Pedagogies and Practices in the Modern and Postmodern

There is a paradigmatic shift in how pedagogy is conceived and practiced in contemporary discourses. In this paper, I focus on the discourses that arise out of the fragmentation of the project of modernity. I attempt to make a distinction between modernist and postmodernist educational theory, their languages and vocabulary and their tools of measurement. Furthermore I show that issues related to change, crisis, difference, diversity and fragmentation of identity, and of knowledge and power are important aspects of the emerging conceptualization within pedagogy. I try to describe some pedagogies such as the notion of “border pedagogy” etc. have emerged from critical pedagogues who locate themselves within the postmodern. Pedagogies that give students an opportunity to engage in multiple reference points that constitute different cultural codes. Finally I raise the problems that the radical critique of postmodernism pose for education that is central to post-Enlightenment, emancipatory, liberal humanist project of modernism.