Historicizing Educational Knowledge and Practice

• In Event: Foucault in Education: Generative Dialogues on Power, Knowledge, and Resistance Across Theory, Practice, and Method

Abstract

This presentation draws on historicizing approaches, or what Foucault termed histories of the present (1991b). It begins with the simple proposition that conventional ways of thinking, being, seeing, feeling, and acting are neither historically stable nor ontologically basic (Foucault, 1994). Thus, historicizing is an intensification of historical study, turning history upon itself by treating all phenomena as historical, including historiography’s own categories and methods for explaining the past (Veyne, 1997). It links the practices of knowledge production to the emergence of their objects of study so as to bring to the threshold the questions, methods, meaning, and modes of judgment that make them intelligible to thought. This nuance shifts the focus from the usual historical events (e.g., the birth of influential figures, the creation of enduring institutions) to the study of their conditions of possibility—the moment when the facts these figures or institutions responded to rose to the threshold of intelligibility (Foucault, 1991b, pp. 76–77). Historicizing thus maps the constitution of a grid of intelligibility from which education’s subjects and objects emerge as sets of interrelated intensities that have the appearance of naturalness and historical durability. This presentation offers three different examples of how Foucault’s historicizing approach can be brought to bear within education research.
The first strand examines how age, class, gender, and race have shaped educational practices from the 14th to the 20th century. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of childhood, education, and family, it integrates feminist and postcolonial critiques to examine the role of institutions in normalizing subjugation. It offers an intersectionally informed engagement with Foucault that seeks to capture the complex entanglements of power and knowledge in the production of childhood and adulthood. By historicizing these dynamics, the study reveals how educational dispositifs participate in the (re)production of social hierarchies through practices of normalization and control.
The second strand theorizes observation as “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1988), redirecting observation not only as a common method for teacher education but also as techniques through which teachers shape their identities, behaviors, and consciousness in relation to social norms, power structures, and institutional expectations. Drawing on a range of research literature including reform discourse, policy documents, teacher interviews, and historical archives on US teacher education, this strand historicizes how observation functions as both a pedagogical tool and a mechanism of making the teachers in teacher education and the professionalization of teaching.
The third strand is interested in ‘Foucault’s’ odysseys. It thinks about Foucault as not an embodied subject but as enunciating a style of reason that travels historically, (re)visioning European Enlightenment’s impulses toward modernity, as well as contemporary political notions of resistance and freedom. The use of ‘odysseys’ recognizes that traveling is not about a singularity but multiplicities of ‘Foucault's’ in which ‘ideas’ are assembled and connected to different settlements, such as U.S. educational scholarship. The chapter continually explores these multiplicities as there is no essential Foucault but ‘Foucaults’ that form in the movements from one space to another.

Authors

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Elsa Roland, Université de Namur