Resources - Discussion Papers

Curriculum, Ethics, Metanarrative:
Teaching And Learning Beyond The National

Professor Allan Luke, University of Queensland

For: Curriculum Perspectives (2002)

Professor Allan Luke

Thanks to ACSA for the invitation to participate on this panel. I’d like to comment on questions about the status of grand narrative in curriculum making and schooling — particularly in relationship to the ethical and political issues raised by the very recent events of September 11, and by the ongoing crisis around migration, refugees and difference in this country. My aim is to frame once again the ethical and political dilemmas facing curriculum theorists and those critical educationists who remain committed to a vision of schooling that addresses and engages with issues of social equity and human rights in the context of rapid economic and cultural change.

This task and its theoretical terms are of course hardly novel. I believe that we have reached an impasse in theory, policy formation and classroom work that is leading to passivity, paralysis and acquiescence to a neo-Tylerian curriculum agenda. My view is that there are inherent and necessary tensions between grand narrative and polyvocality, between emergent cosmopolitan identities, nation and nationalism, and local identity politics in curriculum making. The now dominant approach to curriculum making in Australia is typified by lists of attributes and skills and outcomes of the new human subject. To offer a normative alternative requires an ethical and political metanarrative, however self-skeptical this must be. It requires a species of critical educational theory, hybrid and polyvocal itself, that both articulates visions of social and cultural utopias and heterotopias, while blending this with a continued skepticism towards totalisation and towards the kinds of essentialism that always seem to land grand narratives in deep trouble (Benhabib, 1996).

At the same time, the issues around difference and fundamental ideological disjuncture that have been placed on the table provide a unique historical opening for curriculum theory and making. This is the possibility of disrupting and questioning the acritical acceptance of a now internationally rampant vision of schooling, teaching and learning based solely on systemic efficacy at the measurable technical production of human capital.

Yet we are slowly being backed into an undernuanced and empirically misleading model that bifurcates us into pro and anti-‘globalisation’ politics — a model that reifies globalisation into a singular, universal phenomenon with self-same local effects (C. Luke, 2001; Kellner, 2000), and sits this in opposition to equally naïve, one-dimensional notions about both national and nationalistic sovereignty, local homogeneity, integrity and sustainability, and essentialist versions of cultures, whether white or black, colonial or indigenous. For if they place nothing else on the table, September 11 and subsequent events foreground the dilemmas of learning to live together, of identity and relationality in a time when these matters have tended to become altogether subordinated in educational debates. They underline the need for a critical postmodernism that actually begins to envision and ‘dream’ utopias once again, while understanding and retaining a self-skepticism towards the possible effects of such dreaming (Alexander, 2002).

There are signs that neoliberal educational governance and the new globalised political economy of education have colluded with our own well theorized and fervent, perhaps overstated and overwritten, ‘skepticism towards grand narratives’ (and its attendant foci on theoretical pluralism, cultural relativism, and local ‘cultural appropriateness’) (see footnote 1). Taken together, these two ostensibly apposite forces can set the practical and administrative conditions for a fragmentation of the educational work of teaching and learning. This fragmentation is achieved both through the narrow instrumental technicism of a test or package-driven classroom, and through an overly developed epistemological sensitivity to the local, the ‘cultural’ and the diasporic that eschews grand constructions of discipline, field and discourse and thereby effectively narrows the curriculum to parochial concerns (A. Luke & Carrington, 2002). The challenge is how and whether we have the theoretical and practical resources to conceptualise and enact an explicitly normative ethical and political curriculum reconstruction with/out (self-critical) metanarrative in relation to the current political and national situations.

In recent discussions of new communities of cosmopolitan identities, youth and adult, Pheah and Robbins (1998) ask a simple question that frames the ontological dilemma raised by the unbridled and uneven flows of globalisation: What is worth dying (and living for) beyond and without the nation state? If we wished to translate this position into key curriculum questions, we might ask: Are there a metanarratives other than nationalism or human capital? What is teaching and learning beyond the nation?

At the risk of stepping over the line on what is ‘speakable’ about current events, I would suggest that the events of the last year offer some powerful responses. We have learned that religious belief and political ideology, nationhood and nationalism, human rights, and the physical, psychic and spiritual search for normative versions of the ‘good life’ remain for some not only worth dying for, but apparently worth risking one’s life and family, and, in cases, killing and inflicting violence for. As frightening and unsettling as these signs should be, they sit on a balance beam against the uncontested domination of the human capital rationale. In response to Pheah and Robbins’ question, they suggest that the reasons that we live, teach, learn and die are not simply or solely for the attraction, expansion and amelioration of capital, nor exclusively for the building of versions of the self with a will towards capital. For many of us working in education across and through the postwar, now post-postwar period, we could be forgiven for believing that since the empire began to bite and write back in the 1960s and 1970s, since the emergence of the culture of narcissism in the 1980s, that the traverse of educational rationale, policy and practice has been slowly but inexorably away from any models — pedagogical or philosophical, political or moral, left or right — that do not appear to have at their base the mass inculcation of individuated skills for the production of economic capital.

