A ‘rhetoric of disruption’ by way of attaining the not yet in the future: re‐membering the past by way of challenging our present educational practices

Abstract

Our central argument is that if we are to understand who we are as educators in the present as well as who we hope to become in the future, then we must examine and critique how we have collectively represented who we have been. To present our conviction that understanding our history as adult educators is central to understanding our current educational practice, we develop three theses. First, we argue that the purpose of history is to help us understand how we have created our current educational practices from our historical experiences. Second, we draw upon Williams’ notion of a ‘selective tradition’ to show how our current practices are selectively, and often hegemonically, constructed from past practices. Finally, in hopes of moving us toward illuminating our future, we argue that the purpose of history is to help us analyze those selective cultural traditions that inform our current educational practices in order to expose prejudices and illusions. We thus propose the ‘doing’ of history as a counterhegemonic strategy of ‘remembering’ the past in order to critique the present so that as educators we can reveal our historically‐copntinuing limitations and open us to expanding possibilities of Hberatory practice.