Diverse Epistemologies Research Articles

The Mutual Conditioning of Humans and Pathogens: Implications for Integrative Geographical Scholarship

We highlight an emerging mode of human–environment enquiry that is executed by cross-disciplinary teams, spurs innovation of hybrid methods, and leads to nonintuitive findings relevant beyond disciplinary framings or specific cases. The extension of this approach in health geography is particularly instructive. By focusing on material objects like soils, insects, or sewage, researchers from diverse epistemologies are compelled to translate conceptual models of disease causation, risk, and vulnerability. Humans and pathogens mutually condition one another, a result of continuously changing exposures (settlement and development patterns that modify pathogen and vector ecology) and institutional processes (legal, economic, and organizational contexts in which environments are modified and agents respond to risk). The dynamic interactions of pathogen ecologies and human institutions produce a type of coevolution, as evidenced by three cases we consider: bacteriological and helminth infections from urban wastewater irrigation, West Nile virus and its mosquito vector in the built environment, and Valley Fever and fungal distribution under changing climate and land disturbance. Place-based, contextual exposure pathways are shown to provide only a partial explanation of disease transmission and must be complemented by insights into individual and organizational agents’ motivations, logics, and responses. The object in its context holds the key to understanding the intersection between physical and environmental, and human and governance geographies. Interactively identifying and pursuing theoretical and applied challenges in this manner allows researchers to move beyond entrenched subdisciplinary understandings to frame new supradisciplinary questions. Key Words: human–pathogen interaction, institutions, mosquitoes, Valley Fever, wastewater.

Clan, Sage, and Sky

Colleges and universities retain Native American and Latino college students at lower rates than other ethnic groups even when culturally based services, financial assistance, and support are provided. College teaching and conceptions of learning have yet to evolve on a widespread basis toward culturally diverse epistemologies and practice. This narrative inquiry explores meaning making of 50 Native, Hispano, and Mestizo American students about their learning in a variety of contexts including face-to-face and online college courses as well as learning at home, in extended family and tribal contexts. The study also explores teaching practices students identified as most helpful to their learning and success. Underlying cultural constructs emerged from narrative analysis in eight areas of learning.

Topophilia and Place Experience

Academic spaces of Regional Dynamics and Semiotics and Aesthetic Thought, developed under the program of Bachelor in Elementary Education with Emphasis on Social Sciences of Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas and the Research Geopaideia Group, interested in providing valuable elements in the discussion around current forms as geographical space is revealed and taught in our societies and educational contexts, especially in a teacher training program, it makes a bid to create a space for dialogue, taking advantage of recent digital media and communication, with experts in concepts and diverse epistemologies about geographic space and its significance in the world of life: it is how it is possible to consolidate an encounter with the teacher - Yi Fu Tuan. This meeting was primarily a time to explore emotional responses and for personal, academic and research enrichment full of opportunities for talking to and from the knowledge of Professor Tuan, about space issues. The work of Professor Tuan, widely known to geographers, geography teachers and those interested in related issues has provided in recent decades valuable items for the understanding, study, research and experience of space from other possibilities in which the subject is a main character. The Group Geopaideia aims to provide references for reflection in order to transform the traditional conception of geography in school that locates it only as a science for the enumeration and description of the biophysical phenomena on Earth’s surface, being the geography neglected and marginalized as a task of just mechanical memorization of dates and locations forgetting its core of study which is the geographical and socio-cultural dimension.

‘Diverse Epistemologies’, Truth and Archaeology: In Defence of Realism

In a recent journal article, as well as in a recent book chapter, in which she critiques my position on 'indigenous knowledge', Lesley Green of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town argues that 'diverse epistemologies ought to be evaluated not on their capacity to express a strict realism but on their ability to advance understanding'. In order to examine the implications of Green's arguments, and of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin's work in this regard, I apply them to a well-known controversy between Native American (or First Nations) creationism and archaeology. I argue that issues in social justice should be distinguished from issues in epistemology. Moreover, in tightening in this paper the link between knowledge and truth, I attempt to defend science as a 'privileged way of seeing the world'. The analysis of truth, and of related concepts like reality and 'the way the world is', will assume a central role here. I contend that, ultimately, the only coherent and consistent position is a realist view of the pertinent issues and ideas.

Narrative as Inquiry

ABSTRACT The author suggests that all research is narrative. Resituating all research as narrative, as opposed to characterizing narrative as one particular form of inquiry, provides a critical space for rethinking research beyond current dualisms and bifurcations that create boundaries that limit the capacity for dialogue across diverse epistemologies. The contemporary bifurcation of research as either quantitative or qualitative, or as scientific or nonscientific, has resulted in a master narrative of research which assumes incommensurability across paradigms. The author weaves 3 questions through this research: (a) What is lost when narrative and science are constructed as opposing and incommensurable modes of inquiry? (b) How might scholars reconceptualize inquiry outside a binary framework that privileges science? and (c) In what ways can resituating all narrative as inquiry open spaces for dialogue across multiple epistemologies that is the heart of democratic inquiry? The author concludes by suggesting that narrative is not a method, but rather a process of meaning making that encompasses 3 major spheres of inquiry: the scientific (physical), the symbolic (human experience) and the sacred (metaphysical).

Developing the Next Generation of Education Researchers: UCLA's Experience with the Spencer Foundation Research Training Grant

Background/Context In the early 1990s, the Spencer Foundation instituted an Institutional Research Training Grant (RTG) program to improve the preparation of the next generation of education researchers. UCLA received an RTG in the first round of competition. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study UCLA's Spencer RTG program sought to develop excellent researchers focused on educational issues associated with urban students of color and students with special needs. An evaluation was conducted to learn more about the experiences and career paths of participating Spencer students, the value added by RTG program participation, and institutional changes associated with the RTG program. Population/Participants/Subjects Participants were all 52 UCLA education PhD students who received a Spencer RTG Fellowship in the first 9 years of the program, 52 matched comparison students, and 10 Department of Education faculty. Intervention/Program/Practice Spencer and comparison students participated in the same PhD program courses and requirements, mentoring/apprenticeship model, research practica, and research apprenticeship courses. Spencer students in addition had 3 years of full financial support, came from all areas of the Department of Education, participated in a special seminar every 2 weeks for 3 years, had a personal professional development fund, and were offered many opportunities to network with students and faculty from other Spencer programs. Research Design This in-house evaluation employed multiple approaches. Institutional data provided information about RTG program goals and activities and student characteristics and performance. A Web-based questionnaire and individual interviews provided quantitative and qualitative data about the performance and opinions of all 52 Spencer students and 52 comparison students. Dissertations were scored for engagement with Spencer program areas of emphasis. Individual faculty interviews provided opinions about the RTG program itself and its implications for the PhD program. Findings/Results Nearly all students were successful and benefited from courses, mentor-ship, and opportunities. Spencer students benefited particularly from financial freedom to pursue specific research interests and opportunities for networking and support. They valued highly interacting with PhD students from the Department of Education's entire range of epistemologies and research traditions. They were seen as an elite group, particularly groomed for academic positions. Significantly more Spencer than comparison graduates were in professional positions in which engaging in education research was highly valued. Conclusions/Recommendations The study underlines the following contributions: value of the apprenticeship/mentoring model; strengthening of sites for exploring diverse research traditions and epistemologies; value of belonging to local and national communities of practice; utility of multiyear funding packages; and enhanced faculty interaction around improved research preparation.

‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity

Responding to Kai Horsthemke’s call for the valorisation of universal knowledge within the debate on indigenous knowledge, the paper argues for an understanding of knowledge that is based neither universalism nor relativism. Arguing against the dualisms of ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘science’, the paper proposes that the debate be focused rather on knowledge diversity. Drawing on the work of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin, the paper argues that diverse epistemologies ought to be evaluated not on their capacity to express a strict realism but on their ability to advance understanding. Such an approach allows for the evaluation of the advancement of understanding without necessarily requiring the expression of the literal truths that divide ‘belief’ from ‘knowledge’.

When Writing Professors Teach Literature: Shaping Questions, Finding Answers, Effecting Change

The article explores writing-centered pedagogies that deepen student learning in literature survey courses. More broadly, the article also responds to Richard Fulkerson and Maureen Daly Goggin, who challenge professors of English studies to find disciplinary unity within the diverse epistemologies of rhetoric.

Mediating the meaning of evidence through epistemological diversity

Nursing's disciplinary recognition of 'multiple ways of knowing' reflects an epistemological diversity that supports nursing praxis. Nursing as praxis offers a conceptual way to explore what it is about the interface of practice, knowledge and evidence in nursing that distinguishes us as a discipline. I suggest that the relationship between evidence and knowledge is defined and mediated by the same epistemological diversity that supports nursing as praxis. Just as the meaning and truth-value of evidence is evaluated from within the body of existing disciplinary knowledge, new evidence may prompt an evaluation of the meaning and truth-value of extant nursing knowledge. Nursing practice that relies on scientific evidence as a singular basis of practice knowledge is susceptible to exploitation by the diverse agendas operating within an ideology of evidence-based practice and the healthcare system. Mediating the meaning of evidence for nursing practice through acknowledgement of the diverse epistemologies that underpin nursing knowledge will contribute to a disciplinary-specific definition of what constitutes evidence for nursing, and will better direct how evidence is integrated into a disciplinary body of knowledge.

School-Family Relations In Context

This study addressed teachers' and parents' perceptions of the meanings and functions of parent involvement. Twelve teachers and 13 parents participated in semistructured ethnographic interviews. All actors were either employed by or involved in an ethnically concentrated elementary school in a low-income, culturally diverse, urban community. Analyses revealed that teachers and parents have different perceptions of parent involvement. These different perceptions implicate diverse epistemologies,differential power, and some competing purposes. On the other hand, teachers and parents both claim that firm, mutually beneficial partnerships (or collaboration) between them are essential to children's learning, healthy development, and success in school. Perceived barriers need to be addressed for these partnerships to eventuate.

Comment: “Science” Rejects Postmodernism

The National Research Council report Scientific Research in Educationclaims to present an inclusive view of science as it responds to federal government attempts to legislate educational research. This author argues, however, that the report in fact narrowly defines scienceas positivism and methodologyas quantitative. These definitions are made possible by the outright rejection of postmodernism and the rejection by omission of other theories including queer, feminist, race, postcolonial, critical, and poststructural theories. The chief issue in this report is, in fact, not “science” but the larger issue of epistemology, from which methodologies like conventional science emerge. After using postmodern analyses to illustrate the danger of the report’s normalizing and totalizing discourse, this author urges researchers to be on guard against those who would reject diverse epistemologies and methodologies in educational research

Preparing Education Doctoral Students for Epistemological Diversity

One of the most confusing developments in educational research over the past quarter-century has been the proliferation of epistemologies-beliefs about what counts as knowledge in the field of education, what is evidence of a claim, and what counts as a warrant for that evidence. Although the discussion of various epistemological perspectives in educational research often is highly abstract, and viewed as the prerogative of philosophers at some distance from the real world of educational research practice, the consequences of this diversity are quite real. Beliefs about what counts as knowledge are a central determinant about what a field knows about its subject matter. The variability in such beliefs can lead to small and large gaps in what various members of the educational research community hold to be true about educational phenomena. These discontinuities are partly at the root of the widespread perception that the community of educational researchers has failed to amass a cumulative body of knowledge about how schools and schooling work (National Research Council, 1999; Ravitch, 1998; Viadero, 1999). Few claims about educational research are as damning, or as damaging to the enterprise. Experienced researchers and novices alike find it hard to keep up with the cacophony of diverse epistemologies. Behind the welter of names-positivism, naturalism, postpositivism, empiricism, relativism, feminist standpoint epistemology, foundationalism, postmodernism, each with an array of subspecies-lie important questions: Is there a single, absolute truth about educational phenomena, or are there multiple truths? (Or is the concept of truth itself so problematic as to be of no value in understanding the world?) Can we count on our senses, or on reason, to distinguish that which is true about the world from that which is false? Are there methods that can lead us close to understanding, or are there inherent indeterminacies in all methods? Is knowledge of the world discovered, or constructed? Can knowledge of the world be evaluated independent of the social and historical contexts in which it exists, or is it always contingent upon, or relative to, particular circumstances?

Disciplinary Integration in Graduate Environmental and Natural Resources Education

In the context of environmental management and policy, disciplinary integration is an important component of problem analysis. Although the specific meanings of disciplinary integration are difficult to define, skillful integration requires an understanding of abstract concepts and hands-on experience with integrative processes. We suggest a two-part framework, consisting of substantive and process components, for graduate-level curricula in environmental/natural resources. The substantive components focus first on establishing a disciplinary foundation in descriptive and analytical approaches used in the social and ecological sciences. Once this foundation is established, confronting common and diverse epistemologies and ontologies across social and biophysical fields provides a means for understanding differences and building links among disparate disciplines. The process components focus on cognitive-analytical activities and interactive social dynamics built around integrating disciplinary approaches. These provide a necessary experience in integrative thinking and provide opportunities for building professional skills in integration. Further, they can provide a transformative experience for students' understanding of integrating social and biophysical perspectives in natural resource and environmental issues.

Mentoring Moral Courage: Resources in Liberation Ethics, Community Service, and the Social Commitment of the Academy

AbstractThe essay argues that resources in Scripture, tradition, and social theory are important but insufficient to the task of teaching social ethics. Liberation ethics promotes not only diverse epistemologies to evaluate the structures that mediate social relations, but also moral courage to execute social responsibility. Given this agenda, teaching social ethics also requires community-based learning experiences, democratic classrooms, and the social commitment of the academy. Drawing on student writing and the example of the author's own academic institution, the essay argues that multiple resources and sites are needed to educate students in ethical theory and moral courage.

Call–English as a Second Language

CALL for English as a second language1is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry which has been influenced primarily by educational technology (Reiser, 1987) but also by fields such as computational linguistics2and recently by applied linguistics as well. These related fields contribute diverse epistemologies which shape CALL research questions and methods. The diversity in CALL research can also be explained in party be the current variety of approaches to CALL development and use. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, pedagogical objectives in CALL were focused primarily, although not exclusively, on improving specified areas of learner's grammatical knowledge through approaches borrowed from educational technology (Hart 1981, Hope, Taylor and Pusack 1984, Wyatt 1984). Today, in contrast, CALL is used for a variety of pedagogical objectives through many different types of software such as microworlds (Coleman 1985, Papert 1980), grammar checkers (Hull, Ball, Fox, Levin and McCutchen 1987), pronunciation feedback systems (Anderson-Hseih 1994, Pennington 1991), intelligent tutoring systems (Chanier, Pengelly, Twidale and Self 1992), concordancer programs (Johns 1986, Tribble and Jones 1990), word processing (Pennington 1993), and software for computer-mediated communication (Kaye 1992). These diverse approaches to CALL are predicated on different beliefs about teaching and learning (Higgins 1995, Kenning and Kenning 1990, Sanders and Kenner 1983, Stevens 1992). Rather than reviewing these “CALL philosophies,” this article will focus on the evolution of research traditions dedicated to the empirical study of CALL use for ESL. Accordingly, the termCALL researchis employed to refer to empirical research on the use of CALL.

Mead vs. Blumer: The Divergent Methodological Perspectives of Social Behaviorism and Symbolic Interactionism

An examination of the methodological perspectives of Mead and Blumer establishes considerable divergence in emphasis and consequence. Their diverse epistemologies rest upon equally diverse ontological assumptions. Blumer's naturalistic inquiry neither compliments Mead's methodological perspective nor facilitates the examination of Mead's theoretical ideas. Several experimental studies of 'taking the attitude of other are discussed, one by Mead's student Leonard S. Cottrell, which are consistent with Mead's methodological perspective. That perspective is equally applicable when exploratory-descriptive research is required. Many problems of naturalistic methodology are avoided by recognizing the different domains of meaning for investigator and investigated, by reducing the scope of behavior to be examined, and by increasing control of the investigator's behavior regarding that which is examined. An illustrative study is discussed.