Mitch's Memorandum #10 on Gage

Memorandum on	Mitch Bleier U ED 70300 Prof. K. Tobin Spring 2008 May 21, 2008
Gage, N. L. (1989). The paradigm wars and their aftermath: A “historical” sketch on teaching since 1989. Educational Researcher, 18(7), 4-10.

In this 1989 article, N. L. Gage takes the perspective of a writer looking back from 2009 on a possible history of twenty years of educational research resulting from what he refers to as the height of the “Paradigm Wars” of the 1980s. He reviews the conditions from which the paradigm wars emerged—a time of dissatisfaction of critics with what they perceived of as the failed attempts to lay a scientific foundation for understanding and improving teaching practices. Thus the climate of educational research in the 1960s and 1970s was rejected as positivistic and authoritarian.

Gage lays out the positions of three groups of critics: the Antinaturalist critique; the Interpretivist critique; and the Critical Theorists’ critique. He then proceeds to imagine three possible futures resulting from these critiques.

In one scenario, all three groups of critics prevailed in the 1990s and 2000s and “interpretive-qualitative studies and critical-theoretical analyses” almost completely supplanted the dominant objectivist-quantitative research of the decades before. Research was democratized, teachers were empowered, and disenfranchised groups found their voices. Education in particular and society in general became more equitable.

A second scenario sees the reconciliation of paradigms. “[R]esearchers realized that there was no necessary antagonism between objectivists, [antinaturalists,] interpretivists, and critical theorists” (p. 7). The various approaches all were used to enact educational research that complemented each other’s strengths and ameliorated each other’s shortcomings. Objectivistic-quantitative, interpretivistic-qualitative and critical-theoretical methods were employed side-by-side and sometimes in mixed-methodological combination as necessary to achieve educational, social-justice and democratic goals.

In a third version of the future, Gage envisions the continuation of the intransigence and counter-productivity of the paradigm wars throughout the next two decades.

Gage closes with a plea for the educational researchers of 1989 to abandon factionalism in favor of collaboration and the sincere, appropriate application of the full range of approaches to research in order to improve education and make possible better lives for the children whose education we are researching and shaping.

Mitch's Memorandum #9 on Pitt and Britzman

Memorandum on…	Submitted by: Mitch Bleier
Pitt, A. and Britzman, D. (2006). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning. In K. Tobin and J. Kincheloe, (eds.) Doing educational research – A handbook (379 – 401). Rotterdam (NL): Sense Publishers.	U ED 70300 Prof. Tobin Spring 2008 May 7, 2008

Pitt and Britzman explore the questions, what makes knowledge difficult? and what is it to represent and narrate “difficult knowledge”? They use “difficult knowledge” to describe “a concept meant to signify both representations of social traumas (both large and small-scale) in curriculum and the individual’s encounters with them in pedagogy” (p. 379).

The inability or failure to address traumas as they occur (deferred action) mediates both how those traumas eventually are written/rewritten in memory and how they are used to deal with current traumas with which they resonate. Pitt and Britzman refer to Caruth’s term “unclaimed experience” to describe the unanalyzed, uninterpreted, unincorporated, unresolved trauma. (p. 381 – 382)

“The crisis of representation” refers to “the adequacy of language to capture experience is considered an effect of discourse rather than a reflection of that experience” (p. 380). What would Rorty say about this?

Crisis of representation around traumas leave traces in narratives about “difficult knowledge.” (p. 380)

“…psychoanalytic inquiry begins with the problem of resistance to discourse, and,…‘must take into account the fact that the human subject is a theorizing being and a being that theorizes itself.’… Psychoanalytic research posits education as an exemplary site where the crisis of representation that is outside meets the crisis of representation that is inside” – a phenomenon that Freud called “the playground of transference.” (p. 380)

Deferred action

Traumas are not dealt with in the moment. They form the basis for interpretation of current experience. Traumas are dealt with later and they are reconstructed and redefined.

Transference

“…one makes sense of present situations through the imperatives of older conflicts” (p. 383)

“Where does one situate the event that is experience, in the past that is narrated or in the presence of its interpretation? For Freud, both positions of time are embodied in the transference” (p. 383).

Symbolization

After a description of a psychoanalyst and a boy (having difficulty in school) reversing roles in the creation of a strict classroom situation: “If transference is an obstacle to representing learning in the present, symbolization allows one to return the obstacles to the archaic conflicts they represent” (p. 385).

“…in symbolization the idea and the affect influence one another” (p. 385).

PARTICIPANTS’ CONSTRUCTIONS OF DIFFICULTY MADE FROM THE PROTOCOL (p. 387 – 393)

A series of survey responses is used to illustrate and explore the above ideas.

• It is interesting that the first two respondents, the undergraduates, acknowledge the power, if not always the legitimacy, of knowledge, and the consequences they might suffer if access to knowledge is given to or withheld from them.

• But they don’t consider rationalization, justification, obfuscation as possibilities.

• Nor do they recognize knowledge as dynamic and situated. They don’t talk about constructing or creating knowledge, they talk about obtaining and distributing knowledge.

• The other interviewees have a more introspective approach to knowledge and how their inner selves interpret and use prior experience to mediate current experiences.