Sun-hong’s online journal

Ethics and Moral Education

Dewey’s approach is very like that of the existentialist Satre, who would also associate moral behavior with personal responsibility. (p.148).

In the 1966 version of Values Clarification, great emphasis was placed on the freedom of choice in values. A later (1975) version wisely emphasized the thinking that must precede a really free choice. Dewey, I think, would have been unhappy with both versions. Consider Figure 8.1. It is clear that the later version moves closer to Dewey in its inclusion of thinking and its insistence on the identification and evaluation of alternatives. Indeed, if carefully implemented in a curricular plan, it might come very close to what Dewey recommended. But the possibilities are lost in a far too formulaic approach to pedagogy. Dialogue is often cut of when a student merely asserts that he or she “really” values something. Dewey himself insisted on a much more complex process. We cannot be content with merely “clarifying” our values – if by that we mean ascertaining that we believe we really hold them. Rather, we must engage in a sophisticated analysis of likely consequences, our competence to produce the desirable ones and to take responsibility for the undesirable ones should they occur, and the means available to us. (p.156)

Justice, for Dewey, is located in consequences, not in procedures that predate deliberation and reflection. Dewey separated himself from the whole social contract tradiction. Indeed, he thought it was quite dead: “The fact that man acts from crudely intelligized emotion and from habit rather than from rational consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and political philosophy.” (p.164).

In contrast, Dewey’s approach can be traced to face-to-face community life. If there is a major difficulty with his approach, it is the fact that important political decisions are no longer made in such communities. Dewey himself recognized this difficulty in the 1920s. When he wrote that the “community” must want for all its children what the best and wisest parents want for their own, he had in mind a social collectivity in which face-to-face communication is possible. In such a community, the conditions noted by Kozol would be visible and open to appeal. Today, minorities and the poor are increasingly isolated in their own geographic communities, and communication breaks down between these isolated units and those in which political decisions are made. (p.169).

If Dewey had lived past the 1960s, he would almost certainly have been a strong advocate for the kind of campaign conducted by Martin Luther King. From Dewey’s perspective, the civil rights movement was a powerful attempt to build community outward, to form the connections required by democratic methods, and to force face-to-face meetings. It would be difficult indeed to face the parents and children of East St.Louis, Camden, and the South Bronx and say in person, “This is all you deserve.” (p.170).

Indeed, when we attach liberalism – from a communitarian perspective or any other – we should keep in mind the observations of Stephen Holmes that David Horowitz recently pointed out:

“Every anti-liberal argument influential today,” as University of Chicago’s Stephen Holmes observes, “was vigorously advanced in the writings of European fascists, “ like Giovanni Gentile and Carl Schmitt, including the critique of “its atomistic individualism, its myth of the presocial individual, its scanting of the organic, its indifference to community….its belief in the primacy of rights, its flight from ‘the political,’ its decision to give abstract procedures and rules priority over substantive values and commitments, and its hypocritical reliance on the sham of judicial neutrality.(p.173)

I quoted John Dewey earlier, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.” What would the best and wisest parents want for their very different children?” (p.174).

It is highly unlikely that Dewey would endorse Adler’s proposal, even though Adler suggests by juxtaposing quotations from Hutchins and Dewey that Dewey might do so. In all of his educational writings, Dewey insisted that the content of study is not nearly so important as the method of inquiry and the level of thought invoked in its pursuit. There is nothing in any subject itself that is inherently “good for the mind.” Mind is entirely a dynamic affair, and “intelligence” should be applied to doing, not to some unseen and stable capacity. (pp.174-175).

One could argue, of course, that the people about whom Appel is concerned, having so little to begin with, really have the least to lose. A system that insists on including them cannot possibly make their situation worse. This is the heart of the dilemma for critical theorists. The critical response has to be that enacting a system purporting to improve social conditions is worse than doing noting if it both fails to change those conditions and, in its failed attempts, justifies the status quo. This is what Apple fears – that in the interests of national competitiveness and the privileged classes, children of the poor will be more rigidly ranked and more firmly stuck in their lower places than ever before.  (p.176)

Feminism, Philosophy, and Education.

