Mapping Knowledge Perspectives in Studies of Educational Change.

Abstract

This document argues for the utility of mapping knowledge perspectives as a kind of cognitive art, or play of figuration to help orient educators to knowledge communities and their cultural codes, and to reinscribe modernist vocabularies into post-modern ways of seeing and representing educational change knowledge. A perspectivist approach is used to examine educational change discourse in comparative and international education texts since the 1950s. Diverse ways of seeing, discovered using textual exegesis, may be mapped at macro and meso levels of social reality. Present discourse communities that are discussed include: (1) functionalist, neofunctionalist; (2) radical functionalist, neo-marxist; (3) radical humanist, critical theory; and (4) humanist, interpretevist. The research presents post-modern cognitive maps that reins.cribe and structure ways of seeing social and educational phenomena embedded in the semiotic space of literary texts and the intertextual space of educational practice. In one map, paradigms and theories in the field of comparative education have been identified with the use of textual analysis and are presented in topological fashion in a meta-discourse field with four paradigmatic nodes and four theory basins. Textual dispositions regarding social and educational change and characterization of reality are the coordinates used to form the textual orientations in the field. The study uses discourse analysis and phenomenographic methods to examine the weave of discourses and practices about educational change in education texts' over time as historically locatable assemblagPs of cultural codes and practices. Three major orientations to knowledge are identified as orthodox, heterodox, and emerging heterogeneous. (DK) *********************** ******************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document. *********************************************************************** MAPPING KNOWLEDGE PERSPECTIVES IN STUDIES OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE'