GUEST EDITORIAL

Preconceptions and Theoretical Frameworks

John Wallace

Science and Mathematics Education Centre, Curtin University of Technology,GPO Box U1987, Perth WA 6001, Australia

William Louden

School of Education Studies, Edith Cowan University, Churchlands WA 6018, Australia

Our response to Caliendo and Kyle’s (1996) editorial, entitled “Establishing the Theoreti-cal Frame,” has a decade-long gestation period. As we were considering how we might frameour response, we each recalled one Sunday afternoon in the winter of 1986 when we were bothworking back at the office in our jobs as curriculum writers in a large Australian school board.In our spare time we were writing Master’s dissertations. John was conducting an investigationof the impact of a curriculum intervention on high school students’ science process skills usinga pretest/posttest experimental design involving over 800 students. Bill was undertaking a close-up account of the work of a teacher-friend, looking at the problem of how teachers know whatthey know.

Taking some time out from our work that afternoon and over a cup of coffee we soon foundourselves talking about our respective dissertations and what counts as rigor in educational re-search. John—with a background in the sciences and well-schooled in the scientific research tra-dition—was concerned about how Bill might be able to justify his findings in terms of the normsof validity and reliability. What could an N of 1 study possibly say about the larger populationand how could Bill study the work of a friend and still maintain a credible arm’s length rela-tionship? Bill—with a background in literary theory—argued that his study of the practicalknowledge of one person was concerned to understand the particular, not to generalize beyondthe case. He said that questions about reliability and validity made sense in the research tradi-tion of John’s study, but he also said that he was not very interested in the kinds of questionsthat may be answered by an experimental study of 800 students. John argued that large samplesand experimental designs are needed in order to be more certain about what to do to improveteaching. Bill countered by saying that teaching was by nature uncertain and that what was need-ed was a better understanding of these uncertainties and a different kind of research tradition.

Following that Sunday afternoon, we have had many such conversations about education-al research. Two years later, we found ourselves together again as doctoral students in a class

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 34, NO. 4, PP. 319–322 (1997)

© 1997 by the National Association for Research in Science TeachingPublished by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-4308/97/040319-04

on qualitative research. We can remember engaging in our own version of the qualitative/quan-titative debate fueled by articles in the Educational Researcher1 of the time. John went on toconduct a qualitative study of the experiences of 5 elementary teachers in a program of peer su-pervision. While this was a departure from the experimental design of his Master’s work, themethodology section of his thesis contained the familiar headings of validity, reliability, and tri-angulation. Bill’s study of continuity and change in one teacher’s work had some of the featuresof his Master’s dissertation—it was an N of 1 study again—but it paid more explicit attentionto the relationship between epistemology and method. Drawing on the tradition of philosophi-cal hermeneutics, this study provided a series of interpretations based on a long period of par-ticipant observation in a school. While the thesis contained a methodology chapter, it dealt withtheories of knowledge, not prescriptions of method.

Since that time we have written many articles together. Sometimes reviewers have criti-cized our work for not saying enough about methodology, which we have taken to mean nothaving the right methodology. Sometimes we have tried to write about methodology in waysthat might make sense to quantitative and qualitative researchers. Often we have written aboutthe relationship between researchers and teachers and now have a better understanding of thecomplexity of writing close-up accounts of people we know (and people we get to know in thecourse of our research). Lately, we have been experimenting with more narrative forms of writ-ing about teaching, following the lead offered by a variety of cross-genre writing which strad-dles the traditions of literature, history, and journalism. In these texts authority lies in the rich-ness of readers’ recognition of a truth, not in assertions about the reliability and validity of theresearch method.

We have been influenced in our writing by books such as The First Stone by Helen Garner(1995), a novelist’s investigation of a very public case of sexual harassment in an Australianuniversity. In this powerful and compelling piece of research, Garner tells of her endeavours todiscover the truth about the case and what she learns about her own sexuality in the process.Other examples include Pat Barker’s (1991, 1993, 1995) series of “factional” accounts of thefrontline deprivations, class divisions, and moral contradictions of the Great War; and SimonSchama’s (1991) genre-stretching history Dead Certainties, in which he weaves two parallelnarratives about historical characters. As Schama explains, both stories play with the “gap sep-arating a lived event and its subsequent narration” and both stories “dissolve the certainties ofevents into the multiple possibilities of alternative narrations” (p. 320). In the field of researchon teaching, we particularly admire the way in which R. W. Connell’s (1985) Teachers Workuses fictional composite characters to report the results of a research project on educational in-equality.