Many contemporary feminists have become almost phobic over the word essence. However, even John Dewey allowed its use insofar as it refers to an enduring quality or attribute and not one fixed for all time in an unchangeable nature. (p.181).

Feminist epistemology also intersects with and may modify postmodernism. In agreement with postmodernists, some feminists reject most claims to universality, the traditional notion of objectivity, the search for capital-T truth and certainty, and the creation and use of “grand narratives.” (p.183).

Rather, the rightness of a research method must be judged by both the purposes of the participants (researches and subjects) and its effects. Instead of asking merely how a study holds up against preestablished criteria of adequacy, we ask now whether purposes are shared and whether the results are both useful and acceptable. (p.186).

Moral education from the care perspective has four major components: modeling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation. (p.190).

Richardson (2000) argue the need of ‘scientific’ criteria and suggests some ‘literary’ dimensions. She advocates five criteria: those of substantive contribution; aesthetic merit; reflexivity; impact, and expression of a reality. Supporting the use of poetry and other creative literary forms in ethnographic work, she observes that “increasingly ethnographers desire to write ethnography which is both scientific – in the sense of being true to a world known through the empirical senses – and literary – in the sense of expressing what one has learned through evocative writing techniques and form. More and more ways of representing ethnographic work emerge.” (Richardson, 2000, p.253).

Richard, L (1992). The consequences of poetic representation. In C Ellis & M Flaherty (eds). Investing subjectivity. Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage.

Bochner (2000, 2001) similarly argues the need to bring in more artistry while also attending to ethical dimensions. As he sees it, sociological research can apply canons of methodological rigor as long as the agenda encourages an “ethical, political, and personal sociology that listens to the voices of ill, disabled, and other silenced persons…in order to…empower…engage emotionality….and give sociology a moral and ethical centre.” (2001, p.152). His criteria for

As Laurel Richardson (1990) observed, narrative connects sociology to literature and to history. (p.140)

Why, if its object is to “change the world” (as Marx insisted), should it describe itself in language inaccessible to all but a few? And why does it assume that the material labeled “privileged knowledge” is somehow educationally valuable? Why, that is does it tend to valorize the class of educational elites and suppose that something generous and democratic is accomplished when everyone is given a change to emulate the elite model?

I proposed that ‘narrative inquiry’ as describe by Connelly & Clandinin (1990, 1994) and Conle(1996,1999,2000a) can indeed be a rational enterprise and can be challenged when its activities are considered through the lenses of the attempt by Jurgen Habermas to newly ground rationality in his theory of communicative action (1981a,b). I propose that the communicative rationality that he detects in everday actions can also serve as a rational anchor in narrative inquiry, provided the aim is not strategizing, but mutual understanding. I suggest that challenges to truth claims, sincerity claims, and social appropriateness claims can be issued in narrative inquiry, but will prompt not argumentative, but narrative discourse, when inquirers move to redeem such claims.

(Conle, 2000,p24)

Habermas relies on argumentative exchanges to redeem a claim. Reasons must be given. I suggest that narrative inquirers respond mainly through more narrative, giving narrative reasons. (Conle, 2000,p24)

 When I , in communicating with you, orient myself towards understanding, I assume that we both have the right to challenge one another in three ways: whether the things we tell are true, whether we truthfully express our own feelings, wishes, etc., and whether what we say is socially/morally appropriate. In addition, of course, we can also challenge one another on whether what we say is clear enough to be understood. Without these assumptions, communication breaks down. We need to assume the rationality of the discourse in these four ways, otherwise we need not even attempt to try to understand each other. Such an assumption of rationality, according to Habermas’s theory, is universally warranted and offers a standpoint from which to make judgements and issue critiques. Narrative inquiry, I propose, also falls into this type of communicative action.

 If I can issue these challenges, if I can assume that she make these claims, then we are engaged in a rational enterprise that can be differentiated from fiction, irrational babble, and power games.

 There are many wonderful, masterfully written, literary narrative where linguistic rules and conventional, symbolic expectations have been violated. The narrative inquirer, however, who wants to be part of a social science enterprise that has a rational base does not have this options. (p29)

 It is not clear to me whether educational researcher who use narrative methods relate their inquiry to this dilemma in the philosophical foundations of their work or whether they see it as irrelevant. I believe the legitimacy of narrative methods in the social sciences hinges on the apparent impasse I just pointed out and the suggestion that validity claims are made, and should be made, to safeguard the rationality of narrative inquiry in both research and researcher education. (p30)

Althoug credibility is not an epistemically relevant criterion (Phillips, p.18)

Those must have faced and survived some epistemically relevant test or examination. narratives that need to be true or close to the truth to be accepted and acted on

Must have faced and survived some epistemically relavant test or examination.

If what a narrative inquirer is concerned about is to understand conscious, voluntary, human action, that inquirer must ascertain the beliefs of the actor – that is, the beliefs that the actor truly holds (but they need not be beliefs that are true). (p. 19)

Narrative inquirers would experience that he/she has to wonder what is the good narrative.

Polkinghorne stresses in his preface that “practitioners work with narrative knowledge. They are concerned with people’s stories: they work with case histories and use narrative explanations to understand why the people they work with behave the way they do (Polkinghorne, 1988, p.x).

How do story and narrative different????

Telling it straight : issues in assessing narrative research….by D.C. Phillips.

Richard Rotry’s skepticism about epistemology (Rotry, 1979), and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s postmodernist “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1984). These factors, of course, are not independent; some postmodernist work, for instance, seems to build upon Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Rotry; Rotry seems to have been influenced by Kuhn and Feyerabend as well. Finally, some responsibility must be borne by ethnographers and others who have focused attention on the role of culture in shaping individual behavior: Clifford Geertz and, more recently, Jerome Bruner, are two of many scholars who could be cited here (Geertz, 1973, 1983; Bruner, 1990); it is not that these latter scholars have abandoned objectivity or the search for truth as ideals of inquiry, but rather that many of their readers have misinterpreted them in this way. (See Eeertz, 1973, chap.1. Most commentators focus on his use of the Rylean notion of thick description and overlook the cautions that he gives and his attestation that he is doing science. )

About narrative research validity….

In the educational researcher, Connelly and Clandinin explicitly raise the question: What makes a good narrative? Their answer, in essence, is that we have to go “beyond reliability, validity, and generalizability,” although they pass the buck by stating that the specific criteria are currently “under development in the research community” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p.7). They suggest that a good narrative is one that can be lived vicariously by others: they advodate use of the criteria of adequacy and plausibility, and they cite Spence’s dictum that narrative truth consists of continuity, closure, aesthetic finality, and a sense of conviction (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p.8) In a similar vein, they affirm that “time and place, plot and scene, work together to create the experiential quality of narrative” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p.8).

Bruner states that plausibility is a key notion (Bruner, 1990, p.108)

In an earlier work published in 1986, Bruner also says little on this topic that moves beyond the level of vague generality ; narrative is a “different way of knowing” than science, which prizes “well-formed argument” (Bruner, 1986, p.11), for in narrative, what is valued is not truth but “verisimilitude” (which was a notion that was taken up by later writers). A story, whether allegedly true or alleged fiction, “…..is judged for its goodness as a story by criteria that are of  a different kind from those to judge a logical argument as adequate or correct” (Bruner, 1986, p.12). Good narrative leads to “good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily ‘true’) historical accounts” (Bruner, 1986, p.12).

According to Popper, this is the way science grows. It does not grow by gross accumulation but by a series of focused attempts to shake the various claims put forth. (p.121).

