Towards Asia “curriculum-as-lived”: Amplifying student voice in the Asia literacy curricular landscape

Historically consciousness curriculum inquiry

“…Contemplating how to meaningfully incorporate an ecology of knowledges has been an ongoing challenge in my own curriculum inquiry. My analysis of Asia-related history curriculum practices (e.g., Cairns, 2020) and a co-authored book, The Asia Literacy Dilemma: A curriculum perspective (Cairns & Weinmann, 2023) draws on Asian Cultural Studies scholar, Chen's (2010) Asia as method and deimperialisation as a theoretical framework for challenging outmoded curricular conceptualisations of Asia. Viewing Asia from 'alternative axes of alterity' (Yew, 2011, p. 4) is essential for disrupting the reproduction of the idea of 'Asia' as a colonial, orientalist imagination, which tends to be perpetuated by historically fixed binaries such as East/West, coloniser/colonised, self/other, and so on.…”

“…Considering 'the production of knowledge about Asia has been dominated by an academic tradition founded in Western epistemologies' (Cairns & Weinmann, 2023, p. 13), this means also being aware of how we as researchers based in Australia investigating Asia and Australia's relationship with Asia are subjectively positioned by the historical conditions that continue to influence the reproduction of knowledge and power relations. With the aim of showing 'respect for epistemological diversity' (Paraskeva, 2020, p. 285) and recognising 'global opposition to neoliberal globalization and neo-imperialism' (Johnson-Mardones, 2018, p. 121), we seek to engage a range of analytic tools from the Global North and the Global South (see Cairns & Weinmann, 2023). Historical consciousness is essential for interrogating how Westerncentric knowledge traditions are reproduced by curriculum practices and acknowledging that-as a settler researcher in settler-colonial Australia-my own sense of place and knowledge-making practices are inherently Euro/Westerncentric and are therefore constituted by the processes and effects of the physical and epistemic violence of colonisation on Indigenous people across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.…”

“…Furthermore, when we pay attention to the voices of curriculum actors in the past, we become more attuned to those that have been and may continue to be silenced or marginalised. The tendency to undervalue the voices and perspectives of children and young people in curriculum conversations, especially beyond the classroom, is certainly something curriculum inquiry can better attend to in future (see Brennan, 2022) and is something I have begun to foreground in my own work (Cairns & Weinmann, 2021, 2023.…”