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Itinerant Curriculum Theory James C. Jupp, Editor
This edited volume provides a compendium of recent work on critical curricular-
pedagogical praxes via itinerant curriculum theory (ICT). Overall, this volume
advances ICT as a transnational-local way of doing critical curricular-pedagogical
praxes, up-from-below, within bioregions. For those interested in doing critical
pedagogy from an historicized, transnational, yet local perspective, this book is
indispensable.
James C. Jupp is Professor and Chair of the Department of Teaching and
Learning at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His decolonial work on
ICT is deeply indebted to the people and bioregion of the Rio Grande Valley
along with his colleagues over the years.
Itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) attempts to create an itinerant path to address
the problem of coloniality-globalization. …This is crucial because it allows one
to critique the complex processes of axiomatization of specific codes within the
capitalist society from slavery in the 1400s to the current slavery constructions
as de-/re-/coded flows of an economy and culture pumped by an epidemic of
overproduction within the colonial matrix of power.
Excerpt from chapter 10 by João M. Paraskeva, author of Conflicts in Curriculum
Theory, Curriculum Epistemicide: Towards an Itinerant Curriculum, and
Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia.
I find it illuminating to consider itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as advanced in
this new volume… I see this as an embodied theory that we need to imagine,
pursue, and live—continuously evolving, never ending curricula which we should
all seek to be and share. I see it as a shape-shifting theory that lives within us
and is recreated in each situation encountered, striving to do and be what is
worthwhile and just.
Excerpt from afterward by William H. Schubert, Professor Emeritus of Curriculum
Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago and co-editor with Ming Fang He of
the Oxford Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies and author of Love, Justice,
and Education: John Dewey and the Utopians.
Cover image: ©iStock.com/Anna Bliokh
9781636 673530
ISBN 978-1-63667-353-0
www.peterlang.com
Decolonial Praxes, Theories, and Histories
Itinerant
Curriculum Theory
Edited by James C. Jupp
9781636673530_cvr_eu.indd All Pages9781636673530_cvr_eu.indd All Pages 17-Aug-23 10:39:4717-Aug-23 10:39:47
Itinerant Curriculum Theory
PETER LANG
New York • Berlin • Brussels • Lausanne • Oxford
James C. Jupp
Itinerant Curriculum Theory
Decolonial Praxes, Theories,
and Histories
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
The German National Library lists this publication in the German
National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG
ISBN 978-1-63667-353-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-63667-351-6 (ebook pdf )
ISBN 978-1-63667-352-0 (epub)
DOI 10.3726/b20299
© 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne
Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA
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All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
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This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and
storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number:
For
Amy, Cecile, Gricelda, Viviana, Raúl, Nora, and Patricia
a.k.a., the Aztlán Study Group
Itinerant Curriculum Theory: Decolonial Praxes, Theories, and Histories
James C. Jupp
(E d itor)
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
JAMES C. JUPP
Section I: Decolonial Curriculum Praxes
1. Nutmeg Curriculum 31
DINNY R ISRI ALETHEIA NI
2. Resistant Traditions of the Rio Grande Valley, Aztlán 39
RAÚL GARZA, GRICELDA EUFR ACIO AND JA MES C. JUPP
3. Itinerant Curriculum Theory: Navigating the Waters of Power,
Identity, and Classroom Praxis 63
ELIZABETH JANSON AND CAR MELIA MOTTA SILVA
4. “And the Linguistic Minorities Suffer What They Must?”: A Review
of Conflicts in Curriculum Theory Through the Lenses of Language
Teacher Education 79
MAR IA AL FR EDO MOREIRA
5. Welcome to the New Taylorism! Teacher Education Meets Itinerant
Curriculum Theory 95
TODD ALA N PRICE
6. A Dialogue with Dwayne Huebner: Rethinking the Ways of Knowing,
Being, and Speaking within and about Schools 107
ELIZABETH JANSON, ROGER VENTURINI AND DWAYNE HUEBNER
x TABLE OF CONT EN TS
Section II: Decolonial Curriculum Theories
7. Territorializing-Deterritorializing: The Tireless Path of Becoming
Less Incomplete 135
GABR IEL VEGA TORRES, ALMA KAR INA GA RCÍA TORRES,
DAFNE REYES JURADO AND JAMES C. JUPP (TRANS.)
