Positivism

I thought I would use this blog entry to complete some ideas that I feel I articulated very poory toward the end of EN 800 this morning.

In response to the Schrag article, and also to Ben, Frances, and Anna's comments, I did a very poor job of trying to summarize the epistemology of an entire (strange) field of research, a field I spent the spring semester of this year studying. I was trying to say that I think the field Teacher Research (also know as Practitioner Inquiry or Action Research) has some very interesting and specific answers to the notion of positivism and its place in educational research. But it's a hard field to summarize.

In the class (Advanced Classroom Research ED 678 at Boston College), nearly all of us struggled with the very idea that Frances brought up in response to my claim that Schrag's ideas negated the notion of localism in education. Frances, I believe, was pointing out that even if you attemtp to creat knowledge locally, you still need to be sure enough about what you've found out so that you feel confident in applying it to broader contexts; that even if you only apply it locally, you need to have a certain amount of ... well... certainty that any given technique will work. (Hope I did that justice.) That was the very stance that I and my entire class held as we read through mountains of material on teacher research (TR).

At one point in the semester, the professor (Marylin Cochran-Smith) said that she wanted to make the bold claim that if you want to find generalizility and certainty (in an experimental sense) and you were not going to find it in this field. Our reaction, I believe, was similar to what Ben said about the idea that if you can't ever know for sure that you're doing the best thing-- that that's bad. We wanted to find a way to MAKE some of this research more generalizable, more certain, (essentially, more positivistic).

About 2/3 of the way through the class, I started to see what Cochran-Smith was really saying: those notions were positivist epistemologies. The belief that you need those qualities in order to know something-- that is ONE theory of knowledge; there are others. As I continued to read the works of Patricia Carini and Cochran-Smith & Lytle, among others, I realized that I was becoming more satisfied with the process of what they were doing and where they were ending, that I was less resistant to 'research' that ended without concrete conclusions or predictions or prescriptions, research the was much more narrative and descriptive. This is still hard to articulate.

While at CCCCs, I attended the two prestentations on TR, and this helped me a lot. I needed to write up a response paper for the class, and so I wanted to throw my hat in the ring. At the end of the first presentation, I raised my had and asked the four-person panel about the issue of generalizability. Did their research have implications outside of the context in which it was conducted? Was that a concern of theirs? They had some great answers, and they helped me shed some of the positivistic thinking that I was having trouble getting around.

One presenter by the name of Fishman suggested, "We want insight, not proof." Holy shit. I never thought of it like that. I was so concerned with this idea of proof-- a concern that I think our entire culture is addicted to-- that I was blinded to the idea that I KNOW to be true, that insight is a powerful thing-- I would argue, more powerful than concrete, empirical evidence-- and that it is not always arrived at through experiments and proof. (Please forgive the passivity of that sentence.) That really struck me. Another presenter, and my memory is just not helping me with her name, suggested that the real knowledge they found came, as it always does, from the details, not from the generalized patterns. Boom. I thought about what I'm always telling my writing students-- that an argument is made persuasive by the use of specific details, almost never by generalized statements. I knew this, and I wondered why it was so hard to apply this to life, not just papers.


I think that session, and the reflective papers that I wrote about it, did a lot to help peel away the layers of positivism from my perspective, helped me to see that P is indeed *a* perspective, not the only singular way that knowledge is created. There are those who would argue against everything I've said here. Schrag is probably one of them.

Anyway, to get back to class today, I was trying to be brief and retort to what my classmates were saying, and again, I think I did a bad job. I was trying to say that there is indeed a field of very interesting research out there that does not feel the need to generalize its finding to bigger populations; it is a truly pragmatic epistemology. It's a field concerned with the knowledge generated by the teacher in the site of practice (as an insider), a field that seeks to empower local knowledge and the ways in which education is really about individuals, not patterns of generic behavior. It's a pretty amazing field, but one that is very hard to enter conceptually. I think it literally took me about two months and tons of reading to begin to see what the point was. I'm still not sure I'm doing it justice, but I hope that anyone still reading can at least see more clearly the points that I was trying to articulate eariler today in class.

Let's get some pizza,

-Josh