Foucauldian Reflections on Curriculum History in China

• In Event: 46.022 - Becoming Historical: Curriculum Research and Reform in China

Abstract

Genealogy explicates the contingency and complexity of our ongoing historical constitution. It is, as Koopman (2013) emphasizes, an expansion, not an abdication, of archaeology, a problematization of the present that encourages reconstruction. At the core of this responsive reconstruction is the ethical orientation toward the transformation of ourselves, a concept Foucault reactivates from ancient Greece but which has existed in China for centuries, perhaps most notably with the Confucian tradition. I will start with China’s contemporary curriculum reform and, in the spirit of Foucaultian genealogy, trace the conditions of the emergence of the present in which we are present. Inspired by Foucault, I will argue that “becoming historical” is central to understanding who, where, and what we are as curriculum researchers today.
Foucault (1982) was determined demonstrate not that our present is contingently formed but to explicate how we have contingently formed ourselves so as to make available the materials we require to constitute ourselves otherwise. As Koopman (2013) and others explain, force of Foucault’s thought is to disclose to us how the present might be transformed on the basis of the materials furnished by our contingently constructed present. As a Foucaultian form of problematization, genealogy reveals our problems in their dynamic contingency and complexity so that makes them available for critical investigation and reconstruction. Such reconstruction is the explicit aim and challenge of China’s curriculum reform. Its scale is simultaneously institutional and subjective, as Chen (in press) has explained,, requiring teachers and students to reconstruct their roles in the learning process.
As problematization, Foucault’s genealogy aspires to provide us with conceptual tools and archival materials we will require if we are to engage in the elusive educational practice of reconstructing ourselves as teachers and students (1990). These tools and materials for subjective reconstruction are precisely what a genealogy encourages us to recover in those pedagogical practices and curricular procedures that have contributed to our current forms of constituting ourselves as teachers and students. The ultimate goal of genealogy, as I have understood it, is the explication and conceptualization of a complex set of curricular practices that have contingently coalesced in contemporary curriculum reform in China.


References

Chen, Yuting. In press. From Follower to Creator: The Past, Present and Future of the School as a Reform Subject. In Curriculum Studies in China, edited by William F. Pinar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, Michel (1982). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel (1990, 1988). Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings 1977-1984. [Edited with an introduction by Lawrence D. Kritzman.] New York and London: Routledge.

Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Ransom, John S. 1997. Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Author

• Tingwei Rong, Hangzhou Normal University