Educational Explanations. Christopher Winch

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Educational Explanations - Christopher Winch


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with religion.11 To some extent, it may be necessary to live within the scope of those criteria, to suspend disbelief and to act as if they were true, in order to appreciate their power and persuasiveness for those who apply them. Neither should we exclude the possibility that such a temporary acceptance of them may give us insights into those practices (and even those of our own culture or subculture) that may otherwise be denied to us. To say, however, that participants in such practices live in different realities does not follow, although it may well follow that their conception of what the world is like differs radically from that of the researcher.12

      There remains the difficult question as to whose criteria for establishing truth and falsity should be dominant. We will return to this repeatedly.

      PERSPECTIVALISM AS A VARIANT OF REALISM

      An alternative approach might be to accept that there are multiple perspectives on a single reality but to maintain that they each offer a distinctive perspective on it, and that the underlying reality may never be known by human investigators. On the face of it, this looks like a similar stance to the one recommended above. However, it is situated in the wrong place, where truth is interpreted as ‘correspondence with reality’ – a doctrine that we have had cause to reject as an explanation of what truth is or what truth-telling practices amount to. It also leads to unacceptable consequences that lead it to collapse back into a multiple realities position.

      How can this be? Different perspectives on reality will yield different accounts of that reality. In favourable situations these perspectives will be complementary and will build into a more coherent, multi-dimensional account of the underlying reality. But this benign scenario will, more often than not, fail to apply. To take two examples, A considers a practice to be witchcraft, B considers it to be bad science. C sees as practice to be nothing more than training, D considers it to have an educational element. Neither pair can both be right. If one of each pair is wrong, then perspectivalism does not work. If both of each pair is right, then according to perspectival realism each of both pairs has access to different realities, so we are back once more with multiple realities.

      Nevertheless, the insight that there will be different perspectives on the same phenomena cannot be ignored without the danger of losing much of the insight that systematic enquiry can give us. The question is, ‘How to best understand multiple perspectives in a fruitful way?’

       Perspectivalism and Salience

      One of the primary tasks of social researchers is to explore and to understand the perspective of their subjects in order to describe accurately and in detail their dealings with the world of education, a social practice often riven with different perspectives and rival conceptions (Winch, C. 1996). This interpretive or hermeneutic aspect of educational research demands a truthful and accurate account of the perspective of research subjects if any understanding from their perspective is to be gained.

      However, acknowledgement of the importance of perspective undoubtedly throws up problems for the educational researcher. These fall into two categories: the competing perspectives of research subjects and the perspective of the researcher. In a sense, the former are relatively unproblematic, since it is the researcher’s task to truthfully and accurately represent the different perspectives of the participants. The position of employers vis a vis their employees gaining qualifications will probably be different from that the employees themselves and different again from that of politicians. These may lead to fundamental disagreements of a conceptual nature: certain practices are thought to be properly educational, whereas others see them as nothing more than training. Such differences of opinion and conceptual framing may be difficult to resolve, but they can be accurately noted, provided the researcher has a good grasp of the relevant concepts as they are used by subjects in different positions.

      This brings us to an important point. Researchers will not adopt value-neutral stances to the practices and beliefs that they study. The best course is to acknowledge this and any possible concomitant limitations of doing so. One could argue, for example, that the main protagonists of the School Effectiveness Research Programme failed to do this and consequently left themselves open to charges of ideological bias and, perhaps more seriously, to a form of hijacking by policymakers wanting quick results (White 1997).

      THE ROLE OF CONCEPTIONS OF RATIONALITY IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

      If persuasion of these various kinds is established in ways in which beliefs are changed and concepts undergo shifts, what room is there for rationality in such processes? Are we doomed to doubt the rationality of both research subject and their researchers? We have, it should be acknowledged, held fast to the concept of truth, but has this been done at the price of giving up on rationality? There are paradigms of rationality


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