Ingólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson.

Presentation at the American Educational Research Association conference, Division F symposium: "Constructing a Cultural History of Education: International Perspectives", Seattle, WA, 10–14 April 2001

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There are two foci of this presentation that is based on a chapter (with the same title as above) in the book Cultural History and Education: Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (Routledge 2001, editors Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin, and Miguel Pereyra).

One is to tell the story of the rupture in the discourse on education that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s in Iceland. The rupture was a conflict between educational ideas and the practices of a rural country with its cultural traditions, on the one hand, and the belief that educational reform should be based on scientific knowledge and modern curricular thought, on the other hand.

Another focus is to develop a conceptual framework for studying educational reform as well as the discourse on educational reform. The conceptual framework of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which he calls reflexive sociology, and the genealogical method of the French historian of systems of thought Michel Foucault are developed to study reform. The book chapter is concerned with the merging of reflexive sociology and the genealogical approach into a method to study historical and contemporary issues in education. The key concept in this presentation is the concept of historically and socially constructed legitimating principles that compete in a social field.

The story told in the chapter is about a government-sponsored reform in elementary education (age level six to 16), first proposed in the late 1960s, in Iceland, and how it became a discursive break with the tradition. The reform, put forward by the Ministry of Education, was presented as one of the key links in a chain of projects toward modernizing Iceland. Educationists involved in the reform, whom I call reformers, typically argued for the reform on the basis of its power to improve society and move the country into the modern world.

We see here a competition of legitimating principles. The pre-reform principle consisted of cultural assumptions about knowledge intelligence, excellence, and achievement; practices of congregational pedagogy and the Icelandic story-telling tradition; nationalism; objectivism; and written tests.

These diverse ideas and practices, not really a coherent bunch from an epistemological standpoint, had, discursively, developed, into a historically constructed legitimating principle that stood in conflict with modern curricular thought and the practices of teaching proposed in the reform.

For instance, cultural assumptions about knowledge and intelligence, excellence and achievement are important. Individuals who have accumulated a huge volume of knowledge—primarily cultural literacy in terms of knowing names, literature, and locations—are celebrated for intelligence in Icelandic society. I am particularly interested in the delegitimating effects, which such assumptions have had on reform themes, such as on inquiry teaching methods and process evaluation.

The impact of nationalism on educational perspectives in Iceland, in particular on history as a school subject is important. Icelandic history textbooks have been studied by Gunnar Karlsson, a professor of history at the University of Iceland. He has placed them in the context of European tradition. History in Europe in the nineteenth century became nationalistic; the aim of the new history was to awaken patriotism and cultivate the idea that the people were the citizens of a remarkable nation. Another aim was to celebrate the role of the individual and her/his abilities and achievements. To achieve these objectives, teaching methods should be inspiring for the pupils and tell stories about heroes who fought and defeated evil for the good of the nation.

The fourth pattern I discuss here is objectivism, a twentieth century thread in this web, is very important in its relation to nationalism. As described by Wolfgang Edelstein, a key figure in the reform work:

"When historicism broke the web of meaning, the facts without references remained in the minds of many generations of pupils. At the same time, the older bourgeois contemporary goal was maintained as ideology. The historicism preserved the collection of facts and the honorable status of history. We know similar examples from religious history: The rituals remain when the power of the faith fades" (Edelstein 1988, p. 181).

Written "objective" tests were instituted in the 1920s and quickly became the major means of evaluation in Icelandic schools. Written tests are particularly well suited to test knowledge that appears objective. They sanction the transmission of a nationalistic and fragmentary knowledge base which is difficult to change once it is there and appears objective because it has been stripped of its explicit values. And they are well suited to strengthen the cultural assumptions about knowledge and intelligence, excellence and achievement because they "objectively" report who is knowledgeable and intelligent.

The reform

In the reform discourse there is a pattern of scientistic arguments for democratic and child-centered concerns. There is a belief in progressive education; in particular, open schools were celebrated as a prototype of the most proper reform practice. And there is a belief in scientistic curriculum models, such as the Bloom taxonomy and the Taba curriculum spiral, as well as in developmental psychology à la Piaget and Kohlberg.

Other themes include the beliefs that knowledge is a process, that the learner is active, that evaluation needs to be continuous, and that subject matter needs to be integrated. Common catch terms are, for instance, activity, inquiry, hands-on, integration of subjects, and integration of students.

Many of the new school subjects were integrated from previously separate subject matter such as history and geography into social studies, or zoology and botany into biology. This signifies a major point of departure from the pre-reform curricula that was, by and large, structured around academic disciplines. The introduction of a large-scale use of cooperative learning and other interactive teaching methods is also a departure from the pre-reform pedagogical tradition. New perspectives about evaluation and testing also played a major role in the reform discourse.

