Think Piece, Naked Science-Avoiding Methodolatry in an Environmental Education Context
- Authors: Price, Leigh
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/387264 , vital:68220 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122255"
- Description: Research methodology is significantly political and in this think piece I try to better understand the effect of this politicisation in the production of science. The main focus of the think piece is to identify the dominant methodological discourses and analyse them using techniques borrowed from post-structuralism. From this analysis, I suggest that methodological discourses are reproduced and normalised in much the same way as discourses of, for example, sexuality, and I give examples of this from my experience as a PhD student of environmental education. I also suggest that some transgressive methodologies, such as those associated with postmodernism or participatory research, despite purporting to empower, at times also disempower. Furthermore, all of the methodologies that I analyse are, in one way or another, ‘loaded’; they cloak their agendas. From this analysis, I move towards suggesting an alternative critical realist methodology for environmental education which is naked; its agendas are clearly stated, not least because this epistemology does not lend itself to deception. An important part of this critical realist conception of methodology is the idea of ‘meta-reflexivity’ in which truth is not vulgarly pragmatic or fideistic.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Price, Leigh
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/387264 , vital:68220 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122255"
- Description: Research methodology is significantly political and in this think piece I try to better understand the effect of this politicisation in the production of science. The main focus of the think piece is to identify the dominant methodological discourses and analyse them using techniques borrowed from post-structuralism. From this analysis, I suggest that methodological discourses are reproduced and normalised in much the same way as discourses of, for example, sexuality, and I give examples of this from my experience as a PhD student of environmental education. I also suggest that some transgressive methodologies, such as those associated with postmodernism or participatory research, despite purporting to empower, at times also disempower. Furthermore, all of the methodologies that I analyse are, in one way or another, ‘loaded’; they cloak their agendas. From this analysis, I move towards suggesting an alternative critical realist methodology for environmental education which is naked; its agendas are clearly stated, not least because this epistemology does not lend itself to deception. An important part of this critical realist conception of methodology is the idea of ‘meta-reflexivity’ in which truth is not vulgarly pragmatic or fideistic.
- Full Text:
Joking around in Zimbabwe, undoing and redoing participation
- Authors: Price, Leigh
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373715 , vital:66716 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122750"
- Description: In Zimbabwe, I teach a participatory course on environmental education to trainers. The course is an adaptation of a course designed by Rhodes University, South Africa. It gives participants a background in educational theories and has a strong theoretical component built around a focus on practice. During the time that the course was being delivered to non-industry participants, the theoretical component of the course was whole-heartedly embraced. We assumed that calling the course ‘participatory’ presupposed the need for this theory because within the theory were the tools for emancipation. And participation, we believed, had an emancipatory mandate. However, when we decided to redevelop the course for industry, we were uncomfortably surprised by the request from a majority of industry participants to reduce the theory and concentrate solely on skills-based training. This paper documents how this discomfort resulted in my adjusting my view of participation.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Price, Leigh
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373715 , vital:66716 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122750"
- Description: In Zimbabwe, I teach a participatory course on environmental education to trainers. The course is an adaptation of a course designed by Rhodes University, South Africa. It gives participants a background in educational theories and has a strong theoretical component built around a focus on practice. During the time that the course was being delivered to non-industry participants, the theoretical component of the course was whole-heartedly embraced. We assumed that calling the course ‘participatory’ presupposed the need for this theory because within the theory were the tools for emancipation. And participation, we believed, had an emancipatory mandate. However, when we decided to redevelop the course for industry, we were uncomfortably surprised by the request from a majority of industry participants to reduce the theory and concentrate solely on skills-based training. This paper documents how this discomfort resulted in my adjusting my view of participation.
- Full Text:
Playing musement games: Retroduction in social research, with particular reference to indigenous knowledge in environmental and health education
- Authors: Price, Leigh
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373763 , vital:66722 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122701"
- Description: My aim here is to introduce the concept of musement (retroduction or abduction) as an appropriate alternative to deduction and induction, both in indigenous knowledge (IK) specifically and in social science generally. As an example, I will use musement to tentatively address some of the ethical problems of using indigenous knowledge (IK) in environmental education and health education. This paper will therefore be of use both to researchers/educators wanting a discussion of retroduction, and researchers/educators wanting a discussion of indigenous knowledge epistemology and its relationship with ethics. I am arguing, from a perspective that allows a stratified reality (things can be real even if not measurable or actually present), that, we admit retroduction into our list of allowable research logics. In terms of IK, the result of accepting retroduction as a valid logic is that we allow IK to be dynamic and non-reified. It also allows a previously ignored aspect of IK, its spiritual/non-empirical beliefs, to be validated through ethical outcomes experienced in our lives, rather than through the previous criteria of empirical validity. In other words, we ask for IK: does believing in (whatever) adequately explain experience and/or provide optimistic, long term, ethical, appropriate ways of living? Thus, retroduction has the potential to allow IK to contribute to a normative ethics.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Price, Leigh
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373763 , vital:66722 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122701"
- Description: My aim here is to introduce the concept of musement (retroduction or abduction) as an appropriate alternative to deduction and induction, both in indigenous knowledge (IK) specifically and in social science generally. As an example, I will use musement to tentatively address some of the ethical problems of using indigenous knowledge (IK) in environmental education and health education. This paper will therefore be of use both to researchers/educators wanting a discussion of retroduction, and researchers/educators wanting a discussion of indigenous knowledge epistemology and its relationship with ethics. I am arguing, from a perspective that allows a stratified reality (things can be real even if not measurable or actually present), that, we admit retroduction into our list of allowable research logics. In terms of IK, the result of accepting retroduction as a valid logic is that we allow IK to be dynamic and non-reified. It also allows a previously ignored aspect of IK, its spiritual/non-empirical beliefs, to be validated through ethical outcomes experienced in our lives, rather than through the previous criteria of empirical validity. In other words, we ask for IK: does believing in (whatever) adequately explain experience and/or provide optimistic, long term, ethical, appropriate ways of living? Thus, retroduction has the potential to allow IK to contribute to a normative ethics.
- Full Text:
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