The Asia Literacy Dilemma

Book excerpt: The Asia literacy dilemma brings forward a novel approach to the long-standing global debates of Asia-related teaching and learning. By bringing into focus ‘Asia’ as a curriculum area, the book provides original commentary on the rationale and feasibility of ‘Asia literacy’ and its role and significance within and for twenty-first-century education. The book’s unique contribution lies in a comprehensive problematisation of ‘Asia’ as planned, enacted and experienced curriculum, bringing together policy, teacher practice and student experiences to present an extensive discussion. By contextualising the problematics of Asia-related curriculum within contemporary national and transnational curriculum challenges, Cairns and Weinmann take account of conflicting discourses of nation-building, ethnocentrism, transnationalism, geo-economics and the purposes of twenty-first-century education. Its use of interview data with teachers and students recentres key actors that are often sidelined in official curriculum policy discourse. The book also introduces the concept of curricularisation to describe the process through which objects and discourses of curriculum are produced and reproduced. In doing so, the book presents a comprehensive discussion of the impossibilities and possibilities of Asia curriculum in the Australian context, providing an innovative longitudinal and integrated understanding of the status quo of Asia curriculum. Highlighting the urgent need to reinvigorate the re-emerging centrality of curriculum in recent education debates around policy, teacher standards, assessmentand learning outcomes, this book is an important reference for education policy experts and academics in the fields of curriculum studies, teacher education and studies of Asia.