As COVID-19 mutates and as our response to the virus evolves, this Literary Metissage documents our early reactions to the pandemics as phases or strands. Strand I, Navigating A Global Stand Still At Viral Speed, highlights our shock and incredulity. Strand II, Mediated: Slow Going - Virtually Alone, speaks to our slow acceptance of the situation and our readiness to begin adapting to it. Strand III, Social Distancing: Reflections Toward A Way Forward, engages with a phase of deep reflection and thought about the negative and positive implications of COVID-19 on and for shaping the social conditions of the world we live in.
The International Handbook of Curriculum Research is a tremendous pioneering contribution to the internationalization of curriculum studies discourses. Its editor is the world-famous curriculum theorist and educator William F. Pinar. A leader of the reconceptualization movement of curriculum studies in North America during the 1970s, Pinar continues to be one of the most renowned and prolific curriculum scholars in the world. One of the key contributions of his scholarship is to understand curriculum as an international text and promote curriculum studies as a worldwide discipline. Internationalization of curriculum studies requires, and creates, spaces where curriculum scholars working around the world in their own contexts engage in what he calls "complicated conversation" (Pinar, 2019) with one another. Such complicated conversation, structured by diverse cultural, political, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives, allows curriculum scholars to look at the curriculum and the factors that shape it (e.g., history, politics, economy, and culture) in deeper and broader ways. Pinar has contributed many books and articles to support the internationalization of curriculum studies. His edited volumes on the intellectual histories and present circumstances of curriculum studies in South Africa (2010), Brazil (2011a), Mexico (2011b), China (2014a), and India (2015), as well as the two editions of the International Handbook of Curriculum Research (2003, 2014b), are remarkably ground-breaking. The second edition of the International Handbook of Curriculum Research, the focus of this book review, has three parts. The first part is an introductory chapter by Pinar that helpfully introduces the readers to the purposes and contents of the book. The second part comprises five chapters by renowned curriculum scholars who consider the issues of the internationalization of curriculum from varied perspectives. The final part contains thirty-nine country-specific reports of curriculum research from thirty-four countries. To give readers an idea of the quality and breadth of scholarship in this volume, I will discuss the key ideas put forth in the five introductory essays. Tero Autio's chapter, "Internationalization of Curriculum Research", critiques the neoliberal emphasis on instrumental education that forces standardization, measurement, and comparison on teachers and students and undermines the possibility of holistic and transformative educational experiences. Autio underscores the importance of progressive and transformative educational concepts including Bildung, currere, and ideas from the Eastern wisdom traditions to repair the damage done by economically driven instrumental approaches
