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.