This document discusses governance and critical pedagogy from a poststructural perspective. It begins by exploring Foucault's work on how power operates through governance and discipline to marginalize groups. It then examines poststructural thought and how discourse constructs reality and power/knowledge. The document analyzes how curriculum operates as a site of governance that privileges some ways of reasoning over others. Finally, it considers how critical pedagogy could adopt a poststructural lens to avoid simply replacing one orthodoxy with another or oversimplifying power relations.

1. +
Governance and
Critical Pedagogy
Robert J. Parkes,PhD
Senior Lecturer in Curriculum Studies
The University of Newcastle,Australia

2. +
 Understanding the Power of Governance: A Poststructural
Perspective
 A Poststructural Perspective on Curriculum
 Towards a Post-Critical Pedagogy
Overview

3. +
Understanding the Power of
Governance: A poststructural
perspective

4. +
 “[Foucault] was forceful in bringing
into prominence the ways in which
marginalization, subjection, and
abjection could take place even in
the most liberal or enlightened
practices.” (p. 16)1
 “[He wanted] to write the history or
trace the archaeology of what they
[the medical, penal, psychiatric or
pedagogical establishment]
silenced, repressed, or excluded in
constituting themselves and the
institutions that house them.” (p.
130)1
Foucault, Genealogy &
Governmentality
1. LaCapra, D. (2000). History and reading: Tocqueville, foucault, french studies. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press.

5. +
 Response to Structuralism
 The Problem of Fascism
 May 1968 Revolution/s
A brief genealogy of
poststructuralist thought

6. +
Sovereign Power1
1. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon.

7. +
The Panopticon and
Self-Governance1
1. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon.

8. +
Disciplining the Self
 Self-styling1 (shaping)
 (Self)exclusion
1. Gore, J.M. (1993). The struggle for pedagogies: Critical and feminist discourses as regimes of truth. New York: Routledge.

9. +
Port Arthur Prison,Tasmania

10. +
Panoptical Surveillance
 Individuation
 Differentiation
 Normalisation

11. +
An Educator’s Panopticon:
The Lecture Theatre

12. +
 Power is productive.
 Power simultaneously constrains and enables.
 The constraining aspects of power are what gives it a
productive force.
 DO NOT confuse ‘productive’ with good,and therefore
constraining with bad.
The Productive Effect of Power

13. +
 Foucault was concerned with the way a “subject comes into
being … comes to mastery, comes into existence and agency,
through subjection” (Petersen, 2007, p. 477).
 Power is not simply a force that subordinates from the
outside, but must be understood as “what we depend on for
our existence. . . that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our
agency” (Butler, 1997, p. 2).
 Foucault (1977) has clearly stated that “[t]he chief function of
disciplinary power is to ‘train’. . . it does not link forces
together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them
together in such a way as to multiply and use them” (p. 170).
Power and Agency

14. +
 Discourses are:
 Authoritative statements . . . what experts say when they are
speaking as experts. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982)
 Common-sense statements that have come to take on an
authority in everyday life.
 A series of statements that form the objects of which they speak
(Foucault) . . . Instances of Power/Knowledge – power forming
knowledge / knowledge inciting power.
Discourse as Power

15. +
 Discourses constitute, construct, incite, and induce, rather
than simply document and describe,‘reality’.
 Crisis of Legitimation: Incredulity towards meta-narratives.
The Crisis of Representation

16. +
No Escape From Discourse
 There is no outside text, no
outside history / we cannot
escape discourse.
 When we produce a text or
make an authoritative
statement, we inevitably
repeat and recycle discourses
that are already in circulation
(intertextuality).
 Authoritative statements are
always made from within
existing traditions (discursive
regimes).

17. +
 Radical uncertainty, undecidability, and the call for
democracy.
 Practice of freedom (to be other than who you are now).
How do we judge what is good?

18. +
 Relativism
 Idealism
 Subjectivism
What have some of the critical
responses been to poststructuralism?

19. +
A Poststructural Perspective on
Curriculum

20. +
What is curriculum?
 All of the learning planned and
directed by the school to attain its
educational goals.1
 Refers to the learning experience of
students, as expressed or anticipated
in goals and objectives, plans and
designs, and their implementation.2
1. Tyler, R. W. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Or see: Tyler, R. W.
(2004). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. In D. J. Flinders & S. J. Thornton (Eds.), The curriculum studies reader (pp.
51-60). New York: Routledge.
2. Skilbeck, M. (1984). School based curriculum development. London: Harper & Row Ltd.
The most common answer to this
question:
The Syllabus as a set of
educational prescriptions
[ Usually a set of official Aims,
Knowledge,Skills,&Values ]

21. +
So what is the curriculum?
 the collection of all school subjects?
 the Syllabus for a specific school subject or Key
Learning Area?
 a Scope and sequence that maps how the syllabus
prescriptions will be met in an individual school?
 a Unit of Work that outlines the teaching and learning
strategies and goals for a specific set of syllabus topics?
 Lesson Plans for individual lessons that work towards
the achievement of unit goals?
The Explicit,
Planned, or
Official
Curriculum

22. +
“Currere” the lived experience of
education?1
 What the teacher actually
does to enact the lesson plan
during a specific class or
period?
 What students actually
experience in the classroom
during a specific lesson . . . or
even over the course of their
entire schooling?
1. Pinar, W. F. (1975). Currere: Towards reconceptualization. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists.
Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.
Image from Paramount Picture’s School of Rock

23. +
Example:The International Baccalaureate Curriculum Map
Curriculum as cartography?
“The Map is not the Territory”

24. +
The Three Curricula that
all Schools Teach
To understand curriculum we must explore“what is valued and given
priority and what is devalued and excluded” (p. 297).1
Explicit Implicit / Hidden Null
The official written syllabi,
programmes, lesson plans,
and policies.
The learning of attitudes,
norms, beliefs, values and
assumptions often
expressed as/by rules,
rituals and regulations…
common-sense
knowledge… rarely
questioned or articulated.2
What is not included in the
curriculum and
consequently those ideas
and skills that are withheld
from students that they
might otherwise have used.3
Whose interests are being served by the explicit,implicit,and null curriculum?
1. Cherryholmes, C. H. (1987). A social project for curriculum: Post-structural perspectives. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 19(4),
295-316.
2. Seddon, T. (1983). The hidden curriculum: An overview. Curriculum Perspectives, 3(1), 1-6.
3. Eisner, E. W. (1979). The educational imagination: on the design and evaluation of school programs. New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co. Inc.

25. +
Curriculum constitutes particular
rationalities at the expense of others
 “Curricula are historically formed within systems of ideas
that inscribe styles of reasoning, standards, and conceptual
distinctions in school practices” (p. 151). [Offering] “an
ensemble of methods and strategies that inscribe principles
for action” (p. 163). . . [and particular] “styles of reasoning”
(p. 151). Curriculum must therefore be understood as “a
practice of governing and an effect of power” (p. 151).1
 Curriculum forms our ways of reasoning about the self and
the world, and the rationalities that emerge from this process
are constituted not only by what it includes, but by what it
implies and neglects.2
1. Popkewitz, T. S. (2001). The production of reason and power: Curriculum history and intellectual traditions. In T. S. Popkewitz, B.
M. Franklin & M. A. Pereyra (Eds.), Cultural history and education: Critical essays on knowledge and schooling (pp. 151-183). New
York: Routledge Falmer.
2. Parkes, R. J. (2011). Interrupting history: Rethinking history curriculum after 'the end of history'. New York: Peter Lang.

26. +
1. Kemmis, S., & Fitzclarence, L. (1986). Curriculum theorizing: Beyond reproduction theory. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University.
2. Green, B. (2010). Rethinking the representation problem in curriculum inquiry. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 42(4), 451-469.
What is the function of curriculum?
Lessons from the Deakin School
 The double problem1 of the relationship between:
 theory and practice
[curriculum provides a set of representations of a ‘world outside’]
 education and society
[curriculum operates as a site of cultural reproduction]
 Re-examing the work of Ulf Lundgren and the Deakin School,
Green2 refers to this as the unresolved problem of
representation and reproduction.

