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Developmental Psychology and the Postmodern Child
Abstract
In this chapter I shall address the current and possible areas of intersection between the discipline of developmental psychology and analyses of contemporary society that seek to understand the phenomena of postmodernism. I suggest that theorists of postmodernism must engage with, as well as comment upon, developmental psychology if they are to offer an effective critique, and that there are areas of developmental psychology which postmodern analyses need to take seriously if they are to fulfil a potential of providing critical instruments for change. I shall be discussing developmental psychology, and in particular Piagetian developmental psychology. My intention is not to confirm or reinstate its role but rather to focus on what are in fact pervasive debates about the status and function of postmodernism.
... Although families and family values have changed, sociologists overwhelmingly assume the modern nuclear family to be dominant (Vanevery, 1999) and even ''postmodern'' sociologists maintain essentially ''modern'' assumptions about family structure, for example envisaging family situations predominantly in heterosexual terms (Burman, 1992) While modern family ideology emphasizes the importance of ''doing things together'' the postmodern world increasingly emphasizes individual expression and self-identity, and this causes considerable stress within the family (Munro & Madigan, 1999). Conflict between the private lives and public ideology of families is also noted by Baudrillard (1998, p.100) ''The family is dissolving? ...
... The implication, that families operated a modern framework within a postmodern world, is consistent with the idea that there is strain between ideal family life and the outside world. Although they approach the resolution of that strain in different ways, this assumption underlies the thinking of all of the authors cited in the family context in this article (Burman, 1992;Elkind, 1994;Munro & Madigan, 1999;Nickerson & Black, 2000;Stewart, 1999;Vanevery, 1999). ...
Qualitative data were gathered from 35 families visiting the Legoland tourist attraction in Billund, Denmark. Analysis employed a framework based upon established "push" and "pull" factors for tourism and leisure, but also took into account sociological changes in family structure and process. It was found that parents did not respond to Legoland as tourists might be expected to do, and that children mainly experienced the attraction as an isolated leisure opportunity. All of the families interviewed were essentially "modern" and "nuclear" in outlook, although there was some evidence of postmodern attitudes and stresses. Relatively few single parent families, and no phenomena comparable with "Disneyland dads" were encountered, implying that Legoland preferentially attracts families of a certain type and outlook. The findings are discussed in terms of the light they throw on families' experience of tourism and for their implications for developing and marketing attractions of this kind.
... In this volume, British psychologist Valerie Walkerdine (1998), drawing on the work of Michel Foucault (1979), interrogated "the very lynchpin of developmental psychology, the 'developing child,'" identifying it as "an object premised on the location of certain capacities within 'the child' and therefore within the domain of psychology" (148). In the years that followed, the work of Walkerdine (1984Walkerdine ( , 1987Walkerdine ( , 1993 as well as fellow British psychologist Erica Burman (1991Burman ( , 1992Burman ( , 1993Burman ( , 1994aBurman ( , 1994bBurman ( , 1996 was crucial in bringing attention to the social constructedness of both "the child" and the notion of development. Their work and others ' (i.e. ...
In this introductory chapter Julie C. Garlen and Neil T. Ramjewan challenge the dominant Western ideal of childhood innocence by examining its historical and socio-cultural construction. The authors argue that childhood innocence, often seen as a universal right, is a myth rooted in colonial, racial, and developmentalist discourses that perpetuate inequality. The chapter critiques how innocence has been used to marginalize Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other non-white children, who are often excluded from this ideal. It also explores the intersection of innocence with scientific, educational, and legal systems that have historically oppressed marginalized groups. By questioning the concept of innocence and its implications, the authors advocate for a more inclusive and critical approach to understanding childhood that acknowledges diverse experiences, identities, and intellectual histories. The chapter sets the stage for the broader collection, which seeks to decolonize and dismantle the limiting narratives surrounding childhood and to explore marginalized and intersectional perspectives on children's agency and subjectivity.
... These discussions complicate, diversify and enrich the traditional picture of family life and how families spend time together, where time has become a popular sociological concept to investigate in relation to families in recent years (May & Dawson, 2018). These unrelenting and rapid changes in our societies have led to the existence of families containing both 'modern' and 'postmodern' values which often exist side by side (Burman, 1992) creating a very different understanding of family than what was once understood to be a nuclear family (Murdock, 1949) of two parents and their children during the 1950s-1980s. Elkind (1994, p. 1) summarises this change: "The modern nuclear family, often portrayed as a refuge and retreat from a demanding world, is fast disappearing. ...
Our study contributes to the current research on tourism and quality-of-life (QOL) by investigating Memorable Event Experiences (MEE), as a primary resource for familial bonding and memory creation. A mixed methods approach (focus groups and questionnaires) is used to explore the QOL indicators of: physical well-being, psychological/emotional well-being and relationships with family within the context of localised event experiences. Findings from this study are transferable across all aspects of the tourism system, they demonstrate that experiencing an event together as a family can facilitate collective memory creation, familial bonding, and create thick sociality or ‘we-relationships’ and can therefore enhance a family’s QOL in the long term.
... 'The whole child' of post-World War Two welfare and educational reforms has turned 'lifespan', as we are exhorted to become flexible, incomplete subjects committed to 'lifelong learning'. Indeed the 'postmodern condition' has long been associated with a subjectivity endowed with child-like qualities-of play, spontaneity and irrationality (Burman, 1992(Burman, , 1998b: 'Today's cosmopolitan self is constructivist, active, entrepreneurial, and works for the self's capacity and potentialities through a perpetual intervention in one's life' (Popekwitz & Bloch, 2001, p. 109). ...
The paper addresses contemporary relations between emotions, gender and feminist action research. Starting from analysis of the increasing emotionalisation of everyday life, it explores the quasi‐feminist—or what the author calls ‘feminised’—forms of incitement to reflexive confession that are increasingly gaining favour within professional and higher educational contexts and draws on literatures and sets of debates that inform education action research, including: childhood and governmentality; feminist research; and international development critiques. The author proposes that reflexivity as an educational and research practice has come to stand in for, and thereby limits, the contemporary focus on ‘participation’ to reduce its radical collaborative and action agenda and instead incite researchers to work on ourselves, and only on ourselves. The paper warns against underestimating the speed and flexibility by which neo‐liberalism absorbs and co‐opts creative strategies—such as reflexivity—for its subversion, and returns them to old‐style individualism.
In this chapter, I use Foucauldian theory to consider and critique the role of technologies of power, surveillance and governmentality within mathematics education research. I argue this deconstruction is pertinent within our current neoliberal, market-driven education system, as both schools and universities are involved in overt and covert methods of governing. Moreover, this era is predicated on the fiction of the free, autonomous self, and discourses of “becoming”. I examine this argument through the deconstruction of a key taken-for-granted truth of mathematics education research within the UK and other Western contexts, such as the USA and Australia—that it is heavily and uncritically invested in progress, progressive pedagogies and the “free” autonomous subject. I argue that this position relies on a “natural” mathematical child, who is posited as asocial, acultural and apolitical, where the focus is on what is to come, not what is already. Instead I suggest that mathematics education, and the mathematical child, are not natural but instead are social, cultural and political products. The natural, developmental, “free”, child is (re)produced through both overt and covert surveillance, and monitoring from both schools and universities.
This chapter explores questions of the subjectivities elaborated within accounts of postmodernity by juxtaposing readings of two theorists of contemporary politics and philosophy, Lyotard and Benjamin, who explicitly invoke and address childhood in their analyses. While Benjamin analyses the cultural and political strategies of modernity in his (1929–33) radio broadcasts for children, Lyotard1 claims to explain the postmodern condition to children. I will explore areas of convergence as well as difference that give rise to correspondingly different politics, and politics of childhood. While both accounts threaten to indulge in a romanticization which reinstitutes a model of the subject as abstracted from cultural-political contexts, this abstraction is also used to invoke the possibility of a subversive political imaginary. These familiar rhetorical devices therefore maintain a theme of the child as quintessential or idealized subject within postmodern as much as modern accounts — albeit for contrasting analytical purposes.
