Tom Popkewitz

My studies are concerned with the political and cultural politics of education knowledge and its comparative reason. These studies view schooling and research as practices creating kinds of people (e.g., the citizen, the learner, the child left behind) that distribute differences (the achievement gap) to exclude and abject. Recent studies focus on the impracticality of practical research for enacting its social commitments; examining historically current curriculum, teacher education, and international assessments as generating phantasmagrams that affectively differentiate potentialities about societies and people. My current research centers on the political sociology of scientific knowledge in international student performance assessments; the post-World War II mobilizations of social and education sciences; and teacher education. The research includes historical, ethnographic, and comparative studies in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and the United States.

I have written or edited approximately 40 books and over 300 journal articles and book chapters, with translations into17 languages. I have been awarded six honorary doctorates from European universities; received American Educational Research Association fellowships; and been named a Laureate of Kappa Delta Pi, among other honors. 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. My research includes national and comparative studies of teacher education and curriculum reforms in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Courses Taught: Reform and Change in Curriculum and Instruction (C&I 716), Paradigms of Educational Research and Evaluation (C&I 714), Methods & Post-Modernism, Post-Foundationalism, Post-Colonialism and the New Materialism (C&I 916), and Internationalizing of Educational Knowledge (C&I 366 & 727).