Educational Epistemology, Culture and History: Response to Joan Walton

Abstract

I read Dr. Walton’s response to my paper with great interest. I truly appreciate her writing up the response that I believe will allow us to think deeper about the issues raised by my paper. I would also like to thank the journal’s editor-in-chief Dr. Margaret Farren for giving me the opportunity to write this response to Dr. Walton. First of all, Dr. Walton offers an important point about the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity. She argues that the dichotomy is tentative in nature, given the fact that all human perception can be regarded subjective. She makes a compelling argument that objectivity is not an independent entity that complements subjectivity, suggesting what seems objective is merely an inter-subjective agreement that is constructed among people. Thus the sense of objectivity is a construction in our minds in a socio-cultural context: We make sense of the world we experience and construct meanings, some of which we choose to label as objective. She makes this point by referring to quantum physics and the consciousness research where the consensus built among scientists and philosophers is the fundamental departure from the traditional paradigm of science. In these cutting-edge research domains, the nature of objective reality cannot be fully captured with positivistic science. To me, her discussion is a good follow up discussion to the issues that I raised in my paper. The main topic of my paper is teacher expertise development but it can be seen to encompass a broader issue of how future social research should be envisioned and construed. In the field of education, especially in the United States, the quality of teaching is often discussed in terms of meeting teaching standards and performance goals that are considered to be “objective” criteria (Ravitch, 1995; Valli & Buese, 2007). I do not necessarily consider the use of standards and goals meaningless, but as my paper suggests, what seem to be at the core of teacher expertise development does not end with merely setting such criteria no matter how “objective” they seem to be. Rather, it is each individual teacher’s psychological construction of meanings, what they choose to do to overcome challenges in each classroom situation and how they interpret their teaching to plan for the next step. This means that what is transformative in teacher education cannot be truly captured without incorporating the subjective dimension and dynamics of inter-personal forces inherent in day-to-day teaching. As is widely known, the accountability movement that has swept across schools in the United States in the last decade can be seen as a movement to dismiss such subjective dimension and teachers’ meaning-making process in the name of objectivity (Ingersoll, 2013; Zeichner, 2010). In fact, as Dr. Walton suggests, this is the very point qualitative researchers in the Western cultures have been arguing, long before the accountability movement: The first person account of experiences is what matters to understand the complexity of teacher development, and it can be captured only through qualitative methods embodying epistemological stances substantially different from the positivistic approaches. Dr. Walton points out that Western cultures are therefore not foreign to the issue of subjectivity in educational research. I agree with her point but I would like to add a few points: First of all, it is not necessarily true that qualitative researchers view practitioners’ actions-in-practice as an essential arena for practice improvement. The point of my paper is to suggest that the subjective basis of practitioners’ actions is an important area to focus on for educational researchers but I am not clear that if this is something that is necessarily assumed among qualitative researchers in Western societies. In fact, qualitative research can take place as outside-in research just to identify certain patterns from qualitative data without any intension to engage in inside-out inquiries into teachers’ meaning-making process or their actions (Mertens, 2008). *Corresponding author: Noriyuki Inoue, University of San Diego 5998, Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110, E-mail: inoue@sandiego. edu