The Practices in Making Practice: Historicizing the Realizations of a Concept as “Useful” and Real

• In Event: Curriculum Studies and Historicizing the Present: The Political and the Impracticality of Practical Knowledge

Abstract

“Practice” is a powerful signifier that circulates across multiple institutions and research programs to think about people’s social and personal life, for promoting democratic participation, and as principles for organizing change. The social and political significance of “practice” in the contemporary landscape is given in Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner (1983). Schön’s book has been phenomenally successful as a reference for social policy, reform oriented research, and programs found in different social institutions.

The paper is to explore the notion of “practice” as not only a word given to constitute worthwhile research but also travels into social policy and research communities. Schön’s book illustrates the currency of the word as a signifier of social change. It has over 22,000 citations Our intent in the seminar is to problematize the larger phenomena in which the various theories and claims about practice are made. These claims are, if we can be historical, the contemporary resurrection of the philosopher’s stone; that is, the finding of the “unambiguous knowledge" that not only rectifies the failings of current social life, but also lays the paths that fulfills the dreams of future.

Our paper will have two parts. First is historical looking at social and cultural histories and the social sciences, cultural history, and studies of science to explore how “practice” is made into a category about the real from which knowledge is sought to understand and reform. Second is to examine current research in teaching and teacher education to consider the theoretical and political assumptions about consensus that circulate in the notion of “practice” and useful knowledge. For example, it will examine a major US teacher education reform to consider how the everyday life of teachers in urban and rural schools to pursue the adequacy of talking about “experience”, and its corollaries of “voice” and “practical knowledge” when thinking about school reform and correcting social wrong. Using interviews and observations, it is argued that the notion of practice naturalizing what teachers say, and that to talk about practical knowledge and experience is to conserve the very systems of reason that need to be challenged in relation to social commitments.

We hope to point to the paradox of contemporary social science research that strives to be practical and develop “useful” knowledge; but is impractical as its assumptions of harmony and consensus elides the very complexities and uncertainties in a theory of change. And impractical as it eludes the very complexities that it claims to identify.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin