Winner of the 2006 AERA Division B Outstanding Book Award

Struggles over Difference addresses education, schools, textbooks, and pedagogies in various countries of the Asia-Pacific, offering critical curriculum studies and policy analyses of national and regional educational systems. These systems face challenges linked to new economic formations, cultural globalization, and emergent regional and international geopolitical instabilities and conflicts. Contributors offer insights on how official knowledge, text, discourse, and discipline should be shaped; who should shape it; through which institutional agencies it should be administered; and social and cultural practices through which this should occur.

The book disrupts popular myths about education in this part of the world, including base suppositions about the "other": that Asian pedagogy is exclusively rote learning, that educational systems and governments here are faced with classical developing country issues, and that institutional and state formation in the region can be assessed on a North/West or left/right continuum. The essays not only map and reframe issues of difference for those who work in education in the Asia-Pacific, but also illuminate critical issues of curriculum and policy for teachers, students, teacher educators, and researchers worldwide.

Introduction
Yoshiko Nozaki, Roger Openshaw, and Allan Luke

1. Curriculum, Ethics, Metanarrative: Teaching and Learning Beyond the Nation
Allan Luke

2. “… Nothing Objectionable or Controversial”: The Image of Maori Ethnicity and “Difference” in New Zealand Social Studies
Roger Openshaw

3. State Formation, Hegemony, and Chinese School Curricula in Singapore and Hong Kong, 1945–1965
Ting-Hong Wong

4. Official Knowledge and Hegemony: The Politics of the Textbook Deregulation Policy in Taiwan
Jyh-Jia Chen

5. Thai English Language Textbooks, 1960–2000: Postwar Industrial and Global Changes
Noparat Suaysuwan and Cushla Kapitzke

6. The Construction of Culture Knowledge in Chinese Language Textbooks: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Yongbing Liu

7. New Ideologies of Everyday Life in South Korean Language Textbooks
Dong Bae (Isaac) Lee

8. Environmental Education and Development in China
Darren M. O’Hern

9. School Knowledge and Classed and Gendered Subjectivities in South Korean Commercial High Schools
Misook Kim

10. Identity Conversion, Citizenship, and Social Studies: Asian-Australian Perspectives on Indigenous Reconciliation and Human Rights
Michael Singh

11. Fastening and Unfastening Identities: Negotiating Identity in Hawai‘i
Gay Garland Reed

12. The Question of Identity and Difference: The Resident Korean Education in Japan
Hiromitsu Inokuchi and Yoshiko Nozaki

13. History, Postmodern Discourse, and the Japanese Textbook Controversy over “Comfort Women”
Yoshiko Nozaki

Contributors
Index