Curriculum

Toward New Identities

William Pinar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135636654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This collection of essays by established writers in postmodern pedagogy stakes out new conceptual territories, redefines the field, and presents a complete review of contemporary curriculum practice and theory in a single volume
Drawing upon contemporary research in political, feminist, theological, literary, and racial theory, this anthology reformulates the research methodologies of the discipline and creates a new paradigm for the study of curriculum into the next century. The contributors consider gender, identity, narrative and autobiography as vehicles for reviewing the current and future state of curriculum studies.

Special Features
Presents new essays by established writers in postmodern pedagogy,

Reviews curriculum studies through the filters of race, gender, identity, nattative, and autobiography,

Offers in a single, affordable volume a complete review of contemporary curriculum practice and theory.

Chapter One

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Storying the Self: Life Politics and the Study of the Teacher’s Life and Work

Ivor F. Goodson

Preparing for Postmodernity: The Peril and Promise

The current changes in the economy and superstructure associated with postmodernity pose particular perils and promises for the world of education.

As Wolfe has argued, it is quite conceivable that it will not just be public social services which are dismantled in the new epoch but also aspects of the superstructure (Wolfe, 1989). In particular, some of the median associations such as universities and schools might be diminished and decoupled in significant ways. This means that institutional sites may no longer be the only, or major, significant sites of definition and contestation, and it also means that methodological genres which mainly focus on institutional analysis and institutional theorizing may be similarly diminished.

Associated with this restructuring of institutional life is an associated change in forms of knowledge, particularly the forms of workplace knowledge which will be promoted. Significantly, much of the workplace knowledge currently being promoted is context-specific and personal (Goodson, 1993, pp. 1–3). Putting these two things together means that different sites for definition and delineation will emerge in the postmodernist period. Firstly, there will be the continuing struggle for the theoretical and critical mission inside surviving but conceivably diminished institutional sites and existing social arenas.

Secondly, and probably progressively more important for the future, will be the site of everyday life and identity. It is here that perhaps the most interesting project, what Giddens calls “the reflexive project of the self,” will be contested in the next epoch. Life politics, the politics of identity construction and ongoing identity maintenance, will become a major and growing site of ideological and intellectual contestation. In this regard, new modes of phenomenological work, with their focus on lived experience, may prove to be prophetic. The agenda standing before us is one in which identity and lived experience can themselves be used as the sites wherein and whereby we interrogate the social world theoretically and critically. If that sounds too grandiose (which it does), what it really means is that we should be investigating and promoting more contextual and intertextual studies of the process of identity, definition, and construction, especially the life history genre.

Here the important distinction is between life story and life history. The life story is the initial selected account that people give of their lives: the life history is the triangulated account, one point of the tripod being the life story and the other two points being other people’s testimony, documentary testimony, and the transcripts and archives that appertain to the life in question.

Storying the Self

The use of personal stories and narratives in teacher education has to respond meaningfully to the new conditions of work and being in the postmodern world. As a number of social scientists have recently argued, this means we should reformulate our conceptions of identity and self-hood. The global forces which are undermining traditional forms of life and work are likewise transforming notions of identity and self. Identity is no longer an ascribed status or place in an established order; rather, identity is an ongoing project, most commonly an ongoing narrative project.

In the new order, we “story the self” as a means of making sense of new conditions of working and being. The self becomes a reflexive project, an ongoing narrative project. To capture this emergent process requires a modality close to social history, social geography, and social theory—modes which capture the self in time and space, a social cartography of the self.

The huge interpenetration of local and personal milieux with major global forces of information dissemination and economic redefinition is leading to a range of responses. One response undoubtedly is a new focus on the “reflexive project of the self”—this leads to a form of centering best expressed in a recent comment by a teacher in a recent interview: “what is home now—home is where I am.” This response clearly links with a long tradition of romantic individualism in Western history. In this form the life story is seen as the individual construction of the autonomous self.

However, in such individualistic construction, the role of the collective subject is obscured. Tribal and collective identities continue to appeal. In fact one paradoxical response of growing global homogeneity is the stress on “the politics of minute difference.” In this way countries fragment in pursuit of local tribal identity—the Balkan situation is perhaps an extreme example but the phenomenon can be viewed worldwide. This is not, as is sometimes claimed, an identity project harking back to old warrior tribes in Europe and Africa. It can, for instance, be as clearly evidenced in Canada, not only as French identity pushes Quebec towards independence but as western identity is pushing Western Canada towards the embrace of increasingly “regional” politics. In times of rapid global change we stress the “sense of place,” of local identity, that we know.

