Curriculum Studies as an international conversation: cosmopolitanism in a Latin American key
My work addresses the field of Curriculum Studies as a worldwide interdisciplinary field, its difficulties, complications, and possibilities. It primarily focuses on the relations between the Anglo-Saxon field of Curriculum Studies and the Latin American educational tradition. Looking at these relations from the 1960s to the current moment, I seek to unpack the complexities involved in understanding Curriculum Studies as an international field. Although there are historical and current power dynamics complicating this endeavor, I suggest a possible cosmopolitan project informed by intercultural dialogue. I develop my understanding of curriculum as currere (Pinar, 1976a, 1976b; Grumet 1976a, 1976b) to inform my dissertation both conceptually and methodologically. I accept Pinar’s conceptualization of the field of Curriculum Studies as a complicated conversation. I situate my joining the conversation in that field from an international point of view, from my Latin American self. It is my own biography that brings this particular conversation into being, with the intention of making life educative. I situate my own educational experience at the center of this inquiry, trying to understand my biographical situation as a Latin American history teacher earning a Ph.d. in Curriculum and Instruction in an American University,a context where my biography intertwines with the field’s history. I move from biography to history in a conversation where personal troubles become public issues, biography and history intertwine, and the struggle for a better life emerges with ethical urgency. Methodologically, I suggest a variant of the regressive-progressive-analytical-synthetical method currere. I tie each of these four moments of currere to a specific decade in my life and in the history of the field in the United States and Latin America. The regressive moment, the time of the given, is tied to the 1960s, when the field of curriculum arrived and was in tension with the progressive moment, which is tied to the 1990s and the problem of ‘the other’ that emerged around the commemoration of 1492. The analytical is the 2000s, in which the decision to devote myself to the field of education was put into tension with the synthetical, which refers to the current moment, the 2010s, when I advocate the study of Curriculum Studies. From there, I propose my version of a cosmopolitan project in Curriculum Studies, a cosmopolitanism that I can only sing in a Latin American key.
Curriculum Studies, Currere, Internationalization
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign