Thomas S. Popkewitz

The production of reason and power: Curriculum history and intellectual traditions

Curricula are historically formed within systems of ideas that inscribe styles of reasoning, standards and conceptual distinctions in school practices and its subjects. Further, the systems of reasoning embodied in schooling are the effects of power. That power is in the manner in which the categories and distinctions of curriculum shape and fashion interpretation and action. In this sense, curriculum is a practice of social regulation and the effect of power. The question of what is curriculumhistory is also a question about the politics of the knowledge embodied in disciplinary work. Two enduring assumptions of the Enlightenment inscribed in contemporary educational history and research are explored. One identifies social progress as tied to an evolutionary conception of change. The second relates to the epistemological assumption that inquiry must identify the actors as causal agents who bring or suppress social change. Both of these assumptions are, I argue, grounded in a particular doctrine of modern...

The Alchemy of the Mathematics Curriculum: Inscriptions and the Fabrication of the Child:

School subjects are analogous to medieval alchemy. There is a magical change as mathematics, science, and social sciences move from their disciplinary spaces into the classroom. The educational and social psychologies have little or nothing to do with understanding disciplinary practices. They are intellectual inventions for normalizing and governing the child’s conduct, relationships, and communications. The author examines this alchemy in standards-based mathematics educational policy and research for K–12 schools. He argues that (a) the emphasis on “problem solving,” collaboration, and “communities of learning” sanctify science and scientists as possessing authoritative knowledge over increasing realms of human phenomena, thus narrowing the boundaries of possible action and critical thought; and (b) while reforms stress the need for educational equity for “all children,” with “no child left behind,” the pedagogical models divide, demarcate, and exclude particular children from participation.

Dewey, Vygotsky, and the Social Administration of the Individual: Constructivist Pedagogy as Systems of Ideas in Historical Spaces

Current constructivists’ pedagogies draw on the writings of early 20th century Russian psychologist Vygotsky and the American phhilosopher/psychologist Dewey. This occurs without examining the historical spaces of the past and present in which that knowledge is socially constructed. This emptying of history in systems of knowledge is odd for an intellectual project concerned with cultural-historical theories. To address this omission, the writings of Dewey and Vygotsky are examined as part of the turn-of-the-century human sciences. They functioned to bring the new democratic political rationalities into the governing of individual conduct. Contemporary pedagogical theories that draw on Dewey and Vygotsky maintain this function of governing conduct, but with different narratives and images. The differences are made visible when comparing the “problem-solving individual” in education with the images of the individual inscribed in social theory, state policies, economics, and the military. My moving between the past and the present and between education and other social practices directs attention to the shifting terrain that relates school knowledge, power, and problems of social inclusion/exclusion.

A Changing Terrain of Knowledge and Power: A Social Epistemology of Educational Research

In the past decade, important struggles about the production of knowledge have taken place in history, the social sciences, and education. These struggles involve more than the “knowledge interests” that Habermas pointed to in the 1970s; instead, they point to important epistemological ruptures in the doctrines of “reason” that have dominated social and political debates since the late 19th century. This questioning reaches into the presuppositions of progress and power underlying intellectual work. This article explores some of the main features of the controversies about knowledge by turning first to certain assumptions that guided social theory at least since the 19th century. The assumptions relate, for example, to the focus on human action (and agents) as purpose or explanation of theory, to the conceptualization of space and time, to the introduction of change as a problem of the administration of time (the control of process and development), and to the inscription of political and social doctrines of progress into science. My interest here, however, is not only in the disciplinary struggles, but also in the changing social conditions that make these debates possible. I look at the systems of reasoning in educational studies as social practices—what I have previously called “a social epistemology.” When we examine current discussions against 19th century assumptions about social theory, we are able to understand that the stakes of educational research are social and political as well as epistemological.

Rethinking decentralization and state/civil society distinctions: the state as a problematic of governing 1

In a variety of national contexts, there have been discussions about the changing relations of the state to the educational arena. Often, these discussions talk about centralization and decentralization of the state or of the devolution of power, the latter referring to shifts in the loci of power to geographically local contexts, for example through community governance of education. These discussions, it is argued in this essay, tend to position state power as dualistic, pitting one set of actors against another without inquiring into the patterns that locate different actors. The structuring of oppositions between state and civil society, public and private, government and economy does not adequately characterize the diverse ways that rule is exercised. The purpose in this essay is to relocate the problem of the state in the problematic of governing; to consider the state as networks of relations among various actors and discursive strategies that regulate and discipline the citizen. Pedagogy is explor...

