Driving the Paradigm

Reflexive Interlude: Maybe This Is All About Me, Afterall

Writing this article, I am near the end of my third year as a tenure track assistant professor in the Measurement and Research program in the College of Education at the University of South Florida (USF). I enjoy my job, love my colleagues and students, and had what I was told was a “very successful” mid-tenure review. The latter surprised me. While in no way do I want to jeopardize my upcoming bid for tenure, I feel I must share that whatever passes for my research agenda is all over the place. It includes publications, presentations, and grants using randomized controlled trials, quasi-experiments, meta-analyses and systematic reviews, case studies, narrative inquiries, institutional ethnographies, discourse analyses, among others. It inquires into higher education, school choice, community college, early literacy, Indigenous education, educational technology, educational leadership, special education, K-12 assessment, sexual assault, co-parenting, etc. . . . I have also published about or advanced (new) qualitative research methods. I am a certified reviewer for the What Works Clearinghouse.

I have been both complimented and critiqued for the “diversity” of my research agenda. My Australian post-doctoral mentor, Tess Lea, called me a polyglot, which I believe she meant as a compliment. But when hired at USF, I was advised by the Department and Search Committee Chairs to work on a story that tied my research together. A successful mid-tenure review at USF meant, at least for my College, that the story I crafted was convincing (enough). I am grateful this story served its purpose, that it may be useful to guide my future research decisions, and that I can fairly easily pick it up to explain myself to would-be-skeptics and future tenure application reviewers. It is not a bad story. And yet I am mindful that it is a story, one crafted for a particular purpose, in a particular context; a story that creates me more-or-less as an intelligible scholar (The Collective, in press).

In my most doubtful moments, after a(nother) journal rejection or funding denial, I worry about the weaknesses of a diverse agenda. If I (had) specialized, maybe I would be a better scholar, maybe my article or grant would have been accepted, funded. More often, however, I find that a broad understanding of different ways of and reasons for doing research puts me in meaningful conversations with and makes me helpful to so many interesting researchers. I believe researching from various paradigms allows me to be more flexible, fluid, resistive, and sometimes, more creative. I believe it makes me a better teacher of research. This is all to say that my qualitative classroom fantasies are bedfellows with my fantasies about being a playfully incoherent scholar who resists the neoliberal academy’s insistence that I produce and package myself as coherent subject (The Collective, in press). What if the epistemological ambiguity I seek in qualitative classrooms were the frame for my scholarly narrative? What if instead of writing a single story to encapsulate my research agenda, I could write several stories, craft myself as several scholars? And what are the risks, challenges, and strategies of teaching to produce and value scholars who conduct research across multiple paradigms, scholars more-or-less like myself?

Paradigms Essentialized: Necessary Failure I

It is the first day of Qualitative Research in Education Part I and 18 education doctoral students sit in a semi-circle (or sometimes at groups of tables) and introduce themselves according to three prompts I provided: (a) share who you are, (b) what program you are in, and (c) what you think/feel/believe/know about qualitative research.

Paradigm talk usually begins here.

Influenced by Paul and Marfo’s (2001) argument about the importance of philosophical training in the preparation of educational researchers, the College of Education at USF requires all PhD students to take a 3 credit hour Philosophies of Inquiry course, which most students in my qualitative classes will have completed. I expect this foundational philosophy course is where some of what I’m calling “paradigm essentialism” begins. Paradigm essentialism refers to the adoption of a research paradigm or methodology as an identity. This adoption is reflected in the varying “I am a . . . ” statements students make the first night of Qualitative Research in Education Part I. I suspect these “I am” statements are often the result of self-reflective learning, prompted in part by an assignment in their philosophy of inquiry classes to consider their own beliefs about the nature of truth and reality and the extent to which those beliefs align with particular research paradigms. Those who write in the field of reflection and reflective inquiry (e.g., Lyons, 2010) tell us that engaging personally with new ideas is vital to learning, especially for understanding foreign ideas that may disrupt or otherwise unsettle deeply held beliefs to promote new understandings, action, and critique. And identifying as a certain kind of researcher can help students connect to a research community, render themselves intelligible to like-minded scholars, and better craft their own research agenda stories, all of which can be invaluable to starting and maintaining an academic career (Sternberg, 2013). Identifying with a particular research tradition seems one instrumental way to simplify the task of packaging and selling oneself in the academic market.

At the same time, Foucault (2000) and others (Butler, 1997, 2004, 2005) alert us to the potential dangers of firmly entrenched identities. It is through these identities that we join silos, draw boundaries around systems of thought, become unreflective and unresponsive to one another, and ultimately come to desire our own oppression (Butler, 1997). Fostering informed epistemological ambiguity in the classroom becomes more difficult in the face of students with more-or-less firmly entrenched researcher identities. Because they are a certain kind of researcher, they do not do other kinds of research. They find it difficult to consider situations in which researching from a different paradigm might be desirable, let alone valuable. I attempt to disrupt essentialized paradigms by fostering what Hoy (2005) describes as critical resistance: “ . . . resistance not to the constraining principals per se, but to one’s attachment to them insofar as they constitute one’s identity” (p. 100). My disruptive approach so far has been direct. I pretend to get angry, pound my fist once on the table for emphasis: “If you take anything from this class it should be this: You are not a research paradigm!” I share my graduate school experience where my choice was not whether I was a researcher of a certain paradigm, but whether I was “quantitative or qualitative.” Not even 10 years later, I am pleased my students find this somewhat absurd—I point out that identifying as a post-positivist or pragmatic or post-structural researcher is probably no different. And finally, I edit out all “I am an X researcher . . . “ statements from students’ writing, replacing them with, for example, “I do X research.”

My aim in disrupting researcher identities is to enable future qualitative scholars to engage in a perpetual analysis and critique that resists the temptation to too strongly embody any one academic perspective (Wolgemuth, 2009, 2014). This critical resistance is what Foucault (1989) refers to as the ethic of an intellectual, “to engage a type of knowledge and analysis that is taught and received in the university in a way so as to modify not only the thought of others, but of one’s own as well” (p. 303). Students who adopt this ethic in lieu of a paradigm-driven identity will be better prepared, I believe, to embrace and enact informed epistemological ambiguity—to conduct and design clever, messy research.

Paradigms Ontologized: Necessarily Failure II

It is 9:00 a.m. on a Tuesday and my calendar tells me I am to spend three hours this morning grading students’ research proposal assignments for Qualitative Research in Education Part I. The assignment asked students to write a 15 to 20 page proposal for a qualitative research project that includes (a) the rationale and significance of the project, (b) the research paradigm/orientation and methodology, and (c) the methods, including data collection, analysis, validity, ethics, and role of the researcher. I open the first assignment ¹ :

The purpose of this constructionist study is to . . .

The student, dutifully citing Crotty (1998) and maybe Paul (2004), goes on to explain,

Constructionism holds that individuals create meaning for themselves through everyday interaction with social and societal constructs. Individuals understand reality by looking at the world through these constructs. As a research paradigm, constructionism emphasizes subjective engagement with the world and rejects the positivist idea that research can be free of human values. Instead, constructionists seek to bring together researchers’ and participants’ value-laden perspectives to show the complexity of meanings in social life.

And later in the methods, they describe their interview methods, citing Roulston (2010a, 2010b):

My constructionist interviews will produce interview data that is co-constructed. I will analyze this data for both what is said during the interviews as well as how what was said was enabled in the interview context.

