Comic: Products and Practitioners: how a visibility of developmental processes aids in practitioner formation

The one-page comic below was created as a quick reference for faculty and students at Olin College, where learners can see the development of both products and processes in the domain they are learning in (whether that’s engineering, education, or something else).

The text after the comic is also in the Scribd document description and functions as an accessible image description of the one-page comic.

Products and Processes: how a visibility of developmental processes aids in practitioner formation by Mel Chua on Scribd

Another theory comic: image description follows. (Heavily influenced by Community of Practice, Situated Cognition, and Cognitive Apprenticeship theories.)

Text at the top of the page: When learners are engaged in an authentic, situated, & communal practice context, they see the development of two kinds of things over and over again in their environment:

Title text: Products & Practitioners (of their practice).

The middle of the page is divided into two columns. The left column is under the portion of the title that says “Products,” and shows three people getting clay from a big lump labeled “raw materials.” Below that, the same three people are shown starting to form pots from the clay; one person drops their pot and cries “oh, no!” Below that, the same three people are shown continuing to work on their pots; the middle person is now saying “oh, cool!” as they piece the pottery shards back together, and one of the other potters looks at them and thinks “I see how you adapted that!” Below that are drawings of the three final pots, all different; one is a squat, short pot with squiggly decorations, another is the broken pot pieced artistically back together, and the third is a tall vase made out of coils. All together, the left column shows the development process of a variety of pottery “products” from start to finish.

The right column is under the portion of the title that says “practitioners.” At the top is a group of three small children labeled “novices,” in the middle is a group of three teens labeled “juniors,” and at the bottom is a group of three adults labeled “masters.” The novices are making small simple pots; one cries out “my first pot!” while raising their fist in excitement. One teen is looking at the excited small child and thinking “I remember that time.” Another teen is being gazed at by a small child thinking “someday, I’m going to do that,” and is in turn looking at an adult practitioner and thinking the same thing. One of the teens has made a mistake on their pot; an adult is watching them and saying “I remember that time.” All together, the right column shows the developmental spectrum of potters from novice to master, with younger practitioners looking towards the older ones in anticipation of what they will do, and older ones looking back at the younger ones in remembrance of where they once were.

Below these two images is text that reads: one thing seeing these developmental cycles constantly reinforces is the sheer diversity of ways to engage with the profession/practice and the world. Each product and practitioner is fashioned from a different mold. The question becomes not “how do I fit the norm,” but rather…

“What might I make?” and “Who might I become?” (in a thought bubble coming from a person at the bottom center, head cradled thoughtfully in hands, with a variety of ceramic pieces surrounding them at either side)

At the bottom of the page is the copyright/authorship notice: Copyright 2016 CC-BY-SA Mel Chua.

Comic: 7 Techniques Adapted From Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory

The one-page comic below was created as a quick reference for faculty and students at Olin College, where students and faculty frequently have spontaneous, complex learning interactions in seemingly chaotic studio/project environments. Cognitive apprenticeship theory provides one of many ways to make sense of the sorts of implicitly taught and culturally engrained deep teaching and learning skills that might otherwise be lost in overwhelming chaos.


7 Techniques Adapted From Cognitive Apprenticeship: “Making Thinking Visible” in spontaneous, complex learn… by Mel Chua on Scribd

Header: Cognitive Apprenticeship – 7 techniques for making thinking visible (studio version)

This comic is a one-page visual description of 5 Cognitive Apprenticeship techniques developed in the 80′s by Collins, Brown, Newman, and Duguid, plus two additions adapted by the author for adult learners (denoted with an *).

The techniques are:


  • scaffolding (faculty directs attention — a faculty member frames part of a complex problem, asking a student to “please focus your work here first”)
  • bounding* (student directs attention — a student frames part of a complex problem, asking a faculty member to “please focus your feedback here first”)
  • modeling (faculty does, faculty explains — a faculty member works with a complex problem, explaining what “I am trying to…” do)
  • coaching (student does, faculty explains — a student works with a complex problem while a faculty member coaches them on what “you might try to…” do)
  • narrating* (faculty does, student explains — a faculty member works with a complex problem while a student explains what they think “you are trying to…” do)
  • articulating (student does, student explains — a student works with a complex problem, explaining what “I am trying to…” do)
  • reflecting (comparing faculty/expert practice with student/novice practice)


These seven techniques are displayed in a thought bubble being pondered by a cartoon character who has lifted off the top of their head, pointing to the gears turning inside; this is a metaphor for “making thinking visible.”

Beside that character are two ways the 7 techniques can be used:

  • used to describe spontaneous, complex learning interactions (a faculty and student interacting over a complex problem, their illegible speech bubbles overwritten by a label saying “what is happening here? Bounding.”) A note at the bottom says that the technique “switches rapidly every 1-2 sentences.”
  • used to request spontaneous, complex learning interactions (a faculty and student interacting over a complex problem; the student says “could you please Model this for me?” and the faculty replies “sure!”)

The text at bottom left (cut off by the scan): *denotes new code adapted for adult learners. Comic CC-BY-SA Mel Chua 2016.

Oral deaf audio MacGyver: identifying speakers



  1. There are five houses.
  2. The Englishman lives in the red house.
  3. The Spaniard owns the dog.
  4. Coffee is drunk in the green house.
  5. The Ukrainian drinks tea.












  1. Slow sounds, many pauses, not a soprano




Starter back and shoulder workouts

For accountability and later amusement purposes, here are my current strength workouts. Right now I’m cycling between back workout days, shoulder workout days, and rest days. 


  1. Alternating jog/sprints for 5 min.
  2. Foam roll quads (vastus lateralis/side, and front)

Bodyweight circuit: 3 rounds of…

  1. Jump squats, 30 sec (exhale on jump, watch left ankle)
  2. Hollow body hold, 30 sec
  3. Plank to down dog, 1×12 (exhale on the transition to down dog)
  4. Plyo high-knee skips, 30 sec
  5. Flutter kicks, 30 sec
  6. Side planks, 30 sec per side
  7. Side lunge to balance, 10 per side (not alternating; the leg stretched out is the one that goes up)
  8. Transverse toe touches, 10 per side

Back workout:

Always do a warmup set with the empty bar or a light weight before beginning. When two weights are listed, start with the higher weight and progress incrementally down to the lower weight when form starts to fail. Alternating movmeents need both sides to complete before a rep is counted.

  1. Deadlift 105lb / one-arm bent-over row (not alternating), 30-25lb, 3×10
  2. Cable lat pulldown 27.5lb-20lb / alternating transverse crunches, 3×10

Shoulder workout:

Note: my shoulder mobility and muscle awareness is currently kind of crap, and they’re imbalanced and funky in interesting ways, so pay close attention to core engagement and movement awareness/quality and muscle engagement here.

  1. Clean hang press 50lb / bench leg extensions, 3×10-12
  2. Shoulder press 20-15lb / inverse pike on incline bench, 3×10
  3. Superset 3×10 (do all three back to back before resting and repeating) of:
    1. Upright rows 7-5lb (start with dumbell handles horizontal, keep dumbells together, peel shoulders back and keep them down)
    2. Alternating lateral raises (keep shoulders back and down; bend knees and tighten core)
    3. Standing flys (start with dumbell handles vertical, keep elbows in)


This post could be written by a lot of people who belong to a lot of groups. This post has been written by a lot of people who belong to a lot of groups, and you should find and read those things too. This just happens to be the post that I can write, about a group that I belong to also.















Postmodernism for engineers: the (draft) collection

I’m having some pretty big affective-intellectual anxiety right now around (re)writing the theoretical chapter of my dissertation, which tries to explain postmodernism to an engineering audience. Which is a big scary translation, in my eyes — I feel like I’m a postmodernism novice who’s blindly babbling about this (not true, but… impostor syndrome!)
So I split it into short essays targeted at specific topics. It was supposed to be around 10 pages; it’s actually around 25. (Oops. Turns out I know more about this than I thought.) If you’re (1) a technical-ish person interested in seeing whether my explanations of postmodern concepts work for you, or (2) someone familiar with what postmodernism is (at a really basic level) and would tell me if you think I’m translating the ideas accurately, I would LOVE writing feedback.
You can read and comment on individual sections in the posts listed below, or read the full version on Google Docs (and comment there)  – feel free to comment! Edits will be made to this version, so don’t be surprised if it is slightly different (and hopefully better) than the blog post sectionings listed below. Thanks to Mark Hoemmen, Suzanne Loughry Nellis, Julia Thompson, and Todd Fernandez for some awesome feedback thus far.
The blog posts in this series include:
  1. What’s postmodernism (and how do I explain it to engineers)?
  2. Okay, fine, you can’t define postmodernism, so I’ll provide a history of how it came to be. (Followed immediately by section 2.5, or: by the way, a postmodernist reading of the historical I just provided basically demands that I go “but that narrative isn’t a single clear explanation either!”
  3. Comparison with other (probably more familiar) paradigms, including positivism aka “this is probably what you think science is.”
  4. Parts 4-6 present some key ideas in postmodern thought, and how they relate to ideas familiar to engineers. The first one is power and agency (otherwise known as commit access)
  5. Then there’s truth and meaning… (otherwise known as design reviews)
  6. …and finally slicing and separations (otherwise known as black-boxing)
  7. Bringing it home: postmodernism as a language to describe aspects of engineering practice
  8. Finally, looking at educational studies as a place where the “postmodern turn” has already happened, and what engineering might learn from that.

Ignore my (horrible and inconsistent) citation practices. And yes, there are obvious “I wanted to keep writing so I stuck NOTES IN ALL CAPS HERE and moved on” markers. Look, I’m just… trying to… get this out, ok? It’s taken me… a couple years, and I finally wrote all this in about 2 days.

Postmodernism: paradigmatic comparison

I’m just going to keep posting these until they are all done. I’ve lost the ability to write useful annotations at the start. See previous posts, or something.

Since I am presenting postmodernism here as a qualitative research paradigm to be incorporated into engineering education practice, I will compare it to the philosophies and practices already present in the field as they appear in several qualitative research paradigms previously discussed within it. Glesne’s introductory book on qualitative research defines a paradigm as “a framework or philosophy of science that makes assumptions about the nature of reality and truth, the kinds of questions to explore, and how to go about doing so” (2011, p. 5). These assumptions affect our research, as “research approaches inherently reflect our beliefs about the world we live in and want to live in” (Lather, 1991, p. 5). Becker (2001) describes qualitative research fields as being protective and self-preservational about their own boundaries, as human communities are wont to do. After all, one needs a way to distinguish who and what belongs within a group and who and what does not, and how to determine which things within the field’s accepted boundaries are “best.” Paradigms provide a way to legitimize and privilege work that shares a field’s assumptions about the nature of reality and knowledge.

Koro-Ljungberg and Douglas’s JEE meta-review of qualitative research in engineering education synthesizes four perspectives (2008, p. 165) that align with the paradigmatic breakdowns given by Glesne in her research methodology textbook (2011, p. 7) and Lather’s now-classic paper on postmodern research “paradigm talk” (2006, p. 38-40). In the table below, if paradigm names vary between sources, I use the first names listed by Koro-Ljungberg and Douglas, with selected alternate names given in parentheses afterwards in the extended explanations. Following the table, I discuss each paradigm more extensively in turn.

Table 1: Qualitative paradigms in engineering education research





View of reality

Single objective reality, objective and falsifiable

Multiple subjective, constructed realities

Multiple subjective political realities constructed on the basis of power

Multiple, fragmented, unknowable

View of truth

Truth is one

Truth is many

Truth is many and constitutes a system of socio-political power

Contains the signs of its own contradiction

Purpose of research

Prediction, cause and effect

Describe and understand

Emancipate, socio-political critique

Deconstruct “grand narratives”

Methods of research

Defined in advance, hypothesis driven, ex: experimental or quasi-experimental, causal comparative

Preliminarily defined in advance, emergently adjusted during the study, ex: grounded theory, ethnography

Designed to capture inequities, ex: participatory action, critical discourse analysis

Generated during the study, “theory as methodology,” ex: deconstruction, geneaology, rhizoanalysis

Role of researcher




various changing roles

Outcome of research

Context-free generalization

Situated description

Critical essays, policy changes

Re-conceptualized descriptions

Positivism (postpositivism, logical empiricism) is the paradigm used by mainstream scientific research, according to Popper’s (1959) definition of science as the usage of empirical falsification. The positivist paradigm assumes a pre-existing and objectively knowable reality (Lather, 2006). Consequently, using a postmodern paradigm, inquiries as to the truthful nature of this reality can be conducted by formulating and testing falsifiable hypotheses via experimental procedures defined in advance of their execution. Knowledge produced by this style of research builds linearly upon itself until researchers know how the world works (Glesne, 2011), or in the case of postpositivism, until they approach as close as possible. The purpose of research is to determine cause and effect (Koro-Ljungberg & Douglas, 2008) and predict future results (Glesne, 2011) since experiments for testing falsifiable hypotheses should be repeatable. Researchers are therefore interchangeable components who serve as neutral, detached observers. Furthermore, research outcomes are expected to be generalizable across contexts (Koro-Ljungberg & Douglas, 2008); under such a paradigm, transferable knowledge is privileged.

Lather (2006) playfully compares positivism to classical ballet, with its rule-driven precision. Since engineering training includes a great deal of science background, the positivist paradigms are commonplace among engineers. Indeed, they are so commonplace that sometimes they are assumed to be te only paradigms available. Such assumptions can cause conceptual difficulties for engineering researchers transitioning towards education research and suddenly encountering the existence of other paradigms of research (Borrego, 2007).

Interpretivism (constructivism, phenomenology) is a research paradigm frequently used in the social sciences such as anthropology and sociology. From an interpretivist point of view, reality is subjective and constructed (Lather, 2006) and therefore leads to multiple truths. The focus turns away from prediction of an absolute reality and towards understanding of a co-constructed one (Glesne, 2011), with researchers and participants acting as partners in creating that understanding. The result is often thick description, situated in a contextually-dependent environment (Koro-Ljungberg & Douglas, 2008); it is no longer required to be generalizable and transferable in order to count as valid knowledge.

Many methodologies and theories fall under the umbrella of interpretivism, including constructivism, constructionism, phenomenology, ethnography, grounded theory, and narrative analysis, to name a few. Lather’s analogy for interpretivism is a community picnic, with its dynamics of humanistic cooperation amongst parties (2006). Qualitative research projects in engineering education often employ an interpretivist paradigm, for example when examining case studies and stories from underrepresented groups or describing the engineering cultures of indigenous groups.

The critical approach shares interpretivism’s assumptions about the social construction of reality, then adds an emphasis on the sociopolitical power relations of those constructs (Lather, 2006). These power structures create oppression; therefore, the goal of research is to liberate (Glesne, 2011). By capturing and proclaiming inequities and injustices, researchers and participants become activists who can affect policy change (Koro-Ljungberg & Douglas, 2008) Projects employing critical paradigms are also often associated with a focus on marginalized groups (Lather, 2006). Within engineering education research, a good deal of work using the critical paradigm focuses on aspects of diversity: gender, race, sexuality, disability, etc., and the power dynamics that lead to under-representation from particular demographics within the engineering field. Feminist theory, critical theory, and critical discourse analysis are examples of theories that might be employed within this paradigm (Glesne, 2011).

The critical perspective “springs from an assumption that we live amid a world of pain, that much can be done to alleviate that pain, and that theory has a crucial role to play in that process” (Marc Poster, Critical Theory and Postructuralism: In search of a context. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1989, p. 3). Consequently, projects within the critical paradigm move beyond understanding to demand action. Their research outputs move beyond disseminating knowlege to an academic elite and often frequently aim towards positive impacts on the research participants and their communities. This might take the form of political initiatives, the design and manufacture of products, performance art, or other action-oriented approaches.

Finally, postmodernism (deconstruction, poststructural, postcolonial, and the other “posts”) both draws from and works against each of the other perspectives. Like positivists, postmodernists acknowledge the utility of prediction and control, but question how they are pursued and the ends to which they are used, and whether such pursuits, dependent on the assumption of an impossible level of objectivity, can ever ultimately be successful. Like interpretivists, postmodernists acknowledge the social construction of reality and the unique positionality contributed by researchers and participants; unlike many interpretivists, postmodernists do not seek a convergence, stabilization, or taxonomical ordering of this constructed understanding. Like critical inquiry, postmodern inquiry is concerned with power, but “instead of having the critical theorists’ goal of eliminating the oppressive acts of society, postmodernists seek to delineate the multivocal relations of power that exist in order to understand differences” (Tierney and Bensimon, 1996, p. 15).

As previous sections of this chapter have described, the postmodernist emphasis is on play and disruption of assumptions made within a variety of paradigms. Instead of settling within one paradigm, postmodernism proliferates paradigms. In a sense, a postmodern paradigm creates, uses, and attempts to shift between multiple paradigms; in the case of this project, the primary shift is between interpretivist and postmodernist paradigms. Shifts between paradigms disrupt existing ways of thinking and dominance relationships, and provide opportunities for Lather’s (2006) analogy of the postmodernist paradigm is of a carnival; there is no single reference point, and reality is ultimately unknowable and self-contradictory. Inasmuch as it can be said to have a particular goal, postmodern projects aim towards reconceptualizations of phenomena (Koro-Ljungberg & Douglas, 2008), or to borrow a title from one of Lather’s (2008) papers, to work with, within, and against the world so that it may “appear other to itself anew.”


Drawing on the idea I brought forth in the previous section, that postmodernism can provide a theoretical language for describing some aspects of engineering and engineering education practice, a logical next question might be: what might it look like for that to happen? To conceptualize what a “postmodern turn” might look like in engineering education, I turn to a place where it has already occurred. Specifically, I look at the collection of disciplines termed “educational studies,” where the “postmodern turn” in educational research has matured over roughly the past 25 years.















Postmodernism: a troubling of the historical narrative I just provided for postmodernism

The narrative I have just told about postmodernist history in relation to modernist and premodernist thought is, as all narratives are, a partial and extremely cleaned-up telling of a much messier reality. I told it as a narrative of three separate philosophical paradigms that occurred in chronological order and with causal relationships. However, I can simultaneously say that everything happened everywhere and all at once. As one simple example, postmodern thought appeared during what I have described as premodern times, as in the earlier example of using the Tao Te Ching to illustrate postmodernism. Further, as I will discuss shortly, modernist (and premodernist) views of the world are prominent in contemporary US engineering culture and its emphasis on optimization and improvement.

These inevitable oversimplifications in explanation are inescapable; they are a feature of language itself. Lather points out that “language is delineation, a strategic limitation of possible meanings. It frames; it brings into focus by that that which goes unremarked” (Lather, 1991, p. xix). The narrative I have just provided about postmodernism is one possible narrative among many, and it is one that provides traction towards engaging with this project on postmodern terms rather than more modernist philosophical assumptions that might otherwise be brought to bear by default. For instance, it is important to not simply conceptualize postmodernism as “a better and more recent form of modernism,” because the emphasis on constant improvements over time comes from a modernist rather than a postmodernist perspective.

This insight — that postmodernism was not “more optimized modernism” — was one that I personally struggled with in my early encounters with postmodernism as a student previously trained in the high-context expectations of engineering. After dutifully writing down postmodernist thought as a neat historical progression (similar to the one I wrote above), I realized that the portrayal itself was misaligned with the philosophy — that such a neat history was a hypocritical and modernist/structuralist portrayal of postmodernism, and that I didn’t know how to escape it. “Even the name ‘postmodernism’ suggests a progression from modernism,” I blogged in a frantic attempt to reconcile my knowledge into a single self-consistent system (Chua, 2013). When I took my complaints to Dr. Lather, she nodded. “Yes,” she replied. “Sit in the paradox, Mel” (Lather, 2013). Postmodern thinking is full of an intentional search and embrace of tension and paradox, much like the tradition of Zen koans; the intent is to shake readers out of their habitual ways of thinking, being, and making-sense.

A practice of tension and paradox means that postmodernism can never stand alone as a “pure” form of thought and an “untainted” philosophy that is separate from modernism. After all, a postmodernist perspective would interrogate the ideas of “purity” and “untaintedness” by saying such a thing is actually impossible, and that this impossibility is perhaps not even problematic. Postmodernism is not a clean break from the past; it is is a troubling and questioning and playful interrogation of it. It is not a rejection of meaning, but a practice that plays with the concept of meaning as never factual or final (Gergen, 1991).

One implication of this is that viewing engineering and engineering education as sites for postmodern paradigms and practices also means simultaneously seeing them as sites for non-postmodern paradigms and practices. Engineering is not “postmodern,” nor is it “non-postmodern” — it is both of these, and more, at the same time. The intent is not to have postmodern ideas in engineering replace the non-postmodern ones, as if doing so were an unequivocal upgrade — again, such a move would be antithetical to the postmodern perspective. Instead, postmodernism entangles with engineering education and encourages it to tinker with itself to see what happens.

Any postmodern practice must exist alongside other perspectives and practices, since the practice of critique is impossible without something to critique, and the practice of destabilization is impossible without structure to destabilize. As Jackson and Mazzei say in their preface to “Thinking with Theory,” “a recognition of the limits of our received practices does not mean that we reject such practices; instead, we work the limits (and limitations) of such practices” (2012, p. ix). Postmodernism simultaneously works with, within, and against other paradigms for thinking and being. The next section will explore the sorts of received philosophies and practices within engineering education qualitative research that a postmodern perspective could work with, within, and against.

Postmodernism: a (reluctant) historical progression

Postmodernism may be impossible to define, but this does not provide an excuse for avoiding attempts to articulate or understand it further. The postmodern refusal of clear definitions makes it tricky to talk about what the word “postmodernism” “means,” since a postmodernist treatment of “meaning” denies a singular meaning that can be found in absolute or stable form. However, a postmodernist treatment of meaning does acknowledge that meaning exists, and that it can be constructed, found, and played with by looking at the relationships of the thing (“sign”) at hand (the one you’re investigating the meaning of) and other things. Therefore, in this section, I will position postmodernism relative to other viewpoints that might be historically familiar to engineering readers, with the intent of providing more material with which readers and I can employ to make sense of the concept.

As its name implies, postmodernism is a movement which grew in response to modernism. It is therefore instructive to look at the philosophical paradigms of premodernism and modernism in order to see postmodernism’s relationship relative to both. The image below provides an overview: premodernism viewed reality as static and predetermined, modernism brought with it an emphasis on continuous progress in the name of human liberation, and postmodernism questioned modernism’s relentless pursuit of that notion of “progress” while inquiring what, exactly, “progress” might mean. (Note to blog readers: the images below are from an earlier blog post and I would love ideas on how to do a decent text description of this for screenreaders and so forth, or whether such a description is redundant with the explanation below.)




Prior to the 19th century, premodern (or sometimes “romantic”) viewpoints were widespread across Westernized societies such as the US; such a viewpoint viewed the world as ordered by divine and governmental authority, and a human’s role within that world to be pre-ordained by the circumstances of their birth. In other words, if your parents were farmers, you would probably be a farmer, because that was the will of God; one’s identity was fixed.

Modernism came of age during the time of the Industrial Revolution, revolting against the notion of a fixed identity. The importance of the individual and the “sovereign self” that could determine its own destiny was reflected in narratives about self-starting bootstrappers who pursued “The American Dream” and went from rags to riches. This notion of identity developed in parallel with the rapid development of technologies that made the average 19th and 20th century American’s life dramatically different from their parents, and the narrative of constant economic, technological, and social progress. With modernist thinking, the stock market would always go up in the long term; transistor density (and thus computing power) would always become smaller and cheaper (Moore’s law), and humankind was on an inevitable trajectory towards upwards and measurable progress.

Simulaneously, in the biological sciences, Darwin’s theory of evolution also provided a narrative of ongoing progress that was literally encoded into the nature of humans and the world around them (Darwin, 1859). Scientific quests for knowledge and betterment, and a belief in progress and perfectability became highlights of a modernist way of thinking. Also associated with modernism and its philosophy of science was structuralism, a movement associated with linguistics which emphasized the search for underlying structure and facts and presupposed the existence of such structures and absolute facts. (Ward, 1996, p. 86-104).

The “postmodern turn” pushed back against modernist assumptions with the challenge that there are no facts, only interpretations. Whereas modernist and structuralist thought emphasized the finding of intrinsic meaning and truth and the categorization and increasingly fine-grained naming of things in order to further optimize society’s understanding and evolution, postmodernism questioned its incessant gaze towards those goals. Whereas modernism and structuralism enshrine the primacy of individual choice and upwards progress, postmodernism questions these assumptions. What does “better” mean, and who gets to decide it? What are the boundaries of an individual, and why is it so important to separate people into stable units of analysis? A modernist pursuit on measurable progress requires trackable units of measurement (students with grades, countries with GDP, etc.) whereas a postmodern query asks: why do we use these particular methods of measuring and meting out?

Postmodernism is a response to the modernist emphasis on unrelenting “progress” towards a “better” world that interrogates the assumptions and power structures behind those terms and asks how they might be otherwise. Correspondingly, the postmodern inquirer’s work is not towards the increasingly “better” articulation of knowledge and truth which they are attempting ot teach their audience. “The postmodern text is evocative as opposed to didactic; extended argument is displaced… [in favor of] pastiche, montage, collage, bricolage, and the deliberate conglomerizing of purposes [that] characterize postmodern art and architectural styles” (Lather, 1991, p. 10). By questioning the very concept of a single, infinitely extendable “better” and the promise of certainty that the grand, sweeping narrative of continuous improvement and the search for truth and meaning offers, postmodernism exemplifies an “incredulity towards metanarratives,” or totalizing narratives that exclude the search for other explanations (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv). The postmodern movement, or “turn,” is deeply steeped in such refusals to settle, opting instead for the constant motion of “keeping meaning at play” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012, p. 70-71).

For a further discussion of the historical relationships between premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism, a reasonable starting progression might be to consult Tierney (1993) for a brief and self-admittedly oversimplified historical retrospective, Lyotard’s classic “The Postmodern Condition” (1984) for one of the seminal first attempts by a postmodernist to explain postmodernism to the world, or “The Postmodern Turn” (Best, 1997) for one comprehensive historical look at the postmodern movement across disciplines alongside Cavallaro’s “Critical and Cultural Theory: Thematic Variations” (2001) which provides a brief, encyclopedic-style introduction to relatively up-to-date discussions of key concepts in postmodern thought.