Editorial: History and method(ology)

Abstract

The 25th anniversary of the Australian Association of Research in Education is an appropriate time to produce a special issue of the Australian Educational Researcher on history and methodology. History is being 're-invented' during the 1990s. Why now and in what ways? First, debates about modern/postmodern times raise questions about the nature of the rapid change accompanying globalisation and new information technologies. Is this a period of fundamental change in social, political and economic relationships, similar to those arising out of industrialisation or the introduction of the printing press, in the transition from modern to postmodern times? Or are the changes we experience merely the acceleration of previous modernist phases such as the late 19th century rise of industrial capitalism, the 20th century rise of advanced capitalism, the move to flexible capitalism during the 1980s and now the consumer capitalism of the 1990s (Lash & Urry 1990). Or is postmodernism as a new popular theoretical paradigm merely, in an era demanding high performativity by academics, a tyranny of the new? Andy Green (1994) suggests that postmodernism has become 'the theoretical benchmark against which all intellectual products has to be assessed' (p. 67). He cites three bodies of theory informing the debates: the cultural critique of modernist art and architecture; the French poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault; and the general theorists about the nature of social and economic change which impacts on life and work organisation, such as the work of neoMarxist geographers. He also suggests that many of the debates about postmodernism (as about poststructuralism) have been at a level of generality which is disturbing, and points to the unevenness of trends, and to how what constitutes the postmodern is itself historically contingent. Green calls for more comparative historically based studies of the impact of globalisation at the local level. Historians in the main have been informed by the work of Foucault; Ian Hunter's (1994) Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism Ceviewed in the Australian Educational Researcher (1995, 2, 1 pp. 107-130) is an example. The postmodern turn, with its emphasis on intertextuality, subjectivity, discourse and power, therefore has presented a challenge to educational historians, in ways which have fragmented the subject and undermined the metanarratives of historical progressivism. The papers in this special issue explore some of the resonances of the modern/postmodern tension around the quite divergent educational issues of