Valuing epistemic diversity in educational research: an agenda for improving research impact and initial teacher education

Abstract

Research in education draws upon a wide range of epistemological traditions due in part to the wide range of problems that are investigated. While this diversity might be considered a strength of the field, it also makes researchers who work within it vulnerable to being divided into those worth listening to and those who should be ignored by those who are interested in the outcomes of our research, especially policy holders and system providers.Epistemological diversity in educational research also presents challenges for inducting teacher education students into the profession. We outline some of these challenges in a discussion of epistemological diversity in research in education. We also describe differences in how research traditions construct educational problems. We argue that crossing epistemic boundaries is a necessary condition of the educational practices of teachers, and of those preparing to join their ranks. We compare and contrast knowledge producing processes in education, and identify the repertoires of capabilities and habits of mind associated with different epistemologies or 'angles'. We suggest that the impact of educational research, including its contribution to teacher education programs, policy and public debate about issues in education, might be enhanced through a heuristic suite of four angles that are each understood to be necessary but not sufficient on their own. We provide a brief worked example of how such a heuristic might be applied to make sense of the diverse bodies of research regarding student engagement in school.

Conceptualising the impact of initial teacher education

“…It is indisputable that enhanced student learning should be the ultimate aim of the education enterprise of which teacher education is a part, and that graduate teachers should be able to enter the profession with the knowledge, skills and dispositions required to positively impact on student learning. However, the assumption that there is a direct, linear and causal relationship between the initial teacher education programme and the learning of students taught by initial teacher education graduates as they take up their career trajectories fails to acknowledge and capture the complexity of the situated nature of initial teacher education in education systems (Hayes and Doherty 2017;Cochran-Smith and Zeichner 2005;Cochran-Smith et al 2014;Davis and Sumara 2006;Grossman and McDonald 2008;Mayer et al 2012;Rowan et al 2015). As a result, a limited conception of impact is enacted that fails to capture the multiple variables contributing to student learning in a multi-faceted, integrated system.…”

Re/searching for “impact”

“…Collective engagement has individual benefits, which in turn shape the collective. Returning to Bausinger (1961) is also helpful in realising this expanded, versatile, alternative perspective of what “impact” is, what it means, or how it is understood and represented: we might view re/search processes at the very least as an elaboration of the complexity of the meaning of “impact”, that it can be reinterpreted as “the provisional, partial and contingent nature of solutions”, that “tend to be dismissed as unnecessarily complex and inaccessible” (Hayes and Doherty, 2017, p. 123).…”

“…These practices therefore, illustrate how certain emotions that can routinely be labelled as a provisional singular psychological disorder and as the root of a social disorder (Lindebaum and Gabriel, 2016), or dysfunctional organisation, can actually, if nurtured in a safe place, maintain a moral and/or restorative social order or organisation. Such explorations provide a dimension of information that commonplace assumptions of what “impact” is, and means, might miss (Hayes and Doherty, 2017). To paraphrase Lindebaum and Gabriel (2016), a world without such emotions would be, perhaps, an obedient, submissive and acquiescent world, but it is unlikely to be a just one.…”

What you think you know shapes what you see: How epistemology shapes curriculum, teaching, and learning

“…Most HPE research and scholarship is grounded in post‐positivism, resulting in calls for studies with alternate epistemological underpinnings (Han et al., 2022; Regehr, 2010). As several have asserted, HPE could be strengthened through valuing and employing epistemological diversity, which might be best achieved by interdisciplinary collaborations (Hayes & Doherty, 2017; Varpio & MacLeod, 2020). Varied epistemologies open the way to research questions that address a broader array of topics, lenses that incorporate diverse perspectives, and methods of study that will lead to new insights and approaches.…”