Historicizing the Neocolonial "Languages" of Inclusion and the Good Life as Pathways for Transformation Roundtable

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 11

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

Abstract Edit Abstract
As a contribution to the decolonization of educational knowledge, the symposium brings together explorations of curriculum reforms in Ecuador, Kenya, Mauritius, and the U.S. The panel historicizes the common sense of these school reforms today, such as “effective teaching,” the “inclusion,” of “all,” and the hopes of “the good life” related to literacy, language and health education of immigrant and colonized groups. The papers argue that these reforms, in spite of their inclusive language and good intentions, generate differences and exclusions in through their rules and practices. We argue that the normalization and standardization of qualities given as “essential” to development, inclusion, or the good life require scrutiny for what they simultaneously deny and preclude as the fully human.
Session Summary Edit Session Summary
This symposium brings together globally distinct explorations of curriculum related to literacy, language and health education of immigrant and colonized groups in Ecuador, Kenya, Mauritius, and the U.S. The panel historicizes the common sense of these school reforms today, such as “effective teaching,” the “inclusion,” of “all,” and the hopes of “the good life” in order to turn effective language teaching, literacy reforms, linguistic diversity, and indigenous knowledge from matters of educational fact into matters of concern (Latour, 2004). The papers offer distinct genealogies that spotlight the enduring coloniality of these curriculum reforms—specifically, how the qualities given as essential to development, inclusion, or the good life, bound and delimit what counts as the fully human.

Methodologically, the papers engage in a sociology of educational knowledge (see, e.g., Popkewitz, Diaz, & Kirchgasler, 2017). The papers explore how desires for the effective teacher, the literate global citizen, the (Mauritian) Creole speaker, and the modern indigenous are not immune from the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000). The papers’ different cultural and historical points of entry explore how curriculum reforms generate principles, rules, and practices that participate in “making up” kinds of people (Hacking, 2007)—idealizing proper subjectivities and modes of development and assigning reasonable and unreasonable ways of thinking, being, seeing, and feeling.

The first paper studies the making of U.S. bilingual teachers as a strategy to remake the bilingual child and how the desire for “effective teaching” belies cultural assumptions about the bilingual child who is not (yet) a citizen. The second paper historicizes how transnational school reforms promoting “literacy for all” in Sub-Saharan Africa reinscribe a colonial-era thesis that conflates the attainment of literacy with becoming a reasonable person. The third paper analyzes how the introduction of Creole language into the Mauritius school curriculum subtends the rehabilitation of a pathologized identity in Mauritian politics. The final paper explores how efforts to recognize indigenous knowledge employ selective principles that classify what is “reasonable” indigenous knowledge that governs what is intelligible as a thesis of the “the good life.”

In keeping with the concerns of Division B and of de/colonial perspectives, this symposium asks how the desire for curriculum to offer a pathway to freedom and transformation entails the reinscription of borders and boundaries that are the “reason” of educational knowledge itself. These rules and principles require scrutiny insofar as their theories of identity, knowledge, and transformation divide and exclude, even in their very gestures to recognize and include.

The symposium features a chair and discussant who have made significant contributions to the study of coloniality in curriculum reforms. The chair will briefly situate the session’s thematic concerns within broader postcolonial and critical approaches to education (7 minutes). Following the authors’ presentations of their papers’ key arguments (12 minutes), the discussant will offer commentary and perspective linking the papers to efforts to deprovincialize curriculum studies through transnational perspectives on education (10 minutes). Finally, the symposium will seek audience questions and comments to discuss further implications for the field (25 minutes).

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 6: De/Colonization and Desire (The Wanting of Curriculum)

Papers

• In the Search of the Territory of Good Life: A Theoretical Exploration of the Language of Buen Vivir in Education Roundtable - Gioconda Pamela Coello, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Saving Souls as Secular Science: The Coloniality of "Literacy for All" Roundtable - Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• The "Effective" Bilingual Teacher: Making the Bilingual Child by Making the Teacher Roundtable - Belén Hernando-Lloréns, University of Iowa

• Of Peoples and Tongues: Creole Languages, Curriculum Reforms, and the Decolonial Moment Roundtable - Nicholas Natchoo, The University of Kansas

Discussant

• Roland Sintos Coloma, Wayne State University