means of communication and exchange, although this certainly doesn't mean that other languages haven't also been in play. The same must be said of books such as this one, published in English as it is, even though it features scholars writing from South America and elsewhere, for whom English is not their first language (L1), or indeed their preferred language. What is important here, however, is the question not so much of the language of transnational curriculum inquiry but of opening it up to other epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies, and other forms of knowledge and ways of knowing. This might be described, following Derrida, as a necessary supplement. It is not about displacing Western knowledges (and even English-language scholarship, contemporary or classical), rather of building new relationships across diverse knowledges. How this might be done is, of course, another matter altogether. Jupp (2017, p. 13) calls for "… a South-led transnational curriculum studies South-North global dialogue that emphasizes Southern voices, epistemologies, and readings of the Global North from the periphery". This might be best conceived as a crucial initial phase, with hopefully a recalibrated discourse to subsequently emerge, as a re-energised feature of the curriculum field, worldwide. So how best to understand what we have named here transnational curriculum inquiry? Calling for a new emphasis on notions of mutuality, negotiation and cosmopolitanism, Jupp (2017, p. 9) refers to "the emergent transnational curriculum studies field". For us, however, 'transnational curriculum inquiry' has greater resonance and value, certainly for our purpose here, in introducing and framing this book. This is partly because it was introduced early on by our fellow Australian, Noel Gough, as the Foundation Editor of IAACS's journal Transnational Curriculum Inquiry. As he wrote in his inaugural Editorial, regarding "the idea of transnational curriculum inquiry", this is about more than just producing yet another journal or generating more publications: "it is also a site for research and for producing intercultural understanding and actively valuing cultural diversity" (Gough, 2004, p. 7) . This creates new opportunities "for reconceptualising curriculum work that can be generated by considering how we should respond to, and progressively consolidate, the formation of new publics -democratic, multicultural, and transnational citizenries" (p. 4). Furthermore, it involves "reconceptualising curriculum inquiry as a postcolonialist project" (p. 7). We endorse that understanding. While this book is by no means wholly to be read along such lines, overall, it is certainly intended as a gesture in that direction, and as such, a call for further work along such lines. How it is to be understood, and realised, remains a project still to be fully and properly articulated. The book that you are reading comprises nineteen chapters 10 by authors from around the world, and more specifically from Aotearoa New Zealand, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, England, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Africa and the USA. We have organised it in accordance with the thematic structure of the original Conference-'Decolonising the Curriculum', 'Knowledge Questions and Curriculum Dilemmas', 'History, Nation, Curriculum' and 'Curriculum Challenges for the Future'. Our intended reader is the curriculum scholar, whether established or emerging, although we hope that others in the field will also find the book of interest and value, even utility. We are confident that all of the contributors, as writers and scholars, will concur with our view that scholarship matters, and perhaps especially so at a time when visions of teaching as pragmatic-intellectual work are being actively supressed, and schooling is becoming more and more regulated and constrained. In what follows, we provide a brief overview of the volume as a whole, and of the chapters it contains and frames. 'Decolonising the Curriculum' (Sect. 1) opens the volume, foregrounding a key theme for transnational curriculum inquiry-perhaps especially important at this time where there is widespread outrage seen in worldwide affirmations that 'Black Lives Matter'. This emphasis was also a key focus for the Melbourne conference, where a Featured Panel addressed the topic of 'Indigenous & Decolonising Challenges in/to Curriculum'. As various commentators have noted, Australia-starting as a British penal colony and federating as a settler society in 1901was always a profoundly 'white' nation-state, with the notorious White Australia Policy at its heart. Yet there was, and always will be, a longstanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence and, as the Uluru Statement from the Heart makes clear, this country was never Terra Nullius, and sovereignty over the land was never relinquished (https://ulurustatement.org/). The Australian challenge remains: the decolonisation of curriculum and schooling. These chapters engage this challenge-not only in Australia but elsewhere as well, speaking from the local