Disseminating Facts or Nurturing Debate?

2008

AERA’s Role: Disseminating Facts or Nurturing Debate?

Gene V Glass

There are two sides to improving research access and use. We are talking about communications and, to belabor the obvious, communications has at least two sides: the medium and the message. Now, the medium is pretty much in hand…and has been for many years. Packets fly all over the industrialized world at near the speed of light and at near zero cost, and they reach a significant percent of the world's population. FTP, email, chat, video…enough already. The critical piece of the puzzle, as it involves organizations like the American Educational Rsesearch Association, is the message. What should be sent out there? What about education research is worth asking people to attend to and use?

"Outreach" from broad-based scholarly organizations like AERA to the public always raises within those organizations issues such as 'quality,' 'peer review,' and 'consensus,' among others. On questions of public policy that necessarily impact powerful political interests, should an organization like AERA view itself as a disseminator of strongly warranted facts? As the capacity for inexpensive communications has grown, the question of what to communicate has become more urgent.

Let's acknowledge first that AERA is deeply committed to a highly authoritarian view of knowledge and its communication. Peer-reviewed, extremely selective periodical journals stand at the very top of a pyramid of tightly controlled and authoritarian message making. In this respect, AERA imitates the scientific societies that have published journals since the Royal Society first published the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665. I want to suggest that this is precisely the wrong model for AERA to play if it wants to improve access and use of scholarship.

Education research is not a science. I'm sorry to have to tell you this. It no doubt will be heard as an ego injury to many of my colleagues. Education is not a science in spite of the fact that we have in Washington D.C. an Institute of Education Sciences, as if there were not just one education science but several. Among the many things education research lacks that would make it a science is a "paradigm." Now, the word "paradigm" in the modern colloquial sense means practically anything. But in the Kuhnian sense it means a shared view, something particularly lacking among educationists. From the Wikipedia: "It [the word "paradigm"] has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. [Addition in 2022: In fact, "paradigm" is today applied to virtually everything, as are "parameter," "factor," and the like.] According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share.” (The Essential Tension, 1997). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, “a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). A scientist, however, once a paradigm shift is complete, is not allowed the luxury, for example, of positing the possibility that miasma causes the flu or that ether carries light in the same way that a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th century theory of poetics, for instance, or select Marxism as an explanation of economic behaviour. Thus, paradigms, in the sense that Kuhn used them, do not exist in Humanities or social sciences. Nonetheless, the term has been adopted since the 1960s and applied in non-scientific contexts."

Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions wrote that the battles in the social sciences are so vicious because there was no agreed upon paradigm. Look at what a lack of a paradigm does to us. Without one—and believe me, I'm not advocating adopting one for education research—it is impossible to draw boundaries around any problem and contain the disagreement. Didactic instruction may seem better than constructivist teaching in this study—or averaged over these 100 studies—but the finding only applies to learning measured in these particular ways, or at these times and not five years later, or ten, or by paper test instead of depth interviews, or for the conscious utterances of these teachers and not for their unconscious feelings that are as yet not competently investigated. A paradigm involves an agreed upon collection of concepts and ways of observing them, at the very least. It is no wonder then that an unknown wag once opined, "Facts are negotiable; beliefs are rock solid."

Without a paradigm, there can be no consensus, and without a consensus there can be no peace within the organization that seeks to play a role as shaper of public opinion and belief. The only recourse such an organization has is authoritarian control, and we have too much of that already.

Years ago I was invited to chair the first "consensus panel" for AERA. Apparently the powers that be, suffering continuing frustration at not having caused a big stir in the general population, located the problem in a lack of consensus on a message to be delivered. Well, as it was, I was the last person in the world to ask to put together a panel to come up with a consensus position on anything. I had only late in life come to believe that debate is the highest form of scholarly communication. (Isocrates…Clarence Karrier) The only product to emanate from this effort, if I'm not mistaken, is the recently released book Studying Teacher Education, edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Ken Zeichner, which purports to "apply a common set of scholarly lenses to a range of important topics in teacher education" but which, not surprisingly speaks to a consensus on methods rather than findings.

One of the reasons quantitative methods and measurement are so popular within AERA is because it is possible to reach consensus because one is operating in a purely formal logical system where consensus follows from the axioms and deduction. Who then still believes that AERA has a collection of facts that it is eager to disseminate to the world by means of the latest technology?

What then can AERA do? If AERA can't be the dispenser of certified and approved knowledge, what can it do? It can do what all pre-paradigm disciplines do: foster debate. So debate and not dissemination is the preferred mode in which AERA and education scholarship should address the wide world.

What can debate contribute? Just read the Chomsky & Piaget debate regarding human innate aptitude to language that took place at the Abbaye de Royaumont in Oct. 1975 near Paris (Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Press, 1980).) Or even more scintillating, the Chomsky vs Skinner "debate" on language acquisition.

We are not good at debating. We are too much followers of tribal leaders, because without a paradigm, we look to a personality to lead us in our work. We have modeled our scholarship on the sciences: peer-reviewed articles bound in issues of journals. Unfortunately, most of the exciting and truly educational dialogue goes on between the reviewers and the authors, with the editor serving as referee.