Showing papers by "Thomas S. Popkewitz published in 2008"

Paradigm and Ideology in Educational Research: Social Functions of the Intellectual

Abstract: I accept much that Popkewitz says in his impressive book. I wish I didn't! He writes with great elegance and power on many issues of current interest: the social and cultural location of research activities; the relationship between theory, research and practice; the social role of the intellectual and the epistemological and social assumptions inherent in professional practice. I read the book with a degree of elation, inwardly nodding and saying to myself: Yes, yes, yes. And yet after finishing it I experienced a certain post-reading tristesse. The analysis of the nature of educational research, strategies of educational change, the process of evaluation and problems of educational consultancy is trenchant but the question with which one is left is not: What is the future for these activities? but: Have these activities any future? Popkewitz's discussion of different research paradigms will be familiar to most readers who are already university teachers or members of the research community, but it constitutes a very clear and sophisticated introduction for students coming fresh to the discussion of conflicting methodologies. He is fair to all perspectives, but his own position is quite clear. In stating that the purpose of this book is to probe 'how social assumptions, cultural location and political interests become inextricably tied to conceptual procedures and design questions' it is clear that the idea of rational, objective, value-free educational science isn't going to come out on top. And so it proves. However, though a critique of Western liberal-bourgeois objectivist social science will be familiar to many, Popkewitz's chapter on Soviet pedagogical sciences may well cover unfamiliar ground. The point which he elaborates is that the Western emphasis on schooling as a psychological problem and the Soviet emphasis on schooling as a pedagogical problem have to be seen not simply as differing in their utilitarian purposes but as rooted in the different historical and social circumstances in which educational goals are decided. Soviet research is based on Marxist analysis underpinned by the philosophical assumptions of dialectical materialism, but Popkewitz explores various contradictions and the challenges made by a number of Soviet educationists.

Education sciences, schooling, and abjection: recognizing difference and the making of inequality?

Abstract: Schooling in North America and northern Europe embodies salvation themes. The themes are (re)visions of Enlightenments' projects about the cosmopolitan citizen and scientific progress. The emancipatory principles, however, were never merely about freedom and inclusion. A comparative system of reason was inscribed as gestures of hope and fear. The hope was of the child who would be the future cosmopolitan citizen; the fears were of the dangers and dangerous people to that future. The double gestures continue in contemporary school reform and its sciences. American progressive education sciences at the turn of the 20th century and contemporary school reform research are examined to understand their different cultural theses about cosmopolitan modes of life and the child cast out as different and abjected. Today's cosmopolitanism, different from that in the past, generates principles about the lifelong learner and its cosmopolitan hope of inclusion. The inclusionary impulse is expressed in the phrase “all children can learn”. The child who stands outside of the unity of “all children” is disadvantaged and urban. School subject research in music at the turn of the 20th century and today's mathematics education are exemplars of the inscriptions of hope and fears in the sciences of education. The method of study is a history of the present. It is a strategy of resistance and counter praxis by making visible what is assumed as natural and inevitable in schooling. Keywords : educational sciences; history of present; politics of schooling; reform; social inclusion/exclusion South African Journal of Education Vol. 28 (3) 2008: pp. 301-319

The Social, Psychological, and Education Sciences: From Educationalization to Pedagogicalization of the Family and the Child

Abstract: This chapter considers the thesis of pedagogicalization through focusing the social and education sciences. Pedagogicalization is spoken about as the expertise of science in ordering what is (im)possible to know and do, creating borders by which experiences are acted upon and the self is located as an actor. The expertise is explored historically through changes in the cultural theses about the modes of life of the child and family: turn of the 20th century educationalization in which the lives of the family and child are rationalized to relate individuality to norms linked to collective, social belonging; and turn of the 21st century pedagogicalization in which the expertise of science focuses on individuality as a seemingly isolated site of continuous innovation and processes of self-evaluation and monitoring bound to networks with no social center.1 In both the past and the present, the cultural theses generated about the family and child, I argue, embody double gestures about the hope of the future and fears about those dangerous to that future and abjected, cast out into unlivable spaces. The first section directs attention to turn of the 20th century social and education sciences and is divided into three four parts. (1) The initial discussion focuses on the American Progressive reforms as turning the private sphere of the family into an object of scrutiny and public administration in making society. (2) The sciences of progressive reforms, argued in the next, generated cultural theses about the family as embodying cosmopolitan values that linked individuality with narratives of the nation and its collective progress. (3) Pedagogy was ‘converting ordinances’ and the soul as the object in the ordering of conduct. (4) Following this discussion, cosmopolitan hope is examined as engendering double gestures. With the hope of progressive reforms were fears of those populations deemed as threatening the future of the republic. The sciences of G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and Edward L. Thorndike, icons in American Progressive education, are explored as embodying double gestures to The Social Question, the concern for intervention programs to perceived moral disorders to the city and poor and immigrant populations.