Sigmund Freud argued that the smaller the difference between two people, the larger it was bound to loom in their imagination. He called this effect the “narcissism of minor difference” (see Ignatieff, May 13, 1993, p. 3). Life story work can, in fact, do much to exacerbate the “narcissism of minor difference” especially given the focus on the individual, the personal, the specific, the selective, and the idiosyncratic. The life history might restore aspects of the political, the collective, the general, the contextual, and the social.

For Giddens, the reflexive project of the self

consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choice as filtered through abstract systems. In modern social life, the notion of lifestyle takes on a particular significance. The more tradition loses its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and the global, the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options (Giddens, 1991, p. 5).

He spells out some of the implications of the emerging social order for life-cycles.

Self-identity for us [in the late modern age] forms a trajectory across different institutional settings of modernity over the durée of what used to be called the “life cycle,” a term which applies more accurately to non-modern contexts than the modern ones. Each of us not only “has,” but lives a biography reflexively organized in terms of flows of social and psychological information about possible ways of life. Modernity is a post-traditional order, in which the question, “How shall I live?” has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat—and many other things—as well as interpreted within the temporal unfolding of self-identity (Giddens, 1991, p. 14).

The idea of the “life cycle”… makes very little sense once the connections between the individual life and the interchange of the generations have been broken… Generational differences are essentially a mode of time-reckoning in pre-modern societies…. In traditional contexts, the life cycle carries strong connotations of renewal, since each generation in some substantial part rediscovers and relives modes of life of its forerunners. Renewal loses most of its meaning in the settings of high modernity where practices are repeated only in so far as they are reflexively justifiable (Giddens, 1991, p. 146).

Above all, Giddens is arguing that the “situational geography” (p. 84) (what we called earlier the social cartography) of modern social life and modern social selves has been drastically repositioned by the electronic media to the extent that the experience of social life and self is more fluid, uncertain, and complicated than in previous epochs. In the global marketplace, we are allowed to choose between a series of decontextualized self-identities, rather like in the manner of the commodified market place generally. Hence, the local and traditional elements of self are less constitutive. This leads to the self as an ongoing reflexive and narrative project, for as Giddens writes “at each moment, or at least at regular intervals, the individual is asked to conduct a self interrogation in terms of what is happening” (p. 76).

In Giddens’ work, it is as if he is trying to re-assert the place of individual self-storying at a time where the self is being ever more commodified, saturated and legitimated. Storying the self then becomes an ongoing process of self-building and self-negotiation; in this sense it is possible to see the self as an ongoing project of storying and narrative. This conceptionalization of self-building is not unlike the conclusions arrived at by Leinberger and Tucker in their book The New Individualists (1991). Here they are concerned with the offspring cohort from the “organization men” of William Whyte’s study in 1950. They argue that the whole epistemological basis of individual life has shifted because of the economic and social changes of the last decade. This economic and social change plays itself out in what they call a different “self ethic.”

As the organization offspring came of age in the sixties and seventies, they were exhorted to find themselves or create themselves. They undertook the task with fervor, as self-expression, self-fulfillment, self-assertion, self-actualization, self-understanding, self-acceptance, and any number of other self compounds found their way into everyday language and life. Eventually, all these experiences solidified into what can only be called the self ethic, which has ruled the lives of the organization offspring as thoroughly as the social ethic ruled the lives of their parents. Many people mistakenly regarded this development as narcissism, egoism, or pure selfishness. But the self ethic, like the social ethic it displaced, was based on a genuine moral imperative—the duty to express the authentic self (Leinberger and Tucker, 1991, pp. 11–12, Leinberger and Tucker’s emphasis).

Leinberger and Tucker push the argument about self to the point where they argue that the (supposedly) authentic self is being replaced with by “an artificial self.” In pursuing the ideal of the authentic self, the offspring produced the most radical version of the American individual in history, totally psychologized and isolated, who has difficulty “communicating” and “making commitments,” never mind achieving community. But by clinging to the artist ideal, the organization offspring try to escape the authentic self and simultaneously to maintain it as the ultimate value. It is a delicate balancing act to which many of them have been brought by the search for self-fulfillment, but it is a position that they are finding increasingly hard to maintain.

As our story will show, there are signs that the search for self-fulfillment is drawing to a close and with it, the era of the authentic self and its accompanying self ethic. The ideal of the authentic self is everywhere in retreat. It has been undermined from within; it has been attacked from all sides; and, in many ways, it simply has been rendered obsolete by history (Leinberger and Tucker, 1991, pp. 15).