27. +
Constructions of Curriculum
[or Different answers to the double problem of curriculum]
1. Eisner, E. W., & Vallance, E. (Eds.). (1974). Conflicting conceptions of curriculum. Berkley, CA: McCutchan Publishing
Corporation.
2. Schiro, M. S. (2008). Curriculum theory: Conflicting visions and enduring concerns. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.
Eisner’s Model1 Schiro’s Model2
academic rationalism concerned with
“enabling the young to acquire the tools to
participate in the Western cultural tradition.”(p.
12)
Academic Idealist Curriculum
the development of cognitive processes
concerned with “the refinement of intellectual
operations.” (p. 5)
Techno-Rationalist Curriculum
technology concerned with “finding efficient
means to a set of predefined, unproblematic
ends.” (p. 7)
self-actualization concerned with education
“as an enabling process.” (p. 9)
Learner-Centred Curriculum
social reconstruction concerned with “social
reform and responsibility to the future of
society.” (p. 10)
Social Reconstructionist Curriculum

28. +
1. Gundem, B. B., & Hopmann, S. (Eds.). (2002). Didaktik and/or curriculum: An international dialogue. New York: Peter Lang.
The Key Curriculum Question/s
 Anglo-American Curriculum Tradition:
What knowledge is of most worth?*
[What should be taught?]
 European Bildung-Influenced Didaktik Tradition:1
What will the student become?
[What should the student become?]
*Whose knowledge is being taught?

29. +
Towards a Post-Critical Pedagogy

30. +
 Uses rhetoric that “give[s] the illusion of equality
[empowerment, student voice, dialogue] while leaving the
authoritarian nature of the teacher/student relationship
intact”.1
 Overstates the power of ‘rationality’ to free the subject from
constraining metanarratives.2
 Narrowly identifies power with forces of exploitation and
repression.3
 Can’t get beyond the missionary position!4
The Emancipatory Project of Critical
Pedagogy through a Poststructural Lens
1. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn't this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard
Educational Review, 59(3), 297-324.
2. Yates, L. (1992). Postmodernism, feminism and cultural politics: Or if master naratives have been discredited, what does giroux
think he is doing? Discourse, 13(1), 124-141.
3. Shapiro, S. (1995). The end of radical hope? Postmodernism and the challenge to critical pedagogy. In P. McLaren (Ed.),
Postmodernism, postcolonialism and pedagogy (pp. 187-204). Sydney: James Nicholas Publishers.
4. McWilliam, E. (1997). Beyond the missionary position: Teacher desire and radical pedagogy. In S. Todd (Ed.), Learning desire:
Perspectives on pedagogy, culture, and the unsaid (pp. 217-235). New York: Routledge.

31. +
 A pedagogy of ‘empowerment’ as it appears to privilege
those doing the ‘empowering’, and thus fails to avoid the
very relations of power it proposes to subvert.1
 Radical pedagogy discourses have tended to hold traditional
[zero-sum] conceptions of power and knowledge” that overly
simplify power relations and lead “to a kind of self
righteousness that claims innocence, and risks the
replacement of one orthodoxy with another” (p. xx).2
 Tendencies to create grand narratives of its own.3
The Emancipatory Project of Critical
Pedagogy through a Poststructural Lens –
Continued
1. Gore, J.M. (1992). What we can do for you! What can "we" do for "you"?: Struggling over empowerment in critical and feminist
pedagogy. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp. 54-73). New York: Routledge.
2. Gore, J.M. (1991). Neglected practices: A foucauldian critique of traditional and radical approaches to pedagogy. Paper presented
at the The Liberating Curriculum Conference, University of Adelaide.
3. Gore, J.M. (1993). The struggle for pedagogies: Critical and feminist discourses as regimes of truth. New York: Routledge.

32. +
 What discourses are invoked in the name of critical
pedagogy? Social justice?
 Who has defined critical? Justice?
 What is gained through critical / social justice agendas?
What is lost? Who is benefited? Who is sidelined?
What might a poststructuralist ask
about ‘social justice’?

33. +
Parkes, R. J., Gore, J. M., & Elsworth,W. (2010). After poststructuralism: Rethinking the discourse of social
justice pedagogy. In T. Chapman, & N. Hobbel (Eds.), Social justice pedagogy across the curriculum:The
Practice of freedom (pp. 164-183). NewYork: Routledge.
Parkes, R. J. (2010). Discipline and the dojo. In Z. Millei,T. G. Griffiths, and R. J. Parkes (Eds.), Re-theorizing
discipline in education: Problems, politics and possibilities (pp.76-90). NewYork: Peter Lang.
Follow-Up References

34. +
Brennan, M., & Popkewitz,T.S. (1997). Foucault's challenge: Discourse,knowledge, and power in
education. In M. Brennan & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.). Columbia:Teachers Press.
Baker, B., & Heyning, K.E. (Eds.). (2004). Dangerous coagulations? The uses of Foucault in the
study of education.NewYork: Peter Lang.
Walshaw,M. (2007). Working with Foucault in education. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense
Publications.
Further Reading