Buku Ki Hajar Dewantara

10.
1177/1532708603251809
Mirón • Cultural
Cultural Studies ↔
Images of Public
Critical Schooling • May 2003
Methodologies ARTICLE
The Cultural Images of Public Schooling

and the Emergence of Plurality in Research
Louis F. Mirón
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In this experimental article, the author initiates a methodological move

toward the aesthetic in educational research. In doing so, he uncovers the
hidden dynamics of power in the politics of knowledge. By treating the cur-
rent commonsense images of public schooling as part of an emerging plu-
ralism, he argues for a conception of aesthetics that is anchored in every-
day cultural practices. Viewing public schooling as both a site of
theoretical/methodological inquiry and intervention, the article begins to
move away from an epistemological perspective that is rooted in “problem
solving” to one that Willis captures as the “relations of creativity.”
Keywords: aesthetics; postmodernism; pluralism; deconstruction
Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—William Butler Yeats (“The Second Coming”)
Cultural images of public schooling discursively structure the way research-

ers conceptualize the research problem as well as the larger sets of empirical and
theoretical guiding questions. In other words, images, and their embedded
metaphors, vigorously shape our conceptual models of educational research.
As such, images and metaphors are more than mere rhetorical devices. Lakoff
and Johnson (1980) observed that metaphors are “pervasive in everyday life,
not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual sys-
tem, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in
nature” (p. 3). Understanding the prevailing cultural images shaping public
Author’s Note: Previous versions of this article were presented at the following conferences: University of
California Outreach Conference, San Francisco, October 1998; American Educational Research Associ-
ation annual meeting, Montreal, Quebec, April 1999; and Reclaiming Voice II, University of California,
Irvine, June 1999.
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 203-228
DOI: 10.1177/1532708603251809
© 2003 Sage Publications
203
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204 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • May 2003
schooling, in short, coming to terms with why these images are hegemonic,
may be an analytical key to more fully open the doors of what I would describe
as an emerging plurality in educational research. This is as it should be in a
democratic scholarly culture.
More ambitiously, this understanding may in a limited fashion disrupt the
power-knowledge relation, what Michel Foucault (1979) richly captured as a
“knot” (p. 27). Such an understanding ultimately points the way toward the
primacy of the aesthetic in educational research. What will hopefully result is a
move away from an understanding of the educational subject as object or subal-
tern (marginalized) subject (see below).
It appears that as a pluralistic society, we are inescapably bombarded with
multiple cultural images. These predominate in the mass media, the Internet,
and communications in general. Out of these appear to emerge what I call
“hegemonic images” that substantially affect public schooling and the myriad
of societal perceptions of academic success or failure. Especially in the arena of
public schooling, the responses to these cultural images from both elite groups
as well as classroom-level educators and students are of significance to research-
ers for their interpretive political meanings.
It is important to recognize that by no means do these hegemonic images
remain unchallenged. They are “scattered hegemonies” (Grewal & Kaplan, as
cited in Mahler, 1999). For example, the discourse of academic performance
theorized below has undergone serious challenge by both upper-middle-class
parents in Long Island as well as ethnic minority students and their families in
east Los Angeles. This hegemonic image is inextricably tied to the articulatory
practices of the establishment of state educational standards, standards-based
school reform, and “high stakes testing.” Following Appadurai (1997), perfor-
mance cultural images and discourses are prime examples of what we might
characterize as “representational hybridity.” As I will attempt to explain in
detail, such complexity has profound implications for research and of course
for the signification of hegemonic cultural images and the capacity to resist
them. Michael Peter Smith (2001) defined (cultural) hybridity—and the
capacity for political resistance—as the “recombinant possibilities of contem-
porary life” (p. 137; also see Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 122).
These cultural images emanate outside of public schooling. On a more
abstract level, these shifts in research paradigms signal an emerging
epistemological acceptance in the educational research community toward
multiple changing social realities of postmodernity (see definition below)
(Harvey, 1989). Perhaps the single best illustration of these conditions is the
mediating effects of communication technologies on educational research.
This movement in educational research toward postmodernity is still in transi-
tion and, as I argue in the third and final section of this article, optimally
should culminate in public schools and classrooms in Arnstine’s (1995) notion
of the “primacy of the aesthetic.”

Mirón • Cultural Images of Public Schooling 205
The purpose of this article is to explore the dialectical, that is, interactive
relationships between the cultural images of public schooling and the research
traditions in the academy. The article is organized into three parts. Part 1 of this
article examines the hegemonic images of public schooling, especially in inner
cities. In Part 2, I argue that there is an emerging plurality in educational
research, a plurality that is symbolized by commonsense images, primarily
emanating from institutions. Finally in Part 3, I outline possible uses of aes-
thetics in public schools.
1. Hegemonic Images of Public Schooling
To unpack the multiple social constructions of educational research, both

quantitative and qualitative, I explore the usefulness of hegemonic, common-
sense images of public schooling. It seems that the metaphorical language
embedded in the multiple cultural images of public schooling is especially well
suited for communicating research into the practices and processes of public
schools. I rely on cultural images as a rhetorical strategy to begin the continual
process of untying the knowledge-power “knot” (Foucault, 1979, p. 27).
For want of more precise nomenclature, let me divide the prevailing cultural
images of public schooling into three types: those that flow from modernity,
those that flow from what I call a transitional postmodernity (see below), and
those that are rooted in the aesthetic as a kind of discourse practice and the
“politics of the performative” (see Phelan, 1993, and conceptualization of the
aesthetic below). Modern cultural images focus on the commodification of
schooling. These cultural images tend to treat the individual learner, and the
social relations of learning, as objects. Transitional postmodern images, as they
relate to the study and practice of public schooling, are transitional in that they
tend toward the plural, and local. They reinscribe the school subject in history,
culture, and politics. As such, they partially embrace Biesta’s (1994) concept of
practical intersubjectivity. Finally, the aesthetic cultural image embraces both
modern images and images emanating from a transitional postmodernity. That
is, they move toward the near complete acceptance of the conditions of
postmodernity as they apply to the conduct of educational research. Put differ-
ently, aesthetic images invoke a kind of radical plurality of research designs and
methods (see Barone, 2000). Aesthetic images of public schooling more com-
pletely and accurately capture the full range of intellectual and emotional qual-
ities of the students, teachers, parents, and educational leaders who live the
everyday discourse practices of public schooling.
Representing the Politics of Aesthetics in Research
In numerous writings, Stuart Hall (1986, 1996, 1997) has argued that lan-
guage is the central medium through which meaning is produced, communi-

cated, circulated, and reproduced through everyday cultural practices. As such,

language takes on more then merely symbolic and rhetorical functions:
Embedded in wider notions of discourse theory, language is implicated materi-
ally in lived cultural experiences. Thus, language is concerned with both rheto-
ric and action. It is fundamentally performative in nature. For example, in the
arts language produces material1 effects that Peggy Phelan (1993) characterized
as a kind of “performance politics.” Her observations are worth noting in
greater detail:
By suggesting that [performance art] participate in a “performative exchange” I

hope to broaden current disciplinary boundaries which define the field of the
gaze, the animate and the inanimate, and the seen and the unseen. Performance
is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disap-
pearance. Poised forever at the threshold of the present, performance enacts the
productive appeal of the nonproductive. Trying to suggest that the disappear-
ance of the external other is the means by which self assurance is achieved
requires that one analyze the potential payoffs in such disappearance: perfor-
mance exposes some of them. (p. 27)
The implication is clear for purposes of this article: Although rhetorical in

scope, performance is a kind of discourse practice. It is a speech act (see Mirón &
Inda, 2000). More precisely, as Thomas Popkewitz (1998b) has argued, dis-
course practices are effects of power that, in turn, may produce material effects
on power relations. For purposes of this article, the material effects may be con-
ceptualized in productive terms, that is, ones that may reduce both the
exclusionary school practices that help define the Other (see example on special
education, below) as well as academic and social inequalities that partially
result from these exclusionary practices. I build on these theoretical and nor-
mative positions below to advance a conception of aesthetics as it relates to edu-
cational research.
Although the concept of aesthetics has a rich history in philosophy, art, and
literary criticism (see Eagleton, 1990; Easthope, 1991), it is only relatively
recently that aesthetics has gained widespread utility in educational research.
With the publication of Maxine Greene’s (1995) Releasing the Imagination
came new and important insights into how aesthetics—as a cultural practice
that has discursive, normative, and material consequences (Hall, 1997)—
might inform the professional activities of educators and educational research-
ers. Aesthetics concerns the realms of politics as well as the philosophical pur-
suits of beauty.
Aesthetics as a Cultural Object
Generally speaking, the meaning of aesthetics has taken two distinct epi-
stemic paths. On one hand, it refers to the rather fixed interpretation of works

of art as objet d’art, that is, as inherently possessing universal value more or less
independent of interactions with the human subject (see Biesta, 1999). Viewed
from this perspective, aesthetics is not concerned with action; therefore, it is
not embedded in discourse practices (see Hall, 1997). Rather, aesthetics is an
ideology inextricably bound to art objects, which as Terry Eagleton (1990)
observed, “become commodities in the market place (that) exist for nothing
and nobody in particular, and can consequently be rationalized, ideologically
speaking, as existing entirely and gloriously for themselves” (p. 9). Here, aes-
thetics is not a cultural practice that both produces shared meaning and enacts
material consequences for the Other (see below). Rather, aesthetics is repre-
sented in objects that have a totalizing, that is, universal, meaning usually
restricted to the fine arts.
Aesthetics as a Material Cultural Practice
On the other hand, Dewey’s (1934) conception of aesthetics simultaneously

“as ends and as means” stands “against an aesthetic tradition that interpreted
(the distinction between art and life) in starkly dualistic terms” (Haskins,
1999, p. 287). Put differently, the meaning of aesthetics is inseparable from
action that inevitably arises with the experience of art. Action here has both a
normative and material content. The boundaries between knowledge and
experience are blurred. More operationally, language as a primary conduit of
meaning and of action that may result from human agents’ articulatory prac-
tices is inevitably inscribed in the multiple discourses of aesthetics. Aesthetics,
arguably, may ultimately constitute a political practice as action invariably
implies an ethical content. Properly understood, I want to argue that aesthetics
constitutes a material cultural practice. As such, it carries material effects for
the learner, specifically the subaltern Other (see McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993).
These effects are the results of power as well as shape the productive uses of
power. Action is concerned with the expression of values, specifically in regards
to identity formation and pedagogical encounters with the Other (see below).
As Hannah Arendt argued, “Plurality is the condition of human action,
because we are all the same, that is, human in such a way that nobody is ever the
same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (as cited in Biesta, 1999,
p. 212). It is this theory of aesthetics—as a performative discourse practice (see
Mirón & Inda, 2000)— from which I want to build my own understanding of
the concept.
Following Judith Butler’s (1993) work on performative theory in the con-
text of gender and “bodies that matter” (also see Lyotard, 1984; Stone, 1999), I
propose that aesthetics in educational research has two dimensions relating to
performance (Biesta, 1999, 2000; Sarason, 1999).2 First, aesthetics is the fairly
artistic ritualized presentation of the shared meanings that school agents enact
when they construct school processes and practices. Both of these obviously

imply value judgments and provide an organizational context for meaning in

the conduct of everyday decisions. Whether written in the mission statement
of the school or posted on its Web site, these concrete activities help represent
lived cultural experiences for students. Artistic form is not separate from the
intentional or unintentional meaning of the subjects who create it, as
Nussbaum (1990) elegantly argued (pp. 3-13). In educational research, for
example, presentations of “findings” that seek to capture in artistic form what
traditional qualitative or quantitative designs and methodology may miss are
an example (see Barone, 2000; Crue, 2000). The research performance is
strictly “ritualistic,” precisely because it is narrowly artistic in form and pur-
pose. It does not lead to action with an ethical content (see Stone, 1999).
Secondly, aesthetics is performative, that is, a discourse practice that has
material effects on the learner as both object of study and subject of multiple
research discourses. To use Searle’s language, discourse actually “performs” the
words it describes. It enacts. Moreover, as Stone (1999) correctly indicated, this
action is ethical in content in that it concerns the ever-elusive issues of social
justice for the Other. Aesthetics includes the use of the imagination (Greene,
1995) to take action on behalf of the subaltern Other in public schools and
classrooms. I want to suggest that this action is inevitably moral. Having
spelled out in detail what I mean by “aesthetics,” I turn now to a catalogue of
some of the multiple cultural images in public schooling.
Thinking Modern
Modern cultural images of public schooling can be characterized by their

tendencies toward what Lyotard (1984) called “totalization.” For the purposes
of this article, totalization as encapsulated in modern cultural images may be
operationally defined in structural-functional terms (Parsons, 1971, 1977).
They emanate from institutions outside of public schooling that seek to
socially regulate and thereby partially control human behaviors through their
functional systems. Social control is primarily achieved within these systems
through the productive exercise of power (see Popkewitz, 1998b). At the same
time, because power is decentered and inextricably tied to knowledge, new
constructions of these institutions (and thus the cultural images themselves)
are possible. Modern cultural images of public schooling are inappropriate.
They primarily focus on the educational product and hence reify the tendency
to commodify knowledge and the social relations of knowing. As mentioned,
they tend to make objects of the learner.
Examples of modern cultural images3 of public schooling include the medi-
cal, civil engineering, industrial/business, and athletic images. The social rela-
tions embedded in cultural modern images are hierarchical and patriarchal in
nature and often involve racialized classifications (see Banton, 1977; Meyer &
Jepperson, 2000; Torres, Mirón, & Inda, 1999). There is usually a figure in

power, often upper-middle-class male and White, that comes to the rescue of
the ailing Other.
The modern cultural images are closely linked; the dynamics between them
effectively blur their demarcations. Discourses that emerge during the deploy-
ment of the medical image are illness and disease (“the school system is sick”).
The medical image functions like treatments in a hospital. The “patient” (the
student or public school system) is perceived as part of a biological system
whereby the architects of the system (elites and activist citizens) seek to achieve
continuous, and stable, homeostasis and apparently avoid disequilibrium at all
cost (see Martin, 1990). When applied to inner-city schools in particular, this
functional system is held as being in a chronic state of degenerative illness. The
biological system (like its engineering counterpart, below) is ill beyond organi-
zational surgery. Interestingly, the medical image operates discursively in clini-
cal terms; that is, the language used connotes a technical medical problem
(acute or chronic illness)—one that must be remedied by treatment. More
experimental portrayals of this cultural image that would spurn innovation in
public schooling are shunted for more immediately solvable “treatments.”
These convey the idea of “quick fixes.”
In this regard, medical images work in conjunction with engineering ones
(see below). I would prefer importing scientific experimental methods and the
sense of improvisation and innovation characteristic of the scientific method
rather than view educational illness as an evil to be eradicated like a violation of
nature. Put simply, viewing the school system as sick leaves little room for trial
and error. The consequence of a medical mode of thinking—given that an edu-
cational disease is merely metaphorical—is an abiding sense of crisis (Mirón,
1996).
Parallel to the medical image of public schooling is the engineering image,
in particular civil engineering, the profession of building bridges and the like.
Civil engineering images appear to resonate with the culture of North America.
Like the current call to save or fix social security in time for the retirement years
of the baby boomers, both education bureaucrats and politicians understand-
ably desire to “fix” failing schools. The assumption is that when the schools are
finally fixed (or cured, as in the medical image), the process is completed.
Rarely entertained is the notion that the work of school improvement is never
over. It is a continuous process. Finally, an unintended consequence of this
mode of thinking is the social reproduction of public schooling and other
forms of social inequalities in the inner city and in rural communities. It is rare
to learn of a failing school in the suburbs in need of engineering redesign, cer-
tainly not the affluent ones.
Closely linked to the civil engineering image is the industrial/business one.
Perhaps the most widely used of the cultural images emanating from moder-
nity, it is most embedded in capitalists’ social relations. The concern is with the
education “product.” Mirroring the growth in the global economy and in the
stock market, the focus is on the production of statistical gains from high-

performing schools. Those that fail to achieve at high levels or, worse, academi-
cally fail altogether are punished. This form of accountability is evident in Pres-
ident Clinton’s reform proposal to end federal funding to states that do not
improve failing schools and more recently in California Governor Gray Davis’s
educational reform initiative to rank order public schools from highest per-
forming to the worst performing school in the state.4
My last modern hegemonic image in public schooling is familiar to many
parents of athletes in the research community. This is the athletic image. The
assumption is that the education “race” is a zero-sum sport contest. That is,
there are clear winners and losers. Of course, in every zero-sum game the win-
ners come at the expense of the losers. As pointed out in the description of the
industrial/business image above, society rewards performance. There are no
rewards for failures. Collaboration, here the idea that gains can be made when
learning is mutual, tends to get lost. On the other hand, a more optimistic con-
ception of the education problem as an athletic contest potentially allows for
the setting of high academic standards.
Modern cultural images appear to implicitly wield a functional systems
approach. For example, the medical image embraces a biological system, the
civil engineering a mechanical system, and the athletic image a Darwinian
system of survival of the fittest. School reform efforts aimed at “fixing” the
broken system, for example within the image of medicine, apparently uni-
formly impose one model of reform on all schools, regardless of socioeco-
nomic structures, organizational dynamics, or levels of parental and commu-
nity involvement.
Transitional Postmodern Images
Transitional Postmodernity
I use transitional as a temporal metaphor. That is, it is an analogy to the

ongoing transformations in the global economy fueled by communication
technologies. As such, I signal a transformation in culture resulting from
postmodernity, what Harvey has termed an epoch of postmodern “condi-
tions.” These conditions, in turn, facilitate the construction of electronic cul-
tural images of public schools. I argue that as these images become implanted in
society through mass media, they become socially structured, that is, cultural
images that cognitively shape how researchers think about public schooling
(see discussion on cultural images below). This phenomenon is especially
observable in inner-city schools in urban centers, where increasingly the dis-
course of school failure is prevalent (see Mirón & St. John, 2003).
I borrow the notion of transitional from a broad spectrum of literature,5
including social postmodernism (see Nicholson & Seidman, 1995), critical

social theory, post-Marxism (Harvey, 1989), and poststructuralism (Poster,

1989). In particular, Douglas Kellner has argued that there exists an emerging
cultural transformation that is in its transitional historical phase. As the forces
of globalization have caused a change from manufacturing to an integrated,
technology-driven economy (the knowledge sectors), Kellner argued that “the
interaction of technology and capital” is helping to “transform every aspect of
life.” Poster (1990) echoed this sentiment when he asserted that “an increasing
segment of communication is mediated by electronic devices” (p. 1).
In educational research, the movement away from dominant research para-
digms, whether quantitative or qualitative in methodology, toward multiple
methods is an illustration of this broader shift in society. Not insignificant,
moreover, relatively new information technologies such as video cameras,
online e-mail and conferencing, and more mundanely, qualitative software
programs have perhaps propelled this shift. For example, Campbell’s research
in progress uses interactive video to assess how elementary students in Califor-
nia conceptualize mathematical problems. His research has significant impli-
cations for a complex philosophical question, constructivism. It is conceivable
that without the use of interactive video, questions of constructivism would be
pursued through philosophical rather than empirical analysis. My argument is
that this movement toward plurality in educational research remains con-
tested, and its outcomes, though perhaps inevitable, are a result of ideological
conflicts in the research community. Like the conceptualization of aesthetics
advanced above, educational research also may be considered a political
discourse.
Transitional images in public schooling tend to (re)focus research and prac-
tice on the problems of the individual or the collective learner. The educational
subject is restored as a concern of public schooling. Because transitional
postmodern images place educational subjects, and their social relations, at the
center of the educational enterprise, I assert that such cultural images approach
more complete characterizations. They are more appropriate when compared
to modern images. These cultural images are potentially more useful because
they capture phenomena closer to the agents of public schooling, as they more
fully enter into practical, intersubjective social relations embedded in teaching
and learning (see Biesta, 1994; Maxcy, 1991). However, these cultural images
are still hegemonic in that they are in bipolar opposition to the more modern
and totalizing images described above. Although transitional postmodern
images tend to be more complete, because they more fully capture plural
dimensions of school actors’ lived cultural and social experiences in the class-
room, they nonetheless are effects of power. Put differently, these cultural
images view the learner as “Other,” that is, a subaltern, marginalized subject
(see McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993; Mirón, Bogotch, & Biesta, 2000).
Popkewitz’s (1999) observations in this regard are worth noting at length:

The role of professional knowledge is to assimilate and develop the rationalized

and universal narrative about action initiated and carried out by actors. The nar-
ratives of action function as salvation stories by which people express intentions
(consciously or unconsciously; Ideologically or whatever is its opposite). The-
ories of action circulate different ideological traditions as salvation stories [italics
added] of change through the actor inscribed in the theory as securing truth. (p. 1)
Furthermore, the transitional postmodern images I describe below tend to

unintentionally paint a picture of students in need of rescue by families, com-
munities, or even the student himself or herself. This “salvation story of the
soul” (Popkewitz, 1999) is paradoxically tied to the emancipatory aims of the
project of modernity. These emancipatory goals are neither good nor bad in
themselves (see Anderson & Grinberg, 1998). As I tried to make clear above,
transitional postmodern images are potentially more progressive in that their
underlying values seek to make the institution of public schooling more equal
and equitable for greater numbers of students. It is naive, however, to view
these aims as free of the effects of power and logocentrism (see Poster, 1989).
First is the constructivist learner. Popkewitz (1999) observed that “recent
policy discourses embedded in the rhetoric of neoliberalism (e.g., markets, pri-
vatization, and community) makes the agent a local, constructivist actor such
as found in state decentralized discourses about community health, commu-
nity schools, and community based welfare systems” (p. 12). Constructivist
learners are flexible workers who can prosper in the knowledge sectors because
they can take responsibility to autonomously manage their own educational
and training needs, whether in or out of formal schooling. Constructivist
learners move a bit closer toward embodied learning (see below). This cultural
image focuses on the restoration of academic confidence, both individually and
collectively (see Bush, 2000). Viewed from this perspective, so-called failing
schools would not be primarily a problem of the institution but rather one of
confidence intrinsic to the learner. I stress the notion of intrinsic because I am
not concerned here with the fairly mechanical issue of building self-esteem by a
series of motivational rewards or punishments. This would reify the business/
industrial image described above. The educational task—if you will, prob-
lem—would consist of restoring confidence to the individual learner or cul-
tural group. In short, restoring confidence is analytically distinct from the
notion of self-esteem; the latter is a purely modernistic image.
In the family image of schooling, the emphasis is on meeting individual stu-
dent needs or caring for a social group. An example would be African Ameri-
cans, whose family members grew up during the civil rights movement. These
families view access to educational opportunity as a fundamental civil right,
not a privilege to be earned (Mirón & Lauria, 1998). As my work with Mickey
Lauria has shown, many African American parents from poor and lower-middle-
class backgrounds demand equality of educational opportunity for their chil-
dren. However, owing to the lack of human attention to respect, trust, and car-
ing—as well as often deplorable physical conditions (Kozol, 1991)—students

and families perceive that access is unattainable. Within the family image,
the gamut of student needs is provided for—physical, emotional, social,
and academic. 6
In addition to the family, students’ individual needs can also be met in com-
munity. This leads to my last transitional postmodern image. Collaborative
learning models, for example, peer tutoring, can flourish. Respect and trust, in
addition to caretaking, are the social foci. The social relations embedded in the
contexts of the enterprise of public schooling are the analytical unit, the poten-
tial focus of research if you will. Thus, mutuality defines the quality of experi-
ence of schooling, and learning may be considered a potential by-product of
pragmatic collaboration between student and teacher, what Biesta (1994; see
also Maxcy, 1991, 1995) conceptualized philosophically as “practical
intersubjectivity.”
In summary, what primarily distinguishes a modern from a transitional
postmodern orientation in public schooling as expressed through the use of
cultural images is the concern of the former with the multiple problems of
teaching and learning—outcomes, organizational functionality and commodi-
fication, and the manner in which the learner is represented and the meaning of
learning is defined (Hall, 1997, pp. 1-13)—as product and educational perfor-
mance. By contrast, transitional postmodern images recall the human dimen-
sion, the learner himself or herself, whether encapsulated in psychological pro-
cesses or social relations. The focus is on the human subject and practical
intersubjectivity (Biesta, 1994), although paradoxically the subject is con-
ceived as “Other.” In the following sections, I extend the transitional
postmodern image of public schooling and its emphasis on understanding
schooling as a human enterprise into the realm of aesthetics. Before doing so, I
need to analyze the consequences of modern and transitional postmodern
images of public schooling.
Effects of Commonsense Cultural Images
A consequence of the epistemology of modernity is a tendency toward com-

modification. Cultural images of public schooling such as the athletic and busi-
ness image grossly illustrate these tendencies in modernity, tendencies “to
equate process with product, the separation of knowledge from power, and the
‘objectivication’ (commodification) of knowledge and the social relations of
knowing” (Mirón, Biesta, & Bogotch, 1999, p. 4). The “product” of public
schooling is a prime example. Less obvious illustrations are found in other
modern images, however. For example, the engineering image, a favorite of
neoliberals, depicts schooling as a problem of organizational structure, that is,
the attempt to technically design (reengineer) the correct, single best system of
teaching and learning. Research into school practices is potentially plagued
with serious epistemological difficulties. If the sole purpose of schools and stu-

dents is to “perform,”7 for example, researchers might understandably con-

clude that the master (sic) teachers of the school, near-mythical figures, caused
the school to fail or to excel. Virtually no serious researcher of public schooling,
much less experienced practitioners, would make such a claim. Nonetheless,
popular culture and media are riddled with images of gallant teachers and
school administrators who turn around failing classrooms and their test scores
overnight. Just picture Jaime Escalante.
I want to be especially clear here. The point is not that excellent teachers and
school leaders do not matter. Of course they do. However, when commonsense
images are applied unscrupulously to “failing” or “high-performing” schools,
the mistaken notion may ensue that “lifting” (no metaphor intended) aca-
demic performance to such lofty heights is the sole purpose of schooling.
Other, potentially more fundamental goals such as community development
initiatives (Crowson & Boyd, 2000; Mirón & St. John, 2003; Torres & Mirón,
2000) may get buried. By inadequately examining the language and symbols
embedded in the use of everyday, commonsense images of public schooling,
the conclusions of the investigator perhaps point in the wrong direction. Politi-
cians and policy makers might, for instance, spend billions to fix an educa-
tional bridge leading to nowhere. As recent works by Anyon (1997), Lipman
(1998), Weiner (1999), and Mirón (1996) have established, the issue in many
cases is not failing schools but rather failed school reform and distressed urban,
inner-city communities (also, see Mirón & St. John, 2003).
My research has shown that schools in the inner city have a difficult time
establishing a climate of trust and mutual respect (Mirón, 1996, 1997). Educa-
tional research that reveals in detail the processes whereby such conditions are
concretely and deeply established in whole schools and classrooms may unex-
pectedly conclude that academic outcomes may not be that significant in the
long term or, more precisely, that the meanings of academic achievement are
multiple. Thus, we need multiple representations of the meaning of academic
achievement. The social reality now is that the meaning of achievement is
nearly totally defined by the results of standardized, national, and increasingly
international test scores. On the other hand, if students, especially in the inner
city, who are routinely deprived of healthy social conditions grow up, instead,
learning how to trust adults, resolve conflicts by negotiation, and appreciate
social, class, gender, and sexuality differences, then these nonacademic out-
comes of public schooling could possibly be viewed as significant. These social
outcomes can be juxtaposed with more traditional measures such as test scores,
school climate, and dropout rates. Such outcomes can help begin to redefine
public schools as political institutions in the sense that shared community
moral values can be put on the school reform agenda. Public school reform can
thus potentially help foster local community development (see Baum, 1997;
Crowson & Boyd, 2000).8 More public schools can then contribute to the over-
all quality of life in local communities (Mirón, 1995).

Ultimately, the community image may hold the most promise in the transi-
tional postmodern camp, but students still lack voice and power. The sense of
community is what’s missing in contemporary society. Information technology
has significantly reduced the need for face-to-face interaction (see Poster,
1990). True, a sense of place and shared values that mark the experience of com-
munity are systematically being infused into schools through parent and com-
munity involvement (California Commission on Teacher Credentialing,
1998; California Department of Education, 1999; also see University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine, 1999). Parents and community members still hold the balance
of power. Students are seen as “rescued” or “saved” by community and business
partnerships (see Popkewitz, 1999; also Baum, 1997, personal communica-
tion, July 1999; Epstein, 1993). This move toward parental and community
empowerment is understandably appealing in that unequal power relations
may seem more balanced in favor of families and residents, but ironically, stu-
dents are frequently cast as the “Other” in public schools (Mirón et al., 2000).
Transitional postmodern images begin to more appropriately refocus9 our
scholarly and practical attention to human beings and human agency; to the
persons that are the hallmark of schooling and education, or at least should be;
as well as to the concrete differences these subjects make in the everyday lives of
public school students. Educational subjects, for example, superintendents
and building principals, can take action. However, these actions are not
“things” that lead to better products. They are, rather, discursive practices or
communicative actions (Habermas, 1970). As such, school-level actions
(reforms) are embedded in social relations marked by multiple discursive
spaces and subject positions (see Mouffe, 1988). Primary among these are the
interactions with students.
School agents can act. This is so because the subject who acts on educational
alternatives (see Hays, 1994) is historically contingent, that is, constituted in
language and forever reconstituted in discourse practices and social relations of
power (Butler, 1993). Objects are thus potentially recast as subjects in public
schooling. The hegemonic images of public schooling and corresponding edu-
cational research, thus, may reflect a larger historical-theoretical trajectory,
which ranges from viewing the student as an object in modernity to a consti-
tuted (yet marginalized) subject in transitional postmodernity. In Part 2, I pro-
vide the social and historical-theoretical contexts that give us insights into an
emerging plurality in educational research.
2. Emerging Plurality in Educational Research
In 1998, Elliot Eisner laid out the parameters of what I am arguing in this
article as an emerging plurality in educational research.10 Eisner didn’t specify
any field within the generic category of educational research. Rather, his call
embraced, perhaps unintentionally, a transitional postmodern orientation,

whose new epistemological and ontological underpinnings potentially disrupt

the historically monolithic character of educational research. In education, the
putative dominant paradigms of the physical, social, and human sciences have
tended to marginalize important theoretical and methodological insights from
the humanities, the arts, and cultural studies (see Ginsberg, 1997). Eisner
(1998) put the issue squarely: “My own view is that social and physical science
are a species of research; research is not a species of science” (p. 34). Here, I
expand on Eisner’s brief argument to assert that educational research is no lon-
ger monolithic. Whether conscious or not, educational researchers now
embrace a plurality of methodological approaches (see Anderson & Herr,
1999). For example, research in educational leadership embraces multiple
approaches (see Capper, 1993, 1998, 1999), including the study of the ethics
of administrative dilemmas (Beck, 1994) and their potential resolution
through moral leadership (Sergiovanni, 1992); educational leadership as dra-
matic performance (Starratt, 1993); the spiritual dimensions of administrative
practices (see Bolman & Deal, 1995; Capper, 1998); the ethos of caring, social
justice, and critique (Starratt, 1991, 1994); and finally the concept of research
in the field as embedded in the language and symbols of metaphors (Beck,
1999). There now appears to be an abundance of diversity in research design
and methods.11 Moreover, I view this move toward pluralism, away from meth-
odological metanarratives, as a healthy one. It signals a more democratic schol-
arly culture and tolerance for differences in educational research.
These multiple educational research paradigms help to partially disrupt the
regimes of truth as systems of reason (Popkewitz, 1998b) that are embedded in
approaches that tend to make students and schooling as objects of nature.
These “natural” epistemological assumptions, for example, that public school-
ing is a commodity, are linked to the modern cultural images described above.
Viewing the processes and outcomes of public schooling as commodities is a
conceptual legacy tied to the modern cultural images detailed above. Pluralistic
approaches in educational research potentially net both theoretical as well as
methodological gains. That is, the relational dynamics unearthed in such sub-
stantive areas as those listed above begin to spotlight the internal circuits of
power, the uncritical assumptions embedded in the internal circuits of power,
and the uncritical epistemological assumptions embedded in educational
research. The hegemony of epistemologies of nature (the natural sciences) no
longer appears to unilaterally obstruct the social relations of teaching, learning,
and leadership.
The language and research methods of the arts, cultural studies, and the
humanities best capture the emerging plurality of educational research. Fur-
thermore, because knowledge emanating from the social sciences may be
socially constructed, care must be given to distinguish between material (physi-
cal) reality and social (nonphysical) reality; the former is better suited for
research methods imported from the physical sciences. Here, I am especially
concerned with the latter forms of reality as they relate to the understanding of

