Aporias, Transcendence and a Curriculum of Hospitality

Abstract

Engaging in dynamic encounters with the other and otherness in education—an issue of creating an aperture that welcomes “a newcomer” either as a new idea or new practice—is important for the field of curriculum studies. Complicating aporias as “various forms of other and otherness,” this paper focuses on the encounters with other and otherness (as our understanding of transcendence or border crossing), in which transcendence (border crossing) becomes possible when a curriculum of hospitality is enacted. While culturally and historically informed, the curriculum of hospitality stresses the simultaneity of (1) ethical attentiveness to the encounters with other and otherness, (2) understanding the premise on which hospitality can be enacted—equality and humility and (3) autobiography as possible enacted form of the curriculum. As a curriculum counterpart (Pinar, 2011), curriculum of hospitality centralizes ethical attentiveness to encounters with other and otherness that makes transcendence (space carving) possible, the possible enactment of which is autobiography. It emphasizes the responsibility of educators for welcoming students into a particular world of ideas, knowledge, and skills that honors otherness with hospitality.