1st Edition

The Asia Literacy Dilemma A Curriculum Perspective

By Rebecca Cairns, Michiko Weinmann Copyright 2023

    The Asia literacy dilemma brings forward a novel approach to the long-standing global debates of Asia-related teaching and learning. By bringing into focus ‘Asia’ as a curriculum area, the book provides original commentary on the rationale and feasibility of ‘Asia literacy’ and its role and significance within and for twenty-first-century education.

    The book’s unique contribution lies in a comprehensive problematisation of ‘Asia’ as planned, enacted and experienced curriculum, bringing together policy, teacher practice and student experiences to present an extensive discussion. By contextualising the problematics of Asia-related curriculum within contemporary national and transnational curriculum challenges, Cairns and Weinmann take account of conflicting discourses of nation-building, ethnocentrism, transnationalism, geo-economics and the purposes of twenty-first-century education. Its use of interview data with teachers and students recentres key actors that are often sidelined in official curriculum policy discourse. The book also introduces the concept of curricularisation to describe the process through which objects and discourses of curriculum are produced and reproduced. In doing so, the book presents a comprehensive discussion of the impossibilities and possibilities of Asia curriculum in the Australian context, providing an innovative longitudinal and integrated understanding of the status quo of Asia curriculum.

    Highlighting the urgent need to reinvigorate the re-emerging centrality of curriculum in recent education debates around policy, teacher standards, assessmentand learning outcomes, this book is an important reference for education policy experts and academics in the fields of curriculum studies, teacher education and studies of Asia.

    List of tables

    About the authors

    Series editor’s note

    Acknowledgements

    List of acronyms and abbreviations

    Foreword

    Introduction

    1 The Asia curriculum entanglement

    2 Tracing the emergence of Asia as a curriculum discourse

    3 Curricularising Asia education policy

    4 The Asia curriculum paradox: Teachers and students reflect

    5 The Asia cross-curriculum priority in review

    6 Towards a re-curricularisation of Asia

    Afterword

    Index

    Biography

    Rebecca Cairns is a Lecturer in Humanities Education at Deakin University, Geelong, and Co-convenor of the Transforming Curriculum, Assessment and Pedagogy research program and the Australia-China Relations and Higher Education research network at Deakin University.

    Michiko Weinmann is an Associate Professor in Languages Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, and Co-convenor of the Transforming Curriculum, Assessment and Pedagogy research program and the Australia-China Relations and Higher Education research network at Deakin University.

    “A definite contribution to transnational curriculum inquiry.” - Daniel Johnson Mardones, Universidad de Chile

    "Australia has a long standing interest in engaging Asia to the extent of incorporating ‘Asia Literacy’ in its national curriculum. Yet, what is ostensibly a well-intended curriculum has suffered from a chequered history of curriculum inertia. This book delves deep into the problematics and politics of the ‘curricularisation’ of ‘Asia Literacy’, and Asia learning with fresh perspectives richly informed by curriculum and cultural theory in innovative ways. Written in a highly systematic and yet critical manner, Michiko Weinmann and Rebecca Cairns’s book clearly stands out as a key text that contributes to, and cuts across, Curriculum Studies, Asian-Australian Studies and Education Studies." - Aaron Koh, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong