Performatividad y educación científica posmoderna

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Performativity and Postmodern Scientific Education
Alexandro Escudero, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Diana Farias, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia
Abstract: This article describes the main problems that science education faces in industrialised
countries: a general negative opinion of the sciences, a decline in the number of students choosing to
study science and a decline in the number of students signing up for doctorate programmes in science.
The article puts forward the hypothesis that all this is the result of a conflicting scenario: students
have postmodern identities, while education is modern. To this end, the article reviews the main
philosophical and sociological ideas about post-modernity, and the criticism of modern education that
has arisen from same. The article then goes on to describe the difficulty that postmodern discourse
has in propounding a genuinely postmodern pedagogy. Finally, it proposes the idea that performativity
theory could participate in the conflicting scenario of science education.
Keywords: Performativity, Postmodern, Scientific Education
Approaching the Problem
T
HE MOST STRIKING sign of the crisis in the teaching and learning of science is
the significant decline in enrolment figures for degrees in the natural sciences and
the widespread desertion of same by students. In the past decade, there seems to have
been a growing perception that the problem has become more acute in some European
countries. This has been linked to the liberalisation of the system of choosing subjects in
schools in many countries, as well as to the increasing variety of courses being offered by
universities. For instance, in the UK and Ireland, the number and proportion of young people,
respectively, choosing physics or chemistry declined steadily during the 1990s, while biology
managed, at best, to maintain steady figures.
The problem was equally pronounced in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and
Italy. Officially, among the EU-25 countries, only Greece and the Flemish part of Belgium
reported that they did not face a diminishing trend in the number of students choosing to
study science in schools (European Commission, 2004). Furthermore, many countries have
seen a decline in the number of students choosing to pursue the study of physical sciences,
engineering and mathematics at university.
For instance, between 1993 and 2003 the percentage of S&T graduates fell in Poland,
Portugal, France, Germany and the Netherlands. In addition, the percentage of graduates
studying for a PhD (the most common route to becoming a professional scientist) has dropped
throughout the EU. The ROSE study of students’ attitudes to science in more than 20 countries
has found that the more advanced a country is, the less its young people are interested in
studying science.
Data presented in the EU report Europe Needs More Scientists (2004) show that the pro-
portion of researchers in the EU is 5.7 per 1,000 of the workforce, whilst comparable figures
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for Japan and the USA stand at 9.14 and 8.08 respectively, suggesting that the problem has
a pan-European dimension. If students’ attitudes towards school science remain as negative
as they currently are, the issue of the supply of scientists, and whether Europe is producing
enough of them, will be exacerbated and not diminished (Osborne & Dillon, 2008).
In light of the above, we would like to point out that there are three main problems for
science education in industrialised countries: a general negative opinion of the sciences, a
decline in the number of students choosing to study science, and a decline in the number of
students signing up for doctorate programmes in science.
All this leads us to pose three questions: has science education in industrialised countries
failed? Does science education consider the new contextual factors when formulating its
curricula? Is postmodern science education possible?
In order to answer these questions, we will be reviewing the main philosophical and soci-
ological ideas on postmodernity, and the criticism of modern education that has arisen from
same. We will describe some of the most important factors in the current context that influence
students studying science, as postmodern individuals. Finally, we will propose the idea that
performativity theory could participate in the conflicting scenario between students with
postmodern identities, within modern science education.
The Scenario of Post Modern Discourse
Modernity is a historical and political period that emerged in Western Europe and which,
by championing the idea that reason and science were the only tools of human thought capable
of banishing theological and metaphysical principles, succeeded in delegitimizing the mon-
archical and ecclesiastical power that prevailed in the 18th
century, to impose a project of
enlightenment in its place. The practices and discourses that arose in this part of the world
shaped the main point of reference for modern societies, as well as generating their own
variants in the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union.
In the 19th
century, the processes of industrialisation, secularisation and development of
science and technology were the indisputable evidence that Europe’s enlightenment wielded
in order to construct a positivist narrative of the need to impart teaching (the transmission
of knowledge) and secular moral education (the education of citizens) as being the path to-
wards emancipation. The modern mentality came into being with the idea that the world
could be changed (Bauman, 2005). This impetus to reject tradition in order to introduce
newness rapidly brought about a compulsive need to make and unmake. The project was a
fundamental notion for modernity. The need to colonise the future or to achieve a utopia
were what gave modernity its driving force and inspiration. Being modern meant, above all,
believing that the future would be better because it was in our power to improve it. The
emancipation of humanity would have to defeat, particularly, two constant threats: ignorance
and individualism.
The project of modernity has proved to be a process filled with tensions, paradoxes and
contradictions;; it has been marked by recurring crises during the course of history. The
academic sphere accepts that a failure of modern precepts took place in the second half of
the 20th
century, when a series of systems entered into crisis: the governability of mass
democracies, the Keynesian orientation of the economy, the social democratic welfare state,
the sustainability of the environment as a result of the dynamics of industrialism, and the
dawning of the relativist and post-positivist challenge to science (Wagner, 1997).

The social analysis of these crises and challenges was analysed in the industrialised
countries within the context of an academic debate that commenced with the publication of
The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (Lyotard, 1987). In this text, Jean-François
Lyotard claimed that since the 1960s the industrialised countries have experienced several
significant changes, but particularly a different way of producing and using knowledge. He
labelled this new condition postmodernity. The most vigorous counterpoint to Lyotard’s
idea was submitted by Jürgen Habermas, who denied the existence of postmodernity, and
in contrast proposed that the modern project was an unfinished one, and that in any case we
should promote the correct outcome of modernity (Habermas, 2001). As a result of this debate
between modernity and postmodernity, these irreconcilable stances became enriched by a
multiplicity of ideas that revitalised the majority of academic discourses.
For example, Anthony Giddens propounded the idea that the postmodern condition is one
of late modernity, in which modern precepts have become radicalised. This phenomenon,
typical of industrialised societies, has mainly modified the identity-building process (Giddens,
1997). Modern values such as freedom and autonomy are experienced in late modernity in
a state of continuous tension and anxiety, since the decisions that the individual has to take
every day force him to ask the questions: will I do everything correctly? Am I making the
right decision?
In a similar direction, Zygmunt Bauman coined the term liquid modernity (Bauman, 2007b)
to stress that one of the characteristics of the contemporary age is the fragile links with which
the individual connects with the community and with other individuals. The author explains
that given the fact that there are so many options for living one’s own lifestyle, personal re-
lations are constructed without any dense or eternal commitments. Individuals place more
value on the idea of escaping from relations unharmed rather than achieving a long-term
commitment.
Another significant contribution to postmodern thought was made by Ulrich Beck when
he claimed that industrialised societies are built on a fundamental paradox: the risk society
(Beck, 2006). According to the author, industrialised societies possess all the objective
conditions to offer security to each and every one of their citizens, but paradoxically these
citizens live their lives with a sensation of risk on different levels: in the areas of employment,
existentially, personally and in the family. The risk society is at the same time stimulating
and frustrating, and one premise by which to successfully negotiate everyday life is to possess
sufficient information so as to make the right decisions.
Gianni Vattimo claimed that dense thought, typical of positivist rationality, is no longer
of use to individuals living in industrialised contexts. Without using a pejorative approach,
but rather a propositional one, he argues that adopting weak thought helps individuals to
enjoy the advantages of nihilism, typical of postmodern societies (Vattimo & Rovatti, 1995).
The analysis that Gilles Lipovetsky made of today’s society was based on a viewpoint
that was different to the Schools of Suspicion1
, and therefore lends an optimistic, enlivening
impulse to the discourse on postmodernity. Lipovetsky suggests that we are currently exper-
iencing a hypermodernity characterised by hedonism, hyper-consumption, the preeminence
1
The term ‘Schools of Suspicion’ became a topic following the publication of Freud: Interpretation of Culture
(Ricoeur, 1999), in which Paul Ricoeur groups together the theories of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche within a way
of thought that suspects that the instrumental reason conceals unknown drives – unknown even to the individual
himself. These drives are represented in the dynamic of capital, in repression and in weakness.
ALEXANDRO ESCUDERO, DIANA FARIAS

of the ephemeral, the leisure culture, and the enjoyment of fashion. In the author’s opinion,
blaming today’s unease on superficiality prevents us from identifying its anthropological
and social nature, and in this way, discovering its advantages. Hypermodernity is, above all,
a sensation that the ideal future promised by modernity has returned to remind us of the
banality of existence (Lipovetsky, 2006).
In his philosophical thought, Jean Baudrillard puts forward the idea that the simulation
of the real has triumphed, and that the market drives the consumption of simulation on a
global scale. Sceptical toward the modern discourse regarding absolute truth, he believes
that in view of the diversity of self-legitimated narratives, today’s world is more real than
we expected it to be (Baudrillard, 2005). Authenticity has been replaced by the copy, but
those who are involved in this phenomenon are unable to notice it. The narratives of all the
possible realities seek their representation in the media and achieve a hyperreality and a
simulacra of the real.
Using a Marxist analysis, Fredric Jameson claims that postmodernity does not exist in itself,
but rather as postmodern manifestations, which are those specific nonconformist reactions
of the dominant discourse that he still relates to the very dynamic of late capitalism. Cynical
consumption, pastiche and social schizophrenia are the ingredients of postmodern expressions
in industrialised societies, and their objective is to highlight the message that the authority
that upheld the Euro-centric, patriarchal and capitalist discourse has declined (Jameson,
1996).
With the above selection of authors and their main theoretical postulates, we have attempted
to outline the scenario of postmodern discourse. To sum up, the authors who produce dis-
courses on postmodernity agree that fully living the values of modernity, such as autonomy
and liberty, meant reducing Euro-centrist authority and deconstructing the grand narratives
that promised a human development based on scientific progress. Thus it was possible to
show that the threats to the modern-day individual were a necessary fiction, and that now
the pulverisation of narratives has two consequences: it grants the individual a sensation of
freedom, but it confronts him with an enormous responsibility: taking charge of his own
life.
Postmodern thinking influenced pedagogic discourse in a very particular way. The post-
modern criticism of education has offered some highly original points of departure for re-
vitalising the educational discourse of science. However, none of these proposals can be
taken as a genuinely postmodern pedagogy. We will return to this theoretical impossibility
further on in this paper. To start with, we will list a series of authors and the most important
criticisms that have been made of modern education.
For instance, Lyotard says that the role of the university teacher and of higher education
is negatively impacted because of the way knowledge and science will be transformed in
computerized postmodern societies. He argues that the instructor, the learner and the cur-
riculum must all become victims of the relentless drive to maximize efficiency and develop
professional, computer-based skills training (performativity 2
), at the expense of the tradi-
tional role of the university (influenced by the early 19th
-century German reformer Wilhelm
2
In this case, the term ‘performativity’ to which Lyotard refers is linked to the academic performance of students
in higher education, and should not be confused with the term performativity that constructs performativity theory,
and which derives from the English noun perfomance: execution, representation, exercise, and which we will explain
further on.

von Humboldt) as a place where learning, research and knowledge accumulation—for the
exclusive training of the mind—is an end in itself (Lyotard, 1987).
Michel Foucault considered the disciplinary condition of modern educational systems as
being a way of standardising the individual (Foucault, 1984). In this sense, any way of
learning or teaching that goes against or deviates from this standardisation is belittled or
punished. Based on the above, authority and discipline in education are priority issues for
postmodern theory.
Richard Rorty believed that two fundamental values in modern education – truth and
freedom – have turned into political flags defended by the positions of the traditional right
and left, respectively. This political point of view is aggravated when both positions believe
that education is only received from childhood to maturity, but they lose sight of the fact
that education contains within it socialisation and individualisation processes that accompany
us throughout our lives. Socialisation and individualisation is a tense relationship that perhaps
cannot be resolved by simply promoting the idea that students be instructed in the truth, or
be left in freedom to learn. (Rorty, 2002).
The term deconstruction, coined by Jacques Derrida, has been applied to postmodern
analysis with useful results for the educational discourse. This author claims that the modern
(binary) idea of nature (complete and void of meaning) and culture (incomplete and stuffed
full of meanings) has reached its end. And with this, the teleological meaning of education
has also ended. The task that the modern project of education conferred upon itself as a way
of completing the work of nature is no longer sustained on philosophical foundations, but
on a metanarrative. However, the modern metanarratives that favour education, and the
speculative theory of German idealism, which favours university education, are being decon-
structed with new forms of alternative learning that transcend the binarism typical of modern
educational systems (Biesta & Egéa-Kuehne, 2001).
From another point of view, Giroux proposes that postmodern thinking enables us to
generate a symbolic resistance that challenges the liberal and humanist notion of the unified,
rational person as being the bearer of history. He analyses the contribution of postmodern
thought to education by clarifying the complex links between culture and power, while
highlighting the changing and contradictory nature of subjectivity. This enables us to view
the broadest and most specific contexts in which authority is defined, and which leads to a
healthy mistrust of any setting of limits, and of the hidden ways in which education subor-
dinates, excludes and marginalises (Giroux & Flecha, 2006).
Zygmunt Bauman notes that the habit of consumerism in postmodernity invites us to take
advantage of as many opportunities of happiness as possible. The products of the market –
knowledge, work and life in general – are spheres that can be accessed with an instrumental
education, but the training of citizens is the task that gives education its true meaning (Bau-
man, 2007a).
Nowadays, education is a device of power and control whose chief purpose is to reproduce
the dominant values of society and to legitimise its authority. Educational narratives not
only tell us where we belong, they put us where we belong (Usher & Edwards, 1994). Ac-
cording to these authors, the dictum about the necessity to educate is a clear assertion of the
legitimacy of those who possess ‘true, valid knowledge’ not only to pass this on to others
who do not possess it, but to tell others what to do, how to behave, what ends to pursue and
by what means. In other words, what is being established in modernity is not only the need
to educate, but also that the purpose of this education is to shape the very conduct of life.

Education, then, is expressed through a legislative discourse which confers the power to set
the limits and boundaries that define what is to be included and what excluded in the service
of creating the rational man to live in a rational society. Education is not just a neutral in-
strument for imparting knowledge.
Cathy Loving (1997) has noted an increasing leverage of postmodernist-type ideas in
science education in several areas: in qualitative research by stressing the strict linkage to
socio-political causes, in pedagogy and learning by stressing assorted constructivist ideas,
in curriculum and content by stressing the conjectured gender and Euro-centric bias of
Western science, and, more importantly, in the epistemology and nature of science discourse
(views on theory, knowledge, and experimentation) by stressing Kuhnian-type interpretations
(although it is clear that not everyone sympathetic to a Kuhnian reading of science need be
in agreement with postmodernity).
The aim of this selection of authors and theoretical postulates is to show, in broad terms,
that postmodern thought has carried out some highly original philosophical and sociological
analyses of the modern educational condition, and that it has formulated an educational dis-
course that is interesting to a certain extent, but it has not generated any genuinely postmodern
pedagogical proposal. This is because postmodern thought has been notoriously sterile as
regards the regulatory dimension of pedagogy, owing to the very postmodern assumptions
themselves (Ayuste & Trilla, 2005). In other words, postmodern thought possessed an intel-
lectual power capable of exposing the incongruities of modernity, and of disintegrating its
foundations, but when it aims to be congruent with its principles, it shuts down any possib-
ility of constructing any kind of educational regulations. In any case, postmodern thought
has barely been able to formulate the means of education, and to reject its aims.
To illustrate the fact that when postmodern thought ventures to propose a regulatory di-
mension of education, it gives the impression that it has already been said before, and in a
better way, in modern pedagogy, we have selected three proposed postmodern pedagogies.
We believe that postmodern thought loses its power when it attempts to formulate pedago-
gical proposals without paying attention to this contradiction in terms.
