Chapter 4: Curriculum Development Collaboration between Colonizer and Colonized: Contradictions and Possibilities for Democratic Education

Globalization, which we define here as the accelerating pace of social and economic movement on a global scale, has generated unique calls for curriculum reform. For example, some reforms are aimed at designing and implementing curriculum that is responsive to markets, while other reforms focus upon critical forms of democracy (Camicia & Franklin, 2010). The international education movement has approached change in multiple ways with multiple stakeholders. Sometimes the affinities (i.e., national/ global) and intents (i.e., neoliberal/civic) of stakeholders in the movement are multiple and contradictory (Parker & Camicia, 2009).

Within this globalizing milieu of curriculum work, we propose ethical curriculum development that acknowledges that Western epistemological stances, especially grounded in the process of colonization, Enlightenment principles, and spreading “truth” to the “other,” however well-intentioned, have devalued indigenous and non-Western epistemologies. In this chapter, we describe, analyze, and interpret the challenges and opportunities related to culture, context, and power asymmetries in international curriculum work within the context of our, the two authors’, work to create critical democratic, postcolonial, cosmopolitan curriculum.