Crafting a Foucauldian Genealogy Method for Analyzing Rationalizations for History Repeating Itself in a Contemporary Curriculum

Introduction
Viewing curriculum as discourse can enable educators to identify how historical markers of discrimination in terms of e.g., race, gender, class, and epistemologies are repeated. Historical markers are archaeologically embedded in the various dimensions of a curriculum and find expression in preferred ways of thinking, speaking, doing, and being. Such historical hypernorms are often maintained by patterns of rationalizations, or technologies of power that reify their taken-for-granted legitimacy as ‘truth regimes’.
Goals and Methods
This phase of the study aimed to critically explore and disclose how the (socio/politico-historically constructed) rules of knowledge-formation in a contemporary occupational therapy curriculum-as-discourse, are reproduced and maintained as truths at a university that historically supported apartheid in South Africa. A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis approach was used to systematically craft a genealogy analysis method from foundational Foucauldian theory. Adjacent, a lens of the ‘dimensions of the curriculum’ was employed: i.e., the formal, the informal, the hidden, and the negated curriculum. These dimensions of curriculum enabled various data sources to be categorized accordingly, e.g., overarching policy documents and minimum standards for education; social events; timetables and prescribed texts; physical teaching spaces; espoused values, and underlying assumptions modelled in pedagogy.
Results
Following the four rules of knowledge-formation that ensued from an archaeology analysis (i.e., ideal type of occupational therapist; who had a say about the profession; preferred reasoning; and future ideations), the contemporary reification of the historical markers was problematized through various technologies of power and self. Examples are selection meritocracy; paternalism in pedagogy; the negation of conservative political postures; and the rationalization of mono-cultural epistemologies.
Conclusions
Consciously dismantling the rationalizing strategies for the continuation of discriminatory patterns of inclusion and exclusion in a curriculum, can open a space for critical dialogue, disruption and reconfiguration of a curriculum-as-discourse towards social justice, and epistemic freedom in (higher) education.