Ricoeurian Thought

Paul Ricoeur (19132005), a French philosopher in the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, offers insights into research methods for curriculum studies and issues of curriculum and ethics. His work has influenced research method through the development of hermeneutics as affecting the conceptualization and practice of qualitative inquiry and narrative inquiry. His work on self-hood (how we become a self and what are the characteristics of that self), while less taken up in curriculum studies, offers important counterweights to curriculum work that focuses on the cognitive/rationalist aspect of being human rather than on a more complete image of the human being as the basis for curriculum thinking and making.

Ricoeur's work in method falls into three areas: the potential of hermeneutics, the practice of hermeneutics, and the practice of narrative. Ricoeur confronted the question of whether “meaningful action” (taken from the work of Max Weber, the German sociologist who helped establish the “human sciences” as distinctive from the “natural sciences,” laying out the groundwork for qualitative inquiry). Ricoeur asked if such [Page 751]action could be treated as a text, the original hermeneutic object of inquiry. He argued that meaningful actions are “documents of human actions” transcending the meaning we ascribe to the action as it is occurring. These actions also reveal the contexts within which the action occurs, thus making the larger world present to us (even when we are not aware of this). Hermeneutics offers the possibility of unearthing such hidden meaning. Ricoeur developed the distinction between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of the restoration of meaning as different practices for unearthing meaning. He called Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud the “masters of suspicion” because their work was devoted to tearing away the veils of illusion about how society really works. “Tearing away” bears directly on all the hidden curriculum work. The hermeneutics of the restoration of meaning, on the other hand, offers the counterweight to such analysis, without which the work of interpretation is only half complete. One example of tearing away/restoration is William Reynolds's book applying Ricoeur's “hermeneutic arche” (“reading” texts and action naively, reading in systematic detail, and connecting the naive reading and the detail to the world to which it refers, seeing how the action/text orients us to live in a certain way) to curriculum studies scholars. Donald Blumenfeld-Jones enacted a critical hermeneutic reading of three iconic dance curriculum texts using ostensive, personal, and historic meanings that intersect in the text. For narrative inquiry, Ricoeur's three-volume work Time and Narrative set important parameters for narrative thinking. Ricoeur distinguishes between plots of narratives and emplotment. Plots are simply the chronological telling of a story and are not yet narratives. For plots to become narratives, they must become emplotments. Emplotments present the particulars of the story as not one thing after another (a plot) but one thing because of another (emplotment). The narrativist will offer the details in an order that builds up understanding of the inner and underlying meanings of the narrative and not be as concerned with pure representation.

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