Provincializing History? Reapproaching Educational Neuroscience and the Narration of Past-Present

• In Event: 34.023 - Curriculum History as Memory Work: Deterritorializing the Field

Abstract

This paper takes up the spirit of deterritorializing by revisiting debates within postcolonial studies and their implications for narrating curriculum histories. It takes as springboard the advent of contemporary educational neuroscience and its reliance on visual images of the brain as a form of coding and representation of children and learning. In Understanding the Brain (2007) the OECD argued that such research is valuable in delimited domains. While brain research may tell us at what age it is best to start learning a second language, it won’t clarify which language that should be. The link to curriculum is clear here by way of risk – the risk that the politics of knowledge and questions of ethics become buried beneath developmentalism, colored charts, and images.
To reapproach such events as ‘historical’ issues without invoking an automatic for/against binary (Baker, 2009; 2010), this paper reanimates a specific question asked by Chakrabarty (2007) in Provincializing Europe - whether a non-Eurocentric history is ever possible? It considers within that, from the perspective of postcolonial techno-science (e.g., Abraham, 2006), whether knowledge is reducible to place. Chakrabarty ponders whether, if terms such as nation, equality, justice, political, body, freedom, and the discipline of history formed in Europe, such baggage can be avoided in publishing formal histories, or whether there is always something remaining of this heritage even in ‘non-European’ histories. Abraham asks whether the very formation of ‘nation’ and ‘empire’ was facilitated by claims to rationality, and especially scientific, above other value systems in locations distant from science’s putative origins in Europe.
This paper is a thought experiment that actively puts such questions into motion. It does so by examining two sets of primary documents whose initial sites of production lie both outside and within ‘Europe.’ The documents were selected for review because of their relation to debates over mind-brain theory today (the contemplative turn and neuro turn, respectively), yet at their point of publication they were not part of scholarly circles that foresaw that relation:
1) Nagarjuna’s (c. 150 – c. 250 CE) Fundamental Wisdoms of the Middle Way, considered the most commented upon, studied and translated Buddhist scholarly text. Nagarjuna founded the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism and in this seminal text ‘mind’ is treated as just another concept, not an essentializable entity that would be responsible for writing history;
2) F. J. Gall (1758 – 1828) publications on organology (phrenology) authored before Germany was a nation, and inciting frenzy around claims to science and pseudo-science. Gall offered a process in which squeezing and spatializing areas of the cranium became a means to describing character, including ‘mental’ potential for writing and analysis.
Such movements intersect with debates over neuroscience today, but what would we say the ‘history’ or ‘memory work’ around that site is in education? While the former documents pertain to ‘the contemplative turn’ and the latter ‘the neuro turn,’ these turns today overlap, rewriting past-present. The paper concludes by elaborating productive problems faced in generating curriculum histories from postcolonial studies’ perspectives.

Author

• Bernadette M. Baker, Queensland University of Technology