Essay Instructions: You are to write a 2-page paper. Read the article below and answer the discussion question. State the question first and then continue to answer. Do Not Use Outside Sources.
McIntyre discusses various paradigms of research…
Question
1.What are the different rules and assumptions of these paradigms?
In this view, research is mechanical, male and rather melancholic. The problem is like a key that unlocks a particular rational process, one which is abstract and impersonal. The researcher struggles in isolation to state the problem, and there is little sense of him engaging much with other people. With precision and control in mind, the researcher acts from outside on the educational field. He alone appears to have the power to bring a problem into being. This model for research has been called the positivist, empirical-analytic or natural science model, and has, through its grip on education and the social sciences, dominated adult education and training. It continues to be recommended to students as the most respectable approach to research, at least in the US. However, it has been vigorously criticized as being based on limited assumptions about science, persons and society that deny the Powell of human beings to make meanings and create a social world or to imagine human inquiry as a collaborative activity of research participants. Thus, for several decades there has been a challenge to the domination of empirical-analytic science and a search for alternative programs. In the liberation from the strait-jacket of a natural science model, there is room for more choice but also great potential for confusion. If now there are different frames of reference for inquiry, it is even more necessary to make explicit the underlying assumptions of our work. In fact, if research includes inquiring into our practice as adult educators and trainers, we could avoid examining our deeply held beliefs about our practice and its contexts? And perhaps also what we believe about inquiry? This chapter aims to explore some of these questions by: briefly clarifying some meanings of the concept paradigm; exploring some dynamics of research in the field of adult education and training; and exploring selected examples of research drawn from different context of adult education and training.
Paradigms
The term paradigm is used in multiple senses in both educational research and the wider literature. Through there are no definite schools of thought about paradigm, three main meanings can be identified: the social organization of science. In this view, the paradigm is the key concept in a complex sociological account of the way science is institutionalized. It refers to typical methodologies their associated disciplines, and the social relationships and the worldview that underlie, for example, Western behavioral science. This is the rich meaning of paradigm that emerged from the work of Kuhn. A broad philosophy of science. Here, the paradigm is seen as a set of philosophical beliefs supporting a broad approach to research. It is a way of expressing a philosophical alternative to empiricist science, for example, naturalistic inquiry paradigm for the new paradigm inquiry. That’s, it is argued, there are many methods but two competing paradigms. Another version of this approach understands qualitative research and quantitative research as opposing paradigm with paradigm being represented in many comparable traditions. Types of science. This is a view of paradigms associated with critical theory. There are three forms of human inquiry can take, according to the dominant knowledge-interests. These are empirical-analytic, interpretive, and critical science. This is the view Carr and Kemmis developed when they argued that a critical educational science, going beyond both empiricist and interpretive science, is necessary if practitioners are to achieve a better relationship between theory and their professional practice. The advantage of the above first and third views is that they emphasize that knowledge is always constructed in a social context. They assume there are no absolute answers as to what research is. Activity deemed as research is legitimate when it conforms to the practices, ideals and values shared by a community of researchers. This view is of the great significance to adult educators and trainers. It makes me context of inquiry – and the values and interests that make the context what it is – fundamentally important. Because there is such a variety of contexts in adult education and training, this view of the research in the field will lead us to relish, rather than regret, the uncontrolled diversity of research practice in adult education and training.
We will, then, be able to identify a range of research traditions perhaps in different kinds of organizations and settings. A given paradigm will be accepted in one place but rejected in others. History, culture and location will affect what paradigm surfaces in an organization. We might ask, for example, how research is seen by computing professional, telecommunication technicians, vocational education planners, community development workers, Greenpeace activists or Catholic missionaries. What complex about inquiry emerged among practitioners with such organizations are challenged or changed?
The concept of paradigm thus provide us with a way of understanding research and inquiry in our field practice. The term inquiry is added here to suggest that a range of investigation activity can count as research. Paradigm leads us to greater awareness of our deeper assumption about such matters as knowledge, human learning, self and society. Thus, there is a connection between the researchers understanding of research and the view of the field. Paradigm points to the difference in the way that people understand adult education and training – to the fundamental differences in the worldview, institutional linkages, political and social values that underlie beliefs about what should be researched and why it should be researched – and how in fact the field of inquiry is seen. For this reason, a paradigm is something more than the philosophical reference for one research methodology over another. To reiterate an important point, the term paradigm issues in a range of ways at different levels of analysis. Ongoing debates about education research have not really clarified these meanings. Three difficulties are worth noting. First, there is a problem of different levels of analysis of paradigm: scholars are often unclear whether they mean a specific methodology, and institutionalize research edition or a broad worldview. The concept can be used validly in each of these ways, although equally paradigm is best not reduced to any one of them. Second, there is a tendency to refer to qualitative research as a paradigm, to denote its indifference from quantitative methodologies although what is usually meant is there a difference from a scientific approach. This is the problem of equating paradigm to a type of methodology, obscuring the important aspects of research as institutionalized power. It obscures important differences among diverse research traditions that are qualitative. It ignores critique of social critical. We are suggesting in this chapter. Third, the very abstractness of the concept of paradigm can lead to an exaggerated emphasis on philosophical basis of research compared to political, apical and pragmatic considerations. This is precisely what is wrong with the idealized model of scientific research referred to earlier: it neglects the way assumptions actually construct the research process, it is important to ask in what sense or senses it is an author is using this rich but troublesome idea of paradigm.
Adult Education as a Field of Inquiry
That the difference among adult educators and trainers about the nature and the uses of research can be seen in a number of key areas: the influence of school education on thinking about educational research; the conflict between institutional and learner perspectives on adult education and training; the domination of research by the intervention of the state in economic reform and educational restructuring; and the importance of the context of inquiry on what is researched, who does the research, and to what ends. Research on adult education and training has been overshadowed high school education. Education is steel often thought of in terms of schooling, and it is only quite recently that TAFE, workplace training and adult education have become researchable. Academic research in adult education and training is not well developed and perhaps scholars their fortune to exaggerate the special features which separate adult education from education and the social sciences in general. This can cut off inquiry from rich sources of theory to be found beyond the field of practice. Moreover, the schooling influence over it emphasizes institutional or formal adult learning, such as in TAFE systems. This is unfortunate because some of the most interesting research questions in adult education and training are about the informal learning in workplaces, community organizations and other settings. There is a tension between an institution perspective and a learner perspective on adult education and training. tension exists between a perspective which emphasizes formal learning in courses and one which emphasizes the need to understand the experience of adult learners. This tension is seen in different scholarly research traditions. Research is still dominated by participation and course taking: who participates, why they calm, how much they participate, and what they gain. This research is often empirical-analytical, often uses a national sample surveyed approach, and may emphasize the distribution of adult learning opportunities and barriers to participation. Others working in an interpretive tradition have reacted against its focus and explored how adult learning is distinctive, how it can be understood, and how he can be theorized as an aspect of life experience. By neither the participation nor the adult learning research perspective provides a framework that helps us to understand how institutions and learners interact in context. A further tradition can be identified, which engages critically with the social and economic institutions analyzing how they determine radically different opportunities for learners. Research in this tradition is participatory, it goals on as part of social action and it is often critical of the failure of academics to speak of social injustice, power and oppression. We can thus see that I don’t education research is not a unified field in which the goals and methods of research are subtle among experts. There are deep ideological differences about but don’t education and training that affect what is seen as the meaning and purpose of research. The state is intervening to reform education and training, transform the practice of adult educators and trainers. In the past decade, adult educators and trainers have been affected by continuous restructuring of educational institutions. The contemporary state has taken a much more direct role in shaping educational direction, under the political-economic pressures of the shift to global capitalism. This had several consequences. In particular, the state has employed strategic research to engineer policy changes – for example, in making vocational education and training respond to the needs of industry or learner clients through competition policy and drawing private and community providers into a national training system. Educational policy has itself become an important focus of research and critique. Thus, important questions for researchers are: in what directions are the policy interventions of national governments driving both practice and research? How far do researchers respond to policy agendas and to what extent do they challenged and critique those agendas? How they respond will largely depend on how they see themselves as researchers. Are they are objective observers, measuring and communicating information about policy impacts? Are they insightful interpreters of the meaning of change to those it affects? Or are they change managers, dancing with the demons of organizational restructuring? Or do researchers see themselves as representatives of those oppressed by change? The practice of research and inquiry is always situated – it always takes place in a particular organization or settings. We have already suggested that it is too limiting for a doubt education and training research to take either an institutional perspective or a learner perspective as an exclusive frame of reference. Research needs to explore how learning occurs in context, because the setting of adult education and learning can differ greatly from each other. Where something is learned in TAFE, community adult education, HRD, through informal learning in an environmental campaign, how it is structured, the relative power of participants, and the kind and degree of coercion all defined the kind of experience to learn a will have. To inquire into practice leads to analysis of context and it structuring of learning. While assumption of the development of professional field of adult education and training is that there might be theories of adult learning, which can apply irrespective of the nature of setting in which learning, occurs. Such research in the field is limited by such frameworks? Or on some of the eminently researchable things in the field to be found in what is distinctive about the context of practice? If so, the researchers’ framework for understanding the context becomes important. Researchers need to analyze their assumptions about the context that lie perhaps unconsciously in their thinking – affecting, for example, what they take to be a problem for research, for whom it is a problem, and how it might be approach to research.
Framework, Problem and Process
Their view of inquiry I am suggesting is that any adult educator or trainer has a framework for understanding research in the field. This is a long way from the textbook approach which equates research with formal inquiry for scientific and scholarly purposes. In this alternative view: research can take quite different forms, in which research method may be less important than in scholarly research; the former research will depend greatly on the context, the researchers framework and the kind of problem that arises; research is seen as a political and practical process in which the researcher pursues inquiries into a problem three range of activities; and there are then a wider range of issues that impinge on the researcher: issues of power and relationship with others, of ethics and negotiation with participants, of naming and theorizing concepts, of design and methods, of project management, writing up and reporting. Interpretive research can take many forms. Among the best known is educational ethnography, which takes a problem how participants make sense of their social world e.g. the classroom, a workshop, a community group, a learning team. Among the best-known research on this kind is Walker’s Louts and Legends. Over three years, Walker studied the life of several groups of young men at a Sydney high school. The Asian men are understood as inhabiting worlds constructed by male youth culture and those cultures with which it interacts – the culture of the school, of ethnic and language communities, and social class. The identities of young men are shaped by the youth culture and its interactions, but at the same time the boys are shaping the youth culture by imposing themselves on it or resisting is by resisting its value and understandings. In empirical-analytic studies, such voices are heard. Human complexities are purged of their subjective qualities. For the behavioral scientist understanding. It does not isolate and quantify the factors which prompted learning, such as course or teacher qualities, the learners own readiness to change, or the effects of other activities associated with the center. The scientist does not deny that the stories are moving, but simply say we do not know what they represent because there has not been controlled analysis of various factors involved. We could leave the issue there but for a crucial point: as the vocational education and training agenda demands more sophisticated analysis of outcomes. The corporatization of public education institutions, the emphasis on outcomes-driven activity, favors highly instrumental research. Empirical-analytic science is attractive to the corporate managerialism of the contemporary state, because it ties down the object of study and restricts the meaning in play when controlling the communication of evidence becomes a priority. The tendency of positive science reduce complex information to simplistic generalizations became a virtue rather than a vice. The new public sector managers are less concerned with the real-life complexities of bowel adult learning than with controlling the policy agenda, assessing policy impact, and limiting demands on the public purse. The policy interest of Government has led to the resurgence of participation studies, but in a very different form from the North American tradition of motivational research which aim to develop theory, not influence social policy. The new wave of policy research demand social and political relevance from researchers and a robust engagement with social policy debates. The social research is not simple surveillance by governments of the educational effort of their populations but is partly shaped by the advocacy of such public-interest organizations as the national institution for adult continuing education in the UK, which through such national survey as the learning divide study has shown the extent of the social inequalities that challenge the rhetoric of lifelong learning for all.
Conclusion
In this chapter little has been said of the significant contemporary impact on educational research of feminist and post-structuralist approaches and postmodernist thought. The theories challenge the notion that there are clearly identifiable research frameworks, and suggests a diversity of theoretical and value assumption and research methods. There has been enough said here about the confusion engendered by paradigm theory to suggest that the term might have outlived its usefulness, particularly when it has been employed in a counter-critical way to reassert the authority of behavioral science position in the guise of such unhelpful terms as post-positivism. Whatever the limitations of some accounts of paradigm, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that research knowledge is perspectival rather than obsolete. Knowledge is always generated within a perspective or research tradition and a project was set of assumptions about what is problematic, what is researchable, what counts as evidence and so on. This chapter has equated understanding research not to knowledge of research method or techniques, but to examining how methods frame or construct knowledge. The argument has emphasized the diversity of research practice in adult education and training, suggesting that is diversity reflects the nature of the field. Researchers different in the perspective they take on the field and its problems, according to their assumptions about such factors as the importance of formal courses provided by institutions, the kinds of policy forces driving research, and the nature of the context in which they work. This chapter has limited discussion of three competing research traditions which exemplify research in the field: empirical-analytic research, in the form of participation studies, will probably continue to dominate policy research, if only because of the demand of the contemporary state for hard evidence of the value of adult education; interpretive research, centered on the exploration of learner perspectives, will also continue to advocate the study of the subjective meanings of adult learning. The challenge for research, however, is to transcend the limitations of this opposition between institution and learner. This chapter also argues that research needs to do more justice to context and it has in the past. Diversity of context makes Adult Education distinctive; therefore, research must develop better ways to understand how learner and setting interact reduce adult learning. Neither an institutional perspective the focus of participation nor a learner perspective the focus on adult learning theory can give an adequate frame of reference for understanding this interaction. New models for research will need to be found for this task, and they will need to engage more with the social and political forces that are determining the agendas for policy and practice in adult education and training.
