Beyond Progressive Liberalism and Cultural Relativism: Towards Critical Postmodernist, Sociohistorically Situated Perspectives in Classroom Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we propose that classroom studies in the TESOL field tend to subscribe to either of the following two normative orders: (a) progressive liberalism, and (b) cultural relativism, without reflexively recognizing and meta-analysing these normative frameworks and their social, historical, and political situatedness. Drawing on Foucault's (1981) methods of historical excavation, we attempt a critical analysis of the socio-historical situatedness of these modernist normative orders. By building on relational analysis from critical educational studies (Apple, 1999), critical ethnography (Canagarajah, 1993; Chick, 1996; Kumaravadivelu, 1999; Pennycook, 2001), and the theory and method of articulation from cultural studies (Slack, 1996), we propose critical postmodernist, socio-historically situated perspectives in classroom studies and educational research as alternatives that break away from the modernist determinism of reproduction theories on the one hand, and radical postmodernist relativism on the other. We illustrate how such perspectives can contribute to our understanding of classroom practices with two classroom examples from Hong Kong schools, and we attempt to show the potential of these perspectives for contributing to the opening up of possibilities for change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".