Bill Green’s address returns us to a fundamental curriculum question that has been facing Australian education for the last several decades. We cannot reconstruct curriculum as long as the unfinished business of nation-building sits undone, with misrecognition of identity and hybridity, ongoing struggles around reconciliation and entitlement, confusion about place and situatedness, and indeed a very slow coming to grips with our own new blended, cosmopolitan affinities and networks. (Where do we turn on the North/South, East/West axis for military alliance, for trade, for intellect, for identity, for institution?). The recent events have forcefully restated to us that the stance of neoliberal governance — while all dressed up in the post-ideological discourses of new economies and new human capital — remains profoundly ideological in the most morally barren way: playing the ‘race’ card at an historical moment when it might be educating or reconstructing the new Australia. This is both in relation to ongoing issues of reconciliation and the status and treatment of refugees and the Other more generally.

It isn’t just in response to the moral and political vacuum in curriculum development that we must begin to query the principled response of Australian education to the emergent forms of identity, work, economy, cultures and institutional life. This is something that was at the foundation of the Queensland New Basics reforms: a commitment to realign, not uncritically, educational practice, curriculum and the construction of discourse and identity in schools with these emergent, hybrid and blended forms of life in communities and amongst our students. (Whether this is a plea for a ‘kinder, gentler’ human capital model or indeed for a new human subject, which it no doubt is, is of course up for debate). There is another, equally compelling reason. Simply, current approaches to curriculum theorise and construct possible worlds by default.

Australian state governments’ theoretically eclectic and avowedly practical approaches to curriculum making are a neo-Tylerism, focused on the production of quantifiable, tractable and ‘useful’ outcomes. There are various ways that we can divine what might count as an outcome: typically, on a continuum that ranges from visible behavioural demonstration or skill-acquisition to knowledge/content bit to progressive process or experience deemed essential, or, ranging from psychological capacities, to social outcomes. Yet as Cherry Collins has pointed out, there are powerful, implicit normative categories, ontological models of the subject and epistemological models of knowledge at work here. And if the Pinar reconceputalist perspective holds, the framing and specification of the outcomes — taken as a product it-and-of-itself — is always a surrogate for an explicit specification of the human subject, fields of knowledge, and possible worlds under discourse construction. That is, all curriculum narrates, projects, ‘trajects’ imagined human subjects into future pathways, a recurrent theme of Noel Gough’s decade of work on curriculum futures.

At the same time, there is much to learn from Peter Buckskin’s commentary on Garth Boomer’s work, specifically, a focus on narrative. Not just because Boomer’s lasting contribution to the field of literacy education has been the concept of the English teaching as an epic journey, but also because of the degree to which Indigenous knowledge and epistemology demands that we return to the contingency of existence on narrative, on the dreaming of histories of the present and of the future. If there is something that indeed J.F. Lyotard’s original "report on knowledge" to the Canadian government (1992) probably learned (though he didn’t know it) from Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and many of the world’s other Fourth World peoples — it is that underlying every discourse of technicality, there is a narrative, an epic poem, whether of peoples, nations, worlds. Epic poems, of course, should we parse them with story grammars of varying sophistication, have protagonists, problems to solve, journeys and attempts, outcomes and consequences, and, most importantly, moral, didactic resolutions.

I make this point, hardly original, not to romanticise the social construction of curriculum. For narratives and epics are not necessarily free-floating forms of textuality or highly personalized representations of identity, as they have become in so much educational research, however such a stance can by justified via literary, phenomenological and psychoanalytic theory. Grand narratives can be parsed, analysed, understood and, indeed, rewritten, as can their potentially significant material and discourse consequences for peoples, communities, and nations. Some grand narratives, their interpretations and interpreters, kill people, one of Lytoard’s simple points that often gets left out of accounts of postmodern ‘skepticism towards metanarratives’. It is this matter of the differential material and bodily effects of narratives (and all texts and discourses) that makes the analysis of grand narratives political and economic, their psychic and spiritual consequences notwithstanding. And it is this dilemma of how to construct utopias, heterotopias and dystopias without totalisation and essentialism that sits at the heart of both the next generation of curriculum making, and will weigh heavily on the development of blended critical educational theory I noted at the onset of this talk.

