Curriculum in a New Key

The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki

Ted T. Aoki, William F. Pinar, Rita L. Irwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135704421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Ted T. Aoki, the most prominent curriculum scholar of his generation in Canada, has influenced numerous scholars around the world. Curriculum in a New Key brings together his work, over a 30-year span, gathered here under the themes of reconceptualizing curriculum; language, culture, and curriculum; and narrative. Aoki's oeuvre is utterly unique--a complex interdisciplinary configuration of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and multiculturalism that is both theoretically and pedagogically sophisticated and speaks directly to teachers, practicing and prospective. Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki is an invaluable resource for graduate students, professors, and researchers in curriculum studies, and for students, faculty, and scholars of education generally.

Part II
Language, Culture, and Curriculum

Chapter 10
Toward Understanding Curriculum: Talk Through Reciprocity of Perspectives¹ (1981)

When two strangers meet, indeed two worlds meet. How is it when two worlds meet? I have heard that a bridge is necessary only when there are two worlds to begin with and when there is a committed interest in bridging the two worlds.

The metaphor of “bridging two worlds” begins to provide us with an image to help us understand what it means when two people meet. But like the everyday metaphor of “understanding each other through contact,” I fear that the bridging metaphor is more opaque than transparent and fails to lead us too far in our understanding. I recall Robert G. Hanvey in a paper, “An Attainable Global Perspective,” which he presented at a recent WCCI Conference, emphasizing: “Contact alone will not do it. Even sustained contact will not do it. There must be a readiness to respect and accept and a capacity to participate. …”² Cross-cultural awareness through contact alone results in but a tourist’s surface sense of awareness of a culture. There lacks an understanding that penetrates beyond the tourist bureau’s gloss.

Often it is said that to understand a person from another land or culture, one must be empathetic. Understanding in our situation must be beyond empathy for as anthropologist Magorah Maruyama says, “Empathy is a projection of feelings between two persons within one epistemology. For understanding in a trans-national or trans-cultural situation, what we need is trans-spection, which is a trans-epistemologica1 process.”³ I interpret Maruyama’s “trans-epistemological process” to mean a way of bridging two ways of knowing.

My interest in this paper is to understand more fully what it means when two people from different lands meet in a face-to-face situation to make sense together of school and curriculum.

John O’Neill, a phenomenologist and critical social theorist at York University in Toronto, talks of such talk as being essentially “a conversation of mankind” connecting language and reason.⁴ How shall we understand such conversation as a meeting of mankind? Approaching such a situation with the image of problem solving or with the image of scientific inquiry is apt to pulverize the lived wholeness of the conversation. I surrender my notion of the “meeting of mankind” to the image of “conversation” that Michael Oakeshott so marvelously furnishes us in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.” Listen to what he says:

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation, which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails. Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.⁵

Using “conversation” as my paradigm case, I wish to explore three concrete situations.

Situation 1. A Conversation with Graduate Students in Curriculum Studies

In my work as chairman of a curriculum and instruction department, I find myself occasionally in what I grandiloquently might call a transnational situation when I encounter students from beyond North America—from nations such as Kenya, Zambia, Ghana in Africa; Thailand, Korea, East India, Malaysia in Asia; Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt in the Middle East. These are graduate students, dedicated educators, who come with profound interest in curriculum studies in an M.Ed. or Ph.D. program, committed to return home following study with us.

Their visits help me to arrest the almost mindless instrumental mode of life that I routinely live as administrator. They help to remind me of the centeredness of conversation in any educative process. Somehow a student’s visit transforms, as by magic, the physical environment labeled office into a human situation.

What does it mean to understand how an environment becomes a situation? Let us note Strasser’s portrayal:

In 1804 Saint Bruno went to establish himself as a hermit in a savage region of the French Alps. By the very fact that Saint Bruno seeks a place where he and his companions can devote themselves undisturbed in their meditations, the environment (physical geography) ceases to be an environment. The saint asks the mountains and valleys a question: “Where can I establish myself as a hermit?” The mountains and the valleys reply, albeit wordlessly. They reply by what they are. Thus there begins a dialectic, in which things are involved negatively and positively. They are opposed to, or in favour of a certain human intention. They are “useful,” “safe,” “harmful,” “unsuitable,” “dangerous.” Precisely because things arrange themselves, as it were, around an intention, a “situation” is born.”⁶

In a situation within which we as strangers meet, each with his own culturally conditioned horizon, how can we begin to make sense common to us? And in our reaching out for each other through gesture, silence, and talk, how can we become aware of our reachings, knowing fully that our reachings never fully reach?

