I briefly kind of wondered if it was me who'd provoked this post by Greg, since my comment on last week's curios touched a little bit on epistemology. I'm currently taking courses on research methods in education/the social sciences, and we've seen the different epistemological paradigms that subtend different types of scientific research. The way it was explained to me, positivism is the paradigm according to which we can know exactly what reality consists of and understand relations of cause and effect between phenomena. It's a fairly naive position to take, so it was superseded by post-positivism, which stipulates that we can know an approximation of reality and understand relations of cause and effect in a probabilistic manner, through statistical analysis. This is the paradigm that subtends quantitative research. Qualitative research, on the other hand, can be based on a so-called constructivist epistemological framework, which stipulates that different versions of reality are constructed by the different participants and that research can consist of learning about these different constructed realities.
Now, this is all well and good. But it's true that when confronted with some inconvenient results produced by predictive quantitative research, some educationalists will retreat to the position that we cannot know for sure what works or doesn't work in education, it's naive to think otherwise, our students are not statistics but people in all their messiness, and we need to adopt a more nuanced view of what works in education and what research can tell us. Claims of "positivism", in other words. But I don't think this accusation is one that its targets would think accurately describes their views. Greg, for example, thinks research shows explicit teaching to be more effective for student learning than discovery learning. But he doesn't claim we know for sure that explicit teaching will be more effective for every student in every situation, or that we can predict for sure what a student will have learned after the process of explicit teaching. Greg adopts a post-positivist view of knowledge, not a positivist one.
What annoys me about some of these educationalists, and which I was complaining about in my comment on last week's curios, is that despite taking up the mantle of nuance and tarring claims about research that they disagree with with the label of positivism, they also aren't shy about themselves making claims about research results. I was reminded of this when reading this recent report that was brought to my attention by Professor Anna Stokke: https://sites.google.com/view/manitoba-math-myths. Briefly, the Canadian province of Manitoba (where I used to teach university-level mathematics for a few years) recently reduced the requirements to become a teacher, probably in response to a shortage of teachers. The thing about this that mainly attracted the attention and condemnation of Professor Stokke and her coauthors was that future elementary teachers in Manitoba will no longer be required to take any university-level mathematics course. However, the response by an education professor at the University of Manitoba was that said changes actually bring the process of teacher certification more in line with research in mathematics education. When asked for evidence for these claims, the professor responded with a series of cites, some of which having to do with Lee Shulman's classification of teacher knowledge, but none of which credibly support the professor's claims. Indeed, anyone who's read Shulman's seminal paper "Those who understand" will know that, first, it's an entirely theoretical paper, but also second, it actually insists on the importance of teacher content knowledge.
So in which way can the changes to the Manitoba teacher certification process be said to be in line with mathematical education research? Unless we define "mathematical education research" to be "some things mathematics education researchers talk about and believe, even though they have no evidence for it, and anyway belief in evidence is positivist". I honestly feel this sort of thing can fuel populism. We talk about how our decisions should be informed by science, but this sort of thing shows that "science" may not mean evidence, but simply some self-anointed researchers' opinions or (as suggested by Greg) moral intuitions that many people would disagree with. (I, for one, do not believe explicit teaching, or having students memorise times tables, to be immoral, for example.)
Thanks for writing this, Greg. I haven't been concerned about positivism being a problem in your work, but your piece helped me understand the problem in general. In many areas of life, not just education, I see people acting as if empirical research offers the only reliable source of information concerning a course of action. Such a position can be crippling because the research often isn't there and because, as you point out, scientific theories are provisional. Science provides valuable, but limited, guidance. We need to keep that in mind and use this knowledge appropriately. I wasn't aware that some educational progressivists are using charges of positivism to dismiss research, but I am not surprised.
I should add something to my last comment. Greg suggests that some educationalists think explicit teaching to be immoral. That might be the case, but I also wonder (though I don't really have evidence for this) if some believe explicit teaching to be *too easy*. Educationalists talk a lot about education as a profession, teachers having professional autonomy and using their professional judgement, and so on. It's the argument why teachers must spend years studying in faculties of education: it professionalises them, and not doing some would unprofessionalise teaching. With such a perspective on education, explicit teaching seems kind of cheating. It looks like something anyone can do. You just get in front of the students, teach some theory, do examples (I do), have them work on a few exercices under guidance (we do), and then send them on their way with homework exercices (you do)? Where's the using your professional judgement to lovingly craft authentic learning situations tailored to each student's individual learning style and interests? (You might say there's a moral intuition somewhere there as well.)
Greg's view of teaching seems to be more that of a trade rather than a profession. I understand he believes teachers to require content knowledge in the subject they teach, but the teaching itself is something that is learned on the job, under the guidance of a mentor. His school even provides new teachers with fully prepared lesson plans, which goes entirely against the idea of a teacher's individual professional autonomy.
Now, of course, explicit teaching isn't actually so easy, and there is an element of science to it. I know that both my and my partner's first term as teachers (at the post-secondary level even) went horribly, and we're not the only ones. Maybe the practice at Greg's school to provide a lot of guidance and mentoring to new teachers, but not really require any demonstrations of professional autonomy from them, at least not at first, is the way to go.
Considering that both of these news outlets consider private schools a ‘bad thing,’ I'm not convinced that they add anything to Greg’s argument about positivism in general or his example of school uniform.