What’s tricky about this is that without narrative, whether grand or small, the task of thinking about, making, critiquing, and transforming curriculum is an empty task. Since working for the Queensland state department of education in 1999, I have sat in on curriculum policy and syllabus writing and planning sessions in many states, in Asia and North America. In many cases, teachers, bureaucrats and subject experts are set the absurd task of filling in (usually age or grade and field specified) lists of tasks, characteristics, needs, skills, outcomes, knowledges without any normative programmatic framework, whether empirical/analytic or narrative/interpretive. In such contexts, we reconstruct the new human subject piecemeal, on the basis of underexplicated generational wisdom, judged by our capacity to reach ‘stakeholder’ consensus which, whether manipulated or genuine, is likely to be as needy of an overall normative vision for education and schooling. This occurs in the context of national, state and regional educational jurisdictions that seem incapable of leading their educational communities anywhere other than the performance-based production of human capital.

My point here is as salutary for those of us who do educational theory and research as for teachers and curriculum bureaucrats. In the case of curriculum making, radical overskepticism towards metanarratives, an oversensitivity to the local and the individual can lead to fragmentation and paralysis. And if Pinar’s position is right, there’s not only no place outside of epic poem but one writes them by default, and indeed, winds up living them in one way or another. Even one’s skepticism towards grand narratives is an epic poem (or at least a sonnet or three minute radio song), with the deconstructionist as heroine.

Let me shift to a narrative of sorts — or actually an analysis masquerading as a narrative. In the week before September 11, I was in Phnom Phen, Cambodia at a conference on Language and Development issues. The conference brought together Cambodian educationists, some Southeast and Northeast Asian bureaucrats and teacher educators, and ‘Northern’ and ‘Western’ language and literacy workers, community workers, curriculum developers, makers and implementers working throughout Asia on various aid, development and corporate programs. These include ESL teachers, textbook developers, basic education workers, educational official and officers from various NGOs, national and transnational aid and trade agencies, and some state curriculum bureaucrats from Southeast and Northeast Asian countries. In other words, all of the players in globalised and international education, and education in ‘developing’ contexts were represented: not just government and non-government sectors, not just aidcrats and educrats, but also the increasingly influential private providers of educational analysis and intervention (many of which were developed as extensions of large-scale engineering and agricultural project management, others of which began as government organisations but have long since been corporatised or privatised), the free-lance contractors and subcontractors that these organisations employ, and of course, multinational publishers and the ubiquitous Australian universities hawking for students. This is the new face of education in conditions of global flows.

There were several things that struck me during that visit. The first two insights were not particularly insightful and would have been shared by many of our fellow teachers there. First, the disparity of the global distribution of capital is unsustainable, regardless of the complexity of local cultural and environmental effects. Second, the historical effects of genocide and starvation during Khmer Rouge rule meant that Cambodian educational bureaucracy, schools and higher education institutions were being led by a generation of great youth and energy, actively seeking new models, stories, and ways ahead, but, as well, vexed politically and with their own healthy skepticism towards particular fascist species of grand narratives.

By contrast, the opinions and views exchanged by many of my Australian colleagues there were more mixed. As Alaister Pennycook’s (1998) groundbreaking work on English and Colonialism shows, English as a Second Language has become a contemporary, multinational industry. Where we find the flows of capital, information and bodies, we find English educators as the new intellectual piece-workers of economic globalisation: ESL and MBAs seem to be the most heady brew on the educational market. While once the staple of Bible-translation, ESL has morphed variously into ESP (English for Special Purposes), EAP (English for Academic Purposes). But we would search wide for the old species of English for Moral Purposes or English for Political Purposes. In this context, English language teachers no longer form an intellectual vanguard nor do they necessarily act as a deliberate professional instrument of colonialism. For the English-language teacher has become a kind of intellectual/semiotic guest worker, usually on contracts, shifting from employer to employer, working increasingly for subcontractors or private providers rather than nations or governments, moving from site of emergent capitalism to site, often with family in tow — an ostensibly cosmopolitan but perpetually diasporic subject in her or his own right.