Reformers highlighted their child-centered views as well as the importance of democratic school practice. Anti-testing perspectives and the view of evaluation as process were instrumental in establishing a vision of democratic, child-centered reform in education. Anti-testing rhetoric was used to combat the prevalent learning of what was depicted as useless facts, and reformers claimed that they could offer more child-centered and democratic ways than tests to evaluate children's progress.

The reform was heavily criticized by conservative forces in the 1980s. In brief, the traditionalist critics argued that reformers suggested that the traditional perspectives of knowledge and intelligence, excellence and achievement were no longer viable in the school. They maintained that the discovery orientation of many reform projects could threaten the necessary cultural literacy-type knowledge base of children and adolescents. They thought that inquiry teaching merely suggested mindless busy-work. Further, they argued that most psychology and pedagogy is nonsense, at best, and a leftist subversion aimed at destroying Icelandic nationality, at worst. In this view, everything concerning the methodology of teaching diverts attention away from serious learning; what is needed is simply a sound nationalistic knowledge base.

Reformers made a considerable effort indeed to establish the argument that the reform policies were different from previous school practices and more effective in bringing about progressive social change.

But the break between the two legitimating principles—the one of the reform and the one of the pre-reform tradition—may stem in part from epistemological differences; that is, transmission of knowledge as fixed versus interactive models of knowledge acquisition, testing of facts versus evaluation as a process, pre-scientific knowledge of the child versus scientific knowledge of the "learner," and so forth. But epistemological differences never turn automatically into discursive conflicts; such differences only become discursive conflicts in a conjuncture of historical and political conditions. Therefore, if the reform is a rupture with the pre-reform tradition, it is much more a political rupture, "produced" by those who believe they can benefit from reversing the hierarchy of educational values, than it is an epistemological break.

The main strength of the genealogical approach is that it enables us to see how the significance of these elements of discourse, which I call discursive themes, emerged in a particular place and time. In that sense, genealogical analysis differs from conventional historical approaches that tend to search for causal relationships or record the chronology of events.

The Bourdieuean perspective draws attention to the processes (trajectories) of legitimation that shape the given social field. These processes I call legitimating principles. They consist of discursive themes that fall into patterns around these principles. They function as hierarchies of values in the sense that some discursive themes carry more symbolic capital than other themes. In studying these legitimating patterns by a genealogical investigation, I teased out the significance of the points of intersection by asking specific questions about the structured and structuring processes (that is, the legitimating principles) in the field of reform. How did a particular practice emerge and relate to other practices? How do, for example, written tests in Iceland relate to other discursive themes? How did they receive so much symbolic capital? Because what can count as symbolic capital may be restructered, which, in turn, restructures the legitimating principles. In fact, the term legitimating processes might better capture what I mean. Yet these principles are most of the time rather steady, hence the term legitimating principle.

The research presented in this essay belongs to a growing body of historical and sociological research in education that represents a departure from historicism to a genealogy of the educational ideas or, in the language adopted here, discursive themes. The concept of legitimating principles "combines" the genealogical method to the analysis of social fields. Legitimating principles are historically and socially constructed in the struggles over what counts as capital in the social field-in this case, the field of reform.

There are many advantages in this type of theorizing. While Foucault and Bourdieu, and not less their followers (often nicknamed "the posties") have been criticized by neo-Marxists for despair and pessimism and their theories seen as unsuitable for studying change (for more discussion, see Ingólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson 1993c), one of the greatest assets of the concepts of discursive themes, legitimating principles, capital, and social field is indeed their suitability for studying change. From the Bourdieuean perspective, struggles in the field of educational reform are seen as struggles for the currency of the discursive themes and practices that an individual wants to become counted as capital. This perspective is suited to a search for ruptures that could be exploited; discursive themes are disconnected from each other and then reconnected. In short, I believe that arguing for the potential of a progressive curriculum theory, based on and supported by, for instance, feminist pedagogy, as opposed to scientific curriculum theory, based on, for instance, developmental psychology, would be a utilization of the rift between technological and progressive views that could be found among reform themes.

Thorsteinn Gunnarsson. 1990. Controlling Curriculum Knowledge: A Documentary Study of the Icelandic Social Science Curriculum Project (SSCP) 1974–1984. A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the College of Education. Ohio University.

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© Ingólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson, The University of Akureyri (ingo@unak.is), Thingvallastraeti 23, IS-602 Akureyri, Iceland