Keeping doors open: transnational families and curricular nationalism

Abstract

This paper reviews sociological literature to explore the challenge transnational populations pose for nation-based curriculum, and vice versa. With increasing access to dual citizenship and temporary migration, more people are living transnational lifestyles. This poses new challenges in raising the transnational child. Transnationalism has emerged ‘bottom-up’ from individualised choices and circumstances rather than ‘top-down’ through institutional strategy. As a result, education sectors are yet to respond with a reoriented curriculum that can accommodate polycentric lives. This paper adapts Beck’s critique of methodological nationalism and proposes a parallel concept in the curricular nationalism underpinning much official curriculum. It then reviews literature reporting on three curricular experiments that seek to cultivate citizenships above and beyond the nation. While such transcendent designs on citizenship unsettle curricular nationalism, they fail to address the specificities of transnational child’s memberships both here and there. The pedagogic principle of ‘connectedness’ is retooled as a pragmatic way forward.

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