Struggles over Difference

Disrupts popular myths about education in Asia and the Pacific. Winner of the 2006 AERA Division B Outstanding Book Award Struggles over Difference addresses education, schools, textbooks, and pedagogies in various countries of the Asia-Pacific, offering critical curriculum studies and policy analyses of national and regional educational systems. These systems face challenges linked to new economic formations, cultural globalization, and emergent regional and international geopolitical instabilities and conflicts. Contributors offer insights on how official knowledge, text, discourse, and discipline should be shaped; who should shape it; through which institutional agencies it should be administered; and social and cultural practices through which this should occur. The book disrupts popular myths about education in this part of the world, including base suppositions about the "other": that Asian pedagogy is exclusively rote learning, that educational systems and governments here are faced with classical developing country issues, and that institutional and state formation in the region can be assessed on a North/West or left/right continuum. The essays not only map and reframe issues of difference for those who work in education in the Asia-Pacific, but also illuminate critical issues of curriculum and policy for teachers, students, teacher educators, and researchers worldwide.