With a foot in both worlds...

In reading the Lauer and Asher, I had a flashback (closer to PSTD) from my quantitative stats class last summer. It was necessary and valuable, but really, really tedious!

I wondered a bit at the connection to the Gesa Kirsch reading, but I found the most important connection for me on page 251, when Bereiter and Scardamalia are referenced as postulating that research methods will work together in a linear and orderly fashion. The more I thought about the dueling epistemologies my own brief experience conducting research and reading research, it seems to me that epistemology and the development of research is anything but linear and orderly. As to epistemology, I readily see that any research method has underlying assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the construction of knowledge in a discipline. It took me almost two semesters to really "get" it (the role of epistemology in research design and methodology), but it's starting to make sense. My latest set of questions have to do with why we have to choose--that is, why a researcher has to swear allegiance to a particular epistemological construct. Just as there could be different types of knowledge (instrumental, communicative, and emancipatory in one particular philosophical paradigm) aren't there different ways of developing and constructing different kinds of knowledge?

I'm not sure that anything in the realm of teaching and learning will ever be "linear and orderly" or "a coherent effort to understand how human minds actually accomplish the complete act of writing." There are too many unquantifiable factors, too much individuality, too many features that can't be accessed and articulated, much less plugged in to a linear and orderly model.

What I can see is that different methodologies each give a window into the experience--like the blind men and the elephant. And there isn't a predictable sequence. Sometimes, as they suggest, a case study may set up a hypothesis and experimental study. Sometimes simple observation might lead to a survey and then a case study. In my project a survey and statistical data triggered questions, setting up a case study or narrative inquiry. I'm all for methodological pluralism. However, just like any kind of pluralism, it won't be neat and orderly.

I like Sandra Harding's principles to guide both the transparency and balance in research. It seems that they will contribute to the breaking down of walls and hierarchies, as Kirsch suggests, on page 258, and that is inevitably messy and unsettling to some. But I think it has the potential to access understanding and knowledge that has always been below the surface.