Curriculum and Poststructuralist Theory

J L Miller, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
Deconstruction Often misunderstood as well as incorrectly attributed to Jacques Derrida as the originator of the word, deconstruction illustrates that language works not because there is a correspondence between a sign and a thing or because of presence, but because there is a difference, an absence. Deconstruction shows how a discursive system functions, including what it excludes or denies. Differance Central to Derridas theory of deconstruction, this term combines the sense of the English verbs to differ and to defer. Thus, in the concept of differance, meaning is produced through the dual strategies of difference and deferral. Discourse In Foucaults conceptualization, it means the discursive practices that themselves form the objects of which they speak, consisting of written or spoken words that are grouped according to certain rules established within the particular discourse.

Many of those involved in curriculum studies and practices worldwide still consider Ralph Tylers basic principles of curriculum and instruction, also known as the Tyler rationale, to be the model that primarily guides curriculum development and design. However, many curriculum critics decry various reductions of Tylers intentions into a factory model of education, a model grounded in a behaviorist psychology that conceives curriculum as bits of information and universally agreed upon knowledge that supposedly can be arranged in a linear order and transmitted to the learner. In such a model, curricular development, design, and, most importantly, curricular meaning are determined by relationships among Tylers sequential steps of developing educational purposes or objectives, as well as educational experiences, and then deciding how these can be organized and evaluated in terms of learners attainment of the predetermined objectives. In contrast, poststructuralist theory is utilized by curriculum scholars who wish to challenge forms of Tylers schema that appear to them as singular, predictable, ahistorical, ideologically neutral, linear, sequential, and measurable versions of what and how one might acquire what is regarded as subject-area-specific content knowledge. That knowledge most often is considered to be stable

and universally accepted as the truth or best knowledge about a particular topic and is presented as such in classroom textbooks and teachers curriculum guides. However, moving away from a technicalrational emphasis on curriculum development, where curriculum is only conceived as predetermined content to be covered in accumulative and additive ways, curriculum theorists and developers who work from poststructuralist perspectives assume curriculum development to be a political act, with incomplete, fractured, and deferred meanings constantly shifting and reconstructing versions of particular content knowledge. Poststructuralist curriculum theorists and practitioners, especially, are invested in developing and proliferating a multiplicity of views on any given field of knowledge. Specifically addressing issues of power, poststructuralist curricularists further examine not only what and whose determinations and creations of knowledge count, but also how and under what conditions particular discourses come to shape what gets constructed as curriculum. They especially attend to what cultural and social practices as well as discourses constitute, reproduce, or call into question what is generally assumed to be the content or what educators often generically refer to as the curriculum as well as how and in what sequences it supposedly might be learned. From poststructuralist perspectives then, it is impossible to conceive of curriculum design, development, and evaluation as totally knowable, predictable, and universally applicable processes. Instead, poststructuralists argue that, given wildly varying social and cultural educational contexts, participants, and discourses, there is no one best way to proceed. For, to state any curriculum content, process, or activity as definitive is to insist on an ultimate meaning and a predetermined way. Poststructuralist curriculum theorists also argue that educators and students subjectivities the unconscious and conscious emotions and thoughts of individuals, their senses of themselves and their varying ways of understanding their relations to the world are always in process, contradictory, produced historically, and reconstituted in discourse each time they think or speak. Indeed, poststructuralist theory posits that subjectivities, including perceptions, biases, and desires, rather than being considered inherent and part of a constant essence in humanist conceptions of the individual, are socially constructed in language, and thus can be considered sites of both struggle and potential change (Weedon, 1997). Poststructuralist curriculum scholars argue that the subjects perceptions, biases, desires, and identity constructions,

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as well as their assumptions about what knowledge is of the most worth and what therefore should constitute the curriculum, are framed by and formed within particular educational discourses. The political elements of the processes of such formations are the focus of many poststructuralist curriculum scholars and practitioners. These educators often examine concomitant influences of psychosocial experiences in and out of schools as well as social and cultural contexts, including, for example, positionings in relation to normative constructions of gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and ability. Within these framings, the individual is a subject subjected to dominate discourses that often impose predetermined meanings and thus guide educational processes, such as curriculum development, which are usually based on generally accepted assumptions about what knowledge is of the most worth. At the same time, in relation to content that might be studied as well as to others with whom the teacher or learner might interact, the individual student or teacher is a potential site for a wide range of possible forms of subjectivity, and thus might generate fresh and unanticipated versions of knowledges and identities that cannot be predicted or controlled.