Poper’s insistence that science can only proceed through careful attempts to falsify its own claims has led many scientists and philosophers to regard “falsifiability” as a ccriterion by which scientific and nonscientific claims can be separated. (p.122)

In1962, Thomas Kuhn introduced the notion that science grows through revolutions. Although many critics have pointed out that Kuhn is less than clear in his use of the word paradigm, a Kuhnian paradigm seems to consist of a basic theory, set of concepts, and ways of working that guide a particular branch of science for some interval of time. A paradigm, Kuhn said, gives rise to a coherent tradition of research ; it attracts “an enduring group of adherents,”  and it is “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems” for its workers. While a paradigm holds sway, scientists are engaged in what Kuhn calls “normal science.” (p.124)

This model  often referred to as the “naturalistic” model, but it must be understood that “naturalistic” here has a different sense from the one we used in talking about Dewey’s “naturalistic” philosophy. It refers more simply and directly to the model of the natural sciences. Naturalistic social science, then, is social science modeled on the natural sciences. (p.126).

The methodological battles within the social sciences contributed to a growing feeling within the educational research community that the naturalistic model (the model of the physical sciences) was inadequate for the study of education. (p.127)

Several theorists had suggested that the aims of social science are different from those of naturalistic science. Whereas naturalistic science aims at explanation in terms of prediction and control, social science aims at understanding. When this difference is accepted, it sometimes leads to a contrast that concentrates on the differing concepts of evidence and sometimes to a more general contrast that associates social science with the humanities rather than the science. (p.127).

When Elliot Eisner uses terms like referential adequacy and structural corroboration as substitutes for validity and reliability (standard terms in the naturalistic model), it suggested that one set can be described in terms of its differences from the other. (p.129)

The Philosophy of education by Nodding.

The aim of education, according to Dewey, is more education. (p.27).

p.30

P36.

p.37

p.38

There still were lots of arguments defending idealism against realism (or, more often,, materialism), rationalism against empiricism, and momism against pluralism. (P.43)

Some critics think that traditional philosophers made another error when they added Dewey’s pragmatism to realism and idealism as starting points for education thought. Dewey certainly challenged both realism and idealism, insisting upon starting with human beings as organic wholes acting in a world of which they are a part – neither as separted observers of something external nor as bits of some universal mind stuff. Dewey also challenged the epistemologies of rationalism and empiricism. But when he discussed education, he worked always from objects and events accessible to observation and reflection: the activities of children, the workings of intelligent action, the effects of interest on effort, the development of creative individuality in democratic settings, the observable motivational factors underlying imitation. Indeed, Dewey thought that the systematic positions connoted by the adjectives realist, idealist, and pragmatist got in the way of clear thinking about practical affairs. In his major works on education, he rarely used such terms, and when he did, it was usually to reveal the errors of such use. Dewey was neither a traditional nor an analytic philosopher. (p.44)

It reminds us that teaching is a relation, one to which both teacher and student contribute. (p.50)

It is worthing pointing out here that there are existential thems in Socrates and in Dewey. For Dewey also, there is no fixed human nature. We participate in our own creation, But Dewey gives greater emphasis to the role of environment in shaping us. For Dewey, freedom is not a basic condition that is either recognized in anguish or denied in cowardice. Rather, it is an achievement, one that is attained primarily through adequate information and thorough reflection. Where Dewey and Satre part company is in Dewey’s faith that scientific method will ensure progress. Sartre would not argue against the clear thinking that Dewey espoused, but he would counsel against assuming that human beings will continue to use this method or that the method itself guarantees progress. (p.63)

Buber wanted us to start instead with the “reality of mutual relation.”(p.65)

Why, if its object is to “change the world” should it describe itself in language inaccessible to all but a few? And why does it assume that the material labeled “privileged knowledge” is somehow educationally valuable? (p.70)

Discussion of competence theories and their current epistemological status would take us far beyond the scope of our present purposes. What we need to ask here is this: Even if, especially if, logic describes the natural workings of a competent mind, is that a reason for teaching its explicit rules? (p.82)

Indecipherable…(p.87)

Not only can we not tell which argument is “best” by some logical or conceptual standards: neither can we assume that a bit of thinking is morally acceptable simply because it is adequate “critically.” (p.93)

