The Problematic Eurocentric Knowledge Transference for Global Western-Washing of Education

• In Event: Curriculum Research Lines From the Global South: Toward a Dialogic Encounter With Southern Places

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
My conceptual essay performs my quest for scholarship regarding educational knowledge formation, dispensation, management, politics, and absences has led me to the center of Global Education. It is the American Empire of Knowledge vs other Empires and its place as the global truth bearer. My objective is to look at the transformtions that happen in creating “disciplined liminal otherhood” as a result of education that causes alienation and cultural fracturization that renders a person “Be-Haal.”

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The non-Western “framework” I initiate is organized around the notion of Be-Haal in the Urdu language. Contrasting with “Be-Haal,” haal is the state of total wellbeing for a person. In Urdu language, we use the word haal when we inquire “How are you?” So it is inquiring about wellbeing at every level. “Be-Haal” is being out of sync with oneself or a state of being distressed. My conceptual essay, exploring this out of sync idea of “Be-Haal,” drives at that state liminality or in-between-ness that I explore here.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The conceptual essay, through the sliding de-centering notion of itinerancy (Paraskeva, 2016), provides the “method” for my research. As research method, the conceptual essay allows for process-oriented research and argumentation organized around a topic of inquiry. Using the conceptual essay as research method, I emphasize the essay’s importance transnational understandings (e.g., Paraskeva, 2016; Watkins, 1993). The conceptual essay, as method of understanding, is fitting for my study as it includes autobiographic, social, political, and historical wholeness.

Data sources
The conceptual essay, as taken up here, considers the following texts as “data”: personal teaching experience, experience working with preservice teachers, experience working with professional teachers and graduate students, and relevant philosophical inquiry and writing. Data analysis, using the conceptual essay as method, provides for ever-tighter circles of process reflection embodied and performed in the writing, thinking, re-writing, and reflecting.

Findings
The Western Modern Eurocentric Ideology plagues the social apparatus to manifest a crisis at every level. In exploring and examining Be-Haal through the conceptual essay, I have come to the following conclusions:
1. Reality is reframed in a rationale that is based in positivism, proven by “scientific methodologies”, creating an ecology of knowledges that creates hierarchies and intentional absences and that in turn causes an epistemicide.
2. The effects of the exploitation of Pakistani educational system by Eurocentric ideology via imported curriculum and corporatization cannot be minimized and is devoid of what children need to be “democratic.”

Scholarly significance
The freedom to be “westernized” is actually the directed diminishing and concurrent epistemicide of a way of life. Disciplined Liminal Otherhood in modernity/post modernity is a state of dying or death waiting to come back to life. Liminality limits focus and the fight for survival overtakes every other thought. BeHaal is how we end up as a disciplined liminal otherhood.

References

Paraskeva, J. (2016). Curriculum Epistemicide. New York, Routledge.

Watkins, W. H. (1993). Black curriculum orientations. Harvard Educational Review, 63, 321-338.

Author

• Aneeka Cheema, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth