Reconsidering ritual in education

Abstract Our focus in this article is on the necessity in teacher education and educational research of revisiting ritual as a guiding, limiting practice in our field. First, we spend time with an etymology of ‘ritual’ to account for the ways in which its linguistic history has shifted, and fixed, a sense of what ritual is and might do. Second, we conduct a necessarily partial survey of ritual in the academic literature for the sake of setting the stakes of the term itself, as well as the ways in which it has been developed over time through research, broadly. We narrow, then, to considering ritual through the lens of two primary sources: educational critique, and Foucault. From there, we consider manifestations of ritual as they come to demand certain forms of avowal from educators and educational researchers, occluding access to other modes of enquiry, different stances, and varied possibilities for truths.