The linguistic turn within curriculum theory

Abstract

If, as the linguistic turn has taught us, there is no representational knowledge, but more agreements and/or struggles over how to talk and learn about what we call reality, we need to address and analyse the consequences of different vocabularies of educational phenomena and schooling, in order to better understand and make use of both the performativity of language and the force of communicative action for normative rationalisation. Three examples are given. One shows how the concept of equivalence has had an apparent performative function within educational policy, another illustrates the gradual displacement of the concept of professional responsibility in favour of greater use of the concept of accountability, and the third concerns the pragmatisation of the linguistic turn into a communicative and deliberative turn. Proceeding from a dialogue between Rorty and Habermas, an outline of a research programme seeking to analyse the vocabularies and rhetorical force of different communicative practices is sketched.

Keywords:

• linguistic turn
• curriculum theory
• performative function
• deliberation
• communicative practice
• Rorty
• Habermas

Acknowledgement

This article uses and further develops parts of my keynote address, ‘Is There a Future for (Swedish) Curriculum Theory?’ at the conference Curriculum Theory Revisited in Uppsala, Sweden, 26–27 August 2005 (cf. Englund 2007a).