circumstances of South Africa, Chile, Aotearoa New Zealand and China, together with Australia. Chapters in other sections-Corbett, Green and Roberts, for example-also take up the challenges of decoloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) , as is incumbent on most of the world. Theoretically and empirically robust, the Section starts with Crain Soudien's "Development, Decolonisation and the Curriculum: New Directions for New Times" (Chapter 2). Drawn from his provocative and historically situated keynote, his chapter here presents insights from four positions on decoloniality taken in South Africa, involving 'Transformation' by 'Detachment', 'Inclusion', 'Enlargement' and 'Critical Appropriation', respectively. Locating these within global debates, he concludes that intellectual and emotional engagement with this in curriculum terms involves teaching "wider and deeper ways of knowing, but also … teach[ing] with compassion and care". Georgina Tuari Stewart, a Panellist at the Melbourne conference, offers the image of 'Smoke and Mirrors' in her chapter exploring curriculum policy of inclusion of Māori knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand curriculum (Chapter 3). Along with later chapters, Stewart uses a critical engagement with Michael Young's work to unpack the insubstantial, even deceptive explanations underpinning the policy, and its confusions in and for practice. Chilean scholar Daniel Johnson-Mardones in his chapter entitled 'The Mestizo Latinoamericano as Modernity's Dialectical Image: Critical Perspectives on the Internationalization Project in Curriculum Inquiry' (Chapter 4) takes up a key South American contribution to decoloniality debates in which coloniality is constitutive of modernity. He proposes intercultural dialogue as a contribution to the internationalisation debates in curriculum studies, a dialogue moving beyond Euro-centric modernity/coloniality by starting from the 'mestizo latinoamericano'. Kevin Lowe and Nikki Moodietwo Australian Aboriginal Panellists at the Melbourne conference-join here with Sara Weuffen to analyse the official Australian Curriculum and its 'mirage' of Indigenous content (Chapter 5). They trace the shift from education for self-determination, equity and anti-racism towards concerns with Indigenous underachievement and 'self-esteem', seeing this as a form of assimilation and incorporation into settler society. A policy of 'reconciliation' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people sidelines Indigenous control of knowledge for and about Indigenous people and absolves settlers from responsibility to decolonise. Weili Zhao offers transnational curriculum studies "a de-colonial language gesture" in her chapter from Hong Kong (Chapter 6). Drawing on Huebner and Heidegger, Zhao reintroduces the recuperation of language as a decolonial tool, as a means to avoid "curriculum epistemicide" (Paraskeva 2016) . Pointing to the loss of alternative cognitive, cultural and ontological frames, represented in the loss of language, she discusses problems with Chinese adoption of the globally circulating term 'competencies'. The term's 'translation' adopts Western 'Tylerian' framing of curriculum, evacuating Chinese historical terms and knowledge traditions. In Sect. 2 ('Knowledge Questions and Curriculum Dilemmas'), what has been described as the 'knowledge question' is confirmed as a resonant topic in recent curriculum-theoretical debates. Initially linked to the work of Michael Young and others, it has been both generative and controversial, putting knowledge back on the agenda at a time when, as some argue, attention to knowledge as such risked being backgrounded or eclipsed. Yet the curriculum question par excellence has long been that originally ascribed to Herbert Spencer-'What knowledge is of most worth?' New issues of disciplinarity have arisen in recent times, along with attention to 'practical', 'tacit', 'body', 'interim', 'personal' and other forms of knowledge-including, crucially and increasingly, the issue of indigenous knowledges. Initially oriented to and even dominated by Western, modernist, metrocentric orientations and value, this debate has more recently opened up to 'other' perspectives, from China and from Asia more generally, as well as revisiting Classical understandings, and those linked to other non-Western epistemologies, ontologies and even cosmologies. All this returns politics and ethics to the picture, and highlights issues of power and desire, and of the non-neutrality of curriculum-but also of the need for educators themselves to be knowledgeable, as agents and designers, and as curriculum makers. Knowledge questions generate and provoke curriculum dilemmas, and curriculum dilemmas of various kinds more often than not can be tracked back to challenging issues of knowledge and 'knowledge-ability'. This section includes five chapters, headed by Zongyi Deng's account of knowledge and 'content' in recent debates and his overview of three different but potentially complementary perspectives on curriculum and schooling (Chapter 7). Crucially he introduces a Chinese 