Postmodernism

Postmodernism can be viewed not so much as an “ism” (which suggests something complete, totalized, unified) as a social, discursive, cultural, and political turna turnout of and away from the modern, from previously customary modes of thinking and living. Some argue that this turn was precipitated, in great part, by sociopolitical movements during the 1960s in the West, particularly theorized by French philosophers, historians, and linguists, that resisted and attempted to overthrow normalizing and often oppressive social mores, structures, and practices. Such a turn became apparent in the 1970s and 1980s through a proliferation of new media, technologies, mass cultures, reconceivings of capitalism, consumer and information societies, urbanization, and cultural forms that questioned modernist Enlightenment ideals of rational, fully conscious humans and the quest for foundations on which to base claims of eternal truth and certainty.

The postmodern turn was evidenced most dramatically within U.S. curriculum studies during the 1970s and 1980s with the move by a group of theoretically diverse scholars to “reconceptualize” the field's technical-rational focus and prescriptive and managerial nature to encompass efforts to “understand” curriculum. Drawing on the Latin word currere, to runas in running the course of a racereconceptualized curriculum involved attention to processes of inward journeys to explore experiencings of educative activities as well as to examine larger social and cultural contexts and power relations that framed such experiencing. Reconceptually oriented curriculum scholars introduced psychosocial, humanities-based perspectives as well as neo-Marxist political analyses in response to the deficiencies of conceiving of curriculum and its design and development as another version of “truth and certainty”as linear, sequential, predictable, and measurable versions of supposedly universally agreed-upon versions of content as well as pedagogical and learning processes.