Session Information
Session 3A, Educational Research Methodology: Philosophical Questions
Symposium
Time:
2005-09-08
09:00-10:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Volker Kraft
Contribution
Much current educational research shows the influence of two powerful but potentially pernicious lines of thought. The first, which can be traced at least as far back as Francis Bacon, is the ambition to formulate precise techniques of research, or 'research methods', which can be applied reliably irrespective of the talent of the researcher. He writes for example that 'the entire work of the understanding' is to be 'commenced afresh, and the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step, and the business be done as if by machinery'. The search for a universal method can be traced through Descartes and David Hume to John Stuart Mill. Standard textbooks offer their readers knowledge of research techniques: grounded theory, ethnomethodology, participant observation, interviewing, discourse analysis, and others. There are thoroughly democratic, or certainly egalitarian, implications here. If there do exist research methods that can be acquired relatively straightforwardly by almost any aspiring researcher, irrespective of his or her general intellectual sophistication, quality of judgement and understanding of the subject being researched, then every teacher can be his or her own researcher. This idea is fed by certain versions of the 'reflective practitioner' movement. The second potentially dangerous line of thought is the recognition that in the social sciences we are ourselves the objects of our study. Certainly one of the most fundamental differences between research in the physical or 'hard' sciences and research in the social sciences is that the latter is reflexive, as it is often put. That is to say, because the social sciences deal with humankind the researcher's object of study necessarily includes himself or herself. However in some educational research literature, particularly that influenced by the 'reflective teacher' and action-research paradigms, the proper insistence that the researcher's object of study necessarily includes himself or herself seems to have become the expectation that the researcher (the teacher-as- researcher, or reflective teacher-as-enquirer) should focus or himself or herself. The first line of thought threatens to cut educational research free of the fundamental philosophical and sociological ideas that should govern or at least inform it. The second tends to turn it into an absorption with self, particularly when allied to what its practitioners like to think of as the postmodern turn. Here the thought that reality is essentially constructed, rather than found, or that the 'self' is a matter of multi-layered textuality, leads to an interest in the self and its identity rather than in educational practice as it is more generally understood. There are no simple ways out of this unfortunate state of affairs. However, arguments against solipsism, against particular versions of constructivism, and against facile equations of reality with 'text' can prove powerful and salutary.
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