Curriculum Inquiry 44卷1期文章

1. Cosmopolitan Literacies, Social Networks, and “Proper Distance”: Striving to Understand in  a Global World

Author: Glynda A. Hull and  Amy Stornaiuolo

Source:Curriculum  Inquiry, 2014, 44(1): 15-44

Abstract:How are identities as cosmopolitan citizens  realized in practice, and how can dialogue be fostered across differences in  culture, language, ideology, and geography? More particularly, how might young  people be positioned to develop effective and ethical responses, in our digital  age, to local and global concerns? Such are the questions we addressed in a  design-based research project that linked young people around the world via a  private social network. In effect, we studied cosmopolitanism “on the ground,”  as youth on the cusp of adulthood came to think and act reflexively about the  opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges of intercultural,  cross-geographic communication in a global, digital world. To analyze the  conversations and creative artifacts exchanged by groups of youth in New York  City and in India, we invoked the cosmopolitan construct of “proper distance,”  asking how participants gauged their relationship to their readers. We  identified three stances that composers adopted in their efforts to communicate  with and understand their audiences—proximal, reflexive, and reciprocal—and we  demonstrated how such stances were manifested semiotically and relationally.  This study contributes to a growing literature on the relationship of  globalization to education and on cosmopolitanism as one response to this  confluence. It demonstrates in empirical, interactional detail the complexity  and challenge of learning to communicate, create, and understand across  difference, as well as the potential of youth to engage those complexities  ethically and to work at comprehending their subtleties. It further illuminates  the centrality, for our youthful participants and their cosmopolitan project, of  being able to compose in multiple and conjoined modes, and it reanimates the  rhetorical construct of “audience” for digital and global  times.

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2.Multimodal Cosmopolitanism:  Cultivating Belonging in Everyday Moments With Youth

Author: Lalitha M.  Vasudevan

Source:Curriculum  Inquiry, 2014, 44(1): 45-67

Abstract:This article explores the idea that everyday  moments hold cosmopolitan potential wherein such recognition can reorient  educators and youth toward one another in meaningful and generative ways. Found  in the quotidian practices of young people are indicators of their affiliations,  their proclivities, their interests, and their curiosities. Educators, should  they choose to take these practices seriously, will find ample fodder in the  wide range of youths' communicative and expressive practices for making  connections across differences and to move toward lowering barriers of  participation for youth in institutional spaces. Data from an ethnographic study  of a theater project housed within an alternative to detention program are  reanalyzed using a lens of multimodal cosmopolitanism to explore everyday and  often fleeting moments of interaction to render visible the ways in which  participants expressed and experienced belonging in myriad ways—belonging to the  project as well as to one another. A discussion following two ethnographic  vignettes of the theater program offers recommendations for how a multimodal  cosmopolitan orientation can support educators to approach curriculum and enact  pedagogy that nurtures belonging with and among youth every  day.

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3.Cultivating a Hospitable  Imagination: Re-Envisioning the World Literature Curriculum Through a  Cosmopolitan Lens

Author: Suzanne S.  Choo

Source:Curriculum  Inquiry, 2014, 44(1): 68-89

Abstract:When world literature as a subject was  introduced to schools and colleges in the United States during the 1920s, its  early curriculum was premised on the notion of bounded territoriality which  assumes that identities of individuals, cultures, and nation-states are fixed,  determinable, and independent. The intensification of global mobility in an  interconnected 21st century calls for educators to re-envision the world  literature curriculum through a cosmopolitan lens. I argue that such  reconceptualizations necessitate reclaiming the primacy of the other which  suggests the importance of cultivating an imagination hospitable to the other.  In the first part of the article, I discuss inherent paradoxes underlying  cosmopolitanism in both social and political domains which then point to the  role of the hospitable imagination as a vital intervention disrupting  individualistic and instrumental agendas. The hospitable imagination manifests  in other-oriented cultural creativity in which creativity is a means culminating  in responsibility to the other. In the second part of the article, I utilize  cross-comparative case-study analysis of world literature teachers in three  cities—New York, Perth, and Singapore—to theorize cosmopolitan approaches,  particularly curricula practices, that foster hospitable ways of imagining  through continually problematizing the boundaries of openness toward the other.  Ultimately, such practices aspire toward unconditional, absolute hospitality  involving decentering the self and deterritorializing interpretations of the  other.

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4.Ontologies of Place, Creative  Meaning Making and Critical Cosmopolitan Education

Author: Margaret R.  Hawkins

Source:Curriculum  Inquiry, 2014, 44(1): 90-112

Abstract:Discourses of globalization and  cosmopolitanism, focusing on the rapid flows of people, resources, and knowledge  around the globe and subsequent encounters between global citizens, present a  binary between “global” and “local.” At the same time educational theories,  perhaps especially in the areas of language and literacy studies, promote a view  of learning as occurring through mediated interactions in local, situated  practices. This article offers a lens to bridge perspectives between  ever-increasing global shifts and movements and situated human interactions  through a theorization of the mediational nature of place. Following discussion  of global and local as binaries across literatures, I offer a theory of  ontologies of place, highlighting it as mediational in meaning making in human  interactions. Locating learning within a sociocultural framework, I describe a  project linking underresourced English-learning youth transnationally through  multimodal e-communication, then present an analysis of data from the project to  illuminate how place mediates the interactions through which understandings are  negotiated and constructed. Findings point to not only the primacy of place in  creative meaning making among global youth, but also to the necessity of paying  adequate attention to a critical cosmopolitanism: a way forward that considers  how to promote and support global encounters and engagements in a way that  expands affiliations, openness, creativity, and caring with an imperative to  create and sustain just and equitable relations.

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5.Toward a  Conceptual Framework for Understanding Cosmopolitanism on the  Ground

Author:  NinniWahlström

Source:Curriculum  Inquiry, 2014, 44(1): 113-132

Abstract:In this article, a continuum of resistance  and receptivity constitutes a framework for understanding a cosm

opolitan  orientation “on the ground.” Such a continuum is based on an understanding of  the effects of globalization, when it comes to individual people, as both  containing a potential for an active interest in other ways of life, and a  resistance toward others' values and ways of living triggered by a feeling of  being forced into situations without one's own voluntarily choice. The notion of  continuum implies that each individual occupies a different position depending  on the situation and context, and that these positions can shift. In the  conceptual use of cosmopolitanism in empirical studies, there is need for more  developed and specified terms to be used as analytical tools for discerning if  and when something may be considered as a possible cosmopolitan orientation. For  this purpose, the four capacities for self-reflexivity, hospitality,  intercultural dialogue and transactions of perspectives, are developed out of  Delanty's understanding of critical cosmopolitanism. To be able to distinguish  between institutionalized routine conversations and conversations that seem to  engage the students in a more active cosmopolitan meaning making, the continuum  of efferent and aesthetic-reflective experiences, taken from Rosenblatt's  studies of reading, has been suggested. A preliminary analysis of data from an  empirical research study focused on classroom conversations, and contextualized  by an analysis of a curriculum concerning fundamental values, indicates that it  is possible to discern different discursive actions of self-reflexivity and  hospitality in classroom conversations, as well as a potential for intercultural  dialogue.