Fortunately for me each of these graduate students comes to talk in English, although typically his sayings carry an “English” English accent, already indicating something of his historical tradition. Beneath the English language he uses an accent of the tribe I would like to hear, the language of the cultural-historical crucible into which as a child he was thrust, within which he likely learned to speak a language, a language in which and through which he lived and experienced life, the language in which and through which he learned to make sense of his lived reality.

I sometimes worry that these educators coming to study with us see their mission as taking home, virtually as “commodities,” notions of education and curriculum educators in the Western world espouse. Underlying this view is a naive assumption of the universality of knowledge—a notion that is tenuous and dangerous.

In our conversational situation, the initial turn takes us usually to talk of program and such. But to remind ourselves of who we are in conversation, I ask that we turn the conversation to ourselves. For instance, I ask: “Why are you here in a North American University to study education and curriculum? Are you intending to return to your homeland? Upon your return, what do you intend to do with what you learn here? Would you be concerned about North American intellectual ‘imperialism’? Would you be concerned about becoming an instrument of that imperialism? How will you know that what we consider ‘good’ here is ‘good’ in your homeland?”

My interest, you see, is in promoting conversation that is a dialogue between two worlds, that ought not to be reduced to a monologue, spoken only in the language of one world, the language of the university professor.

Situation 2. A Conversation with Francis Lampi of Zambia

I wish now to ask you to enter into another conversation situation. In recent months, Francis Lampi, a young curriculum scholar now at the University of Zambia, and I have been engaged in a conversation through correspondence. In my writings to him, and in my reading of his writings, I find him, Although not physically present, vividly present before me. I can see him, at times serious, and at times smiling. I can hear his deep voice become softer when he becomes serious, become effervescent when he laughs.

Francis wrote to me just recently:

“I was appointed a junior lecturer in our university (Zambia). … My colleagues not only from the University of Zambia but from the Ministry of Education as well have all a “real” empirical view of knowledge. They are behavioural psychologists, believing that the only “effective” teaching can be done the Bloom’s Taxonomy way, with objectives and means to attain them. I feel alone with my concerns. …”

I replied:

Your portrayal of your Zambian colleagues’ orientation does not surprise me a bit. They must have received a powerful bit of “behavioural mod” education in the Anglo world. I can understand what it is like to feel loneliness.⁷

In trying to make sense of this talk, it may be helpful for you to know that Francis in his master’s program joined me in a curriculum theory class. In our seminars we cast ourselves within a framework of multiple socio-cultural realities, paying serious attention to what anthropological philosophies had to say about the shape of each notion of reality. In this exploration we were influenced by Continental European thought, which we found less enamoured of scientism and technology, and much more deeply concerned about what makes possible our very human thoughts and actions, our human doings and our human beings.

For instance, we were impressed with Husserl’s questioning of the Cartesian objectivist world and his urgings to bracket out abstracted reifications so we can move toward understanding “the things themselves,” the concreteness of the concrete world of reality. He led us to suspect that much of our own everyday curriculum talk, by objectifying and abstracting teachers and students and their activities, tended to miss the mark.

We have been impressed also by a new breed of sociologists—sociologists of knowledge and sociological phenomenologists, like Basil Bernstein, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, Alfred Schutz and his disciples, where notions of beings as actors engaged in the construction of reality made for us much more sense than the social theorists who tended to reduce out the situational life and experiences of people.

We were also impressed by critical social theorists like Jurgen Habermas, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno of the Frankfurt School, who, noting a crisis in the human sciences, called for emancipation from instrumental and technical rationality into which so many of us in the Western world have been driven by our sociocultural tradition to a dialectic rationality of praxis that sees unity in the dialectic between theory and practice. Within this praxis framework, we began to appreciate the Third World curriculum efforts of people such as Paulo Freire, who to us spoke anew with vigour about the educative act.

These interests grew out of our serious effort to heed Husserl’s call of “to the things themselves.” In the search for the origin, we have begun to consider the ontological basis of human thought and action. Such interests have led us to explore the works of scholars such as Heidegger, Ricouer, and Gadamer, who seek to understand the essence of our being in language. As David Smith in his paper indicated, we are what we say.

For Francis Lampi, his colleagues, and me,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• “A Lingering Note”: An Introduction to the Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki
• I: RECONCEPTUALIZING CURRICULUM
• II: LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND CURRICULUM
• III: SOUNDS OF PEDAGOGY IN CURRICULUM SPACES
• IV: APPENDIX: SHORT ESSAYS
• Author Index
• Subject Index