Border Pedagogy in American Schooling: Reflections on China Pedagogy in Cultural Studies

When debating whether cultural studies has exhausted its use, we tend to overlook its pivotal role in critical pedagogies for teaching difference at school. Chinese Studies in American colleges and schools offers a case of reading personal memoirs of China's traumatic pasts as if they were authentications of Chinese history. Disregarding the hidden teleological end of these personalized narratives, some educators in the U.S. use instructional games and films adapted from such a narrative mode to teach other cultures, but represent the latter's difference as deficient, deviating or lacking, which in turn alludes to itself as the ”penultimate form” of democracy. By espousing a critical ”border pedagogy,” humanist educators can resist the end-of-history mindset and move toward more dialectic and reciprocating strategies for teaching difference.