Professionalization in teaching and teacher education: Some notes on its history, ideology, and potential

Abstract The more recent calls for school reform have focused on a re-visioning of the work of teachings and teacher education. A central rhetoric in the current climate is related to the professionalization of teaching. We can view the public discourses as not simply a formal mechanism for describing events but as part of their context serving to align loyalty and social solidarity with particular values and social interests. My intent in this discussion is to raise questions about how the word, professionalization, is used within the social and political contexts in which teaching occurs. At the same time, I propose that there are certain issues in teaching that professionalization can address. In particular, I examine tensions of modernity and a post-modernity for considering the power relations in which the professional production of knowledge and the development of expert-mediated systems of ideas occurs.

The Culture of Redemption and the Administration of Freedom as Research

This essay focuses on the systems of “reason” in the educational sciences. It examines todays image of the constructivist teacher and child who, from different ideological agendas, collaborate and “construct knowledge” in a decentralized system of education. This image, it is argued, is an effect of power. It functions historically as a governing practice that links political rationalities about progress to the construction of individual identities. Contemporary research inscribes a 19th-century premise that the purpose of research is the social administration of the subjects (and subjectivities). This administration embodies a redemptive culture that promises empowerment and emancipation, but the particular scaffolding of ideas functions to consolidate and conceal power relations as the educational sciences inscribe “action,” “practice,” and “the soul.”

The learning society, the unfinished cosmopolitan, and governing education, public health and crime prevention at the beginning of the twenty-first century

The ‘learning society’ expresses principles of a universal humanity and a promise of progress that seem to transcend the nation. The paper indicates how this society is governed in the name of a cosmopolitan ideal that despite its universal pretensions embodies particular inclusions and exclusions. These occur through inscribing distinctions and differentiations between the characteristics of those who embody a cosmopolitan reason that brings social progress and personal fulfilment and those who do not embody the cosmopolitan principles of civility and normalcy. Mapping the circulation of the notion of the ‘learning society’ in arenas of Swedish health and criminal justice, and Swedish and US school reforms is to examine the mode of life of the citizen of this society, the learner, as an ‘unfinished cosmopolitanism’ and also directs attention to its ‘other(s)’—those that are outside.

Ideology and social formation in teacher education

Abstract Teacher education contains codes of culture that are shaped by two important dynamics of American life. One is the process of professionalization: Certain occupations have cultural and social authority in controlling realms of meaning and definitions of reality. The second is the predicament of schooling: Social issues of power and interest are incorporated into the discourse of pedagogy and give direction to teacher education. The realization of administrative control and “practical” reasoning occurs within contexts of power that relate to these two dynamics.

Curriculum study, curriculum history, and curriculum theory: the reason of reason

This paper explores the intersection of curriculum studies/curriculum history/curriculum theory through the study of systems of reason that order reflection and action. Words about ‘learning’, ‘empowerment’, ‘problem‐solving’, ‘self‐realization’, ‘community’, and so on, are not merely there in order that educators should ‘grasp’ some reality to act upon. The words are made intelligible and ‘reasonable’ within historically‐formed rules and standards that order, classify, and divide what is ‘seen’ and acted on in schooling. These rules and standards of reason are effects of power and the political of schooling. The first section explores this notion of the political and reason, considering curriculum as a double gesture. One gesture is the hope of schooling. The gesture of hope embodies fears of dangers, and dangerous populations. The latter, dangerous children, are placed in in‐between spaces—the immigrant, the poor, the disadvantaged who are to be included, yet defined as different and abjected. The phrase ‘all children can learn’ illustrates the double gesture. The ‘all’ assumes a unity of the whole that differentiates and divides the cosmopolitanism of the child (e.g. the life‐long learner) from the child ‘left behind’ who is different and can ‘never be of the average’. Finally, it explores how the notion of research as finding ‘useful’ or ‘practical’ knowledge for changing the school inscribes this double gesture and, ironically and paradoxically, assumes a consensus that establishes a hierarchy that divides the researcher from those to be shepherded. The exploration of the system of reason in curriculum studies makes visible the limits of the present, and, through this critical engagement, makes possible other futures.