160

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Winter 1999

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Winter 1999

161

S~ntbetica{[~ Growing
CONTEMPORARY
CURRICULUM
DISCOURSES
TWENTY YEARS
OF
JCT
EDITED
BY
WILLIAM
F

You will, I think agree with my choice of phrases once you've moved
through this remarkable collection .. . let us celebrate what is truly a collective achievement."

From the editor's introduction, by William F. Pinar

WILLIAM F. PINAR teaches curriculum theory at louisiana State

University, where he serves as the 51. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed
Professor. He is the author of Autobiography, Politics, and Sexuality
(lang, 1994), and senior author of Understanding Curriculum (lang,
1995).

VOLUME

Noel Gough's Curriculum

as a Popular Cultural Text

PIN A R

"This is a celebration and a farewell. Twenty years

have passed since JCT and its conference
appeared on the scene: twenty years of innovative and provocative articles, essays, several
book-length pieces, and many remarkable conference presentations. I have used the term
"reconceptualization" to describe what occurred in
the field during the 1970's, but the term is not
dramatic enough to express the role that JCT and
the Bergamo Conference have played. Perhaps
"intellectual breakthrough" is mare descriptive."

$39.95 JULY 1999

ISBN 0-8204-3882-0
70 IN THE COUNTERPOINTS SERIES

PAPERBACK

a Post-Human Curriculum:
John Weaver
University of Akron

Since the reconceptualist movement began and curriculum theory emerged as

a field, there has been at the very least a common interest in and foreshadowing of
issues we have come to describe as post-structural and postmodern. These movements focus on reconceptualizing the body, exposing the tyranny of reason, and
inventing alternative narratives. Similarly, curriculum theory and the post-structural,
postmodern movements have set off alarm s; warning readers of the modernist path
of systematic stagnation resulting from suffocating methodologies and limited
notions of"legitimate" knowledge that masquerade around intellectual communities
as truth and nature.
One area where the rhizomatic symbiosis between curriculum theory and poststructural, postmodem thought seem to diverge is the role the culture of information
technology has played in shaping the meanings ofeach movement. Whereas Derrida,
Deleuze, Guittari, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard either were predicting the
influence of the culture of information technology on or grapsing its potential for
such important contemporary issues as identity, writing, representation, truth,
science, (grand) narratives, and discourse, curriculum theorists have been virtually
silent. This has been an unfortunate turn of events since information technology has
emerged as a powerful force that provides concrete examples of the contemporary
relevance of post-structural and postmodem thought. As Sherry Turkle (1995) notes:
"In late 1960s and early 1970s .... Thesetheorists ofpoststructuralism andwhatwould
come to be called postmodemism spoke words that addressed the relationship
between mind and body but, ... had little or nothing to do with my own ... more than
twenty years after meeting [these poststructural and postmodern] ideas .... I am
meeting them again in my new life on the [computer] screen. But this time the Gallic
abstractions are more concrete" (15).
Turkle's story of rediscovery is played out a little different in the field of
curriculum theory. There have been articles in.JCTand other curriculum journals on

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Synthetically Growing a Post-Human Curriculum

John Weaver

the culture of infonnation technology and the reconstitution of the body or the
writing process, but to date there has been only one attempt, in my (limited) mind,
to theorize the culture of infonnation technology: Noel Gough's. His attempts have
been both a rediscovery and a recharting of the connection between post-structural
and postmodem thought and infonnation technology as it relates to science
education, popular culture, and cUlTicu lum theory. Gough has been ab Ie to shed the
burden ofthe traditional leftist critique wh ich looks upon the influence of in formation
technology on society with a suspicious dismissal and an unhealthy paranoia that
can be found in the work of early critical theorists such as JUrgen Habennas and
Herbert Marcuse and contemporary new and improved-Marxists like MontyNeil or
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Atthe same time, Gough ' s work is no idle exercise in
the techno-worship of cyberspace. Instead, he (re)makes the future of curriculum
theory and infonnation technology as he critically enters into a dialogue with the
post-human condition and the manifestation of this condition in popular culture
texts. In this dialogue Gough not on ly theorizes the impact ofinfQnnation technology
on our identity, environment, and curriculum but also establishes a post-structural,
postmodern practice in order to understand the impact on students, teachers, and
the world of genetic cloning, cosmetic surgery, prostheses, synthesized drugs,
memory altering devices, bio-hazardous conditions, and post-Fordist economics.
As he peers into the future, Gough does not seek advice from "canonical
treasures" or traditional European intellectuals. Instead, Gough relies upon popular
culture texts such as Science Fiction, films, music, television, and com ics . Gough's
critical but unsuspicious look into the potential of popular culture texts levels
arbitrary hierarchies of knowledge that elevate select forms of knowledge as
universal and transcendent wisdom while labelling other sources as void of meaning.
Gough's vision is an example of what intellectuals can accomplish if we decide to
unpack our own notions of what are wOlthwh ile forms of knowledge and deflate our
own notions of taste.
In this review I will focus onhis seminal work Laboratories in Fiction, but! will
also draw on some of his recent work while drawing from other techno-cultural icons.
1 will also try to flesh out what it means to educate the post-human generations to
come and what thoughts curriculum theorists might want to entertain as the third
Christian millennium rises above the horizon.
In Laboratories in Fiction, Gough presents a curricular vision that is based
partly in realism and partly in SF and other fonns of popular culture. Not surprising
to any readers of JeT, I am sure, Gough reminds us that science curriculums
specifically and school curriculums in general have failed to equip students with any
tools to create and position themselves in the post-structual, postmodern textual
world they confront in every cultural site. Instead of providing students with the
power to create maps to navigate through the postmodern terrain of our postindustrial, post-colonial, post-human, and post-structural worlds, we give them, in
regard to our representation of science in schools, a fiction that fails 10 "resemble the