For Dewey, all statements or beliefs that guide inquiry are to be regarded as knowledge. Not all such statements will survive the tests of inquiry, but those that do we may call “true.” (Dewey preferred to say of such statements that they have “warranted assertability.”) We will return to Dewey’s views and also consider others that reject the notion of fixed and absolute truth in a bit, but for the moment I draw it to your attention for contrast. (p103)

Why not, they argue, concentrate on observable behavior and its products? Why insist on nonobservable structures of mind like those associated with Piaget’s sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages? (p.108)

Piaget’s epistemology is one form of constructivism – a position enormously popular in education today. Piaget himself traced his constructivist roots to Immanuel Kant, who, Piaget said, first emphasized the interaction of cognitive mechanisms with the world in constructing knowledge. Kant’s position was a rejection of two important earlier positions – the innate ideas characteristic of rationalism and a form of passive reception of sensory material from the external world characteristic of early empiricism. (p.108).

Feminists, too, have launched strong critiques of traditional epistemology. Some, working from the perspective of critical theory, argue that women and other oppressed groups are in a privilege position with respect to their own oppression. Feminist “standpoint epistemologists” claim that knowledge of women’s condition constructed from the stand-point of women has an authenticity that so-called objective knowledge can never achieve. These theorists reject claims to universal knowledge and objectivity and argue that since bias itself is unavoidable, the only way to avoidd pernicious bias is to include the views of all interested parties in our accounts and arguments. In all matters involving oppressed groups, the views of the oppressed groups themselves have special weight. (p.110)

Many critical theorists, feminists, postmodernists, and naturalists would prefer to give up epistemology completely and engage in hermeneutics. From this perspective we can continue the search for meaning, employ local truth, and claim local knowledge, but we reject the basis project of epistemology. (p.111)

Do Dewey and Piaget differ on important matters? Both are thoroughgoing interactionists; both place knowers and the known in one world of potential experience. But Piaget, in keeping with his Kantian roots, posited cognitive structures that describe mental activity in each stage of development, whereas Dewey preferred to work with visible behaviors, spoken intentions, and observable consequences. Also, Piaget was interested primarily in development, not education. Dewey was so thoroughly concerned with education that he placed the philosophy of education at the center of all philosophy. (p.118-p.119)

Chapter 1. Situating narrative inquiry  

The four turns are a change in the relationship between the researcher and the researched; a move from the use of number toward the use of words as data ; a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific; and a widening inacceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing. (p.1)  

There are many philosophical treatments of the word “experience,” from Aristotle’s dualistic metaphysics in which knowledge of particulars and universals were considered separately, to early empiricist atomistic conceptions of experience, Marxist conceptions of experience distorted by ideology, behaviorist notions of stimulus and response, and poststructuralist assertions that state our experience is the product of discursive practices.  

However, the view of experience that serves as “the cornerstone” of our analysis has its root in John Dewey’s (1938) pragmatic philosophy. By doing this we “work toward clarifying differences and affinities narrative inquiry has with other areas of scholarship” with an intent. (p.2)  

To this day, most academic work is nonnarrative, and in many disciplines the most prominent theories, methods, and practitioners continue to do work that is based on quantitative data and positivist assumptions about cause, effect, and proof. (p.3)  

Turns: the attention to relationships among participants, the move to words as data, the focus on the particular, and the recognition of blurred genres of knowing. (p.3)  

I will provide not complex definitions of any of these traditions but instead highlight the relationships and distinctions that mark the territory of narrative inquiry. We do this by considering qualitative research and narrative inquiry. (p.4)  

Narrative researchers usually embrace the assumptions that the story is one if not the fundamental unit that accounts for human experience. (p.4)  

Narrative researchers use narrative in some way in their research. Narrative inquiry embraces narrative as both the method and phenomena of study. (p.5) 

