Abstract
This chapter evokes nonviolence—the calling of our time—as a curriculum vision to rethink our daily educational work. The task of the curriculum theorist in the local, national, and international world is to practice nonviolence in everyday educational life. Nonviolence—cultivating the integration of body and mind and promoting compassionate relationships—should lie at the heart of today’s education. In this paper, I first discuss the concept of nonviolence and then explore three important aspects of engaging nonviolence in education: nonviolent engagement with the self, nonviolent relationships with difference, and practicing nonviolence as an essential task of the curriculum theorist. In so doing, I also explore different intellectual traditions in curriculum studies and their contributions to this vision, including nonviolence studies, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and international wisdom traditions.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper is a revision of a keynote presentation at the 5th triennial meeting of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) at the University of Ottawa, Canada, in May 2015. My thanks go to conference organizers especially Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook for inviting me to speak to an international audience. I also thank the Association of Canadian Deans of Education for sponsoring my visit.
- 2.
Organic relationality lies at the heart of nonviolence but it necessarily contains the difficulty of growth and life in general. Refusing to grow up and staying in one’s comfort zone is, arguably, doing violence to oneself. In this sense, the loss, pain, and anxiety of growing up cannot be avoided, but can be sustained by compassionate relationships. Moreover, Freudian psychoanalysis is embedded in modern Western discourses that set individuality and sociality at odds with each other. As much as sociality can repress individual desire, individuality relies on sociality to enable its own independence. In this sense, the relationship between the two cannot be only subversive but must be dialectic.
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Wang, H. (2019). Nonviolence as a Daily Practice in Education: A Curriculum Vision. In: Hébert, C., Ng-A-Fook, N., Ibrahim, A., Smith, B. (eds) Internationalizing Curriculum Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01352-3_12
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