Postfoundational Theories as Methodologies of Practice: Innovative Approaches to Understanding the Educational Subject of Difference

• In Event: Everybody but Foucault: How Alternative Poststructuralisms Operate in Educational Theory, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

The third paper, “Postfoundational theories as methodologies of practice: Innovative approaches to understanding the educational subject of difference,” examines challenges to the official narrative of educational research, policy, and practice posed by postfoundational scholars, Patti Lather, Bernadette Baker and Judith Butler. This philosophical inquiry demonstrates how postfoundational theories offer innovative approaches to understanding diversity and repositioning the experience of students who do not conform to the norms of race, class, gender and other differences by acknowledging context, experience, and the ongoing production of multiply situated knowledges. The theoretical framework and methodology for this study comprises three postfoundational theories as methodologies of practice. First, I use Lather’s (2004) postfeminist methodologies to problematize the normative foundations and absolute knowability of positivist educational research informing school policies and practices based on categories, binaries and hierarchies that privilege and marginalize and suggest self-reflexivity in research. Second, I frame Baker’s (2000) postcritical deconstruction of the educational subject of school policy to illustrate the reproduction of inequalities and exclusions and suggest a reconfiguring of how educators understand difference in educational policy. Third, I apply Judith Butler’s (2004) postgendered notion of performativity mobilizing the new language of political activism for inclusion and contesting the normalizing processes of school practice with potential for reconceptualizing difference, thereby, effecting educational change. Data draws from four areas: publications from positivist educational research privileging developmental theories; federal policy such as the No Child Left Behind Act; and classroom practice such as academic tracking. Postfeminist, postcritical, postgendered analyses are based on the notion that disciplinary knowledge is produced through relations of power operating on many levels to inform research, policy and practice. I conclude by arguing Baker, Butler, and Lather reimagine a field of possibilities for understanding the educational subject of difference in a way that the French poststructuralists could not – to be suspicious of origins and foundations in the context of US American educational research, policy and practice that construct the educational subject primed for inclusion or marginalization. What postfoundational scholars reimagine is a new paradigm of inclusion that troubles the implicit politics embedded in normative educational policies and practices and attentive to race, class, gender, and other differences. Significance: Postfoundational theories and methodologies provide educators with analytical and political tools for challenging conceptual underpinnings of traditional educational research, policy and practice, rethinking the production of knowledge about and by difference, and pursuing targeted avenues for educational change. Postfoundational analyses expose the metanarratives in educational policy from the Tyler Rationale to the NCLB Act as effects of totalizing, exclusionary practices in schooling privileging certain groups of students while excluding others. As the second paper suggests, problematizing the construction of the educational subject in relation to normative schooling practices that mark, label, and exclude based on categories of differences is necessary. As other presentations in this symposium note, understanding the subject in innovative ways helps educators shift narratives that privilege and exclude toward making difference the starting point for generating new knowledges and an inclusive vision for education in postfoundational times.

Author

• Suniti Sharma, Saint Joseph's University