Suffice it to say, the student continues on along these lines, explaining how their data analysis is constructionist and reflecting on how they are a constructionist researcher. The epistemological consistency of their writing about constructionism, and the way constructionist thinking informs every element of their research design, is certainly commendable. Many published peer-reviewed articles fail on this expectation of consistency alone (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2009). At the same time, this consistent writing about research paradigms does work other than communicating an approach to varying elements of a research proposal. This writing brings something called “constructionism” to life and makes it real. In my qualitative classrooms, I wonder about the shorthand involved in creating and relying on something called a “paradigm” to bring together complex epistemological and ontological ideas. The danger I want to point out is that when paradigms become more real than the complex of ideas they are meant to signal, depth, critique, and nuance are likely eschewed. This is troublesome in my ideal qualitative classroom where I want to see students driving paradigms. That is, if we want to imagine what happens when two paradigms “collide,” then we need to be able to recognize the epistemological and ontological debris field. For example, how do we talk about the paradigm(s) of an observational research project in which the researcher, responding to the preferences of her teacher-participants, sometimes conducted classroom observations as a “fly on the wall,” careful not to get involved, careful not to bias the results, and at other times as a researcher-participant, taking over classroom lessons in the teachers’ absence? What criteria does this researcher put forward when she discusses the validity of her observations when one approach seems to assume the existence of an objective reality from which the researcher can separate herself and the other holds reality is co-constructed and the researcher should therefore involve herself in the observation? How does this researcher communicate the paradigm(s) of her inquiry when the participants and contexts demanded she adopt different philosophical orientations to gather the data in the first instance?

The danger of paradigm ontologization is not necessarily inherent in the material nature of research paradigms, but, from my perspective, is evident when paradigms become too real, as they threaten to do in the above example. That is, when paradigms take on a life of their own, they solidify and signify more than a set of ideas brought together at a particular point in time to serve a particular purpose (Lincoln et al., 2011). Strict adherence to the researchers’ chosen paradigm in the example above may not have allowed her the flexibility to conduct observations in response to the demands of her context. Maybe the result would have been “bad” data? Maybe one of the teachers would have dropped out? I find that students who adopt a “too real” paradigm are less adept at thinking ambiguously about research design, which involves a nuanced and flexible understanding of the variety of ideas paradigms are meant to convey, and the courage to ignore them.

I currently use two ways to work against the over ontologization of research paradigms in my qualitative classes. First, I ask students to engage original sources to think about their research methods instead of Crotty (1998). I encourage them to think about how, for example, Dewey’s (1938/1997) ideas about the inquiry process or Foucault’s (1972) archeology might inform their research design; to think with particular theorists and theories as they design and conduct their research. Second, inspired by Koro-Ljungberg’s (2015) Methodologies Without Methodology, I encourage students to engage in “messy design” by deliberately designing a research project in which more than one paradigm would be used. They describe their reasons for informed epistemological inconsistency (or ambiguity) and consider how the quality of their research should be judged given the multiple paradigms at play in their work. I believe that engaging in these activities helps students understand the temporal and contextual nature of research paradigms and enables them to think about paradigms as more fluid and subject to change, resulting in deeper and more creative thinking about qualitative research.

Paradigms Idolized: Necessary Failure III

I have a student in class, perhaps they are familiar. In every conversation that student speaks from their paradigm. They are fully immersed in and knowledgeable about their paradigm. They can quote predominate theorists, advance articulate arguments, and are usually very adept at designing studies guided by their paradigm. To be honest, I have a difficult time finding fault with this student—they are great contributors to class discussions and usually produce what I consider to be excellent work.

Yet students like this one also present a challenge to my ideal qualitative class. They are often obsessed, and in their obsession run the risk of privileging one method over all others, what Lather (2006) described as “the kind of methodolatry where the tail of methodology wags the dog of inquiry” (p. 47). Like essentialism and ontologization, idolization is probably an important part of the learning process. Thinking with Lacan is helpful to understand why this may be the case. Desire refers to something that is both exciting and beyond one’s reach, that is desire is present in the gap between one’s fantasy and what Lacan calls the Real, a concept developed in a series of lectures beginning in 1953 (as described in Eyers, 2012). Lacan views both fantasy and the gap between fantasy and the Real as positive—as motivating and the mechanisms through which we find meaning (Brown, 2008). From this perspective, I encourage paradigmatic obsession because it fuels learning. I feed it (both my own and students’ obsessions) by suggesting further readings, setting up reading groups, allowing myself to get caught up in students’ passions for new theories/theorists/ideas.