Through the attention to methods for analyzing and understanding stories lived and told, it can be connected and place under the label of qualitative research methodology. Narrative inquiry begins in experience as expressed in lived and told stories. The method and the inquiry always have experiential starting points that are informed by and intertwined with theoretical literature that informs either the methodology or an understanding of the experiences with which the inquirer began (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). In essence, narrative inquiry involves the reconstruction of a person’s experience in relationship to both the other and to a social milieu (Clandinin &  Connelly, 2000). (p.5)Narrative researchers routinely and consistently situated themselves and their methods historically in the accounts they provided of their work. (p.6) 

We only become narrative inquirers when we recognize and embrace the interactive quality of the researcher-researched relationship, primarily use stories as data and analysis, and understand the way in which what we know is embedded in a particular context, and finally that narrative knowing is essential to our inquiry. (p.7) 

For narrative inquirers both the stories and the humans are continuously visible in the study. (p.7)  

For us, of course, other ways of inquiry are less appealing and appropriate. However, we do not assert that other ways are invalid or that those who employ them are less qualified as researchers. (p.9)  

An important movement in the social science occurred in the late 19^th century. At that time Comte, Mill, Durkheim (Smith, 1983), and others convinced social scientists that they could use the methodology of the physical sciences to study. (p.9) 

Researchers acknowledge that their subjects are not bound, static, atemporal, and decontextualized. (p.11).  

Researchers admit the humans and human interaction they study exist in a context and that the context will influence the interactions and the humans involved. They recognize the researched is not atemporal but exists in time and that time is itself a socially constructed concept (Slife, 1993).  

Researchers acknowledge that since context matters, human interaction and humans are embedded in context, and people, cultures, and events have histories that affect the present, findings from one setting cannot be effectively decontextualized. Researchers need to provide accurate descriptions of these characteristics of the research experience for without them it becomes impossible to understand and use findings from the project. (p. 11) 

What is important at this point in the turn toward narrative inquiry is that the researcher still maintains a belief that in the interpretive process they can relate to the research in such a way that they can provide “valid” and “generalizable” interpretations in their research projects.  

The emergence of postmodernism, poststructualism, neopositivism, and cultural studies called studies question the authority of the researcher for knowing or asserting knowledge (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994).  

They are not static but dynamic, and growth and learning are part of the research process. Both researcher and researched will learn. (p.14) An important positivistic assumption underlying the use of numbers relates to reliability. Quantitative researchers, who base their research in modernist and post-positivist views of the appropriate way of conducting studies of the social sciences, have concerns about reality. They want to be able to assert that anyone experiencing a phenomenon would label it with a similar, hopefully identical, number or in the same way. Numbering a phenomenon and then correlating the consistency of rating allows researchers to assert a level of reliability upon which validity can then be asserted. (p. 15).   

Kuhn (1970) argues that language attached to numbers results in the limited, flat, and sterile language of science. When numbers replace the phenomenon under study, the exact nature of the phenomenon or construct must be specified. (p.15) 

Bruner (1986) labels the findings of paradigmatic knowing actual, in contrast to the findings of narrative knowing, which he labels possible. (p.18).  

Plotlines, character, setting, and action (Bal, 1997) provide ways of holding meaning together in more complex, relational, and therefore more nuanced ways than flowcharts or number tables. (p.20).  

According to Lincoln and Guba (1985), the fact that the researcher constructed or selected the instrument to explore her or his understanding of the concepts and their interrelationships raises problems regarding the trustworthiness of the research findings. Indeed, there is little textual evidence that allows the audience to determine whether the research was simply designed to impose the worldview of the researcher on what was researched. (p.20).  

Narrative inquiry, both in the collection and presentation of the data, allows a clear arena for addressing questions of the trustworthiness of the data and their interpretations. The three-dimensional narrative inquiry space described by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) prompts researchers to both question explanations and meanings constructed and provide the audience with accounts that uncover and reveal such questions of meaning, value, and integrity. (p.21) 

The anthropologist, historian, psychologist, medial practitioner, and educator (for example) were interested in constructing grand narratives: theories of the world that could be applied universally, regardless of particular circumstances. The basis for the grand narrative is the careful study and accumulation of facts from which laws are determined. Such laws, based as they are on irrefutable facts, allow social scientists to predict and control human life. (p.22).  