In their study, they provide an important and exhaustive list of reasons for the end of the era of the authentic self. The list itself provides some glimpses of their implicit conception of authenticity and is worth reviewing in full:

• Self-fulfillment has proved to be unfulfilling, since the exclusive focus on the self has left many people feeling anxious and alone.

• The inevitable economic problems experienced by large generations, coupled with the long-term souring of the American economy, have introduced many members of the generation, even the most privileged among them, to limits in all areas of life, including limits on the self.

• Alternative and more inclusive conceptions of the self, especially those introduced into organizations by the influx of women, now challenge almost daily the more traditionally male conception of unfettered self-sufficiency.

• The macroeconomic issues of takeovers, buyouts, and restructurings that have dominated organizations for the past five years have left little room for psychological concerns in the workplace.

• The rise of a genuinely competitive global marketplace linked by instantaneous communications has accelerated the diffusive processes of modernity, further destabilizing the self.

• The centuries-old philosophical bedrock on which all our conceptions of individualism have rested, including the highly psychologized individualism embodied in the authentic self, is being swept away.

• Similarly, the most important developments in contemporary art and popular entertainment are subverting the conception of the artist on which the integrity of personalities who use the artist ideal to solve problems of identity depends.

• The rise of postmetropolitan suburbs, which are neither center nor periphery, and the emergence of organizational networks, which replace older hierarchical structures, have thrust the new generation into concrete ways of life to which the authentic self is increasingly extrinsic (Leinberger and Tucker, 1991, pp. 15– 16, their emphasis).

They argue then that the authentic self is being replaced by what they call “the artificial person.” While this would seem to polarize authenticity and artifice too greatly, it is an interesting distinction to pursue and the authors make clear the ambiguities that are present: Out of this slow and agonizing death of the authentic self, there is arising a new social character—the artificial person. This new social character is already discernible among a vanguard of the organization offspring and is now emerging among the remainder; it is likely to spread eventually throughout the middle class and, as often happens, attract the lower class and surround the upper.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the designation artificial person does not mean these people are becoming phony or insincere. Rather, it refers to a changing conception of what constitutes an individual and indeed makes someone individual. In the recent past, the organization offspring believed that individuality consists of a pristine, transcendent, authentic self residing below or beyond all the particular accidents of history, culture, language, and society and all the other “artificial” systems of collective life. But for all the reasons we have cited and many more besides, that proposition and the way of life it has entailed have become untenable. More and more the organization offspring are coming to see that the attributes they previously dismissed as merely artificial are what make people individuals—artificial, to be sure, but nonetheless persons, characterized by their particular mix of these ever-shifting combinations of social artificiality of every variety. Starting from this fundamental, and often unconscious, shift of perspective, they are evolving an individualism that is “artificial” but particular, as opposed to one that is authentic but empty. It is an individualism predicated not on the self but the person: while self connotes a phenomenon that is inner, nonphysical, and isolated, person suggests an entity that is external, physically present, and already connecte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical Education Practice
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One Storying the Self: Life Politics and the Study of the Teacher's Life and Work
• Chapter Two Curriculum, Transcendence, and Zen/Taoism: Critical Ontology of the Self
• Chapter Three On Using the Literacy Portfolio to Prepare Teachers for "Willful World Traveling"
• Chapter Four Unskinning Curriculum
• Chapter Five Reflections and Diffractions: Functions of Fiction in Curriculum Inquiry
• Chapter Six Pinar's Currere and Identity in Hyperreality: Grounding the Post-formal Notion of Intrapersonal Intelligence
• Chapter Seven Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Powerful Teacher
• Chapter Eight Early Childhood Education: A Call for the Construction of Revolutionary Images
• Chapter Nine Beyond Eurocentrism in Science Education: Promises and Problematics from a Feminist Poststructuralist Perspective
• Chapter Ten Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight
• Chapter Eleven Don't Ask; Don't Tell: "Sniffing Out Queers" in Education
• Chapter Twelve The Uses of Culture: Canon Formation, Postcolonial Literature, and the Multicultural Project
• Chapter Thirteen Engendering Curriculum History
• Chapter Fourteen Curriculum and Concepts of Control
• Chapter Fifteen Curriculum as Affichiste: Popular Culture and Identity
• Chapter Sixteen Models of Excellence: Independent African-Centered Schools
• Chapter Seventeen Revolution and Reality: An Interview with Peter McLaren
• Index
• Biographical Notes