8. Against Epistemological Fascism: The (Self) Critique of the
Criticals—A Reading of Paraskeva’s Itinerant Curriculum Theory 153
MAR IA LUIZA SÜSSEK IND
9. Itinerant Curriculum Theory Against Epistemicides: A Dialogue
between the Thinking of Santos and Paraskeva 169
INES B. OLIVEIRA
10. Itinerant Curriculum Theory Revisited on a Non-Theoricide towards
the Canonicide: Addressing the “Curriculum Involution” 189
JOÃO M. PARASK EVA
Section III: Decolonial Curriculum Histories
11. Selection of From Simón Rodríguez to Paulo Freire: Education
towards the Integration of Iberoamerica 229
ADRI ANA PUIGGRÓS, JAMES C. JUPP (TRANSLATOR) AND
RAÚL OLMO BAILÓN (TRA NSLATOR)
12. Decolonial-Hispanophone Curriculum: A Preliminary Sketch and
an Invitation to a South-South Dialogue 257
JAMES C. JUPP, MICAELA GONZALEZ DELGADO,
FREYCA CALDERÓN BERUMEN AND CAROLINE HESSE
13. The Longue Durée of the Geopolitics of Curriculum 289
JAIRO FÚNEZ-FLORES
14. A Deterritorialized Critical Pedagogy for Social and Cognitive
Justice towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory: An Outlook
from Spain 315
ROSA VÁZQUEZ-RECIO
Section VI: Afterward
15. Growing Curriculum Studies: Contributions of João M. Paraskeva 353
WILLIA M H. SCHUBERT
Section II Decolonial Curriculum
Theories
7 Territorializing-
Deterritorializing: The Tireless Path
of Becoming Less Incomplete
GABRIEL VEG A TORRES
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Unidad 203
ALM A KARINA GARCÍA TORRE S
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
DAFNE REYE S JUR ADO
Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla
JAMES C. JUPP (TR A NSLATOR)
University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
Borders regulate in the highest places,
Always untouchable and intangible borders.
Provisional yet perpetual, at same time
Borders surround me on all sides, every part.
Silvio Rodríguez. Fronteras
The present theoretical essay seeks to reflect on three categories relevant to
the field of curriculum: territory, territorialization, and deterritorialization.
We take these categories from existing theoretical resources in Giroux’s
(1992) border pedagogies. Giroux signals that political, epistemological, cul-
tural, and other limits are at work in configuring the curriculum. We also
work from the theoretical resources in Parakeva’s (2016) notion of itinerant
curriculum theory (ICT). Paraskeva posits the necessity of revealing colo-
nial logic articulating curricular discourses while also insisting on epistemic
justice for those subjects and peoples annulled in curriculum’s dominant,
136 GABRI EL VEG A TOR R ES, ET AL.
colonial, and homogenizing logic. Paraskeva’s insistence on justice moves
our thinking along with the field of curriculum theory toward an epistemic
and linguistic turn. This turn articulates what Dussel (1981) and many oth-
ers that followed have called a Global South or analectic logic. We urgently
advance this turn in the present historical conjuncture of the COVID-19
pandemic and before the experiences of diverse political-pedagogical subjects
who directly or indirectly in recent decades have demonstrated the need to
transgress the borders of hegemonic curricula. Following the transgression,
we advance subaltern subjects’ (Spivak, 1998) forms for speaking, thinking,
and habituating that curriculum.
Pursuing these directions, our theoretical essay unfolds via the following
contours. First, we begin our analysis by thinking through Giroux’s (1992)
notions of border curriculum that defy the political and educative limits of
the Mexican education system imposed on subalternized subjects. Second,
we trace hegemonic discourses that articulate and maintain what Paraskeva
(2016) has called the curriculum epistemicide of knowledges along intimately
with related practices and identities of historically vulnerable indigenous,
African-descendant, and itinerant migrant populations. Third, we articu-
late the notion of territorializing curriculum with the dual meanings of both
identitarian resources and an instrument of aperture for the mobilization
of subjects toward new sites of enunciation in formative and educative pro-
cesses. Finally, we articulate the notion of deterritorializing the curriculum
following Paraskeva (2016) in order to reclaim the notion of territorializing
as political-pedagogical practice embodied by diverse subjects toward the
construction of in situ curricular, alternative, emancipatory, and decolonial
projects.
Curriculum and Borders in the Present Historical Conjuncture
At the beginning of 2020, the world was paralized. The pandemic provoked
by the Sars-CovV2 required that humanity enter an impasse from which we
are just beginning to leave. This impasse represented not only a health crisis
but also an ideological and political crisis brought on by the years of neo-
liberal politics’ negligence that had dismantled public concerns in favor of
private interests, individual well-being, and market interests. The educational
system had already shown evidence of fragility as a consequence of decades of
abandonment derived from the lack of state financial support. Following the
economic market principles of supply-and-demand, both national and inter-
national private institutions had introduced a great fragility into federal and
state systems, including but not limited only to the educational system. Four
Territorializing-Deterritorializing: Tireless Path 137
decades of predominantly neoliberal politics in Latin America had eroded
in a substantial way the social, democratic, public, and secular educational
systems:
[…] with the advance of neoliberalism, a complex phenomenon was pro-
duced: the state retracted, deteriorating the educational system; social and
political groups were organized into “social education”; and NGOs advanced
over this same terrain as well. Among the NGOs, one can find those that have
actual social objectives and others that clearly represent the face of corporate
interests. The concept of “popular education” began to separate from the public
and state educational apparatuses, especially in the discourses of political and
social groups that rejected populist nationalisms or the superficial “democracy”
that that public and state apparatuses produced. (Puiggrós, 2010, p. 57)
The statement above supposes that public education in the historical pres-
ent confronts serious challenges, principally social and educational inequality,
that are related to systemic crisis within the neoliberal capitalist system. Old
debts and voids are exacerbated in educational systems in general and the cur-
riculum in particular. These exacerbations, after years of neoliberal “efficien-
cies,” have a lacerating effect on groups that have been historically excluded,
in particular, subalternized subjects of the curriculum.
