Procedures of power & curriculum change; Foucault and the quest for possibilities in science education.

Procedures of power & curriculum change; Foucault and the quest for possibilities in science education

David W. Blades New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 290 pp.

Almost half of the text of this book is a story about a Kingdom where children are disappearing. More specifically, it is about the Quest the Cathedral authorities in this Kingdom decide to mount to find The Answer to the problem. There had been widespread concern about these children and their welfare for a long time, but nothing the society had done was able to either stop the process or to find them. The Servants, sharing the general concern, but worried about recruiting the next generation of their members, encouraged all children to have an initial training in Servanthood, but these efforts actually led to an increase in the disappearance rate! This underlined the magnitude of the problem, since a preparation that could lead to such a high status and influential profession ought to have been attractive. After all, the Servants find been responsible for much of the technological innovation that had transformed this realm into a modern efficient machine, envied by the whole world. Their commitment to discerning `the knowledge of all causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible' (Bacon, 1942, p.288) set them respectivefully apart.

Just a moment! Is this not a book about changing the curriculam for senior secondary science in Alberta, Canada? Yes it is, and the details of the stages of how the move for reform began and its outcome several years later are given in Chapter 2, after the more general context of international movements in science curriculam is set in Chapter 1.

Anyone who has been involved in the critical decision making about strategic areas of the curriculum in Australia, such as the senior secondary sciences certainly are, will find much to resonate with in the account of this project to develop Science 10 in Alberta. The same stages have been played out in the development of the Victorian Certificate of Education, in the work of SABSSA in South Australia, and they are going on in New South Wales as the Board of Studies there responds to the McGaw Report.

There was agreement about the need for change, with sidespread support for a vision of science education for all students, under the umbrella of scientific and technology literacy. When draft details of what the new course would include became available, opposition to it emerged and gained such strength that a slower introduction was announced. The controversy over the new course, however, continued, and it was taken up in the public media. Counter arguments lost their strength as some of the initially supportive groups changed sides. Major compromise became the only way to sustain the project. The topics in the final version had a familiar and comfortable ring about them to many teachers and academic scientists, who had found the ones in the draft so different from where they expected the vision would lead. The hopes of others for quite new approaches were dashed.

As an employed writer and evaluator in the project, David Blades, the author, was close to all of these events and the major players in them. To provide a link between his structural account of the events of the curriculum project and the story of the Quest, the author provides an outline of some of Foucault's post-modernist perspective. His initial reading of The Foucault reader (Rabinow, 1984, p.6) upset and challenged him with the words, `the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent'. These words kept coming back to him as he thought of his experiences in the project. He reports in Chapter 3 his deeper reading of Foucault's ideas of power, and how he came to see these as essential to his doctoral research task of considering the possibilities of curriculum change.

As a result of his commitment to this post-modernist position, the author explores in Chapter 4 how the story of this attempt at curriculum reform might be told in a way that is more understanding of its lived reality than the log of events that Chapter 2 provides. He is attracted to Jerome Bump's (1985) notion of metaphor as a means of `enabling readers to make new connections and see things in new ways' (p.447). So Chapters 3 and 4 are introduced with two powerful metaphors but, for the longer story, Blades chooses to use allegory, a literary method that allows, as he says, `a more sustained presentation while retaining openness'.

The metaphor that begins Chapter 4 specially resonated with me. In an ancient story in the book of Genesis, Jacob, the Jewish patriarch, wrestled through a whole night, before going on to claim his inheritance. Blades's midrash (an interpretation of writing that leads to insights and lessons for living) differs from the usual views that Jacob was wrestling with an angel or with God. Rather, he suggests, Jacob was wrestling with himself.

As I became intellectually committed throughout the 1970s to seeking and advocating a school science that would be for all students, rather than a preparation for future scientists, I repeatedly found myself trying to argue for the content that had attracted me to science. But I was part of the tiny minority among my school peers who went on in science. What had attracted me had not attracted them. So I have had to continue to struggle against this temptation.

The design of any more general curriculum for school science is put into the hands of persons who have strong science backgrounds. Like Blades in his book, these persons, as I have done, must sublimate their own interest, as they go about the tasks of defining and promoting science content for learning that is not their sort of science -- a wrestle with self indeed!

The story of the Quest is a good read. It is in the genre of Don Quixote, Alice in Wonderland, and Pilgrim's Progress even if not in their literary class. With this allegorical story as the central part of his doctoral thesis, Blades and his thesis committee certainly blazed a new trail in science education. To my knowledge, his is the first to make use of the explicatory strengths and forms of post-modernism. Having listened to an exchange at AEKA this year about how flexible the form of academic theses can be, I'm sure Elliot Eisner would warm to Blades's attempt even if Howard Gardner, with his more constrained view of academic reporting, would not be so approving.

Qualitative studies are on the increase in science education and many other areas of education and for good reasons. They accept the realities and complexities of so much of education in a manner that is unavailable to researchers whose approach is experimental and quantitative. Writing up such qualitative research in the traditional form of a thesis has, however, not been easy, and it often leads to fuzzy, discursive, and not very convincing arguments. Supervisors and doctoral students facing this problem would find this book of a thesis, with its two very different forms of discussing the same issue, of interest.

In the Kingdom story, the author is a Priest, but his additional experience with the Servanthood as an apprentice Scholar enabled him to join the group making the Quest. In doing so, he was rather like a participant observer in an ethnographic study. His puzzlement with the twists and turns of the Quest are shared sometimes as musing reflections. At other times, they are in his exchanges with Foucault himself who was conveniently available to walk with him for part of the Quest's journeying.

Over the years, a few Australian doctorates have provided an insider's account and analysis (as distinct from a historical perspective) of situations of curriculum change. There has, however, been no drawing them together as Reid and Walker (1975) did for some early American and British studies, and Goodson (1987) so influentially followed up. Being interested in rather disparate curriculum subjects, the local authors seem to be unaware of each other, and how common their findings are, despite the different analytical approaches they have used. Since they found so much that is reported in Blades's book, it is appropriate here to draw more general attention to some of them as a type of educational research that needs extending in Australia's complex commonwealth/state systems of curriculum.

The closest Australian thesis to Blades's study, though reported in quite a different form and style, is the study of Christina Hart (1995) of the dynamics and shifting priorities in the development of physics for the Victorian Certificate of Education from 1987 to 1991 -- shifts that have continued to reduce the degree of change that appeared desirable and possible originally. Hart, like Blades, was a writer in that project, and as with him, the influence of Foucault is strong with her headings of `Discourse and power'; `Knowledge and power'; and `Discourse as power'.

In an echo of Blades, she reports:

   The influential roles (of academic physicists and the project bureaucrats)
   were mediated through powerful discursive mechanisms which embodied
   implicit assumptions about the nature of physics, and constrained
   consideration of the (original) issues of participation and the quality of
   learning within acknowledged boundaries.

   Ian Robottom (1985), in his study of environmental education, reported:

   While it is normal for conflicting perspectives to contest the ground
   during attempts at curriculum improvement, it is a fact of life that there
   are also attempts to co-opt the process of change. Some (of these) attempts
   to manage change operate to disenfranchise the `owners' of conflicting
   viewpoints by claiming that consensus exists at the level of discourse.

In the Quest, the decisions about what route to take were often like this.

Using a social network analysis, Ron Toomey (1982) reported the redefinition of senior geography in Victoria's Higher School Certificate. His initial conceptualisation of the change process was managerial and! rational, akin to Blades's `technical-rational acts'. Subsequently like Blades, he found that conflict, power and interests became more useful explanatory concepts for the process. `R, D & D activities have more to do with providing an environment for acting out roles to do with establishing power over others than managing change.'

Toomey introduces the idea of `curriculum negotiation' -- a process of camouflaging basic conflicts in values by a common rhetoric to which all parties subscribe. This process, he argues `is thus a conflict about conflict'. The project team find themselves `in a zero-sum conflict situation with both academics and teachers: a situation out of which they must trade to survive -- an apt phrasing which Blades could have used in his account and even in his story of the Quest.

In re-visiting each of these three authors, I found many of the aspects of the process of curriculum change described by Blades as dashing the hopes and intentions of both the Albertan project and the Quest. One has to wonder why so many people with educational vision keep trying to bring about change via major curriculum reform. At the end of the Quest, Blades faces this dilemna in a very personal way. The publication of this book gives us an example of the hope he expresses that `critique of the nature of technical thinking in curriculum discourse can itself be transformational, revealing possibilities for change'.

References

Bacon, F. (1942). Essays and New Atlantis (G. Haight, Ed.). New York: Walter J. Black. (Original work published 1597)

Bump, J. (1985). Metaphor, creativity and technical writing. College Composition and Communication, 36 (4), 444-453.

Goodson, I. F. (1987). School subjects and curriculum: Case studies in social history of curriculum (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press.

Hart, C. (1995). The story of a curriculum document for school physics. PhD thesis, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria.

Rabinow, P. (Ed.). (1984). The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon Books.

Reid, W. A. & Walker, D. F. (1975). Case studies in curriculum change: Great Britain and United States. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Robottom, I. M. (1985). Contestation and continuity in educational reform: A critical study of innovations in environmental education. PhD thesis, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria.

Toomey, R. (1982). Planned curriculum change: A social network analysis. PhD thesis, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria.

Peter Fensham Monash University