Transpacific Curriculum History: Historicizing Global Whiteness as Unintended Reverberations of Education Reforms in South Korea

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Histories in Practice: Revisioning Time, Space, and Place (Table 20)

Abstract

While curriculum history as a field of educational study was instigated in the U.S. (Baker, 2009), its impact has been global. For example, “transnational curriculum history” was developed to explain the connection between national and global educational research agenda in the European contexts (Sivesind, & Wahlström, 2016; Tröhler, 2016). Scholars in “transnational curriculum studies” centered on the localized discourse of curriculum knowledge in East Asian contexts (Kim, 2010; Moon, 2021; Zhao, 2020). The decolonizing scholarship also has extended the curriculum history to question the Western-dominated knowledge production in global education research, policy, and practice (Jules et al., 2022; Paraskeva, 2016).
As part of a larger project “Doing Curriculum History Otherwise,” this paper presents “transpacific curriculum history,” in which I historicize the U.S. educational imperialism (Kim, 2022; Tröhler, 2022) in East Asian regions and their educational reforms. The “intimacy” between the Asian and American continents is historical due to U.S. militarism, Western colonialism, and American exceptionalism (Lowe, 2015). This paper traces back to the point when the epistemic coloniality started with the well-intended postcolonial education reforms in South Korea, to change the Japanese colonial ideology in modern Korean education, whose national desire for building humanity was made in association with the U.S. military government (1945-48). By revisiting this less-told curriculum history in the global contexts and explaining how its epistemic legacy continues today, the study explicates how the racialization of human kinds and Whiteness persists in today’s education reforms in the form of generalized educational knowledge and reform discourses.
I distinguish “historicizing” from “historicism” (Popkewitz, 2013). Whereas historicism is a style of reasoning to find the human subjects as agents of changes in past events that are organized in chronological and linear manners, historicizing makes use of history not to explain the causal relations from the past to the present but to defamiliarize what we take for granted today (Rahm, 2023). Historicizing is also concerned about making intelligible the “social epistemology” (Popkewitz, 2014) that makes people believe what is the true, right, and just ways to do education. Drawing on research literature and historical archives, I discuss the paradox of de-imperializing national education in postcolonial South Korea as re-imperializing the systems of educational knowledge with the U.S.-centric epistemes, which continues today.
This study contributes to expanding the emerging scholarship of transpacific decolonial studies (Kim, 2022; Suzuki & Bahng, 2020) in educational research by establishing the field of “transpacific curriculum history.” I conceptualize how the current scholarship on decoloniality is “still Western,” mostly relying on the transatlantic mobilization of educational knowledge in its critical stance (e.g., de Sousa Santos, 2014; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), which marginalizes the ways to problematize the epistemic coloniality in the transpacific education reforms. To dismantle this omission and construct new possibilities, this paper moves beyond the U.S.-centric perspectives on curriculum history scholarship. By adding transpacific perspectives to curriculum history, the study explicates how U.S. educational imperialism works through global Whiteness, and how a global understanding of racialized coloniality continues today in the well-intended education policy and reform.

Author

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University