In the Mexican national curriculum, looking specifically at cultural diver-
sity in México, for more than two decades the curriculum has demonstrated a
vulgar inattention to cultural and linguistic resources of its peoples. It is clear
in the national curriculum that knowledges, practices, languages that differ
from the hegemonic (Western, White, modern, colonial, neoliberal, patriar-
chal) have not been incorporated. There has been no intent of articulation
or reconfiguration to follow or grasp a pluricultural nation, and much less
even, to create an intercultural dialogue between cultures or to advance what
might be termed the real intent to carry out intercultural exchanges.
Beginning with the curricular marginalization to which subaltern
groups have been submitted—specifically referencing indigenous, African-
descendant, itinerant migrants, and others, we recognize the urgency to for-
tify and nurture bridges that permit the transit toward what Connell (citado
en Gallardo, 2015) and Torres (2012) have called curricular justice. Gallardo
(2015) mentions that “school culture contained in the official curriculum of
primary grade education as much as the culture of the lived, real curriculum
are distanced from being any representative summary either of the society
from which it comes or from the people it should serve” (p. 72). This is evi-
dent in México and other Latin American countries due to the curriculum’s
prescriptive and normative character and its homogenizing logic (Dietz,
2012), a logic that excludes the heterogeneity and diversity that configure
138 GABRI EL VEG A TOR R ES, ET AL.
subjects but also denies the very same subjects’ pedagogical and educative
projects, their languages and cosmovisions, and their values. Specifically, the
official curriculum excludes the recognition of diverse, existing, and lived
cultures, and it excludes the day-to-day knowledges and practices that strug-
gle to manifest themselves on the global epistemic map.
The present historical conjecture is further deepened due to the ongoing
emergency of programs, projects, and strategies that overtime have sought
to reconfigure the curriculum to respond to the necessities and demands of
diverse subjects by prioritizing information technology (IT) and related com-
munication processes. These programs, projects, and strategies are but just
another factor of exclusion and inequality to subaltern groups that cannot
access these technologies in the first place and, therefore, superficial solutions
actually result in access being denied.
Orozco (2020) affirms that the present historical conjecture must tie
into past resources called received potentials. Following Orozco, we under-
stand active historical understandings and practices that articulate a possible
future. In this way, we might trace a directional and active possible historical-
political project. With our received potentials, we approach the present his-
torical conjuncture as a possibility to reconfigure the curriculum, toward
its territorializing-deterritorialzing. The curriculum today confronts serious
questions in relation to relevance and transcendence of its supposed project, a
project that has been identified as narrowly homogenizing and exclusionary.
Despite these realities, at the same time we understand the present historical
conjuncture as the possibility to articulate alternatives and other reference
points that until now have occupied the margins, existed only on the borders.
Here, for example, we refer to the sustained demands by groups and popular
movements that in recent decades have retaken schools and other curricular
spaces as a site of dispute from which social transformation might take place.
The Curriculum as a Territory and the Practice of
Territorializing
The metaphor of curriculum as territory provides a provocation in the sense of
experiences that might advance the being-in-and-inhabiting the curriculum
in the same way that territories might be inhabited. In this way, territory —
in the classic sense related to the State and its territorial sovereignty — is
de-linked from what is inside and outside its physical and symbolic borders.
In this way, we might rethink what is inside and outside, what is included and
what is excluded. Moreover, we might rethink what territories are delimited
Territorializing-Deterritorializing: Tireless Path 139
inside the curriculum and think through how we identify and engage in
border crossing.
To fully engage the notion of border crossing from the point of view of
critical pedagogy, we return to the theorizing of Giroux (1992) who prob-
lematized the processes of constructing curriculum. Giroux focused on how
these processes and practices of curricular construction are defined by spe-
cific practices of power and subordination of diverse sectors of society cou-
pled with specific hegemonic and homogenizing educational politics. Giroux
thinks through borders as limits, in both metaphorical and literal meanings,
in order to follow how culture, power, and knowledge are configured and
how students in specific and determined sites have access to action in the
world. Following Giroux, borders are constituted that delimit a designed and
professed territory, but which also might enable political, cultural, and epis-
temic movement of subjects across different pathways, deviating from those
prescribed in the school curriculum.