sites in which most scientists work" in any form . What is constructed in science
curriculums is a characturization of science in which students "follow recipes,
perfonn routine procedures, rehearse technical skills ... [and] demonstrate the reliabilityofselected ('well-accepted') scientific 'laws'" (p. 20). This fiction mirrors more a
traditional Gemsback utopic story found in the 1930s popular monthly SF periodic
Amazing Stories than the "reality" of laboratory life. Science is presented as what
Bruno Latour (1987) calls "Ready Made Science." In this Ready Made (Science)
fiction, the scientist always lives in a world where "data generation systems,
'scientific' knowledge and 'scientific method'" are clearly demarcated and these
dimensions of science are part of a "rational sequence of activities that can be
described in tem1S of the 'scientific method' " (p.16) .
Gough seeks not to displace this fiction with a more "accurate" or "reliable"
picture of what science is and what scientists acutually do in the laboratory. What
he is after is a more realistic fiction. A "Science in the Making" (Latour 1987). It is a
fiction found not in textbooks but in Science Fiction, films, and music . Gough
envisions cUlTiculum theory as a popular culture text where we finally acceptthat "the
science of science fiction is not the same as the fiction that is textbook science but
it may be m ore mean ingfu I, m ore interesting and more cen tra I to th eli ves oflearn'ers"
(p.24). It is a vision even those who have found solace in post-structural, postmodern
thought find problematic and hard to embrace. Gough's vision requires us to draw
distinctions between popular culture and academic culture and recognize the
pedagogical and theoretical value of the former and the fiction ofthe latter.
As you may have gathered, Gough ' s notion offiction is one central tenet of his
thinking about science education and curriculum theory. Through the power and
insights of SF literature and otherfonns of popular culture, we can reclaim the terrain
of fiction as a source of knowledge and collapse the arbitrary, but influential,
boundary that emerged between the (treasured) fact and ( unreliable) fictions during
the Enlightenment. Gough reminds us that both "fact and fiction refer to human
experience, the important difference being that' fiction' is an acti ve fonn ... whereas
'fact' descends from apastparticiple, a part of speech which disquises the generative
act" (p.26) . Science fiction , for Gough, offers an opportunity to expose and critique
the " narrative strategies of scientific writing" and how this writing style creates "an
illusion of neutrality, objectivity and anonymity which constributes to the authority
of the [scientific] text" (p.19).
Atthe same time, Gough asserts, "SF does much more: itgives 'imaginative fonn'
to 'the limits of our own constructed knowledge.' SF also gives imaginative fonn to
what might lie beyond these Iimits, beyond the ' fringes ofouras-yet-unsayable fears
and hopes '" (p.31) . SF with its imaginative force opens vistas to theorize popular
culture, infOlmation technology, and the post-human condition. It presents itself as
a deconstructed and reconstructed terrain upon which postmodem conditions such
as commuications mediated via information technology, cyborg bodies, ecological
crises, multi-national capitalism, and biochem ically enhanced m indsare interpreted

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l64

Synthetically Growillg a Post-Human Curriculum

John Weaver

and constructed. Gough's work presents us with an oPPOliunity to theorize the

future. Our immediate task is to recognize the crossroads at which we find ourselves
and ask which path we would like to construct and then travel: Do we continue to
theorize the popular and the fictional with suspicion as we continue to reside in our
modem ist, disciplinary departments or dowe follow Marleen Barr's advice, "risk ... being
denied tenure for choosing the' wrong' field of study" (1993 , pA), and dare being
labeled undisciplined or unfocused in orderto seek understanding of the postmodem
conditions in fields that post-structuralism has legitimated but universities and
academics often scorn?
Noel Gough has selected his path and he presents us with some key insights if
we decide to choose the "wrong" field to study. For those in curriculum theory
interested in the cultural studies of science, Gough warns us that science is not the
issue at hand but rather how science is presented in school curriculums and
textbooks. Whereas science textbooks "fictionalize science in ways that are likely to
impede leamer's understanding of the meaning of science in our society and
culture ... SF often registers new scientific knowledge (and speculates on its consequences) long before it is recognized by the general public-even longer before it
is registered in textbook science" (p . 33). In other words, SF is an opportunity to bring
science textbooks into the 20th century as we prepare to enter into the third Christian
millennium. SF symbolizes a postmodem curriculum for teachers as it introduces
concepts such as quantum physics, chaos theory, fractal, non-linear mathematics,
and dynamic systems that are traditionally ignored in science textbooks.
Viewing SF as a fictional scientific text comes with some stipulations. SF is not a
better method to unveil "the 'textbook science' itmay illustrate .... Rather, I believe that
SF is a conceptual territory in wh ich we can explore ideas and issues that may be more
important to us ... than those to be found in conventional science textbooks and
classroom practices" (p.2S). The unconditional adm ittance of SF into the classroom is
an invitation to revolutionize our notions ofknowledge and meaning making.ltrequires
curricu lum theorists, teachers, and cultural critics to accept SF, and for that matter other
forms of popular culture, onto the scene of curriculum theory on its own terms without
passingjudgement or greeting with the traditional suspicion that somehow popular
culture texts are inherently flawed and must be rescued by the erudition of trained
cultural critics who in the end have the final and true meaning of any SF text. Ifwe adopt
this approach SF has done nothing to transform our curricular practices and we have
failedto seethe value of SF in the lives and learning experiences ofy oungpeople.Gough
is right when he suggests that such an approach questions "not only the quality ofthe
media but also young people's taste and judgement" and represents a "condescending
and patronising" perspective based not in the hopes, dreams, and fears of young
people today but in the displaced pessimism ofadults (p. 44). In place of condescension
and patronage, Gough offers a cUJTiculum that "engages learners in critical explorations
of science, technology and society" wh ile having "an understand ing of, and empathy
with, their [students] perceptions and values" (p. 50).

SF curriculum as a popular culture text taken as the unconditional acceptance

of anon-traditional fonn of knowledge into the fold of curriculum theory discourses
signals a shift in "understanding the perceptions and values of young people." It
requires us to suspend our suspicions of popular culture and admit that SF is a, and
other fOnTIS of popular culture are, sophisticated formes) of knowledge offering
insights into the state of science, literature, the environment, history, and math while
pennitting speculations ofthe future that are so desperately needed for the literary
imagination of young people and adults. SF is an outlet for the revitalization of our
creative souls that traditional academic and curriculum work has so painstakenly
drained from us and labeled as illegitimate, unreliable, and invalid. SF is a futuristic
opportunity for cUiTiculum theorists to take back the past and present. Through his
work, Noel Gough has demonstrated that a different present can be visionalized and
practiced.
lfGough 's work represents curriculum as a popular culture textthen it isjust as
reasonable to assert that it is also an opportunity to theorize the post-human
condition andtoenvision whatapost-humancurriculum mightentail. ForGough, this
is a logical leap for curriculum theorists since young people oftoday already live in
a post-human world . To make his point, Gough harkens back to popular culture. He
suggests that to understand how young people decide what it means to be a posthuman and what it means to live in a post-human era, science fiction films provide
some insights. "These movies", Gough asselis,

165

...can be interpreted as speCUlative reconceptualizations of what it means to be human

in a world of increasingly intrusive technological manipulations. The popularity of
these movies among teenagers may be a reflection of young people's curiosity about
questions that are signi ficant to them .... In my experience, students who have watched
the Robocop and Terminator movies are far more interested in discussing attitudes
to[wardsJ ... various aspects ofbiotechnology .. .than in considering the scientific or
technical plausibility of the phenomena these film s depict (p. 45).

Young people are seeking answers to issues they will have to deal with in the near
future such as the cloning of humans, synthetically grown skin, genetic coding and
screening, prostheses, organ transplants plus the environmental issues concerning
bio-hazardous materials. In the post-human world everything is contested and
young people often turn to popular culture to make sense out of this reality.
For curriculum theorists to assist young people in theirtrek ofmeaning making,
we have to become less the "defenders ofthe faith" (p . 44) who privilege academic
knowledge and the principles of purity, essentialism, rationality, and reductionism
and more the creator who promotes opportunities for young people to navigate
through the contested terrain of everyday life. To be a creator in a post-human world
is to realize that young people are already cyborg/media creations~half human, half
computer generated image~who use their post-human identity to move about in the
world and to contruct an '''awareness about the world, a complex, hesitating
orientation toward the future'" (p. 44).

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Synthetically Growing a Post-Human Curriculum

John Weaver

The post-human condition is also a symbol ofthe mu lti-national, post-industrial

world. Just as young people understand that they reside in a biotech culture of
implants, prosthesis, designer drugs, and fertility drugs, they realize that multinationals are also a part and producer of the post-human condition. The multinationals who control the flow of information, the access to cutting edge drugs and
surgery, and the creation ofjobs also control the destinies of young people. To have
access to information, cosmetic surgery, and good paying jobs is to define what the
future will be. To be post-human is to be privileged; to be artificially constructed,
neurologically altered, and mechanically enhanced guarantees success.
ForGough, the time is ripe for curriculum theorists to follow the lead offeminist
science fiction writers and critique the post-human condition multi-nationals are
constructing. Through their fictional works, feminist science fiction writers offer a
curricu lum tool kit for survival in a post-human world. Gough writes in regards to the
anthology Angels of Power and Other Reproductive Creations, it

people ... who know the most about how postmodernism feels (as distinct from
how to envision or analyze it) are all under the age of six tee n" ... . Ifwe are to establ ish
mutually rewarding pedagogical relationships with the kinds of young peoplewho,
as many cultural critics assert, "have no sense of history," "live in a world of a
simulacra," and "seethe human form as provisional" ... then weneed to attend closely
to the media through which-and the standpoints from which-we might be able
to achieve shared meanings. (1995, p. 73)

... highlights to sociopolitical dangers inherent in in virlo fertilization, technologically assisted surrogacy, fertility drugs, and "designer children." The collection
raises questions about who really benefits from these technologies: thewomen who
are the SUbjects/objects of the research and technologies or the scientists who
compete within a predominantly Eurocentric, white, male scientific establishment
for international prizes or funding from transnational pharmaceutical corporations
and departments of defense. (p. 52)

Whereas traditional curriculum approaches often revere and deify science and
privilege it not only through the stories told but also in the stories sanctioned as
legitimate, curriculum theorists stand at the edge of time facing an opportunity to
construct a post-human curriculum that permits young people to wrestle their
destinies away from multi-national corporations and to invent their own stories that
will envision a future that is liveable. An opportunity exists to re-invent the stories
ofthe post-human condition so schools may be a place where futures are not sold
and handed-out according to the position one maintains in relation to multi-nationals
and access to information but where futures are constructed and re-constructed;
where information technology dominates but not at the peril of young people; and
where science and academic knowledge is respected but not atthe price of degrading
and humiliating other forms of knowledge including those forms ofknowledge such
as science fiction, films, comics, television, and music that young people cherish and
come to rely upon as sources of understanding and meaning.
In his later works Gough (1995), develops further his vision of a post-human
curriculum. In "Manifesting Cyborgs in Curriculum Inquiry," he connects the
posthuman condition with postmodernity, popu lar culture, the experiences of young
people and the intertextuality between the three.
As adults, our fractured postmodernist identities are not constituted by the same

kind of stories as those oftheyoungpeople we teach. As Hayles (1990) writes: "the

