Research methods - critical educational research in curriculum study

Cao Duy Trinh Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 91(03): 53 - 57 53 RESEARCH METHODS - CRITICAL EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH IN CURRICULUM STUDY Cao Duy Trinh* College of Sciences – TNU SUMMARY Researchers must know what they are doing in their researches: the concepts related and the methods; the natural or social nature of the inquiry; the viewpoints and attitude of the researchers towards the objects they are working on. If we want to study the curriculum, for example the exercise of power in the English course-books, then we can use research methods of Critical Educational Research. Exactly, we can use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methods. These methods will help reveal the inequality established in the course-books for solutions for that abolishment. This article will revise the conceptions of research and research methods with paradigms such as Positivism or Anti-positivism as the progress of history in scientific researching. It also offers the Critical Educational Research to be used for ideologies search in the curriculum. The author also suggests a link with Critical Discourse Analysis for a concrete study of English course-books. Key words: Research, research method, critical educational research, curriculum study. RESEARCH & RESEARCH METHODS* As language teachers, we know that Applied Linguistics, since its foundation in the 1950s, ashas stressed the relationship between experience of language teaching and the study of linguistics. Language teaching methodology has relied on linguistic traditions such as Chomsky’s Transformational - Generative Linguistics, Hyme’s Sociolinguistics and Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics. It has also been basing on psychological traditions such as Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism and Humanism (Canh, L.V., 2004, pp15-58) [1]. Research also has its own underlying assumptions, theories, methodologies and methods. Educational research is the investigation of activities and the undertakings of a science: the systemic and scholarly application in teaching and learning in social contexts and formal education framework. It helps us in achieving a sound knowledge to develop education and relating professions and disciplines. Human always ask questions about themselves and the world around them. The ordinary questions then become * Tel: 0912 621599 epistemological questions and assumptions. To answer those questions with satisfaction, they need methodologies, instrumentation and data collection. In the process of finding out answers to questions about the nature of the phenomena around them, human have ever had their experience, reasoning and research as their means. Experience or the common sense knowing is our everyday tool of the world’s discovery. Anyway, laypeople’s personal experience usually relies on undetermined happenings and is not thoroughly tested. Scientific research is done systemically and tested empirically with firm explanations and professional concern with the relationships among phenomena. Scientists have the control over the sources of influence in explaining the occurrence. Research is the further means human uses to find out about truth. It is systematic, controlled, empirical and critical study of hypotheses about the relations among the phenomena. And thus, research is different from experience. Research is the combination of experience and reasoning and become our successful tool for the world discovery. Educational research comes from different views of social sciences: established and traditional view, interpretive view, critical theory, feminist theory and complexity theory. Số hóa bởi Trung tâm Học liệu – Đại học Thái Nguyên Cao Duy Trinh Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 91(03): 53 - 57 54 How shall we look at social reality and what are the views constructed on different ways of interpreting the reality? There can be four sets of explicit and implicit assumptions underlining the conceptions of the social world: ontology, epistemology, human nature and methodology. First, people have asked questions about the essence of social phenomena investigated as assumptions of an ontological kind. Ontological assumption concerns on the nature of the world and human being in social contexts. The nominalist believes that social reality the product of individual consciousness and reality is the result of individual cognition, therefore, created by one’s own mind. They think objects of though are nothing but merely words and there is no independently accessible thing that constitutes the meaning of a word. Meanwhile, the realist insists that objects exist independently “out there” in the world and they impose on us from outside. They exist independently from us. Secondly, the set of assumptions are of epistemological kind: knowledge and its forms, acquisition, and the communication of it to other human being. The positivist thinks that knowledge is hard, objective and tangible, requiring an observer role of the researchers and natural science methods. The anti-positivist assumes that knowledge is personal, subjective and unique, requiring the researchers’ involvement with the subjects without natural science methods. The third set of assumption is about human and their environment. Human being is not only the subject but also the object of the study – the products of the environment and also creators and producers of the environment. The three sets of above assumptions have been leading to different methods: survey, experiments, etc. for the objectivists and positivists who believe the world of natural phenomena to be hard, real and external to each individual; accounts, observation and personal constructs, etc. for the subjectivists, anti-positivists, considering the social world soft, personal and humanly created. Methods, for the positivistic model in normative research, means giving responses to questions, measurement recording, phenomena describing and experiment performing. In interpretive paradigms, they