The Problems with the Future: Educational Futurism and the Figural Child

This article contributes to work on temporality in education. Challenging the future‐oriented focus in contemporary education, the authors question how ideas and assumptions regarding the future—centred on the Child—can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman and John Dewey to examine the educational ramifications of the focus on the future, which we call ‘educational futurism’. The argument seeks specifically to explore how educational futurism imposes limits on educational discourse and privileges a certain future—making it unthinkable to imagine ways outside of such a privileged future. Juxtaposing Lee Edelman and John Dewey, we draw out connections and disconnections between their disparate philosophies, illustrating the ways in which educational futurism ignores or overlooks the lived experiences of children. We conclude by briefly noting the queerness of children and the impact of such queerness on broadening discussions of the future of children and their educations.     

Competency,epistemology and pedagogy: curriculums holy trinity

In this era of heightened calls for accountability and standards, clear visions of competence are more necessary than ever and, moreover, these planned products of education need explicit articulation. Such articulation falls within the purview of the formal curriculum and it is with this that the present article concerns itself. It draws on a past Ontario, Canada curricular initiative, The Common Curriculum, as the vehicle through which to examine the difficulties inherent in spelling out a conception of competence. Such difficulties, it is argued, stem from the inextricable link between definitions of competence and their associated epistemological and pedagogical implications.     

Vertical and Horizontal Discourse: An essay

The analysis in this paper has its origins in a critical account of the sociology of education (Bernstein, 1975) where the various approaches to the study of sociology were taken as the distinguishing feature of the discourse. This matter was further developed (Bernstein, 1996), with the distinction between vertical and horizontal discourses and their various modalities introduced in the context of differentiating this mode of analysis from more 'Bourdieuan' perspectives. This present paper is concerned with filling out and extending the sketches adumbrated in earlier work in a more accessible form. The model proposed generates a language which relates the internal structure of specialised knowledges, the positional nature of their fields or arenas of practice, identity constructions and their change, and the forms of acquisition for successful performances.