Giroux (1992) writes “these borders are not only physical, but they are
also culturally, historically, and socially constructed and organized within
rules and norms that are meant to limit and capacitate determined identi-
ties, individual potentialities and social forms” (p. 2). One can say, social
environments establish borders of different types that impede free transit to
other physical and symbolic spaces. With territorializing in mind, we might
retake these same rules and norms to reflect over the dominant curriculum
discourses. We recognize that the subjects of the curriculum inhabit a ter-
ritory without many possibilities of traversing or inhabiting it beyond the
intentions of the prescriptive specialists. We might inhibit the curriculum
in ways that move beyond those who designed it and profiled its neoliberal-
official competencies from the hegemonic educational politics of México and
Latin America.
Here, we might trace how borders are fixed and how they are found to be
delimited as contents, materials, evaluative forms, etcetera as those that stu-
dents are exposed to in the processes of their subject formation. It becomes
possible to see how borders become fixed, delimited, and overdetermined in
the students’ formation through curricular contents, materials, forms of eval-
uation, and other factors that definitely limit subjects’ potentials and expo-
sures. Yet at the same time, this curricular territory is occupied principally via
an elaborate artifice that is alienated from the student to whom the curricu-
lum is destined. The curriculum in fact assumes the subjects’ adaptation and
situation within the curriculum’s values, norms, and behaviors in interpreting
reality. These required adaptations convert the curriculum into a ghetto that
cloisters the subject with others in a predesigned world that, by following
140 GA BR IEL VEGA TORRES, ET AL.
its path, denies the subject access to other worlds, including the subject’s
own world. This invisibilizing and negating dynamic of “Other” subjects
and their knowledges is framed by the deepening of capitalist values of con-
sumption, competition, and globalization’s homogenization of the world’s
referent points. As an ongoing intended by-product, this dynamic results in
the destruction of cognitive diversity and anything that opposes the matrix
of colonia l it y.
Curricular borders are manifested and implanted through the techni-
cal labyrinth built into the curriculum starting with its determined uses of
specific validated and legitimated knowledges fixed in the curriculum’s terri-
tories. This curricular exercise of legitimated and official knowledges is con-
figured not only in the selection of content to learn but also is projected in
teaching methods, the evaluation of teaching and learning, the established
relations between the educator and educands, and the social roles that are
reproduced through educative practices.
Nonetheless, from the cosmovisions from which actual social subjects are
constructed along with the practices and movements subjects participate in,
the notion of curricular territories also inherently implies counter-hegemonic
practices. These practices might put subjects’ stabilities in play when they
critically cross borders between what is learned, lived, and imposed. These
border crossings enable the generative, the unspoken, the unestablished.
From these meanings, the practice of resistance and insurgence emerges that
responds to the political projects of specific groups, that is, of subalternized
subjects.
Giroux’s (1992) language in border pedagogies helps us understand the
existence of borders in the first place in order to visualize them. Following his
active directions, we engage in political participation in order to reconfigure
ourselves in ways that make us border crossers. These reconfigurations permit
new political notions of territorializing the curriculum by those who occupy
and use it. They also enable different symbolic organization of the curricu-
lum that allow for both epistemic diversity and differently enunciated power
relations from which knowledges might be re-instrumentalized in situ within
specific communities and collectivities.
The notion of territories presents us with a double bind. First, it allows
us to understand the curriculum’s colonial and hegemonic logic, which is
defined by the place that the curriculum is located and cloistered. This is
the logic that configures subaltern subjects via Western, eurocentric, moder-
nity whose position is determined in hegemonic power relations. In this first
understanding of territories, there is no possibility of the subjects’ mobility
nor processes for resignfying subjectivities. On the other hand, territory is
Territorializing-Deterritorializing: Tireless Path 141
also constructed by the oppressed (Freire, 2005), the wretched of the earth
(Fanon, 1983) as a dimension of struggle, movement and creation that reveals
different forms of insurgence.
From these insurgent territories, it becomes possible to rearticulate
schooling in general and curriculum in specific as a political apparatus with
particular focus on communal-political cultural performance. From our per-
spective, we advance this understanding of territory linked to curricular dis-
courses in order to better define it as a dimension of political action and
praxis that might transform its technical-instrumental design and homog-
enized globalizing competences and evaluations. As political action and
praxis, the curriculum might become the place from which subaltern subjects
ground and project their hopes, dreams, and utopias through an exercise in
epistemic subversion.
In the multicultural context of México and the great part of the American
continent represented through its indigenous and African-descendent popu-
lations, Alicia Barabas (2004) emphasizes that territoriality is symbolic and
can be constituted through the notion of ethnoterriotorial delimitation.
This ethnicized notion of territorializing provides a means of communities’
theorizing the reactivation of memory “as an instrument of political rights
and territorial demands from the ‘modern’ nation states that invaded them”
(p. 146). Specifically, there are constitutional statues in the case of México
(Articles 2 and 3) over the legal acceptance of local knowledges of indigenous
peoples. Nonetheless, these knowledges have been maintained at the margins
of the curriculum. Barabas advances the notion that it is possible for indig-
enous peoples to construct territories through political action. Specifically,
inhabiting the curriculum is not enough, but instead we must focus on
territorializing it in order to activate it as a political praxis or movement.
