Curriculum as cultural practice: Postcolonial imagination

The opportunity to take familiar curriculum concepts/ideas and re-imag-ine and re-articulate them in ways that facilitate the development of new habits of mind is exciting for me for a number of reasons. First, it brings to the forefront what I have been “preaching ” in my academic work for some time now, namely, that alternative sites for curriculum theorizing could be generated from already established curricular metaphors/concepts and their reflections in practice. Second, the move itself is a recognition that multiple modes of theoretical representation emerge from genuinely valuing alter-native insights and perspectives grounded in a dynamic variety of human experiences, thereby adding richness and complexity to curriculum and curriculum discourse. Third, it is an opportunity for me to closely examine a popular and taken-for-granted curriculum metaphor—“curriculum as cultural practice”—and demonstrate how, historically, it has been mediated through a colonial imagination “contrived to the disbenefit of the other” (London, 2001, p. 45). The intent here is to re-imagine and re-theorize thi