Gaile S. Cannella

Predatory vs. Dialogic Ethics: Constructing an Illusion or Ethical Practice as the Core of Research Methods.

The ethical conduct of research is addressed from two perspectives, as a regulatory enterprise that creates an illusion of ethical practice and as a philosophical concern for equity and the imposition of power within the conceptualization and practice of research itself. The authors discuss various contemporary positions that influence conceptualizations of ethical practices that include imperialist market imperatives for research that marginalize ethical concerns, positions held by peoples who have themselves been traditionally placed in the margins of societal power, academic positions and the selves of individual researchers, and locations created for the specific regulation of research. The final section of the paper introduces the articles in this special issue; these articles illustrate the complexity and cultural embeddedness of research regulation as well as the need for reflexive critical discourses that recognize the moral and ethical dimensions of everything but especially as related to the construction and practice of research.

Qualitative Research, Power, and the Radical Right

Recent legislative and executive orders that mandate preferred methods for evaluating the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 signal a much larger movement in the social sciences. Attacks stemming from the “culture wars” of the 1990s have spread to forms of research labeled “unscientific,” including postmodern research and qualitative research. Examination of the sources of the attacks reveals a wide network of new and recent foundations with decidedly right-wing political views, the establishment and growing power of the National Association of Scholars, and other well-funded efforts to discredit research that uncovers and exposes deep inequities in social life and schooling on gender, race, social class, religion, and/or sexual orientation. Each of these well-funded sources of attack is discussed and the agenda of each is dissected.

The Scientific Discourse of Education: predetermining the lives of others - Foucault, education, and children

A discourse of education has emerged that legitimizes the belief that science has revealed what younger human beings are like, what we can expect from them at various ages, and how we should differentiate our treatment of them in educational settings. Recent poststructuralist, critical, and postmodern work has called to question the notion of predetermined, universal childhoods that require particular forms of educational experience determined by scientific discovery and by human beings who are older. The purpose of this article is to further problematize the discourse of education that has justified the construction of younger human beings as the ‘other’ and legitimizes the continued regulation of their lives through the institution of education. This particular problematization is based on and limited by the work of Foucault and addressed from two positions: (1) rules that govern the discourse of education; and (2) disciplinary technologies that produce docile bodies as objects that yield to the discourse.

Dangerous Discourses II: Comprehending and Countering the Redeployment of Discourses (and Resources) in the Generation of Liberatory Inquiry

In the previous special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, titled Dangerous Discourses: Methodological Conservatism and Governmental Regimes of Truth (Lincoln & Cannella, 2004), the authors analyzed the National Research Council (NRC) report Scientific Research in Education to illustrate the dangers in conceptualizations, forms of legitimation, and methodologies of present day reconstructions of the discourses of research. The NRC report is a U.S. government–requested project designed to clearly define the nature of research that is to be labeled as representing quality and therefore useful and fundable. Accurately referred to as methodological fundamentalism (House, in press), contemporary conservative research discourses as exhibited in the report have returned to a Western elitist high modernism that would reinscribe a narrow form of experimentalism as the “gold standard” for judging legitimacy and quality. Similar to the backlash against the civil rights and women’s movements during the past 15 to 20 years, diverse research philosophies and methodologies (e.g., critical theory, race/ethnic studies, feminist theories) that are conceptualized from within critical dispositions and have proposed to include the voices and life conditions of the traditionally marginalized are not “just” attacked but are directly rejected (NRC, 2002, “reject[s] the postmodernist school of thought,” p. 25). These conservative discourses are being produced from within the United States and other government complexes of power (and reinforced from various societal institutional positions) in a manner that would inscribe and provide resources to a universalist regulatory science. Originating from multiple and diverse positions, critical analyses of the NRC report (represented in the first special issue) provide specific examples of the ways that power and resources are being redeployed to foster conservative technologies of truth. Discourses are shifting and being repositioned

Preparing Teachers for Cultural Diversity: Constructivist Orientations.

Abstract Constructivist philosophical orientations can provide the foundation for teacher education programs that address cultural diversity. The view of knowledge and reality as human construction, value-laden, and embedded within social context leads to a respect for diverse cultural perspectives. Constructivists can make a conscious choice to examine and value democratic principles that actually lead to the empowerment of all groups of citizens. Social reconstructionist teacher education is an example of a teacher preparation philosophy that implicitly follows constructivist principles. Social reconstructionists have recognized that preservice teachers enter education with their own constructed realities and must be involved in the examination of their own culturally based beliefs as well as the historical and cultural context from which schooling has emerged. These constructivist orientations can lead to the reconceptualization of teacher education and a truly democratic response to cultural diversity.

Epilogue: Claiming a Critical Public Social Science—Reconceptualizing and Redeploying Research

The word itself, “research”, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. (p. 1)

Learning through social interaction: Shared cognitive experience, negotiation strategies, and joint concept construction for young children

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the nature of sociocognitive growth in 5- and 6-year-old children. Questions focused on (a) growth when interacting with peers who entered the investigation performing differently or similarly on cognitive tasks; (b) joint construction of concepts within collaborative problem solving; (c) negotiation strategies used for problem solving; and (d) levels of shared cognitive experience displayed by young children during sociocognitive interaction. Pairs of young children worked together to solve spatial perspective taking problems. Cognitive growth following interaction and the within-pair social interactions were analyzed. Entering performance composition of the dyad did not impact cognitive growth. The construction of shared cognitive experiences in which children worked together and actually solved problems did result in cognitive change. Educational implications are provided.

Critical and Feminist Reconstructions of Early Childhood Education: Continuing the Conversations

Over the past few years, several early childhood educators have engaged in both critical and feminist analyses of the dominant perspectives in early childhood education. Following the work of such scholars as William Pinar and Maxine Greene, they have called for reconceptualizations of the field. In a recent session at the American Educational Research Association conference, a large panel of early childhood educators shared their visions for reconceptualization. Four of those visions are included in this colloquium. Readers are invited to react and provide their own suggestions.

Regulatory Power: Can a Feminist Poststructuralist Engage in Research Oversight?

This personal narrative focuses on a specific experience with the regulation and potential discrediting of diverse forms of research—service as the chairperson of an institutional review board. An attempt to adjust to contemporary legislative expectations for the protection of human participants in research in one institutional setting is described. Because of the complex, ambiguous, multivocal, and political nature of research and research regulation, the author has come to believe that qualitative researchers who become informed critical activists regarding research ethics and regulation are immediately needed as voices in the construction of appropriate practices that would protect all those involved—subjects/participants, researchers, volunteer academic reviewers, individual informants, the general public—while at the same tiome facilitating respect for research diversity. Valued qualitative research constructs—emergence, reflexivity, and the recognition of power and political agendas that place ethical practice and research diversity at the forefront of public discourses—are discussed as essential to the critical regulation of research.

Gender Composition and Conflict in Dyadic Sociocognitive Interaction: Effects on Spatial Learning in Young Children.

Abstract The effects of gender and disagreements on learning during sociocognitive interaction were investigated with 33 pairs of children between 5 and 7 years of age using spatial perspective-taking tasks. Children who did not make cognitive gains during social interaction had partners who expressed multiple disagreements that were not justified or explained. Females placed with other females exhibited more unexplained disagreements than mixed-gender or all-male pairs did. Males placed with males progressed more following social interaction than mixed-gender or all-female pairs did. Theoretical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.