Usher and Edwars (1994) claim that postmodern education has the potential to question
the status of the definitive, the certain and the proven. It is a site where the play of difference
can escape the fundamental immobility and reassuring certitude of logocentric closure, a
site of endless dissemination. The consequence of this for postmodern education is that it
provides no new definitive perspective from which a new set of prescriptions and techniques
for organising teaching and learning can be generated. It is about particular, singular respons-
ibilities. This means that education can no longer be dedicated to the achievement of univer-
sally applicable goals – truth, emancipation, democracy, enlightenment, empowerment –
pre-defined by the grand narratives. Education should be more diverse in terms of goals and
processes: “Instead of reducing everything to the ‘same’, it would instead become the vehicle
for the celebration of diversity, a space for different voices against the one authoritative
voice” (Usher & Edwards, 1994: 211).
Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) call for forms of pedagogy that open a space for plurality
and that develop a border pedagogy that rejects finality and certainty for the voice of differ-
ence and dialogue. Border pedagogy confirms and critically engages the knowledge and
experiences through which students author their own voices and construct identities. This
means it takes seriously the knowledge and experiences that constitute the individual and
collective voices by which students identify and give meaning to themselves and others, and

draws upon what they know about their own lives as a basis for criticising the dominant
culture. At issue here is the development of a pedagogy that replaces the authoritative language
of recitation with an approach that allows students to speak from their own histories, collective
memories, and voices while simultaneously challenging the ground on which knowledge
and power are constructed and legitimated.
Another proposal for postmodern science education is that of Michalinos Zembylas, who
argues that Lyotard’s work provides a site in which to organise what could be a postmodern
scientific education with two main aims: to transform the teaching of science and the cur-
riculum, and to transform the role of the student by re-committing him to his creativity and
his sense of amazement at nature. In Zembylas’ opinion, it is also necessary to reconstitute
the role of teachers, who should go from being the ones who control and transmit the “ca-
nonical” knowledge of the textbooks to being actors who, together with the students, cooperate
and co-construct a more local knowledge in which the “epistemologies” of the teachers and
students are both valid (Schulz, 2007).
The previous paragraphs recall the modern pedagogues who proposed pedagogic models
that are considered libertarian, such as Paulo Freire, Célestin Freinet, Antón Makarenko,
Carl Rogers and Alexander Sutherland Neill.
New Contextual Factors in Science Education
Now that we have reviewed the main philosophical and sociological ideas on postmodernity
and the criticisms of modern education that these ideas have given rise to, we will now proceed
to describe some of the most important factors of the current context influencing students
studying science, as postmodern individuals. The theories of postmodernity agree that the
contemporary social scenario possesses different characteristics that define new problems
for education. We have selected six characteristics that are closely linked with the educational
context:
1. The collapse of the Grand Narrative which promised an ideal world also weakened
the idea that school was the medium through which to achieve success.
According to Lyotard, the momentum of the modern project was sustained on narratives that
promised the emancipation of humanity through reason, the full exercising of freedom, the
appropriation of the products of work and the development of capitalist techno-science.
Modernity placed its trust in the progress of science, the arts and political freedoms, as a
way to guarantee an ideal future (Lyotard, 2008). Schools would have the task of training
enlightened, rational exemplary citizens who would be the masters of their own destinies.
With the collapse of modern narratives, there was also a decline in the narrative on the im-
portance of official education, which promised success. Educational institutions seem to be
pursuing ends that are not very clear, and very far from students’ concerns.
2. The new global and multicultural societies demonstrate that the current Western
educational systems founded on Euro-centrism have many challenges to resolve.
The decadence of the dominant totalitarist ideas is one of the conditions that generate sens-
itivity toward differences. Our societies are composed of very localised heterogeneous social

cells that at the same time form part of a world (or rather, a multiplicity of worlds) that is
increasingly globalised, totally interconnected and characterised by a very high degree of
diversity that seems as if it will never be overcome (Stehr, 1997). One of the values of
modernity – equality – involved eliminating differentiated treatment in education and estab-
lishing an education system that was egalitarian and for everyone. In postmodernity, the
value of equity (the search for equality without eliminating difference) replaces the egalitarian
dream and attempts to tackle one of the challenges of our time: to achieve a balance between
the local and the worldwide (Gadotti, 2002). In Western education, differentiated treatment
still persists with regard to the stratification between First World/Third World countries,
which leads to the generation of stratified educational systems, unequal patterns of employ-
ment, bureaucratisation, and the centralisation of decisions in which it is still assumed that
there is one single science, one single history, one single narrative.
3. The disintegration of the modern individual and a new political integration of identity
appear in schools.
In the modernity project, the individual is understood as an individual in relation to his
community, as a part of a whole. One of the processes accompanying the industrialisation
of Western societies is individualisation. This forces each person to “design their own bio-
graphy”, and to “live their own lives” in a “fugitive world”, in which personal decisions are
made without guidelines, authorities or any other trustworthy declaration of truth (Schreiner
& Sjøberg, 2004). This generates a feeling of unlimited freedom accompanied by uncertainty,
anxiety and fragmentation. Young people assume that the way in which they approach their
lives is unique, that they belong to them and they must be come to terms with on an individual
basis rather than as part of a society. The decadence of the modern individual implies that
no essences exist in people’s self-identity. The hard-and-fast categories on which modern
identity used to be constructed, such as nationality, sex and race can today be disintegrated,
(self) reflected, (self) interpreted and (self) defined. Today’s forms of association are based
on categories that range from the emotional, the spontaneous to the singular;; young people
mobilise themselves, coming together in support of struggles in favour of the environment,
pacifism, anti-globalisation and sexual freedoms;; but as fast as they congregate, they disperse,
in the same way that they change their identity with the passing of time, or experience incon-
sistency in their roles in everyday life.
4. Traditional academic knowledge is called into question as a consequence of new
ways of learning and establishing oneself as an individual.
Another of the consequences of the weakening of techno-science as a supplier of well-being
and progress is the way in which knowledge and ways of learning have been redefined.
Students no longer learn only at school, they also learn through the Internet, at the cinema,
through music, television and on their travels. What throws modern educational systems off
balance is the fact that students find it more enjoyable to learn through unconventional
educational media. The educational paradigm of modernity based on a school education with
rigid, rational content that was promoted by the media to combat the spectre of ignorance
and to be an “enlightened” citizen has now disappeared;; now the call has gone out to promote
opinion and criticism, as the criterion for choosing and understanding the avalanche of in-

formation in which we are immersed. The dynamics of the new “scenarios” that are separate
from school and university require reflection in order to organise the connection between
the notions of information and knowledge, which can enable us to understand how these
new media can go from being mere channels for the transmission of data to places of collective
production, transformation and exchange of knowledge by the changing individuals who we
described above.
5. There is a cynical relation between power and knowledge, without the modern ideal
of a comprehensive education in values and aesthetics.
Another sign of our time is the disenchantment with science and technology. The domination
of nature by the modern individual and the objects obtained through contemporary science
and technology did not bring greater freedom, or a greater and better distributed flow of
wealth. It only brought greater security with respect to the facts, and a strengthening of the
scientific “truth” in a world that is increasingly encoded in science. Nevertheless, as Lyotard
points out (Lyotard, 2008), the vocational figure of the wise man has become blurred by that
of a scientist on his way towards deprofessionalisation. The “wise men” are now subject to
the regime of the most performative, where what I say is truer than what you say, because
with what I say, “I can do” more than what you can do with what you say.
The development of technoscience has become a way of increasing unease, not of calming
it. We can no longer link it to the idea of “progress”. It does not comply with the requirements
originating in the needs of the individual;; it now meets the needs of the market, governments,
military agencies, multinationals and private capital. The scandals of the “external” context
of science appear in the news on a daily basis, the halo of divinity that the modern project
snatched away from religion and placed on science has disappeared;; we are living in an age
in which people are less convinced of the “truths” and the “facts”, and individuals are much
more critical – those who are the new students of science classes.
