Lynn Fendler

Teacher Reflection in a Hall of Mirrors: Historical Influences and Political Reverberations

This article traces the genealogy of reflection in teacher education by seeking the conditions of its emergence through the influences of Descartes, Dewey, Schön, and feminism. Drawing on the critical lenses of Foucaultian genealogy and the sociology of scientific knowledge, the analysis investigates how the complicated meanings of reflection get played out in complex and contradictory ways through research practices. The purpose of this article is to highlight the diversity of meanings that constitute understandings of the term and then to critique the effects of power that reverberate through current reflective practices.

Others and the Problem of Community

ABSTRACT Community building has been a key concern for a wide array of educational projects. Recently, educational theories concerned about social justice have begun to challenge assumptions about community in U.S. education by criticizing its tendencies toward assimilation and homogeneity. Such theories point out that a communitarian agenda excludes the Other, the stranger, or the person of difference. This paper analyzes various conflicting constructions of community in current U.S. education literature, including the establishment of common values in schools, the attempt to integrate racially diverse views into educational discourse, and the exhortation for political solidarity within underrepresented groups. I analyze the construction of community and suggest that community has three distinct strands of meaning: the appeal to “third way” kinds of compromise, the appeal to solidarity for empowerment, and the appeal of emotional bonding. After providing examples of these three strands, I argue that current definitions and assumptions about community building can be politically dangerous insofar as differences are appropriated, assimilated, or excluded. Finally, by bringing some examples from feminism and postcolonialism into conversation with education, I suggest that problematizing the idea of community allows for critical appraisal of the meanings of community and difference, commonality, and diversity.

New and improved educationalising: faster, more powerful and longer lasting

This paper is a historical and critical analysis of changes in features of educationalisation focusing on how educationalisation has been characterised over time by a peculiar interweaving of knowledge and social reform. The history of the American Social Science Association provides a backdrop; drawing on the theories of Deleuze, this paper highlights historical differences between previous and current educationalisation features in research and schooling. Building on the Deleuzian analysis, the paper then examines characteristics of Problem-based Learning, as an example of educationalisation, in so far as it casts education as an engineering task. The paper concludes with a critical analysis of norm-referenced standards in educational research and schooling, questioning the relationship between education and empowerment.

Whose literacy? Discursive constructions of life and objectivity

Drawing from literature in the social studies of science, this paper historicizes two pivotal concepts in science literacy: the definition of life and the assumption of objectivity. In this paper we suggest that an understanding of the historical, discursive production of scientific knowledge affects the meaning of scientific literacy in at least three ways. First, a discursive study of scientific knowledge has the epistemological consequence of avoiding the selective perception that occurs when facts are abstracted from the historical conditions of their emergence. Second, a discursive approach to scientific knowledge can also be an example of science‐as‐exploration. Third, literacy and discourse studies contribute insights that alter assumptions about pedagogical appropriateness in science education. The paper concludes by suggesting that when science literacy includes the historical production of scientific knowledge, it can thereby extend the possibilities for what can be thought, studied and imagined in the name of science education.

Focusing on presentation instead of representation: perspectives on representational and non-representational language-games for educational history and theory

Debates in science seem to depend on referential language-games, but in other senses they do not. This article addresses non-representational theory. It is a branch of newer approaches to cultural geography that strive to get a handle on spatial relationships not by representing them, but rather by presenting them. In this case, present connotes spatial and temporal proximity and availability. In non-representational theories, there are no longer signs or symbols that represent concepts or realities. Furthermore, non-representational theories also dissolve distinctions between the speakable and the unspeakable, and they erase distinctions among pictures, models, displays or depictions and reality. The article outlines briefly the stance of the historian Ankersmit, who distinguishes presentation from representation in history and the consequences for the truth-value of what is argued for. Finally, insights from representational and non-representational positions are offered as they relate generally to educational research.

How Is It Possible to Make a Difference? Agency, Actors, and Affect as Discourses of Change in Education Research

This paper describes three discourses that have been mobilized in educational research for thinking about how to make a difference: agency, actors, and affect. (1) Agency in critical theory is positioned in a particular dialectical relationship to structure. The distinction between domination and agency appears to derive from pre-existing ideological stances that cast change as the product of antagonistic oppositional forces. When structure is understood in terms of dominant ideologies, then agency becomes the explanation for change. (2) When we use Actor Network Theory to explain change, we have at our disposal a great many more sites of potential change. With ANT, researchers have the possibility to attribute change to non-human entities, and to produce historical narratives of change that include many changes of direction, fits and starts, aborted efforts, and serendipitous results of interactions. (3) Nonrepresentational theories put everything on the same plane of immanence, and this deregulation allows the greatest possible range of possibilities for attributing change. For educational research, nonrepresentational theory has the effect of deregulating the scope of possibilities and rules of engagement by which researchers can attribute change and claim difference, and still holding researchers accountable for the ethics and aesthetics of affecting change. This paper summarizes, historicizes and analyzes implications of agency, actors, and affect for effecting change.

There Are No Independent Variables in History

For this chapter’s approach to historicizing historiography, I consider the publication of this book to be a historical event. By regarding the publication of this book as a historical event, I can read the chapters as contributing to, and having been shaped by, a confluence (or “entanglement” per Sobe, this volume) of factors including current fashions in historiography, linguistic affinities, and the influence of Thomas S. Popkewitz’s editorial hand. Explicit statements in the introduction and implications of specific chapters indicate that this book was designed to interrupt current assumptions about historiography, especially those that have become prominent in recent US educational research, about what it means to do history of education. The chapters in this volume enact different kinds of critical interventions against some traditional approaches to writing history.

Web 2.0 and the Future of Education Research

For any conversation about the future of education research, it is necessary at some point to address the roles of computer-based information technology. Knowledge production, research reporting, access to information, and pedagogical design in education are now all mediated by various sorts of computer technologies. From a standpoint of critical curriculum theory, I am interested in examining the ways in which Web 2.0 technologies present possibilities for education research that are different from other forms of information technology, and how those differences may be relevant in terms of epistemology, pedagogy, communication, and power relations in education.

Educationalising Trends in Societies of Control: Assessments, Problem-Based Learning and Empowerment

In order to provide some parameters by which I might identify characteristics of educationalisation, I have found it helpful to draw on Mary Furner’s (1975) history of the American Social Science Association and James Kaminsky’s (1993) history of educational philosophy. Furner argues compellingly that the mission of the early American Social Science Association was one of reform. Her book is aptly titled Advocacy and Objectivity, and she writes:

Philosophies of Hospitality: Toward Perpetual Peace and Freedom

This paper has been inspired by the Research Community: History and Philosophy of Educational Research, of which I have been a member since 2000. Organisers Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe have hosted annual face-to-face gatherings of this Research Community for the past 19 years. It is in appreciation of the Research Community as a site of hospitality that this chapter is dedicated. Based on my experiences with this group of philosophers and historians, this chapter celebrates the philosophical themes of vrede and gastvrijheid.