Tom Popkewitz

My studies are concerned with the knowledge or systems of reason that govern patterns of inclusion/exclusion in policy, school practices and research related to pedagogy and teacher education. My research includes historical, ethnographic, and comparative studies of educational reforms and the education sciences in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and the US.

Scholarship: I have written or edited approximately 40 books and over 300 articles in journals and book chapters, translated into 17 languages. Two of my books (Paradigms and Ideology in Educational Research and A Political Sociology of Educational Reform) have won awards for their contribution to educational studies. I have conducted national and comparative studies of teacher education and curriculum reforms in the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, particularly as they relate to questions of social exclusion (e.g., The Myth of Educational Reform, and Struggling for the Soul). I have co-directed a ten-country European Union-funded research project on educational governance and social exclusion (1999-2002), and directed comparative projects in the history and contemporary studies of educational reforms. These studies appear in edited books (e.g., Educational Knowledge; Changing Patterns of Power; Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education; and co-edited Educational restructuring: International perspectives on traveling policies; The Child, the Citizen, and the Promised Land: Comparative Visions in the Development of Schooling in the Long 19th Century). My current research concerns the transnational relation of science, education, and society embodied in the emergence of international student performance assessments, and the changing patterns of governing societies and people in the post-World War Two mobilizations of social and education sciences.

Courses Taught: School Reform (C&I 716), Paradigms Of Educational Research and Evaluation(C&I 714), Globalization and Teaching(C&I 765), and Internationalizing of Educational Knowledge (C&I 366 & 727).