6. Students “understand” the new information technologies better than their teachers.
Some of the products of techno-science are technology, automation and access to information,
elements that appear to turn individuals – as Lyotard would say (2008) – into the lords and
masters of nature, at the same time as they profoundly destabilise it, given that as part of
nature, it is also now part of the “creation” of science. The way in which individuals deal
with this situation favours those who were born out of this situation, beings who themselves
challenge the grand Western biological, technological and evolutionist narratives. The inhab-
itants of this postmodern world could be said to be cyborgs, the only ones capable of critically
re-appropriating the scientific-technical discourse as one of the main current means of de-
termining what we are, who we are, where we are and what we are capable of doing (Haraway,
1995). We live in a world that establishes “an open ideological space for the reassessments
of machines and organisms as codified texts” (Haraway, 1995) through which we can move
deeper into the game of writing and reading a world into which our students were born and
are better “adapted” than we are.
Once we have defined those that we consider to be the new contextual elements of science
education, we can attempt to answer the questions that lie behind the reflections in this text.
Has modern science education failed in the industrialised countries?

Not yet. We believe that in the current conflicting scenario, where students with postmodern
identities are studying under modern systems, the alternative has been to put forward educa-
tional proposals that attempt to overcome the modern foundations, to be postmodern, but
which can very easily recall modern pedagogies. The situation is experienced more deeply
in science education, where proposals are still decidedly aimed at validating the ideas that
sustained science in modernity: truth, reason and progress. We could describe this scenario
as a “knot” in which educational systems turn back on themselves repeatedly, while students
increasingly distance themselves from conventional teaching systems. This apparent inertia
of the roles of teaching and learning is what separates science education from postmodern
citizens.
Does modern science education consider new contextual factors in its curriculum? No.
Science education ignores the importance of identity in these new students, as well as ig-
noring the subjects to which they are attracted: environmentalism, gender identity, multicul-
turalism, responsible consumption and pacifism. Meanwhile, postmodern thought prioritises
a redefinition of the politics of margins and the centre, giving importance to the politics of
identity. Science education has not acknowledged that students are not modern people any
more. And education needs to be moved on to postmodernity. According to postmodern
thought, modern education represents the means of eliminating otherness. It is a manifestation
of violence insofar as it attempts to reduce difference, contingency, provisionality and to
play to one and the same. Education is a site where meanings are reduced to a single, determ-
inate meaning, where otherness is brought under the control of reason and difference is re-
duced to sameness.
Is a Post Modern Scientific Education Possible?
Theoretically speaking, no. Postmodern thought has succeeded in carrying out highly original
philosophical and sociological analyses on the modern educational condition, but owing to
the fact that its criticisms erode the regulatory dimension, it becomes impossible to propose
a postmodern pedagogy. In any case, postmodern thought has managed to shed light on the
inconsistencies of modern education, without being able (owing to its own principles) to
offer a new teleology.
We agree with the postmodern postulates that forecast a decline in the modern individual,
and with this decline, a search for answers to the educational challenges in postmodernity,
on a more intimate dimension, by approaching identity. Performativity theory offers theor-
etical tools to enable us to imagine that no matter how paradoxical it might seem at first
sight, the peculiar idea of the fragility of identity has given rise to solid, powerful physical
and social movements: feminism, ecology, multiculturalism and pacifism. The new individu-
alism and the constitution of the social identity is an act of power, and identity, as such, is
power (Laclau, 2000). The individual and his agency become the centre of political and social
action and give the postmodern era its distinctive historical constitution: the dissolution of
the society of traditional bourgeois values, and the emergence of civil society (Touraine,
1994).

Performativity Theory in a Conflicting Scenario
The concept of performativity was introduced into philosophy through J. Austin’s theory of
speech acts (2008). This author used the term to refer to statements capable of doing things
by means of the word itself, specifically those for which this capacity for action is the actual
purpose of its use. Judith Butler recovers the perlocutionary act from the theory of Austin’s
speech acts, according to which saying is equal to doing, and “saying something” means
producing effects and consequences in the emotions, thoughts or actions of oneself or others.
Butler adopts and extends the latter notion because she is interested in the force or power
that these acts have on other subjects, and on the speaker himself and, above all, its capacity
to produce intentional changes and transformations. (Femenías, 2003).
