Education Commons^™

Anti-Ethnography?, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

"Many of the ongoing difficulties teachers face revolve around the 'translation' of disciplinary knowledge—especially critical theory—into pedagogical praxis. It often seems that our teaching lags behind our theoretical knowledge by about two decades, and sometimes we wonder if it will ever catch up. This sense of disjunction has been compounded by the difficulty of teaching postmodern understandings of subjectivity, truth, and epistemology in an increasingly commodified teaching context, where consumers expect to purchase a clear, identifiable, and literally usable product, and where 'knowledge' often means easily digestible and repeatable content rather than analytic skills, critical understandings, or complex world views. …