Speaking with many of these teachers, some of whom I worked with when they trained over two decades ago, what struck me was the degree to which their work also had become fragmented and directionless. Several said as much. Many had started as teacher/backpackers of a particular generation ‘looking for adventure’, but also had committed to humanitarian aid, health and education. (see footnote 2) Some now worked on one-off aid projects by non-government organisation aid agencies, others were employed by the growing sector of private ‘subcontractors’ who bid against universities and governments for lucrative contracts to deliver specialised educational services, some were subcontractees of these organisations. Most remained dedicated and committed educators, but their previously overt political commitments had been translated into an abiding concern for the communities they worked in, expressed as a need to be "culturally sensitive", "culturally appropriate", to avoid either the aculturalism of technocratic education or the cultural imperialism of Western education.

They were caught in a shift that has been underway since the 1970s: a shift in who provides educational services, in what ways; a shift not only in structural political economy of education, but as well in the kinds of educational subjectivities constructed to act as human techne for these new educational markets. This is to say nothing of the comparable but different historical dilemma of pro-Aboriginal Australian educators who find themselves morally and epistemologically double bound by their own histories and Whiteness.

Peoples of the Asia-Pacific diaspora know well the stories of education, language, translation as the disciplinary instruments of colonialism. The resilience of the nexus between Western religion, literacy and pedagogical discipline across the region is remarkable. The colonialist curriculum was, in many ways, taken as nonproblematic as the imperial and Judeo-Christian discourses that provided its epistemological basis (Pennycook, 1998). While we continue to grapple with the aftermath of colonisation, Buckskin’s and Green’s comments remind us, we would have to admit that its agents, whether teachers, missionaries, governors, soldiers or bureaucrats — clearly had a grand narrative. For our part, we have lists of outcomes.

Likewise for those who taught in such sites in the postwar period, right through the Colombo Plan-era. Clearly, aid, trade and development were inextricably linked in a ‘helping discourse’ that was about the expansion of postwar technocratic institutions, modes of information and production across those countries. And so it was with its other — the discourses of liberation and emancipation embraced by those of us in the next educational generation. We too had a powerful normative educational agenda, drawing on provocative ‘point of decolonisation’ theorising and activism of Fanon, Freire, Illich and others.

However fragmentary they may be, these glimpses of local educational work suggest a bigger problem. In the current condition of education for and by globalisation, two powerful forces have been brought together. First, having been ‘burned’ by grand narratives before, many of the educators working in such contexts have retreated to a studied subservience and humility to the local — trying to achieve contextually, ‘culturally appropriate’ local ends within the parameters of their particular institution or task. This is an utterly reasonable move, in spite of its tendency to buy into and proliferate a traditional anthropological version of the cultural (Foley, Levinson & Hurtig, 2001). Whatever its educational intents, this new culturalism works together with the fragmentation of educational work through a new transnational political economy of educational reform that speaks the mandates of IMF-style structural adjustment policies. Both generate a concentration on the local, and step away from larger political economy analyses. Much of the educational development and infrastructure work is outsourced, subcontracted, undertaken by differing government and NGOs often with discoordinated means and aims. Hence, many of the now traditional problems of postwar aid and development practices resurface. The work tends to be partial, focused on short and medium term goals, fragmented, and temporally and spatially discontinuous.

My point is that three key historical movements have come together in the field: a skepticism towards educational metanarratives; a tendency of Western and Northern educators to assume a post-postwar cultural pluralism that places a great stress on the ‘local’; and neoliberal governance of the development and provision of new educational services, programs and interventions. What is missing is a strong overarching normative vision about education. In fact, if were are to judge by the quality and depth of state and national education debates in Australia, the US, Canada and elsewhere, there is a studied avoidance of any such debates. With a few notable exceptions, the great irony of current governmentality is the tendency to engage in large scale policy ‘dreaming’ about knowledgeable nations, about smarter states, about intellectual isles, and so forth — while it continues to invest in inward looking, compilationist approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. Without even a recognition that we need to debate such visions, we are left to work in educational environments that are encouraging piecemeal, partial visions directed at short-term goals.

• The Attraction Function: to generate sufficient human capital to ‘attract’ flows of capital investment, businesses, jobs, and attendant infrastructure development into the region, site or local community.

• The Amelioration Function: to mop up the effects of the unequal distribution of capital, including structural unemployment, physical displacement and relocation, population movement, health and environmental problems, political violence, etc.

If we take these two functions and map them against current state educational policy and curriculum development, specific patterns emerge. First, the dissection of Key Learning Areas into lists of outcomes, goal statements, etc. is an attempt, albeit by varying degrees positivist and progressivist, to meet the attraction function. The narrative chain for the attraction principle goes simply something like this: that the student (protagonist) Þ acquires these skills, knowledges, competences (action) Þ dutifully tick boxed in formalized assessment based on quality assurance principles (verification of capital by the teacher) Þ takes these out of the school and is able to both attract and generate capital in the social fields of work and civic life (consequences).

