The problem of how learning should be socially organized: relations between reflection and transformative action

Abstract

Within critical theory progressive relationships between reflection and action involve confronting contradictions within practice artistry from a dialectical view of practice as praxis and as the means whereby one can move in the direction of positive change or social transformation. Freire captures this idea of reflective praxis in his pedagogical approach to conscientization, a form of codification and the encouragement of human agency, but it is also a key feature of the work of Antonio Gramsci. Reflective praxis differs from activity in general as it is enacted through theory that is formulated on understandings of contextual (situated) practices. This is important because if or when theory and practice are separated they fall into a distorted one‐sidedness and if context is ignored the mode of existence, expression or internal organization of the content of action cannot be grasped in terms of its totality of relations and possible contradictions.

Notes

1. The suspension and deconstruction of ideology in material practice can be seen as a quest for a more rational or more reliable knowledge of practice for practical planning in the sense of Weber’s rational sociology (see Weber, 1964). However, it fits well also with critical theory in a post Marxist retheorization of this rational sociology, where such knowledge always pre‐supposes an operation of rupture and a disarticulation of ideas from the connotative domains to which they appear to be linked in the form of a misleading necessity (also Leidman, op cit.). This is because, as expressed by Laclau (1997, p. 10), any approximation to the concrete presupposes conceptual articulations and not the mere exposition of the logical properties of a simple conceptual whole. Consequently, the more concrete is the analysis, the more theoretical determinations must be included in it; and since theoretical determinations are discrete conceptual formations, the precondition for any theoretical approximation to the concrete comprises a progressive process of abstraction which frees concepts from their connotative articulations. This Foucauldian concept has been quoted previously in relation to the destruction of progressive education intentions (Beach, 1999a).

2. These curriculum ideas are reflected in the various Swedish National Curricula since 1990 in statements relating to such things as ‘students developing capacities to take personal responsibility for learning … by taking part in planning and evaluation and by choosing their own courses, subjects, themes and activities’ (National Curriculum of the Basic Comprehensive School; Lpo 94, p. 85). However they derive from policy writing at the political level of the education system internationally as well (Zackari, 2001), as exemplified in writing such as OECD (1992) and (1995), which states that individual schools should create their own profiles and help individual pupils to influence the content of their studies’ (OECD 1995, s. 137). These documents continually exhort the ‘willingness and ability of individual citizens and families to take responsibility for choices and priorities of their own’ (OECD 1995, s. 86) and their ideas have filtered through things like official national propositions (SOU 1992: 94) and reports to the arenas of action comprised by schools and colleges, where they are developed into new working aims for our modern schools where they are described as contributing toward a new school vision (see also Lundahl, 2001).

3. This idea supports something expressed first by Marx over 100 years ago (in the Brumaire), that whilst we may be the makers of our own history, we do not make this history just as we please or under circumstances chosen by us, but under conditions and circumstances given and transmitted from the past (see also Laclau, op cit.; Horkheimer, 1974; Derrida; 1994) that can at times weigh like a nightmare on all our efforts to transform the world and make history move in desired directions.

4. Thus the contentum of the present paper is really that the development of a new form of practice artistry as a reflective praxis in education depends on three things. These are, first and second, the state of the education system already in place and the dispositions of the individuals in it. These things help form what Bourdieu (1996) has termed the structural aspects of the repertory of actual and virtual possibilities that are offered at any given moment by the particular space of cultural positions that discourses and previous events have made available to and recognizable by agents (also Lave, 1988; Beach, 2000). As Bourdieu (1996, p. 201) notes, agents will (and do) usually use the powers at their disposal to activate what seems to be in most accord with their specific intentions and interests, as this accords with the ethos of civilizations like ours, such that what finally happens will depend on the resonance relations between the formative discourses and practices employed. Finally, agents are active but they are not totally free in the liberal sense and restrained only by their individual capacities. They are positioned agents who inherit rather than create the traditions and categories that are immediate in any given social‐cultural context and this is important regarding the subject positions, identities and practices that become apparent to and taken up by them.