Return-Path: <nifl-fobasics@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id h3EDCcU04171; Mon, 14 Apr 2003 09:12:38 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 09:12:38 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <20030414.090717.6398.0.sophocles5@juno.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-fobasics@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-fobasics@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-fobasics@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "George E. Demetrion" <sophocles5@juno.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-fobasics@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-FOBASICS:699] Scientific-based Research X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Mailer: Juno 1.49 Status: O Content-Length: 7948 Lines: 156 Research/Theory/Inquiry Note # 1 George Demetrion Practitioner/Scholar sophocles5@juno.com As part of a research project on the politics of adult literacy education in the United States, I am focusing now on Research Traditions. I'm looking first at the concept of scientific-based educational research, a topic that may be of interest to some list members. Some of the issues that I want to get at are: * What are its core concepts? * What are its strengths? * In what ways can this literature contribute to the emerging field of adult literacy studies? * What are its limitations? * What is (or may be) marginalized. ignored, or silenced when scientific-based educational research becomes incorporated into law as the only legitimate basis to ground educational studies? * To what extent is a synthesis (or at least a working framework) among diverse scholarly traditions viable in relationship to adult literacy? * Where does the intellectual home of adult literacy studies resides, within the "harder" science of cognitive psychology or the "softer" realm of the interdisciplinary field of the cultural studies. * Assuming both/and rather than either/or, which scholarly traditions, to ground this emerging field, gain more or less legitimacy--by whom, why, with what consequences? * What relationships are there between these issues of scholarship and the politics of adult literacy education? * How should literacy be defined and what is its relationship to reading and writing? BTW, I use the term "scholarship" over "science" as a desire to gain critical distance over the operative assumptions of the latter as articulated in the current educational literature. The key document is the National Academy Press's Scientific Research in Education (2002), edited by Richard J. Shalvson and Lisa Towne. It can be accessed at (http://books.nap.edu/books/0309082919/html/R1.html). This post concentrates on the opening page of the Executive Summary, which begins with the following: "No one would think of getting to the Moon or of wiping out a disease without research. Likewise, one cannot expect reform efforts in education to have significant effects without research-based knowledge to guide them" (p. 1). Questions: 1. From a rhetorical or discourse perspective, what are the implications of linking the socio-cultural field of education with the highly technical task of getting to the Moon? 2. How will "research-based knowledge" be defined in the document? How does it compare to other ways of knowing--the question plays off the text by Belenky et al (1986), " Women's Way of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind." The broader question draws on the work of French philosopher Michael Foucault's (1972) text, The Archeology of Knowledge, which probes into the issue of how knowledge is constructed within the context of culture. In the opening of their document, Shalveston and Towne note the following: : "There is a long-standing debate among scholars, policy makers, and others about the nature and value of scientific research in education and the extent to which it has produced the kind of cumulative knowledge expected of scientific endeavors. More recently, this skepticism led to proposed legislation that defines what constitutes rigorous scientific methods for conducting educational research" (p. 1) Several questions/issues stand out for me from this quote: 1) Does this long-standing debate--the debate over the relationship between the intellectual traditions of positivism and its modern derivative post-positivism (See Donna C. Mertens (1997), "Research Methods in Education and Psychology," Sage Publisher for a discussion of the relationship of this school of research), and other 20th century scholarly/research traditions, have a bearing on the nature of adult literacy studies? Merten discusses the "Interpretive/Constructivist Paradigm and the Emancipatory Paradigm as based on other sets of precepts than that which grounds the Positivist/Postpositivist Paradigm. These three schools subsume a great deal of 20th century scholarship of research and inquiry. Related scholarly/ research traditions have been based on the intellectual schools of pragmatism, phenomenology and existentialism, structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural anthropology (which may be viewed as both a science and an art), social philosophy, and postmodernism. For the latter school, I refer to the important monograph edited by Alan Sica (1998) What is Social Theory? The Philosophical Debates. Blackwell Publishers. The first essay, by Robert J. Antonio, Mapping Postmodern Social Theory (pp. 22-75) should not be missed by those interested in exploring relationships between knowledge construction and culture. As I begin to work through the Shavelston & Towne text, "Scientific Research in Education, among the questions, I'm keeping the following in mind: * What is education? Why is it of value? For whom? How is that decided? * What is literacy? Why is it of value? For whom? How is that decided? * Is scientific-based research equipped to deal with the values issue or is it ruled out of court as not grounded in objective data--implications? * What relationships do the various value questions have in shaping (a) scholarly/ research traditions; (b) pedagogy, (c) practice? * How do these value questions influence that which is learned and what are the methodologies needed to get at such learning? * How conclusive can educational scholarship be and what more informs it--the intellectual traditions of the sciences or the liberal arts? * If it's both/and rather than either/or how are these intellectual traditions mediated in what becomes constructed as legitimate scholarship informing adult literacy studies. * What role should methodology play in adult literacy scholarship and why? * What about the scholarly literature and the field-based studies on adult literacy education that already exist? Does this represent important data that the scientic community should evalute--on what basis? I conclude with two quotes from Alex Kozulin's (1990), "Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas," Harvard University Press. "In some studies...'purity' has taken precedence over theoretical meaningfulness. This could easily lead to methodological fetishism when the direction of research is dictated neither by theory nor by the subject of inquiry, but by the methods that guarantee the reliable reproduction of data" (p. 230). A dialogue based on "different systems of thought....would reveal the object [of study] as 'encircled' by different forms of cognitive representation, no one of which is either final or encompassing. Such a dialogue, however, is impossible as long as the scientific inquiry is taken as the prototype of the logic of human thought. Scientific epistemology...presupposes a continuous progression of thought and the sublation of the achievements of the past [in our case, the given scholarship on adult literacy education] into new, higher forms of theorizing. Such a prototype would not allow for a truly dialogical relationship between different systems, because one of them should necessarily appear as a special case of the more developed one" (p. 270). It should be clear that I don't reject the precepts of scientific-based educational research, but neither do I view them as representing privileged discourse upon which the field of adult literacy education is, or should be, based. The fact that its precepts are viewed as privileged discourse is a worthy topic, itself, of the contemporary politics of literacy, which I seek to address. . As always, there's more to say about this important topic of discourses which shape legitimacy in the realm of adult literacy scholarship. Perhaps this topic would be a worthy discussion here, where serious perspectives from divergent point of view can be explored.
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