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The discourses and politics of ‘education’ and ‘epistemology’
Journal article   Peer reviewed

The discourses and politics of ‘education’ and ‘epistemology’

A. McHoul and A. Luke
Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, Vol.3(1), pp.3-17
1989
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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine epistemology as a general procedure or set of procedures for making discoveries about 'knowledge' in general, and about 'educational knowledge' in particular. Contrary to many current versions of epistemology, the present exercise is in counter-epistemology - based loosely on the counter-history-of-ideas of Foucault - which attempts to mount a critique of epistemology as a generalized technique. As it stands, epistemology unwarrantedly claims sovereignty over a number of practical and theoretical educational domains, converting whatever it finds into legitimated 'knowledges'. If we re-think epistemology so that it becomes but one competing and (derivative) discourse in educational studies, rather than ascribing to it any particular curricular privilege, as this paper suggests, a number of quite crucial consequences about what is being done (and what is yet to be done) in teacher education curricula emerge.

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