In writing this response, it is not that we are unsympathetic to the problems that Caliendoand Kyle (1996) write about. Their editorial was motivated by the observation that their mostfrequent reviewer request is “for authors to develop more clearly and articulate the theoreticalframe underpinning the essence of the inquiry” (p. 225). We are both in favor of this, especial-ly if it means that the whole range of researchers are asked to be explicit about the theory ofknowledge on which their inquiries are based. We fear, however, that what it really means isthat qualitative researchers are required to conform to the canons of quantitative research, notthat people using quantitative research methods are required to pay more attention to their epis-temological preconceptions. To put it another way, what counts as an absence of a theoreticalframework or a methodological weakness depends on the epistemological frame of the readeror researcher. If it makes sense to talk about “threats to validity and reliability associated with. . . qualitative perspectives” (p. 226), presumably it would also make sense to talk about overde-termination of research results based on uncontested distinctions between fact and value in quan-

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titative research. Caliendo and Kyle seem more concerned about the former problem than thelatter.

Whereas many science education researchers are working in an epistemological traditionthey have inherited from experimental science and positivist versions of psychology, we findourselves more comfortable in the European tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. Let us of-fer one brief example of the impact of such a difference of opinion about theoretical frame-works: namely the crucial difference in the meaning of “preconceptions” in the two traditions.Whereas it is taken for granted in science education that researchers should free themselves fromtheir preconceptions—seen as threats to validity and reliability—we presume that understand-ing of events is actually constructed through the preconceptions we bring to them. There is noprior state of understanding free of our preconceptions, and no method which can free us fromthe preconceptions we bring to each new experience. Consequently we argue that it is impor-tant to pay particular attention to the influence of preconceptions on other participants’ under-standing of events, and to the influence of our own preconceptions on our understanding of theseevents.

Understanding, however, remains elusive. Despite our attempts to provide accounts basedfirmly on actual events, contextualized by the history of the participants and our own precon-ceptions, the text which emerges is still open to further interpretation. Understanding, as thehermeneutical philosopher Gadamer (1975) puts it, is “always more than the mere recreation ofsomeone else’s meaning” (p. 338). Understanding is in principle incomplete and continues togrow with each interpreter’s encounter with new texts or experience. Always, it involves thecreation of meaning from the text or experience in the light of the meaning-maker’s precon-ceptions and the tradition of interpretation within which he or she acts.

This view of the constitutive role of preconceptions in formation of knowledge may not suitreaders trained to regard their own preconceptions as a threat to validity and reliability. Be thatas it may, it also means that we distrust the idea that following a predetermined method is a re-liable path to the truth. No method, no matter how clearly it is represented in a Handbook, canfree researchers from their preconceptions or deliver them an incontestable truth. No methodcan free researchers from having to account for the constructions of reality they make as theyfollow any research method and produce a written account of the interpretations they make.

We would not wish, however, to be misunderstood as arguing that because researchers con-struct their own accounts of reality, then anything goes. On the contrary, as Solow has put it (seeGeertz, 1973, p. 30), just because a totally aseptic environment is impossible we do not advo-cate doing surgery in a sewer. Even when researchers take great care with methodology, thereis no epistemologically sound way of bracketing or eliminating a researcher’s prior under-standing. Consequently, we believe that Caliendo and Kyle’s editorial provides at least as largea challenge for quantitative researchers, unused to being asked to explain their own epistemo-logical preconceptions, as it does for qualitative researchers.

A friend of ours, Max Angus (1995), has called for deregulation of what he calls the writ-ing about teaching industry, arguing that the most interesting things he has read about teachingcomes from outside the official academic writing about teaching industry. We are concerned thatCaliendo and Kyle’s set of distinctions between scholarship and journalism represent an attemptto re-regulate an intellectual market which has only just begun to feel the fresh wind of a lighterregulatory framework. What we need is more writing about teaching that is aware of its ownepistemological preconceptions, and more writing that is fresh, challenging, and strikes its read-ers as authentic; what we need less of is strictures about method that attempt to regulate quali-tative inquiry by standards developed in imitation of quantitative research. Under Bill Kyle’seditorship, JRST has opened up considerably, allowing space for a wider range of voices. We

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hope that concern about methodological correctness will not close down the kinds of conversa-tions that JRST has just begun to open up in science education.

Note

1Educational Researcher is published 9 times per year by the American Educational Research Asso-ciation, 1230 17th Street, Washington, DC 20036-3078, USA.

References

Angus, M. (1995, November). Writing about teaching. Paper presented at the annual con-ference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Hobart, Tasmania.

Barker, P. (1991). Regeneration. London: Penguin.Barker, P. (1993). The eye in the door. London: Penguin.Barker, P. (1995). The ghost road. London: Viking.Caliendo, S. M., & Kyle, W. C., Jr. (1996). Establishing the theoretical frame. Journal of

Research in Science Teaching, 33, 225–227.Connell, R. W. (1985). Teachers work. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin.Gadamer, H-G. (1975). Truth and method. New York: Crossroad.Garner, H. (1995). The first stone. Sydney: Picador.Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.Schama, S. (1991). Dead certainties (Unwarranted speculations). New York: Knopf.

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