means observation of the participants, interviewing, role-playing, episodes and accounts. These are techniques and procedures. Methodology is about the scientific process. It describes the approaches, kinds and paradigms of research, not the products of scientific inquiry. Positivism, since the 19th century, has regarded observation and experiment as only means of behavior understanding and scientific explanation. This is the influence of natural methodologies on social sciences. And the social scientist will observe social reality with the products formulated like the ones of natural sciences. Anyway, the complexity and intangible quality of social phenomena are quite different from the natural world. The great challenges for positivistic researchers can be seen in the context of classroom and school in teaching, learning and interaction. Positivism has been successfully used, especially for natural researches. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it has been criticized for its mechanistic and reductionist view of nature. It is always trying to measure the objects instead of learning things from inside and with choices, experience, individuality, morality and responsibility of human beings as living organisms. Positivism fails to consider to capacity of human subjectivity, dehumanizing effects of social science, focusing only on discovering general laws governing human behavior. Quantification, computation and statistical theories lack of exploring the circumstances of human conditions. For positivism, scientific knowledge then becomes everything to human, which ignore the creative, moral, critical, aesthetic and hermeneutic sides of knowledge. Behavior means only techniques. Positivism has also been accused of being banal and trivial as it show little connection to whom it is intended for and their environment. Số hóa bởi Trung tâm Học liệu – Đại học Thái Nguyên Cao Duy Trinh Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 91(03): 53 - 57 55 Replacing positivism, there appears anti- positivism movement – the naturalistic approaches. The anti-positivists agree that the world can be understood from the views of the individuals with their autonomous models. Social science, for them, should be seen from inside subjectively with different participants’ direct experience in certain contexts. Developments in psychology, social psychology and sociology have made the understanding and treating of human beings as persons more satisfactory. Working as alternative to positivist approaches, naturalistic, qualitative, interpretative approaches have some distinguishing features: people are active and creative in their meaningful activities; they construct their social world deliberately; situations change, events and behaviors evolve; individuals and happenings are unique and not generalizable; social world is studied naturally, with no intervention of the researcher; fidelity is important; events must be interpreted in real contexts and situations; one event or situation, many interpretations and perspectives; reality is complex with many layers; thick descriptions are better than simplistic ones; situations should be studied from the view of participants, not researchers. Anyway, research methods are not merely technical exercises. They are our understanding of the world: our viewpoint, consideration, and aims of understanding it. More ever, educational research, politics and decision-making are always going together in researching for the truth. The funding of local authorities and government will favor the policy-related research which guides the policy decisions, improves their quality and implements them. Who will be sponsored, who will control and release the data and findings, whose research will be chosen for educational service are, therefore, the problems. Research involves indirectly in the decision-making process with concepts, propositions, explanations, strategies, methodologies, theories and evidence to make inputs, guidance, gloss, orientation, insights and generalization. The relationship of education research, politics and policy- making is very dialectic and complex. Researchers can influence the policy-makers by the links with power groups. Only politically acceptable research will survive. That means the research will be used when it agrees with the political agenda of the governments and the policy-makers. In fact, research is also part of political process in which who does the research, what knowledge is worthwhile and how the results will be used will matter. CRITICAL EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AND CURRICULUM STUDY Critical educational research is an emerging approach while positivist and interpretative paradigms are incomplete accounts of social behavior as they ignore the political and ideological contexts in the educational researches. Positivist and interpretative paradigms are too much interested in technical and hermeneutic knowledge. Critical theory does not only describe or understand the society and behavior. It calls for a society of equality and democracy through social changes. Cohen writes about the origin and the aims of the theory: “The paradigm of critical educational research is heavily influenced by the early work of Habermas and, to a lesser extent, his predecessors in the Frankfurt School, most notably Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer and Fromm. Here the expressed intention is deliberately political – the emancipation of individuals and groups in an egalitarian societyIn particular it seeks to emancipate the disempowered, to redress inequality and to promote individual freedoms within a democratic society. Cohen et al. (2007:26) ) [2] Critical theory points out the problems in the common sense and legitimacy of power and powerlessness, suppression and suppressed, inclusion and exclusion, voicing, ideology, participation, interest and representation. For this theory, even the researches will not be for Số hóa bởi Trung tâm Học liệu – Đại học Thái Nguyên Cao Duy Trinh Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 91(03): 53 - 57 56 the interest of all people. The theory will help the researcher uncover the interest in certain situations before he/she can do something to change the society and other individuals for a real democracy. The research of critical education is practical as it aims at abolishing a society of inequality and illegitimacy. Marxism can be the departure of such ideas. In their studies, researchers must claim their standpoint and there is no place for neutrality or ideological and political innocence. Critical theory and critical educational research, as Cohen et al. (2007:27) ) [2] say: have their substantive agenda – for example examining and interrogating: the relationship between school and society – how school perpetuate or reduce inequality; the social construction of knowledge and curricula, who define worthwhile knowledge, what ideological interests this serves, and how this reproduces inequality in society; how power is produced and reproduced through education; whose interests are served by education and how legitimate these are (e.g. the rich, white, middle class males rather than poor, non-white females). The impact of critical theory on curriculum research is far-reaching. The rationale for curriculum is expressed in Tyler’s questions: What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained? Cohen et al. (2007:30) [2] The above positivist view comes from the ideas that the curriculum is controllable, predetermined, ordered, predictable, uniform and behaviorist. This assumption does not take ideology and power into consideration. It is kind of positivist political neutrality and objectivity, ignoring psychology and psycho- pedagogy offered in constructivism. It is a closed system, different from the view seeing postmodern society open, diverse, multidimensional and fluid. In fact, power is less monolithic and more problematical. The contemporary curricula are rather the products of chaos and complexity. Curricula are rich, relational, recursive and rigorous with an emphasis on emergence, process epistemology and constructivist psychology. The knowledge selected in the society and curricula expresses ideologies and power. The choice of knowledge is neither political neutral nor innocent. Ideologies, as beliefs, come from powerful groups in the society and knowledge selection for the curricula will secure their interests. This is why curricula are value-laden or value-based and never value-free. Values and power are strongly connected: not only what knowledge is but also whose knowledge is, for whom the knowledge is and, finally, whose interests the curricula will serve (or not serve) will count. The curriculum is really ideologically constructed. For critical research, knowledge is not purely intelligence. It belongs to different interests. Technical interests will guarantee the power of their owners because interest, in general, has ideological function. Interests and knowledge go together in the possession, control, interpretation etc. of that knowledge. Cohen et al. (2007: 32) ) [2] mentions the Habermas’s naming of technical, practical and emancipatory interests. Technical interest deals with scientific and positivist method, focusing on laws, rules and the prediction and control of behaviors. Practical interest try to interpret the subjects with hermeneutic, interpretative methodologies of qualitative approaches from the eyes of the participants in the interaction with other people. Emancipatory interest points out the exercise of power and the necessary change for a better society. The idea that ideology of the authorities, the dominant groups with their values and practices outgo other disempowered social groups is not new. One of the ideology critical approaches is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) [3,4,5]. This method can be used for the study of language, culture and ideologies expressed in different curricula (English text-books, for example), as a special kind of discourse. Số hóa bởi Trung tâm Học liệu – Đại học Thái Nguyên Cao Duy Trinh Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 91(03): 53 - 57 57 REFERENCES [1]. Canh, L.V. (2004), Understanding Foreign Language Teaching Methodology, Hanoi National University. [2]. Cohen L., Manion L., rrison K. (2007), Research Method in Education, Routledge, London and New York. [3]. Fairclough N. L. (2001), Language and Power, Longman, London. [4]. Nguyễn Hòa (2000), An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, National University College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi. [5]. Cao Duy Trinh (2006), Exploration ideological power relations in a global document: The Berne convention for the protection of literature and artistic works, Luận văn thạc sĩ tại Đại học Ngoại Ngữ, Đại học Quốc gia Hà nội. TÓM TẮT CÁC PHƯƠNG PHÁP NGHIÊN CỨU – NGHIÊN CỨU GIÁO DỤC PHÊ PHÁN VỀ CHƯƠNG TRÌNH GIẢNG DẠY Cao Duy Trinh* Trường Đại học Khoa học – ĐH Thái Nguyên Các nhà nghiên cứu cần biết về các khái niệm liên quan và các phương pháp nghiên cứu; bản chất tự nhiên và xã hội của việc điều tra; quan điểm và thái độ của mình đối với các đối tượng nghiên cứu. Nếu ta muốn tìm hiểu về chương trình giảng dạy, chẳng hạn như việc thực hiện quyền lực trong các cuốn giáo trình tiếng Anh, chúng ta có thể sử dụng các phương pháp của mô hình Nghiên cứu Giáo dục Phê phán. Cụ thể, có thể sử dụng các Phương pháp Phân tích Diễn ngôn Phê phán. Các phương pháp này sẽ giúp vạch ra những bất bình đẳng tạo ra trong các sách giáo trình để tìm giải pháp xóa bỏ bất bình đẳng đó. Bài báo này xem xét các khái niệm như Nghiên cứu, Phương pháp nghiên cứu với các mô hình như Chủ nghĩa Thực chứng hay Chủ nghĩa Bất thực chứng theo tiến trình lịch sử của việc nghiên cứu khoa học. Bài báo cũng đề cập việc sử dụng mô hình Nghiên cứu Giáo dục Phê phán vào việc tìm kiếm tính Tư tưởng trong chương trình giảng dạy. Ở đây, tác giả cũng gợi ý kết nối với Phân tich Diễn ngôn Phê phán trong công trình nghiên cứu cụ thể về sách giáo khoa Tiếng Anh. Từ khóa: Nghiên cứu, phương pháp nghiên cứu, nghiên cứu giáo dục phê phán, chương trình giảng dạy * Tel: 0912 621599 Số hóa bởi Trung tâm Học liệu – Đại học Thái Nguyên