the realm of desires, emotions, and meanings educational actors (classroom

teachers and other educational leaders) may bring to school processes and class-
room practices.
The Positionality of the Educational Researcher
The emerging postmodern project generally, and specifically within the

rather broad field of educational research, may seriously question the main fea-
tures of the epistemological worldview of modernity. In particular, it poten-
tially challenges the conception of the subject as an ego or consciousness that
exists outside of (and therefore also prior to) history (see Biesta, 2000;
Popkewitz, 1998a). Moreover, it partially interrupts the near universal under-
standing of knowledge as a neutral registration/representation by this ego or
consciousness of the world “outside” (see Hall, 1997). Contrary to the notion
that the subject serves as its own point of departure, postmodernism stresses
that the subject is a “constituted [italics added] subject” (Butler, 1992, p. 9),
that is, a subject that is always inscribed, and potentially reinscribed, in history.
For example, decisions that classroom teachers make, and the values that
underpin their professional judgments, have a history: They come from some-
where and are linked to such sociopolitical dynamics as the relationship of the
school to its local community and wider society (Apple, 1985, 1993, 1996), the
authoritative positionality of the school administrator (Giroux, 1993), and the
near autonomy of the classroom teacher (Tyack, 1974; see also Poulantzas,
1969, 1978).
Nagel (1979) theorized
that there is a necessary logical [italics added] connection, and not merely a con-
tingent or causal one, between the “social perspective” of a student of human
affairs and his standards of competent social inquiry, and in consequence the
influence of the special values to which he is committed. (p. 498)
Research in the human and social sciences, thus, is contingent on historically

relative influences. More to the point of this article, because social organiza-
tions (public schools) are in constant flux, be they so-called open or closed sys-
tems, the intellectual apparatus summoned to study such phenomena need
changing as well (Nagel, 1979). This is especially the case when the emotions,
desires, beliefs, and meanings that educational subjects bring to the research
problem mark the scope of investigation.
The emergence of plurality in research into public schooling is part of what I
am describing as a transitional postmodern move. Scholars such as Henry
Giroux (1981, 1991) have long asserted that pedagogical and leadership prac-
tices seem uniquely resistant of postmodern change, however broadly these
social conditions are conceived.12 As a whole, the field of educational research

now seems to tolerate a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches

(for example, see Capper, 1998, 1999); these developments are relatively new,
few in number, and controversial. Constas (1998) was therefore correct to
argue that educational research still relies on the paradigms of science. Under-
standing whether such paradigmatic resilience is good or bad is beyond the
scope of this article. The emergence of plurality, despite some significant ques-
tions, is healthy in a democratic society. As previously stated, this diversity of
approaches is still in transition. Debate on the paradigm wars, as Anderson and
Herr (1999) claimed, is to a certain extent misdirected. As has been established
above, there is no categorical, definitive postmodern stance in educational
research. This point cannot be overemphasized. So what is the fuss about?
Scholars are in need of research epistemological assumptions and correspond-
ing designs that encapsulate both modern and postmodern worldviews (see
Part 3, below). This signals a move toward the aesthetic.
3. Using Aesthetics in Public Schools
Efforts to improve the quality of experience in individual classrooms and

entire schools may be the only way to interest students. My hope is to apply the
aesthetic cultural images of public schools and their potential usefulness to sug-
gest what aesthetic school practices might actually look like. This may map the
contours of aesthetic efforts to improve the quality of public schooling, in par-
ticular inner-city schools. These are thus both theoretical and practical inter-
ventions into the everyday life of public schools. Following Dewey, the aes-
thetic cultural image of public schooling captures the quality of the learning
experience—as perceived by the individual learner or social groups (learning
communities, racial-ethnic minorities, and so on). At an idealistic level, this
image invokes the sense of beauty, wonder, curiosity, and a literary imagina-
tion, what Maxcy (1991, 1995) characterized as “aesthetic intelligence” (see
also Greene, 1995). Although it superficially concerns matters of taste, I want
to use the ideas of Donald Arnstine to explore substantively how the primacy of
the aesthetic might engage more substantial questions relevant to the needs of
particular kinds of students (as stated, my concern is with inner-city students).
By examining the dimensions of aesthetics in public schooling, more attention
can be given to matters of design, the quality of the learning environment, and
experience of public schooling, as well as to the aesthetic crafts of teaching and
leadership. These foci have significant implications for educational research, as
I will attempt to demonstrate at the conclusion of this article.
Elsewhere, I have written that in particular “urban schools lack aesthetic
sensibilities” (see Mirón, 1996, p. viii). Kozol (1991) has sensitively, and
exhaustively, documented the conditions of everyday life in inner-city schools
across the United States. In urban communities such as East St. Louis, New
York, and San Antonio, the resources needed to bring public schools in these

districts to a level remotely approaching their counterparts in more affluent

school districts in suburbs are substantial:
Looking around some of these inner-city schools, where filth and disrepair were
worse than anything I’d seen in 1964, I often wondered why we would agree to let
our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president,
or business CEO would dream of working. (p. 5)
Usually, we attribute aesthetics in public schooling to programs such as arts

in education. These programs have been somewhat successful in raising aca-
demic achievement in schools (see Catterall, 1998). They range from employ-
ing part-time performing artists (dancers, poets, and sculptors) in elementary
and secondary schools to comprehensive educational tours such as Wynton
Marsalis’s tribute to Duke Ellington at the Lincoln Center. These tours are
nationwide and are often associated with organizations such as the National
Association of Jazz Educators, which holds annual national conventions.
Rarely, however, do practitioners and educational researchers think of the
converse scenario: education in arts or, more specifically, education through
the arts or the aesthetic experience. The latter would involve at least a partial
realization of an aesthetic quality in the classroom. To get a glimpse of what this
means, especially in light of research and practice in public schooling, I turn
now to the writings of Donald Arnstine. In Democracy and the Arts of Schooling,
Arnstine (1995) developed a conception of “the primacy of the aesthetic.” By
this he meant that aesthetic qualities must be present in the classroom for (pub-
lic) schooling to have a genuine educative effect on the learner, that is, beyond
its successful institutional function of socialization (the latter is a by-product
of a systems perspective discussed above). Put simply, the primacy of the aes-
thetic in schooling means a “concern . . . to create conditions that will help stu-
dents have experiences of high quality” (p. 68). I want to distinguish between
two dimensions of aesthetics in education, teaching and learning, or between
teacher and student. The latter two are of course the key primary subjects in
schooling, the other being parents or family-type support groups (California
Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 1998; California Department of Edu-
cation, 1999).
Aesthetic Teaching
The goals for the teacher within this framework are to create in the class-
room a climate that fosters high-quality learning experiences. In the following
passage, Arnstine (1995) illustrated this climate by providing specific dimen-
sions of aesthetic teaching, including engaging high-quality reflection, elimi-
nating routine activities, and allowing students a measure of social control over
their own learning. Arnstine’s statement is worth repeating at length.

