What If Educational Inquiry Were Neither a Social Science Nor a Humanities Field? Revisiting Joseph Schawb’s “The Practical” in the Aftermath of the Science Wars

Authors

  • Robert Donmoyer School of Leadership and Education Sciences University of San Diego

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n8.2014

Keywords:

educational research, qualitative methods, Science Wars

Abstract

The recent debates about what constitutes scientific research in Education, on the one hand, and the so-called “paradigm wars” that got played out in the final quarter of the 20th century, on the other, are more similar than different.  At the center of both controversies was the relative worth of quantitative and qualitative research methods.  Both controversies also distracted researchers’ from addressing the substantive problems that plague schools and other educational organizations.  This paper attempts to move the field beyond the debates of the past and similar debates that seem likely to occur in the future. Inspired, in large part, by Joseph Schwab’s largely unheeded critique of the curriculum field in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the paper attempts to re-conceptualize what inquiry in a field like Education should look like, as well as the role that quantitative,  qualitative, and mixed-methods research could play in a re-conceptualized approach to inquiry.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Robert Donmoyer, School of Leadership and Education Sciences University of San Diego

Robert Donmoyer is presently is Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego. Previously he served as a professor and the director of School of Educational Policy and Leadership at the Ohio State University. He has written extensively about qualitative research and evaluation methods, educational leadership and reform, and the philosophical issues that ground research practice. During the past five years, he has received two multi-year research grants from the federal government as well as research funding from the Ball Foundation.

Downloads

Published

2014-02-15

How to Cite

Donmoyer, R. (2014). What If Educational Inquiry Were Neither a Social Science Nor a Humanities Field? Revisiting Joseph Schawb’s “The Practical” in the Aftermath of the Science Wars. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22, 8. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n8.2014

Issue

Section

Qualitative Inquiry