Abstract
This chapter is reprinted from the article with the same title in Educational Researcher 35(2):3–12, (2006). Research in education and the training of education researchers are often said to require attention to epistemological diversity: Researchers ought to be familiar with different ways of knowing and diverse epistemological perspectives. But the notion is unclear. What is “epistemological diversity”? What exactly is epistemological about? Why is it important for education researchers to be knowledgeable about it? In addressing these questions, Siegel argues that the call for epistemological diversity is not, where justified, as radical or significant as it is often taken to be; and that, where it is radical or significant, it is not justified.
Harvey Siegel, Educational Researcher, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 3–12, copyright © 2006 by Educational Researcher (SAGE Publications), reprinted by permission from author and SAGE Publications.
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Notes
- 1.
“Research for Doctoral Students in Education” (Metz, Pallas, Page, and Young) in Educational Researcher, 30(5), June/July 2001.
- 2.
- 3.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that philosophers’ emphasis on knowledge allows them to regard epistemology as a normative domain since it leaves room for consideration not only of what people, in fact, believe but also of what they should believe, of what is worthy of belief.
- 4.
For example, Mary Haywood Metz (2001) identifies “qualitative sociology” and “anthropologically inclined ethnography” as two sorts of qualitative approaches taken in her own department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She mentions “traditional experiments,” “quasi-experiments,” “survey research,” “ethnography,” “history,” “critical theory,” and “postmodernism” as approaches to research treated in the Research Education Program in that department (p. 12).
- 5.
Many philosophers of science take this sort of “technique diversity” to show that there is no such thing as scientific method; there is no one method to follow in pursuing scientific research. Understood as either an algorithmic procedure or a universal technique, there is surely no such thing. My own view is that this is the wrong way to think about scientific method. That method is best understood in terms, not of a unique technique or procedure, but rather of its reflection of a systematic commitment to evidence. For the fuller story, see Siegel (1985). Interestingly, Metz (2001) posits “an underlying research process common to very different kinds of work” (p. 13), and Page (2001) refers to a common “logic of inquiry” consisting of basic “philosophical issues that inform any systematic inquiry” that different methodological approaches address in distinct ways (p. 22). In these ways, both Metz and Page acknowledge a commonality of both purpose and method (not technique) across the wide range of methodologies taught and practiced by researchers in graduate schools of education.
- 6.
- 7.
Much depends on the degree to which group membership is alleged to influence one’s epistemology. All the authors discussed suggest that one seriously influences the other. I offer my own case of within-group variation as a counter-example to any claim of significant influence; I suggest that other groups, e.g., women and people of color, also harbor extensive within-group variation, thus again undermining the claim of significant influence of group membership on epistemology. I intentionally leave “significant” and “serious” vague here.
- 8.
In addition to her using it as an expression equivalent in meaning to “research methodology,” Young (2001) also understands “epistemology” in this broader way when she writes of the call for faculty “to assume responsibility for explicating the assumptions, goals, and epistemologies that undergird their research, their courses, and their initiation of doctoral students into professional life in the field of education” (p. 4).
- 9.
Here Pallas, like Young, equates “epistemology” with something like “research methodology.” That is, both authors use “epistemology” equivocally, using it sometimes to mean “research methodology” (or “research method”) and sometimes to refer to the epistemological assumptions or presuppositions underlying such methodologies.
- 10.
- 11.
That is, that fail to acknowledge cognitive and/or contextual values that they presuppose and that guide their research agendas and trajectories.
- 12.
There is obviously much more to be said about the character of such neutrality than I can say here. As the anonymous reviewers have forcefully reminded me, such “neutrality” is difficult to articulate. For a recent attempt, see Siegel (2004), pp. 750–754; cf. also Siegel (1987, 1997). My thanks to the reviewers, whose criticisms prompted the preceding two paragraphs. I borrow the “local/global” neutrality distinction from my former student Timothy Mosteller (2006), who introduced it in his Ph.D. dissertation, Epistemological Relativism: MacIntyre, Putnam and Rorty (University of Miami 2002).
- 13.
- 14.
This point deserves much more attention than I can give it here. For further discussion, see Siegel (1997, 1999, 2001), and especially 2002, pp. 812–813. One further matter I have yet to address is the moral complexity of the classroom situation, and in particular, the fact that the teacher’s authority makes criticism of students’ “alternative epistemologies” especially tricky. My thanks to Susan Suissa for this important point.
- 15.
For further discussion, see Siegel (1997), esp. Chap. 12.
- 16.
As suggested by a reviewer.
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Siegel, H. (2012). Epistemological Diversity and Education Research: Much Ado About Nothing Much?. In: Ruitenberg, C., Phillips, D. (eds) Education, Culture and Epistemological Diversity. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2066-4_4
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