I briefly kind of wondered if it was me who'd provoked this post by Greg, since my comment on last week's curios touched a little bit on epistemology. I'm currently taking courses on research methods in education/the social sciences, and we've seen the different epistemological paradigms that subtend different types of scientific research. The way it was explained to me, positivism is the paradigm according to which we can know exactly what reality consists of and understand relations of cause and effect between phenomena. It's a fairly naive position to take, so it was superseded by post-positivism, which stipulates that we can know an approximation of reality and understand relations of cause and effect in a probabilistic manner, through statistical analysis. This is the paradigm that subtends quantitative research. Qualitative research, on the other hand, can be based on a so-called constructivist epistemological framework, which stipulates that different versions of reality are constructed by the different participants and that research can consist of learning about these different constructed realities.
Now, this is all well and good. But it's true that when confronted with some inconvenient results produced by predictive quantitative research, some educationalists will retreat to the position that we cannot know for sure what works or doesn't work in education, it's naive to think otherwise, our students are not statistics but people in all their messiness, and we need to adopt a more nuanced view of what works in education and what research can tell us. Claims of "positivism", in other words. But I don't think this accusation is one that its targets would think accurately describes their views. Greg, for example, thinks research shows explicit teaching to be more effective for student learning than discovery learning. But he doesn't claim we know for sure that explicit teaching will be more effective for every student in every situation, or that we can predict for sure what a student will have learned after the process of explicit teaching. Greg adopts a post-positivist view of knowledge, not a positivist one.
What annoys me about some of these educationalists, and which I was complaining about in my comment on last week's curios, is that despite taking up the mantle of nuance and tarring claims about research that they disagree with with the label of positivism, they also aren't shy about themselves making claims about research results. I was reminded of this when reading this recent report that was brought to my attention by Professor Anna Stokke: https://sites.google.com/view/manitoba-math-myths. Briefly, the Canadian province of Manitoba (where I used to teach university-level mathematics for a few years) recently reduced the requirements to become a teacher, probably in response to a shortage of teachers. The thing about this that mainly attracted the attention and condemnation of Professor Stokke and her coauthors was that future elementary teachers in Manitoba will no longer be required to take any university-level mathematics course. However, the response by an education professor at the University of Manitoba was that said changes actually bring the process of teacher certification more in line with research in mathematics education. When asked for evidence for these claims, the professor responded with a series of cites, some of which having to do with Lee Shulman's classification of teacher knowledge, but none of which credibly support the professor's claims. Indeed, anyone who's read Shulman's seminal paper "Those who understand" will know that, first, it's an entirely theoretical paper, but also second, it actually insists on the importance of teacher content knowledge.
So in which way can the changes to the Manitoba teacher certification process be said to be in line with mathematical education research? Unless we define "mathematical education research" to be "some things mathematics education researchers talk about and believe, even though they have no evidence for it, and anyway belief in evidence is positivist". I honestly feel this sort of thing can fuel populism. We talk about how our decisions should be informed by science, but this sort of thing shows that "science" may not mean evidence, but simply some self-anointed researchers' opinions or (as suggested by Greg) moral intuitions that many people would disagree with. (I, for one, do not believe explicit teaching, or having students memorise times tables, to be immoral, for example.)
Thanks for writing this, Greg. I haven't been concerned about positivism being a problem in your work, but your piece helped me understand the problem in general. In many areas of life, not just education, I see people acting as if empirical research offers the only reliable source of information concerning a course of action. Such a position can be crippling because the research often isn't there and because, as you point out, scientific theories are provisional. Science provides valuable, but limited, guidance. We need to keep that in mind and use this knowledge appropriately. I wasn't aware that some educational progressivists are using charges of positivism to dismiss research, but I am not surprised.
I should add something to my last comment. Greg suggests that some educationalists think explicit teaching to be immoral. That might be the case, but I also wonder (though I don't really have evidence for this) if some believe explicit teaching to be *too easy*. Educationalists talk a lot about education as a profession, teachers having professional autonomy and using their professional judgement, and so on. It's the argument why teachers must spend years studying in faculties of education: it professionalises them, and not doing some would unprofessionalise teaching. With such a perspective on education, explicit teaching seems kind of cheating. It looks like something anyone can do. You just get in front of the students, teach some theory, do examples (I do), have them work on a few exercices under guidance (we do), and then send them on their way with homework exercices (you do)? Where's the using your professional judgement to lovingly craft authentic learning situations tailored to each student's individual learning style and interests? (You might say there's a moral intuition somewhere there as well.)
Greg's view of teaching seems to be more that of a trade rather than a profession. I understand he believes teachers to require content knowledge in the subject they teach, but the teaching itself is something that is learned on the job, under the guidance of a mentor. His school even provides new teachers with fully prepared lesson plans, which goes entirely against the idea of a teacher's individual professional autonomy.
Now, of course, explicit teaching isn't actually so easy, and there is an element of science to it. I know that both my and my partner's first term as teachers (at the post-secondary level even) went horribly, and we're not the only ones. Maybe the practice at Greg's school to provide a lot of guidance and mentoring to new teachers, but not really require any demonstrations of professional autonomy from them, at least not at first, is the way to go.
Arguably, the school uniform situation in Australia might be about private school branding:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-19/school-uniforms-luxury-branding/9412400
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/end-the-branding-war-state-schools-urged-to-reduce-uniform-costs-20230615-p5dgqe.html
Considering that both of these news outlets consider private schools a ‘bad thing,’ I'm not convinced that they add anything to Greg’s argument about positivism in general or his example of school uniform.
If we focus just on the arguments raised in the articles as opposed to one's perceived view of the media agency as a whole though...