through a futures lens

Thinking about curriculum stands to gain from the creative engagement afforded by the global civilizational encounters that will define the twenty first century. Pedagogically this means a constant pushing at the boundaries of how we think about education both in terms of content and also in terms of human existential demands for meaning. This pushing requires that we step outside of the colonizing mindset of educational imperialism and engage with deep dialogue across civilizational terrain that is challenging, complex, uncomfortable but also deeply rich in possibilities. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have highlighted how Western philosophy and, as a result, Western pedagogy are in fact geophilosophically confined to a Greek and totalizing vision of being that limits human cultural invention. The resultant intellectual movements of humanism and Enlightenment reason have been unilateral and failed to engage with local and normative forms of meaning making that affirm human relationships with context. In this globalizing context, as traditions encounter one another, there are an increased range of preferences on offer. Such encounters are sources of great vitality for the curricula field and can result in a wide range of hybrid possibilities. Understanding the geophilosophical orientation of current educational practice opens up the educational space to increased diversity. As Noel Gogh notes: Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy enlarges the field of concepts and signs that we can deploy to account for difference, which in turn multiplies the possibilities for analyses, critiques, and interventions. Such a broadening of our repertoires of representation and performance may be particularly useful when we encounter remarkable difference (difference that puzzles, provokes, surprises or shocks us) … (2007, p. 286