Application to Schools and Classrooms

FOCUS What elements of postmodernism appeal to you as a teacher? Which appeal least? Why? Are there elements of postmodernism that you would like to incorporate into your philosophy of education? give an elite group power over others. In this instance, the scientific method as a metanarrative has been elevated into what its advocates proclaim to be the sole method of arriving at verifiable claims to truth. Postmodernists would contend that the scientific method is only one of many ways to construct claims to truth and that dominant elites have expropriated it to justify their exploitation of people and resources.

6-6c application to schools and classrooms

To empower their students, postmodernists argue that teachers must first empower themselves as professional educators. They need to deconstruct official statements about the school’s purpose, curriculum, and organization, as well as the teacher’s role and mission. Real empowerment means that teachers need to take responsibility for determining their own futures and for encouraging students to determine their own lives.

The process of empowering teachers and students begins in the schools and communities where they work and live. Postmodernists urge teachers to create their own site-based educational philosophy. Teachers, students, and community members must begin a local, site-based examination of such key control questions as (1) who actually controls their school, establishes the curriculum, and sets academic standards; (2) what motivates those who control the school; and (3) what rationale justifies the existing curriculum? This kind of deconstructive analysis will empower people and transform society by challenging special economic and political groups, exposing their powers and privileges.

Postmodernists would question the motives of the proponents of a core curriculum. They would deconstruct rationales for standards, asking critical questions about using standardized tests to measure student achievement, as in the NCLB Act and the Common Core State Standards. To find the real power relationships, they would ask who mandates the testing, develops the test, interprets the results, and determines how scores will be used.

Postmodernists apply the same critique to electronic representations that they do to other texts. Teachers and students need to look beyond the dynamic and rapid pace of the Internet and social media to determine who is writing the script and why they are doing so. Social media can be a means of linking oppressed groups, or it can be a more technological means of dominating them. The Internet, especially social media, can empower people by creating a means of quick communication for those interested in sharing ideas and common concerns with each other. Likewise, technology, if controlled by dominant groups, can indoctrinate people to accept the status quo that marginalizes and subordinates them, and it can be used to generate a rampant consumerism. A postmodernist teacher would examine the representations in software for student use, as well as to consider issues of power related to students’ access to technology.

What would a postmodernist lesson be like? Students in a high school American history class might examine how Mexicans living in the territories that Mexico was forced to cede to the United States after the Mexican War were marginalized. They might deconstruct books, especially textbooks, which treat the topic, to find their authors’ biases and positions. Next, they might discuss how Chicanos in the southwestern states were often relegated to subordinate social and economic status. The lesson might include a journal assignment in which students examine areas of their own lives where they feel either powerful or marginalized and suggest actions they believe would help make their voices heard in constructive ways.

In the following sections, we examine four educational theories: essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, and critical theory (see Overview 6.2). Whereas philosophies present highly generalized views of reality, knowledge, and values, theories explain more particular phenomena and processes. Educational theories examine the roles and functions of schools, curriculum, teaching, and learning. Some theories are