Such a movement would specify contents, the necessary contents for the
co-constitution of subjects. In other words, inhabiting the curriculum is not
enough without territorializing via the reinscriptions of its contents, meth-
ods, and evaluations.
Territory, from the purview of Barabas (2004), is a space that is recog-
nized through limits and borders. For indigenous peoples, we understand
the sacred values of territories, but also, we see that territories represent sites
of political dispute and power relations. Through these understandings, we
push toward the notion that subaltern subjects might territorialize the cur-
riculum, become part of it, to inhabit the curriculum. Nevertheless, we insist
that, without activating it, without struggling over it, indigenous peoples
remain excluded by it. It follows that curriculum becomes a site of dispute
that has to be negotiated, constructed, and appropriated. Only via its active
142 GA BR IEL VEGA TORRES, ET AL .
and authentic dispute can we properly think through territorializing the
curriculum.
There are local and global territories just like there are local-national
ones. Each demarcation and level draws its own limits and borders on subject
formations. The dispute is to generate a bridge that conversely reconfigures
the links between the local, national, and global. Overall, reconfiguring the
links between the local, national, and global activates subjects and humanizes
the territorializing of curriculum. The reconfiguring bridge that serves as a
conduit for this movement is a metaphorical space that critically articulates
the local-national-global. It then becomes necessary to recognize the exis-
tence of these quotidian places, bridges, and meanings as sanctuaries, again
following Barabas (2004) notion of territories. These sanctuaries are spaces
where recognition, communities, and collectives exist. That is, these quotid-
ian places are places in which social and symbolic interaction are articulated
in the curriculum.
Subalternized subjects, it follows, are implicated in notions of territori-
alizing the curriculum in order to deploy strategies that articulate their own
interests and needs, although there are contradictions over what is consti-
tuted in the curriculum and contents that remain on the margins. We must
understand that curriculum as a territory of dispute and conflict, a territory
that is in constant tension that destroys or conserves the diversity of specific
historic subjectivities. Therefore, we emphasize the gerund form of territo-
rializing curriculum, because these activities are not finalized or replicable
consumer products.
In rethinking territorializing curriculum via bridges and spaces, it
becomes necessary to conceive of these reconfigured territories as citadels
that structure and delineate through the subjects’ acquisition of content. This
structuring content is both from the outside world as well as the inner histor-
ical resources that have constituted subjectivity from their collective knowl-
edge reservoirs. Taking all the elements together, reconfigured structuring
contents give form to subjects’ spiritual and physical geography. Following
historical circumstances delineated as “facts,” it is beyond the shadow of a
doubt that indigenous peoples, in their vast pedagogical communal expe-
riences, realize and deploy didactic-pedagogical resources (music, painting,
poetry, sayings, legends, myths, etc.) to transmit particular forms of thinking
to their members and therefore already exemplify our notion of territorializ-
ing curriculum.
Following the previous arguments, it becomes necessary to consider that
what we call “spaces” are indeed social constructions. This means that spaces
cannot be reduced only to simply their geographical reference or tradition
Territorializing-Deterritorializing: Tireless Path 143
through which human beings live in their interaction with the natural envi-
ronment. Rather, geographical spaces represent a larger notion that implies
the social, and these spaces must be thought through collective lived experi-
ences, the imaginary, and spiritual inheritances that include all the elements
that acquire meaning and are interpreted through subalternized subjects who
bring the world to life using words unknown to hegemonic European lan-
guages and their local articulations.
The political dimension of territory developed in the work of Haesbaert
(2013) helps us to see that, when we allude to territory, we are indeed ref-
erencing power relations. This helps us to better conceive of the curricu-
lum as a set of power relations and hegemonic practices. Robert Sack (in
Haesbaert, p. 18) mentioned that territory represents an access-controlled
space. Therefore, from the moment that the flow of access is controlled (be it
merchanidise, people, capital, knowledge, etcetera), space becomes territory.
Until now, we have thought of curriculum via the notion of its territori-
alizing dynamics that limit access, exit, and transit with marked dispositions
and under delimited power relations. In the case of geographical territories,
these are maintained under firm political control in order to keep them from
changing. For Haesbaert, territorializing supposes the idea of symbolic ter-
ritory, without the necessity of controlling a material-historical territory.
Nonetheless, in our understanding, the educational institution is in fact a
territory-space that physically exists, and what is under dispute is the act of
territorialzing it. That is, the historical-material construction and practice of
the curricular project up-from-below, made-by-subjects, through which sub-
jects can find reference points and meanings, and overall, a curricular project
that responds to their life projects.
