Itinerant curriculum theory. A declaration of epistemological independence By João M.Paraskeva, London: Bloomsbury. 2024. 284 pp. ISBN 978‐1350292987

Anyone interested in curriculum studies should see this book as a harbinger of what curriculum studies should be It is highly complex to be able to talk about education detached from other socially intricate issues humanity is currently facing. Any education discussion requires—implicitly or explicitly—that we place such issues at the core of our curriculum affairs and classroom practices. Curriculum debates are conflictive (Apple, 1979) and epitomize what Lyotard (1984) calls ‘language games’. They trigger countless hours of debates in schools, colleges, classrooms and other vast academic communities. Many pedagogues have written about it, and endless theories persistently challenge us to question, ‘Whose/what reading we make of the curriculum’, to ‘whom/what end we do it’, ‘who is talking about curriculum’, ‘who benefits?’ ‘Where do such debates lead us’. ‘what are its implications in theory and practice, and to what extent does the curriculum determine educational action’? João M. Paraskeva's Itinerant Curriculum Theory. A Declaration of Epistemological Independence (hereafter ICT) attempts to unpack and reframe such complicated questions and adds new bold, non-derivative avenues to the debate. Paraskeva's critique of epistemicide, thus, is a call for ICT as a force that gains strength as it weaves through the world and cultivates a repertoire of possibilities that offers solidarity with particular needs in diverse places, especially in the Global South and in oppressed dimensions of the deficiently labeled first world (i.e., less recognized spheres of the Global South, embedded in what could be called the Global South within the Global North, West and East). Paraskeva's Chapter 2 denounces the field's ‘theorycide’—a non-theory theoretical current stage—and unpacks ICT as a non-divisive way to interrupt such an attack on theory. He challenges the eugenic nature of the field, and the Eurocentric fundamentalism of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic traditions; he reiterates the importance of ICT to address the world's endless difference and diversity. James Jupp and peers' Chapter 3 unveils through decolonial veins how ICT helps to edify ‘a decolonial-Hispanophone curriculum’ countering dominant traditions. They frame ICT as a decolonial, anti-racist, curriculum-pedagogical thesaurus fostering nuestros locales—the ‘Indigenous, brown, and black geo-regional traditions of Latin America’. Such a call is also palatable in Graciela Baum and Weili Zhao's chapters. In Chapter 4, Baum draws on ICT to provide an alternative way to disestablish ‘euro-usa-centric’ curriculum dictums and excavate non-derivative approaches ‘to decolonize the English curriculum in Argentina’ recognizing the legitimacy of disparate ‘border voices, saberes, feelings, and bodies’; in Chapter 5, Zhao unpacks the importance of the ICT—as a curriculum camiñar—in China and its interplay with some ‘itinerant’ critical axles within Confucianism’. José Félix Angulo Rasco, in the following chapter, critically examines ICT to challenge ‘neoliberal curriculum and pedagogies in Chile’. Rasco explores how ICT short-circuits traditional functionalist and deterministic curriculum forms—that is, standards and testing—providing a more inclusive pedagogical platform. Fatma Mizikaci's chapter exfoliates—a dear term used by Paraskeva in his examination of ICT—how ICT helps to respond to the needs and challenges faced by historical resistance social movements in Turkey such as Gezi that emerged as a democratic demand ‘for freedom of speech, for recognition of cultural, gender, life diversity, for social justice’. In Chapter 8, Jung Hoon Jung examines the importance of ICT in the Korean curriculum field and how it relates to the ‘neo-post-colonial’ struggles led by one of the most prominent South Korean pedagogues, Young Chun Kim. Rosa Vázquez Recio, in her chapter, helps to complexify our understandings of ICT and how such a new curriculum approach helps one to delink and deterritorialize from hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions to address issues related to injustice, inequality and inequity related to curriculum. Inês Barbosa de Oliveira, in Chapter 10, provides a parallel between ICT and curriculum, as everyday creation in Brazil, and how such anti-colonial curriculum forms are saturated with spontaneity. ICT, Oliveira argues, counters determinism and instrumentality and deals with people's immediate challenges and desires. Mekia Nedjar's chapter takes on the potential of ICT within and beyond our field in Argelia and the Arab world. She unveils how ICT helps to debunk coloniality views that frame the field of international relations. Maria Luiza Süssekind introduces ICT in Chapter 12 to overcome the abyssal line that edifies subalternity and sub-humanity and its impact on our field. In doing so, she explores ICT as a decolonial turn to smash curriculum divisive and graded theoretical lines towards a curriculum that echoes ‘everyday life practices’, which calls for teachers and students to be knowledge creators. Shervani K. Pillay's chapter explores how ICT ethos for social and cognitive justice should constitute a significant political vein in the needed curriculum reforms in South Africa, addressing issues of recognition, inequality, poverty and racism. Omsin Jatuporn, in Chapter 14, unveils how educators should rely on ICT to counter dominant educational and curriculum conventional discourses in Thailand, still under the virus of ‘despotic epistemology’ implicated in various forms of positivist-functionalist approaches and technical-instrumental rationality. Todd Price's piece unveils the concept of ‘virality’—a primary condition of our existence in this viral era through social media and the explosion of digitally enhanced neural connections. In doing so, he advances the role of ICT in addressing the challenges triggered by such virality. Finally, in the last chapter, Arion Godoy and Maria Cecilia Leite examine Paraskeva's ICT in the context of ‘education in rights’ advocated by the Brazilian Public Defender's Office. The chapter reiterates ICT as the decolonized momentum crucial for just curriculum democratic processes as a fundamental human rights issue. has been one of those tenderly revealing lines of thought whose tenets bear such wisdom and handiness that – after reading thoroughly into it – I found I had been applying some of them intuitively in my classes. The journey into ICT has been enriching and, at times, soothing of all the injustice and pain caused by the deadly hegemonic and homogenizing inertia and anglophile bandwagonism that co-opts curricular views in the field of ELT. As the volume documents, ICT allows teachers and educators to develop a curriculum that reflects the radical co-habitus of the world's different and diverse epistemological perspectives, thus addressing humanity's social challenges. This book becomes a necessary asset for educators since it provides an essential pedagogical way of thinking and existence for teachers to achieve a just pedagogy in schools, capable of responding to the diverse epistemological challenges of an increasingly differentiated school community and society. ICT is about hope and possibility, as the volume documents. Paraskeva's Itinerant Curriculum Theory exemplifies how an inclusive curriculum vision allows us to illuminate the darkest spaces of the educational task, healing many of those struggles that come from the confrontation between theory, praxis, and reality, politics and humanity, and idealization and experience. As William Schubert (Chapter 1, p. 1) states in his introductory chapter, ‘anyone interested in curriculum studies should see this book as a harbinger of what curriculum studies should be’. I thus welcome the reader to enjoy the ‘itinerant’ ride. Thanks to Joao Paraskeva for the trust he placed in me to prepare this review for such a relevant book in the educational field, more than necessary if we see the current times for the educational act. There are no conflicts of interest that should be taken into account or prevent the preparation and publication of this review. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.