Aporias, "Unresolvable Otherness," and a Curriculum of Decolonized Cosmopolitanism

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Repair(ing)s of Education Through Identity and Multimodal Storytelling (Table 9)

Abstract

Engaging in dynamic encounters with the other and otherness in education urges us to create "an open appeture" to welcome new ideas and practices. Complicating aporias as various forms of otherness and (cultural) differences manifested in various teaching and learning setting, this paper focuses on how a curriculum of decolonized cosmopolitanism contributes to understanding otherness and differences both in teaching and learning. Curriculum of cosmopolitanism emphasizes the simultaneity of, first, understanding other cultures as a possible life program, second, maintaining a reflective distance to one’s own culture, and third, a re-reading of differences as particularity plus universality with a strengthened commitment to differences. Such a curriculum of cosmopolitanism requires both teacher and students to engage in cosmopolitan encounter.

Authors

• Wanying Wang, St. John's University

• Daniel Ness, St. John's University