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Epistemological issues: introduction
Linden West, University of Kent
I was pleased to be asked to write an introduction to a series of papersexploring the epistemological dimension of reflective practice. I hoped for new perspectives on the theory and practice of current research to help me make more sense of my own work and therefore better able to justify it, most of all to myself. I wanted in-depth debate about the nature of truth and validity in new paradigm research.
I soon realised I was entering a post-modernist landscape where nothing is certain, all that is solid seems to melt into air, to paraphrase Marx. I was confused about what I was reading and was reminded of Jameson’s description of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles in an essay on post-modernism[1]. He suggested the hotel was symbolic of contemporary culture in that it represented a kind of post-modern hyperspace, transcending the capacity of the human mind to locate itself within the structure or to grasp the totality of the building. At best, one might observe and comprehend discrete elements in a grand display of bewildering eclecticism redolent of a society of disorientating, kaleidoscopic change and possibility.
Like parts of the hotel in Jameson’s essay individual papers made sense on their own but, at first reading, appeared to move in different directions, with contrasting language, style and metaphor. Ignatius Loyala, feminist research, Gaia, learning from experience and a post-modernist deconstruction of reflective practice appeared to constitute SCUTREA’s equivalent of the Bonaventura. I thought I had better simply note the diversity of styles and abandon an attempt to synthesise or describe the whole. After all, the difficulty of seeing the overall picture is, as Jameson suggests, a central manifestation of the post-modernist condition.
Tom Steele helped a little in his paper on ‘Taking the Epistemology’ by reminding me that adult education research has always been promiscuous, drawing its methods and assumptions about validity from diverse sources (admittedly with discomfort and reservation among those wanting a conventional, foundational rigour) and trusting that something better, more all embracing, would emerge. The thought that the past seemed diverse too and yet within the chaos and promiscuity great insights were developed (for example, in labour history, cultural studies) and better methodologies created (participatory research, oral/life history work) prompted a re-read. Broader patterns and possibilities might emerge from these essays as a whole, if I could live for a while with confusion and difference.
As I read more intensely patterns did emerge, similarities as well as contrasts. There was, for example, a healthy diffidence and reflectiveness in the writing. There was a determination to reassess the relationship between the particular and general and to acknowledge that, in the past, a search for universal meaning, for truth, for objectivity, for positivist science has sometimes damaged, violated, silenced individuals and groups or at least badly distorted the nuance and specificity of their story. The further removed from experience, what the psychologist Kohut called experience-distant rather than experience-near theories, the more abstract and generalised, the more detached from the reality on the ground, the more potentially dangerous and distortive, is one message from this writing.
There is equally a shared assertion that research should, one way or another, be transformative: it should offer space for people to tell and make their own stories and to celebrate the consciousness and energy for change which this can bring; or at least to see human beings, cultures, as whole entities: socio-political, physical as well as spiritual beings. To do so can transform people’s consciousness of what is needed, and their potential to play a part. Finally there is some, if not universal, celebration of new times, a feeling, however fragile, of faith in the future. The old certainties have gone leaving room for a more pluralistic, democratised culture of many truths, ways of being and seeing.
Edwards and Usher in their paper on ‘Modern Paradigms and Postmodern Controversies’ appear most at home in this world. They celebrate the insights of deconstructionism and turn their attention to current research. For them the reality of much reflective practice remains old objectivist wine in new bottles. Research is used to regulate: part of what they call a ‘power-knowledge formation of concern’ for ‘effectiveness and efficiency’ which limits its emancipatory and democratic potential. And research as reflective practice can, they suggest, remain bedevilled by an illusion of ultimately verifiable knowledge to be found if only one searches deeply and exhaustively enough.
Zukas shares a similar view in her paper on ‘Feminist issues in adult education research: links and conflicts’. She also questions the discourse of universal truths about, for example, adult learning which, when deconstructed, reveals a patriarchal, individualistic ideology at its andragogical core. She wants instead ‘psychologies’, particularly a ‘psychology for women’, which derive from ‘ideas about the specificity and social construction of knowledge, the conjunction of knowledge and power, the relationship between language and subjectivity and the analysis of discourse and rhetoric’.
Benn and Burton are on similar ground in their essay on the social classification of women’s work. They believe that conventional typologies, based as they are on male occupations, have constrained social researchers from arriving at a fuller understanding of the experiences of women. Life histories and women’s encounters with Access courses and higher education more generally have been distorted as a result. Conventional classifications have failed to acknowledge the bias and context at their heart.
Boud and Walker in a paper on ‘Developing models of learning from experience’ are, like Zukas, sensitive about the relationship between the particular and the general. They too are aware of the shortcomings of ‘psychologically-orientated literature’ which fails to encompass the ‘complex interactions of person, space and culture’. But they continue to insist that models have a place, depending on their sophistication and the humility shown in using them. Sometimes, they conclude, the subject is too vast and complicated for any model ‘to emerge’.
The other writers view the scene from different locations but on occasions reach related if not identical conclusions. Sisto and Hillier in a study of midwifery training challenge positivism and all its works. Their message is that critical reflectivity, delving deeper into practice to produce and reproduce knowledge, offers a promising basis for a professional, more meaningful curriculum. Russon explores inner space and finds a possibility of transcendence, of meaning, in the reflective techniques of Ignatius Loyola, where direction and intelligibility can derive from feelings of truth and integrity in the innermost parts.
Hunt in her paper on metaphor looks to a greater awareness of the delicate thread linking the internal and external world. She finds in the chaos and dislocation of present times a potential new paradigm, a different, more holistic, organic way of conceiving relationships between people, cultures, as well as within the research process. Gaia offers a metaphor of interconnectedness, in contrast to the narrowness of Newtonian physics and the reductionism of the machine metaphor. She believes the new paradigm enables individuals to search for their own meaning, unfettered by artificial boundaries or expectations. It is also a place in which researcher and researched are perceived to be inseparable, subjects in search of a shared perspective.
So there are patterns, interconnections, to be found in these papers as well as divergence. Objectivist, machine-like positivism is or ought to be dead. Detail, like individuals, matters. Generalities are not excluded but carry a peril of reductionism. It is time to listen, engage and respect the other in the research encounter; and the researcher’s pre-text, maybe their whole being, is of relevance. There is also an enthusiasm, a belief in the possibility of transformation through reflective practice, if spaces can only be reclaimed by and for those who have hitherto been silenced.
But there is caution too. Research of a new hermeneutic, post-modernist kind, like education more generally, asks much of those involved. The researcher needs to understand her and himself - the pre-text and more; to appreciate the power and politics of research - the con-texts. And to acknowledge the partiality, historicity and social construction of knowledge - the sub-texts. The fact that this is understood and that there continues to be enthusiasm for the validity of reflective practice, however disorientating, threatening, limiting and unsympathetic the current climate, is a sign that a democratic instinct of enquiry is alive and well.
[1] F Jameson (1984) Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. In New Left Review 14