Curriculum, Ethics, Metanarrative : Teaching and Learning Beyond the Nation

Struggles over Difference addresses education, schools, textbooks, and pedagogies in various countries of the Asia-Pacific, offering critical curriculum studies and policy analyses of national and regional educational systems. These systems face challenges linked to new economic formations, cultural globalization, and emergent regional and international geopolitical instabilities and conflicts. Contributors offer insights on how official knowledge, text, discourse, and discipline should be shaped; who should shape it; through which institutional agencies it should be administered; and social and cultural practices through which this should occur. The book disrupts popular myths about education in this part of the world, including base suppositions about the "other": that Asian pedagogy is exclusively rote learning, that educational systems and governments here are faced with classical developing country issues, and that institutional and state formation in the region can be assessed on a North/West or left/right continuum. The essays not only map and reframe issues of difference for those who work in education in the Asia-Pacific, but also illuminate critical issues of curriculum and policy for teachers, students, teacher educators, and researchers worldwide. "This volume raises insightful issues and critical questions which are most relevant to current historical, sociopolitical, and geographic junctures, addressing questions of location, globalization, representation, difference, and negotiation in particular contexts. Well researched and interesting, the book makes a provocative and productive contribution to the field." — Nina Asher, Louisiana State University Contributors include Jyh-Jia Chen, Hiromitsu Inokuchi, Cushla Kapitzke, Misook Kim, Dong Bae (Issac) Lee, Yongbin Liu, Allan Luke, Yoshiko Nozaki, Darren M. O’Hern, Roger Openshaw, Gay Garland Reed, Michael Singh, Noparat Suaysuwan, and Ting-Hong Wong.