Here, we want to locate the act of territorializing within the insurgent
action of both ideating and unfolding a project (Zemelman, 1992), a tran-
scendent historical project:
The historical subject, to be always in the present, must appropriate the long
march of history through acting on behalf of a project; by that influence, the
objective material world unfolds on two planes: the first plane is that of doing
praxis in successive moments in a process transcending each particular moment
and the second plane is that of directionality that conforms to transconjunctural
praxis. (p. 5)
Via counterhegemonic practices, social subjects resist and reject imposed prac-
tices and instead articulate multiple reference points in facing the hegemonic
curriculum with the intention of transgressing it. For instance, important
projects already in motion are those political-pedagogical projects of indige-
nous, African-Mexican, itinerant migrants, and other subaltern subjects.
144 GA BR IEL VEGA TORRES, ET AL.
Deterritorializing the Curriculum
We initially approached the notion of territory from Giroux’s (1992) bor-
der pedagogies. Nonetheless, the need for greater clarity regarding the
implications of territory require us to deepen our study of the term in
other disciplinary areas.
We began our study approaching the notion of deterritorializing from
the point of view of geography, and following this direction, we relied on
Haesbaert (2013) about the myths of territorializing and processes, and the
notion of deterritorializing provided an exploration from geography. Yet
feeling like we needed more to understand the dynamic of territorializing-
deterritorialzing in curriculum, we moved toward Paraskeva (2016,
2020) to better follow the idea of deterritorializing as an epistemological act of
de-linking. Within the field of curriculum’s discursive turn, Paraskeva implies
the dismantling of the coloniality of power and the structures that support
and articulate it.
Curriculum in México articulates dominant, homogenizing, fixed, and at
the same time, colonial logic, and this colonial reasoning even includes pre-
vious counter-hegemonic critical and feminist frameworks and pedagogies.
Paraskeva, undoing the previous colonial logic of even critical curriculum
theories, advances the notion of itinerant curriculum theory (ICT), briefly
mentioned in our introduction. ICT emphasizes new forms of thinking and
feeling education through deterritorializing the curriculum, and this deterri-
torializing privileges differences, the diversity and aperture of epistemologi-
cal borders in the emancipation of subjects.
From ICT’s purview, hegemonic curriculum moves students toward
adopting dominant models instead of their own. During their academic study
and formation, students are driven toward similitude, despite the fact that
diversity is everywhere more evident and resistant. National curricular plans
and programs do not permit spontaneity, and moreover, they do not allow
either educators or students from leaving the established margins. In fact,
national curriculum plans in México create the margins that are then par-
adoxically sought to be remediated as deficits. Instead of working through
students’ backgrounds and assets, the national curriculum seeks to implant
hegemonic knowledge and practices in subalternized subjects, “remediating
them” for “inclusion.”
Because of this, we emphasize Paraskeva’s the mandate for deterritori-
alizing the curriculum. We conceive of Paraskeva’s mandate as having two
key meanings. First, we need to speak of new ways of understanding the
Territorializing-Deterritorializing: Tireless Path 145
curriculum, questioning the curriculum, and deploying analytical and cul-
tural tools to approach it. Most importantly in the first key meaning, we need
a praxis that allows us to get away from the limits and borders of hegemonic
power systems. In the second key meaning, we follow Paraskeva (2016) spe-
cifically with his notion of propagating differences and “inquiring into new
forms of thinking and feeling education” (p. 123). Deterritorializing, there-
fore, has to be assumed from the position of the curricular actors.
These actors include, on the one hand, the educator, since the educa-
tor reproduces teaching from communality with the students. Therefore, the
educator is the one that has to take hold of and re-appropriate the curric-
ulum, understand and analyze it differently, and propagate difference and
diversity in order to provide the potential for an authentic curricular trans-
formation. In addition to the educators, the students themselves are charged
with visibilizing and valuing differences and disrupting the dominant and
homogenizing curriculum.
We know that deterritorializing the curriculum confronts the following
important challenges within curriculum theory (Paraskeva, 2016):
• Articulate forces that support differences and allow them to be and live
inside the same territories.
• Privilege difference and be against everything that is homogenizing in
the curriculum.
• Conscientize (Freire, 2005) for subjects’ growth and unfolding in the
curriculum, not through acquiring dominant national or traditional
systems or even their parts or components, but rather working from
traditions that were invisibilized or in processes of invisibilization.
• Construct curricular foundations for the production of differences
instead of similarities.
• Redefine the territorial margins of the curriculum, explode curricular
borders.
• Teach from difference, both in content and language.
• Provide scientific knowledges with non-scientific knowledges, contrast
local knowledges with national and global knowledges.
• Leave the predetermined margins of the national curriculum.
We emphasize, as we said before, a critical counter-hegemonic practice
that dislocates the globalizing hegemonic structure, in this case the domi-
nant discursive curriculum structure. This counter-hegemonic practice has
as its beginning an aperture in deterritorializing-territorializing the cultural
synthesis imposed by hegemonic curriculum.
146 GA BR IEL VEGA TORRES, ET AL.
Here we need to consider to what degree hegemonic curricular discourses
are implicated in the formation of homogeneously thinking subjects whose
potential to act as transformative beings has been reduced to an adaptation
of the life patterns imposed by Western modernity, neoliberal market logic,
and objectifying reasoning that reduces everything to prefabricated comer-
icalized and consumer identities® (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/2002).
