Lous Heshusius

Closing Down the Conversation: The End of the Quantitative-Qualitative Debate Among Educational Inquirers

The contention of this paper is that the claim of compatibility and the call for cooperation between quantitative and qualitative inquiry cannot be sustained. Moreover, these claims have the unfortunate effect of closing down an important conversation. To elaborate these points, this paper briefly reviews the transition from conflict to cooperation between the two perspectives and then notes how compatibility is based on a confusion over two different definitions of method. Finally, the discussion focuses on why this conversation, because it invokes issues crucial to our understanding of who we are and what we do as inquirers, must be reinvigorated.

Freeing Ourselves From Objectivity: Managing Subjectivity or Turning Toward a Participatory Mode of Consciousness?

The call by educational researchers for the methodological management of the self is placed within a discussion on modes of consciousness. The management of both subjectivity and objectivity are seen as sharing the same alienated mode of consciousness that believes in the possibility of a regulated distance between self and other. Drawing from interdisciplinary writings, I explore a participatory mode of consciousness, which involves a somatic, nonverbal quality of attention that necessitates letting go of the focus on self. The recognition of kinship and therefore of ethics is at the core of a participatory mode of consciousness. I further note relations to educational research and questions to be raised if a participatory mode of consciousness is to be fostered.

The Newtonian Mechanistic Paradigm, Special Education, and Contours of Alternatives An Overview

The concept of paradigm as a set of ontological and epistemological benchmarks is the basis for a discussion of the influence the Newtonian mechanistic paradigm has exerted over special education theory, research, and practice. Discussions of “malcontents” with the mechanistic paradigm across the social sciences and within special education are noted. Recent literature in the field of special education is critiqued for renaming theories as paradigms, thereby leaving mechanistic assumptions in place. The contours are then drawn of theoretical reorientations and of the emerging alternative holistic paradigm and its importance for special education. It is concluded that we do not have paradigms or paradigm shifts within the field, but that the field is part of a paradigm that is undergoing change across the sciences and social sciences.

Why Would They and I Want to Do It? A Phenomenological-Theoretical View of Special Education.

Counter-magic failed. The tyranny of those who fear the amorphous flux and flow of emergent life Reigns over my hours joy, turned dark, And constrains me to organize my own and childrens energies in systems-boxes Which do not conform to life, But to their terror of its freedom, spontaneity, delight and sometimes anger, rage and violence. How to save myself and the children from such a subtle tyranny? Shall I walk away? Shall I say OK? Or search still for the potent counter-magic while feigning conformity, cooperation? When gods sent up the holy fire from Mauna Loa to part the wide Pacific and create new land, It emerged with all the vital energy from the organic Source. Same Source for all the words of man, Emerging in their own time, by their own plan. No accountants numbers, charts and tables can predict the time, prescribe the time, proscribe their time, But counting is and the and a can only rob the poetry from languages holy flow, And rob the responsive essence from the dialogue. What is our part, my part?

The Arts, Science, and the Study of Exceptionality

This article outlines the need for the arts to be integrated into the scientific ways by which educators pursue an understanding of exceptionality. This need emerges from an awareness of profound similarities between the two ways of knowing and from the increasing disenchantment across the social sciences with the dominant scientific paradigm. To persist in the strict separation between scientific thought and the arts would be to restrict the progress of knowledge. Nobel Prize winner Prigogine suggests that the symbol for 20th Century science are art forms. Implications for the field of special education is suggested.

Pedagogy, Special Education, and the Lives of Young Children: A Critical and Futuristic Perspective.

A critical view is taken of the predominant positivist-empiricist assumptions that underlie most theories in the social sciences and which have had enormous influence on special education. These mechanistic assumptions (which include linearity, predictability, quantification, fact/value separation, stimulus-response model, and fragmentation) form the foundation for textbooks in early childhood special education, screening tests, and early identification measures. In the United States they have been solidified under Public Law 94–142. Against this backdrop, contemporary theoretical developments are noted as they provide us with more adequate principles by which to guide our work. Holism, phenomenology, and social constructionism offer valuable support to the concepts of all children as meaning makers, of growth through transformations, and of the socially constructed nature of knowing and of knowledge. Implications for early childhood education are drawn.

The Survival Story of a Non-reader: An Interview

In this article a learning disabled person tells about his most difficult, yet successful educational and social career as a non-reader. Both positive and negative aspects of our educational system are imbedded in this phenomenological account of what it means to be a non-reader in our culture. The introduction argues the need for views by exceptional persons to appear alongside the professional literature to complement and broaden our knowledge. For philosophical, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological reasons this has rarely been the case in standard social science research.