Reconceiving International Education: Theorizing Limits and Possibilities for Transcultural Learning

This multi-voiced paper explores the micro-level dimensions of human learning and becoming from transcultural encounters, lessons and/or curriculum under heightened transnationalism. It posits that mainstream approaches to conceptualizing the ‘education’ of international education lack sufficient theorization of difference, sociality, history and learning in trans-local spaces and suggests that there are expanding networks of transcultural engagements to be examined under the umbrella of international education. To explore this reconceived pedagogical landscape of international education three specific cases are presented: an auto-ethnographic reflection on coming into and making sense of one’s international experience, a conceptual framing of internationalizing preservice education curriculum and a qualitative analysis of the pedagogical impacts of undergraduates’ international internships. Each case illustrates the complexities, possibilities and challenges of (framing) learning and becoming in sites of transcultural engagement

Engaging Texts Today or How to Read a Curriculum Poem

The JCT Engaging Texts Section Editor writes about her vision for the Section and its importance to contemporary curriculum thought

To Wake up Our Minds’: The Re-Enchantment of Praxis in Sylvia Wynter.

Sylvia Wynter’s sustained and committed study of ideas, systems, peoples and worlds broken by epistemological colonialism(s) compels us to bring forward her educational thought for this Special Issue of Curriculum Inquiry. A Caribbean novelist, playwright and scholar born of Jamaican parents, Wynter became Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University in 1977. Across six decades, Wynter’s work generates a discordant symphony of (post)humanist thought that enlivens and “wakes up” our thinking of what it means and has meant to be human beyond the genre of white, European, heteronormative “Man”. Man, Wynter (2003) claims, “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioural autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves” (p. 260)