Educational Truth Telling in a More Reflexive Modernity

Abstract

Postmodernist and poststructuralist discourses have, in the process of problematising what intellectual work looks like, opened up new spaces in which an examination of the processes of intellectual knowledge production can be located. Our intent in this article is to explore the problems and possibilities which emerge for particular forms of educational truth-telling under these conditions. While we examine these processes at a general level, our discussion is also grounded in an analysis of various attempts to tell particular truths about 'good' pedagogy in Physical Education (PE) in the transformed intellectual spaces of the contemporary university. There has been a long-running debate between various forms of expertise claiming to tell the truth about what constitutes good pedagogy in PE. This paper revisits this debate via a mobilisation of Hall's theorisation of articulation, and the reflexive modernisation thesis of Beck, Giddens and Lash. We argue that a more reflexive modernity profoundly problematises all forms of truth-telling in education.