This reduction of subjectivities to Western modernity, markets, and identity
objects includes the very self-same subjects tied to the spiritual, political,
and ethnic lives. These reduced subjects become counterfeit imitations in
an inverosimil physical, symbolic, and in our case, curricular territory. Such
counterfeit imitations include critical-progressive “woke” media identities®,
bland and reactionary imitations of conscientized subjectivities.
Deterritorializing the curriculum, as we are developing it here, represents
an authentic wager in favor of the assumptions of curriculum theory that his-
torically have sustained curriculum studies writ large (De Alba, 2009, 2012).
Nevertheless, our wager emphasizes that curriculum theory might be made
manifest, not in scientific rationales or prefabricated discursive domains of
the Global North, but rather brought into direct praxes in the construction
of curricular projects that enunciate quotidian communities and collectivies
of the Global South. Our wager advances the Herculean and perhaps impos-
sible task that drives at educating communities and collectivities in order
to specifically break with hegemonic curricular schematizations (e.g., Jupp
et al., 2020; Garza et al., 2021) of technical, didactic, or methodological
approaches assumed in what is the “normalized” curriculum field.
Identifying the general global crises in curriculum (even applying curric-
ulum’s own measurements and “results” logic) that are lived out and occur-
ring within broader permanent global crises (De Alba, 2009), we see these
crises part of the deepening and ordinary path of neoliberal global capital
and its related state apparatuses. Here we are thinking not only of the ongo-
ing curriculum crises of “failing” schools and children left behind, but also
of larger global crises such as global warming, mass migrations, “failing”
political-economic states, the rise of neo fascist dictatorships, the growing
income disparities between the rich and those segments of society that can
only get by or have nothing, among other quotidian realities that are visible
everywhere but even more so in the previously designated “Third World,”
exploited Global South bioregional geoterritories.
Within these ontological crises, we think that the call for deterritori-
alizing the curriculum as a means to leverage the curriculum as an act of
epistemic justice is urgent (Paraskeva, 2016). This deterritorializing the cur-
riculum recognizes the assets of subject formation and experiences found in
Territorializing-Deterritorializing: Tireless Path 147
communities and collectivities of subalternized subjects historically denied
in curricular discourses. Additionally, we also recognize the exigency of
deterritorializing ourselves from academic discursive structures that impose a
colonial heritage and reproduce schemata of discriminiation and exclusion by
gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other differences.
As a confluence, Paraskeva (2016) creates an aperture for the dispute and
struggle over deterritorializing curricular praxes that privileges differences
and imply the need to understand education as a conjuncture of difference.
In this conjuncture, the personal plays an important and central role. Part
of the personal refers to what Paraskeva calls the concrete social realities of
communal and collective subjects. Following this direction, deterritorializing
the curriculum needs to operate through, not only the adaptation of subal-
ternized lived experiences to maintain the discursive structure of the hege-
monic curriculum, that is, subaltern subjects’ adaptation to the dominant
discourse, but the deterritorializing of curriculum must proceed through the
affirmation of the experiences of subalternized Others’ differences in order to
stride toward an epistemic and linguistic turn that allows for the curricular
projects to be enunciated in the languages, cultures, and histories of those
who live them.
We recognize in the last decades that there has been an attempt to ques-
tion the colonial matrix of power in education. Specifically in curriculum,
there are proposals to advance a subaltern South-South dialogue. One of
these proposals is the notion of decolonial Hispanophone curriculum (Jupp
et al., 2018, 2020). In this proposal, the authors drive at valorizing, study-
ing, interpreting, conditioning, and above all else, historicizing indigenous,
mestizo, black, and brown Latin American intellectual traditions in order to
promote a South-South epistemic dialogic encounter. This proposal shows us
that acts of deterritorializing the curriculum require intellectual genealogical
work that link with the most historically original segments of society (Garza
et. al., 2021).
To Jupp et al.’s (2020) theoretical-historical proposal, one can also add
the experience of theoretical products generated from the work of the Latin
American Curriculum Seminar organized by the University and Education
Research Institute (UER I) that took place at the National Autonomous
University of México (UNAM) that since 2015 have become an open space
for problematizing dominant educational discourses in Latin America.
Working in interdisciplinary contact with students, teachers, and professionals
from different areas tied to education throughout Latin America, the Latin
American Curriculum Seminar has reflected on and advanced new discourses
in order to face the problems that confront the inherited field of curriculum
148 GA BR IEL VEGA TORRE S, ET AL.
studies. From the seminar, new theoretical-practical proposals have emerged
from different bioregional points of enunciation from those of the historically
hegemonic and homogenizing curriculum discourses, including dominante
critical discourses.
