Informally speaking: A continuing dialogue on postformal thinking

As witnesses to the emergence of a postmodern society, educators are faced with the task of developing a classroom and educational system that begins to address the issues and concerns postmodernity invents and highlights. Educators, however, are often philosophically, politically, culturally, or pedagogically estranged from the epistemological assumptions helpful in engaging the postmodern worlds we live in. Instead, educators resist, ignore, or underestimate the powerful forces, such as information technology, identity politics, popular cultures, and antiessentialist and foundational notions of identity and knowledge underlining postmodernity. As a result, educators respond to the shifts in education schizophrenically. At times they cling to old guideposts that permit them to continue the luxury of living the fantasy that school curricula can be predetermined and preordained, students' learning can be measured in a socalled quantified and objective manner, teachers can be evaluated by an assumed universal notion of excellence, administrators can be expected to act as the one true voice of the school, and educational scholars housed in teachers colleges can be relied upon to discover the universal laws of science that govern all school systems. At other times the fantasy is broken as teachers, students, administrators, and academics deconstruct the assumptions behind modernism and wander out into the uncertain, chaotic, complex, and nonlinear world of schooling where curriculum plans emerge, students become active learners, teachers are accepted as practitioners and not tellers at a bank for knowledge, administrators speak and act as one voice among many, and academics rely more on alternative forms of knowledge while never completely abandoning more traditional ways of knowing.