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PURPOSE
“Educational foundations” and “curriculum foundations” were, from the 1930s up until the mid 1980s, generally understood as the convergence of 4-5 disciplines applied to the study of education. Cultural and social foundations underlying education (including curriculum and pedagogy) as studied through anthropological, comparative, economic, historical, phenomenological, philosophical, political, psychological and sociological inquiry constituted the field. Journals like Educational Foundations, Educational Theory and Interchange articulated these disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses. As critical, feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural studies began to erode away some foundations in the 1980s, the field of educational foundations faced a crisis of unity and purpose. This erosion and crisis continue today. “Foundation” as a useful metaphor was questioned in an era of postmodernism, poststructuralism and a deconstruction of “solid truths” and what Lyotard called “grand narratives” or metanarratives. The cultural and social foundations of education and technology more or less collapsed. Hence, the “foundations of educational technology” are never straightforward or stable.
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