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Introduction

Derrida contends in his Letter to a Japanese Friend that ‘deconstruction is not a method’ (1988, 3). It is not a set of rules that can be instrumentally applied, neither is it an act or an operation. Instead, ‘deconstruction takes place’ (p. 4). In other words, things self-deconstruct or are opened up to deconstruction when they are read carefully. This contention presents an immediate challenge in the writing of this chapter when my designated purpose is to ‘apply’ theory in a research setting for an audience of educational researchers and advanced prac- titioners. Whilst expressing my apologies to Jacques Derrida and his followers as I write this chapter, at the same time, I note the need to interpret and engage with thinking about deconstruction in ways that allow for its dissemination, given the opportunities it accords for thinking differently about educational and curriculum matters. In order to pursue my purpose, I have divided the chapter into three sections. In the fi rst section I provide my interpretation of deconstruction together with a brief account of the work of researchers who are concerned about ‘applying’ Derrida in education. As a link into the curriculum project itself, I explain the relevance of Derrida’s ideas to the curriculum problem under study. The focus in section two is the school-based research project and how Derrida’s ideas were engaged in the development, teaching and evaluation of a curriculum unit for a class of students aged 12 to 13 in a state comprehensive school in the north of England. The project was not without its challenges and high points and these are recounted in the third section of the chapter.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts of any kind in such a way as to demonstrate the three tenets of Derrida’s work: fi rst, that meanings of words are insecure and never fully under our control; second, that the metaphysics of presence implies the existence of an underpinning unity of knowledge that needs to be disrupted to expose its internal illogicalities as well as the source of its authorisation; and third, that deconstruction opens up a space for justice – a

space in which the other (something new, productive and unforeseeable) emerges. The fi rst tenet (the insecurity of word meanings) rests on two ideas: différance and deferral. Derrida argues against the proposal that the relationship between a word (sign or signifi er) and its meaning (signifi ed) is determined, concrete and stable. He proposes that an inscription or mark does not represent a thing or image, as if refl ected in a mirror. Instead, the relationship between a word and its meaning is more diffuse and active, what he describes as ‘the regulated play of differences’ and ‘the instituted trace’ he calls différance (Derrida 1976, 62). The implication of this argument for the reading of texts suggests that word meanings escape accurate defi nition and conceptualisation because word meanings arise from differences to other words, allowing semantic slippage or deferral to occur, whereby meanings become parts of ever-emerging chains of signifi cation:

It is because of différance that the movement of signifi cation is possible only if each so-called ‘present’ element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modifi ed present.

(Derrida 1972, 13) Exceeding the metaphysics of presence, the second tenet in Derrida’s way of thinking suggests that the unity of knowledge seemingly underpinning arguments, concepts and frameworks of thinking is an illusion and needs to be prodded and questioned to expose its cracks and crevices, to expose who authorised it and why. A deconstructive reading achieves this, fi rst, by considering what the author intends or means to say, and, second, by considering what is going on in terms of language and meaning behind the author’s back. The former requires the reader to engage in critical depth with the author’s ideas, background, context, pre- suppositions and purpose. This fi rst re-productive reading provides access to the author’s intended meaning within which an initial interpretation can occur. But a second, productive reading that exceeds the author’s framework and parameters is required next: ‘The possibility must be kept alive of reading otherwise, which means passing through the classical discipline, and never having abandoned or jettisoned it, to explore what it omits, forgets, excludes, expels, marginalises, dismisses, ignores, scorns, slights, takes too lightly, waves off, is just not serious enough about!’ (Caputo 1997, 79). The latter approach opens onto a generative reading, a reading that transgresses the metaphysics of presence and looks through other frameworks, other parameters, other differential plays of the trace. Such a reading is described as providing exteriority because it goes beyond the assumed authority of the text and opens up the text to other ways of thinking that were not encountered during the fi rst re-productive reading.

The third tenet, that ‘deconstruction is justice’ (Derrida 1992, 15) is problem- atical in the light of the denial of self-present meaning as argued above. According to Derrida justice here serves as an enframing concept, in need of deconstructive attention. Allowing justice to self-deconstruct will reveal it as beyond defi nition. Nevertheless, although justice remains ‘an experience of the impossible’ (p. 15), it should never be neglected. It is an unquestionable ‘responsibility without limits’ (p. 19) in the sense of opening up a space for a more just and democratic future than the experience of the present. The responsibility for justice rests on the act of bringing fresh eyes to a problem, on drawing on a unique and respon- sible interpretation of the problem in order to reinstitute and reinvent what was and what could be (democratie à venir). In the context of this study, the relation between justice and the curriculum is located in the questioning of the performa- tive school culture and of traditional versions of curriculum knowledge about a place, leading to an openness towards other ways of knowing.

The aporia of ‘Derrida applied’

I return briefl y to the quandary expressed at the start of this chapter. If deconstruction is not a method or a tool that can be applied (Derrida 1997, 9; Brannington et al. 1996, xix), then, as educators we are faced with a dilemma when we wish to think about deconstruction in pursuit of ethical practice in the school classroom. We are confronted with an impossible situation: an aporia. The aporia, according to Derrida, is ‘the impossible or the impractical’ (1993, 13), ‘the non-passage’ (p. 12). When paralysed, immobilised by our confrontation with the aporia, we look around for another way, a space for the other, something Derrida describes as the arrivant. In other words, to recap: deconstruc- tion occurs whether we wish it to or not. It is automatic, non-applicable. It is not a programme that can be applied. Our role in education, is, then, to follow an-other way, in showing, disclosing, witnessing the event by revealing how the impossible is always and already the possible. Bennington describes our role as showing ‘metaphysics in deconstruction’ and in so doing, opening up a space for ‘repeating metaphysics differently’ (2000, 11). Our showing as teachers is an ethical experience because we are responsible for the future of the others in our care (Edgoose 2001, 131). It involves us in the disruption of the metaphysics of presence underpinning the knowledge and culture of our classroom practices that exclude the other (Biesta 2009a, 109; Blake et al. 1998, 38–39). It involves a responsibility for the engagement and engrossment of our students in their studies, a concern for and commitment to undecidability where fresh and free decisions can emerge and an openness to the arrival of the unforeseeable other, what Caputo describes as ‘inventionalism’ (1997, 42; see also Biesta 2009b, 395). Egéa-Kuehne draws attention to the affi rmation of otherness and alterity available when educators disrupt the safety and comfort of assumedly well-established, transparent, neutral knowledge and the illusion of cultural homogeneity by facilitating the bringing out for students that which is

overlooked: controversy, multiple voices, risk-taking, difference and the unknown (1996, 160; 2001, 203).

Addressing the fi rst aporia encountered in the project and opening a space for ‘repeating metaphysics differently’ (Bennington 2000) requires some back- ground information. The school subject of geography for 11 to 14 year olds (known as Key Stage 3 (KS3) in England) experienced a tough time during the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century. The current geography curriculum bears a legacy from the fi rst Geography National Curriculum of 1991 of out-dated subject knowledge (Rawling 2001). A steep decline in school-based curriculum development, a reliance on non-specialist teachers and on textbook teaching in some schools did not aid its recovery. In addition, the severing of links between university and school geography cut off access to the input of fresh and innova- tive thinking. Competition with other school subjects and the arrival of skills- based competency curricula in early 2000, in which Humanities subjects such as geography, history and religious education were ‘integrated’, did little to enhance the status of the discrete subject. In 2005, Ofsted stated ‘in many schools geog- raphy lacks rigour and fails to motivate young people’ (pp. 8–9). In 2008, the same organisation reported school geography as ‘boring’ and ‘lacking relevance’, ‘heavy in content’ and ‘driven by textbooks’ (para. 49, 23). Given this situation, any self-respecting geography educator who, believing that the word geo-graphy (meaning ‘writing the earth’) carries responsibilities to investigate and improve the means available to students and teachers of writing/righting the earth, is motivated to act. I argued in 2009 (Winter 2009) that the concepts underpin- ning the knowledge and language used in school geography curriculum policy traps meaning in certain ways that prevent other ways of knowing from emerg- ing. Armchair theorising like this has its place, but some form of showing, dis- closing, witnessing this argument inside the geography classroom was called for and took effect in the form of a commitment to attempt to revitalise school geographical knowledge through the development and teaching of a new KS3 curriculum unit for a class of youngsters.