Hi Jay. I don't know if this is the sort of thing you mean, but the
piece of technology that I think had the biggest impact on schools in
the last 50-100 years is the school bus............djc
Don Cunningham
Indiana University
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
Sent: Sunday, November 03, 2002 10:24 PM
To: XMCA LISTGROUP
Subject: history, discourse, and mesogenesis
It's always good to hear a little optimism in messages about difficult
issues .... thanks to Bill and Phil.
Foucault has done good work on the history of changes in discourse
formations on the long timescale, and his definition of DFs is
appropriate
to that scale.
For a more meso-level ( really there are many such levels, but let's say
we're interested in the decades scale) analyis, we might need a
different
genre of research than fits the usual disciplines. Historians don't do
much
on scales less than 50-100 years, at least not without narrowing focus
extremely. Most cultural studies efforts, including the use of
anthropological and discourse methods, don't usually go beyond a few
years
to a decade scale. CHAT, ANT, and CDA (critical discourse analysis) tend
to
hug the lower end of this range and link to the event timescale (hours,
days). Reviews of the literature tend to stay to one decade or less (and
they are a kind of discourse analysis, after all).
How have discourses of education changed in the period since 1950? what
if
any are the major institutional changes associated with these discourse
changes? in CHAT terms, which define what would constitute significant
change (in goals, norms, division of labor, etc.) what have the
signficant
changes been?
We have a strong sense of the conservative nature of educational
institutions and discourses, that nothing much has really changed since
early in the 20th century, or even since early in the 19th century, or
before. But it is always possible to construct continuities that
emphasize
stability. We have a lot of intellectual discourse tools built by
generations of people with a vested interest in stressing gradual change
and the importance and reality of stability. But things can't be as
stable
as we can make them seem. SOMETHING has been happening in the last 50
years
..... what??
Nominations?
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------
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