The Field of Curriculum Studies in the Transnational Curriculum Inquiry Journal: Science, Counterscience, Antiscience?

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: The Curriculum and Its Discourse: Language, Difference, and Power

Abstract

The study aimed at analyzing how the journal Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (TCI) discourse expressed the internationalization and transnationalization process of curriculum field studies in the second decade of the 21st century. TCI’s history is connected to the internationalization movement of curriculum studies that are expressed in the objectives of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS), one of the most respected entities in the field of curriculum, established in 2001. Thereby, as this journal's speculation involves the transnationalization of the different discourses on curriculum studies, it is understood that these studies are not uniform, since they are crossed by different discursive perspectives considered valid in certain contexts. The IAACS, through the TCI, seeks to move the idea of a "narrow nationalism" to overcome the boundaries with the decentralization of knowledge in a shared work. Therefore, understanding that the TCI shows a "complex volume" of the statements that question curriculum practices and policies worldwide, marked by power relations, it is possible to state that the publications of the journal TCI are constituted by struggles and processes that prove the possibilities of emergence of certain types of knowledge. So, what forces emerge from the Transnational Curriculum Inquiry in discussions about curricula? What effects of the relations between knowledge and power were apparent in the articles published in this journal? How did the published articles relate to the enunciated perspective of seeking a multi/transcultural and cosmopolitan approach? Have curriculum studies predominantly manifested as a counter-science and/or anti-science in an insurrectional way? Thus, 66 documents were examined. Read, these products were mapped from the following analysis axis: the representativeness of the articles presented in the TCI, the topics focused, the place where the authors of the articles speak from and sections that compose the editions, the theoretical bases and/or the most used references and the way in which the epistemological position was expressed in the journal, as "multicultural", "transcultural" and "cosmopolitan", in order to set up curriculum studies as insurrectional. The conceptual pair of knowledge and power is discussed considering the intentionality of the journal that, through the proposal of internationalization, brings with it the of the possible relationship between knowledge and power in different space-times and disciplinary fields/areas. So, TCI is established not so much by the symmetry of the relations between knowledge and power, since the places of authorship still remain asymmetrically, but by the dominant theoretical-epistemological perspective, by the thematization generated, by the methodological approaches emphasized, in the end, by the primacy of the discursive enunciations in favor of the decolonization of subalternized powers and knowledge. Concludes, thus, that the TCI seems to affirm the possibility of constituting the field of curriculum studies in a multi, transcultural way, with a cosmopolitan and insurrectional nature and/or in a deconstructive perspective of modern science.

Author

• Janete Magalhães Carvalho, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo