The New Paradigm Wars: Is There Room for Rigorous Practitioner Knowledge in Schools and Universities?

Abstract

ccording to Schon (1995) new scholarship implies a kind of action research with norms of its own, which will conflict with the norms of technical rationality-the prevailing epistemology built into the research universities (p. 27). The battle of snails that Schon refers to echoes the wars among positivists, interpretivists, and critical theorists, satirically described by Gage (1989) in the pages of Educational Researcher. While we believe that practitioner research cannot be subsumed under any of Gage's three paradigms without doing it damage, our purpose in this article is not to argue for separate paradigm status. Nevertheless, we believe that the insider status of the researcher, the centrality of action, the requirement of spiraling self-reflection on action, and the intimate, dialectical relationship of research to practice, all make practitioner research alien (and often suspect) to researchers who work out of Gage's three academic paradigms. If anything, academic traditions of feminist and poststructural research might be more compatible with these characteristics. It is interesting to speculate on why metaphors of war and battles are evoked to discuss these epistemological debates. While it could be attributed to the academic version