(Download) "Editors' Introduction (Editorial)" by Journal of Thought ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Editors' Introduction (Editorial)
- Author : Journal of Thought
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 158 KB
Description
Central to curriculum studies are questions dealing with what constitutes knowledge, education, and research. Just what "fits" under the umbrella of educational research, and who has the right to make these decisions? As two of this issue's authors reference, the National Research Council's Scientific Research in Education (2002) report made short work of these complex questions when they negated the legitimacy of post-structural and arts-based research and limited acceptable social science to what can be measured and replicated. The NRC's reductionist perspective offers little hope of "progress" to the field of education, in that it ignores what contributing author Yvonna Lincoln refers to as the educational researcher's need to perceive "the whole picture." In contrast, the diverse-and sometimes oppositional-articles featured in this issue of the Journal of Thought all grapple in some way with the importance of the research community broadening our collective visions of education and research. Regarded as a whole, the authors' voices move readers beyond the NRC's narrow "gold standard discourse" towards the possibility of exploring new educational standpoints. Developing an awareness of contexts, purposes, and philosophical suppositions beyond our own research standpoints is, then, a professional necessity. It is time-this issue seems to imply-to listen. However, as contributor Donna Adair Breault notes, "As academics, we are often far more comfortable pointing out and critiquing one another's differences than seeking common ground." The "common ground" of which Breault speaks (and to which others indirectly address) is not a matter of simple compromise (i.e., we will now all enact mixed methods), but of constructing-albeit sometimes necessarily tenuous-connections between diverse paradigms in order to honor multiple ways of being and knowing. For some, it is also a matter of removing imposed limitations.