ABSTRACT
Postmodern Perspectives on Power, Culture and Educational Testing The final pair of chapters in the book set out the challenges of postmodernism to the intellectual and cultural foundations of educational assessment and explore some implications for the way forward. In the opening chapter to this book, Patricia Broadfoot and Andrew Pollard began by talking of ‘the complexities arising from the postmodern challenge to the established thinking and practices of late modernity’. They continue:
This challenge, and reactivity to challenge has given rise to new priorities, new forms of contestation and regulation and new forms of discourse across post industrial nations worldwide…
(Chapter 1)
The challenge to the philosophies and practices of modernity lies in the perception that they have failed to deliver on their promise of economic progress and emancipation through the accumulation of scientific and technical knowledge. Within postmodernist thinking, such ‘grand narratives’ have lost credibility. Throughout industrial and post-industrial societies, science and technology have contributed to rather than solved problems, and scientific knowledge is neither cumulatively coherent nor value-free. Claims for what constitutes knowledge emanate from the experiences, biases and power relations of particular cultural groups, and fail to incorporate culturally and socially diverse experience and perspectives. Thus postmodernism asserts that not only have the grand narratives of social and economic progress failed, but the knowledge that underpins them is delegitimized (Lyotard 1984:37).