167

Gough asks us to not only join in a pedagogical adventure with our students who
live in a post-human, mu Iti-media(ted) age but also look with in at our perceptions and
how we interpretthe stories young people live by and construct reality. For instance,
how do we respond to the Baudrillardian issue of the Simulacra? Do we judge it as
a form of adolescent pessimism and nihilism or can we see it as a manifestation ofa
different cultural form that young people are interacting with in trying to make sense
out oftheir lives and the world around them? Do we see the simulacra as a cognitive
wasteland where nothing new exists as Federic Jameson pessimistically asserts or
can we see the simulacra as a source of creativity and imagination? Do we see the
dominance ofthe simulacra in young people's lives as a form of moral decline and
the relativization of standards and taste or can we see these interpretations of young
people as our own pessimistic displacements of our (apocalyptic) vision ofthe future
that reveals nothing about young people and everything about our own immortality?
These are some of the issues, T think, Gough's post-human curriculum vision
encourages us to reflect upon. Gough's curricular vision is one of post-modem
textuality and self-reflection where images dominate and interpretations of images
are essential but not essentialistic.
Finally, Gough's post-human curricu lum is also aboutthe stories we tell and the
metaphors that guide our thinking. Through the interplay between science education, information technology, popular culture, and our perceptions of popular
culture, we already have seen how the stories we tell influence our thinking in
Laboratories ofFiction. As Gough mentions, we need to make a shift from the "'the
storybook image of science'" (p.13) where science transcends humanity, saves
humanity through its empirical grace, and improves our lives without creating any
environmental and cultural problems to a story that creates an alternative view of
science where science still is a source of know ledge but is on ly one possible source
of mean ing we construct as a part ofthe narratives we tell each other and take as truth.
In "Manifesting Cyborgs in Curriculum Inquiry," Gough (1995) suggests that we
need to expand our story telling one step further. We need to include the post-human
or cyborg into our narratives about science, information technology, popular culture,
and curriculum theory.
The cyborg, for Gough (1995), is both a literary figure that captures a metaphorical shift in our thinking about epistemological and ontological issues but also a
symbol of real developments in our post-industrial world. Metaphorically posthumans "arc cxrl icitly human inventions" (p.75). In the work of Donna Haraway

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Synthetically Growing a Post-Human Curriculum

John Weaver

(1991) for instance, the cyborg is a symbol of radical feminism that transcends
traditional boundaries and lim itations in order to enter into a new era of radical pol itics
where traditional barriers and stereotypes no longer hinder the potential of all human
beings, animals, and machines. The cyborg is the embodiment of a new way of
thinking about the relationship between humans, animals, and machines. For
Katherine Hayles (1991) the cyborg is a metaphorical symbol for a cosmic web or
Zeitgeist that is orchestrating the reconnection of science, literature, and other
academic fields after three centuries of arbitrary separation in which science was
deemed the legitimate heir of truth and literature the illegitimate child of all that was
knowable.
The post-human needs to be incorporated into the stories we tell about real life
developments as well. Whether we judge them as freaks of nature, symbols of a
consumer cu Iture, or representatives ofthe newel ite class in the Western world, posthumans are an important part of our society. As Gough points out, one way or another
Ronald Reagan, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Stephen Hawking are all manifestations of cyborgs in our world today. They transcend nature through the enhancement of mechanical body parts and we worship them as asociety fortheir inteIJigence,
political savy, or appearance. They are truly the blessed of the earth - since they are
the ones with wealth, power, and insurance-and they have inherited (bought) the
earth.
On the importance ofthe stories we construct and the post-humans who inhabit
them, Gough leaves us with this thought and challenge:

Gough, N. (1993). Laboratories in Fiction: Science Education and Popular Media. Geelong,
Australia: Deakin University.
Gough, N. (1995). Manifesting Cyborgs in Curriculum Inquiry . Melbourne Studies in
Education, (36: I), pp.71-83.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : the Reinvention ofNature. New York:
Routledge.
Hay les, K. (1991). Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Latour, B. (1987). Science inAction: How toFollow Scientists and Engineers through Society.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age ofthe Internet. New York: Touchstone
Books.

168

Whether or not cyborgs materialise from our narrative experiments,orremainimmanent in them, the kinds of cyborgs we and our chi Idren are now-and are possibly
becoming-will be shaped by the stories we mutually construct .... Ira curriculum
is to generate hopeful rather than fearful possibilities for the complex hybridisation
of humans with what has previously been regarded as "other," then we need not only
to manifest cyborgs in curriculum inquiry but also proliferate them . (p.80)

Gough's vision challenges us on many fronts. The time is ripe for curricu lum theorists
to take up many ofthe themes he manifests in his writings. Ifwe do, no doubt, we
will move along side the many young people who are trying to make sense of the
present and future. And if we do, no doubt, we will meetup with Noel Gough notthis
time though as an "accidental astronaut" (Gough 1991) but as a popular guide.

References
Barr, M. (1993). Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Chapell-lill,
NC: University of North Carolina.
Gough, N. (1991). "An Accidental Astronaut: Learning with Science Fiction. In G. Willis &
W. Schubert, eds. Reflectionsfrom the Heart of Educational Inquiry: Understanding
Curriculum and Teaching through the Arts, pp. 312-320. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press.