In Butler’s interpretation, performativity is built upon reiteration, persistence and stability,
but also on the possibility of breaking. It is what impels and sustains realisation, thanks to
a process of iterability and repetition constrained by certain rules (Butler, 2001). However,
performativity is not merely a free game, a dramatisation or simply a “realising”. It is not a
question of one singular act or an event, but of a ritualised production, of a ritual reiteration
under and through certain conditions of prohibition and taboo, which never completely de-
termine the subject. It is precisely here that the political and transformative capacity of
statements capable of re-inscribing new meanings is anchored (Femenías, 2003).
In this sense, agency is an important element for explaining the transformations of which
the individual is capable. Agency is a practice of immanent re-articulation or re-signification
of power, it is not an attribute of subjects;; on the contrary, it is the performative nature of
the political signifier. Agency is interwoven into the very power relations that it rivals. Only
in this sense, it produces alternative modalities that bring about a kind of political response
that is not pure opposition or transcendence of relations, but the difficult task of promoting
new practices that acknowledge the positive and creative aspects of power. Thus, power fa-
vours and restricts agency to the extent that it allows and limits the control of the discourse
that gives intelligibility to the practices. In other words, power does not reside in the actual
conventions, but in their reiteration (Butler, 2001).
We have recovered certain elements from performativity theory that enable us to describe
the challenge to science education in postmodernity. The project of modernity sustains its
momentum on the idea that humanity should become what it promises to be. The metanar-
ratives served to build and authorise institutions to carry out the standardisation of teaching.
Pedagogy and its educational models emerged with the task of combating the threat that
ignorance and individualism represented for the enlightened individual. Thanks to these
enemies of the enlightened project, pedagogy upheld several educational models, their means
and their aims. In pedagogy, modern par excellence , we are witnessing an attempt to discover,
train and encourage the agency of the individual.
The first thing that postmodern theory does with its philosophical and sociological analysis
is to show the function of metanarratives (to legitimate social and political institutions and
practices, laws, ethics and ways of thinking), to demonstrate that they are the pillars of the
idea of progress, and that they confer a dense, well-defined power to ignorance and individu-
alism. With postmodern thought, this power is atomised, it acquires a ubiquitous nature, and
is dispersed.
As the threatening limits that place the enlightened individual in danger become blurred,
educational discourse loses its “density”, enters into crisis and, given the absence of aims,

is only capable of promoting educational means, turning back on itself repeatedly, as we
mentioned previously. On this point, we would like to link the categories of power and
agency, from performativity theory, and transfer them to the educational sphere: given a
well-defined power, the agency of the individual is questioned;; when the power loses
definition, the agency deconcentrates its momentum and gives rise to transformative resig-
nifications that open up the way for changes.
In our opinion, the changes in the educational scenario that would revitalise science edu-
cation are still gestating, and will only become visible when a new power threatening the
postmodern individual is reinvented. Meanwhile, we will continue to witness performativity,
that is to say, the reiteration and persistence of postmodern pedagogical proposals anchored
in the task of defeating the threats to the modern individual.
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About the Authors
Alexandro Escudero
Alexandro Escudero Nahón is a Ph.D. student at Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. His research
focus on the roll of the University as an ethical project from the modernity inside the post-
modernity condition. He got a Master’s degree in Higher Education at Universidad
Mesoamericana, Mexico and a Master’s degree in Audiovisual Production at Universidad
Internacional de Andalucía site La Rábida, Spain. He also got a Degree in Science and
Communication Technologies at Institute of Higher Learning, Mexico. He has published
Apre(h)ender género. Model of public sector expertise. Ed. Institute for women in Oaxaca,
Mexico, 2004. He has worked as Director of Public Policies to Prevent Discrimination at
the National Council to Prevent Discrimination in Mexico City, and as Director of Expertise
for Public Service at the Institute for women in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Diana Farias
Diana M. Farías is a Ph.D. student at Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. Her research focus is
historical and epistemological approach in science teaching. She got a Magister Scientiae
Degree in Chemsitry a Master’s degree in Environmental Education and a Degree in
Chemistry. She leads the Chemistry Teaching Research Group at Universidad Nacional de
Colombia where she has worked the last ten years as professor in General Chemistry Area.

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