The Epistemic Discourse of Teachers: An Ethnographic Study

Abstract

Despite its obvious relevance and importance, the nature of teachers' images of knowledge, their ‘epistemologies’, has not been extensively studied. In particular, there appears to exist no ethnographic study which attempts to discover the nature of these views. Through semantic taxonomy interviews, written replies to questions, a classification (or category formation) task and participant observation, the epistemologies of several groups of secondary teachers were explored. Analysis and interpretation of the data so obtained indicated that teachers' epistemologies were complex and diverse but that the major issues for the majority of teachers centered around whether science in its logical‐empirical or positivist guise was the epitome of human knowledge or whether some more personal, intuitive access to knowledge was as important or even more important. Teachers' discourse about knowledge could be described in terms of the nature of the set of epistemological rules which they expressed and a model which appeared to allow further analysis of these rules was developed and applied to the data.