Border Crossing

Border crossing is a central concept in the field of curriculum studies. It reflects a profoundly democratic vision of curriculum and locates a set of challenges in realizing this vision. This entry communicates this vision and the associated challenges that educators must address. The entry also provides a set of promising conceptual and pedagogic practices that can help educators confront the portrayed challenges.

In common language, a border can possess positive qualities such as providing helpful conceptual boundaries and asserting the parameters of legal sovereignty. In addition, from a conventional perspective, many borders appear to be ethically neutral, natural in their origin or fixed in their essence, such as one's sex, race, ethnicity, language, or intelligence. By contrast, the primary use of the term border within curriculum studies is pejorative, meant to convey dynamics of dominance and exclusion, inequality, and marginalization. Rather than seen as natural, predetermined, and/or unalterable, borders within a curriculum studies perspective are characteristically viewed as historically contingent, culturally constructed phenomena, perpetuated at the personal, social, and institutional levels in ways that are variously deliberate, habitual, and unconscious.

Curriculum educators committed to a holistic vision of democratic living seek to minimize, reconfigure, transcend, that is, to cross these borders for multiple salutary purposes: to disrupt and demystify stereotypes and enhance deep mutual understanding across differences; to expand bonds of community solidarity; to foster fuller, hybridized self-realization; to problematize prevailing, often unexamined relationships of power and hierarchy; and to institutionalize more enlightened commitments to social justice.

Obstacles to advancing this vision are ubiquitous and deep seated, multilayered, and intertwined. Biological forces often conspire to prioritize familiarity, predictability, equilibrium. Historical and systemic forces, involving sociocultural-political beliefs, attitudes, and rituals, congeal to normalize “us” and villainize the Other. Dominant derivatives of these forces can be fear and disgust, condescension and self-righteousness. In both symbolic and concrete ways, these intoxicating ingredients, often incensed by religious practices, tend to metastasize into an insistent demand for invasion and colonization, certainty and control, separation or stratification. These dynamics can overwhelm the realization of alternate, more democratic impulses toward curiosity and connection, accommodation and care. These latter dispositions are instrumental to a state of more peaceful, respectful, even flourishing coexistence within difference.

Animated by biology and religion, culture and politics, this quest for certainty and control, simultaneously universalizing and insulating, unavoidably collides with the irrepressible reality of three types of controversy that crisscross all these domains of life. These three types involve factual, definitional, and value disputes.

Representing disagreement over what has happened in the past or what will happen in the future, factual controversy highlights the inherent limitations of human knowledge and the essential unpredictability of various human (inter)actions. Given the stakes in terms of affirming or shaking one's personal identity, or influencing the distribution of power and tangible resources, individuals and groups are intensely concerned about how these factual disputes are resolved. A small sample of factual issues on which many citizens, policy makers, and private individuals hold tenaciously antagonistic viewpoints includes the creationist versus Darwinist conception of the origin of the universe; the effects of sex education practices on youth's responsible sexual behavior; the impact of selected governmental regulations on affordable, quality health care and the stable growth of the marketplace; the effects of bilingual or mainstreamed special education programs on the social and intellectual development of all students; the origin and mutability of one's sexual orientation; and the relative role of structural versus personal factors in perpetuating poverty.

...