Postmodern Vision Research Articles

Time and the Environments of Schooling

In this article, we explore questions related to the meaning and nature of time in schooling environments. Cultural, historical and ecological images inform our thinking, using concepts from postmodern perspectives such as semiotics and critical pedagogy. We begin by reviewing the historical development of conceptions of time and describe what is meant by framing our research and thinking in a postmodern vision of time. We examine ideas about other potential meanings of time using semiotic and critical pedagogical interpretations. As the research and recommendations are of value to professional educators and policy makers, we discuss the value of nurturing intellectual relationships, the value of collaboration, and the importance of developing new ways to give voice to teachers to allow them to articulate their views about what is most meaningful and significant in the organization of learning environments.

Postmodernity and Pedagogy: Connecting the Dots

AbstractThis article calls for an acceptance of a constructive postmodernity and links that epoistemology with the use of collaborative learning techniques. If we and our students live in a postmodern world, then our pedagogy must make sense within that same postmodernity. To ignore these epistemological horizons is to split our intellectual commitments from our teaching. The tone of the work is set by a sketch of the muddled term “postmodern.” Four markers are developed to situate postmodernity's ironic sense of reality and to link it to a suspicion of any universal master narrative. Why should teachers care? Because learning should reflect our picture of knowing. We teach a world in what we do. The pedagogical practices most in line with the postmodern vision involve collaborative learning, which itself represents a departure from the classic vision of knowing. The article ends with a coda on the theologies resonant with these commitments.

A Postmodern Vision of Time and Learning: A Response to the National Education Commission Report Prisoners of Time

In this article, Patrick Slattery challenges the assumptions underlying many educational policy documents, such as the 1994 Report, Prisoners of Time, which, in Slattery's view, depict time as both an object to control and as a dictator of the linear sequencing that shapes schooling. Slattery argues for a proleptic understanding of time in education. That is, he calls for an understanding that acknowledges how time interconnects with classroom life by providing an overview of various perspectives from classical physics that illuminate the interdependence of the space-time continuum, by addressing the role of personal history in influencing the relationships of students and teachers, and by advocating for curricula that connect to the realities of students' lives.

Calgary and Everything after: A Postmodern Re-Vision of Lawyering

Hutchinson encourages a re-thinking of the ethics of lawyering. He explores the need to transform through legal theory what is done in legal practice and what is justified to be left undone. This exploration begins with a discussion of the traditional image of the ethical lawyer. He then exposes this image to a series of critiques and introduces alternate models of legal practice. A postmodern vision of lawyering is introduced which reframes and reworks these traditional ways of thinking. By the adoption of such a postmodern re- vision of lawyering, change in legal practice may come about through the legal profession, rather than in spite of it.

Lyric and dramatic poetry, 1946-82

Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s. This collection, a retrospective of Cesaire's poetic production demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew out of the climate of Black Power influenced by the essays of Franz Fanon, another Martinican, who was largely responsible for the ambient view of Cesaire a generation ago. It is the first collection to translate And the Dogs Were Silent and i, laminaria. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82 locates the issues of Cesaire's struggle with an emerging postmodern vision, showing him to be a major figure in the conflict between tradition and contemporary cultural identity. In his introductory essay A.James Arnold engages Derrida dnd deconstruction to demonstrate by contrast the originality of Cesaire's retrospective critique of modernism.

Family, work, and culture: Postmodern themes for catholic spirituality in transforming the crisis of modernity

This essay portrays a destructive, late‐modern cultural battle over family and work, triggered especially by the advent of television, and waged between late liberalism's right and left wings. It sees the modem crisis of family and work as flowing in part from certain strains in Western classical spirituality, which modernity then developed technologically and psychologically. By contrast, it proposes a postmodern cultural vision of regeneration, which weaves afresh and holistic synthesis of creative communion, expressed ecologically, socially, and spiritually, and is centered in the sacred lay experiences of family and work.

The black and the red: Shanks & Tilley's programme for a radical archaeology

Prominent in the new literature of a ‘post-processual’, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ archaeology are a pair of books, conveniently colour-coded as one black and one red, written by Michael Shanks 6. Christopher Tilley, and both published in 1987. The ‘black book’, from Cambridge University Press, has a stark cover mostly of solid black; the cover of the ‘red book’, from Polity Press, is a more cheerful crimson, though its picture, a 19th-century Comedy of death, is a despairing image of dismal decay.Kristian Kristiansen, of the Center for Research in the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, reviews here the black and the red, and the post-modern vision of archaeology they amount to.