If positivism and data were all it took to turn social scientists to the general, there would be no room for narrative today. But in the postwar world, cultural forces were as important as academic ones, and preeminent among those cultural trends was the contest between the United States and
Soviet Union for global predominance. (p.23).  

Narrative inquirers embrace the power of the particular for understanding experience and using findings from research to inform themselves in specific places at specific times. (p.24).  

A turn toward acceptance of multiple ways of knowing the world is a turn toward establishing findings through authenticity, resonance, or trustworthiness (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994).  

But inside the university, narrative ways of knowing fell from favor early in the 20^th century and have only in the past 30 years begun to reemerge as a legitimate field of study, means of communication, and orientation toward truth. (p.25).  

Of the social sciences, only sociology was born as a positivist discipline. By the time that Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim gave the discipline its academic shape, sociologists had already embraced key components of positivism that social structure, not individual behavior, was central to understanding human life, that social structure could be best understood through number data, that there were “laws” that governed human societies, and that those societies should be described in analytical, not narrative, terms (Stark, 2004).  (p.26) 

Rather than imposing the antiseptic, narrow, and confining definition of scientific discourse heralded as necessary for “normal” social science (Kuhn, 1970), narrative inquirers embrace the metaphoric quality of language and the connectedness and coherence of the extended discourse of the story entwined with exposition, argumentation, and description. (p.29) 

What fundamentally distinguishes the narrative turn from “scientific” objectivity is understanding that knowing other people and their interactions is always a relational process that ultimately involves caring for, curiosity, interest, passion, and change. (p.29).  

What distinguishes narrative inquirers is their understanding that understanding the complexity of the individual, local, and particular provides a surer basis for our relationships and interactions with other humans. (p.30).  

The convergence between social science and the public is undoubtedly good for narrative. It grants stories both popularity and credence. But it also raises a set of questions, about power (Who owns a story? Who can tell it? Who can change it), about authority (Whose version of a story is convincing? What happens when narrative compete?), and about community(What do stories do among us?) These are questions about philosophy, but even more, they are questions about method. Academic narrative inquirers have developed a set of methods that give narrative credibility on campus. The challenge now is to enter conversations with the rest of our communities to develop a method – a way of talking and asking and answering and making sense – that will allow narrative to flourish in this congenial moment for stories. (p. 30).  

[01/10/07]Educaitional research Meredith D,Gall Joyce P.Gall Water R.BORGTo summarize, positivist epistemology assumes a mechanistic causality among social “objects.” Postpositivist epistemology assumes that individuals’ interpretations of situations cause them to take certain actions. Scientific realism assumes that there are multiple layers of causal structures, which are real objects that interact with each other to cause people to take certain actions or, in some cases, to take action. (p. 23)We refer to the one offered by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln: “Qualitative research is multimethod in its focus, involving an interpretive, naturlaistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.” (p.2)Positivism – quantative research tradition
Postpositivism – qualitative research tradition. This critique of social inquiry is prevalent among followers of a movement called postmodernism. Just as postpositivism can be seen as a reaction against positivism, so too can postmodernism be seen as a reaction against modernism. Modernism has its roots in the Enlightenment, which promoted the advancement of knowledge through scientific observation and the belief that, “under the seeming surface chaos of the world, of society, there exists a rationality, a basic truth that can be identified and harnessed for human good.” Positivist science is a prominent manifestation of the modernist spirit. Postmodernism, which developed as a reaction against modernism, is a broad social and philosophical movement that questions the rationality of human action, the use of positivist epistemology , and any human endeavor (e.g., science) that claims a privileged position with respect to the search for truth or that claims progress in the search for truth. Laurel Richardson put the matter this way:             The core of postmodernism is the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the “right” or the privileged from of authoritative knowledge. Postmodernism suspects all truth claims of masking and serving particular interests in local, cultural, and political struggle. (p.28). Thomas Good and Joel Levin criticize the recent emphasis on personal story and personal voice as a self-sufficient type of knowledge for improving education ……….When story is used to supplant research, theory, and empirical evidence, rather than to supplement it, we have serious reservations about its value….Some stories are knowingly distorted and used for self-justification and self-enhancement. (p.31) Phenomenological research is experiential and qualitative. It sets the stage for more accurate empirical investigations by lessening the risk of a premature selection of methods and categories….Such preliminary exploration does not supplant but complements the traditional methods of research available to me. (p.481). Structuralism p.508.. 

Meredith D,Gall Joyce P.Gall Water R.BORG

According to the model of Technical Rationality – the view of professional knowledge which has most powerful shaped both out thinking about the professions and the institutional relations of research, education, and practice – professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique. (p.11)

According to Schon, this model is flawed because research, especifally research in the positivist tradition, assumes a stabel, consistent reality about which generalizations can be made and applied, whereas professional practice involes “complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value-conflict.”

Schon and many others claim that practittioners need to engage in reflection-in-action, not in the application of research knowledge, in order to deal with the “messiness” of their work. Reflection-in-action has various elements, but chief among them is a kind of experimentation based on practitioners’ analysis of each unique situation they confront. (We discuss schon’s views about reflection-in-action in more detail in chapter 18.). (p.11)

An opposing epistemological position to positivism is based on the assumption that social relaity is constructed by the individuals who participate in it. These “constructions” take the form of interpretations, that is, the ascription of meanings to the social environment. Features of the social environment are not considered to have an existence apart from the meanings that individuals construct for them. To return to our example of the gold star on a student’s paper, the researcher  might consider it as an instance of teacher feedback to students. The teacher might view the gold star as a symbolic message to the student that he has written a good paper relative to other papers he has written a better paper than most other papers in the class. Still another student might view the gold star as a sign that the teacher was too busy to provide written feedback and therefore used the gold star as a substitute. Thus, the gold star constitutes different social realities, not a fixed, independent reality.

          The view of social reality is consistent with the constructivist movement in cognitive psychology, which posits that individuals gradually build their own understanding of the world through experience and maturation. Formal instruction has some influence, but childdren do not assimilate it directly. Their minds are not like the philosopher John Locke’s Tabula rasa (meaning “blank slate”) upon which knowledge is written. Piaget’s theory of intellectual development in children exexplifies the constructivist movement in cognitive psychology. (p.15).

        Educational researchers who subscribe to this constructivist position believe that scientific inquiry must focus on the study of multiple social realities, that is, the different realities created by different individuals as they interact in a social environment. They also believe that these realities cannot be studied by the analytic methods of positivist research. As yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba state, “There are multiple constructed realities that can be studied only holistically….” Because this constructivist position was developed in large part subsequent to and as a reaction to the positivist approach to social science inquiry, it sometimes is called postpositivism. We define postpositivism as the epistemological doctrine that social reality is constructed and that it is constructed differently by different individuals. Thus, if we consider a concept such as intelligence, the postpositivist assumption of multiple constructed realities would lead us to the conclusion that intelligence has no objective reality. Rather, intelligence is a socially constructed label that has different meanings for different individuals and that, if measured , would be measured in different ways  by different individuals. (p.15).

Norman Denzin describes the process in this manner:
The researcher creates a field text consisting of field notes and documents from the field. From this text he or she creates a research text, notes and interpretations based on the field text, what David Plath (1990) calls “field notes.” The researcher then re-creates the research text as a working interpretive document. This working document contains the writer’s initial attempts to make sense out of what has been learned…The writer next produces a quasi-public text, one that is shared with colleagues, whose comments and suggestions the writer seeks. The writer then transforms this statement into a public document, which embodies the writer’s self-understandings, which are now inscribed in the experiences of those studied. This statement, in turn, furnishes the context for the understandings the reader brings to the experiences described by the writer. (p.16).