Poststructuralist Theory and the Field of Curriculum Studies

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of curriculum scholars in the United States began questioning positivist, social efficiency, and managerial assumptions that had undergirded the early-twentieth-century origins and development of the field of curriculum. These scholars working in the late 1960s and 1970s were loosely connected through their opposition to narrow conceptions of curriculum as able to be determined and sequenced by lists of behavioral objectives as well as students absorption of that content as able to be measured by evidence that standardized tests supposedly provided. Working differently within the movement known as reconceptualization, from a variety of theoretical and ideological perspectives, these scholars attempted, early on, to expand conceptions of curriculum to include examinations of both political and autobiographical aspects and lived experiences of curriculum conceived as both content and process. Those involved in the reconceptualization were united only in their attempts to call attention to the interrelatedness of individuals who were differently situated in varying social, cultural, and political contexts and discourses, and they were determined to examine implications of the situated and discursive nature of any construction of curriculum and pedagogy. Structuralism and Poststructuralist Theory At approximately the same time, a new wave of philosophers primarily emanating from France, although differing in their

theoretical and disciplinary foci, became known collectively as poststructuralists because of their major and sustained critiques of structuralism. Structuralism is the intellectual movement and philosophical orientation often associated initially with the Western discourses of Levi-Strauss, Marx, and Althusser, for example, who claimed to analyze and explain invariant structures in and constitutive of nature, society, and the human psyche. Structuralism challenged the humanist and the Enlightenment projects, which regarded history as progress, placed humans at the center of creation, and privileged rational thought and the Western culture. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, among others, argued that structuralism could explain how certain cultural content (elements of kinship systems and stories told in varying cultures, such as myths and fairy tales) could be considered models of invariant structures. Thus, those associated with structuralism claimed that cultural phenomenon could be examined according to the underlying formal systems out of which these phenomena emerged. It was argued that language and culture acquire meaning as they were intertwined in complex abstract relations. In addition, structuralism, in great part due to Saussurean linguistics and the subsequent development of language as a field of study, regarded language as a transparent and mirror-like medium through which societal regularities reveal themselves and are taken as constituting reality. Aiming for and acquiring the status of a scientific view of language and culture, structuralism thus assumed a systemic center that organized and sustained an entire society and its sets of relations. Poststructuralist theories, although not amenable to full explanation, are more modes of cognition than sets of propositions that can be listed in a linear, rational manner. Poststructuralist thinking was an outgrowth of structuralism in that it incorporated structuralisms attack on humanism and the Enlightenment project. For example, many, although not all, of its theorists supported the psychoanalytic work of Lacan, especially his decentering of the humanist subject through the construing of the conscious and unconscious mind as products of language, of the symbolic. At the same time, poststructuralist theories offered sustained critique of structuralism. One of the major poststructuralist breaks with structuralism involved theories that highlighted how the underlying systems that structuralism analyzed were themselves caught up in language. Michel Foucaults work, in particular, conceptualizes discourse discursive practices that themselves form the objects of which they speak as consisting of written or spoken words that are grouped according to certain rules established within the particular discourse. Unlike structuralisms foundational sets of relations and systems, Foucault asserts that discourse is historically, socially, and culturally contingent, and that major analyses should focus not on what a particular discourse means, but rather, on investigations of how it works,

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under what conditions, and how discursive formations and practices are part of nondiscursive practices. Discourses thus have both disciplinary and disciplining effects. Discourse, according to Foucault, defines fields of inquiry and knowledge as well as how rules within those fields govern what can be said, conceived, and acted upon (Foucault, 1975/1977, 1980). Jacques Derrida, in his early work, also criticized structuralisms presumption that language could be described as a static set of rules. His work demonstrated how those rules could be examined for their contingency and their dependence on temporality, for example. Derrida further concerned himself not only with the regulatory nature of discourses, but also with cultural texts and the impossibility of their intrinsic authority as accounts of truth. In particular, he insisted that the act of reading extends from literary texts to films, popular culture, political scenarios, and to works of art. Derridas notion of reading insists that our ability to understand relies on our capacity to interpret signs that come to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can constrain in advance through intention. Thus, in questioning Saussures claim that signs have an already-fixed meaning recognized by the fully conscious and rational speaking individual, Derrida shifts from the Saussurean focus on speech to concerns with reading, writing, and textuality. He replaces the fixed signifieds of Sausurres chains of signs with a concept of differance. The concept of differance is central to Derridas theory of deconstruction and combines the sense of the English verbs to differ and to defer. Thus, in the concept of differance, meaning is produced through the dual strategies of difference and deferral. In theorizing the problem of difference, Derrida wrote the term as differance, not only to mark the way that signification works one term referring to another, always relying on a deferral of meaning between signifier and signified but also to characterize an ethical relation, the relation of sexual difference, and the relation to the other. For Derrida, then, there are no fixed signifieds (concepts). Signifiers (sound or written images), which have identity only in their difference from one another, are subject to an endless process of deferral. Thus, any representation, in which meaning is apparently fixed, is only a temporary retrospective fixing. The name that we have for something, for ourselves, and for an other, is precisely what fails to capture the referent (as opposed to making or constructing it). Further, signifiers are always located in a discursive context, and any temporary fixing of meaning in a specific reading of a signifier depends on this discursive context (Butler, 2004; Weedon, 1997). Conceptualizing any encounter with or construction of social and cultural worlds as discursive text with no original meaning, Derrida further argued that every structure whether it be literary, political, religious, educational, or economic, for instance that organizes our experiences within that particular structure, is constituted and

maintained through acts of exclusion. In the processes of developing curriculum, for example, by adding in certain presumed facts or content, something else inevitably gets left out. Such exclusions, often predicated on reified notions of difference, are the focus of Derridas conceptualization of deconstruction. Deconstruction, often misunderstood as well as incorrectly attributed to Derrida as the originator of the word, illustrates that language works not because there is a correspondence between a sign and a thing or because of presence, but because there is a difference, an absence. Deconstruction shows how a discursive system functions, including what it excludes or denies (Derrida, 1998). At the same time, deconstruction cannot by definition be defined since it presupposes the undecidability of all conceptual or generalizing terms. Like any method of interpretation, it can only be exemplified, and the examples will all differ. Deconstruction, then, according to Derrida, is only what happens if it happens because it is not a philosophy, a doctrine, a knowledge, a method, a discipline, and not even a determinate concept (Derrida, 2001). If it does happen, deconstruction enables one to critique structures that are held together by identity and presence, concepts that, in Western philosophy, represented transcendental order and permanence as manifested in beliefs and ideas such as the unified subject, the essence of an individual, and consciousness. Derrida utilized deconstruction not to dismantle, reject, or take things apart (as the term has come to be generically and incorrectly used), but rather to reinscribe them in another way. In particular, deconstruction allows one to challenge any notion of foundational center that creates binaries in which the first term of the binary most always indicates presence and power and, subsequently, to attempt to reconstitute that which has been previously inscribed. In addition, the reconstitution must then, in turn, be deconstructed. Derrida understood that social and political transformation is an incessant project, one that can not be relinquished, co-exists with encounters with the other, and insists on a reading of the rules by means of which a society constitutes itself through exclusion or effacement. Feminist theorists Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler, in particular, consider deconstruction to be an affirmative political practice in that it enables us to rewrite the world and ourselves over and over again (Butler, 2004; Spivak, 1974). Curriculum Reconceptualized in Relation to Poststructuralist Theory In particular, the translation and dissemination of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in North America during the 1970s and 1980s enabled some curriculum scholars to take up major aspects of the French poststructuralist theory by addressing the central role of language, power, and discourse in any model or conception of curriculum

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theory, development, and design. The further dissemination of this theory throughout the world, including the work of French feminists Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, encouraged curriculum scholars, within a variety of social and cultural contexts, to pursue poststructuralists particular goal of troubling both discursive and material structures that limit or reify conceptions and enactments of curriculum. Some of the earliest poststructuralist work in curriculum, especially theorizing in the United States that grew from the initial movement to reconceptualize the curriculum field, drew on the theories of Foucault and, secondarily, on the work of Derrida and Lacan in order to challenge essentialist notions of gender identity and examine various gender discourses that often were linked to the very same oppressive discursive systems they sought to dismantle. Explorations of the ways that discourse creates and is substantiated by the body and the unconscious followed, as did work that staged, in writing, deconstructive and poststructuralist performances of thinking about and enacting versions of curriculum that defied dominant positivist and behavioral metanarratives about what knowledge is of the most worth and how it should be presented in textbooks as well as in pedagogical strategies. Such critique became emblematic of contemporary contentions that currently characterize the field of curriculum studies, writ large, in terms its functions, philosophical and ideological commitments, and manifestations of those commitments for curriculum development and design in schools. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, curriculum scholars were conducting studies of curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed texts that emphasized multivocality, multiperspectivity, and the lived aspects of textbooks and classrooms. Some explained and analyzed poststructuralist theory in relation to structuralism. Others explored how curriculum as a field of study might now be characterized by ideas and metaphors from the new sciences of complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, open systems, process, and transformations. A major poststructuralist line of inquiry in curriculum contrasted the behavioral orientation of the Tyler rationale and other positivist approaches to curriculum development with postmodern possibilities of a curriculum that is composed of complex and spontaneous interactions among students and teachers, and content both created from and with/in those interactions. Threaded throughout such poststructuralist curriculum work are constant critiques of any totality of representation that reduces learning to information transmission. Poststructuralist curricularists argue that such reductive narratives of education continue to foster the bifurcations that ignite racism, patriarchy, homophobia, colonialism, and classism. At the same time, others, working from still dominant neo-Marxist positions in curriculum theorizing, argue that the central tenet of poststructuralist theory and postmodernism, writ large that there can only be

incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard, 1979) is itself a grand narrative. Building upon these major influences on as well as upon critiques of the introduction of poststructuralist theory into curriculum theory, development, and design, a number of scholars have further explored poststructuralist theories from a variety of angles and for a number of educational purposes. Women academics within the field of curriculum studies and practice began their poststructuralist work by attempting to conceptualize a multiple, indeterminate female subject. Multiple manifestations of this initial work have contributed to one aspect of what, some would argue, is now a major influence on the field of curriculum the work of feminist poststructuralists.

Contributions of Feminist Poststructuralist Theorizing

Poststructuralist versions of feminism almost always advocate social change and, at the same time, mark a turn away from projects that promote humanist assumptions about progress, identity, and fully conscious selves who can attain, once and for all, freedom from oppression. Most poststructuralist feminists are concerned with gender power relations, in particular, and how those relations are constituted, reproduced, and, possibly, contested. A proliferation of work produced by feminists working in the field of curriculum as well as education, in general, has altered ways in which educators must now attend to issues of language, discourse, and power in all aspects of curriculum conception and development, as well as in the ways that curriculum is enacted, experienced, and created in the classroom. A number of feminist scholars, especially in Australia, the UK, and the US, have drawn on the work of Foucault, in particular, as they work to understand and then to critique how modernist, humanist conceptions of a woman have been constructed through and by dominant discourses in societies in general, and in the field of education in particular (Baker and Heyning, 2004; Luke and Gore, 1992; Tamboukou, 2003). Many have relied on Foucaults work in their analyses of gender, the category woman, and constructions of woman and girl as subject and object in curriculum and pedagogy discourses. Some feminist scholars have studied how children, especially girls, are constituted as subjects within what are typically named child-centered curricula and forms of pedagogy (Walkerdine, 1990). Influential work, focused on Foucauldian issues of power, discourse, discursive practices, and the production of selves, has also centered on qualitative studies of preschool children and gender, as well as on children reading and writing beyond gendered identities (Davies, 2003). Further, in investigating, from a variety of subject matter areas and disciplinary perspectives, a womans subjugated positioning within educational discourses that focus on

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binaries such as normal/abnormal or active/passive, many feminists utilize Foucaults insistence on historical analyses as well as attention to the ways in which attempts to assert legitimate claims to knowledge are often caught up in the very essentializing and patriarchal discourses that women wish to combat. Exploring additional ironies to which poststructuralist theory points, feminist curriculum scholars also have investigated how radical discourses in education, including feminist pedagogy, paradoxically operate as regimes of truth, to use Foucaults conceptualization. Some feminists, especially, have utilized aspects of Foucauldian poststructuralist theory in order to challenge essentialist and unitary notions of voice and dialog, two prominent components of critical pedagogy as well as of some versions of feminist pedagogy (Ellsworth, 1997; Orner, 1992). Another major arena in which feminist poststructuralists have had and continue to exert a major influence on is qualitative curriculum research methodologies and practices. By addressing issues such as power relations with subjects in the field, the crisis in representation, and the stuck, unpredictable, and unknowable places and spaces of qualitative research, especially in relation to difference, feminist poststructuralist work has influenced curriculum scholars who wish to explore such issues within educative contexts. These feminists, for example, simultaneously, both use and immediately trouble typical categories of qualitative research, such as validity and generalizability, and move toward methodologies that foreground ambiguities, uncertainties, contradictions, and incoherences (Lather, 2007; Pierre and Pillow, 2000). In addition, some feminist poststructuralist curriculum theorists continue to grapple with how to conceptualize self, woman, teacher, researcher, or curriculum, not as permanently essentialized or naturalized through humanist and positivist educational discursive practices and regimes, but rather, as sites for cultural critique and social change (Miller, 2005). Toward Further Ruptures The wide-ranging areas of curriculum theorizing and inquiry that fall under the general heading of poststructuralist theory and curriculum have expanded rapidly in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Major contributions of poststructuralist curriculum scholars, teachers, and curriculum developers have highlighted how poststructuralist theorizing challenges master narratives, postulates that all meaning is discursively constructed, and insists that we, as educators, examine how and under what conditions particular discourses come to shape what gets constructed as knowledge. At the same time, it is impossible to claim definitive and static manifestations of or future directions for poststructuralist theory in relation to curriculum theorizing and development. What is possible to note here is the proliferation of those involved in the work of curriculum, writ large, who

are searching for ways in which to confront the reemergence of mechanistic, technicalrational approaches to teaching, curriculum conceptualizing, and development, and of standardized tests as the major tool for the evaluation of students knowledge and teacher effectiveness. A number of curriculum scholars and practitioners are looking to the poststructuralist theory in order to call into question, for example, universalized versions of school reform efforts and educational policy mandates. Indeed, the poststructuralist theory offers perspectives that enable curriculum workers who wish to work toward creating ruptures, toward asking . . . questions about necessary complicities, inadequate categories, dispersing rather than capturing meanings, and producing bafflement rather than solutions (Lather, 2007: viii) to pose challenges to the educational status quo. The poststructuralist theory itself challenges all those involved in the curriculum field to interrogate our taken-for-granted assumptions as we investigate the discursive practices and relations of power that underlie any one answer to the classic curriculum question, what knowledge is of the most worth.

Bibliography
Baker, B. and Heyning, K. E. (eds.) (2004). Dangerous Coagulations? The Uses of Foucault in the Study of Education. New York: Peter Lang. Butler, J. P. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Davies, B. (2003). Shards of Glass: Children Reading and Writing beyond Gendered Identities, rev. edn. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Derrida, J. (1998). Of Grammatology, Spivak, G. C. (trans.) Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (2001). Writing and Difference, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Ellsworth, E. (1997). Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. New York: Teachers College Press. Foucault, M. (1975/1977). Discipline and Punish, Sheridan, A. (trans.). New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, pp 19721977. New York: Pantheon. Lather, P. (2007). Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Luke, C. and Gore, J. (eds.) (1992). Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Paris: Minuit. Miller, J. L. (2005). Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. Orner, M. (1992). Interrupting the calls for student voice in liberatory education: A feminist poststructural perspective. In Luke, C. and Gore, J. (eds.) Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, pp 7489. New York: Routledge. Pierre, E., St. and Pillow, W. (eds.) (2000). Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Practice and Theory in Education. New York: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1974). Translators preface. In Derrida, J. (ed.) Of Grammatology, Spivak, G. C. (trans.), pp ixxc. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tamboukou, M. (2003). Women, Education, the Self: A Foucauldian Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Walkerdine, V. (1990). Schoolgirl Fictions. London: Verso. Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Martusewicz, R. A. (1992). Mapping the terrain of the post-modern subject: Post-structuralism and the educated woman. In Pinar, W. F. and Reynolds, W. M. (eds.) Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text, pp 131158. New York: Teachers College Press. Peters, M. A. and Burbules, N. C. (2004). Poststructuralism and Educational Research. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Pierre, E., St. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. Qualitative Studies in Education 13, 477515. Pinar, W. F. (ed.) (1975). Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Pinar, W. F. and Reynolds, W. M. (eds.) (1992). Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text. New York: Teachers College Press. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., and Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Discourses. New York: Peter Lang. Slattery, P. (2006). Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Tyler, R. (1949). Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Further Reading
Anyon, J. (1994). The retreat of Marxism and socialist feminism: Postmodern and poststructural theories in education. Curriculum Inquiry 24, 115134. Baker, B. (2001). In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History, and the Child. New York: Peter Lang. Britzman, D. (1995). The question of belief: Writing poststructural ethnography. Qualitative Studies in Education 8, 233242. Butler, J. (1995). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of postmodernism. In Caruth, C. and Esch, D. (eds.) Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, pp 213232. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Butler, J. P. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Cherryholmes, C. (1988). Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Davies, B. (2000). A Body of Writing 19901999. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Doll, W. E., Jr. (1993). A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.