What is Science and Scholarship in Education?
The relationship of Science and Scholarship
I think the Wired article retains credibility for many because people have easier time believing “facts” . . . From Henry Kim
. . . many of the most difficult educational problems that exist in the United States today are related to the ways in which the study of education has been organized and percieved within Universities (p. xv). Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
Lagemann in her book An Elusive Science laments the degree to which a limited view of science has dominated the literature over other forms of education scholarship. Ideas about inquiry in science, and in scholarship more broadly, have a profound effect on our practices and of the views of inquiry in society. Susan Haack has called a common state of scientific practice by the pejorative term Scientism. Examples of scientism can include: assuming the trappings or the terms of science to lend authority to one’s claims, using science for answers beyond it’s natural scope, or denigrating the value of other forms of good faith inquiry. While scientism can degrade scientific practice, it can also become a problem when society accepts belief in scientism. Think of Henry’s idea that for most people facts give truth or of news articles that become more believable when common readers hear the phrase, “studies show”. At this point science becomes more of a belief system and that belief system substitutes for intellect, often while denigrating the value of other forms of scholarship.
Haack, citing Peirce, advocates for an approach that draws continuities between science and other scholarly or even common forms of inquiry.
But in place of this axe-wielding demarcationist approach, I have proposed a Critical Common– sensist account that acknowledges epistemological, methodological, and metaphysical continuities between inquiry in the sciences and everyday empirical inquiry. (p.92–93) . . .Natural-scientific inquiry is like everyday empirical inquiry, only different. Standards of good evidence and well-conducted inqury are not internal to the sciences. Rather, to borrow a fine phrase of Gustav Bergmann’s, the natural sciences represent the long arm of common sense; amplifying and extending the senses by means of specialized instruments, stretching the imagination by means of metaphors and analogies, improving reasoning power by means of intellectual and physical tools, and evolving a social organization that enables cooperation and competition, and allows each scientist to take up the crossword where others have left off (p. 48).
What is the Place of Theory?
Given this continuance between different forms of inquiry, what is the place of theory, hypothesis and theoretical integration? What is the intellectual activities that go with theory integration and development? Doesn’t much of theory development consist in ordering, aligning or backgrounding our observations? In education we could concieve of theory building in articulating the nature of the background into which our educational hypothesis are formed. Examples might include questions like: what is good pedagogy, how do we observe learning, or what is the goal of a student teacher relationship? What is it exactly that we are trying to accomplish?
Alan Able was a percussionist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the instructor for Temple University’s Graduate Percussionists. He once said that the only reason to study with any particular instructor was because you liked that instructor’s sound and you wanted to develop that sound for yourself. Isn’t all of education much the same? Isn’t the place our teachers assume or the authors we choose to read are chosen because we want to learn to think in the same way they do. To be intelligent by learning how to use metaphors, analogies, intellectual tools and social tools in the service of inquiry. I think this begins with articulating the background into which we place our hypotheses and this is an important role for theorizing. Consider the nature of observation as presented here by Stanley Fish:
The assertion, generally, is that while “science is based on observation, religion is based on opinion” (RM Paxton) Or, in another formulation, science does not involve belief, it is “based on common observation” (Dave Goldenberg). Science “simply reports facts” (Bob W.) Or, in the same vein, “Science helps us to understand the world as it is” (Mark Grein). . . .
(T)here is no such thing as “common observation” or simply reporting the facts. To be sure, there is observation and observation can indeed serve to support or challenge hypotheses. But the act of observing can itself only take place within hypotheses (about the way the world is) that cannot be observation’s objects because it is within them that observation and reasoning occur.
While those hypotheses are powerfully shaping of what can be seen, they themselves cannot be seen as long as we are operating within them; and if they do become visible and available for noticing, it will be because other hypotheses have slipped into their place and are now shaping perception, as it were, behind the curtain.
John Shotter (quoting Charles Taylor) posits an important new role for theory is in articulating this background. I would say that it is new only in the sense of being new for science, which has often been concieved through a positivist account over the last hundred years. If we look to the 19th Century and Josiah Royce or to the 18th Century and Giambattista Vico, we can find an intellectual tradition which also builds on this role of theory:
Now we need to know the nature of the backgrounds, the different forms of life from which our different ways of knowing emerge. . . . It is to do with the fact that we have failed to grasp not only what it is that we must theorize here, but what the task of theory in this sphere is like. Indeed as Taylor (1987:477) remarks: “We cannot turn the background from which we think into an object for us. The task of reason has to be conceived quite differently.” It must now be seen “as including — alongside the familiar forms of the enlightenment — a new department, whose excellence consists in our being able to articulate the background of our lives perspicuously” (Shotter, 1995, pp.2–3)
In short: science and scholarship are complimentary forms of inquiry and the pursuit of these forms are an important form of intellectual development. Students at all ages and in all the places they find themselves in in society can continue to learn not only the common forms of the enlightenment, but also how to use metaphors, analogies, and other intellectual tools to grow and progress in the intellectual traditions that they inhere and embody.