When an experience is high in quality and also [italics added] involves thought, it
is aesthetic in quality. Teachers must focus on the elimination of routine activi-
ties [busy work] that go a long way toward maintaining control over students’
behaviors, but have the unintended effect of disengaging them from instruction
and therefore probably from learning as well. The overall purpose of developing
a classroom climate that embraces the primacy of the aesthetic is to treat our stu-
dents as active individuals, responsive to their social group yet growing in power
to make discriminating judgments. For this growth to occur, they need to act
thoughtfully in ways that are characteristics of experience when it’s aesthetic.
(pp. 69-70)
This climate set by the classroom teacher will in turn result in the learning of
“dispositions” (customs and affectations) (see Eagleton, 1990, pp. 13-31)
toward the acquisition of the practice of reflection. The underlying theoretical
and practical assumption is that of the community image, which contains the
idea of mutual respect and trust. In contexts such as inner-city schools, this
goal may be unreachable without deliberate attention to fostering such a
climate.
What produces thoughtful engagement reminiscent of the arts is the
teacher’s ability to foster confrontation in the student. Following Derrida
(1992), by confrontation I mean the emotionally violent collision with the
unexpected or, as Arnstine noted, “a discrepancy.” This involves the resolution
between what the student expected to learn based on prior experiences and
information and what is actually true based on empirical evidence or logic. For
example, the idea that Latino parents actually may want to participate as active
parents with their teachers in the learning process may come as somewhat of a
surprise to many Anglo students in teacher education courses, who cite empiri-
cal research that finds that such parents seemingly do not value education.
What students actually “do” with the discrepancy—how they do or do not
resolve it—is the intellectual labor of becoming a student and ultimately
becoming educated. This work is a process of practical intersubjectivity, which
Biesta (1994) has conceptualized as the practical-pragmatic interactive process
between teachers and students in the classroom.
An example from a second-grade classroom in Boston should make the pro-
cess clearer. Darby and Catterall’s (1994) lengthy illustration is worth noting:
An early encounter with aesthetic symbols for a struggling second-grader in the

Boston area emphasizes the importance of the arts in one child’s early
development.
Lanika is one of my special education kids. She has poor attendance and,
therefore, never really established solid friendships. . . . She has poor language/
articulation skills. . . . We did a unit on “birds” and as one of our books we read
Sing A Song of People which is about Boston. We looked carefully at the pictures
and admired how the artist used layered paper to create the pictures. . . . The
assignment was to make a bird with paper and scissors and give no [italics added]
pencils or crayons. The kids could not draw, they could cut, just cut. . . . Lanika

used the book to give her visual clues on how to make a swan. I wish I had video-
taped Lanika making that swan, though I doubt I will ever forget it! I had never
seen her so focused. (p. 302)
This example vividly highlights the core of aesthetic teaching, which Arnstine
(1995, p. 73) argued provides students with a sense of sustained curiosity. It
concretely illustrates the artistry of teaching as performance (see Sarason,
1999). Here, teaching helps move this classroom into an aesthetic mold. How-
ever, the organizational context appears to be cast in functionalists terms, that
is, as “systems of reason” generally and “populational reasoning” in particular
(Popkewitz, 1998b). The effects of power appear to reproduce exclusionary
practices. What does this mean? Put simply, the classroom practice appears to
lack a “politics of the [aesthetic] performative” (Phelan, 1993) in that the hier-
archical discourses (see above) representing the identity of the students are cast
as Other (“special” education kids). But the procedural steps seem at least
pointed in the right direction.
Quality Learning
As mentioned, the passage above signals classroom processes pointing the

way toward a performative (Mirón & Inda, 2000) view of learning.13 Here,
learning means doing, both in the poststructural (see Poster, 1989) sense as dis-
course—practices—as well as in the behavioristic sense as concrete action. The
actions, furthermore, stem from the encounters with learning discrepancies
mentioned above. These discrepancies (the unexpected knowledge that stu-
dents confront) are a result of the climate teachers instill in the classroom. In
aesthetic terms, students must desire such encounters—be willing to engage in
the process of their potential resolutions—in order for high-quality thought to
emerge. In a word, deep learning—genuine knowledge—is at the heart of the
primacy of the aesthetic with respect to what such practices may look like in
actual public schools.
Concluding Observations
In this article, I have juggled back and forth between modernity and
postmodernity, attempting to strike a balance between them. For example, I
used the constructivist image in Part 1 and the embodied learning image in Part
3 to illustrate that transitional postmodern images of public schooling can,
almost fluidly, merge with aesthetic ones. I have shown that though related to
modern psychological views of enhancing self-esteem, academic confidence is
not primarily about instilling positive emotions. Above all, confidence con-
cerns the feedback students derive when they are academically successful. This

