Chapter 2: Deliberating Across Ethical Terrain

Meaningful curriculum projects, even within a single school, often involve difficult conversations about curricular aims and the selection of content. Most veteran teachers and university faculty have been part of curriculum development projects at some point in their careers, and know the hard work such ventures entail. Because people bring different life experiences, values, and beliefs to the curricular table, these deliberations can be laborious and contentious. Now overlay at least 10 different languages, cultures, and nationalities, and one can appreciate the complicated nature of the Deliberating in a Democracy (DID) project.

Curriculum projects that span nations and cultures necessarily engage participants with ethical issues—some foreseen and some unforeseen, some of which come to light during a project, in its aftermath, or are never fully recognized. In the project described here, project coordinators strived for collaboration, flexibility, and reciprocity in their international curriculum work. These are, in our view, some of the ethical principles that should guide such work. As will be seen, at some points the project reflected these principles more so than at others. In this chapter, we describe the project; how it reflected (or not) the principles of collaboration, flexibility, and reciprocity; and how some unexpected ethical issues arose in different civic and political contexts. We conclude with some thoughts on navigating the ethical terrain in international curriculum projects.