Awakenings to the Calling of Nonviolence in Curriculum Studies

Hongyu Wang’s remarkable Awakenings to the Calling of Nonviolence in Curriculum Studies both assembles and expands upon her decades-long, boundless examinations of complexities and potentialities of nonviolence as an “everyday practice of education.” Analyzing complex entanglings of divergent theoretical, cultural, historical and social perspectives, Wang consistently incorporates iterations of difference within the ongoing processes of creating, re-forming and renewing nonviolent relationships with self, other, the earth. Acknowledging nonviolence as a personal calling, one that daily illuminates her cross-cultural pathways, Wang invites her readers to co-travel, to “dream forward” with her as means of enlivening the always-relational, interconnected nature of nonviolence. Via that very invitation, she also enacts the very dynamics of curriculum as lived experience. Writing movingly through both joy and loss in her conceptualizings as well as livings of nonviolence, Hongyu Wang has made a profound contribution to the field of curriculum studies, in particular, and to education, writ large. Janet L. Miller Professor Emerita, Teachers College, Columbia University ‘Starlight is everywhere’, Hongyu Wang exclaims—That starlight is nonviolence, lighting the way in dark times; but we must awaken to it, as the call of this moment, and as a call that is educational. Advancing nonviolence as an everyday practice of education, rooted in a sense of our interconnectedness, she proposes a positive force for the cultivation of flourishing personhood and planet, a promising response to the challenges of division and difference, and a transformational path for creatively restoring and sustaining human happiness and community. She invites us, as well, to imbue our understandings of curriculum as lived with such energy and intention, by which violence and its normalization may not only be denounced, and systems of domination and dualism deconstructed, but also dynamic, nonviolent relationality nurtured within and among us respecting self, others, and the world. A truly beautiful and phenomenal achievement, this seminal and systematic treatment of nonviolence in education and curriculum studies is at once: intellectually productive—illumining the limitations of as well as lines of affiliation with current literature in the field advancing democracy, equity and social justice; theoretically sophisticated—deftly integrating international/indigenous wisdom traditions, nonviolence and peace studies & movements, as well as diverse theoretical perspectives (e.g., critical, poststructural, psychoanalytic, feminist); and emotionally stirring—infused with the experiential insight and autobiographical heart of this foremost scholar on the subject. If King reminds us that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, Hongyu Wang convinces us that it bends toward nonviolence too. Molly Quinn, PhD St. Bernard Chapter of the LSU Alumni Association Endowed Professor Director, LSU Curriculum Theory Project Louisiana State University