ABSTRACT

Critical Studies of Education in Asia features analyses that take seriously the complex postcolonial, historical, and cultural consciousnesses felt across societies in Asia, and that bring these to bear on the changing terrain of knowledge, subjectivities, and power relations constructed both within schools and across the public sphere.

In documenting the multiple sites of conflict and contestation both between and within states in Asia and a host of pedagogic agents – ministries of education, state boards and agencies, schools, teachers and teacher unions, university departments of education, local interest groups, the media, international standards agencies, and global educational reform discourses – the chapters in this volume illuminate the struggles over knowledge, education, and the work of schools. Faced with emergent global and local forces that are determined to challenge ‘official’ knowledge and to offer alternative understandings of education and society in Asia, this volume offers critical insights for academic researchers, policy- makers, and graduate students seeking to understand the tensions and possibilities of educational change in the region. This book was originally published as a special issue of Curriculum Inquiry.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction – The politics of curriculum reforms in Asia

Inter-referencing discourses of power, culture and knowledge

chapter 1|18 pages

Subterfuge hegemony

The simmering politics of the shelved Hong Kong moral and national education debates in the media

chapter 2|17 pages

Educators as transformative intellectuals

Taiwanese teacher activism during the national curriculum controversy

chapter 3|19 pages

Culture, pedagogy and equity in a meritocratic education system

Teachers’ work and the politics of culture in Singapore

chapter 4|17 pages

Neoliberal global assemblages

The emergence of “public” international high-school curriculum programs in China

chapter 5|18 pages

How to mess with PISA

Learning from Japanese kokugo curriculum experts

chapter 6|15 pages

Politics and the practice of school change

The Hyukshin School movement in South Korea

chapter |7 pages

Afterword

On new critical East Asian educational studies