position recalls the language of modernity yet extends well beyond the perspec-
tive that learning is a commodified object. Educational researchers can more
fully capture the full range of care for students—emotional, social, safety, and
academic—by invoking an aesthetic image of public schooling. This cultural
image would juxtapose the family image alongside that of embodied learning.
Thus, the research community may realize gains for research and practice in
core areas of schooling: teaching, learning, and leading. These gains would be
more difficult to achieve with monolithic research designs that tend to be
devoid of an aesthetic conception of schooling.
What are the gains for research and practice with an aesthetic conception?
These can be conceptualized by recalling the definition of the aesthetic image
advanced above. In general terms, we can now understand the qualitative, mul-
tiple expressions of the meaning of teaching, learning, and leading for educa-
tional actors that result from the invocation of modern and postmodern
images. For example, in addition to realizing the qualitative interpretation that
the schools provide a context for meaning, we also know that the expressions of
this meaning (and underlying values) at times can be made only through artis-
tic representation (arts-based research) (see Mirón et al., 2000). Furthermore,
we can hypothesize that the discursive processes themselves carry material
effects of power (unintended consequences). Moreover, by recognizing that the
methodological move toward plurality is transitional, the largely dysfunctional
debate over which epistemology is “best” can be avoided. Practitioners benefit
because attention to action is foregrounded when the performative dimension
of aesthetics is invoked and the language employed to select and define the
research “problem” produces practical alternatives to problem resolution.
The following new kinds of research questions emerge when paradigms are
multiple and a conception of the aesthetic is employed. These can be grouped
around the following categories: normative, political, and performative ques-
tions. For example, what moral values underpin the identification of school-
level problems and the school administrator’s resolution of these (see Mirón
et al., 2000; Noblit & Dempsey, 1996)? Who controls access to legitimate
knowledge (Apple, 1993), and what is the technology that certifies acquisition
of such knowledge (see Constas, 1998)? What discourse practices are accessible
to school leaders in the pursuit of morality and virtue in the school (see Oakes,
Quartz, Ryan, & Lipton, 2000)? In what sense do these discourse practices
carry material effect, that is, constitute a lived social epistemology? Finally,
how does the societal reliance on graphic and cultural images of public school-
ing shape reform movements such as standards-based reform? How does the
enactment of school-based reform socially reproduce the status quo in schools
(see Oakes et al., 2000)? As researchers address these questions, the aesthetic
cultural image may become an intellectual vehicle to help bring the student as
person into the theoretical and practical foreground.

Notes
1. Hays (1994) conceived “material” as embedded in a social structure, “that is, a

given set of social relations, natural resources, or identifiable economic and political
institution” (p. 60).
2. The idea of “performance” is quite controversial. Here, I follow Gert Biesta, who
observed that the performative practice in schooling directly implies communication
with an audience. Thus, the act of the performative is fundamentally educative in its
broadest sense in that it promotes radical reciprocal understanding between the com-
municative authority (classroom teachers) and “others” (students).
3. I am certain that other images in both the modern and postmodern categories
can be found. However, here I focus on what I consider hegemonic images in education.
See Mirón (1992) for a discussion of hegemony.
4. Davis’s call ultimately failed to pass muster with the California legislature,
although it was largely supported by business and industry.
5. Space does not permit even a cursory synthesis of this complex literature here.
6. A vivid example of the family image is the story of Charles G. Emery Elementary
School in Orange County, California. Emery increased achievement rates on the high-
stakes Stanford 9 Test by 20 percentage points in certain areas. In 1998, the 1st year the
test was administered, scores languished below the national average. However, as a
result of a school-improvement strategy that examined “the strength and weaknesses of
the children who would be coming to them from lower grades, setting priorities based
on their new students needs rather than their former students past performance [italics
added], dramatic gains were had” (Hefland, Alexander, & Sahagun, 1999, p. A30).
7. Contrast this definition of performance with the one discussed for the aesthetic
image.
8. Traditionally, academic rather than social outcomes were the exclusive purview
of leadership effects (see Hallinger & Murphy, 1983, 1985; Wimpelberg, Teddlie, &
Stringfield, 1989).
9. Of course, we need to consistently remain mindful of Popkewitz’s admonition
cited earlier.
10. A version of this article was presented at the Reclaiming Voice II conference,
University of California, Irvine, June 1999.
11. My colleague Jonathan Inda correctly asks, “Might not pluralism be a
metanarrative itself?” This possibility is acknowledged as part of the “transitional
move” in postmodernism (see below). I thank Jonathan Inda for this observation as well
as his detailed criticisms of an earlier version of this article. See Hall (1986).
12. For the purposes of this article, I follow Mark Poster’s (1989, 1990, 1997) theo-
retical-historical trajectory to assert that a central feature of the culture of
postmodernity is that of a marked switch in advanced capitalists societies to the “mode
of information” and away from the mode and relations of production. These transfor-
mations are global in scope and, as Manuel Castells (1996, 1999) has established, have
affected the core of identity related to an “information society” (also see Giddens, 1990).
13. For a detailed explanation of performativity theory, see Mirón and Inda (2000).

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Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
Erratum 12(5) 468

© 2012 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708612459690
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Sydnor, S. (2012). Cultural Anthropology of the Penn State Tragedy. Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 12 (4),
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In the article above, on page 335, the copyright permission information under two cartoons was published incorrectly.
The correct copyright permission is:
1) Note. ROB ROGERS © 2011 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Reprinted by permission of Universal Uclick for UFS.
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And
2) Note. From “Fishing With Darwin,” by Barry Boggs, Jr. Retrieved from http://www.fishingwithdarwin.com/
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10.

The Cultural Images of Public Schooling

In this experimental article, the author initiates a methodological move

Keywords: aesthetics; postmodernism; pluralism; deconstruction

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

Cultural images of public schooling discursively structure the way research-

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1. Hegemonic Images of Public Schooling

To unpack the multiple social constructions of educational research, both

Representing the Politics of Aesthetics in Research

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cated, circulated, and reproduced through everyday cultural practices. As such,

By suggesting that [performance art] participate in a “performative exchange” I

The implication is clear for purposes of this article: Although rhetorical in

Aesthetics as a Cultural Object

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Aesthetics as a Material Cultural Practice

On the other hand, Dewey’s (1934) conception of aesthetics simultaneously

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imply value judgments and provide an organizational context for meaning in

Modern cultural images of public schooling can be characterized by their

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Transitional Postmodern Images

I use transitional as a temporal metaphor. That is, it is an analogy to the

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social theory, post-Marxism (Harvey, 1989), and poststructuralism (Poster,

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The role of professional knowledge is to assimilate and develop the rationalized

Furthermore, the transitional postmodern images I describe below tend to

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Effects of Commonsense Cultural Images

A consequence of the epistemology of modernity is a tendency toward com-

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dents is to “perform,”7 for example, researchers might understandably con-

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2. Emerging Plurality in Educational Research

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whose new epistemological and ontological underpinnings potentially disrupt

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the realm of desires, emotions, and meanings educational actors (classroom

The Positionality of the Educational Researcher

The emerging postmodern project generally, and specifically within the

Research in the human and social sciences, thus, is contingent on historically

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now seems to tolerate a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches

3. Using Aesthetics in Public Schools

Efforts to improve the quality of experience in individual classrooms and

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districts to a level remotely approaching their counterparts in more affluent

Usually, we attribute aesthetics in public schooling to programs such as arts

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An early encounter with aesthetic symbols for a struggling second-grader in the

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As mentioned, the passage above signals classroom processes pointing the

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1. Hays (1994) conceived “material” as embedded in a social structure, “that is, a

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Anderson, G. L., & Grinberg, J. (1998). Educational administration as a disciplinary prac-

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