'wisdom' tradition into the debate-thereby nicely complementing Zhao's account in the previous section. Philip Roberts' chapter focuses on the relationship between the types of knowledge in the curriculum based on metropole disciplines and rural knowledges (Chapter 8), raising questions about the relationship between the 'metropole' and the 'hinterland' as sites and sources of knowledge-making. What teachers and educators more generally do with the knowledge they are assigned to teach is addressed next, in Yew Leong Wong's account of curriculum making and curriculum design (Chapter 9), working with what is called 'the methodology of design' and adopting a classically modernist stance in doing so. There is a connection here with a later chapter on curriculum design which seeks to unsettle such a perspective (Chapter 18). Teaching is again the focus of Silvia Morelli's chapter (Chapter 10), written from Argentina, drawing on classical neo-European notions of bildung and didaktik to offer what she calls a distinctive 'language' for talking and thinking about curriculum, and about teaching, in the changing context of what she presents as an emerging postmodernity. The section concludes with an important move by Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan (Chapter 11) beyond the knowledge question per se, as currently formulated, to engage issues of ethics, richly articulated with notions of power and social justice. What is striking here (indeed, across the book as a whole) is the manner in which different chapters work off each other, implicitly and explicitly, pointing in this case to ongoing challenges of curriculum and knowledge, and ranging from considerations of curriculum making at different levels to the curriculum-in-use. Regarding Sect. 3 ('History, Nation, Curriculum'), a feature of the Melbourne conference was its deliberate foregrounding of the historical imagination in curriculum inquiry. This was seen as particularly important in the Australian context, as originally an outpost of empire and later a settler nation-continent in its own right, endeavouring to better understand its distinctive location in the world and concomitant challenges of identity and history, dispossession and reparation. Hence a number of presentations at the conference addressed the History curriculum (and not only by Australians, it must be said), although that aspect is not represented here. Curriculum history as a distinctive genre of curriculum inquiry in its own right didn't figure as much as we had anticipated, although there were various manifestations of the historical emphasis in Reconceptualist work, particularly regarding autobiography and (to some extent) psychoanalysis. The emphasis on nation-the national provenance of curriculum work and inquiry-was certainly much in evidence, not only in presentations on the still relatively recent 'local' Australian Curriculum, but also with reference to curriculum and schooling in other countries. Hence the thesis that curriculum activity more generally remains more or less nation-centric was sustained, overall. This section opens with Bill Green's account of curriculum history as a distinctive form of scholarship, with regard to both traditional history of education and curriculum inquiry (Chapter 12). Green draws on poststructuralist theory and philosophy, and notions of discourse and materiality, to outline what might be involved in researching so-called progressive education in Australia-clearly a transnational phenomenon. Following on from this account are chapters from Brazil, Canada and Luxembourg. Rita de Cássia Prazeres Frangella (Chapter 13) looks at literacy policy in recent Brazilian curriculum developments, and the relationship between curriculum and literacy from a policy perspective. This chapter complements accounts presented elsewhere, on curriculum debates in Brazil (Chapter 17) and more generally in Chile and Argentina (Chapters 4 and 10). Michael Corbett (Chapter 14) seeks to rethink notions of 'place' in recent curriculum inquiry, drawing on his own work in rural education and educational sociology, introducing a scalar view of situatedness, and drawing on recent social and cultural theory by Bhabha, Haraway and Latour. His is arguably a distinctively Canadian perspective, however, not simply because he references the Canadian communication scholar Harold Innes but also, and more importantly, because his account emerges from due consideration of landscape and territory, indigeneity and dispossession, identity and history, in the course of which he puts forward Latour's evocative notion of the 'terrestrial'. The section concludes with Sabrina Sattler's historical exploration of curriculum development in Luxembourg (Chapter 15), indicating how that country's striking trilingualism plays out in ongoing struggles over identity and diversity. It is therefore a good example of the way in which nation, language and education come together in transnational curriculum inquiry, complicating the 'one nation/one language' ideology that still characterises much public and professional debate. Section 4 ('Curriculum Challenges for the Future') concludes the volume with four chapters, each addressed to particular issues which we see as presenting important challenges for the field. The first (Chapter 16), by American scholar Patrick Roberts, seeks to expand the way in which 'internationalisation' has been considered to date, perhaps more particularly in the Anglo-American scene. He proposes shifting from 'complicated conversation' as an organising metaphor to something more appropriate and generative, and to this end he puts forward intriguing notions of 'distal confabulation' and' transnational literacy', aligning more with work associated with the Global South-that is, thinking South. There are links to be made back to Johnson-Mardones's account (Chapter 4), which similarly seeks to unsettle current notions of 'internationalisation'. This is followed by a chapter by Veronica Borges and Alice Casimiro Lopes on teacher education and curriculum policy/politics in Brazil (Chapter 17). What is interesting here is the explicit and focused use of the philosophical work of Derrida and Laclau-a theoretical orientation to be observed of South American curriculum inquiry more generally (e.g. Macedo, 2011) . Hence reading this chapter back to others written from South America, by Frangella (Brazil) and also albeit differently Morelli (Argentina), as well as Johnson-Mardones (Chile), provides insight into a different form of curriculum thought than is common elsewhere, in Australia and New Zealand, for example, or in the UK. Somewhat differently again, Lucinda McKnight's reconceptualist engagement with curriculum design (Chapter 18) is informed by feminism and posthumanism, as well as drawing widely on curriculum theory. Writing from Australia, she challenges the rationalism evident in current-traditional work in curriculum design, seeing it as both modernist and masculinist. Signalling thus a shift in terms of curriculum form as well as, and as much as, curriculum content, she includes a section presented provocatively in poetic mode, thereby pointing to the value of art-based work as an alternative form of expression in curriculum inquiry. Finally, John Morgan (Chapter 19) foregrounds the challenges associated with climate change and the Anthropocene in arguing that the school curriculum as currently constituted, and conventionally understood, is locked into a 'carbon-based' mindset that is now proving to be profoundly limited and limiting. He offers a radically 'post-industrial' perspective on curriculum and knowledge from Aoteroa New Zealand, suggesting that school subjects themselves need to be reconfigured so as to better represent the new lifeworld emerging in the twenty-first century. With links to be made back to Corbett's account (Chapter 14) of ecological damage and new imaginings of place, a crucial issue is thereby put on the agenda of transnational curriculum inquiry-the urgency of global environmental crisis and change, and a concomitant call for action. Perhaps it goes without saying that we see all these various challenges as opportunities too. A final note, then. We offer this book to you, our reader(s), in the hope that you will find in it not only an invitation to, and a rich resource for, understanding curriculum, worldwide, but also-and very importantly-a provocation to curriculum praxis. We see the various challenges offered across this book as welcome opportunities for learning, for changing ourselves and the circumstances we find ourselves in, together, in the only world we have available to us. Disjuncture and difference in the global Economy Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science Globalization and curriculum inquiry: Locating, representing, and performing a transnational imaginary A vision for transnational curriculum inquiry Globalization and curriculum inquiry: Performing transnational imaginaries Talking to my country Decolonizing and de-canonizing curriculum studies: An engaged discussion organized around João M. Paraskeva's recent books Literature education in the Asia-Pacific: Policies, practices and perspectives in global times Curriculum as enunciation Everyday internationalism as an educational project: School curriculum and pedagogies for world-mindedness On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis Conclusion-Itinerant curriculum theory: A reiteration The end of the global south and the cultures of the south Introduction Curriculum studies in the United States: Present circumstances, intellectual histories Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses Curriculum as an expression of national identity The Australian curriculum: Promises, problems and possibilities Curriculum and place International conversations on curriculum studies: Subject, society and curriculum Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide The end of the cognitive empire: The coming of age of epistemologies of the south Antipodean theory for educational research The internationalization of curriculum studies: Selected proceedings from the LSU conference Knowledge and control: New directions for the sociology of education