The amelioration function proves a bit more difficult, despite some well theorized attempts to include particular values and ideologies within curriculum in the areas of studies of society and environment, citizenship and literacy education. The tendency of most state curriculum documents is to attempt a set of ‘overlays’ or grids that can verify or guide supra-KLA coverage of, variously, "core skills", "values", or "orientations". Hence, we find teachers and schools grappling to grid issues of "identity", "futures", "literacy across the curriculum" across their already atomized syllabi and work programs. What this means is that the soft, less rationalized ameliorative function, by definition harder to quantify that traditional skills or knowledge outcomes, becomes part of a subordinate grid of curriculum specification.

The events of the past months verify matters that have been on the table for nations, governments and communities for well over a decade now: that learning to live together in difference, that the establishment of an ethics of care and empathy, that issues of intercultural communication, and the direct education of the ‘Other’ within what historically purported to be homogeneous systems are not designer options for curriculum, pedagogy and education — but must be part of any version of new basics. In the past decade, we have known and written and spoken about and through diversity in education, about the possibilities of a complex redistributive justice based on not just economic, but social, cultural and symbolic capital; we have described how new economies are exacerbating symbolic and physical violence and political division around issues of difference (e.g., Milojevic et al. 2001; Hammer, 2002); and we have pointed out the public pedagogical responsibilities of government, media and corporation to educate about globalisation and diversity — only to be written off as advocates of political correctness.

We have been reminded by commentators as diverse as Francis Fitzgerald (1985) and Manual Castells (1996) that one of the reactions to globalised economies, to technocratic systems and to fast-capitalist economies and cultures is a powerful attraction to simple answers, fundamentalist doctrine, and one-dimensional politics. The same conditions of moral and political uncertainty that have destablised longstanding institutional systems and canonical knowledge increase the allure of simplified, nostalgic approaches to teaching and curriculum.

The question raised by Bill Green, Peter Buskin and others is what a new Australian epic poem might look and sound like. It is Benedict Anderson’s (1991) brilliant and controversial study of the rise of the nation state and "print capitalism" that argues that nations and nationalism aren’t necessarily the problem — but rather that forms of ‘statism’ are the narratives that do most harm. It has been Mary Kalantzis’ public intellectual contribution to argue that Australia’s unique history has left it not only with unfinished business, but as well what she calls an "underdeveloped" national identity. In Kalantzis’ view this has always provided us with an historical opening, a moment and a possibility that older, more ‘mature’ nation states do not have, the possibility for the non-violent formation of a new social and cultural contract.

Taught by the Frankfurt School of the psychically and socially, aesthetically and sexually destructive force of particular regimes of capital; taught by Foucaultians about the impossibility of escape from normative discourses; and taught by postcolonialists and indigenous writers about the genocidal force of those phenomena that purported to know truth, justice and science — it is no surprise that many of us appear to be allergic to normativity, clinging to the necessary but somewhat safer intellectual haven of critique, and reluctant to get our hands dirty with the sticky matter of what educationally is to be done.

Despite the recent events, because of recent events, in the face of recent events — perhaps we have the space for an epic poem. Such poems, Lyotard suggests, can be fascist, dangerous and exclusionary, xenophobic and imperialist. As curriculum theorists, developers and educators this is our job and our moment: to rekindle a robust debate about teaching each other how to live together in difference with a more equitable and sustainable distribution of resources and capital. As sociologists and philosophers, intellectuals and theorists we face a parallel task: to bring together and reframe the "self-limiting, partial and plural utopias" (Alexander, 2001, 579) that inform our new politics of the local, with a more truly ‘glocal’ vision of "repair" of systems of governance and forms of life that have brought us to this unfortunate moment.

References

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Kellner, D. (2000) Globalisation and new social movements: Lessons for critical theory and pedagogy. In N.C. Burbules & C. Torres (Eds), Globalisation and Education: Critical Perspectives (pp. 299-322). New York: Routledge.

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Lyotard, J.F. 1992. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Milojevic, I., Luke, A., Luke, C., Land, R., & Mills, M., Lingard, R., Budby, J., Louie, K., Ip, D. & Alexander, D. 2001. Moving Forward: Students and Teachers Against Racism. Melbourne: Eleanor Curtain Publishers.

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1 For a critique of "cultural appropriateness", see Pennycook, 2000. (click here to return to text)

2 Rod Neilsen’s in progress doctoral research at the University of Queensland documents these family and career dynamics of nomadic ESL teachers. (click here to return to text)

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