As with any obsession, however, a kind of myopic delusion can result, one that interferes with learning. This is what Žižek (2005) attributes to the “fundamentalist” who becomes “the dupe of his [sic] fantasy.” The obsessed qualitative research student risks “really believing” their paradigm. They take everything in through their paradigm, understand everything in terms of it, and thereby construct any new understandings through their paradigms. Take for example, my aim to foster informed epistemological ambiguity in the classroom, an aim I introduced as inspired by Hammersley (2011) Koro-Ljungberg et al. (2009), and Koro-Ljungberg (2015) who write about qualitative research from something we might call a post-structuralist position. In this article, I also write about ambiguity in those terms. At the same time, I understand that the desire for informed epistemological ambiguity can be understood (note, I do not say “misunderstood”) in post-positivist or critical realist terms as part of the (objective) reality of research; that is when ambiguities inevitably and naturally arise in research they should be described and discussed in research write-ups (likely as limitations). Or informed epistemological ambiguity might be understood in pragmatic terms, described by Biesta and Burbules (2003), as important based on the actions the idea makes possible. From this perspective, Lincoln et al. (2011) can be seen as making a pragmatic argument for the fluidity of paradigms when they say that paradigm dynamism is “critical if we are to see qualitative research begin to have an impact on policy reformulation or on the redress of social ills” (p. 116). Obsessed students may have the ability to understand how these various paradigmatic arguments about informed epistemological ambiguity are made, but lack a kind of critical distance (Žižek, 2005) from their paradigms that would permit them to take the positions of other paradigms seriously, even momentarily. Instead, ideas associated with other paradigms are immediately dismissed, repulsed as insufficient, out-of-date, on the wrong side of the post-modern turn (“humanist”), or grossly wrong from the perspective of their favored paradigm. What I hope to foster in my ideal qualitative classroom is an “anti-fundamentalist” space for students to seriously consider even previously discarded epistemologies—to resurrect them and see whether, how, and in what ways they might be (re)imagined in qualitative research.

Žižek (2006) also points to another danger associated with obsession and desire when he makes the important distinction between drives and desires. A drive is automatic, unthinking, defeatist. Drives arise from the realization that the missing element between fantasy and reality cannot be captured—and in this way spells the “death” of desire. Brown (2008) describes the drive as “‘ going through the motions’ and enjoying it as such, giving up on innovations that might disrupt existing routines and habits” (p. 410). The risk for the obsessed student is eventual methodological complacency, designing the same studies over and over, getting “caught into a closed, self propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it” (Žižek, 2006, p. 63).

I attempt to work against the obsessive idolization of research paradigms in my qualitative classes through activities and conversations that I hope create distance between students and paradigms. In Qualitative Research in Education Part II, for example, I require students to analyze data they bring to class using multiple strategies (e.g., coding, poetry, discourse analysis). While paradigms and methodologies do not directly imply methods, a realization I believe in itself can disturb paradigmatic idolization, some methods are more aligned with certain paradigms than others (e.g., discourse analysis and constructionism [Nikander, 2008], coding and interpretivism [Jackson & Mazzei, 2012]). By engaging and working with their data using varying strategies, students learn both the value of different paradigmatic approaches to research and of adopting varying strategies and paradigms when working with their data. Students write that they learned more about their data through multiple engagements and that these engagements permitted more complex understandings of both the research process and their data. For the final assignment, I invite students to create a “messy” write-up of the research process that describes all their engagements with the data as part of one research project. I believe that engaging in these multiple data analyses and writing them up in a messy report interrupts paradigm idolization by creating opportunities for students to distance themselves from their preferred paradigms.

Another example comes from a PhD student, Csaba Osvath, who taught Qualitative Research in Education Part I with me in summer 2015. In a lecture on arts-based research, Csaba demonstrated to students his process of working with glass, from cutting the glass to firing it in the kiln. He opened-up the demonstration asking students to think about their research as he walked them through his art-making, instructing them to first assume that their research paradigm is dead. This activity seemed to both open students to the possibilities of doing and thinking with art in research and made them aware of the great extent they think about research through their paradigms. They reported frequent self-editing as they observed art-making-as-research and asked themselves: “If I didn’t think about research in this way, what other ways might I think of and do it?”