These proposals have mobilized distinct theoretical and academic circles
toward action, and these actions have undoubtedly moved in the direction
of an interepistemic dialogue, or in Sousa Santos’ (2009) terms, an ecology
of knowledges. This interepistemic dialogue invites us to create intercultural
bonds where scientific and non-scientific knowledge interact in enunciating
the world differently. In other words, the interespistemic dialogue invites us
toward the project of territorializing and deterritorializing curriculum with
Other embodied meanings that can demonstrate how to walk in the world on
different feet and name the world in other languages.
Transgressing Curricular Borders
In sum, territorializing and deterritorializing the curriculum represent
concurrent political practices that are fundamental to understanding
humanizing praxes as much on the physical-material plane as on the discourse-
linguistic one. Using the territorializing-deterritorializing dynamic in think-
ing through curriculum allows us to clearly signal curriculum’s political char-
acter as well as the practices that subjects carry out in territorializing the
curriculum at the micro- and local-level in the Global South.
Until now, curricular territory in both hegemonic and counter-
hegemonic instantiations has excluded diverse subjects, subaltern subjects,
and in this sense, curriculum theory has voided curricular (Torres, 2012) and
epistemic justice (Paraskeva, 2016). These voids have resulted in the consti-
tution of subjects that are marginalized and excluded in schools, and they
have created self-contempt, robbing subjects of their identities, cultures, lan-
guages, and their own revindicating political-communal projects.
Monocultural and monolingual curriculum contradict education that
favors and supports human life. Instead monocultural and monolingual
curriculum promotes only neoliberal necropolitics of marketing the perma-
nent and ongoing global crises. It is both apparent and necessary that sub-
jects not abandon their linguistic, historical, and cultural identities (Torres,
2012) and that schools reconfigure the curriculum leveraging these iden-
tities from a bioregional perspective. Moreover, the-child-and-curriculum
along with the school-and-society need to be reconfigured based on stu-
dents’ identities starting with the curricular dynamic we have discussed in
our essay: Territorializing-deterritorializing the curriculum.
Territorializing-Deterritorializing: Tireless Path 149
The experience of the pandemic for the diverse subjects of education has
newly revealed the ongoing crises of curriculum but also the possibilities
of its displacement by newly territorializing-deterritorializing political poten-
tials. With these potentials we understand curriculum as a political project
whose horizons point toward an education that might enunciate solidary,
critical, autonomous, and free subjects. In this way, we advance a notion of
curriculum that is authentically reflexive and committed to justice in our
present moment.
Territorializing-deterritorializing the curriculum as a possible future
implies that subjects transgress the curricular borders imposed by homog-
enizing colonial logic. It depends on the capacity and agency of subjects to
gain consciousness as educators and public intellectuals along with the par-
ticipation of students to work toward the construction of alternative educa-
tional projects that move beyond the borders of the hegemonic curriculum.
Only in this way is it possible to obtain curricular justice toward the devel-
opment of epistemologies, identities, and cultures otherwise. Territorializing-
deterritorializing the curriculum in this way supposes a political struggle for
justice.
As a starting point from our reflections, we emphasize that the deter-
ritorialization of hegemonic curriculum needs to interpellate the corpus of
academic knowledge in order recognize that the canons of dominant curric-
ulum theory is no longer enough. These canons fail to explain the dynamics
of our present social-historical epoch through which we presently pass. We
exigently require other alternative practices that might engage and transform
the complex realities that stalk the most vulnerable populations, specifically
aggravated within Global South social-historical conditions.
For these populations, the promises of Western modernity tried to con-
vince everyone that inclusion in so-called global civilization was the only
route. The “global civilization” advanced Cartesian reasoning and Baconian
positivist designs organized through an exaggerated scientificity in curricu-
lar reasoning, in most occasions forming a rigid epistemic dogma to “mea-
sure” results. Such dogma refuses the cultural-historical recovery of subaltern
experiences and even less demonstrates an opening to possibly recognize
as valid the cosmovisions and knowledge traditions surging forth from a
geographic-epistemic Global South.
This reflection is a contribution that looks to support and advance dis-
courses on deterritorializing hegemonic curriculum because it is here, by
cracking open positivist “science” that advances a univocal stance, that we
can begin the construction of authentic intercultural curricular praxes that
might motivate transformative social practice from multiple cosmovisions
and, at the same time, understand itself to be unfinished and incomplete.
150 GA BR IEL VEGA TORRES, ET AL.
Finally, in search of proposing curricular alternatives that respond to
the diversity of languages that articulate the world, the territorializing-
deterritorializing dynamic strives toward all of the implied and possible
processes of subject formation (students, educators, communities, itinerant
migrantes, the indigenous, social activists, etcetera.) inside and outside of
school. We need to propagate active curricular projects as continually “under
construction” in order to combat that nihilistic skepticism and lack of hope
implied in what is understood as a finished world to which everyone simply
adapts. To the contrary, we advance territorializing-deterritorializing the cur-
riculum because it is urgent to pursue utopias where worlds-made-otherwise
might come into being. As the Zapatists insist, we must take up the tireless
path of becoming less incomplete.
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