Postmodern Perspectives
포스트모더니즘 시각의 교육과 학습이란 무엇인가?
Postmodern Perspectives: What it means to teach and learn from a postmodern perspective.
이미지 출처: pixabay.com“Postmodernism is formed by but is a reaction against the modern world view” (Rudd, 2006). In education, I understand postmodern perspective as an approach to educational change or extension from modern one across the broad spectrum.
Postmodern approach can be defined by the word: particularity. According to Jary & Jary (1995, p. 509), ‘post-modernity’ is seen as involving such features as a world of “flux, flow and fragmentation’, without absolute values, an end of the dominance of an overarching belief in ‘scientific’ rationality and a unitary theory of progress, the replacement of empiricists theories of representation and truth, and an increased emphasis on the importance of the unconscious, on free-floating signs and images, and a plurality of viewpoints.” (as cited in Wright, Module Three-Lesson Two: The Modern and Post-Modern).
Postmodern students are identified with differences within age groups while modern students were defined in terms of difference between age groups. One example is “developmentally appropriate practice, which gears schools to the development rather than the chronological age of children” urged by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. (deMarrais & LeCompte, 1999, p.89). If the modernist assumption is the emphasis on the didactic teaching of content, in postmodern classroom providing learning activities for children to acquire the content is emphasized.
Postmodern educators focus on individual differences in learning rather than “uniformity of thought, knowledge, practice, and curriculum” (Wright, Module Three-Lesson One: Labor, Capital and Science). They identify and respond to students with different learning styles. Recognizing the difference in how each student learns has brought special education. The view on gifted and handicapped students, which was rather negative in terms of similarity and unity in modernism has greatly changed. In the postmodern era, those students are supported much more with better treatment than modern era, which I see as one great positive part of postmodern education in terms of humanism.
‘Choice’ is another word to describe the education in the postmodern era. Diversity has been brought in school governance and structure; magnet schools and charter schools are the examples. For teachers, the word ‘choice’ means that considerable autonomy is given to them. They have more freedom to select curricular materials and instructional strategies, which means less centralized but localized lessons in the classroom and they “are empowered to become more forceful decision makers in their own classrooms” (deMarrais & LeCompte, 1999, p.93).
In sum, what postmodernists would argue is “that only local communities (schools, teachers, students) and their knowledges and practices based on diversity and differences of gender, race, ethnicity makes any sense at all (Wright, Lecture Note. Module Three—Lesson Two: The Modern and Post-Modern)
Elkind, D. (1998). Schooling the Postmodern Child. Research Bulletin, 3(1).
Rudd, D. (2006). Postmodern youth ministry [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/daverudd/postmodern-youth-ministry
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