Poststructuralist Research

Foundations of Poststructuralist Investigation

These curriculum researchers challenge what Jean-François Lyotard would term a “grand narrative”an ultimate, decontextualized, universalized way of conceiving, constructing, and conducting any curriculum inquiry, conception, content, design, development, or evaluation. Poststructuralists research such curriculum narratives by investigating ways that meanings, “content,” experiences, and selves are, in part, discursively constitutedthat is, they “exist” in, rather than outside, language. The self and its objects of perception are effects of a language that always is in process, always modifying itself.

Refusing unitary positivist educational research ideals of rationality, causal explanations, and generalizations, then, these researchers denaturalize and destabilize what seems “natural” as well as interrupt essentialized educational thought, practices, and identities. They investigate how, and under what conditions, particular discourses what Michel Foucault refers to as written or spoken words that are grouped according to certain rules established within those discoursescome to shape what gets put forth as knowledge, who counts as being able to generate knowledge, and what shifting power relations influence and frame any one curriculum or research interpretation.

Specifically addressing issues of power, post-structuralist researchers examine not only what and whose determinations and creations of knowledge count but also how those creations are produced, how they function, and how they are regulated as well as regulate. Poststructuralist curriculum researchers often investigate what cultural and social practices, embedded in and constructed by particular discourses, constitute, replicate, or call into question subject-matter contentor what many educators often generically refer to as “the curriculum.” They also might research social and cultural effects of particular versions and conditions of curriculum constructions and practices on students, teachers, administrators, and parents. And because these researchers doubt the ability of language as well as themselves to perfectly report an external reality, or to convey an ultimate meaning about events, people, or conditions framed by that particular reality, they grapple throughout their inquiries and writing with the crisis in representation.

Influenced by scholarship in literary theory, the arts, philosophy, anthropology, architecture, linguistic and cultural studies, and in the name of various political agendas, including feminism and postcolonialism, poststructuralist curriculum researchers attempt to work in generative ways with, rather than against, the complexities of human existence. They attempt to trouble various reductionisms that are an inherent part of traditional curriculum conceptions as well as positivist and postpositivist educational research paradigms. At the same time, others, many working from critical neo-Marxist positions in curriculum theorizing, argue that a central tenet of poststructuralist theoriesthat there can only be incredulity toward metanarrativesis itself a grand narrative.

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