Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with: teaching research in education as a wild profusion

Abstract

This paper situates paradigm talk with its insistence on multiplicities and proliferations in tension with a resurgent positivism and governmental imposition of experimental design as the gold standard in research methods. Using the concept of ‘coloring epistemologies’ as an index of such tensions, the essay argues for proliferation as an ontological and historical claim. What all of this might mean in the teaching of research in education is dealt with in a delineation of five aporias that are fruitful in helping students work against technical thought and method: aporias of objectivity, complicity, difference, interpretation, and legitimization. The essay concludes with a ‘disjunctive affirmation’ of multiple ways of going about educational research in terms of finding our way into a less comfortable social science full of stuck places and difficult philosophical issues of truth, interpretation and responsibility.

Notes

1. Chart 2 was published in Sipe & Constable (1996), and is used with permission. Unpublished student chart 3 is used with the permission of Dafina Stewart.

2. The concept of coloring epistemology did not emerge from nothing. Scheurich and Young make clear their grounding in work by scholars of color. New work or that not included in their references includes Lopez and Parker (2003); Delgado (1998); Dillard (2000, in press); Hermes (1998); Ladson‐Billings (2000); Lopez (2001); Parker et al. (1999); Rains et al. (2000); Villenas (1996). See Pillow (2003) for a useful bibliography.

3. Britzman’s comments were delivered at an American Educational Research Association 1994 panel, ‘But Is It Research?’ organized by Robert Donmoyer.

4. Derrida speaks of deconstruction as not a method but as ‘something which happens’ in Caputo (1997, p. 9). This is the best introduction to deconstruction that I have found.

5. Spivak, for example, refers to ‘the fabrication of ethnic enclaves, affectively bonded subcultures’ as ‘simulacra for survival,’ a recoding of ‘the abstract collective American “We the People.”’ Her particular example is Alice Walker’s Africa ‘which reads like an overlay of South Africa over a vaguely realized Nigeria’ (1999, p. 172).

6. In terms of ‘disciplinary mistakes,’ Spivak is referring to the construction of the ‘native informant’ in anthropology and the practice of ‘telling life stories in the name of history.’ In terms of ‘perhaps we cannot do otherwise,’ she is referring to efforts toward ‘a rewriting of accountable responsibility as narcissism, lower case’ (1999, pp. 249, 251).

7. Foucauldian positivity refers to ‘the codes of language, perception, and practice’ that arise for awhile and make possible a particular understanding of ‘the order of things’ (1970, p. xxi). Positivities are some other to ‘the order of foundations’ (p. 340) that has to do with successor regimes, ontology of continuity and permanent tables of stable differences. In contrast, the order of positivities is an ‘analytic of finitude’ that historicizes discourse formations within ‘an ontology without metaphysics’ (p. 340). For an elaboration, see Lather (2004c).

8. An earlier version of this section was published as Lather (2005).

9. Eisenhart and DeHaan (2005) delineate five areas in the training of educational researchers: (1) diverse epistemological perspectives, (2) diverse methodological strategies, (3) the varied contexts of educational practice, (4) the principles of scientific inquiry, and (5) an interdisciplinary orientation (p. 7). They focus on the last two, claiming that the first three have been recently addressed by others. By this, they seem to mean a blurring of the borders between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences as based on social studies of science, citing sociological studies of laboratory life in high‐energy physics on the ‘hard’ side, and interdisciplinary brain research and pharmacological ‘enhancement’ of learning on the ‘soft’ side.

10. See Spanos (1993, p. 254), for a discussion of ‘problematic’ in the Althusserean sense of how research problems get framed and studied.

11. For critique of dialectics, see ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ in Foucault (1998).

12. Distinctions between scientism and scientificity are key in such arguments. For scientism, see Hayek (1952) and Sorrell (1991). For scientificity, see Foucault (1972). See, also, Lather (in press), chapter 3: ‘Double(d) science, mourning and hauntology: scientism, scientificity and feminist methodology.’

13. See, also, special issues of Qualitative Inquiry on ‘methodological conservativism,’ 10(1) and 10(2), 2004 and Teachers College Record, 107(1), 2005.

14. One example would be Black wealth/white wealth by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro (Routledge, 1995) where interviews surfaced an approach to looking at the weight of inherited resource capital in ways that shifted the statistical analysis.

15. See Tashakkari and Teddlie (2002), and Greene (2001).

16. See Fonow and Cook (2005), for a framing of contemporary issues in feminist methodology, including the need for quantitative work in policy analysis.