Postmodern Studies in Educational Foundations

This chapter looks at postmodern studies in educational foundations.1 Rather than attempting to define postmodernism, we present a necessarily guilty reading of the reception of the “post ” in education and then turn to our primary interest, a rendering of the ways that the “post ” is moving across the traditional and emergent areas of foundational studies. As such, this is a “small narrative, ” to use a Lyotardian term, a local story of how the post is playing out in one small area of the academy. More generally, efforts to accommodate/incorporate the "post " across the university have not been easy. Often accused of taking over, postmodernism is “all too readily associated with ‘irrationalism, ’ ‘quietism, ’ and perhaps even ‘evil’ ” (Cahill and Hansen, 2003, p. 2). The popular media has taken up the controversy, now named the “culture wars ” and the “science wars ” (Ross, 1996; Mooney, 2005), and critics both within and without the academy worry that the “fashionable nonsense ” (Sokal and Bricmont, 1998) of postmodernism is seducing students away from rationality and into relativism and nihilism. Christopher Norris (1996) rails much about the ends of postmodernism as the leveling of value distinctions by an ultra-relativist orthodoxy and the collapse of truth claims in the face of epistemological skepticism. While he makes distinctions between good deconstruction (Derrida) and bad postmodernism/poststructuralism (Baudrillard, Rorty, Foucault, and, especially Lyotard), his primary interest is in the disastrous effects of anti-foundationalist arguments on the truth-seeking enterprise from the likes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Barthes, etc. 2 In the case of education, in the pages of the Educational Researcher alone, McLaren and Farahmandpur (2000) warn against “the decline of class politics, ” textualism, “toothless liberalism and airbrushed insurgency, ” nihilism, localism and relativism, all wrapped up in “a facile form of culturalism ” that paralyzes progressive politics. Constas (1998) offers a typology of the postmodern noteworthy for its use of the very logic that the "post " sets out to undo (St