The impact of post-structuralist ideas in psychology has brought issues of relativism and multiple meanings to the fore. However, there is a tension between science and subjectivity, between formulating a general and generalizable account and attending to particularity. In this paper I explore how these issues are played out in developmental psychological research. I argue that attending to the power relations that are conferred by structural research practices and subject positions set up within discourse can not only highlight previously unacknowledged diversity of meaning, but also close off total interpretive relativism. Dominant discourses structuring developmental psychology work to occlude the indeterminacy of meaning, in the sense that developmental research practices fail to reflect ambiguities of interpretation. But on the other hand, rather than celebrating the plurality of meanings, we should be aware that acknowledging power relations disambiguates, or fixes, otherwise mutually co-existent interpretations. In terms of developing a critical theory of research practice and analysis, this permits discussion of notions of discursive position and strategy without lapsing either into voluntarism or mechanism.
In this article, I use a Foucauldian poststructural analysis to examine productions of progress within key discursive spaces of mathematics education. These sites of production are educational policy, mathematics education research and case studies of primary school student-teachers in England. From my analysis, I show how progress governs what is possible in the classroom, as they become constructed around a measurable, linear temporality assumed in educational policy. This encourages comparison to and pursuit of the “normal” mathematical child, which in educational policy is produced as a functional automaton, whilst for much of mathematics education research is produced as the cognitive “natural” child. These over sanitised constructions result in confusion for student-teachers who struggle to take these impossible discourses on board.
The postmodern impulse within the modern discipline of psychology is analysed in this article in relation to the ways in which discourse and qualitative research is accounted for within student practical reports. I take these to exemplify key themes within the discipline that function to ward off the potential challenges of relativism and multiplicity offered by postmodern ideas. I discuss the arena of ‘methods’ as a central pedagogic structure for the filtering of knowledge and the erasing of subjectivity in psychology. After identifying key areas of both continuity and critique between postmodern ideas and psychology, I go on to analyse student accounts of the achievements and limitations of discourse and qualitative research which, alternatively, they claim improve upon, or fail to meet the standards of, psychological rigour and discovery. I argue that these highlight strategies of either incorporation or rejection of the critical potential of, in particular, discourse analysis. By such means ‘the crisis’ in modern social psychology becomes part of the continuing narrative of the discipline that can be identified, researched and ‘found’, rather than the story of the impossibility of its project and the desirability of its demise.
New images of masculinity in Robert Bly's Iron John (1990/1991) are explored using versions of discourse analysis and psychoanalytic theory. Different discursively constructed forms of masculinity also reproduce forms of psychoanalytic knowledge (in this case Reichian and Habermasian forms), and the task of the analysis is to demonstrate how that knowledge is structured. The 'Wild Man' is the eruption into the body politic of a new version of psychoanalytic subjectivity. The analysis focuses on the meeting-point between discourses which supply surfaces of emergence for different models of the individual and experiential dynamics which are organized into different subjective configurations in and against language. This meeting-point is analytically decomposed into a series of 'discursive complexes'. Discursive complexes are both systems of statements (discourses) and psychoanalytic themes. This type of analysis is concerned in general with the workings of ideology, and in this particular case with authoritarianism. The ideological context is explored (through complexes of distortion, separation and castration) in order to understand the ways in which the social shapes and meanings of masculine authority are being transformed and reproduced.
Increasingly, contemporary health literature has begun to explore the potential of postmodern approaches to enable new and different analyses of health care practice. Paradoxically, as the use of postmodern approaches has increased, so has the lack of clarity with respect to what constitutes a postmodern approach. Challenges to postmodern approaches to research have come from those who argue that they contribute nothing to either the understanding of the reality of health care or the improvement of the delivery of health care services. This article will explore what postmodern research approaches are and use examples of research to illustrate how such approaches can inform understandings of health and health care practice, thereby opening up possibilities for change. It is designed to encourage people with an interest in postmodern approaches to undertake research that has clear applicability to, and influence on, health care practice.
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