Thomas S. Popkewitz
Encyclopedia
Thomas S. Popkewitz is a curriculum theorist and professor from the United States of America, on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education. His studies are concerned with the knowledge or systems of reason that govern educational policy and research related to pedagogy and teacher education. His research includes histories of the present, ethnographic and comparative studies of national educational reforms in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and the US. His book Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform (2008) explores the systems of reason in pedagogy through historically examining the changing images and narratives of Enlightenment concerns with cosmopolitanism. He has written or edited approximately 30 books and 200 articles in journals and book chapters. Two of his books (Paradigms and Ideology in Educational Research and A Political Sociology of Educational Reform) have won awards for their contribution to educational studies. His work has been translated into twelve languages (Chinese, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish).

Biography

Popkewitz earned a B.A. at Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...

-City University of New York (1962), a M.A. at Teachers College, Columbia University
Teachers College, Columbia University
Teachers College, Columbia University is a graduate school of education located in New York City, New York...

 (1964) and an Ed.D. from New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

 (1970). He has also been awarded a Ph.D honoris causa from Umeå University
Umeå University
Umeå University is a university in Umeå in the mid-northern region of Sweden. The university was founded in 1965 and is the fifth oldest within Sweden's present borders....

 (awarded by the social science faculty) (1989), the title Full Academician to the Russian Academy of Education (1996), a Ph.D. honoris causa from the University of Lisboa (2001), a Ph.D. honoris causa from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is a Dutch-speaking university in Flanders, Belgium.It is located at the centre of the historic town of Leuven, and is a prominent part of the city, home to the university since 1425...

 (2004), and a Ph.D. honoris causa from the University of Helsinki
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki is a university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but was founded in the city of Turku in 1640 as The Royal Academy of Turku, at that time part of the Swedish Empire. It is the oldest and largest university in Finland with the widest range of disciplines available...

, Finland (2007). The American Educational Research Association
American Educational Research Association
The American Educational Research Association, or AERA, was founded in 1916 as a professional organization representing educational researchers in the United States and around the world....

 awarded Popkewitz the Division B (Curriculum Studies) Lifetime Achievement Award (2008) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education gave him its Distinguished Faculty Award (2008). Most recently he was awarded a fellowship as Guest Researcher Professor at the French Ministère de L’Éducation Nationale, De L’Ensigeignement Supérieur et De La Recherche, Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique(2010).

Popewitz began his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970, where he continues to hold the position of Professor within the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum & Instruction. In 1978 Popkewitz was selected by the US State Department to organize an American delegation on teaching and learning for joint Soviet/American seminar at USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences Presidium, marking the beginning of a career that has been particularly defined by its international focus. In 1981, he was named a Fulbright Fellow, allowing him to spend the year at the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences as a Senior Researcher. In the fall of 1988 he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences
The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences is an institute for advanced study in Uppsala, Sweden. It is affiliated with Uppsala University and one of the nine member institutions of the Some Institutes for Advanced Study consortium....

 in Uppsala and from 1994 to 1999 acted as a Visiting Professor at Umeå University in Sweden. His international work has also included his having received a 1999-2000 Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Institute for the Sociology of Education and then in the fall of 2004 was a Finnish Academy of Science Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study.

He has conducted national and comparative studies of teacher education and curriculum reforms in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia, particularly as they relate to questions of social inclusion (Reform as political discourse, The myth of educational reform, Struggling for the Soul). He visited Chinese educational research institutes (1983); participated in a three year symposia on “Theories of Professionalization”—Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Social Science (1986–1988); and was awarded (1988) a W. F. Wilson Fellowship from the Oppenheimer Foundation, to provide lectures about his research in South African Universities. In 1999-2000 he co-directed a nine country European Union funded research project on educational governance and social exclusion, and directed comparative projects that historically and in contemporary contexts examined educational reforms in a global context. These studies appear in edited books (e.g., Educational knowledge; Changing patterns of power; Educational restructuring; and Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education).

His most recent research relates to cultural and historical studies of education and educational research, and the politics of the globalization/localization of knowledge in educational systems. In Cosmopolitanism and The Age of School Reform (2008), Popkewitz examines American Progressive and contemporary education reforms and sciences as comparative systems of recognition and difference that embody twin cultural theses: the hope about the cosmopolitanism of the child as the future citizen and fears about those who do not qualify for participation.

Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform

In Cosmopolitanism and The Age of School Reform: Science, education, and making society by making the child (2008) Popkewitz historicizes the system of reasoning that governs education reform by exploring how it is certain “problems” become visible and how that recognition fashions objects of reform. He argues that embedded in this system of reasoning are the modes of organizing difference, so that in the very gesture to save the student (or the school or the society), there is also an act of social construction that makes the student (or school or society) that was “backwards” and is today “at-risk.” He sustains that this system of reasoning is tied to cosmopolitanism in that it relies upon a comparative analytic of reason that differentiates and divides in its application.

Popkewitz explores how the Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism are inscribed in the project of modern schooling and school reforms, and how that ideal, taken to be rational and universal, offers instead a particular, historical cultural thesis for the way one should live his or her life through its intersection with discourses of national exceptionalism and belonging. That is, cosmopolitanism carries the discursive boundaries that define what it means to be reasonable and to live one’s life by that standard, but at the same time differentiates who stands outside of such reason. He argues that the project of schooling is to transform students into a particular human kind (drawing upon the work of philosopher Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking, CC, FRSC, FBA is a Canadian philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of science.- Life and works :...

)—“the cosmopolitan child”—who is ultimately to accept and take on that cultural thesis of cosmopolitanism as their own. This transformative project, however, is not “cosmopolitan”, or universal, but instead assembled out of different historical trajectories of the nation that intersect with the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science and agency. This assemblage produces a process of abjection that casts out “what does not fit into the normalized spaces” (Popkewitz 2008, 4), thus making visible the child who does not or is not yet able to live this cultural thesis—who is not yet ‘reasonable’ or ‘free’, and thus in need of rescue through reforms. Schooling and its reforms not only make “the cosmopolitan child” but the “disadvantaged”, “at-risk”, or “socially excluded” child as well. In this way, schooling and school reforms, according to Popkewitz, rely upon double gestures of hope and fear: the hope of the nation is articulated in the ideal of the cosmopolitan (happy, free, and reasonable), but this hope is also made out of a fear of threats to the nation that must be tamed and managed. In terms of contemporary reforms, the hope of making all children “cosmopolitan” is tied to the fear of the dangers of living with others who do not accept this "universal" cultural thesis for living.

Cosmopolitanism, then, is understood by Popkewitz to be a form of governmentality that “orders and differentiates who the child is and should be” (ibid. 111) through its inscription into particular qualities: “reason, rationality, and agency in the development of the self in the name of progress and the exceptionalism of the nation” (ibid). Cosmopolitanism and the Age of Reform historically tracks the discursive shifts and continuities of this system of reasoning within US education reforms by taking up two reform movements as exemplars. The first half of the book historicizes the cultural theses used in pedagogy, discussing figures such as Edward L. Thorndike, G. Stanley Hall
G. Stanley Hall
Granville Stanley Hall was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory...

 and John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...

. Popkewitz analyzes the assemblage of practices used to differentiate and classify what was “reasonable” and who was “reasonable”, an assemblage that discursively intertwines ideas of national exceptionalism (and the American “pursuit of happiness”), Protestant reform movements in the US and the making of the pedagogical sciences. This particular fabrication of the cosmopolitan ideal was also a means of differentiating and classifying who was “unhappy” or outside that ideal, and thus “established differences that cast out and excluded those who were not of the ‘race’ of the nation” (ibid. 109): the 'deviant', the 'barbarians' and the 'savages'. It was a way of thinking that made possible, among other things, the eugenics movement that was used to authorize not only exclusion, but at times sterilization and even genocide. The second half of the book, in a history of the present, looks at contemporary school reforms. Popkewitz continues to use cosmopolitanism as an “epistemic anchor” in order to read the shifts in today’s cultural theses for a reasonable life, which though different from those at the turn of the twentieth century, are seen as culminating in what Popkewitz calls an “unfinished cosmopolitanism” as the project of the “lifelong learner”. This “unfinished cosmopolitanism” translates in part as a never-ending process of “problem-solving” meant to tame life’s ever-present uncertainties and ever-increasing mutability and mobility.

In Popkewitzian theorizing, reforms are meant to reclaim some quality or ideal for the future, to indeed “save” the nation (or other collective belongings) through the student, and thus transform children into citizens of a particular kind, who must have a stake in the nation’s future as in their own. That future is not wholly new, but also tied to an idea of the nation that is to provide continuity with the past. As Popkewitz argues, “The fatalism and processes of abjection overlap with a particular inscription of democracy as the planning of people, a paradox of schooling and cosmopolitanism….” (ibid. 177). This planning of people carries with it, even when calling for the inclusion of all, the fabrication of “a continuum to recognize the excluded for inclusion” (Popkewitz 2008, 177). This recognition of who are yet to be included “constructs spaces of difference as outside the reason of normalcy” (ibid).

Popkewitz concludes,

“The denaturalizing of cosmopolitanism does not eliminate its commitments to a human and just world. It is a strategy to continually test the limits to the manner in which the objects of reflection and acts are produced to honor those commitments. The inclusive dream in planning lifelong learning, the learning society, or the information society is not merely to find effective paths to the utopian future. The strategy of study, to play with the analysis, is concerned with agency and change by making visible the limitations of the normative prescriptions that circulate about the ‘useful’ knowledge of research and identifying what works” (ibid. 173).

Selected Books

  • Tröhler, D., Popkewitz, T., & Labaree D. (eds.) (2011). Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century Comparative Visions. New York: Routledge.
  • Popkewitz T., & Rizvi, F. (eds.). (2009). Globalization and the study of education (108 Yearbook. Vol 2). Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education.
  • Popkewitz, T. (2007). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science, education and making society by making the child. New York: Routledge. (This book has been translated into Portuguese and Swedish and translated and published in Spanish [Morata]).
  • Popkewitz, T., Olsson, U., Petersson, K. & Kowalczyk, J. eds. (2006) ’The future is not what it appears to be’ Pedagogy, Geneaology and Political Epistemology in Honor and in Memorial to Kenneth Hultqvist. Stockholm: Stockholm Institute of Education Press.
  • Popkewitz, T. (Ed.) (2005). Inventing the modern self and John Dewey: Modernities and the traveling of pragmatism in education. Palgrave Macmillan Press.
  • Lindblad, S. & Popkewitz, T. S. (Eds.) (2004). Educational restructuring: International perspectives on traveling policies. New York: Information Age Publishers.
  • Popkewitz, T. (Ed.) (2000). Educational knowledge: Changing relationships between the state, civil society, and the educational community. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.
  • Popkewitz, T. & Fendler, L. (Eds.) (1999). Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and politics. New York: Routledge.
  • Popkewitz, T. (1998). Struggling for the soul: The politics of schooling and the construction of the teacher. New York: Teachers College Press.
  • Popkewitz, T. & Brennan, M. (Eds.) (1998). Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, knowledge, and power in education. New York: Teachers College Press. (Translated and published in Spain)
  • Popkewitz, T. (1991). A political sociology of educational reform: Power/knowledge in teaching, teacher education and research. New York: Teachers College Press.
  • Popkewitz, Thomas S. (1984). Paradigm and ideology in educational research: Social functions of the intellectual. London: Falmer Press. (Paradigma e ideología en investigación educative. A. Ballesteros, trans. Madrid: Mondadori, 1984).

Most frequently cited articles

  • Popkewitz, T. S. and Brennan, M. (1997) Restructuring of Social and Political Theory in Education: Foucault and a Social Epistemology of School Practices. Educational Theory 47(3), 287-313.
  • Popkewitz, T. S. (1997) The production of reason and power: Curriculum history and intellectual traditions. Journal of Curriculum Studies 29(2), 131-164.
  • Popkewitz, T. S and Lindblad, S. (2000) Educational Governance and Social Inclusion and Exclusion: Some conceptual difficulties and problematics in policy and research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. 21(1), 5-44.
  • Popkewitz, T. S. (1998) Dewey, Vygotsky, and the Social Administration of the Individual: Constructivist Pedagogy as Systems of Ideas in Historical Spaces. American Educational Research Journal 35(4), 535-570.
  • Popkewitz, T. S. (1996) Rethinking decentralization and state/civil society distinctions: the state as a problematic of governing. Journal of Education Policy 11(1), 27-51.
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