Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
2022 Annual Conference of the Asian Qualitative Inquiry Association, 28 Ekim 2022, (Özet Bildiri)
Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) in a Turkish context should be established on
the critical analysis of the dominant conceptions of curriculum theory and curriculum making. One can overtly
see the national(ist)-conservatist-Islamist hegemonic triangle in politicizing education and in the content making
of the social curriculum through textbooks in Turkey’s education circle. Western (US+EU) influence is powerful
in a copy-paste culture of education. Therefore, transferism from the US+EU hegemony circle is supported by
the national(ist)-conservatist-Islamist triangle and is common to all aspects of the curriculum field from
adopting policies to academic publishing. Within this context, possible revolutionary resistance to these
conceptions would be possible by adopting a new understanding, a new conception of the curriculum. ICT
provides new thinking in the curriculum as opposed to placed knowledge. In the Turkish dictionary, the word
itinerant (seyyar- an Arabic word), has several meanings such as wanderer, something or someone with no
particular place or location; decentralized; rooted nowhere. Only this variety of meanings offers different
possibilities to the conception of ICT, a needed language for the displacement of what is emulative and what is
transferred with new thinking. From this point of view, I will refer to a concept of the mimetic curriculum which
requires a continuous legitimation of the placed knowledge of the EU+US circle. As opposed to emulation, ICT,
as a “rooted nowhere” theory, offers emancipation by killing this kind of curriculum thinking. Resistance is a
start-off for emancipation, for the killing of the old. Such a society with the fullest potential for social
emancipation where resistance may be a way of taking this posture (Paraskeva, 2016), an act of displacement.
The current curriculum thinking is much fed by the tradition of the EU+US circle and thus may be displaced
with the future of curriculum. This thinking offers “emancipatory labor in schools and communities… resist and
disrupt old ways of knowing that formerly rendered subaltern lives silent and invisible” (Paraskeva, 2016). This
is a movement to leave the discourse of educational development which was produced and legitimatized by the
European and American clubs. Certainly, this is a double challenge for Turkey as a country that is squeezed in
between the West and the East, the North and the South along with the dichotomy of transformation and
tradition.